Transcript of The Money Making Expert: The 7,11,4 Hack That Turns $1 Into $10K Per Month! This 90 Day Rule Will 10x Your Income! 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 2 things. The first 1 is 7114, which we'll talk about. And the second thing is that your brain is extremely good at deleting messages.

But there's 5 things that will not be deleted by the brain, and the last 2 are the ones that are most useful. So the first 1 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 multimillion 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's playing by an old set of rules, but 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 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

for doing 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 7 figures.

And is that where your 5 p's 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 2 types of opportunities that everyone needs to know about.

I wanna go through all of that.

Let's do it.

I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see, and continue to doing this thing we love.

If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. 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 I'll give you an example.

In the industrial age, people had to 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 I wanna go through all of that. I am I was running in Cape Town. Look at me plugging my running brand that's lasted for 5 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 to me.

It was about the 2nd or 3rd January. They said, Steve, we love your content. We've been listening to Star Wars here 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.

Mhmm.

And they were saying, like, what do we do? And actually, at that time, I said, you need to need to listen to an episode I did with Daniel Priestley. 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 2 to start if they want to capitalize 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 twenties.

I know people in their forties, fifties, sixties. 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, like, 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 be 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 wanna 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 50000, 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 wanna 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 wanna become an entrepreneur straight away. It's too big a shift. You need to be a number 2. I was a number 2. I had a mentor.

I worked for an amazing guy for 2 years. We went from 0 to 6,000,000 in a year and from 0 people to 60 people in 1 year. So I got the entrepreneur apprenticeship first, and that's where you wanna 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 you, 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, alright. 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. Yeah. 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, there's 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 cofounder 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 gonna start something and finish something all within 90 days. You're not gonna get yourself into a long term thing. You're just gonna 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 were gonna, 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.

Mhmm.

So on Valentine's Day, I bought a few 100 roses, we dressed up in tuxedos, and we went door to door selling, Valentine's Day roses. And that probably lasted 3 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 wanna continue after that.

Something else that I've 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. My 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 the all all of the downstream consequences that occurred. Downstream consequence number 1, got to a 1000000 followers on Instagram Wow. By posting these quotes of ideas that I had every day. So every day at 7 PM, my girlfriend knew at the time.

She goes, he's gonna go off for an hour and think of something to say. Downstream consequence number 2 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 3 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 Into

a little piece of 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 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 a 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 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 1000000000 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 1000000000 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 2,700,000,000 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 1 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, etcetera. 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 were running events, and I had to kinda 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 1,000,000 of revenue down to a few 100,000 of revenue. I lost 90% of my revenue in 1 year. It was mass it was I remember 1 Christmas party, 17, 18 people at a Christmas party, the following year was 3. 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 gonna 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 the essentially, the personal brand has just gone whoosh ahead. But I was I 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 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 3 people on a tractor and then that tractor went and went and did the job of 100 of people with 3 people on it. And it's like, oh, my goodness.

What are we all going to do? How are we all gonna live our lives anymore? And then they would have said, well, what are gonna be the jobs? Like, everyone works in farming. And it's like, well, there's gonna be this whole new system.

There will be a completely new economic system called the industrial system, and it's gonna replace everything. So back in the agricultural age, if you were a lord and if you were rich, if 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 a huge 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 the the fundamentals of the economy are dictated by the technology that we have available to us.

So what happened around the 2000 to 2020 is we had these general purpose technologies that just got introduced as though there 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 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 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 gonna take all the power of big businesses and institutions and just give that to individuals.

That's exactly what happened. And it 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 and going on Rogan and Kamala going on Alex Cooper in the media lens That

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 thirties, he did the national radio campaign. JFK in the sixties 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 personalisation. 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 a 124,000,000 views. And, Carmela did I think it was 7 hours

Just in the long form?

Yeah. Just on the long form. She did 7 hours total, and it only got a few 1000000 views. And 1 of her podcasts only last 7 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 3 hours. Now what's actually happening is is quite predictable.

In a world of short videos and in a world of AI and in a world of confusion and disruption, and and where everyone's throwing, punches at each other saying, you're misinformation. You're misinformation. You've seen some of this, right, going on. Right? Misinformation.

Misinformation. What's actually going on is that people say, hey, enough's enough. I wanna see a long form piece of content and make my own mind up. I don't want anyone to tell me what's in misinformation. I'm smart enough.

I wanna see if this Trump guy is a crazy guy. I wanna be able to see him, you know, for 2 or 3 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. Right?

So now where we are with marketing is you've gotta drop the script, and you've gotta do long form content. And here's my prediction. The prediction is is we're gonna see the biggest CEOs in the world clamoring to get onto this podcast and other podcasts like it. They're all gonna 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 gonna 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 if you were giving them advice on

how to achieve of the world or CEOs. If if you were giving them advice on how to achieve that goal, what would you say?

Well, I 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 1,000 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 1, and you'll eventually be invited onto a slightly bigger 1 again. And there's this pyramid of you know, there's 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 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 2 hours or 1 to 2 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 1 single thing that's helped you become better at speaking or communicating ideas, and you can't say, no, I'll 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. Please. What is my name and my business name?

