This episode of the My First Million podcast features an in-depth conversation with author Mark Manson, best known for his international bestseller, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck*. The discussion covers Mark’s journey from a struggling blogger to a global phenomenon, his views on the “pickup artist” industry, and the psychological principles behind his writing and personal development philosophy.
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Writing, Psychology, Personal Development, Content Creation, Marketing, Social Dynamics
Introduction [00:00]
Sam Parr: Andrew Tate is what men with no self-esteem think high self-esteem looks like. Unpack that a little bit.
Mark Manson: So, it’s funny like watching the rise of Tate because he’s like a copy and paste of 20 million plus copies sold, the champion, the no-fucks champion. Official title, I think. Mark Manson, welcome. Welcome to the pod.
Sam Parr: Thanks, man. It’s good.
The Reality of “Overnight Success” [00:18]
Mark Manson: When The Subtle Art came out and it blew up and it was like at the top of all the bestseller lists and stuff, like everybody in the publishing industry were like, “Oh, you’re like the new phenom, debuted author, overnight success.” And I’m like, “Overnight success? I’ve been grinding on a blog for 10 years. Like, what do you mean overnight success?”
Shaan Puri: Were you good at the beginning or did you suck?
Mark Manson: No, dude, I was a fucking disaster. I was a total disaster.
Shaan Puri: Obviously, you became a great writer, but I want to talk about what you’re doing now, which is the YouTube video or the YouTube channel. Is that like the main thing?
The Influence of MrBeast [00:50]
Mark Manson: When I saw MrBeast, a lightbulb went off. I was like, I love MrBeast, and like I’ve been watching his shit for a long time. But one of my frustrations with him is that it’s all very…
The “Game” and Personal Growth [01:08]
Sam Parr: Intro to the camera here. We got three-time New York Times bestseller, I believe.
Mark Manson: Yeah.
Sam Parr: We have 20 million plus copies sold, the champion, the no-fucks champion. Official title, I think. Mark Manson, welcome. Welcome to the pod.
Mark Manson: Thanks, Ben. Good to be here.
Sam Parr: Been a fan for a while. Um, although I got to admit, I read like a ton of your blogs and I didn’t read the book until like, I still haven’t actually finished the book, but I until we booked this interview, I was like, I should probably go read the actual book that he’s most famous for. Yeah. But there’s something to like the fun of like, oh, I liked his his old shit. You know, like the cool band thing.
Mark Manson: I was a fan before he was cool. Yeah, that that whole thing, yeah.
Sam Parr: I actually was going to ask, so when I was writing that intro, I was like, this is pretty great, pretty impressive. But I know I always wonder this, like when you were younger, like let’s say, let’s say a researcher was watching you when you were like, I don’t know, between the ages of 10 and 20.
Mark Manson: Mhm.
Sam Parr: Would it have been noticeable that you approached things a little different even when you were younger?
Mark Manson: I was definitely different when I was young, for sure. I don’t think it would have been obvious that I would I would I was going to end up an author or in the personal development industry or whatever, but uh, you know, my whole life, my teachers were like, Mark’s different, he’s special. We wish he would do his homework. Uh, we wish he would stay awake in class. Uh, but he could do great things one day. Like that was kind of the constant refrain throughout my childhood.
Sam Parr: Because you just weren’t interested in school or what was the situation?
Mark Manson: Yeah, I was bored and and I would I would just whatever I was into, that’s just kind of what I like I used to bring poker books to class and read them in the middle of like physics class and my teachers would get mad at me and I’m like, well, I’m just like studying poker, you know.
Sam Parr: Were you big into like the during like the Chris Moneymaker phase, basically?
Mark Manson: Oh yeah, yeah.
Sam Parr: That’s cool. Um, did you ever like go all in on it?
Mark Manson: I tried. So it’s funny, um, early on in college, I I decided to sit down and take it really seriously. I made a few thousand bucks, which when you’re like 19 or 20, it’s massive, right? I’m like, oh my god, I can pay rent all summer off my poker winnings. And then uh, I hit You were in college?
Mark Manson: Yeah, this So you were paying like, you know, 20 grand for school but ignoring school to make $300 in a sit and go?
Mark Manson: Exactly. You’re like, I’m staying up till 5:00 a.m. like like, I made 200 bucks last night. Right. Um, and and then I hit my first big downswing and lost like half my bankroll in like maybe three days, four days. Right. And I was like, oh shit, I don’t think I can pay rent this month, you know, I’m like, this kind of sucks actually. Yeah. It’s like a very very unhealthy uh unhealthy life. I love the game, but the lifestyle that it requires, like the grinding, the the patience, like the the emotional fortitude to like handle the ups and downs, it’s Yeah, after about six months, I was like, I don’t think I’m built for this.
The “Pickup Artist” Era [04:06]
Sam Parr: And you there’s a lot of like degenerates you end up hanging around like doing it. So you kind of look around and you’re like, this isn’t healthy. It’s like, yeah, yeah. It’s like they’re not smoking, but there’s like a secondhand smoke of their like life that like I don’t want to be inhaling right now.
Mark Manson: For sure, for sure.
Sam Parr: So I think we had kind of a similar um set of interests. Maybe it’s like very common for I don’t know, guys that are going through some rites of passage. It’s like, yeah, you think you can play poker or like count cards in Blackjack and then then you sort of move on to like the next phase. Yeah, exactly. Um, where you know, there’s a I think 2005 Mhm. A book comes out that I know influenced you, it influenced me. Yep. Uh, do you know the one I’m talking about? Of course, The Game. The Game. Neil Strauss, yep.
