Leaving LinkedIn and the Power of Professional Focus with Jacob Warwick - Damns Given 2.02

Hello, welcome to Dams Given. This week, a podcast about radical clarity, quitting LinkedIn, and, uh, to be honest, why most people will struggle to have either. I'm Nick Richmeyer, your host, and today I'm gonna be sharing with you my interview with Jacob Warwick, a multimillion-dollar salary negotiator from Execs in the City. But before we do that, just a little bit of housekeeping. A reminder that all our episodes are available at damsgiven.com. Subscribers there get a little bit of extra content. In fact, if you want kind of a cheat sheet for today's episode, make sure you go subscribe right now. We've got subscriber-only super show notes. You'll get some application points from me, next steps specific to every episode. Regardless, make sure you like, subscribe, and follow wherever you're listening. And probably the most important thing is we're really trying to have a conversation here. And, um, some of you have gotten in the habit of sending us emails and responding and asking follow-up questions or commenting in your podcast feeds or on YouTube. That's super duper important to me. Um, I want to have those conversations. I love those conversations. It helps us learn and get sharper together.. So make sure you do that. If you want to send an email, you can send it to podcast@culturecraft.com. That's podcast@culturecraft.com. And I'd love to hear from you. So Jacob Warwick, you may not know the name, but he's an executive coach and negotiation strategist, like I said, big into behavioral psychology and persuasion. And he primarily works with Fortune 500 C-suite leaders. And he really started as a LinkedIn strategist specialist. He helped people get discovered and connected and did ghostwriting and built a huge massive network on LinkedIn. And then a few weeks back, kind of set off a bomb and said, "I'm out on LinkedIn." He is one of the original ghostwriters, built a 25-employee firm doing it and said, 30,000 connections later, I'm out. Um, and it got me really, really curious. I've spent some time with Jacob, I've talked with him, we've engaged, we've disagreed, and I thought, you know, we should really have this conversation. He's known for saying out loud what most people in professional circles are afraid to say. I think that's part of what makes him a good negotiator. Um, transparently, some of you are going to love Jacob. Like, he is so straightforward, so clear, so direct. And some of you, like, you're gonna get a little twinged or triggered by the— by things that he says. You, you may find parts of his personality not to your taste. And to be honest, that's what I love about him. Um, he's so fully himself and has found a way to leverage that into a really exciting career, which is honestly what so many people tell me they want to do. They want to be able to be themselves and build a career out of that. Um, And so, there's a fearlessness that from him that on first glance might come across as ego, but that's not really my experience. It really is what I see as like a honed kind of clarity about what matters to him and what doesn't. Something that's shifted over time. You'll hear that in the interview that what mattered to him was very different 5 years ago and 10 years ago than it is today. And with that, he has made dramatic decisions about his work. And he has a willingness to be misunderstood. You know, as much as some of you know, I'm not a big LinkedIn fan, even though I spend time there. I didn't invite Jacob to come on the show to beat up tech or to convince you to quit LinkedIn. Maybe we'll do a different episode on convincing you to quit LinkedIn, but that's not what this is. Really, we're always exploring this intersection of tech and culture and business and how these things are evolving. And, um, even as they increase in their extraction, how do we find answers in the midst of it? Yes, walking away is an option. You can walk away, right? You can be done. And that's a little bit we'll talk about tonight. Or no, for most people, you're going to stay and you're going to find solutions or, or choose a different path or be more specific about how you use these forms of technology. And technology is this ever-changing thing, right? Now, next week on the pod, I should say, we're going to have— our guest is going to talk to us about in the AI era, what's the future of software? So we're going to— we're exploring these ideas, these realities from so many different angles. But really, Jacob, I ended up landing on him to have him in this newest season of the show because I tell leaders all the time that the two most important things required of them are humility and courage. And the second one is in the shortest supply. Not that humility is having its heyday, let's be honest, but we are all living out of a lot of fear. And we talk a little bit about fear in this episode. And what I've seen in Jacob is an enormous amount of courage, not the least of which this most recent decision. So stay tuned as usual for the end where I reflect a little bit on, on what I learned along the way talking to Jacob and what I think you can take from him. And, uh, once you're done, make sure you just keep up with him. You can find Jacob in his newsletter at execsinthecity.com. Uh, until then, uh, let's bring on Jacob. All right, well, as mentioned, I've got Jacob Warwick here from Execs in the City, and we're going to talk today about giving a damn about privacy and your mental health and all of those things as it relates to these online platforms. It's a subject we talk about a lot, um, but we're going to get it into very specific here. Jacob, welcome.