What is, what is it that I'm the same as that you already understand?

Okay. Let's pause there. Why is why why does that matter?

When people are storing information, they need to open a folder, and they wanna open a folder that's very easy to label. So, they don't wanna open a folder that says, like, I'm an energetic healer that works with transmutational objects that could that could transcend time, space, and blah blah blah. They wanna go, oh, you 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 a you 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 Mhmm. 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 3 to 6 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 a 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.

Mhmm.

And so going back to this point of preparation. Right? So 1 of the big things that is gonna 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 a 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 to you for you to be successful, you've got to get into people's head. They have to kinda know who you are. In order to do that, they have to spend time with you, they have to have rep, repetition with you, and they have to see you in multiple contexts.

So the research says 7, 11, 4. 7 hours, 11 interactions on 4 platforms. Per In order for you to remember me.

Okay. Total.

Okay.

So, for example, you and I, we've now connected a few times. So we have probably clocked up maybe 7 hours together.

Mhmm.

Now what that means is that, if I bumped into you at a conference, even if I was on 1 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 it's how we feel towards famous people. So we think that we know George Clooney. We think that we know Angelina Jolley.

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 711 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 7 hours 11 interactions for on 4 platforms. So when I work with entrepreneurs, here's 1 of the questions I always ask. I say, if I was to block out tomorrow and I'm gonna 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 audiobook 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 Mhmm. 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 Mhmm. When everyone listens to this podcast.

And you kinda see it at the moment on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a, a long stream of professional personal brand builders. Whereas 5 years ago, it wasn't the the case.

But the 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 is there a a framework for creating some kind of differentiation amongst, a noisy crowd? Because it's yeah.

So the the differentiation so a lot of people ask me about differentiation. So let's talk about what makes you different. And to you 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 kinda see people as blobs not to hit, and you just kinda 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 were 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 there's 5 things that will not be deleted by the brain.

The first 1 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 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, watching the news.

So So be a scary person.

So be scary. Right? The next 1 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.

Yep. Well, peacocking. Yeah. You could try yeah. Exactly.

You could wear that big kind of hat that you've got in the cupboard that, that we don't talk about. Mhmm.

And

then the next one's sexy. So so we've got strange, we've got scary, we've got sexy. Now these are 3 things that most businesses don't wanna be. So most businesses can't stand out. And sexy, even if they wanted to be that, most people can't pull that 1 off anyway.

Mhmm. So only a few lucky people get to do that 1. But actually, the last 2 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. And 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.

Right? If I hand it to you in a beautiful box and it's beautifully wrapped, you're going to 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 711 4. So free and familiar are the 2 things that anyone can apply.

So look at let's look at you, for example. You spend tens of 1,000 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 11 4, people have spent 7 hours, 11 interactions, 4 locations with you. And, also, you've done free value. So you've given a lot for free.

So, essentially, those are the 2, and you're also strange. So so with those 3 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. Yeah.

Sexy as well. Thank you so much for that, Daniel.

You've got all 5 going on.

It but when you were saying this, I was actually thinking of this as a 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 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 I know this myself because when I was 18, 1 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.

Interesting.

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 cuts through the noise. The other thing too, let's go to your friends, the 21 year olds in, Cape Town. 1 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. 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 wanna do a drinks business, they're going to, like, talk to bottling companies, and they're gonna 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 gonna 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 wanna do when we launch anything is we wanna test the demand of what we do. So testing demand, the best way to do this is, or 1 of the best ways to do this is to productize the demo and a customer needs analysis. Mhmm. 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. And

So give me an example then using I'm gonna launch a and a coffee.

Yeah. And

it's the the point of difference with my coffee is it is gonna be a fuel libido.

Fantastic. So, let's imagine that we're gonna sell that through retailers. Yeah. And the real customer is not the end user. It's the retailer who's gonna 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 wanna do is we wanna 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 wanna show you the branding. We wanna show you, like, what this is gonna look like. And then, also, what we wanna 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, wait list campaign, or we will, collect the data, through, you know, a coming soon promotion. So, essentially, what we're gonna do is we're gonna present the data, and we're gonna do the customer needs analysis or present the demo, the customer needs analysis, and that's all gonna 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 gonna say, oh, that's fantastic. That's what we'd like to do. We wanna collect the data and we wanna 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 1 of the things that 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 Mhmm. What you should do is you should take the book idea you have and then run it as a Facebook ad, run a 100 different titles, and when people click on that Facebook ad, they hit a waiting list. Yes. Now in that whole process, what you've just done there is you've figured out the exact percentage of people that will click

Mhmm.

On, a 100 different ideas. So for my upcoming book, 1 of the things that I did, and some people listening to this now would have seen the ads, is I ran 70 book titles. Beautiful. 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 tell off the top of my head.

Which is the most successful?

