The Diary Of A CEO (Uncut) 01-20-2025

The Money Making Expert (NEW): The 7,11,4 Hack That Turns $1 Into $10K Per Month! Daniel Priestley

In order to be successful, you need to know that people have a small number of slots in their brain for who they remember. So you’ve got to get into people’s head. And in order to do that, you need to know two things.

The first one is 7-11-4, which we’ll talk about. And the second thing is that your brain is extremely good at deleting messages. But there’s five things that will not be deleted by the brain.

And the last two are the ones that are most useful. So the first one is… I wish I knew this stuff at the start of my career. Daniel Priestley is the money-making expert and serial entrepreneur who’s built several multi-million dollar businesses from nothing, and has mentored over 3,500 businesses with the same frameworks for career success that you’re about to learn.

The problem that we have now is that we live in a digital world, but all of society is built for the industrial revolution system, which means that we’re playing by an old set of rules and going through a schooling system that is preparing them for a world that no longer exists. So people feel like that there are no opportunities, there are no safe jobs anymore, feeling like you’re in competition with AI. And that leaves a whole generation of people feeling absolutely wiped out before they’ve even started.

So what are the new set of skills people need to know to set them up in this digital world? Well, there’s actually a step-by-step approach within that, including building a personal brand. Okay, let’s pause there. Why does that matter? Because that’s the key to capital, talent, customers.

And it’s not about becoming an influencer with millions of followers. But if you’re seen as a key person of influence, that’s enough to make seven figures. And is that where your five Ps come in? Yeah, and I’ll take you through all of those.

And then there’s the entrepreneurial pyramid, which opens you up to this whole other world of opportunities, as well as side hustles, and the two types of opportunities that everyone needs to know about. I want to go through all of that. Let’s do it.

This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven’t yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show, and you like what we do here, and you want to support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button.

And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I’ll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We’ll listen to your feedback, we’ll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we’ll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.

Daniel Priestley, how do you define and describe what it is that you do with your content, with your work? And through all of these books that you’ve published, what is the summary of what you do and who you do it for? So I have a massive passion for entrepreneurship. About 20 years ago, I started seeing a massive trend about entrepreneurs who could stand out, scale up and make a positive impact in the world through business. I have built multiple businesses over the last 20 years, and I’m just fascinated by the predictable stages that people go through in order to build successful businesses.

As I’ve been growing my businesses, I’ve been writing about it in my books, mostly to document what I’m learning myself. And I also built a community of entrepreneurs who wanted to essentially make the most of the times that we’re in. So what’s happening at the moment is we’re going through massive amounts of change.

It’s very similar to the agricultural age when it was replaced by the industrial age. And there were new economic rules that didn’t apply to the agricultural age, but did apply to the industrial age. So the agricultural age was the feudal system and the industrial age was the capitalist system.

What’s happening is the industrial age is fast being replaced by the digital age. And as we go through this massive change, we’re seeing new rules and new economic rules that apply. So give an example.

In the industrial age, people had to become successful. People had to gain skills and then get a job and find an employer who would employ them for those skills. As we go into the digital age, what works is to build a personal brand based on your unique intellectual property, and then to position that brand next to a scalable digital elegant business model.

And those who are doing that, and those who have figured that out, are doing incredibly well and succeeding at speed. And there’s actually a step-by-step approach for doing that. I want to go through all of that.

I was running in Cape Town. Look at me plugging my running brand that’s lasted for five days. I was running in Cape Town and a young couple came up to me at the end of my run when I’d stopped running it underneath this tree.

And they came up to me, it was about the second or third of January. They said, Steve, we love your content. We’ve been listening to Diverse for a while.

And they looked at each other and you could see that they were really stressed. And they said, we’re just trying to figure out how to start a business and what we should be doing. And I could see in their face that they’d been mulling it for a long, long time.

There was this like, they’re very, very young. I’d say they were like 21 years old and they were saying like, what do we do? And I actually, at that time I said, you need to listen to an episode I did with Daniel Priestly. But I also knew you were coming on.

So I said, and I’m recording with him shortly. So make sure you listen to that. So through the lens of that 21 year old, you’ve detailed that their world has now changed.

They’re living in this digital world. Where would you advise those two to start if they want to capitalise on the opportunity that’s presented itself? Okay, so I’ll slow down for a minute. What’s happening at the moment is people in that situation, they’re feeling incredibly invisible, that they don’t matter.

They feel stuck, that there are no opportunities. You can’t buy a house. You can’t get a career.

There are no safe jobs anymore. AI is disrupting everything. And they feel detached from meaning and purpose.

And that leaves a whole generation of young people feeling absolutely wiped out before they’ve even started. It doesn’t actually exclusively apply just to people in their 20s. I know people in their 40s, 50s, 60s.

I know entrepreneurs who have traditional businesses who feel that way. So it’s worth acknowledging that it’s a widespread phenomenon. Everywhere in the world, people feeling invisible, feeling the pain of not being able to connect with the right people and feeling stuck and feeling detached from meaning.

So what we need to do is address that because what’s happening is you’re playing by an old set of rules. And that’s normal because the school system told you an old set of rules because it was based in the industrial age. And we have to start by learning the new set of rules.

So if I was advising 21 year olds in particular, the first thing that you want to do is called an entrepreneur apprenticeship. An entrepreneur apprenticeship is where you go and work in a small team of less than 12 people where you have direct contact with an entrepreneur. And in particular, you’re looking for an entrepreneur who has somewhat of a personal brand.

So they have, let’s say, 5,000 to 50,000 followers on social media. And they’ve got an elegant business model that inspires you. It doesn’t necessarily have to be exactly what you want to do in the future, but you need to learn the new rules.

So you need to learn how is that person building their personal brand and how are they building their business so that it can scale? How do they communicate with people anywhere in the world? How do they sell to people anywhere in the world? So those are some of the key things that you have to do. You do not want to become an entrepreneur straight away. It’s too big a shift.

You need to be a number two. I was a number two. I had a mentor.

I worked for an amazing guy for two years. We went from zero to 6 million in a year and from zero people to 60 people in one year. So I got the entrepreneur apprenticeship first and that’s where you want to start.

And then once you do that, you can do side hustles and then begin the entrepreneurial journey on your own. But how do you know if it’s for you? How do you know if you’re cut out for it? So at the moment what’s happening is that the rules are changing so fast that it’s not like anyone’s cut out for it, right? So there is no sure feeling where you go, oh, I’m really cut out for this because it’s giving me clear signals. During times of disruption, the signals get jammed.

So what’s happening is people are going through a schooling system that is preparing them for a world that no longer exists. So we go through 12 years of school and it’s saying, oh, you know, here’s how you get ready for an employer. Well, there are no employers and here’s how you get ready for a career.

There’s no such thing as careers anymore. And here’s how you get ready for a job. Oh, by the way, that job can easily be done by AI already.

So all of this is happening and that means that people are feeling this void and they’re saying, well, I don’t feel ready for anything. That’s because you had 12 years of training for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. So what we have to do is say, all right, let’s look at the world that is emerging and let’s position ourselves for that world and reskill ourselves and reposition ourselves for that world.

When you were talking about that entrepreneurial apprenticeship, it sounded like a new form of education, a new form of university. Are there any other ways, if we’re talking about that preparation phase where you’re getting ready, are there any other ways you would advise someone to rapidly excel their knowledge and skills in preparation to become an entrepreneur? Is it books? Is it, do I sit on chat GPT? What worked for you? Books are great. YouTube channels are great.

I didn’t have any of that. You know, believe it or not, even books were hard to come by when I was a teenager. You know, you had to kind of order business books in or you had to go to a big bookstore that had a business book section.

We didn’t have Amazon and we certainly, you know, anything like a podcast, you actually paid for cassette tapes and CDs and they were $1,000. They were really expensive just to listen to some business content. Believe it or not, that was a thing.

And all of it’s for free now online. However, you can’t learn to ride a bike through books and videos. You have to get on the bike.

So the best thing to do is to work for someone who’s building a business. And if you can’t do that, become a co-founder with someone who’s got more experience than you. And if you can’t do that, then you need to do some small side hustles.

A side hustle is an open and shut business case. So within 90 days, you’re going to start something and finish something all within 90 days. You’re not going to get yourself into a long-term thing.

You’re just going to start something, see how it goes and it ends in 90 days. When I was a teenager, I did nightclub parties. So the nightclub party had a time where we would agree with the club that we’re going to have the venue.

Then we had a promotion phase. Then we ran the party and then that was it. At the end of the night, we split the money and that was the finish.

And it all happened very quickly. And you get the learning experience, but you don’t have the ongoing connection to the business. I also sold roses door to door.

So on Valentine’s Day, I bought a few hundred roses. We dressed up in tuxedos and we went door to door selling Valentine’s Day roses. And that probably lasted three weeks from the time we came up with the idea to the time we found a supplier, bought the roses, went door to door and made our sales.

And then it was all finished at the end of Valentine’s Day. So these are called side hustles. And the important point is that they’re not ongoing ventures.

They’re just open and shut. And then you can reflect. You can then sort of see what worked, what didn’t work, and then see if you want to continue after that.

Something else that I don’t think I’ve ever heard many entrepreneurs or founders talk about when they’re giving advice on that preparation learning phase is the importance of writing. Yeah. Because that had a profound impact on me.

The rate in which I learned was having a practice. At what stage in your journey did you write? So I made a commitment to myself when I was 24 to write a tweet every day. Okay.

And I would screenshot it then post it on Instagram. Now this was maybe the single biggest hack in my life that I’ve never really talked about because of all of the downstream consequences that occurred. Downstream consequence number one, got to a million followers on Instagram by posting these quotes of ideas that I had every day.

So every day at 7pm, my girlfriend knew at the time, she goes, he’s going to go off for an hour and think of something to say. Downstream consequence number two is it taught me how to communicate ideas in a concise high impact way and kind of what people respond to. And I’d say number three is it generally meant that if I went through my day and something had happened, it gave me a moment to condense that down into wisdom, a piece of truth.

So that day I learned something and without that practice, those learnings kind of would have passed you by. So what you’re describing is actually beyond just writing, it’s publishing. And publishing means to make public, to put something into the public domain.

So yeah, there’s journaling, which you keep private, but then there’s making something public. And when you do this, you have to think about how would this be of value to others. So you’re thinking, you know, entrepreneurs have to be thinking about how would this be of value to others.

You’re putting it into the public domain. So you’re getting feedback as to whether this is a good idea or a bad idea or okay idea. So yeah, publishing doesn’t have to be tweeting.

It doesn’t have to be writing a book. Publishing is video, audio. It can be long form content.

It can be short content. You could do shorts, you could do tweets, right? All of that is publishing. The essence of publishing is that you’re taking your ideas and sharing it publicly, putting it in the public domain.

That is a very rapid way to get started. Interesting fact on this, that out of the billion people who use LinkedIn, only 3% are publishing regularly and less than 1% publish weekly. So you think that you’re in competition with a billion people on LinkedIn.

99% of people are just there to kind of lurk and watch what other people are doing. Only 1% of people are competing. 1% of people are creating the content on that platform.

When it comes to YouTube, there’s 2.7 billion users of YouTube but only 4% of people have an account and only a fraction of those accounts are active. So it’s a tiny percentage of the world’s population that are creating something. Most people are consuming.

So one thing that you’re describing is the move from being a consumer to a creator and entrepreneurs have to make that move. How have you accelerated your learning? Because you’re someone that is able to give out lots of different ideas from lots of different reference points and there must be some kind of underlying framework you’re using to like learn, process and publish, which now presents you, which is part of the reason you get invited onto all these podcasts now and people are paying you to speak at their events etc. What was that framework for you? So my background was I used to have an agency and we used to run all these different events and we used to have to put stuff onto people’s seats when we’re running events and I had to kind of write stuff all the time like quick reports and all that.

So I got in the habit of writing. I saw the power of writing. In 2009, the entire world tipped on its head after the global financial crisis and I was completely disrupted.

I went from millions of revenue down to a few hundred thousand of revenue. I lost 90% of my revenue in one year. It was massive.

I remember one Christmas party, 17, 18 people at a Christmas party, the following year was three. It was morbid. So during that time where the global financial crisis had such a deep impact, I began writing about what is it that I know to be true, what is it that like I don’t know much because I’ve just had the rug pulled out from under me, what is it I do know to be true, what are the most strong truths that I could share.

And I ended up writing the book called Key Person of Influence in 2009 and it came out in 2010. And what I felt very confident about was this idea that the future was going to see a shift from business and institutional brands to personal brands, that we would see the decline of big faceless companies and the rise of individuals whose personal brands were bigger than the institutions. And it was pretty radical idea at the time, but I felt pretty confident about it.

And the more I wrote about it, the more I felt this was where the world was heading. If we look today, we can see Brian Cox, Professor Brian Cox has more followers than CERN. We can see Richard Branson has orders of magnitude more followers than Virgin.

We can see Elon’s got more followers than NASA. We can see, you know, Trump is way more powerful than the Republican Party. So the essentially the personal brand has just gone whoosh ahead.

But I started that process very murky, that I didn’t quite know what it was, it was a feeling or a sense. And by the time I’d gone through the publishing process of writing, I was clear. And the macro factors that brought that about, what are those underlying shifts that happened that meant we went from the logo to the person? Let’s zoom out 300 years.