Thanks for having me, Nick. I appreciate it.

For people who don't know you, which shame on anybody who doesn't know you, they should, but for people who don't know you, Jake, give a, get a little sense about who you are, what you do, and then we'll talk a little bit about LinkedIn.

Sure. Well, I, uh, I guess I owe a lot of what I do to LinkedIn. I'm most well known for being the guy who was originally a ghostwriter, and this is before ghostwriters were really a thing on LinkedIn, but we built a ghostwriting platform and, uh, had about 25 employees for a company called Discover Podium, of which I was the CEO of. And drove millions of dollars of business through LinkedIn. That eventually became a trap, which we will likely talk a little bit more about later, or if you want to read an article I've put out about this later, but it became a trap. And instead of selling the business, I shut it down. And what I expected was to find solace in the woods here in Montana. And what happened was all of the traffic that that business generated was redirected towards me, which is something I wasn't really anticipating. So all of the highest fit clients filtered towards me and that started to develop more of an executive coaching type business or more of a consultancy. And then from there, I have, I guess you could say, niched out into becoming more focused on negotiation. As I've studied more about behavioral psychology, influence, persuasion, and how it works at the highest levels of the Fortune 500, which is where much of my client base comes from, I've decided to share a lot of those tips with others on what to do, what not to do, and some of the traps in that. And I'm probably best known for not being able to keep my mouth shut and saying what other people want to say, but can't because they hope to get employed someday. So I'm likely your best unemployable friend or someone you poke fun at and just say, well, thank God it's not me kind of thing. So I don't expect everyone to know about me. I was just over about 35,000 followers and I've spoken on the topic quite a bit and I've shared in Forbes and Fast Company and, you know, the traditional crap that you see all the marketers talk about, like I've done that stuff, some of it to some success and a lot of it to my chagrin. So I'm excited to talk about it with you today.

Yeah. And I should say we met on LinkedIn, right? So we, we would, this conversation is a function of that environment and I've experienced in real time, right? Jacob Warwick, your ability to say, you know, direct things. I think one of our initial tangles on LinkedIn was you were basically like, hey, save your kind of self-help theater for somewhere else because people are trying to hire you here and they don't want to know about your feelings. Some version of that back in 2013.

I got, I got reamed for that one too. I, uh, on the recent LinkedIn Lunatics post, someone's all, I was scrolling through his history and this white man savior guilt has a post about victim mentality. Careful. Right? Like there's just comments that just absolutely bashing me with thousands of thumbs up and everything. I was like, oh geez, here we go. Here we go. Yeah, I preach self-agency and not victimhood. And for those who have done a lick of research about me, it's from being a child of rape and growing in a dysfunctional household with substance abuse and really kind of living this white trash fairy tale. And I got really fricking lucky in my early 20s and rode the wave of LinkedIn from 18 years old. I didn't go to college. I couldn't afford it. And I was homeless for a while. Found success on LinkedIn. Oh, almost all of my career to LinkedIn and that wave and the visibility it provided. And as a social media manager, really took advantage of that and drove myself from $7 an hour to $250,000 a year in about 2 years.

Yeah. Let's do a little bit of the archaeology, right? Because I think the story of your initial firm and that firm's rise is sort of what you discovered is the seed of kind of how we got here. So, Tell a little bit of that story, you know, that kind of first wave of, 'cause what, what era was that in LinkedIn? What years?

It was 2016 through 2020, really.

Yeah.

Maybe 2021 a little bit.

Those 4 to 5 years on LinkedIn, you and I didn't know each other at the time, but like, that was crazy.

Yeah. I referred to it in the gold rush. Now there was, there was a period a little bit before that, that I was, do you remember when LinkedIn used to rank you amongst profile views at a company? Do you remember when they would do that? So I got a job at Xerox. I was a contract position, but I negotiated it to a director-level role and I was 24. And I put director of marketing at Xerox at 24 and was immediately a Forbes 30 Under 30 finalist. Like I got the knock and like they were talking about it. Now I know that's a trash ranking now.