15% of people clicked a certain 1, and the worst performing 1 was clicked by 0.3% of people. And I could've written a book, about that 0.3. And my maths isn't exceptional, but variance between a 0.3% conversion and a 15% conversion is like what is that? 1500% or something crazy? And all and it was and it was cost me 200 quid to run the test.

Yeah. That's the beauty of Facebook ads. You know, you can do a 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. Mhmm. And people don't do this sort of stuff.

And this is how professionals like yourself launch businesses. So, with anything that I'm launching, whether it's a book or a product or a new business, we're gonna run a set of Facebook ads, probably 10, 20, 30 different variations. When you click on the link, it says, this product is no longer available in your area or this product is not yet available in your area. Mhmm. But you can join the waiting list.

Click here to join the waiting list. Now once people click to join the waiting list, that's where we ask about 5 or 6 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 wanna be, what's in my way, and what do I perceive as the path of least resistance. So all the questions that we ask are, tell me about who you are today.

Which best describes your current situation? Tell me about where you wanna be. Which best describes the outcome that you're looking for from this product or service? What's in the way? Which best describes the reason you've not been able to get that outcome in the past?

Mhmm.

And what are you currently considering as an option for getting that outcome? Right? So those are the key 4 key questions. Then we might ask some price questions. 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, 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 wanna 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, what appears to be cheaper marketing, but attracts the wrong person. Yeah. And then sometimes you get a poorer performing marketing campaign. So this 1 might produce leads at £10 a lead.

This 1 might produce leads at £20 a lead. But this 1 might be attracting students who are broke, and this 1 might be attracting chief executive officers who are on $500 a year, I'd rather pay £20 for that client than £10 for that client.

Mhmm.

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 I wanna 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.

The 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 gonna be pivoting into new products, new markets, new territories. You're gonna be, trying to attract different age demographics. You're gonna be you know, all of that sort of stuff. This is 1 of the rules of the current economy is about data and testing. You've gotta be really fast with how fast you can prototype and test and get the data.

So we 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 gonna share it with you some research. We're gonna have a 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 a new brand of coffee, and it's for Sex coffee. Sex coffee. Right? Sexy sexy coffee. So, yeah, we're gonna 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, wanna be part of this new brand that we're launching, join the discussion group. Discussion groups are pretty wild. So I'll give you 2 examples of discussion groups.

1 of our clients, Gabriela 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. 23,000 people doing the discussion group. Alright?

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 it started with a discussion group. Another guy, 1 of our clients, Max, he sold the 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 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars to invest, and they're, like, basically the family office of multi billionaires 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 10,000,000,000 to invest, and he built himself a a 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 some of the best ways.

And then the final 1 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 1 of your which 1? Huell.

Alright. Sorry. I noticed on Huell that you have a quiz. And the quiz is which Huell is right for you. Mhmm.

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, for you to take. I noticed that Whoop didn't have it. Right? So I actually created 1 for you. But anyway Oh,

thank you.

I'll give it to you later. To you. 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? You know, do you 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 Yes. 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 cuss 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 100 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.

Mhmm. 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 gonna 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 wanna buy.

In my last book, The Diversity of 33 Laws, I talk about, the idea that friction can create value.

Mhmm. And I

give examples of where someone has added friction to the customer process, and it's resulted in more people buying.

Mhmm. And

1 of the studies I talk about is where they took 2 groups of people. They exposed 1 of them to a survey in order to enter a discussion group.

Mhmm. Right? So they

had to go through this survey process to get in. And they let the second group straight into the discussion group.

Yep.

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

Yeah.

Reported that the discussion group was, like, really interesting, etcetera, etcetera. And the group that had been let straight in reported that it was boring. And it was an intentionally boring group. The so they made an intentionally boring group. But just because you made someone go through a process to get in Yeah.

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 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 $1,000,000,000 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 $1,000,000,000 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. Yeah. And if they said it's $10 a month, we'd pay $10 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 100,000,000 people can watch a video in a week and, you know, it transcends time, space, wear and tear. There's no barriers.

Not 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. Mhmm.

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 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, you know, 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 merging 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, etcetera?

Well, it's a fractal. It doesn't matter what you do. The top 1% will even if even if you only did something for billionaires, the top 1% of billionaires have got 15% of the total budget, and the and the bottom 90% of billionaires have actually only got 40% of the budget. If you take the Forbes list, it's still those numbers still apply. The key is is that you well, actually, what you wanna do is the opposite.

You don't wanna get dragged down into the 90%. Because the 90% are the noisiest. They're the loudest. So if you ask everyone, how much should I charge? The average answer is gonna be $500.

But if you ask the top 1% how much should I charge? The average answer is gonna be 15 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, 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 a cave. Someone's clicked on it. Someone there's demand and interest, but the journey of an entrepreneur is an emotional 1. 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, you figuring out what you wanna commit your life to. Mhmm.

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 Yeah. 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 1 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 gonna feel very unrewarded. You're gonna 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 kinda 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 3 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 gonna find something that is in the middle that ticks all of those boxes.

So I've I'm getting a good blend.