So the agricultural age was essentially the economic system was called feudalism. And there was lords and kings and queens. And then there were serfs and people who surfed the land.

And then technology changed things. You can imagine what it must have been like when 300 people were on a farm, and then they saw three people on a tractor. And then that tractor went and went and did the job of hundreds of people with three people on it.

And it’s like, oh, my goodness, what are we all going to do? How are we all going to live our lives anymore? And then they would have said, well, what are going to be the jobs like everyone works in farming? And it’s like, well, there’s going to be this whole new system, there will be a completely new economic system called the industrial system. And it’s going to replace everything. So back in the agricultural age, if you were a lord, right, and if you were rich, you were successful, you had vast tracts of agricultural land.

But as soon as the industrial age kicked in, you didn’t even need land. You only needed a tiny amount of land to put a factory on. What mattered is that you had the ability to organize labor and machinery.

And if you could organize a factory, that was way more economically productive than hundreds of acres. So the whole economic system got tipped on its head. And suddenly, it didn’t matter if you’re a duke, it mattered if you’re an industrialist, if you’re a capitalist.

So this whole new system took over, we had 200 years of innovation, and it went through multiple waves. But the important thing to know is that it’s technology that changed things, right? It’s always a technology shift, right? The fundamentals of the economy are dictated by the technology that we have available to us. So what happened around the 2000s to 2020, is we had these general purpose technologies that just got introduced as though they were nothing.

You know, suddenly, everyone can publish a video online. Suddenly, everyone can write a blog. Suddenly, everyone can tweet.

Everyone can form a community on Facebook. There’s this device that you put in your pocket that is better than a traditional camera studio that the BBC would have had. So the power was just rapidly swinging from institutions to individuals.

I’m sitting there going, wait a second, an individual has got all the things that a multinational corporation has access to, but they don’t have the bureaucracy, right? They don’t have the weight on their shoulders. They don’t make slow decisions, they can make fast decisions. So as I witnessed this technology being introduced, I said, the way this is going is it’s going to take all the power of big businesses and institutions and just give that to individuals.

That’s exactly what happened. And I mean, if there was ever a year where that’s been more in focus with this election cycle, and what we’ve seen with Trump going on and Kamala going on, Alex Cooper in the media lens. That’s what cost the election.

So that’s a big trend. US presidential elections have always predicted major trends. So Franklin Roosevelt in the 30s, he did the national radio campaign.

JFK in the 60s did the televised campaign. Obama in 2008 did the social media campaign. Each of those campaigns changed the game.

Trump in 2016 did a hyper-personalized digital data-driven campaign, famously with Cambridge Analytica. And that actually gave birth to data analytics and hyper-personalization. And then something big happened in 2024.

And what happened is that Trump broke the mold on campaigning and he started going on all these major podcasts. And if we actually crunch the numbers, Trump did something like 40 hours worth of watch time, and it got 124 million views. And Kamala did, I think it was seven hours.

Just in the long form. Yeah, just on the long form. She did seven hours total, and it only got a few million views.

And one of her podcasts only lasts seven minutes. Now, what she did is she approached it like a McKinsey consultant, which is she turned up and she said, here’s the script, here’s the questions. Ask me these questions, and then I’m out of here.

And it was very much the kind of professional corporate approach. Trump rocks up onto Comedian’s Podcast and says, yeah, ask me anything. And then he just goes on a big rant, and it goes for three hours.

Now, what’s actually happening is quite predictable. In a world of short videos, and in a world of AI, and in a world of confusion and disruption, and where everyone’s throwing punches at each other saying, you’re misinformation, you’re misinformation. You’ve seen some of this going on.

Misinformation, misinformation. What’s actually going on is that people say, hey, enough’s enough. I want to see a long form piece of content and make my own mind up.

I don’t want anyone to tell me what’s misinformation. I’m smart enough. I want to see if this Trump guy is a crazy guy.

I want to be able to see him for two or three hours, and I’ll make my own mind up on that, because everyone’s saying so many different things, and I know that there’s all this confusion. I want the long form piece of content. So 2024 began the long form unscripted era.

So now where we are with marketing is you’ve got to drop the script, and you’ve got to do long form content. And here’s my prediction. The prediction is we’re going to see the biggest CEOs in the world clamoring to get onto this podcast and other podcasts like it.

They’re all going to be wanting desperately to build their personal brand because they know that the long form unscripted podcast is the only way to hire talented people, the only way to get loyal customers, the only way to keep investors happy. It’s going to be the key to the entire shooting match is that the CEO of a big company has to become human, and they have to be unscripted. And what advice would you give them? Because you consult for a lot of people.

They come to you for advice, whether it’s the biggest influencers of the world or CEOs. If you were giving them advice on how to achieve that goal, what would you say? Well, I mostly talk to entrepreneurs, and I mostly care about entrepreneurs. And the advice I give to entrepreneurs is work your way up the podcast pyramid.

So there’s literally thousands and thousands of podcasts that get a few thousand views. Just go on those, go on lots of them. If you do a good job, you’ll eventually be invited onto a slightly bigger one, and you’ll eventually be invited onto a slightly bigger one again.

And there’s this pyramid of, you know, there’s a few podcasts as big as yours, but there’s thousands of podcasts in every single niche and vertical where anyone can go on and, you know, talk about who they are and what they do. So for any entrepreneur, my challenge to them, the ones that I’m working with, is an absolute minimum. I want them to create 10 to 20 hours of watch time in the year ahead.

So I want people to go on 10 podcasts that last for two hours or one to two hours, and I want them talking through their business story, their origin, their mission, their vision, you know, how they got started, the types of people they employ, the types of customer problems they solve, the outcomes they deliver, all of that, put it all into a podcast, get good at that format. You publish in lots of ways, right? You publish written form, you publish in video. Is there anything at all that’s, if there was one single thing that’s helped you become better at speaking or communicating ideas, and you can’t say, no, I’ll take away the restraints.

What would you say it is? Frameworks. Frameworks. What does that mean? So you need communication frameworks.

So if I’m introducing myself to someone, I use something called name, same, fame, aim, and a game. So we can break that down. What is my name and my business name? What is it that I’m the same as that you already understand? Okay, let’s pause there.

Why does that matter? When people are storing information, they need to open a folder and they want to open a folder that’s very easy to label. So they don’t want to open a folder that says, like, I’m an energetic healer that works with transmutational objects that transcend time, space, and blah, blah, blah. They want to go, oh, you know, you’re a life coach.

Okay, great. I understand that. Or you’re a vet.

Okay, cool. You’re a consultant. You’re, you know, you’re a software company.

Got it. So it’s like just the most basic thing that I can then hang everything on that, because I already understand it. So name, same, fame.

So fame is like, what makes you interesting? What makes you fascinating? What big brands have you worked with? What interesting projects have you landed? So anything that would make you stand out, any big numbers, any awards, any big names, any of that would be your fame. So name, same, fame, aim, what are you working on in the next 90 days? And then game, what is your bigger vision? What do you want to achieve in the next three to six years? I think a lot of people aren’t even clear on that. A lot of people aren’t.

And that’s why the framework’s powerful, because it forces you to get clear on it. If you then get clear on it, you can introduce yourself with power and authority. You can do the beginning of the podcast.

You can be on a stage, just introducing yourself at a networking function. Believe it or not, you can cram all of that into 30 seconds. And so going back to this point of preparation, right? So one of the big things that is going to give me a significant competitive advantage if I’m building a business is personal branding.

What else do you think someone like me at the start of my career needs to understand about the game of personal branding? Is there, are there any particular platforms I should be aiming at, a particular upload cadence, a particular type of content? Here’s what you need to know. You need to know that humans have a limited ability to remember names and faces. They only have a small number of slots in their brain for who they remember.

And the number is about 1500 in total. And it’s about 150 that you can kind of remember well. And these are called Dunbar’s numbers.

And Dunbar’s numbers basically said you’ve got a few slots for your family, and then some more slots for friends. Then you’ve got your acquaintances right out to 1500 people that you can easily put a name and a face to. In order for you to be successful, you’ve got to get into people’s head.

They have to kind of know who you are. In order to do that, they have to spend time with you, they have to have repetition with you, and they have to see you in multiple contexts. So the research says 7, 11, 4. Seven hours, 11 interactions on four platforms.

In order for you to remember. Okay, total. So for example, you and I, we’ve now connected a few times.

So we have probably clocked up maybe seven hours together. Now, what that means is that if I bumped into you at a conference, even if I was on one side of the room, and you’re on the other side of the room, you’d say, Oh, there’s Daniel, your brain would immediately go, Oh, there’s Daniel, I’ll walk over, I’ll say hello, because we’ve spent enough time together. Now, there’s this phenomenon called parasocial relationships.

parasocial relationships are basically one sided relationships. It’s how we feel towards famous people. So we think that we know George Clooney, we think that we know Angelina Jolie, we don’t, it’s a parasocial relationship, that person, we’ve spent time with them through their movies, through their media appearances.

And therefore, because they’ve clocked up 7, 11, 4 with us, we then feel that we know them. Is this making sense? Makes perfect sense. Yeah.

So what we have to do is build parasocial relationships at scale. So what we have to do is put out enough stuff where anyone can spend seven hours, 11 interactions for on four platforms. So when I work with entrepreneurs, here’s one of the questions I always ask, I say, if I was to block out tomorrow, and I’m going to take all day to watch, read or listen to everything that you’ve got available online.

And I’m looking for things that are on message that tell me about who you are, who you serve, what it is that you do, can I spend all day going through your online environment and just fill the entire day? And most people say no. And then occasionally, some people say yes. And they say, yeah, actually, you can.

I’ve been on a few podcasts. I’ve got an audio book that I released. I’ve got some videos on YouTube.

I’ve got some posts on LinkedIn, you could go through all of that. Those are the ones that are scaling really fast, because they’ve put in the work to be scalable. They can build a parasocial relationship like that.

And if we drill down into the art of building a parasocial relationship, because it’s funny, at the start of the conversation, you said that these are the new rules in business in the world because of these macro changes. But at some point, the new rules become the old rules again, when everyone listens to this podcast. And you kind of see it at the moment on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a long stream of professional personal brand builders, whereas five years ago, it wasn’t the case. But the numbers are still only 1% of people are doing it. 99% of people aren’t posting weekly.

So we’re still early. We’re still way early. But is there a framework for creating some kind of differentiation amongst a noisy crowd? Yes.

Yeah. So the differentiation. So a lot of people ask me about differentiation.

So let’s talk about what makes you different. And to talk about this, let’s go through a scenario. And the scenario is that you’re walking down the street, and you’re walking down Oxford Street, and it’s thousands of people, really busy street.

And as you’re walking down, your brain has this limbic system that just deletes people. So you just kind of see people as blobs not to hit. And you just kind of walk.

And if I stop you at the end of the street, and I say, how many people do you remember seeing? You’ll go, none. I don’t remember seeing anyone in particular. If I said, describe some of the people what they’re wearing, I can’t remember anything.

So your brain is extremely good at deleting messages. And this is what’s happening in our marketplaces. People just delete everything.

Here’s what doesn’t get deleted. So there’s five things that will not be deleted by the brain. The first one is scary.

So if something is scary, we pay attention to it. This is why the news has been so successful for many, many years because they say if it bleeds, it leads. If it’s scary, if it’s horrible, people will watch it.

Let’s find the worst possible things that happened today. Let’s blow them up and put them in everyone’s house so that they spend time watching the news. So be a scary person.

So be scary, right? The next one is be strange. So if you saw someone walking down the street dressed as a giant hot dog, you’d say, oh, I remember the guy who was dressed as a giant hot dog because it’s so strange. Peacocking.

Yeah. Peacocking. Yeah.

You could try it. Yeah, exactly. You could wear that big kind of hat that you’ve got in the cupboard that you don’t talk about.

And then the next one is sexy. So we’ve got strange, we’ve got scary, we’ve got sexy. Now, these are three things that most businesses don’t want to be.

So most businesses can’t stand out. And sexy, even if they wanted to be that, most people can’t pull that one off anyway. So only a few lucky people get to do that one.

But actually, the last two are the ones that are most useful. And that is providing free value. So free things.

Anyone who gives free value away is immediately stand out. Okay, we’ve got to make sure that it is value. It’s got to be value.

Because everyone thinks what they’re doing is value. Totally. It’s got to be something that people would have otherwise paid for.

And it has to be beautifully packaged. So if I hand you a piece of jewelry in a plastic bag, you’re going to think, oh, it’s fake, or it’s, you know, stolen, or it’s, you know, not real or something like that. It’s cheap.

But if I hand it to you in a beautiful box, and it’s beautifully wrapped, you’re gonna say, oh, that’s a very thoughtful gift. So it’s the way that it’s packaged. And it’s also, you know, that it’s actually something that people would otherwise pay for.

So providing free value. And also being familiar, which is clocking up the 7-Eleven four. So free and familiar are the two things that anyone can apply.

So look at let’s look at you, for example, you spend 10s of 1000s of pounds producing episodes of this show, and you just make it freely available on YouTube. I wish that’s how much I spent. Well, each each show, right? So you’re putting all this energy and effort in, and you’re putting high production value, you’re going to the expense of getting all these great guests, all of this stuff’s going on, and then you’re making it free for so many people.

You’re including people in conversations that they normally wouldn’t have access to. So you have clocked up enormous amounts of standout value for people because you’ve been consistent. So 7-Eleven four, people have spent seven hours, 11 interactions, four locations with you.