I didn't know at the time. Well, you could end up in prison. I mean, most of those people end up in prison, so be careful.

Yeah. Well, thank— maybe it was a good miss. Right. I was disappointed. They never even communicated that I didn't get it. I just got the magazine in the mail and it was like, you know, Sean White on the COVID and all that. But anyway, so I was the number one most viewed profile of every employee at Xerox and they had 140,000 employees. So it was my face, this kid, and then it was Ursula, the CEO, and then it was the CMO, John Kennedy, and the VP of advertising, so on.

Right.

And so Xerox was like, what the hell? I got invited to do Social Tools Summit. I got to speak at Microsoft and I was 24. Again, it was all a perception thing. But what I did at the time was I worked for really shitty startups in my early career because I didn't have a college education and I was competing with people that did. And it was right around the '08 collapse. So there was a lot of opportunity, but it was low wages. People didn't want to go after it. LinkedIn was taking off. So I was able to take jobs that were much beyond my pay grade for a much lower cost because I didn't know any better. So I was a marketing manager for $12 an hour. And then I worked in downtown San Francisco for $30,000 a year, $35,000, something like that, not knowing that that was poverty level because everything was poverty level to me. Right. So I was doing the jobs that nobody else wanted. And those jobs are highly volatile. These are Series A, Series B, sometimes seed stage companies that don't have a lot of money. And when you're in marketing, you're last to hire, first to fire. I imagine nobody feels too bad about cutting the 22-year-old on the payroll. You know what I mean? So the problem is still $4,000 or $5,000 a month to live in San Francisco or near it, right? Plus taxes and all that. So if you were gone, you were homeless. And I did experience homelessness after, even after the Xerox experience, mostly from pride and not knowing what to do and being like, the kid that was overelevated in title and then trying to find his place again. So anyway, from a social media perspective, one of the things that I experimented with was I'd A/B tested headlines and titles and there was no filters on LinkedIn back then. So given that I was a marketing manager, what I did was I reached out to every director and VP of marketing I could find on LinkedIn in San Francisco, and I would send 1,000 connection requests in a day because it only takes a second. Just pull up a list, connect, connect, connect, connect, connect. It was basically like easy apply. Right. And then I would see what conversations started from that and what didn't. Right. That was it. I didn't put a whole lot of effort in. Then I went to Seattle. I did the same. I went to New York. I went to Dallas. I went to Denver. I went to every major Chicago, every major metropolitan area. And I did the same, connected with at least 1,000 VPs of marketing. Then I realized, oh, there's a title above VP, CMO. So then I did that and then I did it with salespeople. And I, so there were no limits. I had 45, 50,000 connections on LinkedIn at 20. 5 years old, right? Mostly because I wanted them to see I'm a director of marketing at a Fortune 500 or whatever. I wanted them to see that I had cloud and that built awareness naturally without even, I didn't even have a message to share. It was literally spray and pray similar to, I would go on ZipRecruiter and I'd apply for 1,000 marketing jobs at a time just to see what would come back. So I learned, like, I sometimes I get rejections 8 months later. Like in the mail from a job application. So I knew how robust that system was, but I did that because if anything happened to my job, I was homeless. So I had to keep irons in the fire. It was this really feast or famine, fight or flight survival type. I was still in that trauma from my childhood. So it was like, I need to protect myself mentality. There was no strategy behind this. Right. It just, that's just how it worked. And then LinkedIn put a connection cap on it and said, you can't have more than 30,000 connections. And I manually had to go in and delete 15,000, 20,000 people. And yes, you manually have to do that or they'll ban you if you use tools. Right. So I've been through like agonizing, I mean, I'm not kidding from 2008 until even the last, probably the last year, 4 to 6 hours a day on LinkedIn for over 15 years. Like it just consumed much of my life. Right now, when the Discover Podium era happened, I simply was fed up of the marketing world. I've spent almost about 10 years in marketing at that point. And what I had gotten good at was going to market because I'd worked for so many early stage companies. So it was a lot of creating things from scratch. And the aha moment for me was that instead of applying this shitty go-to-market strategy for some, some no-name startup that I'm not going to care about, what if I applied that strategy to Nick, the person, and I got to see how Nick evolved. So for me, it was learning about go-to-market for software, but just applying it to people because I had more of a relationship with people than some soulless piece of tech. Right. And so when I got to see people grow and I got to see people follow the same strategies a company would follow, but as an individual, it was much more fulfilling and I latched onto it. And so I have a very obsessive and addictive personality and I just went hard on that. Like we grew to over a million in revenue the first year. Most of which, about 80% of those sales came from me directly. And LinkedIn used to have this feature called ProFinder. And this ProFinder feature, whenever you'd go to apply for a job, they put a little toggle in there that said, hey, do you need help with a resume writer? And if you clicked that button, I got the lead, right? So it triggered anyone that was like, and it was a new feature, so there weren't a lot of people on it. There wasn't a lot of competition., but you had to be one of the first 5 people to apply for the proposal. And in San Francisco alone, if I refreshed every 10 minutes and I did that all day, on average, we'd get between 250 and 300 leads a day just from San Francisco, people applying for jobs. And so as I built my team out, I gave them Profinder accounts in Dallas and Chicago and New York. And so we spread out over the United States and they were essentially acting as Full-service sales reps, and we were constantly refreshing the page and sending Profinder leads out. And so from there, I booked 10 to 15 calls a day, just like, you know, those sales bros that you see on LinkedIn all the time.