While understanding that there's gonna be a trade off. There's gonna be There's gonna

be some trade offs. Yeah. Yeah. You can't have you can't have it all at the extremes. You can have it all, but not, all, at the extremes.

You 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 1 of the major cities if we're gonna have 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 2 men typically in their twenties who came from a prestigious US university. They got into a garage, they, you know, they dropped 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's transcended that.

It's transcended geography, gender, race, and 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 do well, 1 of the most fulfilling businesses that you'll ever have has between 612 people and does 3 or 4,000,000 of revenue. And if you've got that, probably you're gonna be the most fulfilled person in the world.

If it's 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 6 to 12 people do 2 or 3,000,000 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 wanna 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 of technology, and they build a business that they build a business that can be sold for between 10 100,000,000.

And that's my that's my game. I like businesses that achieve 10 to a 100,000,000 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 6 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 a100, you have to be a 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.

Oh, okay. What's the LTV? What's the g t you know, GTM? So you kinda gotta be into all of those things, quite naturally. You naturally wanna read business books.

So you're not gonna 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 would be happier if you were less ambitious?

I 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 and to have access to all these resources.

And what 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 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 this some seasons, like, 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 do you goal set at all? Do you set goals in each 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. 1 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 1,000,000.

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. 1 of them is about how you measure or quantify the value of an opportunity looking forward when you have very little information about opportunities?

So so what we're what we're trying to move towards is leverage so that we live in a world of leverage. And there are types so it's important to understand there are type 2 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 have 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 curve 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 how whatever networks they've got, all of that sort of stuff, if they're the right sort of person. There's definitely 2 types of billionaires, but, but, that's probably an exponential opportunity.

Right? It it it puts you further up the parallel 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 that's a bell curve. Right? That's not gonna that's not gonna 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 gonna get out of that bell curve.

Every opportunity fits within that bell curve. You're only gonna incrementally move to 1 from 1 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 there's it's almost the sky's at 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 8,000,000,000 people have got fast internet. So the world the actual the number of people available to talk to has gone into the 1,000,000,000 and billions and billions. The amount of capital is flooding into the internet. Everything is in that space.

And, ultimately, unfortunately, 1 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 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 it's absolutely, scary to think that, you know, 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 agent, an agency in India or 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.

Mhmm. YouTube is YouTube is

I'm competing on the opportunity. I'm competing for attention. Like, how am I gonna 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 defense? You know, you 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 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? How many people this year would represent a phenomenally good year? Alright. So in 1 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 1 in 66. So for every 66 leads we generate, we get 1 client who's who's the perfect client. So it's a very particular focused 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 wanna recommend it and refer 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 wanna focus on.

And if, you know, for those kids on the promenade in Cape Town that I keep referring back to, if they'd asked you if they said, Daniel, what industry would you start a business in today if you were us and you had limited funds?

Well, let let let's do some big trends. The 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.

So those people are going through a big life change. They're transforming the way they live and work. They wanna get rid of their businesses. They wanna move into advisory roles. They wanna travel.

They wanna have, different relationships. They wanna have different priorities. So I would definitely be thinking about how do I work with that group of people. I'm either gonna buy their business and take it over, which would be an opportunity. I'm gonna build a business that disrupts the current way that they're doing business, or I'm gonna sell to that market because they're cashed up.

They got loads of time, loads of money. And every business could think about how it's going to sell to a baby boomer market because that's 50%.

So

a good example might be of a baby baby boomer business. What's a good baby boomer business?

Everything. The whole economy is made up of bay like, if we went out on the street here Yeah. 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.

You know, the courier company that kinda dropped everything off is a baby boomer business. You know, the whole damn shooting match is, like, most like, 50 like, half the businesses, and especially by revenue and valuation, to all baby boomers or half baby boomers at least.

And there may be, sort of a digital arbitrage or opportunity that there's been created with the tran transfer of, with the rise of digital that they might have missed that you could seize upon?

It massively well, 1 of the things is that every single business in the world is gonna be disrupted by AI. And you've got to be the company that, uses AI when they're not. And and using AI, like, being disrupted by AI just means that every employee is way more effective because they're using AI. So 1 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. And you could watch some videos online, and you could, play with chat gbt.

Recently, we, introduced an AI system to 1 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, 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.

Mhmm.

So our sales team can be super effective at sending you through the exact video case study that's relevant to you Mhmm. Because the AI bot has read and understood every single 1 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 dotcomboom. 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 We're we're

early. It's so early. Right? It's it's the moment. I remember when Steve Jobs launched the App Store, and that was 2,007.

2,007, 2008. It was 2 years later that Instagram was launched. It was 2 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 the bigger example would be electricity. So it was the 18 thirties where we generated electricity, but it wasn't till the 19 thirties that we filled our houses full of things that ran on electricity. So it was a 100 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 1,000 and 1,000 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 gonna plug in and are gonna be great opportunities. And that's gonna 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 couple of weeks ago? NVIDIA launched a supercomputer for $3,000. Now this is going to be the fundamental basis for 10 people companies that do a 1,000,000,000 of revenue.