And also you’ve done free value. So you’ve given a lot for free. So essentially, those are the two.

And you’re also strange. So with those three things, you’ve been able to succeed Massive. We do have scary conversations as well.

I have to be honest, we did the nuclear bomb conversation. And happy, sexy millionaire. So you’ve got that as well.

Sexy as well. Thank you so much for that, Daniel. You’ve got all five going on.

But when you were saying this, I was actually thinking of this as a marketing framework for brands as well. I was thinking of that kid that I met on the in the promenade in Cape Town with the couple. And I was thinking if they were starting out with an idea today in a very saturated environment, like Oxford Street in London, pulling in on some of these actually gives you such an unfair advantage to get to get going.

And I know this myself, because when I was 18, one of the things that I realized in hindsight was working for me was I looked a bit strange. I had this big, which some people will find photos of this big hat that I used to wear. And I would wear it everywhere.

I wore it because my hair was shit. But it became this like this distinctive thing that at conferences, at events, on my LinkedIn, it became part of my brand. That’s why I interjected with the word peacocking, because looking slightly different in some way does actually.

It does work. Yeah, it cuts through the noise. The other thing, too, let’s go to your friends, the 21 year olds in Cape Town.

One of the first things we can do for free is we can productize what’s called the demo and the customer needs analysis. So let’s get really tactical here. Um, when it comes to what most people do to launch a business, they make a real focus on the supply of what they do.

So if they let’s say they want to do a drinks business, they’re going to like talk to bottling companies and they’re going to talk to, you know, how much do I have to spend buying the fruit to put in the tea and do all that sort of stuff? They’re thinking about the supply of what they do. If they’re going to launch a consulting company, they’re thinking about, oh, do I have the right MBA qualifications? And all of this stuff is the supply side of what they do. What we want to do when we launch anything is we want to test the demand of what we do.

So testing demand, the best way to do this is one of the best ways to do this is to productize the demo and a customer needs analysis. So that is where we go around and we sell a presentation that might be 15 minutes to an hour where we present what it is that we can do and how it works and the principles of how it works. And then we collect enough data to identify whether you’ve got the need for that product.

So it’s called a customer needs analysis. So the demo and the customer needs analysis, you can package that up so it feels like a product. It feels like something free of value.

So give me an example then using I’m going to launch a new coffee. Yeah. And it’s the point of difference with my coffee is it is going to be good for your libido.

Fantastic. So let’s imagine that we’re going to sell that through retailers and the real customer is not the end user. It’s the retailer who’s going to stock it.

So what I would do is I would say we’ve got a new coffee brand coming and it’s all about coffee for libido boosting. And what we want to do is we want to present to you the data, the research as to how this coffee works and why it works and all of that sort of stuff. We want to show you the branding.

We want to show you like what this is going to look like. And then also what we want to do is set up a customer needs analysis where we collect the data from several of your locations to find out in advance whether people would sample this product, whether they’d buy this product, how much they’d spend. So we will at our expense do the clipboarding or we’ll do the waitlist campaign or we will collect the data through, you know, a coming soon promotion.

So essentially what we’re going to do is we’re going to present the data and we’re going to do the customer needs analysis or present the demo, the customer needs analysis and that’s all going to be packaged up as our first thing. Now, mind you, we may have no coffee at this point. We may actually have no physical product, but big retailers, they move slow anyway.

Even if you had product, they wouldn’t buy it today. So they’re going to say, oh, that’s fantastic. That’s what we’d like to do.

We want to collect the data and we want to see the demo and see the research. So by packaging that up as a first step, you’re actually providing initial value. Do you know one of the things I don’t think I’ve ever talked about that I think entrepreneurs and people that are founding companies should really consider is if you’re thinking about, let’s say writing a book instead of writing the book and then hoping it does well, what you should do is you should take the book idea you have and then run it as a Facebook ad, run a hundred different titles.

And when people click on that Facebook ad, they hit a waiting list. Now in that whole process, what you’ve just done there is you’ve figured out the exact percentage of people that will click on a hundred different ideas. So for my upcoming book, one of the things that I did and some people listening to this now would have seen the ads is I ran 70 book titles.

So 70 books like this would have popped up in your feed and people have clicked on them and they’ve said, I want, I would like that book. They put their email address in or something like that. And now I have this data and I can take the top of my head, 15% of people clicked a certain one.

And the worst performing one was clicked by 0.3% of people. And I could have written a book, um, about that 0.3 and my maths isn’t exceptional, but the variance between a 0.3% conversion and a 15% conversion is like, what’s that? 1500% or something crazy. Um, and it was, and it was cost me 200 quid to run the test.

Yeah. Um, that’s the beauty of Facebook ads. You know, you can do a sound, I mean, at any given time, we’ve got hundreds of different variations of ads running and they, it’s like, you know, it’s basically the hunger games for which ad performs better.

Um, and people don’t do this sort of stuff. And this is how professionals like yourself launch businesses. So, um, with anything that I’m launching, whether it’s a book or a product or a new business, we’re going to run a set of Facebook ads, probably 10, 20, 30 different variations.

When you click on the link, it says this product’s no longer available in your area, or this product is not yet available in your area. Um, but you can join the waiting list, click here to join the waiting list. Now, once people click to join the waiting list, uh, that’s where we ask about five or six key questions.

So there’s this thing inside people’s head called the situational model. And the situational model is where am I now? Where do I want to be? What’s in my way? And what do I perceive as the path of least resistance? So all the questions that we ask, uh, tell me about who you are today, which best describes your current situation. Tell me about where you want to be, which best describes the outcome that you’re looking for from this product or service.

Uh, what’s in the way, which best describes the reason you’ve not been able to get that outcome in the past. And what are you currently considering as an option for getting that outcome? Right? So those are the key four key questions. Then we might ask some price questions.

Uh, what price do you feel would be a fair price to pay? What price do you think would be so cheap that it would make you question the quality? What price would be so expensive, um, that you would no longer be able to afford this? So we’ll ask a few pricing questions. So we don’t just get people to join a waiting list. We’re saying we want to understand the situational model because here’s the interesting thing, especially with other products, not necessarily books, but with other products, sometimes you get a lower click through rate.

Sometimes you get, um, what appears to be cheaper marketing, but attracts the wrong person. And then sometimes you get a poor performing marketing campaign. So this one might produce leads at 10 pounds a lead.

This one might produce leads at 20 pounds a lead, but this one might be attracting students who are broke. And this one might be attracting chief executive officers who are on 500 grand a year. I’d rather pay 20 pounds for that client than 10 pounds for that client.

So by getting the situational model, we can actually then understand which is the best campaign. Is there anything else that’s really sort of pertinent to testing if my idea has legs? And I want to just add an element to this, which is, we’re not just talking here about the first idea. We’re talking about every product you then release in the future.

Every product, every business. Even your marketing campaigns and everything you do. Yeah.

The world is moving so fast that if you’re an existing business listening to this, let’s say you’re a big business, you do tens of millions of profit. You’re going to be pivoting into new products, new markets, new territories. You’re going to be trying to attract different age demographics.

You’re going to be, you know, all of that sort of stuff. This is one of the rules of the current economy is about data and testing. You’ve got to be really fast with how fast you can prototype and test and get the data.

So we’d love intro events where you just simply do an introduction event on Zoom to talk to customers. So we’re introducing you to this new coffee. What do you think? Come and join the introduction event.

We’re going to share with you some research. We’re going to have a guest speaker who you’ve already heard of. Right.

So that would be an introduction event. I’m a big fan of discussion groups. Discussion groups are awesome for testing an idea.

So let’s say it’s a discussion group. You know, let’s say you’re doing a new brand of coffee and it’s for sex coffee, right? Sexy coffee. So, yeah, we’re going to do the sexy coffee discussion group.

Right. And it’s basically we’re launching a new product and it’s all about bringing sexy back to coffee. And if you love having coffee and you want to be part of this new brand that we’re launching, join the discussion group.

Discussion groups are pretty wild. So I’ll give you two examples of discussion groups. One of our clients, Gabriella Rosa, she ran a clinic and it was a fertility clinic and it was about natural fertility breakthroughs.

And what she did is she had a physical clinic that was run in a traditional way. She wanted to go and be more digital. So she launched an online discussion group where she said this is a discussion group for people who want fertility breakthroughs.

Twenty three thousand people joined the discussion group. All right. And it was super active.

And she never had to worry about customers ever again. And she built her business then globally. From there, she wrote a book and she changed her business.

She went from a physical location to a digital business. But it started with the discussion group. Another guy, one of our clients, Max, he sold a business not for crazy amounts of money, but a decent sale.

And he decided he wanted to spend time with people who had family offices and family offices have hundreds of millions of dollars to invest. And they’re like basically the family office of multibillionaires and things. He reached out on LinkedIn and he said, I’m launching a WhatsApp group for people who run a multifamily office or a family office.

If you’d like to join, it’s limited to 400 people. If you’d like to join, fill in the application form to be part of our WhatsApp group for family office. So he ended up with 400 people who have collectively over 10 billion to invest.

And he built himself a group of people who are some of the most successful investors in the world and some of the biggest checkbooks in the world. So it just started with a WhatsApp group. So a discussion group is just a super easy way to launch anything.

And it costs nothing to set up a discussion group on WhatsApp, on Facebook, on LinkedIn. So those are some of the best ways. And then the final one that I love is called an assessment.

So a quiz or an assessment. And this is basically where essentially you turn the customer needs analysis into an assessment and people fill in questions to find out if they would like the thing. So for example, I noticed on one of your, which one? Huel.

Sorry. I noticed on Huel that you have a quiz and the quiz is which Huel is right for you. And if you click that button, you answer a series of questions and it tells you which product would be the best product for you to take.

I noticed that Whoop didn’t have it. So I actually created one for you. But anyway, I’ll give it to you later.

But basically, if you wanted to launch a product like Whoop, you might do an assessment, which is how well do you know your health and fitness? Are you tracking your sleep? Are you doing this? Are you doing that? So by launching the assessment first, while you’ve got the product in development, you could get 10,000 people who filled in the assessment. Now, if they’ve come up with a score that is like, oh, I only know my health and fitness 22%, I need to get that up to over 80%. I need a product that helps me to do that.

So that assessment is essentially diagnosing a need. You’re helping the customer diagnose a need that maybe they weren’t clear on. Yeah.

So this is customer needs analysis. Smart businesses often sell the needs analysis before they sell the product, especially with anything that’s, especially anything that is complex. But it goes beyond that because most customers now feel a sense of clutter in their lives.

We’ve gone from feeling a hundred years ago, we felt that we had lots and lots of things that we wanted or needed. And we had unmet needs. Most people feel the opposite today.

We feel that we have too many books and we haven’t read them. We have too much entertainment. We haven’t watched it.

We have too many clothes and they’re cluttering up our wardrobes. Our houses are full of stuff. So people feel such clutter that they only want things that are hyper-personalized to the thing they actually need.

Because otherwise they feel, you know, that it’s going to be another thing that they’re not using. So by selling a customer needs analysis, when people see that it’s a perfect fit, then they want to buy. In my last book, The Diversity of 33 Laws, I talk about the idea that friction can create value.

And I give examples of where someone has added friction to the customer process and it’s resulted in more people buying. And one of the studies I talk about is where they took two groups of people, they exposed one of them to a survey in order to enter a discussion group. So they had to go through this survey process to get in.

And they let the second group straight into the discussion group. And then they asked both groups to rate how valuable and enjoyable they found the discussion group to be. Now the group that had had to go through a survey to get in, reported that the discussion group was like really interesting, etc, etc.

And the group that had been let straight in reported that it was boring. And it was an intentionally boring group. So they made an intentionally boring group.

But just because you made someone go through a process to get in, people reported that it was more valuable than otherwise, which says something about our psychology. Well, friction does create value. Demand and supply tension is the ultimate test of value.

You know, it’s horrible to say, and I hate this being true, but there is no such thing as objective value. Nothing is objectively valuable. Everything is subjective.

Why is a Bitcoin worth what a Bitcoin is? Because there’s more buyers than sellers. There’s demand and supply tension. Why is water free? Because it’s freely available.

There’s no friction. Why do we never stop and think about how incredible it is that we have Google Maps? And like we go like, oh my goodness, someone spent a billion dollars sending satellites up so that I can have maps on my phone for free. Like no one’s weeping tears of joy for Google Maps.

And we should be because, you know, someone spent a billion dollars on our behalf. So we’ve got free maps on our phone, but there’s no friction around it. Now, if they suddenly said we’re taking it away, we’d hit the roof.

And if they said it’s 10 bucks a month, we’d pay 10 bucks a month. So friction creates value. Demand and supply tension creates value.

Now, the very difficult thing that we have in the world right now is that in a digital environment, there’s no natural tension, right? So a hundred million people can watch a video in a week and, you know, it transcends time, space, wear and tear. There’s no barriers. There’s nothing that stops it.

The money accumulates around those tension points. So the successful businesses, they know how to use the digital environment to drive up demand and manufacture desire and manufacture demand. And then they have choke points in their business or tension points in their business where demand and supply tension is rife.

And those are the places where they monetize. Something that’s really interesting about monetization that’s happening at the moment is that all the money is moving up to the top 10%, right? So as we go through this big transition, the affluence is all up in the top 10%. So we did some research into this.