Yes.

Look, I can fill your calendar. I did that manually. It sucked. Right now I write about this in the article. I would be like, I would wake up at 1:30 in the morning or 3 o'clock in the morning to take a leak because I got a little grandma bladder. I would be on LinkedIn, on Profinder, trying to see what leads came in, and I would have my template out. And oftentimes I'd get leads and I would book a call for the next day. And I had to do that because if I didn't close that business, I couldn't afford to keep my staff. That's how tight the margins were. Right. So we were doing that. So the model itself was we were helping people reposition their resumes and their LinkedIn. So on one side, there was kind of a writing shop. And I hired journalists to be storytellers, not resume writers or HR people. So that was kind of the big difference maker. We help people tell stories, not rehash history. So that was how we presented in a differentiated way. And we, we did over a million dollars just in resume and LinkedIn rewrites. The main side of the business that we were looking to get investment in was that we built career agents. So I had a team of 4 or 5, we call them career navigators. And the idea was that, look, you're busy in your executive role and you know your job sucks. You're an SVP at Salesforce, right? If you go to look for a job, you can't perform your job because of how much time it takes. So hire one of our agents. They'll sift through all the bullshit, all the algorithms and all that. And then they will curate a list and manually write, here are the 5 best spots that are open right now. That was essentially the whole product. We started it at $500 a month. And everyone said, look, if someone's looking for a job, they can't afford it. We scaled that up to $3,000 a month, no problem. And people were retained 6 to 9 months on average through that. And so as those deals, as we started getting better at that, so we'd position them, apply for jobs for them, connect the two. Then people said, oh, now I have an interview. Who do I talk to? They came to me even though I had no experience doing that. And so I wasn't lying. I didn't say I had experience. I just said, hey, in my experience of interviewing, this is what I do. And then here's what some of my other clients have done. And then you repeat that ad nauseam 10,000 times and you become an expert. Yeah. Right. And so when I'm on my blog and you'll see, I'm like, yeah, I've had 30,000 one-on-ones with executives. It's probably closer to 50, honestly. But when I put those numbers out there, people think I'm full of shit. But I was just that obsessed. I mean, these were real 100-hour work weeks. All of the toxic stuff that you're told that isn't good. I did those things for 5 years with that business. And I saw how absolutely ass backwards and toxic it was. Also, this is no offense to resume writers, and I've made a lot of money selling resumes, and I understand the importance of clarifying your thoughts. Like, if you can't talk about your own career, like, what are we doing? Like, yeah, right? Like, so we, my team always like, and it was just like, it's not right to like make fun of your clients. I know that's not a popular thing to say, but it's like, Like you make a million dollars a year and you don't know how to talk about what you do at all. I don't understand that concept. And maybe it's just because I've been so obsessed about careers and I've rewritten my resume 1,500 times, like incessantly, like into like the weirdest degree, which is why people trust me with theirs. Right. But I just got to thinking like, you can't, you can't outsource everything. Right. There's certain things that you need to hold true. Like this is not your true self. We're putting polish on who you are. And of course we're going to miss some pieces. My favorite was when, you know, like when you're working with a VP of engineering or a CTO and they're like, oh, you don't understand the language. It's like, yeah, if I understood the language, I'd be an engineer. Right. I'd be making $500,000 a year, not 60. Right. So give them a break.