This is going to be entrepreneurs who 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 $1,000,000,000 business with 10 people working on the team. There's going to be a little health care unit that figures out how to crunch data and solve a, like, a really complex health problem, and they'll figure out how to do it. That supercomputer, the $3, supersedes what people used to be spending 3 to 6 to $9 a month on. So previously, you would have had to subscribe to that level of compute, and you would have been spending, you know, $50,000 a year just for the cloud subscription to that sort of thing.

Now you 1 payment of $3,000, you can be anywhere in the world crunching any amounts of phenomenal data. So just that 1 thing, that 1 innovation is gonna totally transform industries.

I would imagine that, I'm gonna 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 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 the sort of steps you take towards being able to capitalize on something like NVIDIA's supercomputer?

Yes. So of course it's a pyramid. So the schooling system taught you that you the way to be successful was to turn labor into skilled labor. So become skilled labor. 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 labor. You can get a master's and become really skilled labor, PhD, become super skilled labor. 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 5 years, I did something special with that client. And we got a great result. And I can explain it step by step.

I'm gonna document that. I'm gonna turn that into a story. And I'm gonna record a video about it. And I'm gonna have a little poster with a wheel that explains how we did that. And then I'm just gonna 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. Right? So intellectual property couples up with media. So IP and media are the next level above skilled labor.

So the first step, get out of skilled labor model and get into intellectual property and media. And just making that step opens you up to this whole other world of opportunities. If you you you must know the book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Yeah. 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, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

So he went from skilled labor consulting to intellectual property and media, which was his written word plus his book publishing. So that's step 1. And mind you, he sold 20,000,000 copies and he built a $400,000,000 consulting company, but it was based on IP, not his labor. So that's step 1. 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 a result.

And in that software bucket is the ability to create AI applications. So you're gonna 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 a company. So you can't jump straight from being labor or skilled labor straight up to software and data, and those sorts of things, which is the AI advanced AI stuff. So you gotta go through, intellectual property, media, data, software.

And what do you do with your money? So everyone has a difference with finance strategy or an investment strategy. What's your investment strategy?

I've said to you before that I, like, I really trust the advice that you can't outperform markets. Markets are everything's already priced into markets. So for me, personally, like, I put money into s and p 500. I put it, 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, some of sometimes I see people talking about, like, oh, what should someone do if they're earning $50 a year to invest? Honestly, it's not gonna do anything. Like, you you're you're just, like, obviously do it. But I 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 start up, like, actually, you know, buy yourself some time so you can, you know, move in what would 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 let me explain. Here here's an idea. The the economy doesn't want you to become rich. Right?

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, Book Magic is 1 of my, software startups. We raised £400,000 for 10%, which means £3,600,000 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. 3,600,000 is the other 90% that doesn't actually exist. It was just a figment of the imagination. So it's 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. Right?

So it's it's building things that didn't exist. So when I hear people trying to, you know, get this tiny little bit out of the economy, and then they've gotta pay taxes on it, and then, you know, the the UK government wants half of everything and it's it's horrific. You never like, 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 5,000,000, £10,000,000, 20,000,000 from your mind, from your brain.

Mhmm.

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 getting starting a $20,000,000 company comes I meet so many founders. I had 1 in the office yesterday, great founder from the UK. Young young lady.

She's done exceptionally exceptionally well. She built a company that I think is gonna make 35,000,000. 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, you know, 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, 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 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 know your 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.

Mhmm. Right? So you're also dealing with platforms that are brand new. Yeah. And and, 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 that Zoom and technology

went from geography to ideal customer personas and 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's not defined by geography. Mhmm. So when the government 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 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 yeah.

Yeah. I mean, 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. You know, people say, oh, we you know, 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 to come here. The UK was thriving when we used to have, a $10,000,000 SEIS, or sorry, 10,000,000 entrepreneurs £10,000,000 Entrepreneurs Relief, you know, made the UK 1 of the best places to do business.

So just for people that have never experienced Entrepreneurs Relief Yeah. 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 1 of the ways of 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 10,000,000 of exit value. And, now it's on the first 1,000,000 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 gonna start a company.

Right? They're not gonna take the risk. They're not gonna 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 gonna invest in start ups.

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 to 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. 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?

10000 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 1 of the the truly exceptional ones that I go, I bet a lot on that person, they all live in Dubai.

Mhmm.

They've all gone.

They've all gone.

They've all gone. Moved to America. Some of them were working in SF.

Even America, which is high tax, but you start paying the highest rate of tax at 8 times the average wage. Here, you pay the highest rate of tax at 3 times the average wage. Yeah. So they 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 wanna 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 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. I'm

So I'm an equal I don't have a team. I 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 a narrative because they're rich and they want the tax lower, or if another person on the other side has an agenda because they wanna 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 wanna keep in this country, especially the ones that don't have the mortgage yet and the family, they are off.

They're off.

Yeah. They are 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 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. 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. We're 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.