The top 1% of people in your audience, in everyone’s audience, whether you’re a LinkedIn account or whether you’ve got millions of followers, top 1% have got a total of 15% of the budget available to spend. The next 9% have got 45% of the budget available to spend. So in the top 10%, there is 60% of the available budget.

And then the bottom 90% collectively have 40%. So what happens is that the new business model that’s emerging is that you give free value to the bottom 90% and you don’t ask anything in return, but you monetize the top 10%. And you find things that are very special, very rare, special experiences, special products, limited editions, communities, special access.

The top 10% have got all the money. So you just give free value to 90% of people and you only create products and services for the top 10%. That’s very much a new business model at the moment.

And the 90% are driving your content, your business, your product to the top 10% through their engagement, their sharing, etc. Well, it’s a fractal. It doesn’t matter what you do.

The top 1% will, even if you only did something for billionaires, the top 1% of billionaires have got 15% of the total budget and the bottom 90% of billionaires have actually only got 40% of the budget. If you take the Forbes list, those numbers still apply. The key is that you, well, actually what you want to do is the opposite.

You don’t want to get dragged down into the 90% because the 90% of the noisiest, they’re the loudest. So if you ask everyone, how much should I charge? The average answer is going to be $500. But if you ask the top 1% how much should I charge? The average answer is going to be $15,000 to $20,000.

So you have to be very, very careful not to create a product that gets dragged down towards the 90% because the 90% don’t have the budget to pay the top money. You’re far better off having a way of segmenting that top 10% so that you can actually pick up the signal from them and not the noise from everybody else. Are there any other frameworks that you would use in that early stage where you’re trying to figure out if your idea has traction or even from a sort of motivation psychology perspective, if it’s worth pursuing this thing for the next 10 years of your life? Because we talk a lot about, okay, if someone’s clicked on it, there’s demand and interest, but the journey of an entrepreneur is an emotional one.

And as you often say, there’s you go through hell and high water, ups and downs as an entrepreneur. So there’s an element of this, which is like figuring out what you want to commit your life to. Well, we call this the entrepreneur sweet spot and the entrepreneur sweet spot is a Venn diagram and you’re trying to balance between your passion, the problem and the value of the problem that you solve and how much people are willing to pay for that.

So passion, problem, payment. So ultimately things that we’re highly passionate about, that’s great, but that only ticks one box. And if you’re passionate about something, but you’re not solving a problem for others and they’re not willing to pay you for it, you’re going to feel very unrewarded.

You’re going to feel disconnected. Maybe you feel even unethical about that. A lot of people in corporate jobs, they solve a problem and they get paid well, but they’re not passionate about it.

And what they tend to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater and they go and pursue being a yoga instructor from being a corporate lawyer. And then they wonder why they got no money because they just kind of threw away the thing that they’re very good at and the thing that they get paid for and just exchange it. So what we have to do is actually try and capture all three by making some compromises.

And the compromises are, I’m not going to go to the thing that is the extreme of passion and I’m not going to go to the thing that’s the extreme of financial rewards. I’m not going to go to the extreme of my intellectual property and my problem-solving abilities. I’m going to find something that is in the middle that ticks all of those boxes.

So I’m getting a good blend. While understanding that there’s going to be a trade-off. There’s going to be some trade-offs.

Yeah. You can’t have it all at the extremes. You can have it all, but not all at the extremes.

You talked about something at the start of this conversation, you mentioned the word geography. As we were talking about the macro factors that are at play in the transitions we’ve seen. My question to you is, does geography matter for success as an entrepreneur? So those kids in Cape Town, do they need to be thinking, listen, we need to move to one of the major cities if we’re going to stand a chance in most of these new digital opportunities? It used to matter a lot.

When we used to think about entrepreneurs, we thought about two men, typically in their twenties, who came from a prestigious U.S. university. They got into a garage. They dropped out of Harvard.

They dropped out of Stanford. And then they started something that was VC backed. That was the old model of what we think of as an entrepreneur.

And it was very much dependent upon those parameters. Entrepreneurship transcended that. It’s transcended geography, gender, race, and also the size and scale of what we consider to be successful.

So what we’re now seeing is people all over the world who are able to connect with markets anywhere in the world, launch a product that can be sold anywhere in the world. We’re seeing people who bootstrap rather than get VC capital. We’re seeing people who rather than trying to create something mass market, they create something niche market.

Rather than trying to scale to be a unicorn, they actually ask the question, at what size would I be fulfilled? So there are plenty of people who, well, one of the most fulfilling businesses that you’ll ever have has between six and 12 people and does three or four million of revenue. And if you’ve got that, probably you’re going to be the most fulfilled person in the world. Which is profitable.

Yeah. Well, because a lot of these businesses have 60% margins. If they’re digital businesses, if they’re intellectual property, you know, if they’re running on the new economy assets, then they’ll be wildly profitable.

So you might have six to 12 people do two or three million a year. You might make a million of clear profit. And then you’re totally building business on fund freedom and fulfillment.

Are you the next Google? Absolutely not. Do you have VCs breathing down your neck? No. Are you able to pick and choose the types of people and opportunities you want to work with? Yes.

So incredibly fulfilling. So that’s a new type of business. I would call that a lifestyle boutique.

There’s another type of business called a performance business. And this is a business that typically has 30 people normally working with some sort technology. And they build a business that they build a business that can be sold for between 10 and 100 million.

And that’s my that’s my game. I like businesses that achieve 10 to 100 million evaluation with about 30 people on a team. And we can sell to either a public listed company, a private equity backed company.

We can exit to any of those kind of companies. But, you know, we don’t have to be the next Google. And we also don’t have to split the exit with a VC.

Why do you say that when you also just said that the most fun and fulfilling businesses are actually those small ones with a small group of people? In order to go to that next level, you have to be a business geek. So anyone can build a six to 12 person business. And at that point, all you have to geek out on is the topic of interest to the customer.

So if your customer loves yoga, you’re just talking about yoga all the time. Or if your customer loves photography, you’re talking about photography. And you don’t have to be a business geek at that point.

When you’ve got a team of about 30 to 100, you have to be you have to be totally into the product, the intellectual property of what you do. But you also have to geek out on technology and you also have to geek out on business. So not everyone is built for that.

You have to really love your acronyms. You need to like, oh, go to market strategy or, you know, lifetime value of a client. OK, what’s the LTV? What’s the GT, you know, GTM? So you kind of got to be into all of those things quite naturally.

You naturally want to read business books. So you’re not going to enjoy that if you hate business or if you hate technology, because those businesses tend to be about business strategy and tech. These ones are about intellectual property, media and data.

Got you. Do you think you’d be happier if you were less ambitious? My happiness levels are really high. I walk around feeling like I’m super lucky to do what I do and it’s a total privilege and I love living in these times.

I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to be born at the perfect time to see this change and to have access to all these resources. And how do you think about work-life balance these days? And how should, especially sort of young founders, when I say young founders, I don’t mean age, I mean stage, should be thinking about work-life balance in your view? So I had no balance for many years, probably a decade or more. All I did was essentially just get out of bed, work, everything related to work.

And the reason I did that is that it ticked all of my human needs. I was getting significance and variety and I was, you know, getting certainty and I was getting all of those things that we want from life and I was feeling a sense of growth and development and learning. So everything plugged into those human needs and my business was giving me all of that.

When I had kids and I got married, there was this whole other side to me that needed to be balanced. And I think that there’s more to do with some seasons, like that we go through sprints and I tell friends, family, hey, I’m going through a bit of a sprint right now, we’re launching something new. And then there are times where I switch off a lot.

Do you goal set at all? Do you set goals? You know, I used to, I used to set goals and I used to love setting goals. I don’t anymore because my key person of influence brand brings in opportunities that I can’t predict. So this diary of a CEO thing was an example of that.

I had all these goals for 2024 and then you message me while I’m skiing and say, would you like to come on the show? And I go, of course, that would be amazing. So I come on the show and then that totally transformed my year. So as you build a brand, it’s harder to goal set because you’ve got too many things.

So goal setting is about direct power, direct influence and having a brand is about indirect power or indirect influence. It’s what you attract. So ultimately at the early stages, goal setting is really important because it’s how do I direct my energy? Once you get a little bit bigger, you have to slow down to speed up.

You have to create space to see what’s happening around you. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made was filling my diary so full that I didn’t see some of the biggest opportunities that were going on around me. And I think this has cost me tens of millions.

And I really think at a certain level, strategically, you have to slow down to speed up. You have to create gaps where things can hit you, things can get onto your radar or else you miss all the benefits of having a great brand. So I have a few questions here.

One of them is about how you measure or quantify the value of an opportunity looking forward when you have very little information about the opportunities. So what we’re trying to move towards is leverage, so that we live in a world of leverage. So it’s important to understand there are two types of opportunities.

There’s bell curve opportunities and power law opportunities. So bell curve opportunities means that everything fits within a bell curve and it’s very unlikely that anything will be outside of that bell curve. Power law opportunities means that because of leverage, the sky’s the limit.

What we have to do is have the courage to move out of bell curves and into power laws. So for example, a doctor in the NHS, who I know, recognized that all doctors earn roughly the same amount of money. There’s no outliers.

Everyone who works in the NHS, if you’re a new doctor, you earn about this. If you’ve been around for 20 years, you earn about this. And most people fit within that bell curve.

There’s no doctors who are making a million a month type thing. Then there’s the power law. This particular guy dropped out of being an NHS doctor to become a YouTuber and recognized that there are some YouTubers who are actually earning a million a month and boom, there is this power law that goes up.

So what we’re trying to find out… Ali Abdaal. Yes, of course, Ali Abdaal. So what we’re trying to figure out is we’re trying to figure out is this a bell curve or a power law? So being a speaker on a stage, absolutely a power law move.

Being friends with a billionaire in Italy and having access to that capital, access to whatever networks they’ve got, all of that sort of stuff if they’re the right sort of person. There’s definitely two types of billionaires, but that’s probably an exponential opportunity, right? It puts you further up the power law. It’s not a bell curve opportunity.

However, if someone says, you know, can we meet to talk about some incremental thing? No, that’s a bell curve, right? That’s not going to break me out of what I’m doing. So for most people listening to this, most people are trapped inside a bell curve. You’re never going to get out of that bell curve.

Every opportunity fits within that bell curve. You’re only going to incrementally move to one from one side of the bell curve to the other side of the bell curve. And that’s about it.

There is no massive upside. If that’s you, what you need to be doing is spending a little bit of time talking to people about exponential opportunities, right? And exponential opportunities always involve leverage. That’s what creates the exponential shift.

Leverage could be fame. Leverage could be capital. Leverage could be large databases.

Leverage could be huge distribution networks that already exist. Leverage could be a partnership with someone who’s way further along than you are. Leverage could be being in business first, being in a job.

So all of those things are things that move you onto the power law. And it’s almost the sky’s the limit at the moment, because in 2010, 28% of the world had fast internet. And in 2025, 70% of the world has fast internet.

So 70% of 8 billion people have got fast internet. So the number of people available to talk to has gone into the billions and billions and billions. The amount of capital is flooding into the internet.

Everything is in that space. And ultimately, unfortunately, one of the things that’s happening at the moment is that you’re either in competition with everyone in the world or everyone in the world is a potential customer. And if you feel that you’re in competition with everyone in the world, which a lot of people do, it’s terrifying.

It feels horrible. It’s absolutely scary to think that for a lot of businesses and a lot of individuals with a career, it’s like, wow, I’m in competition with AI. I’m in competition with an agency in India or a remote worker in the Philippines who’s happy for $5 an hour.

I’m in competition with someone who’s phenomenally well-funded in LA. I’m in competition with this incredible tech team in Silicon Valley. YouTubers.

YouTubers. I’m competing on the opportunity. I’m competing for attention.

Like, how am I going to survive? And then the flip side of that is that once you make this transition to this new rules, new way of doing things, then it flips. It’s like, oh, everyone’s a potential customer. So how do you think about defence? You know, in many of your businesses that you run, you’re in competition with lots of people.

Where do you find areas to defend against that competition? The sort of proverbial blue oceans? So what I’m looking for when I set up my businesses to scale is we ask the question, how many people this year could we either take on and leave them feeling completely delighted? Uh, how many people this year would represent a phenomenally good year? Right. So in one of the businesses, the number is 600. We say, okay, 600 people.

If we have 600 people, 600 clients in this particular business for this year, that’s a really good year. We’re happy with that year. So we call that the official capacity of the business.

We give it a name. Official capacity is 600. Then we ask the question, what percentage of our leads buy that product? And in that business, it’s one in 66.

So for every 66 leads we generate, we get one client who’s the perfect client. So it’s a very particular focus business. So then we know that we need to engage 49,000 people.

And if those 49,000 people engage with us, then we will be able to select the 600 clients we work with and that we will absolutely do everything we can to leave those 600 people feeling delighted that they want to recommend it and they love it. And for us, just simply knowing those numbers, that allows us to say, ah, okay, we engage 49,000 people. We make our 600 sales.

It’s a super successful year. We can celebrate that. So by setting the rules to our game, we’re not dragged into anybody else’s rules.

And that means that we’re playing a really defensive game. We’re defending against all the things that we could focus on by being really specific about what we want to focus on. And for those kids on the promenade in Cape Town that I keep referring back to, if they’d asked you, if they said, uh, Daniel, what industry would you start a business in today if you were us and you had limited funds? Well, let’s do some big trends.

