How to START a Personal Brand (Full Course)

Right now, you have a choice to make. You're either building a personal brand to get followers, or you're building it to get customers. Gurus would tell you that you need to make the widest content possible to get the most amount of views. But the reality is all you need to do is build real trust with your ideal customer. In 2025, after 16 years of building personal brands, I decided to do something crazy and build my own. And in the first 10 months, we got over 200,000 followers, 40,000 people on our email list. But most importantly, we received over 750 applications to work with us. In this course, I'm going to help you start your personal brand by establishing your brand positioning and building a content strategy that gets real customers, not just followers. But here's the crazy thing. There's a chance that you are here watching this video thinking that you should start your personal brand purely because you've seen somebody you admire do it, and so you think this is just something that you have to do. A huge mistake that I see is people are building their personal brand just to check a box. They have never actually sat down and defined a goal or what their desired outcome is, and then use that to inform whether or not they should actually build their personal brand. I actually believe that there might be a case where you don't need to do that. When I was embarking on this crazy journey of building my own business and potentially building my own personal brand, I had the fortune of being able to sit down with Gary Vaynerchuk. I worked for Gary for a couple of years. When I shared with him that I was considering not only building my own consulting firm, but starting to put out content to help people build their personal brand, but then also drive awareness and conversion to my business, his response shocked me. This is the man that preaches online 24/7, everyone needs to be making content. Content is the gateway drug to what you want out of life. That's like his direct quote. But what he said to me is, I really think you should be sure that this is what you really want. You might be able to build a great business without ever making content. I want you to make sure that this fits into the life that you are building. And as you can imagine, sitting down with the content king, hearing something like that, it caused me to think twice. And I really tried to look at what am I trying to accomplish? Is making content publicly, is this necessary to accomplish that? And what I realized is that I had two main goals. The first one was that I wanted to grow my business. Theoretically, I could do that without making content. But the second goal was that I wanted to help people build a personal brand. I think there's a shitload of people teaching people how to build a bad personal brand that makes the world worse. I want to help people build personal brands that add to the world, that make the world better. I wanted to do that for a huge amount of people that I know will never work with us directly at Rston. They'll never pay us a dime. And so the first desired outcome I had, I could accomplish that without making content. The second one where I help a bunch of people for free that never work with us, I would never have been able to do that, at least at the scale that I'm looking to accomplish without making content. And so it answered the question for me. The beauty of it is now I have something to measure against. Every decision I make supports those two desired outcomes. Is this helping build the business, or is this helping educate people for free? If it's not doing one of those two things, I'm probably not gonna put it out in the content. You really need to think about what it is that you are trying to accomplish and whether or not content supports that. So, all that to say, it was absolutely insane to me that Gary said this and kind of gave me a pause, but it really made me realize just how important it is to establish and understand the end goal in mind because you may realize that there are better ways of accomplishing that goal outside of making content. Here's an example. I have a friend who is in executive protection, okay? And let's say that this friend of mine is currently a security guard at a local mall or a local bank. We'll use the mall example. And they have the desire to work their way up into executive protection where they are protecting and being like basically a bodyguard for somebody who is probably pretty important. If you're going to be Taylor Swift's EP, it's probably not a good thing if a bunch of people know who you are because you're not going to be able to move through different scenarios as discreetly. In that case, do you think that it would be a good idea to make content? Do you think that making content and building your personal brand publicly will help you accomplish your desired outcome? I'm going to go ahead and answer it for you. I'm going to say the answer is no. There are scenarios where being more publicly known actually hurts your desired outcome and makes it harder to accomplish the goal at hand rather than easier. And so what we need to do is we need to establish what is that desired outcome? What are we trying to accomplish? And does building a public personal brand and making content support that, or does it hurt it? But before we get into establishing your brand positioning, I want to figure out what this goal is, this desired outcome that you have, what you're trying to achieve. A couple years ago, I came up with a framework called the Brand Journey Framework. And it's four simple questions, and it basically helps you figure out what that desired outcome is and then everything you need to do from today to get to that point. It reverse engineers all the way from the desired outcome to today. Very, very simple. Very effective. But actually, before we get into the questions, we have a workbook that goes with this entire course, and it allows you to take what you are hearing me say and supposedly learning and actually make sure that you learn it and apply it to your personal brand. You're going to click that link, go to the website, enter your email. We will send you the workbook for you to download and go through in accordance with this entire course. And the Brand Journey Framework is the first exercise you're going to do. Here's the four simple questions. Question number one is, what is your desired outcome? What are you wanting to achieve? The second question you'll answer is, in order to achieve that desired outcome, what would I need to be known for? Right? Like what is the reputation that I need to have? The third question is, in order to develop that reputation, to be known for the thing, to get the outcome I desire, what would you have to do? We become known for things not just by saying stuff out of our mouth, but by the actions that we actually take day in and day out. What are the actions you need to do to be known for the thing to get your desired outcome? The last and final question, the fourth one, what do I need to learn in order to do the things to become known for the thing to get my desired outcome? If you go through this journey, you're going to have a very clear roadmap on how you're going to get to your desired outcome. But then you can look at what is that end goal in mind, and does making content accelerate my ability to get there, or does it actually make it slower and harder for me to accomplish that goal? If the answer is it makes it easier, amazing. Let's proceed. If the answer is it doesn't make it easier and it's actually going to be harder, I would encourage you don't waste any more time on this video. The rest of this video is for those of you who have identified that making content and building a public personal brand moves you closer to your end goal. If that's the case, let's get you closer to the end goal. And the first question that I would like to address is why.

views. But the reality is all you need to do is [music] build real trust with your ideal customer. In 2025, after 16 years of building personal brands, I decided to do something crazy and build my own. And in the first 10 months, we

got over 200,000 followers, 40,000 people on our email list. But most importantly, we received over 750 applications to work with us. In this course, I'm going to help you start your personal brand by establishing your brand positioning and building a content

strategy that gets real customers, not just followers. But here's the crazy thing. There's a chance that you are here watching this video thinking that you should start your personal brand purely because you've seen somebody you admire do it and so you think this is

just something that you have to do. A huge mistake that I see is people are building their personal brand just to check a box. They have never actually sat down and defined a goal or what their desired outcome is and then use

that to inform whether or not they should actually build their personal brand. I actually believe that there might be a case where you don't need to do that. When I was embarking on this crazy journey of building my own

business and potentially building my own personal brand, I had the fortune of being able to sit down with Gary Vaynerchuk. Uh I worked for Gary for a couple of years. When I shared with him that I was considering not only building

my own consulting firm, but starting to put out content to help people build their personal brand, but then also drive awareness and conversion to my business. and his response shocked me.

This is the man that preaches online 24/7, everyone needs to be making content. Content is the gateway drug to what you want out of life. That's like his direct quote. But what he said to me is, I really think you should be sure

that this is what you really want. You might be able to build a great business without ever making content. I want you to make sure that this fits into the life that you are building. And as you can imagine, sitting down with the

content king, hearing something like that, it caused me to think twice. And I really tried to look at what am I trying to accomplish? Is making content publicly, is this necessary to accomplish that? And what I realized is

that I had two main goals. The first one was that I wanted to grow my business.

Theoretically, I could do that without making content. But the second goal was that I wanted to help people build a personal brand. I think there's a shitload of people teaching people how to build a bad personal brand that makes

the world worse. I want to help people build personal brands that add to the world, that make the world better. I wanted to do that for a huge amount of people that I know will never work with us directly at Rston. They'll never pay

us a dime. And so the first desired outcome I had, I could accomplish that without making content. The second one where I help a bunch of people for free that never work with us, I would never have been able to do that, at least at

the scale that I'm looking to accomplish without making content. And so it answered the question for me. The beauty of it is now I have something to measure against. Every decision I make supports those two desired outcomes. Is this

helping build the business or is this helping educate people for free? If it's not doing one of those two things, I'm probably not gonna put it out in the content. You really need to think about what it is that you are trying to

accomplish and whether or not content supports that. So, all that to say, it was absolutely insane to me that Gary said this and kind of gave me a pause, but it really made me realize just how important it is to establish and

understand the end goal in mind because you may realize that there are better ways of accomplishing that goal outside of making content. Here's an example.

Uh, I have a friend who is in uh executive protection, okay? And let's say that this friend of mine is currently a security guard at a local mall or a local bank. We'll use the mall example. And they have the desire to

work their way up into executive protection where they are protecting and being like a basically a bodyguard for somebody who is probably pretty important. If you're going to be Taylor Swift's uh EP, it's probably not a good thing if a bunch of people know who you

are because you're not going to be able to move through different scenarios as discreetly. In that case, do you think that it would be a good idea to make content? Do you think that making content and building your personal brand

publicly will help you accomplish your desired outcome? I'm going to go ahead and answer it for you. I'm going to say the answer is no. There are scenarios where being more publicly known actually hurts your desired outcome and makes it

harder to accomplish the goal at hand rather than easier. And so what we need to do is we need to establish what is that desired outcome? What are we trying to accomplish? And does building a public personal brand and making content

support that or does it hurt it? But before we get into establishing your brand positioning, I want to figure out what this goal is, this desired outcome that you have, what you're trying to achieve. A couple years ago, I came up

with a framework called the brand journey framework. And it's four simple questions and it basically helps you figure out what that desired outcome is and then everything you need to do from today to get to that point. It reverse

engineers all the way from the desired outcome to today. Very, very simple. very effective. But actually, before we get into the questions, we have a workbook that goes with this entire course and it allows you to take what

you are hearing me say and supposedly learning and actually make sure that you learn it and apply it to your personal brand. You're going to click that link, go to the website, enter your email. We will send you the workbook for you to

download and go through in accordance with this entire course. And the brand journey framework is the first exercise you're going to do. Here's the four simple questions. Question number one is what is your desired outcome? What are you wanting to achieve? The second

question you'll answer is in order to achieve that desired outcome, what would I need to be known for? Right? Like what is the reputation that I need to have?

The third question is in order to develop that reputation to be known for the thing to get the outcome I desire.

What would you have to do? We become known for things not just by saying [ __ ] out of our mouth but by the actions that we actually take day in and day out. What are the actions you need

to do to be known for the thing to get your desired outcome? The last and final question, the fourth one, what do I need to learn in order to do the things to become known for the thing to get my

desired outcome? If you go through this journey, you're going to have a very clear road map on how you're going to get to your desired outcome. But then you can look at what is that end goal in mind and does making content accelerate

my ability to get there or does it actually make it slower and harder for me to accomplish that goal? If the answer is it makes it easier, amazing.

Let's proceed. If the answer is it doesn't make it easier and it's actually going to be harder, I would encourage you don't waste any more time on this video. The rest of this video is for those of you who have identified that

making content and building a public personal brand moves you closer to your end goal. If that's the case, let's get you closer to the end goal. And the first question that I would like to address is why should anybody listen to

you? You watching this, you're in one of two camps. You're either the student or the expert. And the majority of this video, to be very clear, is for the expert. But one thing that I want to call out is that some of you are

actually a student who are pretending to be an expert. If you're the student, you don't have the big W's. You don't have years of experience. You're not who your audience wants to be. You're on the journey of becoming who your audience

wants to become. What your job is is to be the guinea pig, to be the proxy for your audience. You do all the testing and investing that either goes well or doesn't go well. And so if you're the

student, [ __ ] be the student. Don't pretend and posture as the expert. This is where I see so many people get trapped and stuck online. And what you end up doing is you burn trust forever with that audience. So for the students

watching, know that you are the student. Now, the expert, I think it's it's probably pretty clear to you, although you might be somebody who would feel awkward calling yourself an expert, but if you have multiple W's on your resume,

if you are the person who your audience wants to become or you have done the thing that your audience wants to do, then you are the expert and is your job to teach in public. The student is learning in public, but you are teaching

in public. And there's a little bit of build in public that you can you can add into that. But the main thing that I want to focus on is that you're going to be sharing how you've accomplished what

you've accomplished, the mistakes, I guess, that you've made along the way that you would encourage others to avoid when going on the same journey. But you also want to make sure that you're imparting to them the ability to go from

where they are to that expert level quicker than you did. And the first thing I want to do is actually an exercise. I want to start this video off by actually taking some real action and getting some results right away for us.

Okay? And so what you're going to do is there's a link in the description below this video on YouTube. Click that link, enter your email. We're going to send you the workbook. And in that workbook, there's one exercise that I really want

to start off with, which is building your bank. Now, for the students watching this, and again, like I said, we're not going to talk too much to the students, but I do want to give you this cuz I think it's really useful. You're

going to build what I call an interest bank. Interest as in what you are interested in. This is a running list of the things that you are studying, you're experiencing, you're experimenting with, you're learning, you're testing. These are all the things that you are on your

journey of learning. And your channel is going to be documenting the process of improving or becoming better or working towards becoming the expert in this field. Now for the experts watching, you need to establish a credibility bank.

This is a running list of the things that you've done, you've achieved, you've solved, you've proven the mistakes that you've made and the lessons that you learned from that.

These are the things that you built. These are the successes that you have in your career. And what this does is it builds the foundation that you're going to build and amplify your personal brand off of. Now, a really important note

here for some of you, you might feel like, "Ah, that's not fair." It's just the way that life is. The reality is the results that you're going to get for your personal brand do have a lot to do

with what you put down in your credibility bank. Now, real quick, I don't want you to misunderstand this.

I'm not saying make [ __ ] up in your credibility bank, but the more impressive the items in your credibility bank are, the more likely you are to have better than average results with growing your personal brand in the first

couple of years. It's no secret to me that one of the reasons why we're having the success we're having with building my personal brand in the first year, I mean, hello, we're at over 200,000 followers, over 39,000, maybe even

40,000 people on our email list at this point. like it's getting kind of crazy.

And I believe that we're being intentional with how we're making our content, but it's not lost on me that I have had several big public W's in my career that have added to the legitimacy and credibility that I bring into the

content I'm sharing. For example, rather than listening and watching content on how to build your personal brand from somebody who has only done it for themsel, a lot of people value the fact that I have helped build multiple very

big personal brands within the business creator space. And so they know that I'm not just speaking from a tactic point of view, but I'm teaching principles that work in differing scenarios. And so what I want you to do is put together your

credibility bank that that's in the workbook. You can go in fill that out for yourself. And what you're going to do is this is the foundation that you draw from and you speak to because the question that we're trying to answer is

why would anybody listen to you? Well, the answer is in your credibility bank. This is why people will listen to what you have to say. Because if you do more epic [ __ ] you're going to have more

epic [ __ ] to talk about. It's a crazy concept. If you aren't impressed with your credibility bank, well, that's fine. You can keep rolling and start building your personal brand, but just know that you should work on building a

more impressive credibility bank, which means go do cool [ __ ] For example, if I'm wanting to learn from you on how to climb a mountain, well, if you've only climbed, you know, 5,000 6,000 ft peaks, that's not that impressive to me. But if

you've bagged a bunch of 14ers, you've done Everest, you've done K2 and all of these other crazy summits, well then I'm suddenly going to take what you have to say from a different frame than maybe you know Joe who has only climbed a

couple local hills [snorts] as we would call them in the Northwest, not mountains. Okay? And so the more impressive your credibility, the more buyin and belief your audience will have with you and belief that what you're saying is going to lead them to the

outcomes they desire. Now that we are on the path of establishing why people are going to actually listen to what we have to say, one thing that I want to stop and do real quick is address burnout.

But I want to hit this from a brand perspective because I think there's ways that you can burn out from a content creation perspective, but also from actually how you're building your brand and determining your brand positioning.

And I believe this happens, burnout, because most creators end up building a brand that they [ __ ] hate. You start talking about [ __ ] that you're not actually interested in or passionate about and definitely not an expert in,

but you just see these trending topics that all these other personal brands have built their brand around. And so you assume that you need to do the same.

But the reality is is if you don't like the brand that you are building, do you really think that you're going to stick with it for long enough to get the results that you desire? No. And so instead of trying to build a brand that

the algorithm tells you, build the brand that excites you. This year there's been a lot of things that we have chosen to not do from a actual content perspective, from a brand pillar perspective, from a packaging on our

content perspective that we know would actually lead to more views, more subscribers, more followers. We'd get better numbers, but it'd be building a brand that I was embarrassed of, that I wasn't proud of. I can't tell you the

amount of times that I have uh met with different individuals who they make YouTube content as an example and they're consistently putting out YouTube videos. But here's an interesting little element. They won't text those YouTube videos to any of their friends. They

won't share it with anybody whose opinion they actually care about. Why? Because they are embarrassed of the brand that they are building. And to me, that is just a countdown clock to quitting. If you quit, you don't get

your desired outcome. And so, I really want to just take this moment really quick here for you to be very intentional with how you're crafting this. As we move through the rest of this video and the rest of the exercises

that you're going to go through in your workbook, I want you to be very thoughtful. Don't think through the lens of what do people want? What is going to get the most views? What are people going to be most interested in? That's

not the first question that you should be asking. The first question that you should be asking and answering is, what am I going to be most proud of? What is going to make me most stoked to continue doing this? What am I wanting to put out

into the world to show who I am as a human, not this curated caricature version of me that I've crafted so that the algorithm works in my favor? What you want to do is you want to talk about

your core subject matter, right? Like for me, it's personal branding. And within personal branding, you have a bunch of different subtopics. But in addition to that core subject matter, you want to inject elements that show you the human. You don't want your

brand, in my opinion, to be based around just one sole thing because you, the human, more than likely, is not based around one sole thing. And so that's why in my content I will reference my Harley-Davidsons or the fact that I love

metal or the fact that I'm the biggest Seahawks fan imaginable other than the guys that wear no shirts and they paint Seahawks across their chest in the middle of winter during the Seahawks games. I'm trying to share in addition

to the value I'm trying to provide you. I want you to know who I am as a human.

One, because I'm interested in those things. I'm passionate and I'm going to want to talk about them. When I'm sitting and talking with my friends, those subject matters and those topics naturally come up. They should be coming up in the content as well, rather than

trying to hide who you are and and think that there's this this world where you only talk about one thing ever, cuz that's what so many of the gurus online have told you to do. That is maybe a way

to grow really quick on the platform, but it's also a way to quit really quickly from the platform. And so again, I am trying to help you build something that is sustainable. And so I want you to take a moment and really reflect on

who you are as a human. The rest of the work that we're going to do in this video needs to be based off of that. Not some ideal version that you think that your audience will desire, but who you

are as a human. The next question that you should be trying to answer and solve is why would your audience care? We know why they're going to listen to us because we've established that we have the credibility that gives proof to why

we have something good to say. But why are they going to care? What's in it for them? A mistake that I see you making is looking at what your competitors are doing and building your personal brand based on those findings. Aka, you're

optimizing around your competitors, not your customers. Do you want more competitors? Whatever group you optimize for is the group that you're going to attract more of. If you optimize around what your customers actually want, not what your competitors are doing, but

what your customers actually want and need, then you will attract more of them. So when you start with your customers, the way you do that is you identify what is the pain that they are facing. Ultimately the main reason why

we as humans consume educational content is there's some problem that we are looking to solve. There's some pain that we are feeling that we want relief from.

You want to start by defining what the very painful problem is and what your unique solution is to it. Your brand should be built around that. It's a combination of who you are as a human, your expertise, and solving the problems

that your customers actually face. That's what they care about. You probably have somebody in your life who is kind of the the fixer, right? There's people in our lives that we know that are always fixing things. And what do we

end up doing with them? We go to them when we have a problem. We also often times will recommend our friends or family go to them with that same problem. If you become known as someone who solves your ideal customers

problems, guess what? More people will come to you. And so by building and optimizing your brand not around being second best to the top dogs in your space and copying everything they do, but instead you start from the place of

how do I solve real painful problems for my customer. Then what you're going to find is that your brand becomes known as somebody who solves real problems, not somebody who just makes cool content online. Cool content online will get

views and it will attract attention, but it doesn't build trust like solving problems does. And so, if you know your ideal customer's painful problems, then that's going to help inform you of everything else that you need to work on

through the rest of this video and the workbook associated with it. So, make sure that you've downloaded the workbook. Click the link below, download that, enter your information. It's literally just your email, I think, or something like that. and we're going to

email you the workbook and I want you to list out your customers painful problems. What you're going to see in the workbook is it's asking you for 10 to 15. Some of you might not be able to come up with that many right now. That's

okay. As many as you can. But what I will tell you is the more painful problems you identify, the more ideation you have for the content that you're going to make in the future. Now, one of the questions that we mentioned at the

top of this video is how do you stand out? And I'm sure this hits a painful nerve for you because more than likely you feel at some level like your space, your niche is saturated. You feel like there are a lot of individuals who are

making content talking about the thing that you would be talking about or you are currently talking about. That's very real. There are more content creators online today than ever before. I think there's something like 700,000 hours of YouTube content uploaded every

single day. like it's [ __ ] absurd out here. And so you need an intentional and strategic way of actually standing out.

And I believe that there are three different main levers that you can pull to stand out. Now, two of them are in your content. But today, what I want to talk about is your contrarian belief.

And this is the biggest lever in terms of the three levers that you can pull to stand out. I think this gives you the greatest returns out of all three. Like you can take the other two, combine them, and they won't come even close to

identifying your contrarian belief. This is the way that I believe you are going to get the best traction the quickest.

You know that whole 8020 principle that everybody always talks about? Well, I will tell you this is your 80%. This is the thing that's going to drive the actual growth and make all the other things and initiatives you do for

growing your personal brand a lot easier. Now, when I say contrarian belief or contrarian take, people misunderstand this. I've been on podcasts where I'll say that and they immediately regurgitate it, but instead of contrarian, they say controversial.

I want to distinguish and define contrarian versus controversial because I will never ever ever tell you to be controversial for controversy's sake. I think that is a terrible terrible approach. See, your contrarian belief is when you are going

against the dominant belief because you actually genuinely believe it. You are incapable of not sharing this belief because at your core it's so [ __ ] true. Now, a controversial belief on the other hand is when you're taking a

position because you know it's going to trigger people. This is when you design your statement to get a reaction. There are plenty of people that take this strategy on. There's plenty of people that preach it and by all means you do

you, boo boo. I am all for you taking whatever approach you desire. But what I will tell you is if you build that brand, you start to get known as somebody who is controversial. For you watching this, you've probably not been

in these rooms, but I've worked with some of the biggest personal brands in the business world. And what I will tell you is that they avoid people who are highly controversial, like the plague.

Nobody who has a really strong established brand who is very thoughtful about the associations they make, they're not going to want to pair themselves with you. If you're building just a controversial brand for controversy's sake, most people who

build a controversial brand, they're kind of known as a loose cannon. You don't know where that controversy is going to be aimed. I encourage you build a contrarian belief, not a controversial belief. Now that we have that defined,

let's go into how you go about building your contrarian belief. I really want you to identify the belief that you have that is fundamentally different than the other individuals in your space, in your niche, and be able to articulate that to

your audience consistently. A couple examples that I think might help you understand just how impactful having a contrarian take is. Sometimes, as a side note, the contrarian take when you hear it after the fact, you're like, "That was contrarian. That's insane." Yavon

Shinard, and I I hope I'm pronouncing that right. If I'm not, let me know in the comments. He is the CEO and founder of Patagonia. And he was in an industry, the outdoor apparel world and industry, where they were hardcore about mass

consumption and they prioritized profits over everything. He came onto the scene and built a company based on the belief that you should prioritize environmental stewardship aka taking care of the [ __ ] environment rather than prioritizing profits. And so his actions

followed all the things that he has done within Patagonia point to the fact that he's actually caring more about the environment than he is about profits.

And now he's known as the model for building an organization where it's valueled, not profitled. And another example, the final one that I want to share is Reed Hastings with Netflix. Everybody thought that people loved, absolutely adored and

held tightly the ability to go to their local Blockbuster or video rental store. There was the Hollywoods and all the other ones, and pick out the VHS. They wanted to physically hold them and read the back in order to understand what the

video was going to be about. And Reed had this crazy contrarian belief that actually people don't want to leave their house. They want to be able to select a movie from their couch, have it delivered to their front door, be able

to watch it, and then return it without ever leaving their home. And I think it's pretty obvious uh that contrarian take kind of worked. He started by shipping DVDs, right? So that you wouldn't have to like go to the local

store. you could just open your front door and boom, there it is. Watch it, open your front door, place it right back in the mailbox, and off we go. And eventually that evolved into not even having to open the front door, just

having to literally flip on the switch of the TV, and boom, you can stream. And I think it's pretty clear where that contrarian take not only took Reed Hastings and Netflix, but took the entire entertainment industry as a

whole. Streaming is now the number one thing. That's what everybody is doing, right? Every single network that we used to watch on cable now has their own version of an OTT. I just can't hammer home just how important it is to have

your contrarian belief. This is how you are going to stand out from all the other individuals in your space in your niche. Hey, you're here because you're investing all of this time, money, and effort to build your personal brand and

you're not seeing any results. You might be seeing your views going up, but often times sales aren't matching. It reminds me of one of the clients that we worked with this year. Highle media team, absolute gangsters. Yet, they hit a

plateau. See, from a views and subscribers perspective, they were growing like crazy. But from a business perspective, all of this new attention was not converting into leads. It's because they thought they were making educational content when in reality they

were making entertainment content. So, we walked them through our principles and tactics of how to make educational content, not entertainment. Their previous average per video was four to 5,000 leads. This video got over 20,000 leads. And even though they weren't

optimizing for this, that video ended up being their number three video of the entire year with over a million views.