Mark Manson: Ironically, my girlfriend at my girlfriend in high school before I went to college, we were like, yeah, let’s break up. We’re going to college in two different places. We were pretty mature about it. But she was like, here’s a book. And I was like, that’s the best backhanded compliment gift I’ve ever received. It’s like, your girlfriend giving you a book called The Game and it’s like, you need this for college. Yeah, yeah. Um, describe, how did you find it and what was like the next 24 hours after you started reading it?
Mark Manson: You know, it’s funny, it it it hit me at, depending on your perspective, the exact best or worst moment possible. Um, so my first girlfriend in high school had just cheated on me and left me for another dude, and I was completely heartbroken, just gutted, you know, weepy, whiny. And sucks even more in high school because like leaving you is like, she’s still there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re still in the hallway. Yeah. Well, I by this time I was in college, but like we had gotten together in high school. Anyway, it was we didn’t we didn’t you made the right move. So we didn’t split up. We were we were like, oh, we’re in love, we’re going to make it work. I’m going to drive back every other week and all this shit. And it’s like, no, that’s a horrible idea. And so of course she found another guy. You should actually look in the camera and be like, to the person who’s 18 right now, don’t do that. Don’t do that. It’s not going to work. The long distance girlfriend when you both go to college. Dude, just don’t do it. And uh, so anyway, I I was absolutely heartbroken, distraught, and just had like very angry and confused. And I remember being in a bookstore and seeing seeing that book like on the table. And I remember my first reaction was disgust. I was like, it’s like, what is this? Like, who would read this, right? And then I’m like, yeah, yeah, maybe I’ll read a few pages. And and I mean, Neil’s such a good writer. Like, it talk about somebody who knows how to like hook your attention and kind of suck you into a world. Um, yeah, I just I think I sat down and read probably the first 50, 100 pages there in the bookstore. Uh, and then I think I I read the entire thing in just a couple days. And and that was pretty much it. Like I was like, all right, like, you know, the one girl who ever liked me completely fucked me over, broke my heart, and every other girl I’ve ever met seems to have no interest. So clearly I’m not doing something right, you know, like I’m willing to give anything a go at this point. And uh, so yeah, I I I kind of got sucked into that world for um, well, I guess four years, five years. Uh, and then I eventually kind of stumbled into my first business was in that world as well.
The “Models” Philosophy [07:18]
Sam Parr: Yeah, and I want to talk about that because I think it’s again, like I it was like a formative phase of my life too. And so today, I think a bunch of people, rightfully so, you know, like like you, admire you, follow you, and you like add a lot of value to people’s lives, right? Like even though self-help kind of like sometimes gets a bad rap, like you’re by almost by definition, helping people with themselves, right? Like the most important thing. Sure. Sure. But I would say like it’s probably a rabbit hole you’re you went down now and content you create now, but that previous rabbit hole you went down and content you created was around there it is, there it is. Uh Oh yeah. This is your first book, right? Yep. Uh, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty. Yep. Um, at least that subtitle is is like, you know, Well, we can get to this in a second, but before that, that was a very, very intentional Yeah, that that’s jumping ahead a couple years, but yeah, keep going. So let’s start with, okay, so you read The Game, you get, you know, kind of the uh like I always say this about Tim Ferriss’s book, The 4-Hour Workweek, is like after you read that book, you have the 4-hour fever. Yep. It’s like for the next 4 hours, you reconsider your entire life in like a fever dream. Yeah. And I just tell people that when I give them the book, I’m like, you’re going to have this schedule some time. You’re going to need this weekend to have the 4-hour fever. Um, same kind of thing happens with The Game and you become you start, I guess you describe it, you start practicing it. So let’s start start with like you start actually like practicing it. For people who haven’t read The Game and don’t know the core principles of it, like what stood out to you at that time of like, oh, I used to do things this way, but this is like this kind of thing I’m learning, this new skill I’m learning. Well, so the there’s a funny thing about The Game, which is, and it’s it’s funny too because I would put The 4-Hour Workweek in this category as well, and that those are if I was to make a list of like the five most impactful books that I’ve ever read in my life, those two would be on the list for sure. Right. That said, I don’t actually like the majority of advice in both of those books, I don’t think actually was applicable to me or actually worked for me. Right. It was more just showing what was possible, right? So, um, and definitely more so in in The Game’s case than four, you know, 4-Hour Workweek, it it it it it’s primarily principles and mindsets. You know, my my issue with the 4-Hour Workweek was that it just it made it sound way easier than it was. It’s it’s you know, the the the real 4-Hour Workweek is uh, you know, work 16 hours a day so you can make money while you sleep. Um, but with The Game, I think the the really powerful concept that was very life-changing was that social skills and dating are skills that you can practice and get better at. Like that never occurred to me. It just like at up to that point in my my life, like most young people, I just kind of assumed like, well, either girls are into you or they’re not. And if they’re not, you’re kind of you’re kind of fucked, right? Or not fucked in that case. But like it it so reading that book and being like, oh, you can actually go out and practice and get better social skills and get better at being sexual and flirting and and connecting with women and doing all these things, like that those are all skills that you can practice. Like that was very revelatory for me. That said, when I actually went out and tried to do the stuff in the game, which was a bunch of cheesy pickup lines and they called them routines, like where like stories Magic routines. Stories you would memorize and all this stuff. It was a fucking disaster. Like it was just it was completely corny and and I felt very inauthentic and out of place. But like what was impactful is that it got me out of the house and like talking to women on a regular basis. And I realized like, hey, if I actually just get myself in front of a bunch of cute girls, I’m actually I’m not that bad. Like I can talk, I can make a joke. Like I can use my own personality as a starting point and just build from there, right? And so that’s kind of what I started doing through throughout college. And by the end of college, I kind of had developed a reputation as the big party guy, the player, you know, the guy who had four different