1 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 2 people who are racing each other in a marathon. 1 person is running and 1 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 gonna 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 1 on the cycle is leveraging technology and this person's 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? Oliver 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 link income was linked to feudalism. So in the same way that that was happening then, we're gonna see a very similar Dickens. I mean, he had that famous book called The Tale of 2 Cities. It was the best of times.

It was the worst of times was the opening line. We're gonna have the same thing now. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times because we're gonna 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 2 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 are 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 kinda 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 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 incentivise, what is the behaviors that we want to, avoid. We wanna make it hard to simply stick all of your money in expensive assets and then rent them out. We wanna 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 start ups. We want to make it easy for people to relocate here. And, you know, it's an attractive opportunity to 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 gonna 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 gonna get worse and worse.

Is this in part because the way that the political system is set up is that the the prime minister or the president has 4 years? So, actually, they're quite short term.

Because I'm

thinking of Keir Starmer. He he's he's saying that he walked into this deficit. And now he it's looks like he's scrambling around for the money. And the long term play here would be, we need to change the schooling system Yeah. So that in 15 years' time Yeah.

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 an m 25, right, is is the geography. The the British, you know, the 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 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 surf serfdom system? It's like, well, that was for the agricultural age, that was the system that, evolved. We're gonna need a completely different system because we now have an industrialized 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 was a very big thing for the industrial age. Do you

think Trump's gonna make good decisions?

He's certainly gonna be a disruptor. He's gonna be an accelerant. Whatever's happening, I think he's gonna break things that we're going to break, and I think he's probably gonna bring in some things that, you know, emerge as as good things. I think we were definitely going in the wrong direction. You know, we were becoming, you know, governments of the world were becoming very authoritarian for a while there.

You know, they were really policing, different, you know, elements of our lives and speech and those sorts of things. And, all of that's gonna 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?

Oh, America is definitely the most bullish place. Yeah.

So so this just goes back to something I said earlier in terms of if I'm an entrepreneur. Yeah. And I wanna position myself where the opportunity is, where the capital is, where

the mentality is. Yeah. Where where is actually online. So the the the where is digital. You know, 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, geo geographical. So but the biggest economy, the winner take all is the US. Right? Because the US 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 don't have they have 1 friendly neighbor at the north called Canada and 1, neighbor they can work with called Mexico below. Contrast China, I think they've got 17, neighbors to manage. So, the US 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 FlightStory, 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. Because these days, hiring isn't just about finding the most qualified person, but also finding the 1 whose experience, abilities, and interests align with your company's mission.

And it goes beyond candidates who are applying for jobs too. In any given week, 171,000,000 members who aren't actively seeking jobs are open to new opportunities. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn and start today by posting your job for free just by visiting linkedin.com/ doac. So is there anything else that would be on the list of things that if you were a, you know, a 21 year old Daniel Priestley 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. To build more and more leverage Yeah.

And reputation, etcetera. Are there any other big Yeah. Big

big stuff. So the 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 5 to 50000 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 7 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 2 pillars. If you're not financially successful or where you wanna be at the moment, you wanna look at building a personal brand and attaching that personal brand to the right business. Those are the 2 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 per 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 who's succeeding right now. They're focused on just those 2 things.

Why don't people do that? When you when they hear you say all of that, why is it that they then don't do it? And it those people agree. So they're sat at home now. They go, yeah, I get it.

I believe 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 gonna book a a trip to climate. And, it's called Mount, 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 1 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 6 AM.

And I'm, like, I didn't even realize why we were 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 realize, oh, this is why we're doing it at 6 AM.

Because the sun comes up at 6 AM. 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 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 gotta catch a ferry. How many days does it take? Oh, you gotta go for 3 days. How long does it take to climb? Oh, it takes about this much climb.

Is it higher or lower or blah blah blah. How much is it? Can I book through you? And he says, mister 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. Alright? I'm looking around the horizon. I'm seeing all this.

I'm seeing the mountain on the hurt 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, Steven Butler.

He's already so much further ahead. He's creating he creates podcast. 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 if I've got anything of value to share. Some people have floated a company for $1,000,000,000, and I I'm only, you know, I've only just started. Right? What am I gonna share? And what they miss is that every single person, your story is relevant.

Your background is relevant. Those people that you know is part of the mountain of value. You know, the 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 gonna take a place that you previously occupied because they're more relatable.

They're only 2 steps ahead, not 20 steps ahead. Mhmm. 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 my girlfriend. She's a breathwork practitioner, has she's got her own studio, Bali breathwork.com, if anyone wants to go to her retreats. And she, hashtag that, I guess.

And she was spending a lot of time talking about making Instagram videos again. And in fact, I think a year 2 years passes and she's talking about it and she's gonna buy she buys a camera and buys another camera and buys another camera, etcetera, 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, but she never dropped the video. And I was reading, reading a book over Christmas break. I think it was The Courage to be Disliked.