This is why we created Rson Select. Click the link in the description below if you want more information. Now, let's get back to the video. So, clearly a great business and a great brand can be built off of a contrarian belief. But

the question that you are probably asking is, "How do I figure out what mine is? How do I know what my contrarian belief actually should be?" Now, there's a chance that you actually do know it off top, right? Like that was

me. For years, I had been hearing people preach going viral and maximizing for views. And I just knew at my core that was not the right way to build a personal brand where you're trying to actually grow your business if you sell

a high ticket offer. It just didn't make sense to me. I knew it. And so when I would hear those things, I would have that reaction that I described earlier.

My blood would boil. The hair on my neck would stand. Like I would get a little annoyed and irritated. The first thing that you could think of is what do you hear people in your industry say that rubs you the wrong way that makes you

go, uh, I don't know if I completely agree with that. I guarantee there's several of these industry tropes that are out there that you fundamentally view differently. But if you are struggling with coming up with what your contrarian belief is, you don't totally

know what it is, I have a very simple exercise that I want to walk you through that I think is wildly useful and will provide immense levels of clarity on what your contrarian belief could be or potentially provide you several that

then you can go and test in your content. It's called the two column approach. And what I want you to do is [snorts] you're going to draw out two columns or if you downloaded that workbook, you actually have this table

right in front of you so you can fill it out. On the left side, you're going to write down all of the different things that people in your space or niche say that you disagree with. And on the right

side, you're going to write out what your view of that is. I also, in addition to the statements that they say, I want you to write out the things that your competitors do that you disagree with, that you don't like, or

that you think your customers hate. If you're an agency, and most agencies are really slow to respond, terrible with communication, and not organized, that is less of a statement that they're making and more of their actions. And so, what I want you to do is identify

that on the left side. And then on the right side, I want you to write out what you would do differently. What this is is it ends up being a list of contrarian takes. It's a contrarian belief or a

contrarian action that then you can utilize for building your personal brand. When I started, I had three. I'm going to share with you the belief that I disagreed with and what my view of it was. And I'm going to do that for two

more after that because I think it'll help get your wheels turning on what you could identify in your niche or your space that you don't [ __ ] with. So the first one is always try to go viral a

million views or bust. That's what I hear so many people preaching. I believe and I preach that you should optimize for trust, not virality. That is my contrarian belief. Another one is that there's plenty of people out there that

preach that you should be posting on every single platform. Volumes, mountains, mountains of content that you should be posting daily on every single platform imaginable. And the moment that a new platform appears in the app store, you better download that, sign up for a

new account, and be posting at least 20 times a day on it. Like, it's it's crazy, right? And sure, that probably works, but it's not practical. I believe that you should build a system that you will actually stick with, not what your

favorite creator does. Okay? You need to build it around you, not optimizing around them. The third one is that you need your media team to fear you in order to respect you and listen to what you have to say. And [snorts] it sounds

kind of audacious when I say this, but if you're not in this world and you don't lead media teams and work with a lot of people that do, well then you might not realize this, but this is a

very very it's weird, but it's a common belief that a lot of people have. And my contrarian belief, my contrarian take on that is that you need to create an environment of psychological safety or the work will suffer. Creative will

suffer if they don't feel safe to take risks. And so these are the three contrarian takes that I entered onto the scene with when we first started building my personal brand. I talked about all three of these in podcast and

in my content. But what I did is I started to notice that one of them was clearly resonating with the audience more than the other two. We're at a point right now where all of a sudden I'm seeing more and more people talk

about optimizing for trust than virality. When I first started making content a year ago, that was not the case. There were very few people preaching this message. And so what I noticed is it was catching fire. People were resonating with it and understood

it. They agreed with it. They were frustrated and tired of the old way of building a personal brand online. And so when I noticed that, instead of trying to force all three onto my audience, I doubled down on the one that was clearly

resonating with you. And by the way, thank you for resonating with that. Uh that's the one that I am most passionate about. And so this actually worked out really well for me because the one that I like to preach and share with as many

people one-on-one or in small group settings as possible, I'm now able to preach and shout from the mountaintops in my content. Not because it's what I want, but because it's what you have told me you wanted. So once you've done

the exercise, you'll have identified a couple of different contrarian takes, and I want you to test them in your content. And then once you notice that one is resonating more with your audience, just like I described with my

contrarian take around optimizing for trust over virality. Once you notice that, I want you to double and triple down with your audience on sharing that statement over and over and over again.

Now, the natural question that you have is, "How do I know that they're resonating with it?" Yes, I do read your DMs. I do read your comments. I knew you were about to ask that question. And it's a very fair question and there's a

lot of different places that you can look to as indicators that your audience is [ __ ] with this. Look at the piece of content where you're talking about this contrarian belief. Are people commenting literally quoting your contrarian belief back at you? That's a

big sign. That's something that I see uh a lot of times is a great indicator.

Another one is if you make a video that is central around or a piece of content in general. It could be a blog post, a substack, whatever. If you make a piece of content around your contrarian belief and you get more DMs than normal

referencing that piece of content, that is another good indicator that your audience is [ __ ] with this. If you get to a point where things start getting really crazy for you, and this is a wild point to get to with your

personal brand. It it blows my mind every time I see it. If people start making content talking about your contrarian take and tagging you in it, that's when you really know this thing has gone intergalactic. This is what

you're going to build your brand around. This is what you become known for. If you actually listen to your audience and you actually pay attention to what they're saying to you, you will know you'll know that they're liking this one

more than the other ones. And that actually brings up a really important point which I haven't really talked about much ever in my content, which is who should you be listening to? Not what creators should you be listening to, you

as the creator. Who [snorts] should you be listening to to inform the pivots or lack of pivots that you make with your personal brand? And it's a very interesting discussion that happens online. You have half of the camp that

falls into the the belief that you should respond to every comment, read every comment and take it as doctrine, as gospel. And then you have the other camp that is like ignore the comments completely, make whatever you want, and

never take into account what they have to say. And I think there needs to be a happy medium. But first, we need to define what are you doing. I believe that if you have a mass market low ticket offer that you are selling, this

is why you're building your personal brand is to lead towards that, drive sales, build your business. If that's the world that you're in, then I do think you can listen to the audience in your comment section. If they're saying

that they want more of something or they want less of something, I think it's worth listening to them. Now on the flip side, if you have a narrow market, high ticket offering, I don't know that it makes sense to listen to what the

audience is saying in your comment section to dictate how you build your personal brand. I think you need to go to a different group of people. I think what you need to do is look at what your customers are saying, what they want

more of, what the questions are that they have. That's what you want to optimize around because whatever group you optimize around is the group that you're going to get more of. Do you want more followers or do you want more

customers? For me, I want more customers. I love that you are subscribed to my channel. If you're not, you should hit that subscribe button.

I've never said that before, but it just felt natural here. But I'm not looking to build my follower count. I'm looking to build my business. And so, I want to optimize. I care about everyone who's watching the content greatly. And it's

not to say that I don't look at your comments and take it into account, but the biggest driver of the pivots or adjustments or the things that we'll double down on for my personal brand comes from our clients. And so, back to

noticing that people were resonating with optimizing for trust, not virality. Yes, the general audience was [ __ ] with that very clearly, but more importantly, my ideal clients were. I was getting DMs from people that I knew but had never worked with for years that

were saying, "Oh my god, this makes so much sense. I click with this. I'm so tired about working with this agency that is having me film these topics that we know are going to get millions of views, but I could give less than a [ __ ]

about. My Instagram has turned into something that I'm ashamed of, not something that I'm proud of." And so that's what we're optimizing around.

Again, I want to leave you with this on this point. This is super super important. The group that you optimize around is the group that you will get more of. If you optimize around your followers, sure, you'll get more

followers, but if you optimize around your customers, you will get more customers. Now, once you land on that contrarian belief, that contrarian take that you're going to really lean into, what you're going to want to do with that is you need to craft what I call a

brand statement. This is a way for you to clearly and concisely communicate that contrarian belief so that you can say it as many times as you [ __ ] can in the content that you make. Okay? I believe that you want to consistently

pair yourself with that belief so that eventually your audience makes that association. I'm going to share a lot more on that in just a second. But it's kind of like how Apple and Johnny IV have created the association with Apple

being a design first, not a processor or tech first company. When you think of Apple, I would bet you're not thinking about the technical. You think about the design. And I don't believe they became known as a design company because of

their marketing. I believe they became known as a design company because for years they consistently paired themselves with a very clear contrarian approach to building computers and ultimately hardware design as a whole.

Johnny IV is known for approaching design with simplicity, clarity, restraint, not being overly done, but actually exercising discipline and having an elegant approach to a world that the word elegant couldn't have been further away from. And Apple continued

to pair themselves with this for 20 years. Okay? So now when you hear Apple, you don't think processor first. you think design first. And so again, make sure that you downloaded the workbook and you do the two column exercise. This

is going to give you the ammo that then you can go into the world making your content to test which of these contrarian takes, which one is resonating with the customer or the audience that I'm optimizing for, my

ideal customer. That's what you want to optimize around. Again, if you have a mass market low ticket offering, cool.

your ideal customer is loud in your comments, but typically if you have a high ticket narrow market offer, what I have found is my ideal client more often than not they end up texting, dming, or emailing me rather than commenting

publicly on the piece of content. And I don't need to get into the why behind that, but that's just the reality. And so in my world, I'm optimizing more around the private messages I'm receiving than the public comments I'm

getting. And so that pairing that we're talking about of Apple pairing themselves with design first thinking leads to an association. If you haven't heard me define these terms, I want to actually define branding and brand for you because this is how you're going to

determine how you want to be viewed. At its core, branding is just a pairing of things. And I believe that brand is the byproduct of that. A good brand is when your audience inherently associates you and the thing that you are intentionally

pairing yourself with. If Apple is for 20 years straight consistently pairing themselves with design first thinking, it's no surprise for us that the association that we draw upon very quickly when thinking of Apple is design. That's how this actually works.

That's how branding works and how the byproduct occurs, which is brand. A really simple example is below this this cool shirt that I just recently got.

Below it is a black t-shirt, just plain, right? And if you see me in a plain black t-shirt, there's not that much to draw upon. You're more looking at maybe, you know, my rings, my glasses, my hat, whatever, there's not that much to go

off of. Now, if I were to take that same plain black t-shirt and slap a black metal logo, you know, like a Swedish or Norwegian black metal band that you can't even read, that might change how you perceive me. you suddenly have

different associations that you're drawing upon. Why? Because I'm pairing myself with that logo. Now, if we were to exchange that black metal logo for a Hello Kitty logo might be a different perception, might be some different associations that you draw upon, right?

So, what you you the brand, what you pair yourself with consistently informs the brand that your audience sees. This is the lens. This is the filter that they view you through. And so, you want to be very thoughtful and strategic with

the pairings that you make. Knowing this, I think you're going to want to be a little bit more thoughtful with the words that come out of your mouth and the people that you show up publicly with. And so, the formula that you can

think of is pairing times consistency equals an association. Pairing times consistency equals association. Here's an example that I want to share with you. You're very familiar probably with Instagram stories. I think it's something that we interact with on a

pretty regular basis. For me, it's a, you know, too many times per day, uh, as my screen time report on my phone is constantly telling me. If you look at Instagram stories, for example, let's say you meet somebody recently and you

both follow each other on Instagram. You don't know that much about this person. And so what's going to end up happening is whatever you see them consistently posting in their Instagram story is going to shape the brand that you

develop or the brand that you view them through the lens that you view them through. For example, you connect with Sarah and you now follow Sarah on Instagram and suddenly you start noticing that Sarah posts a lot of black

metal songs in her stories. What are you going to assume? It's simple. It's not like some loaded question. The answer is you're going to assume that she's into black metal, right? Pairing times consistency equals association. She is consistently pairing herself with black

metal songs. And so the association is she must like black metal. Now, if you're one of those people who love Amish romance novels and you're posting a screenshot of your favorite Amish romance novel in your story, I'm going

to make the assumption that you like Amish romance novels. And even more than that, if I have known people in my life previously who have liked Amish romance novels, I am going to associate not only you with the Amish romance novel, I'm

going to associate you with what it means in my life to like an Amish romance novel. Okay, it's a little heady there, but basically the point being is whatever you consistently pair yourself with, that is the association that your

audience is going to start creating for your brand. Now, something that we want to be careful and weary of is we've described this from like a positive frame, right? I love black metal, so I think it's very positive to be

associated with black metal, but this works equally as powerfully in the reverse. Okay? Okay. So, just as effective as it is for a positive association, it's also just as effective for a negative one. If you pair yourself with something or someone that is the

opposite of what your desired outcome is, that is the opposite of the brand that you want to build and what you want to be known for, then that be a bad pairing. That's not a good pairing for you to make. That's not what you want to

do. I'm trying to build a trustworthy brand. I want to be known as a trusted figure. And so, knowing that this is how branding works, it would be really [ __ ] stupid of me to start consistently showing up online with

people who are known as untrustworthy characters. If I show up with untrustworthy individuals consistently, you are going to start wondering if I'm trustworthy myself. Like I said, these associations are the lens that your audience views you through. And the way

that you can actually control and set these associations is by being intentional with the pairings that you consistently make. Now, I'm a huge fan of reverse engineering from a desired outcome to today. I try to apply that way of thinking to as much uh that I do

in my work life and in my personal life as humanly possible. And it's what I want to do here with your desired associations. In that workbook that if you haven't downloaded yet, click the link in the description, enter your

email, we'll email you the workbook. In your workbook, there's a desired associations exercise. I think it's called that or something like that. And what it's going to prompt you to do is it's very simple. I want you to write

out two associations that you want to be known as being for and I want you to write out two associations that you want to be known as being against. Just as much as you want to build a brand as

what you are going towards, you also want to build a brand that speaks to what you are not willing to do, what you do not want. Something that a lot of luxury brands do a really good job of is

not only speaking to who they do make their product for, but who their product is not for. And by doing that, you create an exclusivity for the audience that you are actually building and optimizing around. And so this is how

you're going to be able to reverse engineer these desired associations. And once you determine what those are, the next logical question you need to ask yourself and answer is, well, in order to get those associations, what do I

need to consistently pair myself with? This gives you the actions in order to shape the associations that your audience makes when thinking of your brand. It's no longer this crapshoot where you're, you know, pulling the lever out the slot machine and hoping

that you get all three bananas. like this is how you do it intentionally, not with guesswork. Now, watching this video, you're probably at the beginning of building your personal brand or you saw this and realized you don't like

your personal brand and you want almost like a restart or a refresh. And so, what I'm about to walk you through at this stage that you're at might feel absurd. I want to walk you through and talk about some brand threats. And in

the beginning stages, this feels audacious. This feels insane. Like you can't even imagine that there would be a threat to your brand right now because you're just in the beginning stage. But let me tell you, this is a very, very

real thing. There's been several incidents this year where people have come to us and worked with us for a short period of time purely to help solve a problem they were having with their brand publicly. You know, one

could call it a little PR disaster moment. And this is something that I think sure you're going to have things that you can't predict, but a lot of the time if you build with the right foundation, I think you can avoid a lot

of these brand problems and brand threats that a lot of personal brands find themselves encountering in the first couple of years of establishing who they are online. And the thing that I want you to really be thinking about is what you say now

publicly creates the lens that your audience is going to view you through and what you claim that you are strong and staunch about. Your audience will hold you to that for a lot longer than maybe you realize right now. Like maybe

you hate how authors or or you know subject matter experts pump out a new book every year because that that indicates that it must be a shitty or lowquality book. I believe that if you say that enough a year, 2 years, 3

years, even four or five years down the road, it might be very difficult for you to ever do something like put out a book every single year or even just put out a book in general. And this might seem

surprising to you, but you'll be shocked at how much your audience can latch on to some of these messages. You have no idea what the future holds. And so I would encourage you, I'm not saying don't take any strong stances, but keep

your optionality open. If you really truly believe it, like you'll die on that [ __ ] hill, say it. Right? Like I talk about optimizing for trust over virality. That's something that I'm not going to change. I I do not foresee that

change. But there's other things that maybe I believe that I'm not interested in doing right now, but maybe in 5 years I learned that that would be really important and impactful for our business. And that's something that we

need to do. And so I want to be careful about restricting my future ability to act based on current statements and thoughts that I share in my content half-hazardly without real intentional thought. It's kind of like what my mom

always told me about tattoos. only get it if you're still going to be proud of it when you're in your 50s and 60s. I would encourage you to think about the things that you say and the statements you make in your content and the stances

that you take. Is it a stance that you're still going to be proud of and agree with in 5, 10, 15 years? If not, I would take a second stab at maybe thinking about whether or not you want

to say that publicly because what you can end up doing is actually creating a prison that your brand lives within and cannot escape. For example, there was a time where I was working with a creator where it became wildly difficult for us

to sell a product that we were selling and had because they had built the expectation for a long time that they were just giving away free content and that was all they were ever going to do.

Even though they had given a lot of goodwill to the audience and done really well by the audience, when they went to make this transition of informing their audience of an offer they had, their audience got pretty pissy about it. And

the reason why is because they set up expectations that this would never happen. What you say now influences your ability to act later. Now, I'm not saying, and please don't get it twisted and misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm

not saying you can't change your position down the road. You absolutely can. I admire people that admit that they said one thing one way and they have new information now and they're changing their view on something, right?

But just like in politics, whenever a politician, and it's very rare that they do this, whenever a politician comes out and says, "I held this position and now I believe it differently." Sure, I respect and admire that and I think you

probably do, but the masses ridicule them and critique them heavily. It's very difficult as a public figure on whatever spectrum, whether it's massive or even a small little community of people. It's very difficult for humans to see you say something consistently

and now say something different. And so what I would recommend is if you believe that this is something worth dying on the hill for, cool. By all means, say it, share it. But if you don't, I would question whether or not this is worth

sharing publicly because you can make a change in what you believe. You can say you can change your stance, but you will deal with backlash. I I promise you that. I'm not saying that's a reason to not do it. I'm not saying backlash is

the worst thing in the world, but it is something that you should know that you are going to experience if you go about changing your views, beliefs, and opinions on things that you have been consistently saying for a significant

amount of time. Now, so much of this video has been focusing around you and how all these different elements of who you are. And so, we're really clear on you, right? We know who you are. But the question is, should you assume that your

audience knows who you are when they're engaging with your content? And more than likely, you have made the mistake or you've seen another creator make the mistake where they make content for a warm audience. They have inside jokes.

They have all these little things that only their warmest, most consistent audience understands and knows. I assume a lot of times in my content that you know my background and and the different work that I've done in my career, but

the reality is you don't. And so I need to at some point in the video give a qualifier or give some credibility so that somebody you who doesn't know who I am wants to listen to what I have to

say. But the mistake here that I want to correct is thinking that your audience knows who you are. What you should be doing is every piece of content you make, you should assume that the person watching it has no clue anything about

you. Who you are, what you stand for, what your preferences are, what your interests are, what your track record is. None of that is known by the audience. And so I would tell you that everything you do with your personal

brand, you should approach it through the lens of these people are witnessing or experiencing me for the first time.

And with that in mind, you're going to contextualize things a little bit differently. It's kind of like when you're talking to a a group that you've just recently met versus friends you've known for 13, 14 years. It's going to be

a wildly different conversation. With this new group, if you mention, you know, Valerie, I'm going to have to mention the fact that Valerie is my mom's name. That that is something that my friends all know, but a new group

doesn't. That's a very simple example, but you need to apply that way of thinking to building your personal brand. It's kind of like what I said earlier, which is the principle of whatever group you optimize for is the

group that you're going to get more of. If you optimize your content around a warm audience, you're just going to continue with your current audience and you're going to have a very tough time bringing new people into your world. If,

however, you optimize for a cold audience, and cold and warm just means cold, they don't know who you are. warm.

They do know who you are. If you optimize for a cold audience, you're going to attract more of those individuals. But guess what? The cold audience, they come up, they come up to your front door, you open the door, and

you say, "Come on in. The fire is warm and there's hot cocoa in the kitchen." That's how you can convert them from being a cold audience to being a warm audience. You're not going to ever convert them if they don't engage with

your content. and they won't engage with your content if in the beginning you're alluding to things that only people who know you would understand. I hope this makes sense. This is a huge mistake that some of the biggest creators in the

spaces and niches that you follow and admire, this is the mistake that a lot of them are making. Don't make the same mistake. Now, a funny part in this is in order for you to be able to share what

your brand is and what you stand for, you kind of need to know. In order to be able to explain what your personal brand is and what it stands for, you need to understand that. And so, that's why

we've been focusing on what we've been focusing on in this video. Everyone wants to jump to content strategy right away. What is the content strategy that's going to get me a million views or whatever? That [ __ ] doesn't matter.

If you get a million views around a brand that you don't understand, how the [ __ ] are those million people ever going to actually understand what your brand stands for? Here's the secret. They won't. And so, you don't want to be

doing that. Please make sure you understand your brand so that you can then communicate what your brand is and who you are to a cold audience and then you can convert them into a warm audience. Now, a little uh caveat that I

want to add here. I'm going to share a moment of of interesting vulnerability. I'm in my first year of building my personal brand and we've put out uh to date, as of filming this video, we've put out, I believe, eight videos. No,

nine videos. Eight videos. Nine videos. Thank you, Trevor. We've put out nine videos to date. We're still in the early stages. We're still in our first year of putting content out on YouTube. And something that I noticed is

in our most recent video on YouTube, we got some comments saying that we were getting a little bit more repetitive. I saw the comment and immediately I was like, "Oh, okay. I want to make sure that we're not doing anything that is

going to bore the audience. Like, I want to make sure we're providing value and usefulness and all of those things." And so, I had a little moment, like a little mini panic attack. Nah, that's a little dramatic. I had a moment where I was

like, "A gasp is is more uh realistic." Then Trevor and I were really thinking about it and we're like, "Okay, we're in our first year." So yes, we are going to optimize our content around a cold audience. But something that we can do a

better job of in 2026 is doing both. You want to make sure that you are doing a good job of making content that is for new audience acquisition and a good job of making content that is providing current audience nurture. And

if you're missing one or the other, what's going to happen is you essentially one is you're not attracting anybody new and so you're only just working with the people that are currently in your audience. If you're only optimizing for the new audience and

not nurturing the old, it's like a leaky bucket. You're going to be adding water in all the time, but as you're adding in more water, you've got water escaping.

So, you're staying at the same level. You're not going to see the numbers on your content or more importantly, the conversions for your business go up because what happens is every new person that comes in, you have one of the

current members leave. And so, you need to make sure from a personal brand highlevel perspective that you're thinking about not only the cold audience. I'm telling you hardcore optimize and make every video assuming that they're a cold audience, but also

make sure that you are nurturing the warm audience, the people that have already showed you that they are loyal and care about you and what you are producing. So earlier I teased that brand statement. This is where you're

able to take that contrarian belief that you have identified, right? You probably identified a couple. Then you started testing them in your content and seeing which one was resonating the most. and that's the one you're going to double

down on. Once you have that contrarian take that you're going to double down on, you need to form it in a very clear and concise statement. Okay, why do you want to do that? Well, what did we talk

about earlier? What is branding? It's consistently pairing yourself with something. And the byproduct of that is your brand. If you want to build a brand that stands out, it needs to be a contrarian take, but you need to be able

to say it consistently in the content you produce. And so I believe that what you want to do is take all the work that we've done so far. And there's been a lot of it. You want to take that and put

it into one single statement that you're able to articulate in any scenario, shape, or form. Okay? I say it in the content that we're making for our own channels. I say it if I go on a podcast or on the rare occasion where I speak at

an event, I will share it there. And my brand statement is as follows. I believe that business owners and entrepreneurs trying to grow their business through their personal brand should optimize for trust, not virality. There's a lot that

is communicated in that statement. The beautiful thing is is I'm communicating who I serve, how I serve them, and what I do differently than my competitors.

Three important things to make it very clear to my ideal customer why they should choose me or not choose me over my competitors. It makes it very easy for them to make a decision. We want to make things easy for people to decide

on, not just for buying and converting with you, but also whether or not they're going to opt in to consume the content in general. We want this to be an easy decision for them. So, there is a an exercise that walks you through,

it's very simple, the framework that I use for crafting a brand statement. I'm not saying this is the only way that you can make your brand statement. There's other ways you can do it, but this is a very simple and effective way to do it.

And what it does is it produces something that communicates to your audience who you serve, how you do it, and what makes you different than your competitors. And so in the workbook, make sure you downloaded it. If you

didn't, it's the link in the description. Click that link, enter your email. We're going to email you the workbook. In the brand statement section, you're going to follow the framework. I believe insert your audience who want their core desire

should your contrarian belief not common belief in niche or space. If you fill this in, you're going to have something that you can regurgitate and say in any scenario, day or night, awake, tired, good mood, bad mood, whatever. It's very

easy for you to say. I can say my brand statement in my sleep. In fact, if you ask my girlfriend, I'm sure there's been times where I have said it in the middle of the night while I'm dreaming. This

becomes the powerful leverage that you have to amplify your brand and stand out from all these other [ __ ] Just kidding. All these other individuals who are lovely and wonderful in your space that you want to differentiate yourself

from. You want to separate yourself from the pack. This is how you do it. Okay.