Right.

You have to help us tell your story to a degree, which all ghostwriters will understand that dilemma. But anyway, it felt toxic and icky. That's why I had an opportunity to sell the company probably for 4 to 5 million at the time. Maybe, maybe a little more valuations were pretty good in '21 and I chose to shut it down instead. And so I basically chose to be broke again instead of walking away with that. And I didn't sell my team out or anything. I let them find positions. I actually turned the company in on itself. And I said, half the time you're going to work for clients and the other half the time I want you to work for your colleagues. And this was during COVID So it was relatively understandable, like, hey, go find yourself more fulfilling work because my heart's not in this.

Anymore.

So I helped, I strategically dissolved the team over a year and had them find other work. And then once the sales reps were the last to go, because they needed to be, once the sales reps were gone, all of that then came to me. So the product people and the writers, all of those fell off first. The salespeople stayed and all they were selling was me and I was delivering while leading. And then I moved the sales team out and then it all flowed to me after that. So there's a lot of rambling, but that's, that's kind of in a nutshell what happened with that business and then why all of those people came to me afterwards.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's important, right? Because it sets the context for why, why we're having this conversation, right? I don't, I don't think anybody needs a conversation with one more person congratulating themselves for turning off a social media account. Like, that's not what this is. This is about someone who deeply understands. The reason why I want to talk to you is because you're someone who deeply understands this ecosystem. Deeply understands the digital platforms, how they relate to the career ecosystem, how they relate to all of these factors you talked about. And so if we fast forward in time, and I know there's some stuff that happened in between, and we'll maybe go in reverse later, but let's fast forward in time, even just the last, however it's been, 60, 90, 120 days, that leads you to the point where going, hey, this thing that's been such a critical part of my career, it needs to go away.

So there's a few things that happened and it's, it's difficult to talk about this without sounding arrogant. So my intention isn't to be arrogant, but there's a few things that happened. So I shifted my business model about 3 years ago and somewhere between 3 and 4x the amount of revenue I got for less work. And it was really that I shifted towards value-based pricing instead of commoditized pricing. Right? So I shifted towards value-based. And so naturally when you, when you solve value-based problems, you want to solve things that are big value, right? So, you know, in other words, it's saying like, if you want to get rich, solve rich people problems. So naturally my target audience started increasing. So for example, I charge a percentage of lift on what I grow a client. So if Nick, if you were given a $300,000 contract and I was able to secure you $400,000 instead per year, One time you'll pay me about $20,000 to $30,000, right?

Makes sense.

One time, right? You make $100,000 a year more for as long as you hold that job and whatever you do with it after.

Great.