girlfriends or whatever. For me, I had the same experience you had, except for uh the lamest moment, the rock bottom moment is when you hear another guy saying the same thing because he read the same book and you’re like, oh shit, there’s like a hundred of us running around. Yeah. It’s like, this thing I was going to say by itself was actually a little bit cringe. Yeah. Maximally cringe if she heard this from another guy. And I was like, oh, I can’t just like there’s no memorizing your way to success here. But the principles I thought were good and you’re right, the forcing function of like getting you to like kind of uh believe uh self-confidence to believe that this might actually work, that you can actually approach somebody and have a good conversation and that that could lead to something was like pretty powerful. Yeah, I even do this with podcasts. Like I have like a note of like, what’s the first thing I want to talk about with you? Like I kind of know that the next 90 minutes will be great either way. Sure. But that first minute is like the social anxiety piece, which is like the same thing with with these pickup artists, which is like most people just aren’t even approaching anyone. Yeah. With anything that’s of interest that might lead to a conversation. Um, so for me that was like the bigger thing. Do you uh still have that kind of like do you still think about that moment of social anxiety, that first um that first moment and like was the game helpful in like getting those reps? For sure. I mean, I I I I had a lot of social anxiety when I was young. And and it’s funny because it took me a long time to appreciate that that you know, because when you’re kind of naive and a newbie, you look at all the pickup lines and you think it’s the pickup line that’s working. Right. And it’s like, no, it’s actually the pickup line is just the excuse to kind of get you through your anxiety, to give give you the courage to actually go say something. It doesn’t really matter what you’re saying. Right. And uh I actually had a very for, you know, kind of like you hearing overhearing another guy say a word. I actually got very lucky early on because I was trying to use some of the stuff I read in the game. I started I tried to do like some fucking coin magic tricks and stuff. Like just total disaster. And uh I remember I I I was having no luck whatsoever and I actually got very fortunate in that I was in a bar or something and I was talking to these three girls and I was like trying to do a magic trick and they were like really into it and really excited and I kept fucking it up. And then like it kind of got awkward and at a certain point they realized they’re like, wait, like you’re just doing a thing like kind of hit on us. And I like tried to make a joke and it was super lame or something and they kind of rolled their eyes and they started to walk away. And I was like, wait, I have another magic trick. And and I remember one of the girls turned around and she looked at me and she was like, you know, you were kind of cute. Like, you should just be yourself. And I was like, you know, like head explode and I was like, and and that was kind of one of those first moments where I’m like, you know what, like, why don’t I just start like use my personality as the baseline and then iterate on stuff that already feels natural and trying to instead of trying to be like some fucking weird dude in a book, you know, that I can’t believe I spent $10,000 in two years of my life studying all this shit and I could have just like walked up and been like, hi, where are you from? And it would have gotten me the exact same results. There’s a book that’s like a uh food diet book. I haven’t even read the book, but the last page of the book is like a summary. Uh you might know the book because you’re you’re you’re an author. Um, it’s like, here’s the like, after all the studies and all the diets, because like, you know, there’s like a trillion diets out there and like they’re like super some are super complicated. You’re like, you know, peeing on a strip to see if you’re like in ketosis or not. Like you can do you can take it to the nth degree and it was like, yeah, so it seems like the rules are um, you know, eat real food, like not like packaged processed food, like eat real food, not too much. Yeah. And like and it was like that was like basically the the the core of the advice. And it’s like, oh, yeah, and like, but if you actually intensely followed that, you would get all the results you want, but like there’s this thing where we sort of search for this like other answer, the secret answer. Yes. It can’t possibly be just that. There there’s a weird thing that happens in a lot of these industries, which is the concepts and frame frameworks that sell well are often counterproductive. Right. And you see this in diet and nutrition, you see this in exercise for sure. You see this in social skills, personal development, self-help, you see it in the pickup world. Like it’s really sexy. Like when a guy stands up and he says, I have a three-step model that works every time and you’re going to get laid like tile and you’re going to lose 100 pounds and you know, it’s really sexy and you really want to buy it and you like want to believe it and it works and it makes people millions of dollars, but then it doesn’t actually, it’s not actually good advice. Right. Whereas the good advice, like this is the other hard thing about these industries is that the good advice is boring. And so and the things that work, and again, this is true in personal development, it’s true with social skills, true with diet, nutrition, everything. The stuff that works is boring. It’s it’s it’s not the information that’s hard. It’s simply doing it. It’s implementing Right. consistently over a long period of time. That’s the hard part. And there’s no easy way to sell a solution to that. So the easy thing to sell a solution for is, you know, my three steps that work every time. Right. And I see this everywhere like because I’m mostly in the kind of startup business world, um, and like, you know, Warren Buffett, uh they’re like, you know, Warren, you’re pretty open about your strategies. Yeah. Um, and they’re not like that complicated. Um, why do you think that more people don’t do this? And it was either him or Charlie Munger that were like, because nobody wants to get rich slow. Yeah. It’s like, yeah, we just did this in public and he’s like, you know, I made most of my wealth like from the ages of 70 to 90. And like uh, you know, no nobody wants that. Nobody wants to hear that. They want to hear that guy who’s not done this, tell them that they can do XYZ faster or in a different way in a complicated way that like you know, you just didn’t have the info. Now that you got the info, now it’s all going to work. And like same thing like uh, you know, Y Combinator, which is the most successful like, you know, startup investor and and and uh accelerator, their number one advice is just make something people want. Mhm. And they’re like, what’s the great startup advice? Like, well, and then but then but then the the way it helps is like if you just tell someone that they don’t know how to use it. Yeah. But the question like the audit when you’re like, so do you think