Another analogy uh that we shared earlier is how Apple consistently paired themselves with design verse thinking.

And then what happened? We start thinking of design when we think of Apple. You have to say this statement over and over and over again so that when your audience thinks of you, they think of this statement. I believe that

we through a very low volume of content have done this very effectively in our first year of building my personal brand. So much so that last year there was a video that we put out that was really long. It's like 3 and 1/2 hours

long. And one of the comments on the video was calling out the fact that this is too long, too boring, too educational to ever get a million views. And before I could even respond, you or other people in the audience were going and

commenting, saying, and telling informing this person, that's not what I'm optimizing for. They beat me to it.

They knew and they know what I am trying to build and what I'm optimizing around which is trust, not virality. And they know that because I am consistently pairing myself with it. Okay? And so, please go through that exercise. It

might take you a little bit longer than you think. It seems really simple when I say it out loud, but then when you go to put pen to paper, it actually takes a little while. So, block some real

meaningful time to craft this. Once you have this, I think you're going to be blown away at the results that you get on how you stand out compared to others in your space. Now that you understand your brand, it's time to amplify it with

your content strategy. Now, the first thing that I want to immediately flag and qualify is saying that there is a lot of nuance to this viral verse trust conversation and debate. Just for the sake of time, I'm going to make the

assumption that you have a high ticket offer that you're selling to a very specific and fairly narrow group of people. Okay? It's not like you have a probiotic soda that you're selling or uh an anti-aging cream, right? For those

kinds of brands, going viral is a lot more effective. It's actually kind of a biggie that you really want. But if you are selling a high ticket offer to a very narrow group, well, I think it's probably the case that maybe going viral

is not as useful as some of your local gurus on Instagram will have you believe. So, what I want to do is I want to break down what optimizing for going viral typically looks like, like how it actually goes based on my 17 years of

experience. Now, I'm not saying this is always the case. There are obviously outliers. And this is to be clear when it goes well. When you do it really, really good. When you optimize for going viral, you start getting more views, a

lot more views, and you start gaining a lot more followers, which is wonderful. You're seeing everything move up and to the right on all the social platforms.

But here's what actually happens when you do this. When you optimize for virality, inherently, you have to make content that is wider. Okay? And typically what this ends up doing is diluting the message. Think of it like a

shot of whiskey versus a whiskey and coke. Going viral and optimizing for virality is like having a whiskey and coke when you really want the foolproof whiskey that burns as it goes down.

Right? That's what you are looking for. Okay? And so in doing this, what you end up doing is you create wide content that is vanilla and attracts followers and viewers off of that content. But what are they wanting more of? that same [ __ ]

that you brought them in with. It's not like they're coming in from some really wide vanilla piece of content and all of a sudden being like, "Yes, I would love a very deep breakdown on how I can conduct my marketing funnel from

Instagram to my email and then convert on the back end." Like they don't give a [ __ ] about that [ __ ] And so what I have seen and I have been a part of a team where the creator wanted to do this.

Okay? And what happens is originally you're building and optimizing your audience around solving problems for them. Taking the painful problems that they deal with and helping them solve them. But over time as you go wider, you no longer serve their need. So what do

they stop doing? Consuming your content. So what you're doing is you're bringing in all these people that are not interested in the high ticket niche offer that you have and they're coming in but they don't care to buy. They have

no interest in it. Meanwhile, the people that were buying from you are now tuning you out because your content no longer serves them. So, as views and followers are going up to the right, guess what sales are doing? Straight down. It

suddenly becomes so clear. You end up alienating the people that actually want to buy from you. How dumb, right? Yet, you are considering doing this. I've considered doing this. Many creators that I love and respect and admire and

look up to have considered or have done this in a season. You don't have to make that mistake. I'm sharing the mistake with you right now so you don't have to go down that road and learn this lesson

the painful way. Because what I will tell you is it is extremely painful to wake up one day and realize the people that were buying from you no longer give a [ __ ] about what you're putting out

because what you're putting out does not serve them. It's kind of like how I tend to gain weight. One day I wake up, I'm like, "Oh [ __ ] I put on 20 pounds." Right? I wasn't paying attention. I was

just going living my life, doing things and being busy. And then one day I'm like, "Oh fuck." It's the same in this instance. You don't realize it as it's happening until one day your ideal customer, maybe somebody that you know

and previously had a relationship with or still do, they tell you something like, "I used to consume your content. I loved it. I haven't watched a single video in the last 6 months because none of it has helped me. none of it has been

helping me solve the problems and the painful problems that I have within my business or whatever use case you're making content around. Right? Maybe you were helping people lose weight and keep track of their calories and, you know,

get at least 15,000 steps a day, whatever. And suddenly you're starting to make videos where you're comparing candy bars. That's no longer serving your customers need. And so what's going to happen is they're going to start to tune out your content. Now on the other

hand, if you optimize for building trust, I believe that is going to provide insane results for your business. Why is that going to provide insane results? Well, I think in order to answer that question, we have to define what trust is. And I have a very

simple definition that I think will be very useful for you. I believe that trust is how much you believe that someone or something will meet your expectations in the future based on how they have behaved in the past. If I go

out to start my Harley-Davidson, okay, I flip the switch on and then I start it.

If all of a sudden tomorrow I go out there and I press the ignition button and it and it doesn't start, it just peters and it just dies. Do you believe that the next day when I go out there, if I do

nothing different that I am going to trust that it's going to start a little bit less? Okay, that I believe is a very simple version of how trust works. So then how do you optimize your content around building trust rather than going

viral? Well, I think it's actually very simple. Do you need to identify what the painful problems are that you are solving for your ideal customer? What is your unique solution to that painful problem? How do you go about solving it

differently than others? I'm not saying make [ __ ] up, but just look at what do you do a little differently than some of your competitors? And then the third thing, you need to set expectations of what the painful problem is that we're

going to solve in this video. The next step is you need to make it easy for them to take the actions to go from here to here. What do they need to do in order to get the outcome they desire to

solve the problem that they're looking to solve? And if you do that and repeat over and over, I believe that your audience is going to have a strong belief that you will meet or even exceed expectations in the future. This is a

beautiful thing. Why? Because it means that they're going to continue to believe that you will deliver. And if they believe that you're going to continue to deliver, when you suddenly make them aware of an offer that you have, the likelihood that they believe

you'll deliver on that offer goes up. So, the likelihood that they actually convert goes up. And the reason why they believe that is because they trust they're going to get more out of what you provide in your offer

than what they invest. Why? Because that's what's been happening for the last 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 12 months, however long you've been making content.

Those actions on repeat builds that pattern of trust in your audience. It's incredible what this can do. And so it takes this like wildly confusing thing of like how do I build trust and makes it very simple. These are the very basic

actions that you need to take in order to increase this trust with your audience. Now something you'll hear a lot of people talking about is who should you be listening to in future ideation on your content, right? Do you

go to the comment section as your source? Do you go to your customers? Which one do I do? Well, it's going to depend on what your offer is. If your offer is a mass market, not niche offering and it's low ticket, well then

yeah, you can look at the comment section as inspiration. Why? Because you have more people in the comment section that are reflective of what your buyer looks like, acts like, and who they are.

On the flip side, if you're like me and you have a high ticket offering, well, maybe the comment section isn't going to be the best place for you to optimize off of because maybe those are people who are consuming your content, engaging

with it. They're awesome. I love them. But they're not the type that is going to actually end up buying my offering, right? My one-on-one service or even potentially joining one of our group offering. Whatever group you want more

of, that's what you should optimize for. If you want more followers, cool. Listen to your followers. Make the content they're asking you for. But if you want more customers, what are your customers asking for? I want to be clear. I care

about what you, the audience, is saying in the comment section. That's I don't want that to get misunderstood. But what I want to share with you is that the majority of my content that I put out, the customers that we end up working

with, they don't, this is not a rule, it's an observation. Often times, they don't comment publicly on the content.

They will DM, they'll text, they'll email privately. And so I'm looking at those conversations and what are those people finding useful? What are their follow-up questions that they want more in-depth information on? This is how I'm optimizing my content and it's how if

you have a high ticket offer, it's how I recommend you optimize yours. This is the source that you want to go to, your customers, not necessarily your followers. But the thing is is you're never going to get to the point of

reaching your ideal customer because it's not like the first video you put out, boom, all of a sudden thousands of people are seeing it. That's not what usually happens. You have to go through the painful period of doing this for a

while with very little results. And the only reason that you're going to stick with it is if you build a system and a foundation that is actually sustainable.

Not trying to copy what your favorite content creator is doing. not trying to replicate what the guru on your Instagram feed is telling you you need to do by being on every single platform all at once, posting 10 to 20 times a

day. That's ludicrous. I mean, there's a crazy stat that up to 73% of people who start making content quit within their first year. Within their first year, all the investment that you made, all of the uncomfy feelings that you went through

and and being public and everything was for nothing. And so you're watching this video because you want to build something that will last. So let's build a foundation and a content strategy that will do the same. So what does it mean

to build a sustainable system and foundation? It means that your content strategy needs to fit within the constraints of your business, your life, and your experience level. Now, I don't want to sound like I'm like one of those

woo woo people. I'm saying you have realities based on the business life and experience that you have. You might only have one or two hours a week that you can dedicate to content. Another person watching this video might have up to 10

hours a week that they can dedicate. Everybody has different constraints on their time and bandwidth, right? Like energy bandwidth, mental bandwidth, not just the time. You need to reverse engineer what your work, your life, and the experience level that you have. And

by that I mean like how much content have you filmed on camera? You're gonna want to build a system that eases you into it. I didn't start off this year making content, putting out a video every single week on YouTube. That would

have been [ __ ] absurd for me. I was not used to being on camera. I had to ease my way into it. Okay? And so that's what I mean by creating a sustainable system and foundation to work from.

You'll get way greater returns doing 20-minute walks every day for the rest of your life than six months of Ronnie Coleman-esque working out. It's the same with your content strategy. If you post a low volume but consistently for many

years, you're going to beat the creator that tried to sprint hard for a year and then burned out and gave up after 12 months. And and honestly, this is what kind of separates you, the business owner, from the average creator. You

have a business that you are running. And so, your content strategy and system needs to complement what your business looks like and what your day-to-day in the business looks like, not some round hole that we're trying to jam a square

peg into. I can't tell you how many different systems I've had to design based on the entrepreneur. I've worked with entrepreneurs who are incredibly busy and they literally have like at most 60 seconds a week where they can

actually dedicate time to making specific content for the platform. The rest of their content is purely documented. It's just somebody following them around and filming them. I've also worked with individuals who allocate up to 12 to 18 hours a week for filming

where they'll sit down for a full 12-hour session on a Friday and film all [ __ ] day. There's all kinds of versions of this across the spectrum here, but it doesn't matter what others are doing. You need to look at what your

day-to-day looks like and then build the system from there. So, some questions that I would encourage you to answer in the workbook. And just a reminder, if you haven't downloaded it, download the workbook. There's a link in the

description down below. All you got to do is click the link, enter your email, check your email. We sent you the workbook. You can download it and go through all of these exercises along with me. And this exercise has some

questions that I want you to answer. They're going to be like prompts. They're basically going to help you develop and understand what does my actual capacity for content look like?

How many hours a week do you actually have for content? Or what parts of the content creation process bring you energy? What parts drain you? What time of day are you most on? Where is your brain the sharpest? Or where do you

communicate the best? I know for me, I am the sharpest and the best in the morning. In the morning is where I am primed. That's where I am my best. Okay?

And so, we try to orient as much as we can. Today, we've been filming all day, but we do our best to orient our film sessions to when I have the best energy and when I communicate and verbally

process the best. Make sure that you go through the worksheet, answer these questions. It's not anything complex, but it's something that I guarantee you have not sat down and done. And so by putting this together, you are able to

then build your content system, reverse engineering the amount of time that you have available rather than trying to keep up this unsustainable thing that you know is just a ticking time bomb for you to give up at any point. Real quick,

I just want to say I am so sorry. I know that this is a lot to take in right now and even more for you to take action on, but that is the whole reason why we created Rston Select. Rston Select is

your one-stop destination to not only learn but to actually implement. We're talking pre-production, production, post-production, and platform strategy all through the lens of educational content. Click the link in the description below if you want more information. Now, let's get back to the

video. Now, the next thing that we need to do after that we've understood like, okay, we have these foundations on how we're going to do content, we need to choose our medium. And this is really, really simple. There's four different

mediums or ways of making content. There's video, audio, written, and graphic content. And instead of picking the medium that all of your favorite content creators are doing, or the medium that everybody online is talking about, pick the one that is most natural

for you. If you're already writing stuff, if you're really into the written word, well then I would argue maybe the best way for you to start is with Substack rather than trying to do long- form YouTube videos, especially if the

idea of being on camera makes you like shudder. I wouldn't push you into doing that. I want you to work your way up to doing that. On the flip side, if you want to communicate verbally, but the idea of being on camera is scary, audio

is going to be a great method for you. No matter what it is, I want you to pick how are you going to communicate your ideas and thoughts and who you are as a human most authentically. That's the

medium that we're going to go with. Now, the clear and obvious reality here is video is the best as in you can get the most out of video. When you film a video, you can then clip a short. You

can take the audio and make it a podcast. You can take the transcript and write LinkedIn posts, emails, whatever, right? Substacks. you are able to pull so much from video. But again, if that's not what you [ __ ] with, if that

terrifies you, then you're probably not going to stick with it or realistically, you're probably not going to ever start in the first place. And so I would tell you, pick something that you can get momentum on and allow the momentum to

guide you into the next medium that you choose. And now once we have our medium, we need to pick our platform. Oh my god, this is where I think so many people go wrong. and they misunderstand a lot of

messages that people share online. Everybody talks about dominating all the platforms, being everywhere all at once, being omniresent. And here's the reality that is a terrible strategy for you. You are not Gary Vee. You're not Gary Vaynerchuk. You're not Cody Sanchez.

Okay? Trying to be everywhere all at once will cause you more harm than good.

At this stage, you will make diluted [ __ ] content. I can tell you with absolute certainty. Rather than trying to focus on all of them, I think you want to focus on a very select few. Like let's say for example, I all of a sudden

tell my girlfriend I'm going to take up this new hobby of rock climbing. And all of a sudden, the first time that I'm going to go rock climbing, I decide to do the scramble up K2. Now, if you don't

know what K2 is, it's a extreme mountain that is very difficult to summit. Um, many people have unfortunately passed actually in trying to do it. I'm using an extreme example here, but that's what a lot of you think you can do with your

content strategy. You think that you can get into climbing and suddenly climb one of the most complex mountains in the [ __ ] world. You think that you can start making content and make content at the volume and cadence

that the best creators in the world that have been doing this for years that have teams of 10, 20, 30 people behind them are doing. And that is ludicrous. And so, if you're starting off solo just as yourself, what I want you to do is pick

one primary platform and one secondary platform. Let's use the example of YouTube and Instagram. Okay? What you're going to do is you're going to make pillar content for your primary platform. Okay? That's YouTube. That's the main dish that you are making. A

long form direct to camera video like this. That could be an example of the content that you're making as your primary platform pillar content. And so this is an example of my pillar content.

It's a long form piece of content that I'm then going to use this pillar content from my primary platform in order to create content for my secondary platform. in this example, Instagram, which means you might just take the

direct to camera long form YouTube video and you might cut or clip moments for Instagram reels. Or you might get a little crazy and saucy and you mine a moment that you really love, you want to rewrap it as a carousel for Instagram.

That would be another way of utilizing this process. See, your primary platform, that's the one that gets the energy and the innovation. Your secondary platform gets repurposed content. It's not that you don't care about it, but it's that you're not

putting any of your energy towards innovation on that platform. You're reserving that for the primary. Now, if you're starting out or restarting and you have a team, I expect more of you.

What I want you to do is I want you to pick three primary platforms. That's what we did when we set out to build my personal brand. And let's use me as an example. We picked YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Okay? And you're going to

follow a very similar flow to the solo creator. You're going to make pillar content for one of the primary platforms. That's what this is. This is the pillar content on our primary platform. Then what you're going to do

is you're going to use the pillar content to inform platform native content that you create for the two other platforms. I kind of hinted at this for the solo creator. This could look like taking a moment that you clip

and post as an Instagram reel. A moment from the YouTube long form Instagram reel. But another version of this is you find the moment and then you rewrap it contextual to the platform you're posting it on. So maybe what that looks

like is you mine a moment from your long form and instead of just clipping it and posting that to LinkedIn as a short vertical video, maybe you take that moment and you do a written post with it. You recontextualize the rapper in

order to perform best given what that platform wants natively. Not every platform prefers the same kind of content, not the same style, not the same way of communicating. There's many nuances to this. And so this is how you

can behave in a dynamic where you have three primary platforms. One thing that I want to call out here is you need to apply the eye of Sauron approach. I believe this is the most sustainable way to actually drive innovation on your

three primary platforms but not all at once. And that's the key. In Lord of the Rings, there's you know the eye of Sauron and he's moving around and focusing on one area at a time trying to find the ring. Well, what we are trying

to do is find innovation. And so what we are going to do is we are going to focus on one of the three primary platforms at once. All of the focus there. Everything else goes on maintenance mode. And so

that's what we've been doing in the first year of building my personal brand. We have had the eye on YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn have been on maintenance mode. What does that mean?

That means that we're still posting on all three, but YouTube is the only platform right now that we're putting our time, attention, and money towards innovation. The other platforms, we're making content that we know works in formats that we know work. They're not

doing exceptionally well. Sometimes we have a breakout, but we're not optimizing for that. YouTube is our main focus right now. And then once we get to a point where we feel like YouTube is really dialed, we will turn the eye to

Instagram or to LinkedIn and then we'll move on to the next one. So you just get to here's the key. Once you go through all three, don't stop there. Turn your eye back to the first one. Let's say you

go YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn. By the time you get to LinkedIn and get some innovation over there, you're going to need to innovate on YouTube because your audience has probably gotten fatigued.

the preferences of the audience on the platform are constantly evolving and that's why your eye needs to constantly be shifting. Now, what platforms do you pick? Like, how do you know which ones to go with, right? Like, how did I

determine YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn? Here's the first question. What medium did you pick? If you picked video, well, what platforms prefer video the most? If you picked written, for example, what platforms do really well with written?

I'm going to say if you chose written, YouTube might not be the best strategy for right now. Substack, LinkedIn, maybe Facebook. These are platforms that might better serve you and the medium that you have picked. Now, the other thing that

you can ask is, "Where does my ideal customer spend the most time?" And the natural follow-up question that immediately comes is, "Well, how do I figure that out?" You just ask. Okay?

You ask around. It's not that complicated. Whenever you go to a new city and you're trying to find your favorite organic market that serves non-GMO, you know, healthy [ __ ] you find somebody who looks like they only eat

granola bars and go on hikes all day and you ask them. Find somebody who looks like or acts like or seems like your ideal customer and ask them where they're hanging out and go from there.

It's not that complicated. If you are complicating it, I'm going to call you out right now. you are using it as a form of procrastination and that's some [ __ ] Just pick a [ __ ] platform and start. You can always evolve and

iterate from there. You can change what platforms you do 5 months or 5 days into this thing. Don't debate. Pick a platform and let's start posting. Now, make sure that in this section you didn't just listen to me share this.

There's actually an exercise in the workbook that you should have downloaded. If you haven't, click the link in the description. Enter your email. We're going to email it to you.

Go to your email. Grab the workbook and go through the exercise of determining your platforms. Okay, for the solo creator, you have an exercise. For the creator with a team, you have an exercise. Fill that information in. Now,

even if you are being the most disciplined Dan out there and you [laughter] have done a great job of only picking, if you're a solo creator, one primary and one secondary platform or if you have a team, three primary platforms

that you're going to focus on. Great job. That's amazing. You can still [ __ ] it up by having an incorrect cadence, a cadence that you cannot sustain. Okay?

So, just because you're disciplined on the platforms that you choose doesn't mean that you have a winning formula.

You need to also be disciplined on the cadence that you choose. If you choose an output that matches your favorite creator with a team of 30, you are doomed. As cliche and [ __ ] ridiculously repetitive as this sounds,

because you've heard so many people say this in so many different ways, it truly is a marathon, not a sprint. You can always increase the volume of content that you post, but what I have found is creators have a very tough time stepping

back the volume. Very easy to increase, but once you set an expectation with your audience, a lot of creators struggle to walk that back. And so I encourage you start with something that feels very realistic now and increase

over time. And in the true sense of this being a marathon, not a sprint, a great example of what a sprint looks like on an extreme level is think of all those creators in the last, you know, 3 or 4

years that have had their 15 minutes of fame. They went wildly viral and then they disappeared. How much did they actually get from that sprint? Sure, there's a few individuals who were able to take it and run with it, but I would

uh beg you to find somebody who had that 15 minutes two years ago and is still consistently showing up [laughter] for their audience and is relevant in any sort of way. I'm sure there's examples uh and anomalies, but by and large it

ends up being a very short sprint that is short-lived. If you don't stick with this for a long time, no matter how big you get, if it's for a short period of time, there's not actually that much value long term for you in it. You want

to build a system that allows you to keep reaping the benefits of building a strong personal brand and putting out content that compounds in interest year after year, not some 15minute moment in the spotlight. Now, for you who may

still be on the climb of your career, and if you're watching this, you're probably that type of person, you you've never reached your destination. So, you're always climbing. And one thing that I will note from experience, both for myself and a lot of people that I

have worked for in the past, [ __ ] is going to get bigger. If you're doing this correctly and it's working, things are only going to get crazier. Make sure to build a system that is sustainable now so that your future self thanks you.

What I will tell you is when we started when I released my first how to build a personal brand course back in April 2025 to now we're filming this December 2025.

My capacity has changed significantly. I had a whole lot more time dedicated towards content at the beginning of this journey than I do right now. But lucky for us, we didn't build an output cadence that was optimized around the

time that I had then. We built it in a way that was optimized around the time that I was going to have in the future.

I probably had the capacity at the beginning to do a weekly YouTube video. But if we would have done that six months, well actually probably like four months into putting content out on YouTube, we wouldn't have been able to

sustain that because I got way too busy running the actual business. And the whole reason why we're building this personal brand is to support the business. And so all of a sudden, if you don't do this correctly, you get to this

weird place where your personal brand and your business are like at odds and competing with each other when really they should be complimentary. So if you're wondering, well, okay, this is all nice and dandy, but how much should

I [ __ ] post, Caleb? Well, here's what I would say. I'm not going to give you an exact amount because you are different from everybody else seeing this right now. Start with a cadence that feels doable. If I say, "I want you

to make a video uh twice a week on YouTube." Does that sound doable? Are you like, "Woof, that sounds like a push." If it sounds like a push, don't do it. What about weekly? What about bi-weekly? What about monthly,

quarterly, yearly? Right? Like, you can chunk up as much as you want. Here's the key. It has far less to do with what you start out with and far more to do with the frequency at which you increase that

cadence. So as long as you know that you're going to increase the volume every two weeks, every month, every quarter, every year, whatever, then you are set. So even if in the first year of making content, you only put out one

YouTube video a month, you know, in year two, you could increase that volume if you wanted and that wouldn't be a problem because we are doing a marathon, not a sprint. And I've got two frameworks that will really help you in

accomplishing this. First one is the accordion method and the second one is the 702010 framework. I recommend using the accordion method to figure out what the [ __ ] your audience wants more of from you. And I recommend utilizing the

702010 framework to help improve the performance and longevity of your content. The accordion method works just like an accordion. You are expanding and contracting, right? You are going to expand the accordion when you are making more content in the beginning. Okay? So

in the beginning you should have your accordion fully expanded. This is your high volume content so that you can learn what your audience wants more of aka what they call quality. So you're using quantity to inform what your audience says is

quality. And then once you have that information on what your audience says is quality, you're going to contract it and not make higher quality content per se because I believe that quality is not something that you determine, but your

audience does. But what you're going to do is you're going to put the same amount of effort you were putting into the expanded amount of volume and put that same effort into less pieces of content, increasing the odds that your

audience labels it as quality. And this is a neverending cycle because the moment that you think you know what your audience likes and you contract and you start making more of that, soon you'll get to a point where your audience is no

longer resonating or responding to that content the same way they were previously. Which means we will have to expand the accordion again to do more volume to get more data and more information on what our audience is calling quality. Now, real quick, how do

you determine when your audience is calling something quality? Well, if you've never posted a single thing on Instagram, let's start with your first 12 posts. If you do 12 posts over the course of, let's say, four weeks, that's

three posts a week. At the end of that month, you're going to notice that some posts did better than others. And in the beginning, you don't have much you can go off of. So, I know this is shocking.

coming from me. But you're going to look at the views. Okay, look at the views, likes, and comments. What content got more of those metrics, okay? That is probably a very good [laughter] indicator that you should make more of

that because your audience clearly liked that more than the other content you made. You want to continue the expansion until you feel like you have enough information and certainty that you know, okay, cool. Every time that I share,

like for me, like something that Trevor and I have figured out very clearly on my Instagram is when I share the brand journey framework, it seems to work really well. It does really well on Instagram specifically. We expanded the

accordion enough to get that information and then we can contract it and make more content specifically around that through Instagram reels, carousels, etc.