Mhmm. 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 share. 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 of 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 1 of the things I actually got her posting over Christmas was when I I said to her, instead of, like, trying to make good videos, let's make the objective, get to video 1,000. She's she's posted every day since. She's posted 30 odd videos on her Instagram since then.

She changed the goal.

The minute she's the goal became, let's get to video 1,000, 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 1 grain of rice on a chessboard, then 2, then 4, then 8. 8 is bigger than 7 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 1,000 videos is it it 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 the really important part there for me as well is just to to go for 10 years at anything, you are gonna need to really love the fucking thing. And so as much as we talk about strategies and tactics and weightless 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 sung set Fighter the Rain? How many times has Ed Sheeran done Castle on the Hill? How many times have Metallica done Master of Puppets?

So, like, all of the greatest that you, 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, wd40. Wd40 was the 40th attempt to create a spray that would do that thing that w d 40 does.

And then for the last 50 years, they've just been selling w d 40. It's their 1 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 19 fifties, and they have made that same guitar ever since. Porsche 911, they barely changed it.

But Porsche 911 is the most successful sports car because they just get good at doing Porsche 911s. You know, I love Swiss Army Knives, Rolex Watchers. 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, you know, and the first hundred

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 hundred.

To say

the least.

To say the least. Right? In fact, when I was on the show, last time you just crossed 5,000,000 subscribers. I think you're coming up on 10,000,000.

Yeah. We did, 500,000 in December.

So this is called doubling speed. Yeah. It's monumental. You're doubling and doubling and doubling. What will blow your mind is that you'll go from 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 in the year ahead.

So it feels because that's exponential growth. What what if you continue to do the reps, you will cross 10,000,000. And in the same speed that you went from 5 to 10, you'll go from 10 to 20. You'll have 20,000,000 subscribers to the channel, if if if, you know, if you continue to do the reps. So when we crank the handle, we go through doubling speeds.

And you wanna 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.

In in many well, if you're playing the right game, it is. I analyzed your episodes, by the way. Of your last 117 episodes, what percentage were authors?

I'm gonna say it's a high percentage.

It's very high. 78%. Okay. 91 out of a 117 are authors. They've all written books.

What's interesting is the ones who haven't written books are typically like superstars and, like, mega megastars in some other thing.

Mhmm.

But almost all of your guests have written at least 1 book. That 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's sold pretty well, but I I don't think it's gonna I don't necessarily think it's made much money.

No. It's 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 7 hours with you ins your 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, 1 thing that I recommend to all the listeners is have a goal to become an author.

Even if you haven't done anything. Yeah.

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 8 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 1 little thing, that could actually be a massive business bigger than, 1 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 1000 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 1 little restaurant, and then he turned it into a a big thing.

Gabriela, 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 4,000 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 when they're trying because I 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. Yep. Is there a framework for selling?

Well, you wanna productize your sales, and what you wanna do is productize 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 1 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.

Yeah.

So you wanna craft a demo. Crafting a demo is like, you wanna be able to do the features, advantages, benefits, the research that backs it up. You wanna be able to show some data. You wanna have an emotional story that tells people how this product works and how it changed someone's life or how it delivered a 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 a ideal customer has.

So you take an ideal customer. This is where they are. This is where they wanna 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 wanna productize that. You wanna give it a name, and you wanna give it a, like, a landing page, and people can sign up to it, so they can experience the presentation and and do the customer needs analysis.

I've got a picture here called, the messy middle.

Yeah. The Google Google report.

I've actually never seen this before, this image. Yep. 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 that 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 see, oh, it might drive 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 1?

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 3 seconds if they want to. Right?

They can just jump your fence, and and and a 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 wanna 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, 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 wanna feel like it's, lots of value, lots of great experiences. And then at the certain time, there are moments to act if you wanna buy something. If you're in a 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 our last conversation and that mess 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? Like, a lot of people say, I've got a big idea or I wanna launch, but I don't have a brand yet. I I'm I'm invisible. You know, I feel invisible, and that makes me feel stuck. And essentially, they they know what they're excited about.

They know what they're passionate about. 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 5 p's come in, for becoming a key passive influence?

So the yeah. So the 5 p's is, we have to learn to pitch. Right? The entrepreneur journey is a journey of a 1000 pitches. 1 way or another, you're either gonna pitch an average pitch and end up with nothing, or you pitch a phenomenal pitch and and end up with a 10 to a $100,000,000 business.

If you're Elon Musk, you 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 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 pictures, over the last 20 years for Facebook and new features. Steve Jobs used to do it on stage, 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, live, you can do it 1 to 1, 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. 7, 11, 4 stuff. The third element is the productisation, the product ecosystem. Too many people sell time and skills.

They have to sell intellectual property, media, data, software, or productised 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, because your time and effort as a founder has to be on the demand side, not the supply side. So we've got to productise. Raising profile, is the next 1. So having your social media platforms, doing some live events, winning some awards, getting on traditional media or third party platforms, all of that is your profile. And then the next 1, once you've done all of that, is doing your 1st joint ventures and partnerships.