The biggest, so biggest opportunity at the moment is 50% of the economy is owned by baby boomers, people aged 61 to 79. So that’s 50% of the US economy, 50% of the Australian, the New Zealand, the Canadian, the UK, right? So all the sort of major Western economies that had a baby boom, 50% of the economy is owned by people aged 61 to 79. Um, so those people are going through a big life change.

They’re transforming the way they live and work. They want to get rid of their businesses. They want to move into advisory roles.

They want to travel. They want to have different relationships. They want to have different priorities.

Um, so I would definitely be thinking about how do I work with that group of people? I’m either going to buy their business and take it over, um, which would be an opportunity. I’m going to build a business that disrupts the current way that they’re doing business. Um, or I’m going to sell to that market cause they’re cashed up.

They got loads of time, loads of money. Um, and every business could think about how it’s going to sell to a baby boomer market cause that’s 50%. Um, so a good example might be of a baby boomer business.

What’s a good baby boomer business? Everything. The whole economy is made up of, like if we went out on the street here, um, the person down the road who’s fixing, who’s doing the MOT on the cars is a baby boomer business. The guy who services the elevators that come up and down here, that’s baby boomer.

The air conditioning unit business is a baby boomer business. Um, you know, the courier company that kind of dropped everything off, it’s a baby boomer business. Um, you know, the whole damn shooting match is like most, like 50, like half the businesses and especially by revenue and valuation, it’s all baby boomers or half baby boomers at least.

And there may be a sort of a digital arbitrage opportunity that there’s been created with the transfer of, um, with the rise of digital that they might have missed that you could seize upon? It massively, well, one of the things is that every single business in the world is going to be disrupted by AI. Um, and you’ve got to be the company that, um, uses AI when they’re not. Uh, and, and using AI, like being disrupted by AI just means that every employee is way more effective because they’re using AI.

So one of the simple things to disrupt a business with AI is to run a training workshop with all the people in the company about how they could use AI in their role. Um, and you could watch some videos online and you could, uh, play with chat GBT. Recently we introduced an AI system to one of our businesses.

We have 250 video case studies of clients who are happy customers, and they’ve recorded a video for us. And they’re amazing video case studies, but there’s too many of them. There’s so many video case studies.

So we created an AI bot that reads and understands all of those video case studies. And then for my sales team, when they’re talking to a customer, they’re just typing, uh, of they’re typing in the type of scenario that that person’s going through. And the bot is then suggesting, oh, this is the video case study.

This is the customer. This is what they said. Same industry as you, same problem, same challenge.

And then they, here’s the link to the video case study. So our sales team can be super effective at sending you through the exact video case study that’s relevant to you because the AI bot has read and understood every single one of our video case studies. So that’s an example.

You know, there’s been so many of these technological revolutions over the last 50 odd years that I look back on and thought, oh gosh, I wish I was there at the dot-com boom. I would have become a billionaire. I would have had all, you know, a variety of different ideas.

Do you think AI is that now? Do you think we’re living through that? We’re early. It’s so early, right? It’s the moment. I remember when Steve Jobs launched the App Store and that was 2007, 2007, 2008.

It was two years later that Instagram was launched. It was two years later that Uber was launched. And then there was a march of hundreds of different businesses.

And now applications are, you know, everywhere. The bigger example would be electricity. So it was the 1830s where we generated electricity, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that we filled our houses full of things that ran on electricity.

So it was a hundred year transition. Now with AI, we’re at the early stage of generating AI, but we’re not yet into the stage of creating everything that runs on AI. So think about a power station versus a toaster.

So the power station’s been invented, but there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of toasters that can be invented. Toasters, kettles, vacuum cleaners, things that run on electricity. So AI is like electricity, but we haven’t built all the businesses that are going to plug in and are going to be great opportunities.

And that’s going to be over the next 10 to 15 years. Every single industry, you can’t name an industry that’s not going to be impacted by this. Every industry is going to have applications that run on AI.

There’s going to be new teams. Do you know what happened just a super computer for $3,000. Now this is going to be the fundamental basis for 10 people, companies that do a billion of revenue.

This is going to be entrepreneurs who like crunch some data, figure out a little application because of that kind of compute power. They’re going to come up with something and it’s going to be a billion dollar business with 10 people working on the team. There’s going to be a little healthcare unit that figures out how to crunch data and solve like a really complex health problem and they’ll figure out how to do it.

That super computer, the three grand, supersedes what people used to be spending three to six to nine grand a month on. So previously you would have had to subscribe to that level of compute and you would have been spending $50,000 a year just for the cloud subscription to that sort of thing. Now one payment of $3,000, you can be anywhere in the world crunching any amounts of phenomenal data.

So just that one thing, that one innovation is going to totally transform industries. I would imagine that I’m going to guess 90, 95% of people that are listening right now don’t know a lot about AI. They also don’t really know a lot about technology to the extent that many other people do, the 5% do.

For those people who are, you know, it could be the taxi driver, it could be the janitor, it could be a student in university studying philosophy or something, what advice would you give them? If you were the puppet master of their life now and you had to get them close to this opportunity, what are the sort of steps you take towards being able to capitalise on something like Nvidia’s supercomputer? Yes, so of course it’s a pyramid. So the schooling system taught you that the way to be successful was to turn labour into skilled labour. So become skilled labour.

Your time and your skills are what’s valuable. And that was the industrial revolution model for everybody. We all went through that system and we said that’s where the journey ends.

In fact, if you want, you can go to university, become really skilled labour, you get a master’s and become really skilled later, PhD, become super skilled labour. And the whole goal is sell your time for more money. And then sitting on top of that is this new universe.

And the new universe is this digital economy. And the first step above it is called intellectual property. Intellectual property is where rather than learning more stuff, you reflect and create some stuff.

So you say, oh, over the last five years, I did something special with that client and we got a great result and I can explain it step by step. I’m going to document that. I’m going to turn that into a story and I’m going to record a video about it.

And I’m going to have a little poster with a wheel that explains how we did that. And then I’m just going to let people know about that. So now we’re in the business of intellectual property.

Intellectual property is anything written, anything on video, anything audio. So intellectual property couples up with media. So IP and media are the next level above skilled labour.

So the first step, get out of skilled labour model and get into intellectual property and media. And just making that step opens you up to this whole other world of opportunities. You must know the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey.

He passed away 10 years ago. He was not some special guy. He was a church leader in Utah.

He did some consulting with small businesses and he did some consulting with churches. But he just reflected on what he’d seen and he reflected on a few studies that he’d come across and he wrote this book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. So he went from skilled labour consulting to intellectual property and media, which was his written word plus his book publishing.

So that’s step one. And mind you, he sold 20 million copies and he built a $400 million consulting company, but it was based on IP, not his labour. So that’s step one.

Sitting above that is data and intellectual property, media and data and software. So once we have IP and media, now we want data and software. So data is where we build a database.

We get email addresses, we get information about customers, we know more about markets, we get people filling in forms, we get people filling in scorecards, we start conducting surveys. So we’re capturing data that’s unique to us. And then software is the ability to turn our intellectual property into an engine that just automatically delivers a result.

And in that software bucket is the ability to create AI applications. So you’re going to have to move your way up that pyramid. And then the final little top of the pyramid is the ability to create financial assets.

Financial assets is where you sell your business for an amount of money. So you actually package all of that into a business that can be sold and that business becomes a financial asset. The shares become a financial asset and then you make a lot of money by selling your company.

So you can’t jump straight from being labour or skilled labour straight up to software and data and those sorts of things, which is the advanced AI stuff. So you’ve got to go through intellectual property, media, data, software. And what do you do with your money? So everyone has a different sort of finance strategy or an investment strategy.

What’s your investment strategy? I’ve said to you before that I really trust the advice that you can’t outperform markets. Everything’s already priced into markets. So for me personally, I put money into S&P 500.

I put, you know, basically things that you’d call a store of wealth. I don’t think that’s particularly exciting. I’m not, you know, sometimes I see people talking about like, oh, what should someone do if they’re earning 50 grand a year to invest? Honestly, it’s not going to do anything.

Like, you’ll just like obviously do it. But I believe it’s far better to take that money and invest it into your key relationships. I think it’s better to take that money and put it into a startup, like actually, you know, buy yourself some time so you can, you know, move in, move into this new economy.

The thing that excites me most is just creating really valuable businesses. I have a group of companies now. And let me explain.

Here’s an idea. The economy doesn’t want you to become rich, right? It doesn’t want you to accumulate money, right? The whole economy is set up so that you can’t get money or you can’t keep it. And what people think you do to make money is that they think that you take a little piece out of the economy and squirrel it away and store it up.

And that’s not actually how people become rich. What they do is they create something from their mind and they formalize it into a company. And then they get people to invest in that company.

And that creates new wealth in the economy that didn’t exist, never existed. It was a figment of their imagination. And that new wealth, we call that innovation and entrepreneurship.

And what happens, and I’ll give you a real life example. So, Bookmagic is one of my software startups. We raised 400,000 pounds for 10%, which means 3.6 million pounds worth of value is new value that never existed.

It’s just added to the economy. It’s this new economic asset called shares in this company. 10% of the shares were 400,000.

3.6 million is the other 90% that doesn’t actually exist. It was just a figment of the imagination. So, it’s called innovation and entrepreneurship.

Very slowly that becomes more and more real. And then bigger companies come in and acquire that or people acquire those shares and then it becomes a liquidity event. You get capital and then you reinvest that capital into creating new things in the economy.

So, the way rich people become rich is not by squirreling little bits out of the existing economy. It’s by creating something new that never existed and slowly introducing that into the economy. So, it’s building things that didn’t exist.

So, when I hear people trying to get this tiny little bit out of the economy and then they’ve got to pay taxes on it and then the UK government wants half of everything and it’s horrific. You will just be on this treadmill. You’ll never get out of it.

But if you can create something and you can have innovation and entrepreneurship, you can build something that’s worth 5 million, 10 million, 20 million from your mind, from your brain. And then you introduce it and formalize it and it goes into the economy and it’s actually a new asset in the economy. And what is the horror that we need to warn people about if they decide to do what you just said? Because everything in life has a cost.

So, starting a $20 million company comes with… I meet so many founders. I had one in the office yesterday, great founder from the UK, young lady. She’s done exceptionally, exceptionally well.

She built a company that I think is going to make 35 million and she’s going through a fucking horrific time. And it came out of her brain. Yeah.

The biggest horror is that we were never trained for this. Right. So, all of society is built for the industrial revolution system and it’s not built for the digital revolution system.

So, we were told don’t be disruptive and yet the disruptors are making all the money. We were told, you know, you can’t ask someone to do your homework for you yet the people who make all the money get someone else to do all their homework for them. We were told, you know, don’t be an attention seeker but attention seekers make all the money.

So, there’s all of this stuff that we were taught about becoming standardized component labor and that mindset is always fighting you when you’re running a business. Because over here, running a new business, it’s exciting, it’s exhilarating, it’s creative but it feels wrong. It feels like you’re doing something like weird because you’re outside of the system.

So, there’s no blueprint, there’s no clear blueprint that anybody trained you for. Yeah, you didn’t, certainly didn’t do a schooling. In fact, the schooling system taught you everything wrong.

It’s the opposite. They wanted you to become standardized component labor and over here you have to be unique intellectual property. So, you’re also dealing with platforms that are brand new.

Yeah. And also just like a social environment that is brand new. I say that because obviously post pandemic the rules of work changed.

Completely. And Zoom and technology. We went from geography to ideal customer personas in communities.

So, all of our entire economy, in fact, if you think about our governments, our governments are struggling because they define themselves by geography but the digital world is not defined by geography. So, when the of the UK says, we’re putting up the taxes, all the millionaires go, okay, we’ll leave. And then they’re like, oh no, I mean, Norway did this as well, right? All these multi-billionaires just packed up and left.

Oh, we’re introducing a wealth tax. Okay, bye. You’ve commented a lot on this over the last couple of months.

What is your position on this? Because there’s been a lot, there’s lots going on geopolitically, the UK changed the tax system, US got Trump coming in and he’ll be in by the time this podcast is out probably but. Well, my position is that we should collect the most amount of taxes that we can, but the way to do that is with low taxes, not high taxes. Because in a world where people can freely move around, you need to be an attractive place for people to come to.

People say, oh, we don’t like rich people. Well, actually rich people pay a lot of taxes, 1% pay 30%. So, you need, if you wanted to double the tax base, get a few more of this 1% people to come here.

The UK was thriving when we used to have a $10 million SEIS, or sorry, 10 million entrepreneurs, 10 million pound entrepreneurs relief, you know, made the UK one of the best places to do business. So, just for people that have never experienced entrepreneurs relief, can you explain exactly what that, who that impacts and when? Yeah, so essentially entrepreneurs relief acknowledged that entrepreneurs are taking a huge gamble in what they do. They’re pouring time, effort, energy and resources into their business in an unpaid capacity.

And that when they finally get a success, if they get a success, then one of the ways of acknowledging that risk and making that a good decision is that you only pay 10% tax on the first, well, it used to be 10 million of exit value. And now it’s on the first 1 million of exit value. So, essentially, if you’re paying roughly the same as income tax on starting a company, then for a lot of people, they’re just not going to start a company, right? They’re not going to take the risk, they’re not going to innovate.