The next one is the 702010 framework. It is extremely simple and wildly useful. Consistent theme with me. I like things that are simple and useful. 70% of the content that you make should be [ __ ] that you know works from the accordion

method, right? You expanded the accordion. You got information on what works. 70% of what you're doing should be that [ __ ] You should know that this is going to work. I'm not saying, you know, it's going to be like uh, you

know, 10x multiplier, as in do 10x your normal performing content. I'm not saying it's going to go crazy, but it's 70% should be content that you know is going to at least perform at benchmark, if not higher. The next 20% should be

iterations of that 70%. It's still the content that you know that works, but you're doing slight tweaks to either the hook, the setting, the delivery, the packaging. You're changing one little variable to try to improve the performance of what is already working

to get better results. The last 10%, this is where you are most likely to [ __ ] up. They hear me say this and they get excited about the 10%. But in reality, once you start building a brand

and having content that works and you have kind of a baseline performance, you have a high likelihood of falling victim to the trap of needing to always hit your benchmark performance and you start to get scared of trying anything new

that may or may not perform as well as your standard. This is where people go wrong. You need that 10%. You need those big swings in order to figure out what the next thing is. A lot of people who

make content for more than a year experience audience fatigue. And what 99.9% of creators do is they get to the point where their audience is fatigued on their current style of content and then they go into scramble mode. They

are suddenly met with the challenging difficult process of needing to figure out what does my audience want from me now when it is needed. If you implement the 10% in the 702010 framework, what you actually end up doing is you find

the next version of your content before your audience tells you they want it. Thus, you never go into a point where you're panicking and trying to figure out what do we do? Suddenly, our content isn't resonating. We got to figure this

out ASAP. No, you're going to be the intentional, thoughtful creator who actually ends up building a system where you're always trying to put your content out of business. You're trying to find the next style, next format, next version of content that you're going to

make that your audience isn't fatigued over currently. The crazy thing is is eventually they will. And that's why you always want to be prioritizing that 10%.

Now, it's 10%. So, just to be clear, the majority of your content should not be these big swings that you have no idea whether or not they're going to work or not. You should have some predictability in your content and then 10% of it

should be big, big swings. Cool. So, we have some clarity on how we're going to make content and how we're going to operate and all these things, but the big question is, how do we come up with ideas? How do you know what to make?

Right? I'm sure you've heard the classic guru advice, which is something to the effect of list out your top 10 favorite creators in your niche. Then, what you want to do is identify their top 10 videos on YouTube. Then, what you're

going to do is you're going to take the transcripts from those videos. you're going to put them into Claude, Perplexity, ChatgBT, whatever AI tool you use, and reconfigure the script for you.

[sighs] It might be the the the little push that gets you over the barrier of entry of creating content. And if that's the case, I'm not here to judge you. I'm not trying to make you feel bad. But very

quickly, I encourage you to change how you do this, okay? I am not the guy to teach you how to rip off other people's ideas and make them your own. That's not me. To be fair, it is a strategy that

works as far as generating views and impressions. But if you're here, you want to learn how to build a brand around optimizing for trust, which means we need to start with the pain that our customers feel. And so, like I said

earlier in this video, what you need to do is start with your customers in mind and the pain that they are feeling. What problems do they have that you solve?

What are they afraid of? What pisses them off and makes them frustrated? What are they doing wrong? Maybe they think they're doing it right, but what are they actually doing wrong? Once you have that painful problem, like we talked

about earlier, you need to take your unique solution and pair it together. I like to call this a beautiful gift that you're giving your audience. Their painful problem plus your unique solution equals gift for your audience.

Now this gift gets multiplied by your credibility. Okay, ideally contextual credibility. What do I mean by contextual credibility? Well, for example, some videos I will give my credibility as a general credibility statement, which is something the effect of I've been scaling personal brands for

17 years to over 30 million followers. That is a general credibility statement. Sometimes, however, we will use a contextual credibility statement specifically for the video. So, for example, if we're making a video on building a media team, I might reference

as my credibility statement building a media team from 0 to 18 full-time members while increasing content performance quarter over quarter rather than my general 17 years to 30 million followers credibility statement. It's contextual to the topic that we're

talking about, which increases the odds that your audience is going to believe what you are about to say because you have proven yourself worthy. Not in the general space, but in the very specific space in which you are about to speak

to. And so, in your workbook, again, if you haven't downloaded it, click that [ __ ] link in the description. What are you doing here? We want to be taking action. Click the link, enter your email, go to your email, grab the

workbook, and let's work on this together. What you're going to notice is in the workbook there's an formula that's listed out or laid out for you to be able to look at and follow. The formula goes as follows. So the problem

that your customer faces plus your unique solution times the contextual credibility that you have and a proven rapper. That is what determines the success of your content. If somebody's making a video on how to start your personal brand and their credibility is

that they've built five different brands to 5,000 followers each, that's great. That's impressive. That's not easy to do, right? I'm I'm not belittling it.

But you're going to take that information differently than somebody who has scaled personal brands to over 30 million followers. Or another example, someone who has built personal brands and had millions of followers, but they've only been doing it for the

last 5 years versus somebody who has gotten the same amount of total followers, but they've been doing it for 17 years. And I I know this is sounding like I'm trying to put myself into this like wonderful corner. Just roll with me

here. Hear it through a humble tone. You might hear that person differently because not only have they gotten a great result, they've done it through many different seasons and scenarios.

And so you are more likely to believe that they're not sharing what worked in one scenario. They're sharing principles that you can apply into your specific scenario. The credibility that you have is a huge multiplier that determines the

success of your content. Make sure that the credibility that you're providing in the piece of content is contextual to what you're speaking to. The more contextual it is, the more your audience will believe what you are about to say.

Now, the exercise that I want you to do is you're going to list out 10 to 15 painful problems that your ideal customer faces. Then, for each problem, you're going to attach your unique solution to it. For each problem plus

solution, you need to write out what is your credibility or the contextual credibility that you are going to share.

Or if this is a video that lends itself to your general credibility statement, label it as such. In your workbook, you can fill this out. you can actually identify your problems that you solve, what your unique solution is, and what

the credibility statement is going to be that you're going to share in that piece of content. This becomes wildly effective. Now, the 2.0 version is maybe you actually identify these things, the painful problem and the unique solution, and maybe you write two or three

different versions of what the contextual credibility is going to be. Why? Because you're not just going to make one video about this problem.

You're going to make multiple videos over the next couple of years about this painful problem. And so you may want different versions of a contextual credibility statement to give for those individual videos. Now, what I want to focus on is your delivery. How you

communicate these ideas that we just worked on coming up with. Right? Delivery is one of the three levers that I talk about in helping you stand out.

You have your contrarian belief, your delivery, and your wrapping paper. I believe contrarian belief is the strongest lever you can pull. But I actually believe that the second strongest one you can pull is not your wrapping paper, not the packaging, not

the formats. It's actually your delivery. It's how you communicate the information and ideas that you have in a different way potentially than other people in your space. I think a lot of people mess up their delivery because they think they need to be like this

like content version of themselves. And I understand that that thinking, right? Like I understand that there's a lot of people out there that talked about how you need to be really animated. You know, there's the classic old statement

that I remember on old productions that I used to do telling talent, you know, whatever you would normally do, turn up times 10 because it it shows up differently on camera, whatever.

Essentially, what a lot of the industry has done is created this perception that you need to create this alter ego for your content. Now, if that's your stickick and that's the brand that you're creating and you're intentionally creating this alter ego, by all means,

you do you. But what I recommend is that your delivery should actually be the most authentic version of who you actually are as a human. Delivery is not about becoming someone else or building this caricature version of yourself.

Delivery is actually about removing all the things that keep you and are stopping you from being fully you.

Delivery isn't this performance or performative act. And this is where you can go wrong. You start trying to perform. You start acting right. You do things that feel unnatural and not true to who you are. You start trying to

match energy. This is a big one. you start trying to match energy of your favorite creator and you actually just become like a an off-brand version of them. You burn out because you've built a character, not a personal brand. See,

I'm not asking you to perform. I don't want you to act. I don't want you to pretend and become somebody that you are not. I want you to talk the way that you talk. If you're an extremely calm

individual and that's how you communicate in real life, be calm in your content. If you're more intense in the way that you teach, be intense. If you're naturally dry and witty, I love those kinds of people. Bring the dryness

and the witty humor into your content. It should be a natural reflection of how you operate and communicate and deliver information in your everyday life. See, it's far less about being some charismatic character on camera, and it's far more about actually

understanding the points that you're trying to communicate to your audience. The better that you understand what you're trying to say, the better the delivery becomes. It's not about being this crazy charismatic character. It's about actually understanding what the

[ __ ] are you trying to communicate so that you can communicate in a way that they understand. Something that I've noticed that you might be struggling with is communicating your points of view. And sometimes I think this comes

down to communication styles, uh, experience, confidence, all those things. But I've also come to realize that a lot of the times, and it's kind of embarrassing for for us to admit, but a lot of the times, the reason why we're

having a tough time communicating something is maybe we don't fully understand the point that we're actually trying to communicate. Now, this might get a bit heady, um, so I don't want to get bogged down on it, but I want to

give you something that can be very useful helping you communicate your ideas when you're starting off with your personal brand and trying to get up and running. Here's how I think about it.

You should be able to explain a concept to three different people in three completely different and unique scenarios. If you are able to do this, I believe you are at the point where you understand the concept enough to be able

to communicate it in your content in a way that your audience is going to actually understand. And so even if you're the most dry, sarcastic, monotone individual, if you understand what you're communicating and you're communicating something useful, your

audience is going to [ __ ] with it. You will build a following. It might not be the biggest following in the world, but it's going to be a following of individuals who trust you deeply. You don't have to be the most charismatic.

You just need to be the most useful. If you optimize your personal brand around usefulness rather than charisma, you will build a strong personal brand. If you optimize around charisma over usefulness, you will build a vanitybased brand. So the biggest thing that I want

you to take away from this section is that you don't need to get better at your delivery. You need to remove everything that restricts you or makes you feel unlike yourself when you are making content. And one way that I've

gone about doing this for myself is actually implementing game tape reviews. It's like a quarterback Monday morning reviewing the game tape footage of how they performed on Sunday. I like to look at my content and see what is it that

I'm communicating that was clear and what are the areas that are not clear. Trevor and I have been talking about this a lot lately where I go on podcast and I'll watch how I answer a question to see how quickly am I able to

communicate the important points without going down some crazy rabbit hole. I'm a verbal processor and so sometimes I can take a little bit longer than I need to to communicate a point. And so something I'm trying to implement with Game Tape

Reviews is every time that I find that I'm taking a little too long on the spot, I'll pause the video and figure out how could I answer this question more clearly and more concisely. Now that we understand how we're going to

approach our delivery, trying to remove all the things that make us feel like we are not ourselves and not show up as we are, we want to move on to the third lever to pull on standing out. The first

two, like I said, are contrarian belief and delivery, like we just spoke about. The next one is your wrapping paper.

Okay, this is the third lever that you can pull on to stand out in your space or your niche. Something that I hear so many times is like, man, this was such a good piece of content. Why did it get no

views? Nobody watched it. I think a lot of times, not always, cuz some of y'all are creating some [ __ ] but most of you are making really good content. And it's not necessarily that the content isn't good, it's that it doesn't have a

good wrapping paper or wrapper around it to make it attractive to the audience you're trying to reach. Cuz here's the way that this actually works. When you make content on YouTube, for example, sure you have competitors within your

niche or space, but the way that consumption works is you're not competing with just your competitors.

You're competing with everybody making content on YouTube. I'm competing on your YouTube homepage with whatever other channels you're subscribed to along with Mr. beast and a creator you've never heard of and 10 other creators that you love and admire and

have watched a ton of videos from. Your rapping is the only competitive advantage you have before somebody clicks. The contrarian belief and the delivery that we talk about, those are only able to be shared and communicated and engaged with after they click. Your

wrapping paper is what causes them to click so they can find out what your contrarian belief is. so they can experience your delivery. So, the way that you wrap your content determines how likely or unlikely someone is to

actually consume it. Aka, it's really [ __ ] important. It's so important. It's why it's one of the three levers that you can pull on in order to stand out. Your packaging, right? So, on YouTube, this is your title and

thumbnail. It's also your hook. It's also the format in which you're making the content. What do I mean by format?

Well, you have like a direct to camera video here. Uh, we have our in the wild cinematic videos which on our channel are if you're struggling with making content, please watch this or if you're struggling in your creative career,

watch this video. There are two videos that are wildly different format, right? And so that is how you can think of your wrapping paper. It's either your packaging, your hook, or your format.

It's how you're wrapping the concept or concepts that you're sharing in the content. Back to what we were talking about earlier, how you're taking the painful problem your customer faces, your unique solution, that's the gift.

You need to wrap the gift in a way that your ideal viewer is going to want to rip open, aka click on. Now, the exercise that we're going to walk through in your workbook, again, if you haven't downloaded it, download it.

Click the link in the description down below. You're going to build a wrapping paper library. Okay? I like to think of this as I really love Christmas time.

I'm obsessed with it. I love Christmas wrapping paper. I have all different kinds. If I'm giving them multiple gifts, each of them should be a unique wrapper. Okay? And so my vision for my future is one day I have a home where

there's an entire room dedicated towards wrapping paper. I know that's absurd, but this is how I like to think about it. You want to create a room where you walk in and there's all these different wrapping paper options that you can

choose from. You know those screenshots that you take when you're scrolling through Instagram or you see a title thumbnail that you like on YouTube? You take the screenshot and it just goes off into nowhere in your photo or your photo

album and you never see it again. Well, this is something where you can actually house that inspiration and utilize it in the future. No longer are those screenshots just going to live on your phone. They're actually going to be

utilized for the work you're doing. If we're thinking about just the lens of the packaging, right, the title, thumbnail for a YouTube video, for example, if you're making a YouTube video, you've already filmed it, you're in the edit, and you're trying to figure

out how are we going to package it. What I have found, and what a lot of my friends in the industry have found, is when you need packaging, that is when it is hardest to find. And so what you want

to do is you want to develop this in an evergreen sense so that when you have a video that you are wanting to package, you go into your wrapping paper library and you see what wrapping paper best fits this video or this gift that I am

giving my audience. What I recommend you do is you want to have a habit weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, whatever cadence you want. You want a habit of searching and shopping for wrapping paper. And the two best sources that I will recommend when

it comes to YouTube are oneof10.com and YouTube itself. You want to set up a one of 10 account. And I recommend that on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis, you scroll one of 10. And literally, you're not searching for anything specific. You

are generally scrolling until something catches your attention. And when it catches your attention, you need to screenshot that and add it to your wrapping paper library. You can do this in, you know, Google Docs, in notion, in whatever project management tool you

use. Wherever you are going to actually access this and use it on a recurring basis, that's where you want to store this inspiration. That's the room that you want to house all your wrapping paper in. To be clear, when I say you're

scrolling one of 10 and looking for things that stand out, I'm talking things that stand out that it's like, oh, you clearly immediately know, oh, this would be a perfect video for me.

But also, I want you to screenshot the absurd [ __ ] the [ __ ] that you're like, I don't know how I could ever turn this into a video of mine or or package a video of mine with this. You would be

surprised if you were able to see our wrapping paper library. There are some wild uh videos in there or packaging options in there that are absolutely absurd. There are some crazy things in there, but I guarantee at some point

over the next 2 years, we're going to use I'd say probably a good 50 60% of what we have in there. This becomes wildly useful and you'll be surprised.

One example that I will share is I remember we were scrolling through and we came across a video. It was like something to the effect of how I attract 10 out of 10 girls every single day.

Trevor called it out and was like, "Wow, this is a great idea." I'm just [laughter] kidding.

We were looking and we were like, "Oh, wow. It caught both of our attention." And then we were like, "Okay, let's screenshot it, put it in. I don't know how we would use this, but maybe one day we can figure it out." A couple weeks

later, we were talking with one of our clients. All of a sudden, I realized I was like, "Holy [ __ ] what we just discussed with them, we could turn into a video on how we attract 10 out of 10

clients every single day, week, or month, whatever." cadence. There's an example where an absurd piece of packaging that on the surface would never make sense for us suddenly made sense when we had the right problem and solution combination to meet that

wrapping paper. So develop your wrapping paper library ideally with some diversity having all kinds of crazy different ideas in there. And then the next thing that you're going to do after you've built that wrapping paper library is you're going to wrap the gift.

Remember that beautiful gift that you developed earlier? You're going to take that combination, the painful problem and unique solution, and you scroll through your library to see what wrapping paper best wraps this gift.

This is not just for YouTube, by the way. I have a friend who he has been and logged into LinkedIn every single day, I think, for probably at least the last 5 years, if not longer. He has a photo

album on his phone where he has, I think at this point, it's over five or 600 screenshots of top performing posts on LinkedIn. What he'll do is he'll put together his concept, his problem plus solution, and then he looks at all of

these screenshots of the way various LinkedIn posts that performed really well have been formatted. What was the structure? What was the hook? How could I reorient this for my problem solution combination? And then he writes it in that context. You can also do this for

Instagram, for Tik Tok, for Pinterest, for Snapchat, for LinkedIn, for any platform you can imagine. You can develop your wrapping paper library because, like I said at the top, you want to share your contrarian belief and you want people to experience your

delivery, but they're only going to know what your contrarian belief is and experience your delivery if they actually click on the video or engage with the post. And they only do that if you have an appealing rapper that makes

them want to tear it open. If you're trying to optimize for the short form platforms, they have a beautiful feature called save. I'm not recommending that you just hit the general save button cuz that is basically like taking a

screenshot and having it drop into your photo album and never seeing it again. We've all done that. I do it a million times to this day. What you do want to do is you can actually on a lot of these

platforms, Instagram for sure, you can actually create different folders that you save posts in. And so I would recommend you create an inspiration folder that you can save specific pieces of content that you really like. And the cool thing about Instagram is you can

really get that variety or really get that diversity that I was encouraging you to do because you can save reals, you can save carousels, or you can save singular posts. And so you can develop this beautiful diverse library of what

good content on Instagram looks like. So that when you're trying to figure out how to share your gift, the problem, and solution with your audience, you can look at several or potentially hundreds of different versions of what a top

performing post contextualized for that platform looks like. Now, in looking at these, you know, outliers and looking at packaging from other creators or an Instagram reel or a Tik Tok or a YouTube short that somebody made that you really

admire that you're saving for inspiration for later. Look outside of your space and niche. Look at creators that are in completely different worlds.

What's working for them? And then how can you borrow that from a first principal way of thinking? What are the the elements that would work for my message, my gift, the painful problem plus unique solution? What could I take

from a gardening YouTube channel that would work in wrapping my ideas in my lane? I believe this is the way that you can stand out even more. The problem that we are facing right now in all these different spaces and niches is

everybody's copying each other in their own space and niche. So you all look the same. If you want to not look the same, don't do what everybody else is doing, right? It seems obvious, but you are not doing this right now with your own

content or the people you admire aren't even doing this. And so if you just look into other niches and spaces, I think you'll be blown away at how much your content stands out from your competitors. You might be sharing

similar subject matter, similar advice even. You might not have some strong contrarian belief even. You might not be at that point yet. But if you are borrowing your wrapping paper from other industries, this will help you do things

fundamentally different than all the other creators that are looking like each other within your niche or space. I don't know who needs to hear this, but that thing I'm talking about, educational content, it's really hard to learn. See, everybody online is teaching

you entertainmentbased tactics and principles. And that's why we created Rollston Select. We designed it specifically to be the one place that you go to learn how to do pre-production production post-production, and platform strategy through the lens of educational content.

If you want to learn more, click the link in the description. Let's get back to the video. Now, [snorts] a big debate that you're going to see online around content strategy is, do you make deep content or do you make wide content? And

here's the reality. It's not one or the other. See, so many people online are telling you to lean into just one of these. [ __ ] that. That's some [ __ ] It's It's like anything in life. There's

nuance to it. You need a strong ratio of both and you need to inject something that's missing from this conversation, which is a personal element. We are after all building a personal brand, aren't we? And so, you want to make sure

that it's not just deep and wide. It's deep, wide, and personal. And I have a ratio that I roughly loosely follow and recommend that you follow as well. You should be able to give or take 10 points roughly on this. 75% of the content I

believe should be deep content. Solving deep problems for your ideal customer. 20% is nichewide content. Now, I'm going to explain what nichewide means here in a second. And the remaining 5% is personal. Now again, just a reminder before we break this down and go into

what the deep, what the niche wide, and what the personal content looks like. This is a very rough ratio to follow. It is not a rule. Please do not be one of those people that takes this wildly too

literally. You need to eb and flow this and adjust it based on you, and it's going to look different monthtomonth.

But if you roughly loosely follow 7525, you will be in a really good spot. Now the 75% deep content, this is your educational content. This is the main source of the value from your personal brand. These are the frameworks. These

are the painful problems that are solved, right? These are the tactical nuggets that you're giving. These are the belief shifts or the point of view that you have on your industry, niche, or space. This is the content that is

going to establish the most trust in your ability to get results and it will reinforce your credibility.

This is also the content that I believe is going to get you the most customers, the most highpaying customers because this is the content that increases the odds they believe that you can actually help them solve the problem they are

wanting to solve. 20% of the content being nichwide. This is what I like to think of as broad within your niche.

These are the subtopics that serve your ideal customer still, but they also serve a broader base of viewers. An example of what nichewide content could look like if you're making content helping business owners leverage the relationships that they already have to

create new business rather than trying to go out and acquire new customers. A version of nichewide content within this example that you could make is helping people reconnect with old friends or colleagues in general, right? Not just within the context of business. This is

still useful for your ideal customer and the main audience that you are trying to build, but it also serves a broader audience and increases the odds that your content will show up to new people.

But here's the key. Unlike making general random wide content, you're still attracting people that are interested in the general topic that you are talking about. This increases the odds that the average person that comes in will have interest in your offer.

They're not just a random person that has no relation to the offer that you're actually providing, right? It's somebody that's still going to be at least adjacent to the offer that you have and potentially through nurturing them through your content may get to a point

where they do become interested in purchasing the offer that you make available to them. Think of this like your side dishes, okay? your nichewide content, that's the side dish. The deep content, that's 75%. That is your main dish. Okay? And the nichewide content is

the sauteed spinach. It's the garlic mashed potatoes. It's your side dishes. And the other thing that you want to definitely not miss out on is the 5% personal content. Okay? Again, you are building a personal brand. I'm not

saying do that influencer [ __ ] that you probably are thinking of immediately. I'm not saying make content where it's like look at my lifestyle. Look at how awesome I am. What this is is sharing you the human in that personal brand.

And I believe that this is what helps you stand out from the crowd because these are the only things that are truly unique to you. more than likely the subject matter that you've decided to speak to, there's other people that are

talking about it. And if we're being honest with ourselves, there are probably other people that are teaching similar principles and even potentially, crazy enough, similar contrarian takes.

There probably are. But what they definitely cannot replicate is the unique combination of all of your interests and preferences and hobbies and passions that make up you. the unique human that you are. Okay. So, for me, what I constantly try to inject as

much as I can into my content and my brand is my love for Harley-Davidson and the three Harleys that I have and obsess over. My love for metal, right, and all the different subg genres, the black metal, the hardcore, the metal core. I

like it all. My roots in the fitness industry. I try to share that a lot.

It's the combination of all of these things that create the lens that you view my personal branding advice and information and content through that makes me unique compared to the next person that you see off on the right

side of your screen here that is also talking about a similar subject matter. Knowing that your deep content, the 75% is your steak and the nichewide content, the 20% are your side dishes, you can almost think about your personal content

like it's the dessert. A quick note here is the 5% personal doesn't mean that 5% of your content should be a singular video or Substack article around your personal passion. I believe that the 5% should be sprinkled in to the other

content. You haven't seen me make a video in depth on my Harley-Davidson Roadk special build out, right? Going into detail on that. But what you have seen if you've watched some of my content is you've seen that bike. You've

seen one of my other bikes. I'm injecting it. I'm wearing a Harley-Davidson hat right now for God's sake. And so I'm not saying that you need to make specific content around your hobbies, passions, interests, but I do recommend you inject those into both

the deep content and your nichewide content. It gives your audience more at bats to connect with you. I wasn't planning on sharing this, but it's really important. The more of the interests and individual unique things that make you unique and and wildly you,

the more chances to connect with you. our relationships in our personal life, in our work life, the closer the relationship on the relationship sphere or circle, the closer they get to you, more than likely you have more than one

interests in common, right? That's typically an indicator of the closeness of your relationship. And so, if you're wanting to develop a close relationship with your audience, you want to identify more interests that you have in common with them. But if you never share those

interests, you never inject that into your content, how are they going to know what they can connect with you on other than the core thing you talk about? It's really important to focus on the 75%.