that people want this? They’re like, of course. And like, cool, so what tells you that? What what evidence is showing you that people want this? And they’re like, well, we don’t have any. Dude, it’s it’s it’s it’s like that bell curve meme where it’s like, you know, the genius and the the the idiots like, just make something people want. And then in the middle of the bell curve, it’s like, well, you’ve got to have these 12 steps and figure out these strategy, you know, and then the the Jedi is like, just make something people want. I love that meme. That’s I I told like that’s the meme of the year. It’s the meme of the year. It’s so true across so many domains. It’s amazing. Yeah, and I catch myself all the time and I’m like, I need what would the Jedi? Oh, the Jedi would just say like, Yeah. Do it because it’s fun. Instead of like, Yeah. you know, all these other things. Yeah. Um, when you look back, is Ben’s been flashing a bunch of your like, I I noticed Ben Ben he flashes a bunch of your things and they’re like Oh god. This is the cringe section of it. Don’t worry. It gets better. The interview will get better, but this is the cringe section. Uh, but you have like a bunch of these things that I’m like, they’re like just amazing headlines. We’re going to talk we’re going to talk titles later because you’re like a title master. Sure. But when you look back, do you how what’s the meaning you put or like what’s the label you put on these things? I think we’re both of the mindset that like Mhm. life is not really about what happens, it’s kind of like what you what you make of it and also what you tell yourself, the story you tell yourself about what happened. Yeah. Um, so like when you look back on that phase, is it just like um cringe and I don’t want to ever think about it? Like I hope my I forget about that? Is it like, no, that was actually really useful for me in these ways? Is it just funny now? Like what’s your reaction now? Uh It’s a really good question. I would I would say it’s probably like 1/3 cringe, 1/3, I think it was actually really important and informative in a lot of ways, and then 1/3 just kind of funny and just like, can you believe that happened? Uh I actually when I moved out here to LA, um I met up with Neil for the first time and we spent a day together and we spent like half the day just kind of being like, can you believe that happened? Right. Can you believe we actually did that? I look back though, especially now that a little bit more time has gone by, I really do think there there was kind of an underrated factor and I think this is very relevant because this is starting to happen again with Gen Z, with I think the pickup artist industry is underrated as a cultural or social phenomenon, particularly for young men trying to find identity or find themselves in like a very confusing world with a lot of information. Uh because it’s when I look back at that time, like, yeah, like we in the industry, the the coaches, we used to joke with each other. It was like, yeah, we all came for the women, but we stayed for the for the other dudes. Like it’s it’s most of the guys who really got into that, it wasn’t about the girls. It was they needed to feel accepted and and and validated by other men and and just I guess I don’t know, their masculinity, right? There was like a very there was like this yearning for like a masculine role model. And I always found that I was very aware of that at the time, but I didn’t really know what to make of it. Uh but as the years have gone on, I look back and I think like I think it blew up to the extent it did because because of that. I don’t think it was really about the the dating or the girls. I think it was just it was a generation of kind of post-feminism, a generation of like men who had fewer father figures, fewer role models, a lot more confusion about like who they’re supposed to be in the world. And I think we’re that’s that cycle is coming back today and you’re seeing a lot of that happen again with a different set of role models and uh a different industry. Well, let’s talk about one of them. Uh so I think Andrew Tate is like the For sure. uh you know, poster boy right now of that. Ben, can you pull up that tweet he has? You have a great tweet about Andrew Tate. I want to ask you about. Yeah, yeah. Andrew Tate is what men with no self-esteem think high self-esteem looks like. As a rule, narcissism is is always mistaken for confidence by those who have no confidence. From there, it doesn’t take much for the dynamic to turn abusive/exploitative. Yeah, so it’s funny like watching Tate the rise of Tate because he just he’s like a copy and paste of half the guys that were in that industry. Right. You know, it’s like all the shit he says, I’m like, oh yeah, I remember, you know, this guy used to say that. Oh yeah, that guy used to say that too. Oh yeah, that guy made a lot of money saying that. You know, like it’s all the same shit just recycled in a new package. I I do think Tate is uniquely charismatic and I think he has an interesting backstory that a lot of got young men respect. And so that that is adds to the It’s given him a lot more amplification. It’s also just a different era with social media and everything. Uh but And he like layered on an MLM. Yeah, right? So he just combined like three of the most powerful forces in the world. It’s like seriously. Pretty insane charisma with like this like cocktail of like words that cast a spell on young men. Yeah. And then an MLM distribution model where he’s like, look, cut up clips of me and post them everywhere and like that’s how you rise in the ranks and you get like you’re going to make money by promoting me. It’s which is insane. It it’s honestly, somebody really needs to do uh I mean, it probably we probably need some time, but like 10 years from now, I want to see somebody do like a really good book about him and like a a fair book, not like trying to smear him. Like take an honest look of like, who was this guy? Why did he blow up? Why did this work? Right? Like because that it’s I think it’s easy, obviously you can take the worst things that he said. It’s no secret some of the bad things he said. And you can just hammer on those all day, but like I think that’s way less interesting than just trying to understand like why is there such a demand for this guy again, right? Like I thought we kind of got over this and this kind of ties back into my first book Models. So like the pickup industry by like 2009, 2010, I had really, really become burnt out on on just the toxicity of it. And I I really felt that there were kind of two strains of dating relationship advice for men. One was basically promoting narcissism, selfishness, power dynamics. Right. And sure, that stuff can get you laid a lot, but it’s it’s at the expense of preventing any sort of happy or joyous long-term relationship or intimacy with any female ever, right? So you’re like giving up that potential to just like put notches on your bedpost and brag to your buddies. And that is a very bad trade-off. Like if you if you look at just in the terms of a man’s overall lifespan, that’s a very bad trade-off. Um and then so I was I was kind of like, okay, how do we like detoxify this this advice? What does that look like? Um how