And then the investment also slows down. If people can earn more money by just sitting on their capital and sticking it into a property, they’re not going to invest in startups. So, you have to have, if you want an economy that’s based on actual innovation and change and transformation and AI and software and data and the new economy, you have to incentivize investors to do that.

It’s also a globally competitive landscape. So, as soon as you’ve got, you know, Dubai saying, hey, we don’t even do income tax, right? And also when you go to Dubai, tax feels like such a scam because you go, wait a second, their police force, their hospitals work, everything’s clean, they’ve got no potholes, their buildings are amazing, no crime, the transport’s working, like the whole place is working like clockwork. You go, but how are they doing this without collecting 45% of the economy as tax? In the UK, 45% of the entire economy is government spending.

Are people leaving the UK? 10,000 millionaires left last year. So, when I think about all the really exceptional people that I hired over the last 10, 15 years, every single one of the truly exceptional ones that I bet a lot on that person, they all live in Dubai. They’ve all gone.

Some of them have moved to America, some of them are working in SF. Even America, which is high tax, but you start paying the highest rate of tax at eight times the average wage. Here, you pay the highest rate of tax at three times the average wage.

So, they’re not letting anyone get ahead. Now, the other day, Keir Starmer says, we want to be leaders in AI. Well, unfortunately, we have the most expensive electricity, so you can’t run data centers here.

And we also have the highest tax rates. So, highly skilled, highly talented people do not want to be here. And I hate to say it, everyone’s like, oh, you know, we need to tax the rich.

Sorry, they can leave. They really can. And in this digital economy, with a personal brand, with data, with software, with media assets, those assets pick up on a phone.

Like, you literally leave with your phone and you’re fine. I saw this narrative playing out over the last year, and I’m a skeptic. I’m also like politically apolitical.

Yeah, same. So, I don’t have a team. I look at these narratives playing out and I try and figure out if it’s a certain person has an agenda, they’re trying to push the narrative because they’re rich and they want the tax lower.

Or if another person on the other side has an agenda because they want to tax the rich more. And where I ended up landing, purely based on what I saw in my life with rich people around me, and the decisions they started to make, is a lot of the most successful people that if I was Keir Starmer, I’d want to keep in this country, especially the ones that don’t have the mortgage yet and the family, they are off. They’re off.

They are going. And then the stats came out, which I think recently said that about 10,000, we’ve had like an exodus of these people. And I know, I know it’s triggering for some people because they fucking hate rich people.

And they just think that rich people should just, but if you are truly, I think in the middle, you do come to understand to some degree that the backbone of our economy is entrepreneurship, small businesses with AI and technology becoming an even greater part of our economy. There’s a certain type of entrepreneur that’s likely to build and succeed in AI that we really need to keep. And they, we are competing geographically with San Francisco, Dubai, Abu Dhabi.

We absolutely are. The other reason, the other thing, people think that rich people are taking money out of the economy and the opposite is happening. They’re creating wealth that pumps into the economy and they’re creating it from figments of their imagination.

They’re building things that didn’t exist that come into the economy as new wealth. If we were living now, mind you, that’s not all millionaires. Some millionaires are horrible landlords who make their money by bullying people.

If you live in certain locations, the only millionaires you’ve met are probably slum landlords or something like that. That’s not who we’re talking about. We’re not talking about people who are rent seekers or people who, you know, kind of bully people around or any of that sort of stuff.

Talking about wealth creators, people who are coming up with new intellectual property and bringing it into the economy to create jobs and wealth and investments. And they make the world go round. One of the reasons we have wealth inequality is not what’s being talked about.

Wealth inequality is because of technology and technology adoption. So I want you to imagine that we’ve got two people who are racing each other in a marathon. One person is running and one person’s on a bicycle.

So they’ve got technology that they’re leveraging. The person on the bicycle is going to be powering ahead effortlessly. And it’s going to look like a very unfair thing.

And you say, well, this person works just as hard as this person. Why are they getting ahead a lot faster? Because this one on the cycle is leveraging technology and this person is not leveraging technology. When we go through these great shifts, we actually get people who are stuck in the old system and people who are in the new system.

Charles Dickens wrote about this in the early industrial revolution. There were all of these kids that were on the street, right? All of a twist. And there was this huge wealth inequality as some people were industrialists and some people were still in the feudal system in the agricultural age.

Some people’s income was linked to capitalism. Some people’s income was linked to feudalism. So in the same way that that was happening then, we’re going to see a very similar Dickens.

I mean, he had that famous book called The Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times was the opening line.

We’re going to have the same thing now. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times because we’re going to have some people who are leveraging technology and they live a life of fun, freedom, fulfillment, financial success.

And with some people who are stuck in the industrial age who sit there and say, I work as hard as I possibly can and I cannot get ahead. I’m falling behind year after year after year. And it’s because we have two systems operating in parallel.

Okay. So the people that would counter you now, when you talk about, you know, the idea that these individuals that are leaving our wealth creators, what is the counterpoint that is, that is, you know, does make sense. There are some rich people I know that are hoarding a lot of stuff.

I mean, they are, they’re also, they do create opportunities for the economy, but they are, they’re in a hoarding season of life, just kind of stacking it up. They’re not really giving it to many people and they’re playing certain money games just to build wealth and not necessarily creating huge economic value. So what we need is nuance and we need the nuance to understand that there are poor people who are, who are rent seekers, who are not productive, who are takers from the economy.

There are rich people who are takers from the economy and there are rich people who are phenomenal wealth creators who create opportunities around them. There are poor people who are phenomenally valuable to the economy. So if we were to just simply make no distinction by just simply the level of wealth or income, it doesn’t distinguish between, let’s say a nurse who’s on 30,000 and someone who’s a drug dealer on 30,000.

They’re not, they might be economically the same, they’re not the same types of people in the economy. So what we need to do is have some nuance and understand what is the behaviors that we want to incentivize, what is the behaviors that we want to avoid. We want to make it hard to simply stick all of your money in expensive assets and then rent them out.

We want to tax that and we want to make it easy to invest in new economy. We want to, we want to make it easy to bring down the prices of things. We want to make it easy to, we want to make it easy for wealthy people to invest into startups.

We want to make it easy for people to relocate here and, you know, it’s an attractive opportunity to build a business here and create jobs here. We’ve just stuck a 15% tax on top of employing people. So a lot of entrepreneurs have responded by outsourcing to remote workers.

I know plenty of companies that are now hiring people in the Philippines and South Africa because it’s 15%, but straight off the back, all things being equal, it’s 15% cheaper to hire someone overseas than here. You know, so the government is making the wrong moves. They’re just doing the wrong thing.

They’re making it expensive to hire people here. They’re making it expensive for talented people to live here and be here. So the economy is going to suffer until they get their head around the fact that we’re a globally competitive economy.

We have to be globally competitive that we live in a digital world. It’s just going to get worse and worse. Is this in part because the way that the political system is set up is that the prime minister or the president has four years.

So actually they’re quite short term because I’m thinking of Keir Starmer. He’s saying that he walked into this deficit and now he looks like he’s scrambling around for the money. And the long term play here would be, we need to change the schooling system so that in 15 years time, we’ve got a lot of AI knowledge base in our economy.

It’s not that. It’s just that in the industrial age, we created institutions that were appropriate for the industrial age and now they’ve run to the end. And now they’re just outdated.

Look at the name, the UK government. That means it’s a geographical border. The London City Council means it’s M25, right, is the geography.

The British, the UK economy. So anything that is defined by geography already misses the point straight off the bat. It misses the point.

And the point is that we live in a world where you can sell to anyone in the world. You can hire anyone in the world. You can pay anyone in the world.

You can build a brand effortlessly from your phone. You can live and work from anywhere. You can create companies super easily.

Like all of those things, like the fundamental technology has shifted. So it’s like saying, oh, how do we change the Duke and Lord system and the serfdom system? It’s like, well, that was for the agricultural age. That was the system that evolved.

We’re going to need a completely different system because we now have an industrialised economy. So unfortunately, we’re going into a digital world or we’re in a digital world and the entire government is set up for the industrial economy. National identity was a massive thing in the industrial age.

National currency was a very big thing for the industrial age. Do you think Trump’s going to make good decisions? He’s certainly going to be a disruptor. He’s going to be an accelerant.

Whatever’s happening, I think he’s going to break things that were going to break. And I think he’s probably going to bring in some things that emerge as good things. I think we were definitely going in the wrong direction.

Governments of the world were becoming very authoritarian for a while there. They’re really policing different elements of our lives and speech and those sorts of things. And all of that’s going to definitely swing back the other way.

The pendulum has already swung back the other way. If you saw the Mark Zuckerberg announcement the other day. Are you bullish on America? America is definitely the most bullish place.

So this goes back to something I said earlier in terms of if I’m an entrepreneur and I want to position myself where the opportunity is, where the capital is, where the mentality is. Where is actually online. So the where is digital.

You can go to Silicon Valley and you’ll see some of the poorest people living next to some of the richest people. So it’s not a geographical thing. It’s a mindset and the mindset is digital versus analog or digital versus geographical.

But the biggest economy, the winner take all is the U.S. because the U.S. is in a very unique position. They’re energy independent. They’re food independent.

They’ve got massive natural geographical borders so they don’t have to police their neighbors. They have one friendly neighbor at the north called Canada and one neighbor they can work with called Mexico. Contrast China.

I think they’ve got 17 neighbors to manage. So the U.S. has got clear runways, biggest economy in the world, most technology, most universities, all of that sort of stuff. We take our time when it comes to hiring at Flight Story because I fundamentally believe the success of a business is directly linked to how good you are at hiring.

And better hiring starts with smarter insights. LinkedIn, who’s a sponsor of this podcast, has some of the strongest hiring data available to help you identify the best candidates for your business. Their platform will even pair you with those who match what you’re looking for, which might lie outside of the job description and more in their unique skills and interests.

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Find your next great hire on LinkedIn and start today by posting your job for free just by visiting linkedin.com slash d-o-a-c. So is there anything else that would be on the list of things that if you were, you know, a 21-year-old Daniel Priestly and you’re in 2025, what are the like fundamental moves you’d be making? I can guess a couple of things. You’d definitely be making content.

Yeah, that’s for sure. You’d be climbing the podcast pyramid. Yeah, build more and more leverage and reputation, etc.

Are there any other big, big stuff? So the big, so the key is the big opportunity is build a personal brand next to an elegant business model. That is, that’s everything. If you build the personal brand, it doesn’t have to be a massive personal brand.

If you’ve got five to 50,000 followers within a high value niche, if you’re seen as a key person of influence in a high value niche, that’s enough of a personal brand to make seven figures. If you’ve got an elegant business model, you can sell to anyone in the world. You can communicate your value to anyone in the world.

That’s some of the stuff with an elegant business model. So essentially those are the two pillars. If you’re not financially successful or where you want to be at the moment, you want to look at building a personal brand, and attaching that personal brand to the right business.

Those are the two steps. So ultimately, if you said, if I was 21, I’m trying to build my personal brand, I’m trying to attach that brand to a great business. That’s the key to capital.

It’s the key to talent. It’s the key to customers. So it’s that personal brand on a scalable business.

You look at every single person who’s succeeding right now, they’re focused on just those two things. Why don’t people do that? When they hear you say all of that, why is it that they then don’t do it? And those people agree. So they’re sat at home now, they go, yeah, I get it.

The foundations you laid are perfect, makes sense. And they still don’t. I’ll tell you why.

Years ago, I went to Bali, and I saw this massive mountain on the horizon. And we decided that we were going to book a trip to climb it. And it’s called Mount Agung.

So they wake us up at midnight, and we get in a bus, and we have to go to the mountain at midnight and climb through the night, right? It’s crazy. And so from one o’clock in the morning, all through the night, we’ve got this tiny little headlamp on. We’re climbing, and we’re scratching, and we’re like going up the side of the mountain.

And finally, we get up there about 6am. And I’m like, I didn’t even realize why we’re climbing through the night. Like it hadn’t even occurred to me, why would we be doing it like this? And then finally, we get up the top.

And I realized, oh, this is why we’re doing it at 6am, because the sun comes up at 6am. So we get to the top of the mountain, and the sun comes up, and it’s like glorious. The air is thin, it’s crisp, it’s just incredible.

And it’s cold, right, which is rare in Bali. And then the sun lights up Bali, and I can see all of Bali and all of the glimmering sea. And it was just beautiful.

I’m standing there, and I’m just loving it. Taking it in, and we put eggs in the hole, and the volcano steam cooks the eggs. And then I look onto the horizon, and there’s this thing called Mount Ranjani.

I say to the guide, what’s that mountain over there? He goes, oh, that’s Mount Ranjani. I go, oh, is that on the island of Bali? He goes, no, no, that’s on a different island. I go, oh, how do you get there? You’ve got to catch a ferry.

How many days does it take? Oh, you’ve got to go for three days. How long does it take to climb? Oh, it takes about this much time. Is it higher or lower? How much is it? Can I book through you? And he says, Mr. Daniel, you need to appreciate the mountain you’re standing on right now.

Puts his arm around me. You need to learn to appreciate the mountain you’re already standing on. So when I was standing on that mountain, I could see everything but the mountain.

I’m looking around the horizon. I’m seeing all this. I’m seeing the mountain on the thing.