The deep content, that is where you're going to get the greatest returns, the nichewide content, that's how you're going to start to develop a more well-rounded brand and bring more people in and increase the odds that you can

reach a newer audience. But the thing that is going to make you actually stand out is the 5% that is personal in your personal brand. Now, let's talk about structuring your content because we now know what we're going to be making, but

we need to figure out how we're going to go through it in a sequential order to make it easiest for our audience to actually not only consume all the way through, but learn and take action on what we are saying. There is a ton of

[ __ ] out there on content nerds talking about how to keep people watching your content. And this is affectionately referred to as the art of retention.

These retention editing hacks, I'd say I'm going to make a bold statement here. 98% of them come from the lens of entertainment content, not educational.

They have this method where it's like every, you know, 13 seconds or whatever, you need to make sure that there's a graphic or a scene change or some new element on screen that might be effective for entertainment content. Uh,

I know I hate watching it personally, but there's a lot of people that like that. I get that. But if you're truly making educational content, your actual goal is for the audience to take action on what you say. But if you're

constantly having all these graphics that distract from the actual message, you're inhibiting your audience's ability to be educated and you're actually just making entertainment content. I personally believe that within the world of educational content, the greatest retention hack in the world

without competition is your audience learning. The way that we like to structure our intros is actually fairly different than what a lot of people talk about. You've heard a lot of people talk about proof, promise, plan, and I think

that is an incredible framework. We have created our own framework for how we structure our intros to our videos and it's called the four C's framework. I I like the letter C. What can I say? The four C's are call out, credibility,

compass, and the fourth one, which I've not really heard anyone mention, which is core learning. If we believe the greatest retention hack in educational content is the audience learning, then why would we not try to get to the first

learning as quick as possible in the video? And so, we have now wrapped this into how we conduct our intro. Now, real quick, the four C's applies to your wrapping and your intro. We have a call out first. The call out can be in your

intro, but the call out can also be addressed in your packaging, in the wrapping of your video, aka on YouTube, your title and thumbnail. You might not need to do a call out in the actual script of your intro because your title

and thumbnail already take care of that. The call out basically is addressing who the [ __ ] is this video for? The credibility, as we've talked about, is why would somebody listen to you on this specific subject matter? Sure, you might

be successful in general, but are you successful within this subject matter that we're addressing in this piece of content? The compass, give them the overview of how we're going to get from the problem they are currently facing to

the solution that they are seeking. What is the road map or the compass that is going to guide us along this journey?

You're previewing what you're going to hit in the video. And I believe the most important one, the core learning, you want to start off the video as quick as possible, getting to a valuable, useful nugget. Now, I'm not saying you want to

create or take the most important, biggest learning that you're going to share in the video and share it up front. That I'm not saying is the best thing. But you have this thing that a lot of people have been preaching for

years now, which is bury the value. It's like put the the value and the learning deeper in the video so that people stay longer to get it. And I think that did work for a long time, but we are at a point now where there is

just way too much content out there being produced that people don't have the patience to wait. And that's why I believe you need to get them to a learning as quick as possible. Why?

Well, if I learn something in the opening 60 seconds of a video, my belief that I'm going to continue learning throughout the video increases. If I see even a 20-minute video, in that opening 60 seconds, if I learn, I'm assuming

that's not the only learning I'm going to get and the rest is going to be [ __ ] I'm assuming I'm going to continue learning. That's an assumption that I'm making based on previous behaviors in other pieces of content

that I've consumed. So, you need to optimize your introduction in your content, whether it's video or written.

A lot of people talk about time to value. You want to deliver value as quick as possible for the person that's paying for your service. Well, think of it the same way with your video. You want to give them value and usefulness

as quick as possible. People's attention spans, it's not even their attention span, actually, it's their level of patience. They're less willing to wait for value from you because they know there's another creator that they could get it from quicker. Now, from your

intro, you then have the rest of the structure of your content. I could probably make an entire course just on this alone. definitely could talk at least for an hour or two just on how you structure your video, but for the sake

of time, I want to give you something valuable that will be a great starting point for you that you can begin to adapt and evolve for yourself. And I recommend that you follow loosely a structure like this. You have your

introduction, then you give context on what you're about to speak to. You share a principle, a story about that principle, the tactic or the action that your audience needs to take, and then an example of what it looks like to either

do that correctly or incorrectly or both if you're feeling crazy. And then after that, you link to the next video. It's that simple. You can get wildly robust and complex. I have an entire YouTube course framework that I share with

people in Rston Select that is like absolutely insane and very deep and robust. It's many pages long. But this will give you a very very good starting point to get you rolling on creating this content. Rather than you sitting

there looking at a blank page being like, "What the hell do I do? How do I craft this?" Use this framework to help you get started on making your YouTube content. Now, I'd like to talk about how to go about repurposing your content.

And most business owners when they hear repurposing, they think that that means just reposting the same clip everywhere.

And that's one part of it. I guess that's a version of repurposing for sure, but that's not the waterfall method. The waterfall method is about taking one really good moment from your pillar piece of content and getting as

much as possible out of it. This looks like one long form piece of content leading to many platform native pieces of content potentially many off of one specific moment. This is not copy and paste. This is not post the same short

everywhere even though that's what we are currently doing right now. We're working on getting towards this point.

This is platform native repackaging. Maybe you've heard me actually say in podcast, which is you want to take your long form, mine it for moments, repackage those moments in the way that the platform prefers. So now I want to

walk you through how we actually use the waterfall method in our content. We create one long form piece of YouTube content. Right now our cadence is once a month. We will go through and watch it back to mine for the golden moments.

Now, these are moments where I'm giving an aha or we're watching it, we're like, damn, that that was a good that was a banger line, right? It's a belief breaker. It's an oh [ __ ] moment. It's it's something where you're sharing a

story or a tactic that can change the belief of the viewer or give them the exact steps that they need to take in order to get the outcome they are looking for. These are the moments that get clipped. Not like some random

moment, not random timestamps or arbitrary timestamps. Actually, useful moments. Something that you may have experienced before is if you hire a uh a less than ideal editor, they'll go through your long form content and they'll pull 30 clips from it. They'll

get you a lot of volume, but half to twothirds of those clips are not useful in any way. They don't exist or they don't work. sorry, on their own. They're not self-contained. They need the context of the moment that they exist

within. And so what you're looking for is self-contained clips. Clips and moments that don't need the context of the surrounding conversation in order to make sense. And then number three, what you're going to do is you're going to

take those moments, those mind moments that you have, and you're going to turn them into platform native content.

That's what we are trying to do more and more. Sometimes what we'll do is we will due to bandwidth we'll clip a moment and then we'll post that short that clip to all the different platforms. Sometimes what we'll do is we'll identify damn

this was a really good moment from a podcast for example where I go back and forth with the host and maybe what we're going to do is take that concept and turn it into a written LinkedIn post or

maybe we'll turn it into a newsletter that we send to people on our email list. And so what you're looking at is taking a golden moment and then figuring out how do I correctly wrap it using the wrapping paper. What format should I

wrap this idea in in order for it to best serve my audience on the platform that I am sharing it to? All of those moments are communicating the same message, right? It's the same source material, but you're using a different

rapper to share it with your audience. And again, this is something that you're going to need to work your way up to. We are almost a year into building out my personal brand and posting content publicly. And we're not at the point of

consistently doing this to the level that we want. It's Trevor and then half me. Not even half, like maybe like a quarter or a fifth me devoted to the content and the rest I'm I'm running the business. And so as we expand our team,

you'll start to see more and more of the content that we're posting on all three of our primary platforms start to look more and more contextual and native to the platform we're distributing on. This is something that you can work your way

up to. you don't have to tackle from the very beginning, but I wanted to share it with you because I think it's something that you want to start building towards rather than 2, three years, four years down the road figuring out this is a new

operation that you have to completely steer a massive ship. Let's course correct while we're still a little speedboat and it's easy to correct and adjust how we're operating. All of this incredible work to understand what kind of content we're going to make, how

we're coming up with ideas, all of this amazing work has been done. You've been going through your workbook cuz you downloaded that earlier, right? And you've been filling out the exercises and we have gotten a lot of clarity. We

really understand what we're going to be doing. A pretty obvious question that you're going to be asking is what are the first couple of videos that I make?

And so what I want to share with you is the first three videos that I recommend you make. Now, there's a million different versions of your first three.

I'm mainly sharing what my first three were and how you can go about doing this for yourself, your own version of it. So to be clear, this is not the end- all beall. I'm more just adapting what I did

and sharing it with you because I think it was very useful and successful for us. So, the first video that I recommend you make is an introduction video. This is where you're sharing your story paired with lessons that your audience

can use immediately. To be very clear, what this video is not, it's not a brag reel. It's not a resume dump. What this video is is it's three to five key moments over your career or life that were pivotal moments. And each one is

paired with a lesson that your audience can immediately benefit from. This is what makes the video valuable. It's not just sharing what you have done and giving the credibility that they can view your brand through from then on.

It's also providing them useful value in the form of lessons that you have learned along the way, both from doing things correctly and incorrectly. This is exactly how I built my intro video.

It was every season or big seasons of my career along with one lesson that you could take away. It was not every single job that I've had and every little tiny thing that's happened. It's the biggest moments in my career that were pivotal

turning points that I also had a very strong lesson associated with. That's what I recommend you build. Now, as far as what the flow of this video looks like, well, I think you can start with why are you making content now? Why are

you building your personal brand? What is the purpose behind this? And why now? Okay, that's how I started mine. That sets the frame. Then what you want to do is you want to share three to five key moments from your career and life.

Again, they're not random moments. It's not like you're doing, you know, a full biography or anything like that. These are three to five turning points in your career or life that shaped how you think and what you believe. And then you're

going to pair each of those moments with one clear lesson, a takeaway that your audience can act on. This is what most people miss. People don't want to just hear about the awesome [ __ ] you've done.

They want to hear about what you learned in doing the awesome [ __ ] and how it can benefit them. So pair each of these moments with a clear and valuable lesson for your audience. See, ultimately you need to connect it back to the viewer.

The video is about you, but it is for your audience. So each lesson needs to speak to their pain, their goals, the stage that they are at, the confusion that they are experiencing, and the clarity that they are looking for.

Finally, you need to close with what they can expect from you going forward. What I try to do is share what I am trying to embark on, which is this crazy wild journey of building my personal brand. And you want to set the stage for

the kind of content that they can expect, who it is for, what you do to help, and maybe potentially you can start to inject a contrarian belief into this introduction video so that people can start to know what you stand for.

This is kind of setting the trajectory or the frame for the relationship that you're going to have with your audience in future content. Now, video number two is a positioning deep dive. This is where you teach the subject that you

want to be known for through the lens of that contrarian belief. My version of this was psychotic. It was a 6-h hour and 22minute course that we put out for free on YouTube. This was a really strong and very deep positioning video.

I'm not saying that you need to do that, but I'm also not saying that it should be like a a quick little tips and tricks educational video. It's not a high-level overview of your industry or of your space. And it's definitely not something

that's trendy or broad. None of the shallow end [ __ ] We want to go into the deep end of the pool here. And so what this video is is it should be a very deep useful breakdown of the core

subject that you want to be known for. Mine was how to build a personal brand.

That's what I want to be known for. And so my positioning deep video was that.

and it needs to be taught through the lens of your contrarian belief. This video, what it communicates to your audience is here's how I see this space differently and why it matters to you and then how you can utilize how I view

it differently to benefit you in accomplishing the outcome you desire. That is the entire point. That is what my 6 and 1 half hour course was. Now again, it does not need to be that long.

Just make sure that you make it wildly useful. It can be 30 minutes, it can be 45, 60, two hours, whatever duration you want. I will say I would recommend making it at least 25 minutes. And once you start creeping into this like 10 to

15 minute masterclass world, it just becomes almost laughable. Like it's not truly that indepth. A 10 to 15 minute video is not going to do what we are trying to accomplish with this deep positioning video. Now the flow that you

can take in this video is one I recommend start or at least in the opening you know section start with your contrarian belief. Get this out of the way get this communicated to your audience so they view the rest of the

video through that lens. The next thing is is you should probably define the subject that you want to be known for.

In my course, I very quickly define what branding and brand is because that's something that I really want to be known for. It's also a wildly different definition of those two terms than the majority of what the industry says. What

this does is it creates instant clarity for your audience. Then what you want to do is you want to teach the core belief through a few key breakthroughs. Okay?

Not 20 surface level points, just three to five big useful mindset shifting ideas. Looking at my course, it's six and a half hours, but there's four core subjects that I speak to. Brand, content, team, and monetization. I suggest three to five big things that

you tackle within the core subject matter that you're addressing. A prompt that may help you is what are the few ideas that if I would have gotten them earlier in my life, earlier in my career, would have changed everything

for me. Once you have figured out what those are, teach those. That's what's going to make everything easier for your audience to get to the desired outcome where you're currently at faster than you ever did. And then you need to make

it easier for the viewer to take action. Again, this is where trust happens. If you make it easier for them to take action on what you say and they get the outcome they want. If you do that consistently, they're going to start to

associate you with them achieving their desired outcomes. What a beautiful brand to build. And then you want to close by setting your point of view as their new lens. This needs to change their belief.

Okay? You want them moving forward after this video to view everything that they do through this new lens. You are building the foundation for all the future videos that come. As long as you maintain a high value per

minute, the more in-depth you go, the more material source material you have to help you and your team with future ideiation of content. One of the big reasons why I did a six and a half hour course as my second [ __ ] video ever

on YouTube within building this personal brand was so that Trevor would have a lot of source material to help him ideulate on future content ideas. And then the third video that I recommend you make is an experimental video. This

needs to be completely an experiment trying something wildly different to discover what you enjoy making and what your audience enjoys viewing. The purpose of this video is a creative experiment. you are trying something wildly different as far as the style,

the format, and the approach that you take. Even potentially the way that you show up in your delivery might be a little bit different. This exists to help you answer two extremely important questions. What do I enjoy making? And

what does my audience want more of? See, if you're going to stick with this whole making content thing, you're going to be doing it for years, you should probably enjoy the formats that you make. Why not try to find multiple formats that you

actually enjoy making? So, the flow of your experiment video could be as follows. Pick a format that you've been curious to try. Here are a couple of options. A vlog, a rant, a voiceover with B-roll, a scripted piece, a highly

produced creative video, a simple talking head with a twist, a day in the life with an educational tie-in, a walkthrough or a demo, a storybased video. It doesn't really matter what format you choose. It's more what one are you most curious about you trying.

Then the next thing is you need to make sure that it is completely different from the first two videos. It should almost feel in my opinion like a completely different YouTube channel.

Your average YouTube guru will tell you you need to pick a topic and a format and consistently do that over and over so your audience knows what to expect from you. And sure, that is probably the best way to get the most amount of

subscribers and views on YouTube. But that's also a big reason why a lot of YouTubers burn out really quickly. And so what we're building here, like we've talked about, is a sustainable system that you can actually stick with. The

next thing that you're going to do is you need to anchor it to one useful idea. So my experimental video that I did, the third video that we put out on YouTube, it's called if you struggle with making content, please watch this.

The whole concept is me talking through the mindset shifts that I had to go through in order to go from being the guy behind the camera to being the character in front of the camera. And what we chose to do is a 100% scripted

video where I am delivering scripted written out lines over the course of a motorcycle ride throughout Las Vegas, Nevada. This was quite the experiment to be honest with you. I was just curious if I had the chops to be able to do a

video like that. And so again, the format was new, but the value was consistent with the value that we were delivering in the previous two videos.

It wasn't an entertainment video that we were making. Though I will say I I think based on the comments, a lot of people would say it was more of an entertaining video than our previous educational content. But still the purpose for the

viewer was to educate them on what shifts I was making in order to be somebody in front of the camera. Cuz turns out you and a lot of other people have moments where you struggle with being in front of the camera. Good news.

Me too. It's a crazy thing. And so that's how I conducted that experiment. What you want to do next is after you're done making the video, take note of how it felt making it. Did you enjoy it?

Like a big thing for Trevor and I was during the course of filming that video, there was a couple of, you know, stressful moments or whatever. We're in public in a gas station trying to film a scene and not piss off the gas uh

station attendee and the customers that are in there. But the amount of times that we would both turn to each other and be like, "Man, this is so much fun.

We're having a blast." Right? We did another video like this, like the first experimental video in London, and it was so much fun. And so what we learned is like, okay, we walked away with it. Like even if the audience doesn't really

resonate with this, we really enjoyed making it. So we're going to continue to make these kinds of videos because we enjoy it. By increasing the amount of content that we make that we like, we increase the odds that we stick with it.

The next thing that you want to do is in addition to paying attention to how you resonated with it, look at how your audience resonated. Here is the key.

What you just heard me say is even if the audience didn't [ __ ] with it, we would continue to do it. And now I'm saying pay attention to how the audience responds. Seems contradictory, right?

No. Here's the reality. If the audience wouldn't have responded well, if you didn't care about that video and didn't show interest in it, but we really liked it, we would still continue to do it, just at a very low frequency, just

enough to make sure that we are enjoying making content, but not so much that we, you know, bore the audience. However, what ended up happening is you and a lot of other people that were watching it were like, "Hey, we'd like to see more

videos like this." So now we know that we like making it and the audience likes watching it. So we're going to do more of those videos. So within I think it was 7 months later, we released another video in that style. And probably 6

months later from that, we'll probably release another one in a similar style because again, we enjoy it and so does the audience. And there's your first three videos. You now have no excuse to not get started on YouTube. You have to

take action. I have removed every bit of excuses that you have. So, stop procrastinating. Stop waiting for some perfect idea and get started on the first video, your introduction video.

Now that you know how to make content and what content you're going to make, I think it would be really cool if Trevor and I, my content director, walked you through together how we approached building my personal brand in the first

year. In 2025, I decided to start building my personal brand. Up until that point, I had always been the character behind the camera, not in front of it. And in the first year of building this personal brand, we grew

the audience to over 265,000 people. More impressively, I would say, is the 44,000 people that we were able to get on our email list. Now, a lot of people share these cool aspirational numbers, but what a lot of people don't

do is they do not introduce you to the characters who are behind the scenes helping make this actually happen. And so, what I wanted to do in this special video, this special episode, my first podcast ever on my channel, is introduce

two characters that have been helping make this happen. First, someone you've heard me reference quite a bit, my content director, Trevor Odum, and also uh my dog Bugsy. He's going to be hopping in and out probably throughout this, maybe even chiming in with his

opinions on how to build your personal brand. But what we wanted to do is go month by month. And so, we want to start at the very beginning, which is January.

And the thing that I want to start with, which was really funny for me, is I've been doing this, this is like 17 years now. But I remember I turned to Trevor the first week and I was like, "Dude, I

know exactly what I would say to any client, anybody that we work with, anybody who asks me how to start their personal brand, but for some reason with my own, and I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this, I I felt too close to it

and I didn't know what to do and I wasn't exactly sure where to start. Do we shoot photos? Do we like So, kind of walk me through and remind me really like where did we start with all of

this?" Basically, my first few tasks was like, "Okay, we have a limited amount of content of you already out there." Yeah. Very limited.

I think it was what, three podcasts that you had done, including one that was like seven or eight years old from when I was on Team Gary.

I remember it was like in the conference room, I think, or something at Vayner.

Yeah. I remember uh basically I took all of that content. one of my in the first few days I built an AI database of just content cuz like having worked with you for 5 years I know what you talk about

but at the same time you starting your own personal brand I had no idea all of the like the breadth of the talking points like I know you're going to hit heavy on personal brand you're going to go deep into content but what are those

points and what are those main pillars that you're going to stick to like I think the you you had the brand journey framework you had the brand journey framework I didn't even know I don't even know if that's what it was

called back then. But like, so all of these things I'm kind of learning for the first time after I I mean, I've been working with several other creators to now transition completely to somebody who's starting new. I'd never actually

started a personal brand before. I have been on a team that's been pumping hundreds of pieces of content out a week, but I've never actually started one. My first few pieces of priority were I needed to build an AI database of all of your

content, transcribe all the content that you had out there. Uh a speaking gig, like everything that you had done, which was only a handful of pieces, a couple like voice memos and stuff like that that I had recorded on walks to try

and give you a little bit of ammo and stuff like that, but not a lot. Not a lot.

So, we did that. uh that gave me some ideation points of like cool he's going to talk about the these select few things and this is like this is what we can start making our short form content on this is what we can start building

long form content off of. Um so and then from there I developed kind of like systems to stay organized and basically keep us on track.

It's funny because we come from teams that are much bigger. And so it it kind of sounds silly that we're like we're going to we're going to build our project management board for all of our content that doesn't actually

exist yet and we're going to organize our Google Drive a certain way and have a file structure like a file naming convention and everything. But like in the back of our heads, I remember we were talking about this. It was like

we're going to want to stay organized. might not be us forever and it's going to be helpful for when [ __ ] actually does start happening. So, one of the another thing that I started doing was I set up our Google Drive. Uh I think we

purchased a few different pieces of equipment like one FX3 and yeah, this main a cam here. That's what we had bought an FX3 and I think a lens, a tripod and like a light.

Yeah, that might have been what we purchased in like the first uh few weeks there. And then from there was organizing a project management board which is something like I was speaking to a uh like a creative manager

on a team yesterday actually uh who is oddly in a very similar boat to what we're doing and like what my role is which is he has never done this before and he's coming in doing everything and he's coming in and he's doing

everything. I had not done that before. After a year of this, I'm like, I have a few pieces of advice for you, buddy.

Like, and one of the first things I told him to do was open notion, a sauna, Monday, whatever it is, and get yourself a project management board. um set it up as a board view. Go left to right. Your

you put your content in there, all this all your raw footage that you film, you can have Google Drive links, whatever.

And you move it left to right of like this content is for review. This content is ready for review. This content is already reviewed and approved, ready to be captioned and posted. You have a con you have a calendar view of all of your

content. So that like this is something that a a lot of teams we work with don't have like in place when they come to us.

And it's one of the first few pieces that we did and we tell people to do is like jump in, get organized, and make sure that you can stay on track.

And the beauty of it for the person who's on camera too, the talent, is they get a bird's eye view of where everything's at, right? Like I I know for years the amount of entrepreneurs I've talked to that have gone and filmed

a vlog or filmed a bunch of shorts and then they're wondering what is the status of all that epic [ __ ] we just filmed and invested a lot of my time into like where's the status on that? And what's cool is when you have

that system and you maintain that system, then the talent is able to actually take a look and see where everything is in in the status, right?

And so I think that's really helpful. One thing that I'll I'll just quickly hit on that I I focused on and then we can move on to February is this was the first time where I was really taking

what I did naturally and just felt inherent to me, my way of operating and learning how to distill it into bite-sized chunks for people to learn from. And so the thing that I was really focusing on in January was like, how do

I develop my my natural ways of operating into frameworks? The way that my brain thinks and analyzes things. How do I develop this into a framework that the audience can follow and makes it easy? And that was a very interesting

transition because I've worked for some amazing individuals who are wildly gifted communicators and incredibly good at teaching people things.

So I think I had a little bit of a leg up from observing them. But January was really me focusing on figuring out how do I communicate these things, right? And then actually one other thing that we should hit on really

quick is the first video we did, we decided to do an introduction video, right?

We decided to introduce your career. Yeah. It was like, do you mind walking through just a little bit of like what that video was and what the goal was?

Yeah. I mean, I think I don't even know whose idea I It was just kind of like the easiest lowhanging fruit that we can do for our first YouTube video is we can make a video about what you've done in

your career. Shocker. like it's like the lowest hanging fruit that we that I think that we thought of and it was like um going back through your actually I remember seeing a ton of uh old clips of you and Drock when I was going through

all the old footage of you transcribing all that stuff and it was like huh there's been a lot of things you've done and like I think a lot of people would want to be reintroduced to who Caleb is

now that you've done this for what 16 years. Yeah. Um, and so we kind of just laid out your career. Uh, I remember we whiteboarded it. We probably a f you we have photos because I remember you started taking you're like doc starting

to document the process. Yep. Um, and we whiteboarded out for a whole day your career all the positions that you have been in and then uh one or two lessons from each of those like high it's like it's very

high level but it's also extremely tactical and extremely important. It was like and I think it ended up being like a 50inute long video for your for your first video which is crazy. And the kind of the takeaway for people is

you should assume that nobody knows who you are, right? And obviously for the majority of people that seems obvious, right? I've worked for some high-profile individuals. So maybe it would have been easier for us to go into this assuming

that some people knew who I was. That'd be kind of bold. But what we did is we decided, okay, cool. We're building an audience. We need to frame how the audience is going to view me. And so for

a lot of people who are starting or restarting their personal brand, I think something that is wildly effective is to create an introduction video that gives the credentials as to why you are somebody who should be listened to on

the subject matter you're about to speak to in your content, right? And like I think you know some of the people which again it's not a lot but some of the people that knew who I was before we did

this they were aware of some of the characters that I've worked with in the past but maybe they didn't know about the time that I spent at Constellation Brands working on prisoner wine company high west whiskey right like they didn't

know about my first job at Logos Bible software where I learned a lot and was able to develop skills of how to work on software and make you know software that might be kind of seemingly boring for a

lot of people. Look cool. So, I I think it was a good moment for us to share a little bit more of who I was, but to your point, if it was just a list of my resume, that'd be boring as [ __ ] and

nobody would give a [ __ ] But we tried to tie in an applicable lesson for everybody watching. And I I think another side note, I'm going to keep doing that because this is a podcast where we're given as much gold as we

can. Um, one thing that Trevor did a really good job on on that video is taking really good note of what I was saying and asking me follow-up questions, helping to make those piece of the pieces of advice that I was

giving more practical, not just not just high level, but also in the dirt so that people could actually act on it.