do we and it’s not just about treating women with respect, but it’s treating yourself with respect too. Because like what a lot of guys don’t realize is that yeah, obviously if you objectify women, it’s bad for the women, but it’s bad for you too, because you’re objectifying yourself. You’re start you’re basically just measuring yourself by how wet your dick gets. And like that’s a very demeaning way to view yourself and view your own self-esteem. And so I was kind of fed up with the whole thing. I knew I wanted to get out. I wanted to pivot out of the industry and I was like, well, if I’m getting out of the industry, I might as well just write the book that everybody needs to hear and nobody wants to hear, which is that this is all toxic and fucked up and stop doing it. Were you good at the beginning or did you suck? No, dude, I was a fucking disaster. I was a total disaster. Um, do you want me to talk about the content side or the marketing side? Uh, whatever’s more interesting. You you tell me. Well, I’ll I’ll I’ll start with the content side. It’s less interesting, but I’ll start with it because it’s quicker, which is just like most of my content was bad at first. And I think that’s true of anybody and you just get those reps in. You know, I I back in the day, back when blogs were still a thing, I used to get asked all the time like, how do I start a blog? How do I grow a blog? Make make make a living as a blogger. And my answer was always the same, which is like, write 100 blog posts, come ask me again. Right. And uh Have you seen by the way, MrBeast has like almost the exact verbatim answer? Yes, and I love it because yeah, it’s the exact same thing I used to tell people. It’s And it’s a combination of like, it’s actually the right advice because you need a bunch of reps and you need to suck for a little bit and get better just try to make each of the next video better. But it’s also it’s a filter. It’s like, are you serious or you’re not serious? I will help you if you’re serious. Yes. But 99% of you are not serious. This is the easy test. Exactly, exactly. And the funny thing is too is that it’s like most people if they go write 100 blog posts and try to make each one better, by the 100th one, they don’t need the advice anymore. They know what they’re doing wrong. They know what they need to get better at. So Was there anything that got you better? Would did you read something or follow some or you know, model your stuff after someone? Like, do you remember how you got good in terms of writing and content? My two big inspiration, I was a huge Bill Simmons fan back in the day. Wow. We were like very, very aligned. Like, I don’t know. Yeah. Back in the day, page, you know, page two, you know. Page two, yeah. And um, it’s I remember reading his I was like, his column each week was like an event in my life. It was like, I was so excited to go read it. And I remember thinking I was like, I want my art because back then the meta in this is pre-newsfeed, pre-social media, everything. So like in the blogosphere, the idea, everything, all traffic was either SEO or um the blog roll type thing. Yeah, like link farming. Like, you know, you would probably like write something spicy so that a bunch of other bloggers would want to comment on it so they’d link to you and like all this stuff. And it be it was very much a volume game. So like the the standard advice was always, you know, don’t write one big blog post a day, write 20 20 single paragraphs and post those as individual blog posts each day. It just that’s what’s going to make you grow. And I always hated that. That always felt very shitty and uninspiring. And so and I loved Bill Simmons and I was like, man, I want to be the Bill Simmons of my industry, right? Like I want to have these like epic 10-page posts that that guys just get lost in and like, you know, they like schedule their week around. Right. And you end up feeling like a friend. It’s like, it’s a hang. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it that probably hurt me in the short run and it helped me in the long run. Yeah. I tried to meet up with him when uh so we came out here, I was like, I want to schedule and I was like, who’s my dream guest? I was like, I would love to have Bill Simmons on this because I don’t he doesn’t do a lot of like where he’s the guest. I don’t I’ve never really seen any to be honest. Like Yeah, he’s like a uh he’s a big deal at Spotify now, so he’s, you know, he’s Yeah, it’s fine. But like whatever. Who cares. But but he he’s written some If you haven’t if people haven’t read this, go read uh I think it’s called the the Consequences of Caring. Unbelievable post. So good. Uh anyway, sorry, continue. So Bill Simmons inspired you to be like, I don’t need to like sell out to the algorithm the algorithm of that time, the meta of that time. Yeah, and it’s I also think it helped that I I was in a pretty niche and uh insulated industry. Like everybody kind of knew each other and everybody talked about each other and everything. So it it actually I think it helped me get get my name out even more because I was I did have a knack for writing, it seemed. And I did eventually start posting some pretty good stuff. And um and so that kind of got talked about and shared. Do you remember what was uh like kind of your first thing that broke out? I really in that era, I really don’t. I really don’t. It was so gradual, man. Like my it’s funny because, you know, Subtle Art is so massive. Like I it was funny when this is jumping ahead a little bit, but like when Subtle Art came out and it blew up and it was like at the top of all the bestseller lists and stuff, like everybody in the publishing industry were like, oh, you’re like the new phenom, debuted author, overnight success. And I’m like, overnight success? I’ve been fucking grinding on a blog for 10 years. Like, what do you mean overnight success? Right. Yeah, I was doing like, you know, that’s like the low status thing in society. It’s like, yeah, I’m a blogger. Yes, exactly. So you’re unemployed? Like, what is that? You know? Oh, I got I got stories. I got stories. I remember uh like 2013, 2014 and by this time my like my audience was pretty big. Like I had a few hundred thousand readers and uh I remember going home for Christmas one year and uh kind of gotten a argument with my parents and my my stepmom was just like, when are you going to get a real job? And and and she was like, you know, I know such and such like they’re hiring like a web designer. You know, you could go do that. And I was like, that’d be a waste of my time. And she’s like, oh, you could probably make 100,000 a year. And I was like, I already make 100,000 a year. And she just looked at me and she goes, no, you don’t. I was like, what the fuck? Don’t lie. I was like, do you want tax returns? Like, Jesus Christ. What do I have to do to get you people to believe in me? But uh, anyway, we’re jumping around now. Um, you know, the yeah, the content side, I don’t know. I just I had this weird confidence of like I saw that Bill Simmons trajectory over the page two days and I’m and he did it differently than everybody else. And I was like, why can’t I do that, right? And I I’m not going to post 20 times a day. I’m just going to do like one epic article