But I couldn’t see the mountain that I was already standing on because I was too close to it. So the biggest thing that people miss in today’s world is that they’re already standing on a mountain of value. They’ve already got so much value, but they’re so distracted by the mountain on the horizon.

They go, oh, Stephen Bartlett, he’s already so much further ahead. He’s creating, he creates podcasts. I could never do that.

Right. Or they go, oh, you know, I saw this person who’s really good in my industry and they wrote a book and I could never write like that. Or, you know, you know, I don’t know I’ve got anything of value to share.

Some people have floated a company for a billion dollars and I’m only, you know, I’ve only just started. Right. What am I going to share? And what they miss is that every single person, your story is relevant.

Your background is relevant. The people that you know is part of the mountain of value. You know, your relatability is part of the mountain of value.

You’re losing your relatability because as you go so high, people just starting out can’t even comprehend how to get there. So someone in the middle is going to take a place that you previously occupied because they’re more relatable. They’re only two steps ahead, not 20 steps ahead.

So every single person has this mountain of value. But the biggest thing at the moment is the distraction of all the other stuff. And you’re so close to your own mountain of value, you can’t see it.

So the first thing I love to do is just put my arm around people and say, please learn to appreciate the mountain you’re already standing on. It’s so true. And yeah, so I was just talking to someone before you came in about my girlfriend.

She’s a breathwork practitioner. She’s got her own studio, barleybreathwork.com, if anyone wants to go to her retreats. And she, hashtag out I guess.

And she was spending a lot of time talking about making Instagram videos again. And in fact, a year, two years passes and she’s talking about it and she’s going to buy, she buys a camera and buys another camera and buys another camera, et cetera, as we all do. And I realized that eventually the reason why she wasn’t starting is she was so, I think a little bit too focused on how it might perform.

That first video she dropped, that she never dropped the video. And I was reading, reading a book over the Christmas break. I think it was The Courage to be Disliked.

And it talks about the possibility gap, something like the possibility gap, where it’s the gap. But when you say you announce your intention and before you do it, and you can live in this gap because there’s been no evidence to prove you can’t yet. There’s been no evidence to prove that you’re actually not good at violin or you’re not good at DJing.

So you can live in this gap for a long time. It’s like the world, the realm of possibility. You’ve announced it.

People are now giving you credit for it. And there’s been no evidence to prove you can’t do it. And one of the things actually got her posting over Christmas was when I said to her, instead of like trying to make good videos, let’s make the objective, get to video 1000.

She’s posted every day since. She’s posted 30 odd videos on her Instagram since then. She changed the goal.

The minute the goal became, let’s get to video 1000, she was off to the races. The other thing that happens is in an exponential world, in an exponential curve, every double eclipses everything that came before it. And when you go through a doubling speed, you’re doubling and doubling and doubling.

Each double is worth everything before. So imagine this. We put one grain of rice on a chessboard, then two, then four, then eight.

Eight is bigger than seven that came before, then 16, which is bigger than 15 that came before that. Right. And it goes like this.

So every double eclipses everything that came before. So in an exponential world, just those first 1000 videos is you might only get, you know, 10,000 followers, right? It might be small, but then you get a breakthrough. And then in that breakthrough, you get more than 10,000 followers from that breakthrough.

But it was all of that that led to that. It’s exactly what happened to me. Almost to the number.

And to me. The really important part there for me as well is just to go for 10 years at anything, you are going to need to really love the fucking thing. And so as much as we talk about strategies and tactics and waitlists and all these things, the overarching thing of how do we get to consistency so we can start to compound is a consequence of love and passion and.

And repetition. This is what we’re talking about. Repetition.

How many times has Adele’s song set fire to the rain? How many times has Ed Sheeran done Castle on the Hill? How many times has Metallica done Master of Puppets? So like all of the greatest that you admire, they all do repetition and it’s perfect reps. They do it over and over and over again. No one’s talking about this.

Some of the biggest most successful businesses, WD-40. WD-40 was the 40th attempt to create a spray that would do that thing that WD-40 does. And then for the last 50 years they’ve just been selling WD-40.

It’s their one product and they just sell it in a small can or a big can. Tabasco sauce. It’s a 150-year-old business and they just sell Tabasco but every house in the world has Tabasco sauce.

Fender Stratocaster guitars. They figured it out in 1950s and they have made that same guitar ever since. Porsche 911.

They’ve barely changed it but Porsche 911 is the most successful sports car because they just get good at doing Porsche 911s. I love Swiss Army Knives, Rolex Watches. They are all businesses where they figure out what to do and then they just fall in love with the repetitions.

They just do it and do it and do it and do it. And you’ve done 400 episodes of the show I think. And the first 100.

Is that true? 421. 421. So you’ve done 421 episodes of the show.

I would almost guess that the last 21 probably eclipse the first 100. To say the least. To say the least, right.

In fact, when I was on the show last time you just crossed 5 million subscribers. I think you’re coming up on 10 million. We did 500,000 in December.

So this is called doubling speed. Yeah, it’s mental. Doubling and doubling and doubling.

What will blow your mind is that you’ll go from 10 million to 20 million in the year ahead. So it feels because that’s exponential growth. If you continue to do the reps, you will cross 10 million and in the same speed that you went from 5 to 10, you’ll go from 10 to 20.

You’ll have 20 million subscribers to the channel. If you continue to do the reps. So when we crank the handle, we go through doubling speeds.

And you want to figure out what is the activity that leads to exponential growth and just do it, do it again and fall in love with doing it. It’s really that simple. Well, if you’re playing the right game, it is.

I analysed your episodes, by the way, of your last 117 episodes, what percentage were authors? I’m going to say it’s a high percentage. It’s very high. 78%.

Okay. 91 out of 117 are authors. They’ve all written books.

Yeah. What’s interesting is the ones who haven’t written books are typically like superstars and like mega megastars in some other thing. But almost all of your guests have written at least one book, but 78% of your guests have written a book.

Writing a book is a good idea. It is a good idea. And it’s a good idea for the unobvious reasons that most people don’t think.

It’s not necessarily to sell books because, you know, I’ve got a book that sold pretty well, but I don’t think it’s going to, I don’t necessarily think it’s made much money. No, it’s relationships on steroids. It is the ability to have a relation.

It’s a parasocial relationship. It’s the ability to have a relationship with an anonymous person on the other side of the planet where they clock up seven hours with you. Literally what was once inside your head word for word is now inside their head word for word.

So you actually connect at a very deep level with people at scale. So authors becoming an author, one thing that I recommend to all the listeners is have a goal to become an author. Even if you haven’t done anything yet? Well, you can document your journey.

You can discover that you are standing on a mountain of value. A lot of people think they’re not, they’ve not done anything. I have had, I’ve had people who’ve written really successful businesses about the passion that they have and the vision that they have.

Sorry, really successful books about the passion and vision that they have. I have people who, like I’ve got someone who was very successful at selling as a small business, selling a corporate contract. And they wrote a book about how small businesses can sell to corporates.

And that was based on maybe eight to 10 major contracts that they’d won. But then they documented the process and now they have a whole business teaching small businesses to sell to corporates. So like if you’ve done one little thing, that could actually be a massive business bigger than that.

One of our guys, Howard Tinker, he ran a successful restaurant and he had a successful process for building his restaurant, regulars and people who, you know, locals who come back and back. And he actually wrote a book. It’s an Australian term, but he says more bums on seats.

In America, it would have to be more butts on seats. But he wrote the book called More Bums on Seats, gave it out to a thousand restaurants and said, here’s how I built my restaurant. And then ended up building a massive coaching and consulting business, teaching restaurants how to do their sales and marketing.

So he had one little restaurant and then he turned it into a big thing. Gabriella, who I mentioned before, she helped some couples get pregnant through her fertility interventions. And then she wrote a book called Fertility Breakthrough.

And now she gives away 4000 copies a year and her business is massive. On that point of sales, are there any frameworks for sales that you advise or give to entrepreneurs because on stage, a lot of people ask me this. They say things like this.

I’m trying to sell to a customer or I’m trying to sell to the CEO of this company some idea that I have to change the company or I’m trying to sell downwards as a leader. Is there a framework for selling? Well, you want to productise your sales and what you want to do is productise the demo and the customer needs analysis and give it a name so that it feels like a product and it doesn’t feel like a sale. It feels like a product so that you feel that you’re getting something of value by seeing the demo and doing the customer needs analysis.

That’s one of the first things. So break that down for me. So when you say the word demo.

So the demo is explaining the value of what you do. So you want to craft a demo. Crafting a demo is like you want to be able to do the features, advantages, benefits, the research that backs it up.

You want to be able to show some data. You want to have an emotional story that tells people how this product works and how it changed someone’s life or how it delivered a valuable outcome. So all of that’s in the demo and the demo shows how your product is the path of least resistance between the current reality, the desired reality and the obstacles that an ideal customer has.

So you take an ideal customer. This is where they are. This is where they want to be.

This is what’s stopping them. Look at our path of least resistance that we’ve created. But it’s not for everybody.

You have to do a customer needs analysis. So a survey or an assessment and then that tells you whether you need this product or not. So you want to productise that.

You want to give it a name and you want to give it a like a landing page and people can sign up to it so they can experience the presentation and do the customer needs analysis. I’ve got a picture here called the messy middle. Yeah, the Google report.

I’ve actually never seen this before, this image. Yeah. Can you explain to me, I’ll put it on the screen and link it below for anyone that wants to look at it.

I highly recommend you do, what this image is. Yeah, so we used to think of marketing as marketing funnels and marketing funnels essentially we would push people through a marketing process from awareness to consideration through to trust and commitment and purchase. So it was this marketing funnel and we’re just kind of funneling them through.

And that’s how we, you know, almost all marketers draw funnels. Yeah. And then Google did some research to see is this actually true? Is this still how people buy? And they found it’s actually not how people buy at all anymore.

So top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel has been replaced by a trigger, a totally random journey through a playground where we explore and evaluate randomly and then a trigger for signaling intent and then purchase over here. So what this might look like is I might see an influencer talking about her, you know, handbag and I go, Oh, I’m interested in that brand. I’ll give them a follow.

Yeah. And then I ignore them. And then I discover that they’ve actually put some videos on YouTube and I start watching a video on YouTube, but then I go and do something else.

And then I see a review website and I go on the review website. Then I find out that that brand has actually created a waiting list for a new product. So I actually say, Oh, I might drive the waiting list.

Now I’m like ending up down here. And then I get on the waiting list. They tell me that they’re only releasing 500 of that product.

Would I like one? Yes, I would. So then I basically go and purchase. So it’s no longer a funnel experience because customers have figured out that they can disappear within three seconds if they want to.

Right. They can just jump your fence and the funnel feels dehumanizing for most people. So they don’t like to be funneled.

They like to go on an adventure. Rather than thinking about marketing as a funnel, we want to think about it as an adventure or a playground. So we’re going to create things that people can interact with and play with.

So they could watch a video. They could listen to a podcast. They could take an online assessment.

They could complete a customer needs analysis. They could watch a demo. They could get free access to a trial in a portal.

They could join a community. They could join a discussion group. Right.

So these are all things that people can engage with or play with. And we want it to avoid feeling like a funnel. We want to feel like it’s lots of value, lots of great experiences.

And then at a certain time, there are moments to act if you want to buy something. If you’re the right person at the right time, this is the moment to act. So it’s a bit of a different way of thinking about marketing, but it acknowledges the fact that we’re living in a very different world where, you know, funnels worked when people were afraid of not seeing you ever again or that they’re afraid that they would miss out.

But no one’s afraid of that anymore. The people that came to you following your last conversation and that sent you messages and DMs, what is the most frequently occurring question that they asked you? How do I start when I don’t have a brand? Um, like a lot of people say, I’ve got a big idea or I want to launch, but I don’t have a brand yet. I’m invisible.

Um, you know, I feel invisible and that makes me feel stuck. Uh, and essentially they know what they’re excited about. They know what they’re passionate about.

Um, I’ve got a big, I’ve got a big new product idea. I’ve got a way of expanding into a new territory, but I don’t have the brand. And is that where your five Ps come in for becoming a key person of influence? So the, yeah, so the five Ps is, uh, we have to learn to pitch, right? The entrepreneur journey is a journey of a thousand pitches.

Uh, one way or another, you’re either going to pitch an average pitch and end up with nothing or you pitch a phenomenal pitch and end up with a 10 to a hundred million dollar business. Um, if you’re Elon Musk, you’ll end up pitching your way to Mars, right? But journey is the entrepreneur journey is all about pitching. So we’ve got to have a great way of pitching the business.

So people are excited. In person or digitally? Could be video, right? I’ve seen Mark Zuckerberg do hundreds of pitches, uh, over the last 20 years for Facebook and new features. Um, uh, Steve Jobs used to do it on stage.

Um, but then the video went out so you can do it to video, you can do it to camera, you can do it on a podcast, you can do it, um, uh, live. You can do it one-to-one, you can do it to groups, but you have to learn how to be able to pitch an idea, get people excited about something through your words. Entrepreneurs and founders, they are the spokesperson for their business.

They have to be able to be good at pitching. The second thing is publishing content, publishing videos, publishing podcasts, publishing a book, publishing on LinkedIn, right? So it’s essentially taking the elements of a pitch, but putting into different formats, seven, 11, four stuff. The third element is the productization, the product ecosystem.