I appreciate that. Yeah, absolutely. It was great. Before we go on to February, something that I realized I didn't do at the top is I didn't really list off all of the amazing credentials that Trevor has. And I want to do it because he's not going

to do that. He is a humble character and uh kind of like myself, he's not going to want to tout all of those things. Uh he'll feel awkward doing that. And so I'm going to do it for him. So in

addition to Trevor being one of Bugsy, my dog's best friends, uh he freaks out every time that Trevor comes over.

Trevor and I have actually been working together, like he said, for five years now, which is absolutely insane. And before he was my content director, Trevor actually led all of the short form for two very prominent entrepreneurs and creators in the

business creator space. Uh, I'm talking like billions of views a year kind of level and hundreds and hundreds of shorts being produced every single week overseeing many different editors also editing himself. Um, that was another interesting thing that I thought was

really cool going into this year was I've watched you go from being an individual contributor, right? You're you're the editor making the short form clips to being a manager where you're overseeing other editors and you're reviewing all of the clips and you're

the one in charge of the short form process and the quality or sometimes lack of quality and then quickly adjusting and improving it. You oversaw all of that and then now you're going into this role where you are a director

and in the beginning it was director of nobody but very quickly for our second project we hired somebody on to help with the motion graphics and now we just recently brought on a contract editor that we absolutely love that you're

overseeing. We've worked with a couple other freelancers on other various projects. [snorts] And so this is now an a time where you're not just focusing on short form, but actually, oddly enough, Trevor was most experienced on short form. And what did we not do for the

first year? Shorts. We focused on YouTube. And so I think that brings us perfectly to February, which is when we shipped the first YouTube video that we talked about that intro. We don't need to talk about that. Let's talk about the

course. like not only my second video that we're doing on YouTube, this is your second video that you're filming, leading, and editing.

Mhm. For YouTube. Like, let let's talk through like take take it from the beginning here. What what was the process for making? And real quick for context, uh if you're not familiar with it, no reason that you should be. Uh we

produced a 6 and 1 half hour free course on YouTube called How to Build Your Personal Brand. Uh it's absurd. I think it's really really high value. It's long as [ __ ] but I think a lot of people

have gotten an insane amount of value. It's at I don't remember. It's somewhere over 750,000 views at this point. It's insane. Nobody is more surprised than me. But yeah, Trevor, let's let's walk through kind of that process. That

seemed to be like the biggest focus in February. Mhm. I mean, as our second video, well, I kind of reverting back just a little bit like we filmed our first video end of January. I remember we booked like

some it was a decent like Airbnb. It was just like a small setup. We used we used a a Sony and a Canon and just we we just kind of we just started um used what we had available.

Mhm. And then essentially I it was I remember this because you've actually had this idea for a while. You've told me that you've been eyeing this idea of how to how to build a brand or a personal brand for a very long time in

past roles too. Yeah. Um, but in during that film session, I remember we were probably midfilm session and you turned to me in the kitchen and you were like, "Wouldn't it be crazy if we did like some mega

like free course that we released on YouTube as like like super soon?" And we and I was like, "Internesting." Yeah.

Like that would be kind of cool. And I think, funny enough, I brushed it off at that moment, but I think you immediately went back after that film session and started writing it. Right.

Two days later, I Yeah, that was on a Thursday that we filmed that video.

Mhm. And that Saturday, I woke up and felt like a fire under me and felt like I I I felt compelled to to put all of this, you know, to paper. It was a very quick like let's set a deadline for this when

this is going to go live. Let's let's book a space for this. Let's like it. I think it all happened within a matter of a couple weeks where you went from this would be a funny thing that we that we

should do like this would be helpful for us and people would would get a lot of value from it to I think a couple weeks later we're booking the space. I'm looking at spaces uh in LA to film. It's

like a we I found a warehouse. Yeah. Talk about that. Like how did you find the space?

I wanted to do this for our first video because I remember I saw like screenshots of like Harley's in the background of this warehouse and I was like we can put your bike in the back and we can like

that was the main motivating factor just to be very clear is the fact that we could put the Harley in the set.

That was the selling point. Um but no it looked like a dope they don't shoot I remember the the studio manager whatever was like we have never had anybody like shoot audio in here. does like it's a place where basically rappers in LA go

and film all their music videos. What What's the rapper? Kevin Gates and YG were in there two days filming a music video. Uh separately, not together, separate music videos days before we were there. It was insane.

So I And then there's us. Yeah, there's like us. We show up with like a truckload of like some rented gear. We rented like half the gear. I remember cuz the studio manager was like, "How many people like is it going

to be like a 20 person team that's going to come in? you guys have a truck that we're going to have to back in. And I was like, two people. They were like, are you sure? We charge if the party's

over five. And I was like, there's two of us. There's two people that just show up.

It wasn't us trying to sneak people on set. That's for sure. Um, but yeah, we we booked that space. I had found that on I think it was like Pure Space or something.

Pier Space. Um, shout out Pier Space. We booked that. I picked it cuz there were so many different scenes that we could do three different scenes. I also picked it because like we liked it because it looked very different from

almost every like course or anything that you've seen is like again rappers use this space and there's graffiti on these like walls and we're like it would be cool to set up a chair and a green backdrop and literally film

our course in there cuz it's just so like it's super cool. But I remember you invested a lot for like for a second video.

For our second video, it was a lot to book that space for three days.

Um, and I don't even know if you finished writing the video until like two days prior.

Dude, what's crazy is we were never really done because remember the night before our first day of filming, we were up until probably 2 or 3 in the morning finishing and rewriting a section basically. And then we continued to do

that every evening after filming because what we would do is, you know, this was our second video ever that we were doing. So we would learn from the film session. We immediately would go back to the Airbnb. I remember we would

order um Oh man, I I can't. Yeah, I can't remember the name of the restaurant, but these awesome burritos and we would get that and I always made sure to have my 805 curvea and we would then rewrite the

next section taking into account the things that we learned, right? Like lines that maybe I had written that read really well when you would read them, but when I would go to say them out loud, it just like felt weird and

stuff. And we actually, if I remember correctly, we after the first day rewrote the second section so that it was not as many lines but more bullet points because I quickly realized I'm a terrible reader. Uh, just for

context for everybody, I don't read books. I just listen to audiobooks. And so what we quickly discovered is it does not work well for me to have predetermined lines. for an intro. Sure, we'll script it pretty heavily, but

everything else is bullet points to keep me in line. Let's talk through. Okay, we we picked a location, Pure Space. It was really sick. It was really cool. It was very, very expensive, but it was worth it, right? We did that. How did we go

about setting everything up? Another question is why did we do different setups? Right? Like there's four sections to the course, right? We got brand, content, team, and then a very, very quick monetize section. Why did we make them

all different settings? I think there's probably a few reasons to why we did that, ranging from we want to get a bunch of different shorts from this, and it allows us to go, you know, for you to switch outfits,

for you to get shorts so that we can distribute that on the short form platforms a little bit easier. Um, one other thing which we never ended ended up doing, but like we also had the idea at one point to actually split those

into four different videos after we posted the course and posted them as individual sections, which should maybe we'll actually do this year anyways.

Kind of like what we're doing with this series this month. Yeah. Mhm. which is when we're actually testing it now. We had an idea last [clears throat] year but um doing that it's also and this is something I think we realized after

I think for you you actually like the change of environment and change of pace I think refreshes you a little bit when and this is not something I don't think I planned when we had the idea to like

switch this up but it was like you actually do really good if you have like a reset and you go into a new scene and it looks nice and it's like okay we're refreshed.

We also shot this over three different days. I think it was three days, right?

It was like three and a half days or something like that. Hi, buddy. So, like that also I mean it just makes it easier for us to swap every day. I think we did a new scene.

Yeah. Up until I think we did I remember we did brand and we did team together.

Then we did content in one day and then we did monetize on the half day.

Last day. Yep. Yep. So, it was two and a half days. So, those I mean that's probably a there's definitely a few reasons why we did that. Um mainly it's also just because we we thought it was cool to

show off all the scenes in the warehouse because it had so many cool scenes. But there like the other thing too is we made the assumption that if anybody was going to be crazy enough to watch all this stuff,

they're probably not going to watch it in one sitting. Shout out to the individuals who have watched it in one sitting. That's pretty crazy and I'm eternally grateful to you.

People do that. I I have literally I have gotten DMs of people that are like, "Yep, I woke up this Saturday and decided my Saturday is dedicated to that." Real quick, I just want to say I am so

sorry. I know that this is a lot to take in right now and even more for you to take action on, but that is the whole reason why we created Rston Select.

Rston Select is your one-stop destination to not only learn, but to actually implement. We're talking pre-production production post-production, and platform strategy all through the lens of educational content. Click the link in the description below if you want more

information. Now, let's get back to the video. What I was also thinking about is like people are going to come back to this video. And so, we almost tried to treat each section like it's its own video in this massive self-contained

thing, right? And and that way if they did come back, it would kind of re-engage them. To your point, it re-engaged me filming it. But also the theory was maybe this will help re-engage people on some pretty heady,

deep, long [ __ ] bumping into the table. Bugs is just trying to find a spot right now. Hey, you can you can sit down. You can sit down. He's a golden doodle. He's 2 years old. He's the sweetest. I know there's

going to be comments about him asking about him. So, moving on from that and and I want to be careful because we're spending a lot of time on the course, but I think it was like, you know, the biggest probably arguably the

biggest thing we did. Oh, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. So, I think it it it bears uh a little bit more attention. So, the next thing that we do is after we're done filming, how did we handle post-production? Like I I feel

like one, you know, we can talk about hiring Michael, bring him on, but yeah, I'd love to talk through a little bit more.

Yeah. I mean, like I said before, you you and your ever knowing wisdom knew that if we didn't set a date for this thing and actually like get it done, we were going to procrastinate the hell out of it.

It's true. Um, and it's just such a massive project. We would have spent months doing this. But from like start to finish, what what did we determine was like a month and a half or something?

Yeah. From start to finish, from idea to posted was less than two months. I started it on February 1st and we published it on April 4th.

Mhm. I mean, as soon as we got back, we went into post-prouction. I wanted to take a pass at the cut. We had three camera angles. We did a simple like we did a basic three camera setup. It was

nothing fancy. The lighting was nothing fancy. Okay, Trevor, you're saying not fancy and basic, but I want to real quick interrupt you here. Most people at most do two cameras.

It's true. And real quick, he's not going to say this because we're going into post-production, but real quick, a shout out to Trevor on the production.

Trevor was managing three cameras, the audio, and he was running the uh the outline. So, basically, we we have a 55 in TV that we put right below the camera lens, and he was scrolling through the outline because, you know, you zoom into

it, and you can only get a couple of lines before boom, we're on to the next section. So Trevor is managing audio, camera angles, making sure focus, lighting is all good, and making sure to keep up with me on the outline, but

please continue on the post-production, Mr. Simple. I appreciate that. Before we even shot it, we actually had a few calls with a few different uh motion designers. Yeah.

Because one thing that uh we wanted to do was like there's a lot of people who um like there some people are very visual and like they draw on a whiteboard or something like that. Um I asked you

you're like I'm not a I'm not I don't draw. I suck at drawing you guys. My handwriting is horrible. It looks terrible. Maybe one day but not not in the first year that's for sure. And one of the things that we also noticed with

a lot of these, like the whole idea for this course came from looking at the industry, looking at the niche that we're in and doing the opposite of that.

Everybody does paid courses, we do a free one. Everybody does 2hour masterclass courses and we do six hours.

It could have been more. We cut it down. I think we had 14 hours of raw footage.

Um, so like everything that you're hearing, like we just took a look at what everybody else was doing and we're like, you know what?

Which would become a very staple piece for us later in our in our content. But um the the motion design basically uh nobody does that. Nobody has motion graphics throughout their courses like a lot of the times like we wanted

professional. I am Yeah. custom. No, no. Like Mgurts or anything like that. For all the editors out there, you know what a Mogurt is. Um, but we wanted custom motion graphics in our style. Our green, uh, our tan stuff like that, our opal

mist color. Love our colors. Um, so we wanted to do that. So, we had a call. We actually hired somebody before we did the project. The the thing was I was going to do the I was going to cut it, swap

the cameras, color grade it. Everything was going to be done and then I'm going to ship it off to this motion designer.

And this is all going to happen in like four weeks that we shot it. We shot it even less cuz you were going on a trip.

Yeah, I flew to London like the I had to finish it by a certain day in like I think I had less than two weeks to cut it and actually like and this is a 6 and a half hour cut it and then you and I

review it. So like I I think it was like a 5day edit where I'm just I'm cutting this thing down from 14 hours down to 6 and 1/2 or something like that. um making notes in the timeline, grading it, doing

the audio, doing a pass on the audio, and then we actually one of the things we wanted to do was review the whole thing together before we shipped it off so we could have a bunch of notes for um

this is actually a really good workflow that we do a lot of the times. First off, we we almost always do an A-roll cut so that you can review it, especially when you're working with contractors and stuff like that. Oh, I

was talking to somebody yesterday who was like wanting to know how this like workflow. They're like, I'm giving a lot of notes and we're doing like V5, V6, V7. And I'm like, you want to know how you can avoid that? Something that we

learned early on, which was we review an A-roll cut or somebody reviews an A-roll cut. So, we did that together for this one. Um, we can jump into that in just a second, but uh you do the A-roll cut and

then you leave a bunch of notes on frame from that A-roll cut of like I'm picturing this here. I'm thinking this here the road map I'm thinking can be something like this and you can actually draw on frame so that when the

contractor comes in like I had a hundred something notes for Michael of like motion graphic here something here this lower third for the workbook that we included in the course that needs to have a motion graphic that I think so

when Michael sat down to film it I could go on a on a trip to London because he had all that he needed in a frame folder ready for ready to go for him.

Shout out Michael Moyes. We're going to link him in the description. He's an incredible motion graphics uh artist. If you want to hire him, I I highly recommend him. He's [ __ ] awesome.

He killed it. He killed it. And he took a bet on us. Yeah. [laughter] Really early on.

Um which was really cool. But we reviewed that together. And that was probably the biggest thing we did in that post-prouction process is we sat here in this living room actually for 14 hours or something.

Yeah. Uh, we cut the intro. We actually changed it, like completely changed the intro.

That's right. That's a big point. Actually, we had scripted an intro and I'm going to be real. I thought it was a good intro and I still think it was, but when we were watching it back, there was

a moment, the way that it starts right now is you're on one of two paths.

Mhm. And [clears throat] that was originally probably about 30 to 40 seconds into the video, over a minute. Yeah.

Yeah. And we decided in post to cut that opening and go right to that. And uh it turns out apparently it was good because there's a lot of other individuals who are using a very similar intro which I

love that I that is the best compliment that you could ever give. But it [snorts] it was something that was not planned.

A happy accident. Yeah. Yeah. Bob Ross moment big time. Okay. So you're you do the edit, you pass it off to Michael. What did that look like? I imagine, and this is a moment for all of the the creators, the

people who are on the actual production team, like what were the details there? How did you hand off a 6 and 1/2 hour file, but more than that, right? Because you still have to have the source media, you have three angles, you have all the

different cuts. Like, walk through a little bit of what that looked like. So basically the handoff for that project was the the workflow was that Michael was going to do transparent on alpha likeov files for all of his motion

graphics so that he can actually just upload those onto a Google drive and then I can actually I believe I downloaded them and placed them in I want to say.

Yeah, you did. Yeah, you were you were doing the placements. I think I was Yeah, you got all the lossless or not lossless the alpha channel files.

Mhm. Yep. So that was the workflow there. But like I said, he had that whole frame folder to basically go through and he had very little questions for me. I had very little text from him when he was

actually go he's like he read through it all. He's like cool no I have no questions like I know what I'm going to do. We gave him a lot of creative freedom on like the style. I don't know.

I'm not a I'm not a motion gra. I do remember we sent him one example and it was a a really cool video with Arthur Brooks and it was on Harvard Business Review on their YouTube channel and there was some motion that they did on

that that I loved cuz I remember he was asking for a reference and I was like I don't I don't know this is our second [laughter] video.

Yeah. And also like I could tell you all of the stuff that I didn't like what the majority of the people in the industry were doing for their motion graphics.

that was like what I wanted the opposite of. And so, and man, he did an amazing job matching that.

I bas I mean, I remember I was like, I'm picturing something like this here, but like I don't know how you're going to execute this. I give you full creative freedom. And I think it actually bred like some of the coolest [ __ ] that like

I remember we were reviewing it, we were like "Yes damn." Yeah. We were like, "Holy shit." The heads were nodding hardcore.

Yep. Yep. Um, but that was that workflow. We we I think for the footage, it was so much footage and we had so little time. I actually shipped them an SSD and like overnighted it. Yep.

UPS, by the way. What the [ __ ] It's like $300 to overnight a little 4 TB.

I did not know that. That's wild. Okay. Sorry. No, that used your card. That was that was kind of the process there. It was like a little bit of back and forth. There were a couple different versions I think that I was reviewing

back and forth. So then after we're doing all of that, we're placing them in. We're reviewing it. We're stoked about it. One note actually off of what you said that I think is really important for people. If you're going to hire somebody, now I I

this shouldn't be a qualifier that I have to add, but I'm going to add it.

They need to be good and they need to have a portfolio to show you that they're good at what they do.

But if you hire somebody who has a portfolio that shows you that they are good at what they do, trust them. You're bringing them on. If if you hire somebody and then you tell them exactly what to do, um at least in the creative

world, I think you're kind of defeating the purpose, right? Then you're hiring a robot, not a contributor. And we we literally I remember telling Michael like, "Man, we want you to flex your muscles here and show us like what you

would do, what you think would be cool in this instance, what you think is different than what other people are doing." And Michael had done a wide variety of different projects in the back. Like in his portfolio was a lot of

stuff that wasn't this, which was also really appealing to us because it showed that he had a a different edge or angle he was coming from. He wasn't like it wasn't that he had been doing motion graphics for all of these talking head

videos on YouTube, right? Like he from what I remember, I didn't see a lot of that in his portfolio.

I think he was like a gaming like editor. Yeah. I Yeah. For like Twitch streamers and stuff like that. killed it for like and it's so sick and we saw that we're like, "Oh, that's that could be a cool

unique approach here." So, yeah, you know, we're we're giving Michael a lot of love. Highly recommend. Check him out. Uh his [ __ ] is linked in the description. Please, if you need a motion graphics artist uh as a

freelancer, he is an amazing person to hire. So, uh, real quick, actually, I I kind of want to hit on that cuz you you talk about leading a team with trust, and I think that that's what you taught me to do

when I was working under you in my previous role. And I think that that's how we've kind of ran teams for a while.

um now and I think that's how you've always led which I think is really cool of like even the latest this video and the video the few videos before this I was just reviewing them last week um from our contract editor Max Gangster.

Shout out Max. Shout out Max. Love him. I'm not going to try to say his last name because I wouldn't know how to say it. But apologies Max. We we don't mispronounce so we just won't say it.

That's the that's the key. But that is a huge like there have been so many we did this the other day where we're on frame Max is leaving us and I'm first of all I'm never demanding anything in frame.

I'm always asking questions. Do you think that this would be cool right here? Yep.

Do would it be possible if we did this right here? And then I'm also including them like we were having a discussion I think it was the other night or something where it was like let's ask Max.

Yep. It was I think like I think it was if we were going to include this podcast in the full course uh upload.

Spoiler alert. Yeah, that's which is awesome. No, no, it's good. If you're in at this point on the podcast, we're going to take all the videos that we have uploaded in January, pack them together into one mega course on how to

start your personal brand. But we haven't decided whether or not we're going to include this.

And we brought we're bringing it like I'm going to shoot a Slack message over to Max and be like, "Hey, what do you think about this? is this good enough?

Like you're gonna you're gonna edit the footage and see it more than anyone else. Like and bringing in that level of trust and asking your team um it doesn't have to be like major decisions like hey what do we want to do with this offer or

something like that but like bringing them in those creative decisions giving that creative flexibility. Like Max asked several questions to me uh in this latest upload on this frame link and I was like uh I think we could do this but

what do you think? And one thing I tell Max is like if you make a good if it's not going to be like I kind of separate my notes from like game-breaking notes to like this is a preference of mine and

I state that in this is like I love this but I'm also open to this.

Yes. Um when I'm looking through notes and giving notes to editors uh to designers whoever it is on a creative team.

Um and this is this all just comes back to trust of like um what do you think of this? Like I'm asking Max more questions of like, oh, I remember what I was going to say.

Like I told Max, um, if you make an argument for it, I'm probably going to go with you. There's a 98% chance if you make a good argument. And he did it. He was like, I think we should include this

and leave this in because it's kind of a humorous moment that shows Caleb's side of like create like little little funky side of Caleb. And I was like, cool, heard. Let's do it. I I trust you.

Love that. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really big point. I think the other thing that I would say and then we should move on to March is your team if they're the right characters and again that's a stupid qualifier that I

have to put in because a lot of people don't realize that if you hire the right people and you give them that level of trust they will rise above the level that you are bestowing that trust at.

Like I I've seen it time and time again. So it's it's a really good point. I'm glad you brought that up. moving into March, uh, we went psycho mode and we had just filmed this video, uh, middle to end of February. And then I think

about two or 3 weeks later, we're like, you know what? Let's do another course level video. And so I wrote the how to lead a media team. I can't remember what the title is on YouTube right now, but

the video is like how to lead an already existing media team. And uh we I think within three or four weeks of filming the course, we went out to Joshua Tree and filmed for an entire day. Was it a

full day? Yeah, I think it was one full day. I think we did. Yeah.

Sunrise to sunrise to like way after sunset cuz I remember you jumped to the pool at the end when it was freezing.

[ __ ] cold. Yeah. So, we went into that. I think some interesting things to talk about here are the location and the outlining process.

You you mentioned when we were talking about and planning for this podcast and talking about what we were going to go over, you mentioned something that was really interesting which was that I chose the location. Can you speak to

that a little bit? It's so interesting because a lot of people think that like when you bring on a a creative director and you're just starting your brand or whatever, like they know everything and like they will handle all the decisions

and stuff. And I think actually contrary to probably what a lot of people are thinking anyways like about my role and what I'm doing for you is uh it's it's actually it wasn't like that and it still isn't. I actually had this

conversation yesterday and I remember I told this certain it was a creative manager that I was talking to was the one that I said was was starting in a similar role.

I was like, you know, I'm actually still being onboarded one year into this role.

I'm still being onboarded. Um cuz you mentioned like you picked the location at this point. Three months in I I did pick the location for the course, but that was like a mutual kind of like one-off thing. But

you nailed it. Um, three months in, I actually had no idea your taste and what you um what you actually preferred in your locations and I sure as hell could not write for you. Like you keep mentioning that you were writing these

videos. I wasn't actually involved in the writing till I think month five or six right?

Yeah, I think so. I think it was like the three stages videos when we started it. Yep.

And then now we write videos together. Uh, which we'll talk about in a bit, I'm sure. But like at this stage you were writing the videos a lot of times you were picking the locations and like sending them to me like what do you

think can we what what is the setup you're thinking here I have some contribution to that I think a lot of people would expect that I am doing those things and I'm writing your videos and I'm doing all that things but two

months in it is interesting because it's actually the opposite and it wasn't until month five or six that that started happening and people do things differently and I think we advise different things for different teams but for us specifically speifically I think

what's made the content the best so far and why it feels so authentic and it's so deep and so like is cuz actually you're at the you're still so close to it right now which is really key especially if you

are starting out in your first year making content with your personal brand and it's the most frustrating thing for people to hear too because one of the most common things that uh you know one of the most common I should say

conversations that we've had with clients this year is a lot of them wanting their team to handle all of it.

And I I love the thinking, right? Because it's like we don't have a ton of time. We're trying to spend as much time on focusing on the business as possible.

We don't have a ton of time. A lot of people, I mean, me, I don't have as much time to write content as I did when we started, right? The business has gotten a lot busier. Thank God. That's an

amazing thing. I'm so grateful for it. But that means that I have less time for it. But I still fight to be involved in it because the thing that I literally was just having this conversation with somebody today. Um, if and I mean this

with all due respect to everybody who is behind the scenes behind somebody, but if your team was capable of writing this [ __ ] just as good as you would, why are they not the ones on camera? Right? At a

certain point, maybe that'll happen. That's starting to happen now. you're starting to come on camera and stuff, but like it still needs to come from me at some level. Now, what we're going to be working on, and we we'll talk about

this later, is like this year we're going to start working on you getting the outlines to third base, right? And then me rounding it home. But if we didn't have the year of the first half of the year, me writing it and then the

rest us writing it together, right? Because that's how you delegate. you demonstrate, you uh duplicate, I believe is what what I always talk about.