So big business happens when you can find the right partners. So you might need a capital partner for investment, or you might need a distribution partner for sales. You might need a a a a product partner, someone who actually partners to incorporate something that they do into your product, so packaging up through partnerships. Mhmm. 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. Personal brand feels like this weird thing, or it feels like branding, or it feels like this kinda like, oh, I've gotta, 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 wrap, isn't it? Bit of a, 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, 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

Mhmm.

Where you're promoting your ideas to the world, 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.

Or

The the 1 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. Yeah. Here's my dinner.

Here's my girlfriend, my boyfriend. Right? So all of that sort of stuff is self promotion. That's narcissistic.

Mhmm.

And that's that's associated more with an influencer. A key person of influence is operating within a high value niche, and they're 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. They you don't need a huge following for this. Influencers notoriously can't sell stuff. They many influencers have a 1000000 followers, and it turns out they can't sell hoodies.

You know, they're 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.

Mhmm.

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 5 and a half 1000 companies. We've got single moms with children who have special needs, who've gone from struggling to multimillion businesses. We've got, people who had been stuck at 5 people for 10 years, and then they go to 50 people. 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 1,000 different micro niches. Every micro niche needs a key person of influence or 2. Every micro niche can have a book. When we were stuck in geography, there was no point to doing all of this because you only had a 5 mile radius or 10 mile radius anyway.

But now we can reach 1,500,000,000 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 100,000 a year. You know? So we live in this world where the micro niches are incredibly valuable.

Every industry has a 1,000 micronishas. Every micronish needs an a key person of influence or 2. 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 do 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 1 last thing that I think we should talk about. If someone's feeling frustrated, stuck, or overwhelmed, there's the 1 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 gonna feel impossible. If you're in an environment where everybody's doing this stuff, it's gonna feel effortless. If you're in an environment where everyone talks about how money's evil, you're never gonna make any money. If you're in an environment where everyone sees money as just a tool, right, you're gonna make a ton of money. Many years ago when I was in my early twenties, someone suggested that I go to dancing classes.

And I thought, this is ridiculous. Why like, 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 3 lessons, I was dancing really well.

I enjoyed it. I did 3 years of dance classes. I got really good at it. And it was 1 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, like, difficult for me, I feel effortless because I'm surrounded by people who live this way. Every single 1 of my friends is scaling a business and a personal brand. But if you're not in that environment, it's gonna 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.

Do you like, physically the highest? Go to the top floor restaurant in your town. Go to a, 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 2, 3, 4 steps ahead of you. But meet them in an opulent hotel. Right? Anyone can go sit in a hotel foyer of a 5 star hotel. Go and meet for coffee in a 5 star hotel foyer with someone who's 3 or 4 steps ahead of you.

Suddenly, you're gonna 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 1 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'd be really, really cool if people detailed their situation, talked about where they wanna 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 you'll 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. Yeah. Right? Or a Microsoft, meeting. Right?

Or a Google meeting. Right? See if you can just randomly meet up with someone who's aligned on values because they watch the same video. Yeah. Right?

Anyone who's gonna comment this is watched all the way to the end.

Yeah. Exactly.

Right? So have a little video call with them. Like, 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 that's a change of environment. You're 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 that are doing this, if you could all start it with a waving emoji, then at least you know that your 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 3 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.

This year, 55% of businesses globally are utilizing AI in some form. It's become so integrated across every point of my businesses that it's hard to remember a time when my team and I weren't using it. Adobe Express, who sponsored this podcast, is a prime example of a tool our team uses day in and day out. Its generate image tool only needs a few words describing what you want, and using AI, it returns many images for you to choose from. If you're watching, see how quick and easy it is, and you can try it yourself for free.

The customizable templates mean you or anyone in your team can create something that stands out without starting entirely from scratch or being a design expert. It's the type of technology that differentiates Adobe Express from being just another design tool and makes it the quick and easy create anything app. Such Adobe Express will download it for free in the App Store right now. In terms of energy, there are so many reasons why I'm a big match up fan, if you don't already know by now, and so much so that I actually invested in the UK's leading match company called Perfect Ted. And 1 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.

1 of my favorites is this vanilla flavor which I'm gonna make in just 2 seconds. You just take this, mix it here, get a little bit of a 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 diary 40.

Head to perfect ted.com and put in code diary 40 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. 1 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? Or have you had to have a sleep all afternoon?

Something like so I'm like, no. None of that. He He said, okay. You're 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 gallbladder and and liver, and I 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 a reprieve.

It was like a stay of execution. It was 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 I I had the real experience of what it would feel like to 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? Like, it's okay, Dan. You you it's not too late. So suddenly I'm optimizing. I've got my Whoop Band, and and I'm 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 wanna 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 1. 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 1 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 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 over in Cape Town. There's an earthquake this, this year while I was there. And I'm sat in my house, and then it's suddenly at 2 AM in the morning, like, underneath me starts shaking.

Yeah.

And I 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.

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 1 small improvement each day, 1 tiny step in the right direction, has a big difference over time.

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