Too many people sell time and skills. They have to sell intellectual property, media, data, software, or productized services, or they have to have a scalable product, something that doesn’t require their time and effort in order to sell it again and again. Um, cause your time and effort as a founder has to be on the demand side, not the supply side.

So we’ve got to productize. Uh, raising profile, uh, is the next one. So having your social media platforms, doing some live events, um, winning some awards, uh, getting on traditional media or third party platforms, all of that is your profile.

And then the next one, once you’ve done all of that is doing your first joint ventures and partnerships. So big business happens when you can find the right partners. Uh, so you might need a capital partner for investment, or you might need a distribution partner for sales.

You might need a, um, uh, a product partner, someone who actually partners to incorporate something that they do into your product. So you’re packaging up through partnerships. Um, so I always focus people on pitching, publishing product profile partnerships.

That’s the role of the founder. We call that the key person of influence role. Um, personal brand feels like this weird thing, or it feels like branding, or it feels like this kind of like, um, oh, I’ve got to, you know, get up every day and photograph my breakfast and you know, all that sort of stuff.

But actually if we just focus on pitch, publish product profile partnership, most people who are sensible people with successful businesses, they say, oh, that makes sense. I like all of those things. Yeah.

Personal branding has got a bit of a rap, isn’t it? A bit of a, um, a bit of a stigma. The goal is not to be an influencer, to be a key person of influence. And there’s a difference.

And I think, um, there’s different types of personal branding and the best, most effective type of personal branding that I’ve seen is what I call idea promotion, where you’re promoting your ideas to the world. Um, maybe in a particular niche or industry, but it’s all about here are my ideas. And you can do that as well, obviously through books and through podcast appearances and stuff, but there are other types of promotions.

So some people do deficiency promotion. Here are all the ways that I’m flawed. And they build a brand around that.

Well, the one people most object to is self-promotion. Self-promotion, which is here’s how great I am. Look at me.

This is my lifestyle. This is my car. This is my abs.

Um, here’s my dinner. Here’s my girlfriend, my boyfriend, right? So all of that sort of stuff is self-promotion. That’s narcissistic.

And that’s, that’s associated more with an influencer. A key person of influence is operating within a high value niche and their idea promoting. They’re saying, here’s the big insights that you need.

Here’s the data that you should pay attention to. Here’s the problem as I see it. And here’s some nuances around the problem.

Here’s the solution or outcome that’s achievable and here’s how you get to that outcome. So they’re, they’re basically, it’s part thought leader, but also part entrepreneur. Um, they, you don’t need a huge following for this.

Influencers notoriously can’t sell stuff. Many influencers have a million followers and it turns out they can’t sell hoodies. Uh, you know, very, very difficult to get anything sold.

People look at them as entertainers, but they don’t really look at them as thought leaders or, you know, someone who’s directing serious spend. A key person of influence might have 5,000 or 10,000 followers. But when they say, this is the thing to buy, everyone buys it.

Um, you know, so that’s what we’re, we’re going for that. And can anyone do that? Anyone can start. I mean, I’ve, I’ve been working on this for 15 years with five and a half thousand companies.

We’ve got single mums with children who have special needs, who’ve gone from struggling to multi-million businesses. We’ve got, um, people who had been stuck at five people for 10 years and then they go to 50 people. Um, you know, we’ve got people in 50 different industries from real estate, dentistry, to medicine, to IT services.

So like the world, the world is open at the moment. Every single industry has a thousand different micro niches. Every micro niche needs a key person of influence or two.

Every micro niche can have a book. Um, when we were stuck in geography, there was no point to doing all of this because you only had a five mile radius or 10 mile radius anyway. But now we can reach 1.5 billion English speakers online.

We can reach 70% of the world on fast internet. Your tiny little micro niche could be extremely valuable to 35 people on the planet who each happily pay a hundred thousand a year. You know, so we live in this world where the micro niches are incredibly valuable.

Every industry has a thousand micro niches. Every micro niche needs a key person of influence or two. Um, there’s absolutely no reason why, and this is where the economy is headed.

So there’s no reason why a lot of people can’t do this. Can everyone do it? I don’t know if everyone can do it, but a lot of people can definitely do it. So what you think is maybe the subject or question that I haven’t asked at this point in the conversation that people will be sat at home thinking.

There’s one last thing that I think we should talk about. If someone’s feeling frustrated, stuck, or overwhelmed, there’s the one thing that knocks out everything else for cutting through problems or cutting through things that get in the way. And that is this idea called environment dictates performance.

Environment dictates performance. And what that basically means is that we behave according to the environments that we show up in. So if you are in an environment where nobody’s doing this stuff, it’s going to feel impossible.

If you’re in an environment where everybody’s doing this stuff, it’s going to feel effortless. If you’re in an environment where everyone talks about how money’s evil, you’re never going to make any money. If you’re in an environment where everyone sees money as just a tool, you’re going to make a ton of money.

Many years ago, when I was in my early 20s, someone suggested that I go to dancing classes. And I thought, this is ridiculous. I can’t dance and I’ll never be able to dance.

And dancing’s weird. I went to a dance class. And in that environment, it was normal to learn dancing.

And within three lessons, I was dancing really well. I enjoyed it. I did three years of dance classes.

I got really good at it. And it was one of my favorite places to show up. But nothing would have happened unless I made the commitment to get into a different environment.

So the final thing to talk about is that if any of this feels really hard or really difficult, for me, I feel effortless because I’m surrounded by people who live this way. Every single one of my friends is scaling a business and a personal brand. But if you’re not in that environment, it’s going to feel really weird and foreign.

So the easiest thing people could try, just simply try the idea of changing environments immediately by doing a few following things. If you feel stuck, find the highest place that you can get to, like physically the highest. Go to the top floor restaurant in your town.

Go to a place that is like an office that has a foyer that overlooks the whole city. Do whatever you can to go high up and then see how the problem feels when you’re actually high up looking out to the horizon. Just that change of environment will give you new ideas.

Go and talk to someone who you haven’t talked to in a while who’s two, three, four steps ahead of you, but meet them in an opulent hotel, right? Anyone can go sit in a hotel foyer of a five-star hotel. Go and meet for coffee in a five-star hotel foyer with someone who’s three or four steps ahead of you. Suddenly, you’re going to feel very, very different.

Enroll yourself onto a course where everyone’s learning the same thing that you’re learning, and that environment means that it’s normal. Like let’s say you’re afraid of public speaking. Enroll yourself in a public speaking course.

Everyone’s going through the process of public speaking. Suddenly, it feels like pretty normal. Enroll into an entrepreneur accelerator.

Everyone’s an entrepreneur in there. Suddenly, it feels very normal to be scaling a business. So environment dictates performance is the big thing that changes everything.

Pay attention to environment. What I’d love people to do that are listening now on YouTube or wherever you might be listening, I think YouTube is probably the best place to do it, is if you are one of those people that feels a little bit lost and you are, I don’t know, you are working in a restaurant at the moment and you’re working evenings and you heard Daniel talk about AI and all of these things and you just feel like it might be a bit far away or you don’t have the people around you that can potentially help you with that, let’s start a little bit of a community in the comment section. So I think it would be really, really cool if people detailed their situation, talked about where they want to get, and if you just throw that out there in the comment section, who you are, where you are, obviously keep your private details to yourself, but as anonymous as you’re comfortable being or not being, throw the seed out there and it will start a conversation with somebody else.

I see it all the time in the comment section, people start chatting, they start getting motivated. And jump on a Zoom call with that person, or a Microsoft meeting, or a Google meeting. See if you can just randomly meet up with someone who’s aligned on values because they watch the same video.

Anyone who’s going to comment this is watched all the way to the end. So have a little video call with them, jump on a Zoom call and just say, hey, let’s discuss the episode. What are you up to? What are you doing? What are you taking away from that? That’s a change of environment.

You’re putting yourself around a new person. And just so you know who these people are that also got to the end of this and are doing this, if you could all start it with a waving emoji, then at least you know that you’re people that got to the end and saw this part. And if you could be friendly to those people and maybe reach out to them, talk to them, and safely, right, do your own process of verification to figure out, make sure that they’re not a crypto scammer or something.

Safely, maybe connect with them on LinkedIn, verify who they are, and then form that relationship. Because there are people in this audience that I know are searching for like-minded individuals. And as you say, by the very nature that they got to the end of a three-hour conversation, they are like-minded in some way.

Super aligned. You might discover you’ve got more in common with someone on the other side of the planet than someone who’s just down the road. In terms of energy, there are so many reasons why I’m a big matchup fan, if you don’t already know by now.

And so much so that I actually invested in the UK’s leading matcha company called Perfect Ted. And one of my favorite Perfect Ted products is these delicious matcha pouches that come in every flavor from salted caramel, to peach flavor, to mint flavor, to berry flavor. One of my favorites is this vanilla flavor, which I’m going to make in just two seconds.

You just take this mixer here, get a little bit of the powder, pop it on top of the shaker like that. Put the lid on. Shake, shake, shake.

Delicious. If you haven’t tried this yet, you can find Perfect Ted at Tesco and Holland & Barrett stores or online, where you can get 40% off with my code DIARY40. Head to perfectted.com and put in code DIARY40 to try this delicious multi-flavored matcha now.

Highly recommend. And if you do it, please tag me, send me a message online. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next without knowing who they’re leaving it for.

Where do you draw the line between health or anything, optimization and pleasure? I think optimization can lead to pleasure. One of the things that happened to me personally is Christmas Eve, just a few weeks ago, I got a phone call from a GP who I’d never spoken to before in my life, who had looked at my health results from my blood test and said, Daniel, I need to call you before something bad happens. And I went, what are you talking about? He said, well, your pancreas has an enzyme that’s associated with bad things.

Has anyone commented that you’re turning yellow? I went, no. He said, have you lost consciousness or been dizzy? No. Have you, you know, have you had to like fall over? Have you had to have a sleep all afternoon? Something like this.

I’m like, no, none of that. He said, okay, you’re really close to having a health problem. The reason I’m calling you Christmas Eve is because Christmas day, if you drink alcohol, if you eat too much food, you could end up in an ambulance with these levels that you’re in.

I’m like, this is so weird. I’ve never known this. I just had a blood test to sort of see my markers.

And I got this result. And for about a week, I didn’t know whether I had some serious disease. I didn’t know any of this.

I went and got a CT scan. Suddenly I find out that my doctor said pristine, I have a pristine pancreas and gall bladder and liver. And I’d had these elevated levels.

But it was associated with some other things. It was associated with some changes to diet, sleep, exercise, all of this. But it was like a reprieve.

It was like a stay of execution. It was a wonderful experience to go, oh, wow, okay, it’s not serious, it’s reversible. That data has changed my life.

Just that week, it was the greatest gift I could have got for Christmas. Because for a week, I felt like what it must feel like to lose your health and to be told that your health is in serious decline. I had the real experience of what it would feel like to receive bad information.

But then at the end of the week, and I got the CT scan, I had the real experience of like, you know, the ghost of Christmas, right? It’s okay, then it’s not too late. So suddenly, I’m optimizing, I’ve got my work band, and I’m getting a lot of pleasure, like having the data is great. Data is a great thing.

There’s nothing that frees you more than having visibility of the data. What was that epiphany that you got in that week? Like, what is the, for us that, you know, for people that don’t have to go through that to realize what you realized in that week? It’s an age old epiphany. But a healthy man has many goals.

A sick man has only one. Right. So when you think you’ve got your health, you’ve got all of the possibilities ahead of you.

When you think you’ve lost your health, you’re only focused on getting that back again. And you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. You don’t like you don’t know what until you hit that crisis point.

You just take it all for granted. It was just one of those magical moments of going, oh, my goodness, I have this incredible body that’s functioning. Like I need to take care of this.

This is my vehicle. So it was, you know, the epiphany was just, I’m so focused on business and life and opportunities and all this external stuff. But actually, there’s great joy and great pleasure in taking care of yourself.

I think that’s so wonderful to hear and so refreshing. Because it’s the often the missing piece in the big picture of like success and optimization is this. I had it for many years, this we take for granted that all that we strive for and all that we’ve accomplished and all that we love and know is sitting on this tectonic plate that we don’t even know is there until it shakes.

Until it shakes. It’s like I was in Cape Town. There’s an earthquake this year while I was there.

And I’m sat in my house. And then it’s suddenly at 2am in the morning like underneath me starts shaking. Yeah.

And I, oh my God, I didn’t realize I thought the house was the base. Actually, the base is the tectonic plate. And in our lives, that’s our health as entrepreneurs.

We disregard it so flippantly in the pursuit of some kind of accolade until it shakes. And then that becomes the only important thing. Daniel, thank you so much.

It’s an honor. And thanks for having me back. And please keep doing what you’re doing.

It’s amazing. Thank you. Do you know that 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by February? It’s because we focus too much on the end goal and we forget the small daily actions that actually move us forward.

Those actions that are easy to do are also easy not to do in life. It’s easy to save a dollar, so it’s also easy not to. Making one small improvement each day, one tiny step in the right direction has a big difference over time.

And that is the 1% mindset, which is why we created the 1% Diary, a 90-day journal designed to help you stay consistent and focus on the small wins and make real progress over time. It also gives you access to the 1% community, a space where you can stay accountable, motivated, inspired, along with many others on the same journey. We launched the 1% Diary in November and it sold out.

So now we’re doing a second drop. Join the waitlist at thediary.com and you’ll be the first to know as soon as it’s back in stock. I’ll put the link below.