Something like that. You do it together, and then you have the other person do it themselves, and you observe that. And that's the phase that we're about to go into, and we can talk about that later, but I think it was a really good point

to call out because it's an expectation a lot of people have when they hire a content director that they're just going to write everything for them and make everything magically happen. But, you [snorts] know, we've known each other

for a very long time. You have a lot more context on me than most people do starting this position. And even in that scenario, we had to do this. Um, and we could have done it the opposite way, but

then it wouldn't be my words and it wouldn't be me, right? It'd be an outsourced version of me. And so I think we we need to calibrate. And that's what a lot of people need to do is they need

to go through that calibration phase, which is one that a lot of people want to skip, which I think is interesting, super crucial. Yeah, I think it's but yeah, that was So we we went in, we shot that video

only like a week prior having posted our first video. So we we recorded almost three videos before ever dropping one of them. I feel Yeah. Which is crazy. And actually we would not advise that. A big thing that

we preach is uh you want to use posted content to inform how you make the next content. And the thing that I always talk about, which is so funny, is the last thing you want to do is batch

content too much because then you have that sunk cost fallacy of like, well, we we filmed all day. We might as well post all this. But what if you learn that what you did in the film session was

completely [ __ ] and it ruins the rest of the videos? Well, then why would you keep posting it, right? But, you know, we uh we worked with the reality that we had and the reality that we had.

This is the real godhonest answer. I was [ __ ] motivated and I was stoked and we took advantage of that instead of spacing everything out. It was like in the matter of two months we filmed three three videos, no four videos. We filmed

that intro video. We filmed the course. We filmed the media team video. And then in April, Mhm.

In April, we filmed the uh if you struggle with making content, watch this, which was a completely different format than the first three videos that we filmed. Now, we're saying this, but the video I'm describing that if you

struggle with making content, please watch this. That was the third video we released. This is moving into April.

Now, can you kind of share why we did that and why we approached that video the way that we did? So, let's tackle the order of upload because we filmed the media team course and then we filmed this, but we uploaded them

differently. Explain that. Uh, I mean, the media team course was a two two and a half hour video. We was going to need more time in in post-production. Um, especially cuz I was handling the post-production entirely on that video. We weren't

outsourcing to a contractor or something like that. And that's something you'll kind of notice. Hi, buddy. That's something you'll kind of notice for um all of our like we did one video every month of our first year only one video

which to some I mean when they look at the run times on those some it's impressive and to others it's like one video only um but that is the resources that we had um on a solo team and the cadence that we felt like I

could stick to. We wanted to do something that we would do the entire year. sustainability going into uh the if you struggle video. That was the biggest thing for that video is you I remember when uh in the first few

weeks it was like wouldn't it be cool if we started doing some crazy [ __ ] like uh we got a a car mount and we did a video on my bike. All of you'll notice this is a theme. All of our videos come from

like one of us being [laughter] like, especially especially Caleb being like, "Wouldn't it be crazy if" and then we actually do it and we set we set a date and we actually do it. Um, but the the biggest part of that video was

sustainability. It was we wanted to make a video that we don't actually know if it's going to do well or not, but it's just something completely different. We That video was a shotbyshot uh just it was that was scripted. It was

completely shotlisted. 100% shot listed. Um, and that was our first video that we actually did that.

It was insane. The other thing too is I remember we were about to upload like we were planning on doing the media team video and then we were like, "Oh [ __ ] our first video was 54 minutes. Our

second video was 6 and 1 half hours. And if we upload this next, our third one is 2 hours." We're setting the expectation that we only upload mega videos, which if you look at our channel, a good percentage, I'd say there's three.

There's three mega, no, four, four mega videos now. So, of the eight videos or 10 videos that we released in 2025, I'd say four of them are pretty beefy, long videos, but we didn't want to set that expectation that that's all we were

going to upload. I remember the other thing that we talked about was like I wanted to see how many different styles can I do like and this might I'm going to share this this might sound a little egotistical um but I promise it came

from a place of not knowing and there was no ego involved here but I wanted to see like can I show the audience that I'm capable of communicating in multiple different ways in the very beginning of me communicating to people. That was

insane. Like I remember we every single every shot is planned, right? We're resetting the camera, either you on the [ __ ] Ronin or the tripod, resetting it in public with traffic, with other humans, like everything. There was a

moment where we're filming in a gas station and I'm literally like thanking the lady at the checkout and then I turn to the camera and start talking with her right there and I'm she I gave her a warning but she was definitely like what

the [ __ ] is going on? This is so weird cuz it was very weird. We're in this wasn't in like downtown Vegas or anything. We filmed it in Vegas. Uh but this was on the outskirts of Vegas. This

was this is closer more to like you know the mountains and Red Rock and everything like that. And so they were looking at us like what the hell is going on? But that was an interesting one because this was the first time that

we learned a lesson that we'll learn again and we'll share with you again in this. But preparation.

Yeah. We ended up shooting this video over 3 days wanting to get it done in one. Like we flew out your best friend Jordan um to drive the truck while I hung out the back and grabbed uh rolling shots of you

on your bike. Yeah. And to be very clear for all the law enforcement individuals watching, he was secured with a seat belt in the back.

A singular strap that was like [laughter] I remember Jordan looked at it and he was like, I don't know if that is actually going to work, but [laughter] do you feel safe? And I was like, "Yeah, I feel we're okay.

Safe enough." I remember realizing really quickly when I'm setting up these cameras, like we the first time we tried it, we said we shot listed this whole thing. We had a very loose shot list.

Rough idea. He had not. And then I think the lines were there, but I think the shot list the lines that you wrote were good. The shot list was just like uh probably a medium shot somewhere in this

gas station. Uh and we didn't I don't even know if we picked the gas station.

No, no, we just like saw it. We just were driving and found the coolest looking one on our route and we got to the sun was starting to go down and we had maybe we had our rolling shots and I think that was it. We barely

had any. I remember we literally there was a moment where we were trying to figure out the next shot quickly and we realized this is not a good idea. We should just lean in fully to rolling shots.

Mhm. Which I which was an amazing pivot. I think that was your pivot on on the fly. I think it was just out of I think we were all getting frustrated that like this is not going very well.

Yeah. And it's cuz we didn't prepare. Um and this is a lesson. Spoiler alert. We'll learn again a little bit later, but like pouring dozens of hours into a video that's 10 minutes long is essential. Like for this

video, we then went back to the drawing board and I think Jordan had to fly home. We had to do it on a separate day and I think we recorded two other days.

Um, but we went back and we spent a handful of hours shot listing this every shot, shot by shot. This is going to be here. we are going on Google Maps and we're doing satellite images and like this is the gas station that we want and

I'm thinking that this is the setup and this is the shot we know where we're shooting exactly where we're shooting it. Um and we took a whole another day.

We went back out um and shot at a bunch of different places. We had already gotten the rolling shots, the shots of me looking at the camera and talking while I'm riding with my helmet on, which by the way, those are

actually moments where I am literally saying the line. We re-recorded it in post for most of them because the audio was a little tough with uh my 2021 Harley-Davidson Road King special, as loud and as aggressive as it is, we had

to re-record them. But like a lot of those lines I'm saying and looking at the camera as we're writing. But anyways, now we're going to film the talking [ __ ] So we go out and we're going to all

these locations and doing this. We're filming in public. Like you said, we went to a restaurant. The the um waitress was unbelievably kind. The manager on the other hand was not so stoked. I don't know if you remember

that. Yeah. At the end. At the end. But I was like standing on a booth getting that top down shot of you just like and the waitress was super cool there. I wish we had a behind-the-scenes photo because

you would look into the booth and you would see I'm sitting there eating and on the other side of the booth, Trevor is literally just standing on it with the the Ronin and the camera like to get those high angles and I mean, we

probably looked absurd to anybody, but um but we did it. And one little tip actually that I'm going to throw out there that I've never mentioned ever before is for anybody who is trying to film publicly around other humans where

they're going to be looking at you. I'm telling you, sunglasses are your best friend. You'll notice that in both of the videos that we've done like this, the one in Vegas on the Harley and the one that we'll talk about later,

probably walking around London and talking to the camera, I'm wearing sunglasses. if you're going to film out in public and have people look at you and you're embarrassed by that. Some people are not and I envy those people,

but I am not one of those. Like a lot of the comments on those videos are like, "I can't believe you did that. I can't believe you said that in the convenience store." Like with people around you. And

the reality is is I am probably more terrified of what other people think of me than most of you watching or listening to this. That is a very real like real reality is I am very uncomfy talking to a camera when there's other

humans around. It makes me squeamish. I do not like it. But what I try to do is I just try to completely ignore them. I used to play basketball in high school and for better or for worse I would just

completely black out. I mean there was literally one time where I remember I was going for a wide open layup and I'm like why the hell am I so wide open?

Turns out it was the other team's basket. And my whole team was yelling at me, "Bale, Caleb." But I couldn't hear.

And so I try to channel that kind of same energy when I'm filming in public.

It's like, how do I just completely ignore the fact that that dude over there is looking at me very puzzled? Cuz the reality is is it doesn't really actually matter. And more often than not, they're thinking about it in the

moment and then seconds later they're driving and they're paying attention to the road or their kids screaming in the back and they don't give a [ __ ] But I thought that was a very interesting video because you got to exercise some

interesting skills that you have not ever in the past, which is you probably did, I think we could comfortably comfortably say 30 different camera setups in like 12 hours.

Yeah, like 10 or 12 hours. Yeah. Yeah. Which was insane. Real quick before we move on, let let's talk about that real quick. Like a lot of people in the comments on that video ask about what was the film setup. Some people think

that I filmed it myself. Um which that is wildly impressive on those walking shots, but talk to us about that. Like what was that like?

We've had to get very scrappy. And also in the past year, I think my my actual production skills have leveled up so much. I used to do it all the time when like I filmed quite a bit at uh at my

last role but all sit down talking head stuff and then before that I did some commercial work and and some stuff like but nothing crazy like nothing like super but like it's been interesting that we have some ideas like you also

have this one idea of going to New York and filming in the back of a taxi cab and I actually have like in my head how I shoot that and how I do that with like GoPros and stuff Like there's been some

interesting production setups, but uh for this one particularly in like in particular, I think we rented No, we bought we bought a Ronin a Ronin uh RS4 or something like that. Um RS4 Pro, I think. Yeah, it was an RS4 Pro Ronin.

So, knowing that like we have to basically be in and out. Uh this this restaurant or this convenience store will kick us out if we're not if we're there for more than two minutes. And we officially got permission, but they

still they were like, "Make it quick." Every It's funny because like when you walk around with a phone and a camera, you're like, "Yeah." Which is something you can't you can get a phone. Honestly, it's something we we

should have considered is a phone stabilizer and just shot with with an iPhone. That would have been probably a little bit more inconspicuous. But we did a full RS4. I had wired earbuds and then I had you lapped up um with I

believe the DJI Holyland mics like some something like these wireless mics. The audio isn't the best like the audio quality but for running gun like everything that we're doing right now it's not like a it's not like a wired

Sennheiser mic or anything. We're going for speed. Like I remember you telling me I know you haven't like you haven't done this much before but like we're going to need to be in and out. You need your white balance. Like I think

sometimes I even did auto white balance cuz I'm not going to sit here and like fumble with the settings. Like you need to be in and out for a lot of these different shots. And you also I'm going to say something here real

quick. It was a little bit more dramatic and intense than that. There were at the gas station. I literally turned to Trevor and I was like, "You have two shots, two takes for each of these scenes. I'm going to walk up, grab a Red

Bull, and you have two attempts to get it and then we're moving on." Like I I it was a little intense. I was like, "You have two tries and if we [ __ ] this up, we're moving on."

It It was It was very stressful. But I'd say by the time we got to the London video, I had it mostly dialed. Like, oh yeah, you can tell I'm in a whole different world and I'm like But like we had the

pre-production dialed, but that that was the setup. It's the most basic like what can go wrong. I'm on autofocus. I have like auto settings. Like anything that I can eliminate going wrong in those scenarios, I learned that like we need

to do it. We also just had a certain amount of daylight and so setting up I think was that the video that we had a monopod for? No, that was a London video.

Yep. Um but we had very quick we've I I almost very rarely I think used an actual tripod.

Yeah. And I went handheld with the gimbal just like this. I mean and just sitting there like shot like the we're going to do a top down shot.

Cool. Holding the gimbal right here like and we're going to go and roll. Um, very interesting production challenge, but but like that's how we did it. And we're scrappy with it, too. Like I think we taped a mic to the inside of your helmet

and that's how we recorded the audio there when we drove down. Like I just had you roll through the neighborhood on your bike and we recorded audio a different day and I just like taped a mic into your helmet or something. And

we wanted it to sound real, but we also wanted it to be hearable and legible or not legible but hearable, understandable. You know what I'm saying? And so what we did for the the real nerds out there is we did not

record that audio on the same bike. We actually I'm kind of a weirdo and I have a couple Harley-Davidsons that I love.

And we picked my quiet one, the Panam, which is it sounds like a sewing machine basically. And so it would still have the sound of being on a motorcycle but wouldn't be quite as intense as the Road King. And then in post, I remember you

added but more like you had control to separate my audio from the bike audio, but you added in the road king so that it was authentic. So like if you are a Harley nut and you watch that video, all

of that [ __ ] is real. We recorded all of that folly. Like when I take off and you hear the exhaust get louder and louder, like we recorded all of that on the third day, I think, right? Yeah.

All planned with pre-production. all in like this is how I'm going to tackle this and how this is how we're going to do it. And that's probably the biggest lesson that month. We all I think we also launched the course.

Yep. Yeah. April 4th we launched the course and it didn't do that much in the beginning. Like it did better than we expected by all means, but compared to what you guys see now, that first month gave us no indication that it was going

to take off and go in our world intergalactic, right? like we did not see that. So we go from April into May and May was interesting. There was a lot of different things but I think the cool thing that we could talk about is

there's there's two things. The second thing will be this is the month that the course did start taking off. But the first thing that I think we should talk about Gary Gary Vaynerchuk uh if you don't know who Gary Vee is, what rock

are you living under? Um, this man pioneered the whole space of being a entrepreneur who's creating their personal brand online and making content at scale. Like he pioneered the whole thing. All these individuals that you probably watch and learn from right now

that you admire, they are here because of the trail that he blazed. And Gary for the last couple years has been focused, as far as I understand, far more on V friends and Vayner Media and really operating those things. and he

wanted to do something really [ __ ] cool in May for V friends. They had a massive release. They partnered with Topps, the card like playing card collector card maker Topps. And I'm a little ignorant on this world, so please

excuse my ignorance. Anybody who's really in it, you can roast me in the comments, but Topps has a limited edition uh version of their cards called Topps Chrome Cards, I think is something like that. and V friends was doing a

Topps Chrome release, which as a side note, y'all, is [ __ ] wild. It was not that long ago that Gary was drawing these characters on a piece of paper and had this idea and within less than 5

years, that dude is doing a partnership with the number one card maker. I I could go on. I I really admire Gary. I love him to death. He's the best. But he wanted [snorts] to document that month of releasing that by bringing back Daily

V, which was a series that he did, a vlog series on YouTube where for a very long time, he was uploading almost every single day, a vlog from the previous day, usually literally just 24 hours prior cuz the team would stay up all

night, edit it, and then release it. Bunch of savages. And he wanted to bring that back kind of like a nostalgic play to document the whole process. And in doing that, he invited all the OG characters that had been videographers

over the years, which was so cool. Like, uh, I know that Justin Dalres came back and filmed. Uh, David Rock, obviously, Tyler Babin, Jason Marina, right? Dustin Lee did an episode. I did an episode. It was awesome. Stfan did an episode from

Ask Gary Vays. Like, it was it was awesome. It was so cool. And I felt really honored to uh be invited, but then I felt a little insecure because I have not edited a video in years. I mean

years. I've cut maybe like a short here and there and stuff like that. I did a couple of shorts edits, but for the most part, I hadn't done any editing. And we were the plan was like, we're doing

quick turnarounds. I have historically that one of the things that I I think I tried to build my editing brand on when I was an editor is like my speed. I was really fast, but now I am not. And I

wanted to deliver for the man, right? Like Gary's asking me to come out and stuff. And so we tag team that.

Mhm. And that was really cool because you've been a Gary fan for a while now, right?

That's how I got introduced to you was through a fellow uh I was doing internesque work for uh it Tyler Babin, Gary's original videographer after Drock.

Yeah, he came in after Drock. Right after Drock. I was doing some some work for him back years and years ago.

Um, and that's how we actually connected. But yeah, I literally grew up 16, 17. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing right now is because of Gary, which was a very surreal being in a car with him. [laughter]

And yeah, that was weird. That was so cool. And so what we did is we tag teamamed it. I filmed and then I was giving you the footage and you were editing. But let's be real, in addition to that, Trevor was also helping me. Cuz

again, I have not I haven't been the person on the go filming in a long time.

And what people don't realize, that man is a mutant. He has energy like I have never ever seen. If he has coffee or he doesn't have coffee, the man is electric. It's crazy. He's go go go go go. To this day, he's still that way,

right? I saw it. I witnessed it. I had heard stories you had on like at our on our last team you so many times were like I've been in this scenario trust me with Gary and like bro Gary would have me up

for three days straight and I'm taking a private jet flight trying to sleep and edit at the same time like I didn't like I heard it and I was like yeah yeah like yeah you worked hard but like I don't

know if I realize the extent of how this man moves until I'm traveling cuz you I was editing But I was traveling with you while while we were going.

Yeah. Like Trevor was helping me carry the bag with all the [ __ ] camera batteries and stuff like that. Like you were helping me with that. You were helping me grab headphones. Like all kinds of things. I mean, I remember we

were standing in the auditorium where the the convention was happening and I hadn't eaten in like 9 hours. And I I have a fun little thing where if I don't eat for a super long time, I get like

low blood sugar, shaky, and I end up fainting. And so Trevor like ran and grabbed me food and stuff like that.

Like that was super helpful. Back in the day, I didn't have that. I would just grab like a, you know, my blood sugar was low, so it' be like, "Oh, there's a Snickers bar in the green room. Cool.

I'm just going to down the Snickers bar real quick." And one thing that I want to mention that to be super clear here, it wasn't that Gary was demanding these things. It's that I respect that man so much. And I would see time and time

again, we'd have a full day where he's, you know, shaking hands and answering questions for hundreds of people. And then immediately on the next, you know, 4hour flight, he's on his phone working the whole time. And it's like, God, how

can I not, you know, I remember at the time, I think when I was working with him, I think he was like 44, 45, and I was, you know, 24, 25 or something like that. And I was like, this dude's almost

double my age and he has triple the energy. This is insane. I'm at the point in my life where I should have the most energy and be the most willing to stay up and scrappy and I was. [snorts] But

it was wild. And so the the thing that was really cool though is you got to edit two different Daily Vs, the series that I watched in high school. Yeah, that was cool.

That was an amazing moment. And and one thing that was really cool, too, is I think um we got to work with team Gary as team Gary is now. And that was also really cool. I mean, like Sid obviously

great individual, great human. Uh, did a great job of corraling all of us crazy characters cuz you know, Stefan, David, Tyler, like myself, we all have things that we're doing, right? Like we either have jobs or we're building our own

businesses. And the fact that Sid and the team were able to help corout Nura, everybody was able to help corral all of these moving parts and make this actually happen, right? Like um shout out Victoria like awesome EA like that

was super helpful. Aaron on the team managing YouTube like gangster like that was it was so fun but it was also so interesting for me to see how things have evolved right as they should but that was that was kind of an interesting

moment but it was cool for you to see some of the behind the scenes of the stories that I've told and stuff like that you know the war stories.

It was all true [laughter] he just moves. He just doesn't stop. He is awake 3 hours like I remember we did like five cities in 3 days or something like that.

It was wild. Uh like uh somewhere in Canada to uh somewhere else in Canada.

New York. Yeah. To somewhere else in can Toronto, New York uh Orlando, Atlanta, back to V. Like insane. And he just moves. He just doesn't stop. Don't meet your heroes. But my respect for him only grew. Yeah.

Of just like seeing him interact. Like he always makes time for people. He never stops.

at that booth. I remember he never Who walked by when we were at the at the booth? It was um Oh, [ __ ] Why am I blanking?

I know. I know. The rapper. Yeah. Waka flocka. Waka flocka just walked by the booth and Gary doesn't go and talk to Waka. Like clearly I think Waka like wanted to like like hang out or do something but like

he just they had talked backstage. They had connected. Wa was like, "Yo, I'm going to stop by the booth at some point." and Gary was in the middle of a conversation with somebody who um was in a I'll just

say a wild scenario and uh this would have been a really good moment for Gary and for V friends and he could have easily stepped aside taken the photo and then come back but instead he focused all his attention on this person who uh

was going through a wild scenario and really looked up to Gary and got a lot from him and I remember like both of us that like was a a crystal clear moment.

The thing that I noticed too is, you know, we've been able to work for some great people. We've been able to work with some incredible characters this last year and a lot of them have huge personal brands and are talked about a

lot online. But there has never been a human that I've walked through a public place with, not one person, who has more people stopped to ask for a photo, but even more than that, people whispering being like, "Oh my god, that's Gary Vee. I

don't want to bug him, but wow. Like, I've been watching him since I was in junior high. I've been watching him since I was in high school. Like, incredible to see. And I think for me, it was a moment where this was about

halfway into us building my personal brand. And I just remember I never have ambitions of ever being at Gary's level, nor do I think that I'm capable of doing that. That man is on a different level.

But I remember thinking, okay, with the audience that we're building, I really want to act like Gary and do what Gary does, which is put the audience first above his own self-interests at times where it is so clear how much

it would help him, he still chooses the audience. And I just I I thought that was so cool. And that's something that we've tried to take into the content that we make, right? Is like putting the audience first. Like for example, we got

my dog here who's kind of disturbing things and stuff and we didn't have really any time other than now to film this podcast and it's a little distracting and this is your third podcast and you've been doing this

despite him being like in the background and that's distracting. See that's distracting but we're still trying to do this because we've never done anything like this. We've never shared this kind of information on our approach to growing my personal brand and it's a

tiny little way. It's an insignificant example comparison to what Gary has done, but it's it's one way that we're trying to apply and live that out in what we're doing, which I think is the coolest thing. So May was fun getting to

work with Gary again and hang out with him and travel with him and seeing him in action. It was really [ __ ] cool.

Trevor also edited those daily V's. Like we got done with that trip and like he said it was like five cities, six cities, something crazy in a very short amount of time, like 3 days and we were exhausted and I turned to Trevor. I'm

like, "Oh man, I'm so excited to go home and get cozy in my bed and sleep." And he's like, "I'm so excited to go home and get cozy with the editing." Cuz he still had the videos to edit. So, shout

out to Trevor and shout out to all the editors that uh don't get mentioned but stay up all night editing content for the people who are in front of the camera. Um, you deserve more acknowledgement in my opinion. But

beyond that, uh, we go into June and this is when like May is kind of when I felt like things started picking up because the other thing that I forgot to mention that we'll just hit really quick is in May is when the course took off.

May 1st, the course was at 49,362 views. Um, so that was after a little less than a month of being up and it for a while there was looking like it was actually flatlining on YouTube.

And to be clear, 49,000 views in the first month is [ __ ] absurd. We never could have dreamed or imagined.

Yeah. Like uh so that's where it was at as of May 1st. Uh as of May 31st it was at 165,161 and climbing every day. I mean, to this day, we're still getting anywhere from like 2 to 4 thousand hits a day. Like,

that's where the curve absolutely took off and this thing just took on a a mind of its own. And I think with that, uh, also put the, uh, because we made a workbook associated with this course.

Um, I don't know if we've actually talked about that. Uh, it was completely free. All you needed to do is just add your email. We actually ended up growing our email list. Like right now I think we're at

like 44,000 people on that email list mostly from the course alone. But that was when I think up until this point we've been we've been spending a lot of our time in uh pre-production production for our YouTube videos and having fun.

And this is I think to where I think you're about to go with this. Like this is where along with that video things started to change.

Yeah. I'd say up until this point, probably 65 to 70% of my time was spent on the amazing clients that we partnered with from the very beginning. And that was awesome. And then like Trevor said, we not only were racking up all these

views, but there was a lot of people, a high percentage of the viewers were downloading the workbook. And with that, we were also getting a lot of people going to the homepage on our site applying to work with us. Like in the

first year alone, we got over 800 companies that applied to work with us. Like that was insane. We had so much demand. And I remember we got to a point where I started to feel pretty like a little freaked out cuz I didn't know

what to do. And I had all these people being like, "How are you not sending emails? How are you not doing this?" D.