that everybody gets excited about and that was kind of my MO. And it’s funny because that eventually became the meta kind of in the more Facebook era, um, in the early 2010s. Uh, so I was like ahead of the curve, I guess. On the marketing side, I was trash. I was just like selling does not come natural to me at all. It was very much something that I had to consciously train myself, practice. I took a bunch of copywriting courses, um, I like went to marketing seminars, pirated marketing seminars. Uh, like that was always the it’s funny because it’s like the the psychology side, the personal development side of everything, the social dynamics, the relationship advice, like that all came very easily and naturally to me. And it was just it was fun. It was like kind of a hobby. So it was like I never really had to like work hard to kind of figure that out. Like anything I was working on getting better at in my business, it was always the sales and marketing stuff. Right. Like figuring that shit out. I can’t find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better. So you’ve done uh so those content reps got in. You obviously became a great writer and we’ll talk about the book in a second, but I want to talk about what you’re doing now, which is the YouTube video. So or the YouTube channel and it seems like that’s I don’t know, is that your like is that like the main thing? Is that like this is my new baby? Right now that Right now, that’s the new main thing, yeah. And so uh I think you dropped the first first like um video maybe a couple days ago and doing super well. Can you pull it up? I want to actually do a little So one of my favorite little content things is this um this thing that happens in sports and football. Uh they like take quarterbacks that are about to be drafted and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this. They sit down, they like look at game film with them just to see kind of how they think. Sure. And um it’s my favorite thing in any podcast is like when you can really like not like talking the abstract, but talking the specific. Like like why did you do this? Like how did you think about this? Um and we we hung out with MrBeast and when we did that with some of his videos and the way he thinks you’re like, oh okay, I get it. I get like I learned something tactical but also just I get you more. Yeah. Um versus when you ask him general questions. And so I kind of want to play this game. I don’t know how it’s going to work, but we’ll try. I want to know the thought that went into this. Let’s watch the first 10 seconds. I want to hear you talk about it. Okay. What would you do if someone offered you $10,000 to do whatever it takes to overcome your social anxiety? Could you do it? Would you even know where to start? I decided to find out. All right, let’s pause right there. Yeah, yeah. All right, walk me through that. What a lot was happening there. What what was how are you thinking about this? Obviously some MrBeast inspiration here. He was very inspirational. So, let me zoom out for a second, uh more broadly, and then I can can come back to this video specifically. So, early in my career, I did a lot of coaching. First with the pickup stuff and then just kind of like life advice in general. I stopped coaching for a lot of reasons, but one of them was I was consistent I was very frustrated by it, which was that I feel like the incentive like the way the incentives are structured within coaching industries, uh in the personal development world are counterproductive, right? So it’s like if you’re paying me a bunch like let’s say, I don’t know, you have like self-esteem issues and you’re paying me a bunch of money to like help you out. It’s first of all, my incentive isn’t to fix your self-esteem issues. Like my my incentive is to make it feel like I’m fixing your self-esteem issues even though they’re still there. You’re like a pharmaceutical company. Right. I don’t assure you. Exactly. Exactly. And then on your side of the equation, uh it’s what often happens in practice, like on the customer side, is what often happens in practice is people kind of show up, they pay you, say $1,000 and they’re like, well, I just paid you $1,000, so you deal with it, right? Like I’ve been dealing with this my whole life. I just paid you a bunch of money, you deal with it now, right? Like that’s actually what they’re looking for. And so I hated that dynamic. It felt very I mean, it works some of the time, but in a lot of cases it felt very icky and I’ve kind of found myself in like awkward situations with clients and stuff. Uh so I I just got away from it uh entirely and just kind of stuck to books and courses and everything. When I saw MrBeast, a lightbulb went off. I was like, because I love MrBeast and like I’ve been watching his shit for a long time, but one of my frustrations with him is that it’s all very surface level. Like I’ll I’ll watch a MrBeast video and I’ll get to the end and I’m like, I want to know about the guy who won. Yeah, I’m like, tell me about the guy who won or tell me like you’re down to four people. Tell me about their lives. Like bring their families in. Like I want to see let’s get some juicy drama going, right? I talked to him about this. Yeah. And I was like, uh because I was like, he was talking about like a Netflix or like TV shows and it was like, oh like you know, what can you learn about TV show looking what do you learn from like TV shows that have been running for a long time do really well? Mhm. And he he says he’s like, uh also I think they can learn a lot from us and he’s like, he’s like, I’d love to see their retention curve. Um right, they they just don’t know where people are dropping off. He’s like, well, we found was like, if you hit them, hit them, hit them with like the more of like the action and the stakes and then the the quest and like the curiosity, you open the loop and like that’s going to keep people. He’s like, but he’s like, but I do think the one thing TV does well is character. He’s like, we don’t do any narrative or character and I got to figure out how I’m going to do that. But he’s like, I don’t know I he’s like, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around hung on this Lamborghini. Yeah, like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually underperforming our our expectations and like there’s so many things that we need to fix. But It’s your first rep, yeah. It’s the first rep, it’s like the first, it’s like the beta test. But super, super excited about the format. The concept makes a ton of sense and uh also like even just mechanically, like the things you just said, so if you know, coaching is getting somebody to like transform, uh the way that transforms is not information, it’s doing it. Yeah. Best way to get somebody to do it is if maybe a financial incentive or even like the fact that they agree to be in the content, that’s like a there’s a contract there to like do the thing. Um but you also, how can you offer $10,000 to why could you pay your coach? That’s not a sustainable business, but it is if it’s YouTube content, right? So like you have like almost the full loop to be able to make something uh work. It creates it creates a very beautiful flywheel of you’re helping that individual. So in in this video, it’s a woman named Melinda. So I’m helping Melinda and she did get amazing results. Uh you know, she’s finally doing the things that she’s always known that she should do or has always wanted to do. You get to all the people watching because I could easily make a video of me sitting at a desk talking about social anxiety for 15 minutes. Everybody’s heard the same shit. They’ve all like everybody knows what I’m going to say. Now, millions of people get to actually watch somebody overcome their character overcome. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, that’s what how people respond in that situation, you know? Right. It’s the difference between watching Rocky and then some or somebody sitting in a chair and saying, you should got to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different emotional register and the one you remember 20 years later and still think about when you work out and the other one you don’t. Totally. So, it’s the qualitative feedback on this has been honestly, it’s been some of the best of my entire career. Like we if you look through the comments of this video, there’s tons of comments of people saying, I cried, Right. This was me. Oh my god, like I was not expecting this. This is so powerful, you know, it it it’s pretty incredible. And so how did you think about those first 10, 15 seconds? I don’t know how how long we went, but like what are you trying to achieve in those first 15 seconds of this video? So with YouTube content, there’s always this question of like, what’s the hook? Like what’s going to get people to buy in? What’s going to get people to stick around? And one of the challenges that we face with this format is that all of the all the stuff that we’re having people do, it’s it’s it’s super abstract. Like social social anxiety is super abstract. Like how do you show social anxiety? It’s like not very obvious how you show that visually. Uh or like low self-esteem. How do you show that visually? So we were thinking about like, okay, what are like kind of like hooks or gimmicks that we can like implement into the format that can get people bought in, right? And the first and most obvious in this in the current MrBeast meta Briefcase of cash is fucking money, right? It’s like everybody on YouTube’s doing it. It seems to be working for a lot of people. So kind of the the obvious starting point was like, okay, well, what if we just the Jedi, right? Jedi and the Numskull. What if you gave them $10,000? Like what if you gave them $10,000? But the funny thing is is that it actually this intro did not perform very well. And so what do you what is that? What tells you that? Like you’re looking at the curve, you’re like, what what should it have been? Uh for what do you think it should have been to be like good? Well, I think the the issue with this is that even though it’s money, it’s still it’s still not visual enough. It’s still too abstract. And so I think what we’ve learned from this one is that the new approach needs to be we just need to start like mid challenge. So like the first challenge in this video is just approach. We yeah, we take her into a mall and we tell her she has to find somebody from Canada. And like she runs By the way, it’s so funny because she it’s it’s so like relatable, which is why I think you should have started with this. I was actually going to suggest this. Yeah. It’s so relatable because you tell her like, someone in this mall is from Canada, you need to go approach them and ask them and find them and she’s like nervous laugh and then she starts like faking being on a phone call, like which is everybody’s done it, like and then she’s like, it’s like, are you faking a phone call? It’s like, yeah, I am. I just I don’t know, it makes me feel more comfortable. Dude, she was so relatable. Such a spaz. Such a spaz. It was really fun. And and yeah, in hindsight, it’s like we should have just opened up with that and then explain the format later. Yeah. Uh but like Yeah, I mean, we’re new, we’re we’re we’re paving the road as we drive down it. So You also have to like cast. Yes. Which is hard. And you don’t know what’s going to happen and like this is kind of reality TV. For sure. You and there’s also like how this I would say this is a common theme from the pickup to uh subtle art to now this, which is how do you avoid selling out? So like when you’ve been in the the industry, you kind of know, okay, if I pull this lever, I’m going to get more juice. Yeah. Like maybe maybe this will let’s just pretend if this woman’s transformation was not that that crazy, but like in the edit, you could kind of like Oh, for sure. make this video better. It’s like, do we want to have our video be better or worse? Obviously better, but at the same time, we don’t want to sell out. How have you just dealt with that like how hard do I want to turn the knob or pull the lever of like you know, manipulation to make something work? The few that we’ve shot, all of them have been very successful so far, but I’ve told the team that I want to be eventually we’re going to hit one that’s not successful. Like we don’t help the person, it doesn’t work. Right. Or maybe we help them a little, but they don’t get there, right? Uh I think it’s very, very important to be honest about that and to actually make a video like have the video kind of explore why that is, you know? Um because it’s Yeah, there’s a credibility and authenticity that it’s just so, so important, especially and that’s it’s been one of my criticisms of my own industry for 10, 15 years of just like the lack of trustworthiness, the lack of credibility. Because if you promise the magic pill that works in two minutes, you’re going to sell more than if you say this takes you two years of tough work, right? Right. So you’ve probably dealt with that a bunch and like maybe now, you know, you got fuck you money from the book and you’re like, I don’t I don’t have to do that anymore. You know, I guess how’s that changed your psychology? Well, I’m very fortunate in that the book did well, first of all, it is true. The book did so well that I do have fuck you money, so I don’t really care like this is this YouTube project’s losing money and it’s probably going to lose money for a year or two and I’m fine with that. Uh but like it’s I’m also very fortunate that I made my money being very explicit about that, that like there is no magic pill, there is no cure all. Like it’s funny, dude, like even when you dig into research on uh therapies, like what modality of therapy is the most effective, right? You start looking at the research and it’s it’s startling because there is nothing that has more than a 50% hit rate. Nothing. Like not there’s no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes more than 50% of the time. Which is crazy because it’s like therapy is like the most tried and true, like we’ve had it for 200 years, like it’s the one thing everybody like is directed to go to. So there’s and in the world of psychology, there’s just so much that we don’t know what works. Like and what works for you could completely fail for me and vice versa, because everybody’s so individual. So to your point about casting, a huge part of our casting process is doing pre-shoot interviews, me doing