And I had so many people, which I'm grateful for. These are like gangsters in business that for whatever reason care about me and what we're doing and are giving me advice on what we should do. But it was a lot of different voices

with a lot of different ideas. And I just remember end of May or no actually like beginning of May I'm like I need help on the operation of this and what I thought I needed was an EA. And so I

think it was in May when we posted that I was looking for an executive assistant. and I started running interviews and everything like that.

Well, come June um or actually really end of May, I was conducting quite a few of these interviews and one in particular really stood out. Uh I interviewed uh Kate Padoba and I won't go into all the details to to spare her

privacy and everything, but it was [ __ ] unbelievable. Like I had a lot of good interviews and a lot of the people that I talked to I loved and it was amazing. Like I was so grateful at

the quality of individuals that were coming through, but Kate stood out and I remember uh we ended the conversation basically being like, "This isn't going to work out. Um I'm not going to be able to figure out how to afford you." All of

those things. And this was the craziest part. I remember later that evening, Kate followed up via email saying, "Uh, totally understand that this isn't going to work moving forward and everything. I love what you're doing. Um, I remember

you mentioned that there's all these new people coming into your life and you're having a tough time managing all these relationships. You want to check in with people. You want, you know, if it's their birthday, you want to send them a

text or you want to send them a card or a gift or just different things, right?

I was just suddenly getting an influx of humans in my life. And you know me, I'm pretty introverted. And so, like, I don't necessarily naturally have the gift of doing that. And so she said something that I uh built for the

executive that I work for right now uh is this simple Google sheet, but it was incredibly useful. It was the relationship database that she used to manage all the different people in her exec's life. And whether they were

professional personal whatever family members, all of that. And she sent it to me and she said, "Feel free to duplicate this and customize it to yourself. Any good EA will know how to use this." And I remember I probably texted you within

seconds of seeing that. I was like, "Fuck, I got to figure out how to get Kate." And through a series of meetings with my CPA and coming up with how we were going to make this work, we determined that uh we

didn't just need an executive assistant. We needed a chief of staff, somebody to help with the operations of everything, right? Not just the operations of my life, both personal and professional, but the operations of the business.

Because now it was turning into a business. Before it was kind of like I had a cool job and you were helping me make content to get more jobs.

This was the moment where we started turning into a business. Now mind you, I'm not saying we're like some big business or anything like that. I hate when people pretend to be something that they are not. We are not that. But it

was way more serious than what I anticipated in the first year. And so we brought on our chief of staff, Kate Padoba. And that's when I feel like things started to get a lot crazier.

June is kind of the moment. And I remember turning to Trevor because I didn't I don't think we filmed anything in June. I didn't really have any time.

Like I I'm looking here. Yeah, we had nothing that we filmed. Um I in June I went on a long motorcycle trip, like a week-l long motorcycle trip. That's something that I've never been able to do in my entire career. So as a side

note, the really cool thing about this year is not only did we do a lot with the business content, but I also got to live, which was [ __ ] wild. It was a crazy first time in years.

Yeah, it was so crazy. I just spat everywhere. Like it was it was amazing.

And so June was a little bit slow from a content perspective. We didn't have a ton that we were working on, but things were starting to ramp up with the offers we were working on and the plans that we

were building for what we were going to do for the second half of the year. So June, I'd say the biggest thing is we hired uh Kate. That was awesome. She is the [ __ ] best. We're so grateful for

her. Moving into July, we went to Mexico. We went to Cabo and I spoke at I loved that little dance move right there. Yeah, we we'll we'll give that.

[laughter] I did have a few surveys. Um you just kept singing that in the card [laughter] just I remember for a month after that trip you just just one more please. One more. Yeah. I mean, there's there's something about

sipping a Corona with lime in Mexico that just hits a little bit different. But we went there uh to do my first public speaking moment ever. I had spoken in front of like teams internally uh at the companies that I've worked

for, but never done anything publicly like this. This was the first time that I was going to like talk on like a stage and it was it was crazy. And it it wasn't like it was a massive group,

right? Like it was it was Takis like it was a group of like a hundred people and I was freaked the [ __ ] out. Uh I remember really trying to hide my anxiety as much as I could but there was

no hiding it. But let let's talk through that cuz that was an interesting trip cuz not only did we capture that talk which we uploaded which was a funny moment where I thought I completely bombed it and then I watched the footage

and I was like oh that wasn't half bad. That was actually kind of decent. But then the second thing which was interesting is we developed a very interesting view that now I preach as like gospel but in the hotel room I

remember we were jamming and working on something and that's where the whole contrarian take came. Do you remember that?

Yeah. I feel like we we get some gold when we go on trips. It's funny. I've discovered like when we're traveling uh for all these shoots because throughout the year we basically have shot I think like what two videos

in Vegas itself and the rest has been Airbnbs and Joshua Tree and Utah and all these different places that we go for some reason. I think it's just cuz we're in the same room together. That's where we come up with I think some of our best

ideas. One of them was like we were analyzing why uh you were talking through why certain brands or personal brands can blow up when others don't. And I think that's when you discovered the uh the three levers of brand positioning.

Yeah. The contrarian take, the delivery, and the wrapping paper. And the most important being the contrarian take. We were just like looking at the the clients that we've worked with this year who was having crazy results versus like

mediocre results cuz that's the reality. Not everyone was like a [ __ ] banger this year by no means. Um and the big unlock that was so wildly clear was all the ones that were doing a really good

job had a contrarian take. Either a belief they held that was fundamentally different than the other people in their industry or a contrarian action. Right?

like they were building a luxury treehouse hotel in a world where like luxury and outdoors is not typically associated, right? They were they viewed that you could build a strong business and manage a big business effectively while also prioritizing your family and

spending time with your f like these were contrarian takes and we were starting to notice like oh man these things are really standing out. Then I started looking at people that I've worked with in the past or worked for in

the past or other creators that I admire from afar and started looking like whoa all of them came onto the scene with a wildly different view than a lot of others. And at this point like you mentioned we were starting to have some

success with our content and it was way more than we could have ever imagined in our first year. And so we're like why are we having success? What is it that is like you know I I tend to be

self-deprecating. I like that kind of humor. I'm trying to work on it to be a little bit less self-deprecating. So, you might notice that, but I've never thought of myself as a really articulate and clear communicator. Now, a lot of

people are DMing me and saying that in the comments. I appreciate it. And I'm really trying to [gasps] like let that sink in and really receive that, but up until this point, I did not think that was the reason why anything was working.

And I do believe the main reason why is because we came onto the scene from the very beginning talking about optimizing your personal brand around trust, not virality. In a world where every other video that was served on the right side

of our videos suggested, every video competing with us on the homepage was talking about how to go viral. And not that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't think that's the way to optimize. That was our contrarian take.

But to your point, I think an interesting thing that we've recognized is we need to be sometimes in different environments in order to get new ideas.

And so that's something that we have operationalized. It was something that happened. It was a happy accident. Back to earlier your Bob Ross reference.

It was a happy accident that we recognized, but it puts us in a different environment. I find that we think differently. And also, I'm going to be real. For me at least, I [ __ ] love my little family that I'm building

here. my girlfriend, my dog, and I really find that if I don't go away to do some of the really deep writing, I get pulled not because they're pulling me, but because I want to go hang out with them. And so

sometimes I think it's really nice to carve out time where I'm not going to and I don't like I prefer not to call my family a distraction. I I used to think that way and I think that's a real

interesting way of thinking. Uh, family is wildly important, but I am more prone to stepping away from the writing process if I'm at home. And so, something that we have done is we got Jesse's big ass calendar, which is

[ __ ] awesome. Shout out Jesse. Shout out Taylor, who runs all that [ __ ] She's a gangster. Big ass calendar.

Highly recommend that you purchase this. Uh, we planned out our film sessions, our writing sessions, and writing retreats. To your point, we're going away for a week next week, but we're not just doing that next week. We're doing

that several times throughout the year because we noticed that was something that led to great insights and new concepts, right? And so I think the lesson for everybody here is it's it sounds so weird. Observe yourself in your process. If you are doing something

that leads to something great and it happened by accident, turn that into a process. Operationalize that [ __ ] Right. So I think that was very interesting.

Huge. No, I mean that's what it is. Like all year it's been constant iteration.

Not only on the content of like those little things of like, oh, we can we operate better this way or we like to do things this way. That's constant iteration there. Also constant iteration on the concepts and things that you were

talking about in the content. Yes. Every podcast that you've done, I've watched you articulate better and better the brand journey framework. Like all of these different things that you talk about articulated much more clean. like uh you were talking about the levers of

brand positioning in the last few podcasts that you've done and the latest one was so much better than the first time you talked about it cuz you're constantly iterating on that content and that's probably something you'll see like the number one thing that I can

give us props to I think this year is just the constant iteration like we we set a date we did it to our point earlier and we iterate on it after that after we've done it and after we realize

we like to do things a certain way you like to do things this way like this is how I learned how to book. Look, I I pick our locations now for filming and everything. How I learned was I picked a

location and Caleb [laughter] didn't like it because it was a really ugly studio. I was trying to be cheap. Um, and Caleb was like, "No, I get more reinforcement being uh in really dope filming environments." So, I'm like, "Cool. Oh,

got it. Now I can pick locations for you." Something that I had to learn the hard way is a lot of times creatives and me when I was more immature and younger and and earlier in my career, I viewed

what now I call iterations and how you're calling it, I thought it was like indecisiveness.

I thought, you know, people that I've worked for, I thought they were constantly just changing their mind and just couldn't make up their mind. But in reality, they were pinballing iter iterating their way to the ideal end product. And that's what we do

massively. And something that I think is a good takeaway for two different [clears throat] groups here for the person who's behind the scenes, the the creative who's making the content, uh, be more flexible. Understand that that is crucial. And why would you want to be

in an environment where everything is always staying the same? Like you want to constantly be improving and constantly be getting better. And two, for the talent, I would say I would urge you make real changes after each film

session. Take note of what you liked, what you didn't like. Put those into place. But also have some empathy for your team to know that, at least this is the way my brain works. I've been thinking about this for a long time and

they're just hearing about this. And so, yes, the team needs to adapt. Like, when I come to you with a crazy new thing that I want to do, you do need to adapt to that. But you do a good job of doing

it quickly. But I also think, at least I think, I try to contextualize it for you. I try to address the fact that I know I'm changing my mind. I said the exact opposite last week. This is completely different. I know this is a

pain in the ass. I know you've already sunk 12 to 15 hours into this project, and I'm telling you, we're doing it completely different or we're scrapping it all together.

And that's [ __ ] painful. But I think if both parties have a little bit more empathy for each other and a little bit more understanding that ultimately both are wanting to make the best product, it will be viewed less as whiplash and more

just as you said, iterating. I think that's probably the number one takeaway so far in this entire podcast is like if you can operate like that for your first few years of your personal brand, you will grow. Like I take notes when we do

this thing. I'm I'm taking notes and we're iterating and we're just like those things time and time again. If you do one, two, three things better on every every shoot that you do, you eventually get to a place that's really

you're in a really good spot. I agree. I completely agree. So, stop staying stagnant, everybody, and stop doing the same things over and over, right? What is it? Uh definition of insanity everyone talks about is doing the same things over and over and

thinking you're going to get different results. Like stop doing the same [ __ ] over and over if you want different results.

Hey you watching this video right now. I know that this is overwhelming and a lot for you to take in. If you want to go deeper in a slower paced environment, we designed something specifically for you.

Rston Select is your one-stop destination to not only learn, but to actually implement. We're talking pre-production production post-production, and platform strategy all through the lens of educational content. Click the link in the description below if you want more

information. Now, let's get back to the video. Moving into August, we have two things that we should cover. The August video that we released, let's talk through that one. Do you remember which one that was? That was the respecting

the audience's time. Ah, we learned our lesson. This is what we teased earlier. Learning our lesson a second time.

Yeah. Uh, yeah. We had we'd filmed footage with a client of ours earlier in the summer um getting B-roll behind the scenes. Our idea was to make a what we were literally just talking about of like I know how to show up to shoots

with Caleb. I know what to bring. I know all these different things. Uh we have a whole like SOP on that internally for uh how to film with It's a pretty hefty playbook actually.

huge like everything we've learned over the past few years, everything you've learned, especially over the past few years of filming with different types of talent. And our plan was to make that into a video using that B-roll footage

and everything. Um, it was yet another I think lesson where I like I booked I think I booked a shitty studio. That was the first time that I did that because it was my first time picking the location. After the course, um, we went

into it. We were like, I think both I develop like a series of questions to ask you. Um, and then it was like, we're gonna loosely follow the SOP and like that's going to be the video and we show

up to film. He's leaving out the fact I did zero preparation for this. Every other video leading up to this I had done at least 10 hours of pre-production on minimum way more for most of them.

And this one I did zilch. This is where we're like starting to, you'll hear me talk about this in a minute, like this is where we're starting to get stretched very thin.

This is why we're bringing on the chief of staff that we just did like a month ago. Like this is where things This is why uh the month prior we actually didn't film a direct to camera video. We

had to film at the Takim Moore event and use that as our video which actually did surprisingly well. But like we're starting to have to be more creative and we need but the thing we forgot is like we still the the 12 hours of concepting

this intro or this hook for this YouTube video. We forgot like all this pre-production, all this work that we put. That's what made the first few videos so successful for us. And I think I don't know.

I got cocky. That's what it was. I thought I could show up and do a better job off top cuz I think I Please hear this through a humble tone.

I think I do a decent job on podcasts and I explicitly tell the host, "Do not send me the questions ahead. It's all off the cuff." So I thought, well, we'll just rip a podcast. We prepared more for

this podcast than we did for that [ __ ] video now that I think about it.

Actually, we didn't even do packaging. We didn't even talk about packaging before we were gonna do it.

Which is never the case. We literally never do that. Well, we learned our lesson. Yeah. We're just so busy and we're we're diving into things. But that we sat down to film that and it was very clear after an hour

of not getting anything that I'm sitting here like, "Oh god." I mean literally I was getting frustrated with myself because I just he would ask me a question and I was just not answering it well or maybe some of the questions to

be fair I was like ah I don't know if I love that like and I remember there was one point where I am a big fan of the Wimhof breathing and I literally was like I'm just going to stop and right

there with the camera rolling with Trevor right there I just closed my eyes and turned on YouTube and put on the Wimhof breathing to try and calm myself down and get myself into the right headsp space and that didn't [ __ ] work. And we

It did. What? I think it did. It calmed me down a little bit, but we still tried to do the video and it was still like that I think that that brought about the pivot which was like good point.

You know what? We're not getting this today. Like we are not we're not going to get this video. Not to the We can get a video. It will not be something we want to release.

Yeah. At all in the slightest. not nowhere near the level of the first five or six videos that we've done. Um, so I think you like I think you had the idea to pivot into, you know what, here's

[snorts] what's happening. You turn to the camera and you were like, I just tried to film a video and if I had tried to put this video out, I wouldn't be respecting the audience's time. Um, and it was like a one minute insert of just

talking about that and talking about how like I'm not going to put this on you.

This is me. I promise I'll show up better than the next one. And that was the video. It was like a minute and 30 seconds.

And we posted that for that month. We wanted to stick to that goal of one a month.

And that month was a one and a half minute video. Me admitting that I had not shown up and I had not respected the audience's time.

I chose my time over the audience's time. And it was a moment I remember so distinctly too just pounding into my head as I was sitting there in front of the lights with nothing to say being like this will never happen again. I

will not make this mistake again. Yeah, that was a it was a big lesson for us. We have not made that mistake since and we have promoted like we have we have dedicated so much time now into pre-production. We're like I think the

next video or maybe it was the one after that. I think I want to say we put 12 hours into just the intro of just like beating up this intro for a whole day of the next one was the the brand

strategies video. Oh, well that one was like a full day and a half which we filmed like 2 and 1/2 weeks after this moment.

I remember that. And I had spent before. So we we um rented an Airbnb, a sick one that you chose cuz the studio was like a a boowbo. Yeah, studio was boowbo. But the next location was [ __ ] sick. I

remember I walked into that Airbnb. I wish we had that on camera because I was like, "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god." Like it was so cool. And uh leading up to us being out there, I had probably

written put maybe like five to eight hours into the rough outline, like the overview, not details, right? just an overview because we did not have that much time. Like Trevor said, I was really [ __ ] busy. This is a point

where like things started getting crazy and so I didn't have enough time to be able to do this. But I put enough I put like an evening and a Saturday morning into it. And then I think we went out on

a I want to say like a Wednesday night or something like that. Thursday morning we woke up and what were we doing?

We wrote the whole video. I think we just rewrote it. Rewrote it. Yeah. That's actually a a trend. We have big trend.

We've like you've taken like the first stab at it and then we sit down from this moment on. I think we've done that with almost every video which is like you do like a a rough draft at it and

then we have a full day or two of sitting down and actually writing the video together.

Like scrapping the original version, be like that's dog [ __ ] Cool. And now that's out of the way, we can actually write the video.

Looking through our wrapping paper library, coming up with the packaging beforehand. Like lessons all learned, but like that's that started now. Like to my point earlier of like I'm still being onboarded. It's only month six now I think that we're now sitting down and

we write these videos together and I'm seeing your process and how you structure the videos and how you like to flow and the disclaimers you like to add in certain areas. Y all of those things now start to happen

with this video. But we wrote that video in it was like a long 14 hour.

Yeah. 14-hour day in that Airbnb. Uber Eats for meals so that we wouldn't take a moment away from riding. Like, yeah, plenty of Red Bulls, that's for sure.

Like, that was But it was fun, too. Like, we love those days. Yeah, they're the best.

But we did that. Wrote it in 14 hours uh on Thursday and then Friday we filmed it in 14 hours, I would say. Probably like 12 to 14.

That one was like 8 hours of raw footage. I remember. Yeah. This is where my brain now starts to come back to me like this at this moment in time. But yeah, that was like eight hours of raw footage. Our second

biggest video that we had done. I think the video ended up being 3 and 1/2 hours.

Yep. Yeah. So 8 hours down to three and a half hours. So we did that. We did the multiple scenes like we had done in the other videos. Um and then we also made a workbook that went with that. So that

was really cool. You made that workbook. the one that we did for the um personal brand course that we released in April.

I wrote that and then Vin [clears throat] Vin Calibrizzy, an amazing designer gangster uh did that. And then for the brand strategies video, you did an amazing job of taking all the exercises that I walked through in the video and

translating that into a workbook because again I I didn't have any time. But we knew that we wanted this was like, you know, we were talking about zero to 100K, 100K to a million, million to 10 million. There was a lot of actionable

[ __ ] and so we wanted to give people the ability to actually take action. And so you did that whole thing. You created it and designed it. All of that. We put that out in August. No, no, that was

released in September, right? I think it was released the next month. Yeah. But yeah, that was like the first time I had actually written like something in your voice, too. Like that was like it was your it was your words, but it was

Oh, but those cover letters, like the intro letter, you wrote that. You 100% wrote that. I read it. Maybe made a couple tweaks, but like this is when I remember this was the first time cuz you had submitted some like LinkedIn posts

before and stuff and they would get close, but I I never felt like it was like there. This was the first time where I read something that you had written for me. I was like, "Oh [ __ ]

that sounds like me. I'm good with that." So that was cool. Took six months, but that's that's what it like now you're not like this is the moment where I'm starting to like come online. I almost feel like of like you

are getting busier. Oh, I know how to pick locations now cuz I have [ __ ] up picking a location.

I know how to write like we've written a workbook now. I can take this and like I understand our workflow. I understand this is video number six. Um I understand now a lot of these things and I can actually dive in and get my hands

dirty. Yeah. And then uh we're about to get to September, but the last thing that I thought was really cool in August was I and we've been talking mainly about the content, but this was a cool thing with

a client that I I figured I would share. Uh I went out to one of our clients and did a content workshop and that was [ __ ] awesome. That was so much fun. I think we kind of revamped the way that

they went about making content. uh helped improve some some efficiencies around their normal content flow, but also introduced a couple of really fun variations of how to make content and pair it with something that you really enjoy, an activity, a hobby, whatever.

Um, but then the other thing that we worked on, uh, which I didn't expect going into it, but we actually rebuilt their editor onboarding plan. And what usually took 2 to 3 months to get an editor up to speed now takes them two to

three weeks, which was incredible. That was really fun. Um, and I remember on that trip, it was another moment where being away from home and being in another environment. I got a couple of really good points and ideas that we

later end up talking about in the content. But yeah, let's go into September cuz things start getting a little crazy. September, Trevor got the greatest bicep workout of his entire [ __ ] life. Talk about filming the career advice video in London. So, this

was similar to the if you struggle with video that we did a few months prior. We like I think we enjoyed that so much we decided to do another one. We're in London with a client.

Yeah. Um doing doing some It was so fun. How can we get a video out of this trip?

Like um like could we do a vlog? Oh, we're with the client most of the time.

Like let's give them our full attention there. But we had a free day. To be clear, the free day it was one day was one day the day after we had done the flight from Vegas and we arrived to our

hotel rooms at 11:00 p.m. and the next morning we're getting on a train at 6:00 a.m. And I don't fly internationally that often. So like jet lag was [ __ ] real.

It was crazy. You had the you had like a a nice seat too that you could sleep in.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how you I don't literally was, shout out to KM, you can actually a full 67 human can lay out completely flat. It was amazing.

Crazy. Yeah, we did that and then we took a train into London cuz we were staying up north. Um, and we took a that morning we took a train ride, the B&M B&M, our horrible accents.

Yeah, we took a train out to London and our goal was we have one day to film this. We can't reshoot this. not like the first video where we were basically condensing what we did with the first video in 3 days and we're like let's do

it in one day cuz we've we're better at this now. And not even like like not like our normal like 12 to 14 hour days like we had like 10 hours.

We were finishing the last scene for that on the plane. [laughter] I wrote the shot list for that. I think one of the scenes on the plane going there cuz this is still at a time where like we I think in recent months have gotten

much better at 2 months prior starting production uh pre-production on the video but right now we're in the thick of it. We're still like Kate's being like Kate's brand new onto the team.

We're in the thick of it right now. Um so we're we're writing we're still finishing videos the day before. But we did that in 10 hours. We went to five different neighborhoods in London. We're filming uh on the on the tube in the

tube. We're filming front of Big Ben. Big Ben. Yep. Uh Piccadilly Square or Piccadilly Circus. Sorry.

All those things. And I mean we we learned our lesson. Same like this time we like we just went like gimbal or monopod and we were just running around the city setting up shots really quickly. Audio was a very big uh issue

with that shoot that we had to reorder some some new mics. Um, but yeah, that was an insane, but we got a video out of it.

To be clear, the lesson that we learned from it was, uh, maybe next time, don't try and jam like a wild video to shoot with many different scenes in one day after you have a really long flight in a city that

Trevor had been to once and I had never been to. I think one of the only like things that made that possible was like 3 months prior I was there. Yeah.

So, I knew roughly where we wanted to shoot. So, I was like, I know that we could shoot it here. I don't think we're going to be able to like in front of the palace. It's all gated off. But, um, yeah, we shot that

all in one day. It was a bit too much, but we got it done. I remember we ran out of time, so we had to film the last scenes at the train station.

Yeah. And we were just You were falling asleep. I was shot. You were just It was gone. I was in pain. I was in pain.

Trevor was physically ill. I was mentally ill. Like it was it was wild. There's so many other things that people don't realize that you're managing in that. Like you have, you know, every once in a while security coming up and

being like, "What are you doing here?" Right? And I then one of us has to navigate that conversation. Um I'm trying to remember these lines and say them correctly. And then half the time the audio the [ __ ] mic that we were

using the and Holly lands are great but not when you're out in the wild with a distance between you because those were cutting out constantly. I mean there was so many times where I'd be across the street, not that far across the street

and I would deliver the line and Trevor would be like running again. And I was like oh my god.

I could see the frustration. And the thing that sucks is like that's not Trevor's fault. That's neither one of our faults. I remember it was so bad at one point you were like considering trying to find a camera shop to buy a

new lav like a new mic. Yeah, that that was wild. But it was fun. We had a blast. I think the lesson though is we would probably spread that out over two days next time.

We did learn our lesson of of pre-production from this hence forward. We never had an issue with that and we kept getting more and more like this was finished the day before. We keep getting more and more in advance of the video

actually finishing the video. That was that. But we got a video out of it. It in this season, you're still in this season. Really, it's getting very difficult to find three days to go out to Joshua Tree and film a giant 6-hour

video. How can we come up with what can we do to get content on the fly?

Yeah. Which brings us perfectly to October because in October, we started writing the December video. This is the true moment where we started being two months ahead. Let's go. We wrote this together. What what was the video? Let's

let's start there. The December video was uh what uh basically how you went about creating the course, right?

Yeah. Like why we did it for free and all of that. Yeah. And we wrote that together. This is the one that you mentioned earlier.

Uh this is the video that we spent 12 hours on the intro. I actually think it was the London video.

editor Max, you can leave that moment [laughter] in, please. That was a great moment. As a side note, thank you, Max.

That that though, like I remember we started dedicating I think we dedicated a couple days just to that one. And that one's a smaller video for us.