pre-shoot conversations and interviews with the person to really gauge of like, is this a person I can help? Because for every video we shot, we talked to probably two or three people and half of those people, I’m like, you know, not really confident I can actually like Right. get them over the line. Whereas like with this, with this woman, you know, I talked to her and within 10 minutes, I’m like, yeah. No, I could give me a week with her. I’m like, I could get I can get something out of it, you know. Did you um, do you watch the TV show The Bear by any chance? I have not. Everybody says it’s amazing, but I have not yet. Yeah, it’s actually it’s a little bit, I would say it’s a little bit slow, but it pays off. It’s the thing you talked about, which is like the retention curve for me was terrible at the beginning because it’s it’s slow. It’s like it’s like one of those like cool shows where it’s like, no, we’re not going to like be clickbaity. Yeah. And I’m like, I’m kind of used to that hit. So I know like if you’re really going to pay this off with character, it’s going to take some time. But man, it does. There’s like a episode in the second season that’s like such a huge payoff on character that like now I’m like telling everybody, you got to watch the show, just get to the second season, get to the end of it. Yeah. The you know, it’s so, so satisfying. But there um, but we so we reached out to one of the writers and we were like, hey, you know, there’s respect and uh just we like to learn from people like that. Like how do you do this? How do you do this character thing? Um, have you learned anything in the process of like doing these videos of like because it’s new, it’s not writing, it’s not books. You now have like casting and characters and stuff that you probably haven’t done before. Like, first of all, I’m learning a million things. One of the reasons I wanted to do this too, I should specify is like you know, I came out of this period, the post-subtle art period of my career. I did three books back to back to back. I did a movie, like a bunch of traditional media success, like everything was wildly successful, very busy, lots of money. I moved to LA, I took took a few months off and I was just like, man, I miss like the grindy grassroots internet stuff, right? And but what I also realized is like, I miss being bad at something. Like I miss I miss just like throwing shit at a wall and being like, did that work? Like, no, all right, let’s try this. You know, like and in traditional media, I don’t you don’t really have the flexibility to do that. Like you’re you’re being if a studio or a large publisher is bringing you in, it’s because like they know you can make a hit and you need to make a fucking hit. Right. And so I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that yet, but like we should probably learn that. Yeah, so this is this is kind of another side statement and this gets more into like my personal strategy or like opportunities I see in the future. But like it’s the current media environment, I think traditional media they’ve always had the luxury of having that lock-in of like you’re in a theater and it’s more it’s like once you’re in a theater, it’s more difficult to leave than to sit through a bad movie. So everybody just sits through a bad movie. You know, it and it’s and the previous era of television, it’s, you know, you don’t want to sit there and like flip around for 10 minutes looking for something else, so you sit there and just kind of watch a mediocre show. So it’s like traditional media is coming from 100 years of a luxury of just having that buy-in and having you like locked in and and so they can take the time it requires to build character, build narrative, build build drama, right? And and create those very emotional moments that we’ve all had with our favorite movies and TV shows. YouTube is kind of the other way around. Like there’s always shit fighting for your attention and trying to get you to click off. And so YouTube is just retention, retention, retention. Like it’s merciless and absolutely brutal. And so I think we’re in an interesting media environment where YouTubers have become masters of retention and the content on YouTube is super hooky and click-to-rate. Right. Like those two two variables. Yes, and super hooky, very clickbaity, like addictive, but also kind of empty calories. Like you can just blow through like six videos and just be like, wait, what did I I don’t remember a single thing I just watched. And that’s kind of unsatisfying. Traditional media is like caught on the other side of things of like, wait, shit, like people are watching our shows now with like their phones in front of them and they’re like, they’ve now got five different streaming services they can pick from and they can switch it easily switch to another movie like mid movie, right? And so they’re trying to catch up on the retention side of things and I think YouTube is is trying to catch up on the the character development and drama side of things. And I think whoever figures it out first is going to like win really big. But anyway, back to the MrBeast thing and the coaching thing. So I was watching MrBeast videos for a couple years and then like last year I was I was kind of taking this break and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my own career. And I had felt this about his videos for a long time. And and I started thinking I’m like, man, like what if you what if you built the challenges in a way that like forced character development? Like what if the challenges weren’t built around like, you know, standing in a circle or uh you know, keep your hand on a car. Like what if it was built around like a real personal issue that like you have to investigate to like try to understand. Right. And and that’s when the lightbulb went off because I’m like, not only does that potentially create like very amazing transformative YouTube content, but it solves that coaching issue as well. Because when you take somebody who has struggled their entire life with say anxiety or an issue, the problem is never that this comes back to the information thing. The problem is never I don’t have the information to fix my problem. The problem is they’re just not doing it. Right. Like they’re not fucking going out and doing it. And so and they could pay a coach 1,000 bucks and the coach can say, okay, well you paid me 1,000 bucks, now go do it. And sometimes that works, but not always. Or you could say, I’ll give you 1,000 bucks if you go do it. And fix your own shit. Right. Like what does that look like, right? Like what is like the most effective lever for behavior change is financial incentive. And so what if you actually create financial incentive for people to actually go deal with their shit and like do the things that they’ve always known that they need to do and they’ve just never had the guts to do it. And so that’s when I was like, holy That’s kind of genius, yeah. I was like, fuck, I need to make this. Uh so this is our first attempt at it and it’s funny because this was shot end of April, early May. This is we’re recording this end of July. Um there are I like I’m already aware of like 15 things that are wrong with this video and like there are like it’s it’s actually