And I teach you the strategies to do that. So that's the point. Now, I've also noticed I've taken deals from $800,000 to $2.5 million, like at a Snapchat or a Google or some of these big companies. So wouldn't you want to solve million-dollar problems and take $200,000, $300,000 instead? And so here's where this, this all started coming together. It's not like I'm reeking of $2 million W-2 clients. It's not the case. Like it's sometimes it's 20 a year, right? Which is pretty good. Right. But 20 a year, it's not, it's like 1, 1, 2 a month kind of thing. So it's not so obsessive. Now, those folks, when they're working, don't have time to be on LinkedIn. They just don't, right? They have a profile, but it's an illusion that they're there. You don't see them commenting. You don't see them engaging. If they are engaging, it's from a PR company's perspective and it's sharing their own company shit. Right? It's literally drinking your own Kool-Aid and regurgitating it, like, which we see all the time. Right? I guess you could argue that, like, the HubSpot executives are there. The ones that are in martech that, that absolutely reek of needing salespeople to constantly consume their content are there. Right? But that's not necessarily my audience. I'm like, I'm talking C-suite at a Cisco or an Oracle or a Microsoft. I've done negotiations that have involved Satya Nadella and have involved Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and, um, you know, Parker Harris from Salesforce and like all of these co-founders and high-name people. Like I've been one level removed from that for the last 3 years, right? Those people aren't on LinkedIn, right? So there's a, there's a period and I'm trying to match this period without sounding arrogant, but there's a period that if you know, you know. Right? If you know, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg's LinkedIn profile doesn't have to say shit. Right? Some of those people don't have to say anything. So there's this tipping point and there's this messy middle in between. So what I found is I started like with the Discover Podium days, I was engaging with these people more frequently. Then a couple of things happened that tore my career in the opposite direction, which is I started getting asked to speak in communities. And the communities were like Pavilion or Revenue Collective at the time, and then Pavilion. And then, so some of these like more in bulk communities, and this, this is not to, this isn't to throw shade at the communities. Like, I'm not trying to make enemies. I'm just saying that most of the folks there tended to be Series A through C startup leaders, not Fortune 500 VP+ leaders, right? So Those two things are not the same. Title is the same. Those two things are not the same. And again, it's not to say one is better than the other. So like, I have to like basically explain everything that I'm doing because people get so pissed off about the language. When I say like a Series B CMO is not a CMO, like it is not the same thing. No offense, right? A 5-person remit and a $4 million P&L is not the same. Okay. Like you have the same title. That's fine. There's different positions here. But anyway, so the communities brought me into startup world, which brought the ticket price down. And it also brought a lot of noise of criticism from folks that no longer understood. And this is, I'm not blaming anyone. This is my fault, right? But I didn't recognize this was happening. I just like helping people and I like, liked going to communities and trying to explain. And when someone's like expressing a victim situation, oh, marketers have to do this and they have to do that and they have to do this. I'm like, You're competing for a million-dollar job. Chill out. Like, look at this. Like, this is such a first-world problem. You have no room to complain about running demand gen and content and ads and then having to express your value prop to the CRO because he doesn't think that marketing contributes to sales. It's like, big boo-hoo. Like, look at how much money you're making. You are in the top 1% of people. Even these startup people are in the top 1% of people globally.

Right.

World's tiniest violin. And like that, that again, that's probably my bias and hurt coming from, I would get my paycheck from Home Depot, be fully maxed out on my credit card, pay off the $10 minimum fee, put the $10 back in my gas tank, and that's all I could put in it kind of thing. Right. Like no money at all.

Yeah.

Like coming from that situation. And now it's like, now I ask people, when was the last time you had to think about whether or not you could buy groceries? They're like, oh, I got $5 million in the bank. It's like, You're so far removed from what most people deal with. Like, let's be honest, if you have to do a bunch of shit for your job, that's why you're making the big bucks, right? So anyway, so the positionally, those things were so different. It kind of took me down a different path. And those earlier stage folks, like the real sales driven, the go-to-market folks, the people that need to get an idea off the ground. They're active on LinkedIn. The audience where I make the most money is not. There's a disconnect there. Now, I learned from this audience. What's interesting is that through Discover Podium, the inbound audience tended to be the early stage people. When I directed my sales team to go outbound, I targeted high profile executives. And so outbound let me go after the high profile folks that I wanted to to work with, inbound was almost always slop, right? Because you can't really control that much on, on LinkedIn, right? And so I had to kind of delineate that too. So as I participate in the smaller communities, I'm not getting the same quality of client. Again, I've had many great clients from those communities. This isn't to speak down on them, but some of them will pay $8,000 in fees when I have another that'll pay 80. And I'll have another, again, I was sharing this, that this kind of happened during this process. So concurrently, I'm crying to myself and being a little whiner because I'm on LinkedIn lunatics. And there's thousands of people that are saying that I'm a white savior, mansplainer, terrible person, no situational awareness, doesn't try to learn, like everything that I could see negative about me in one place was great. Now, shout out to the people who defended me. If you want to go find them, they're the ones with the hundreds of downvotes. Right. Where somebody was like, somebody was like, this is why men don't open up online because they'll get trashed even if they're trying to be genuine. And you're not even asking if he's trying to be genuine. You're just picking apart his character, right? And dogpiling on him.

Right.

So like concurrently, while I was sad about this deal, I closed another deal where I lifted an executive's contract, multiple millions of dollars and 5 other people on his team, over $10 million a year for the 2026 year. And netted over half a million dollar success fee. And I talked to him for less than 12 hours. So on one hand, I'm complaining about some fucking posts that went viral on LinkedIn that pissed everyone off where I was trying to have some situational awareness with a target audience that is many, many degrees under what I'm trying to find. Again, no offense. It's just not, just not, I'm in the wrong room. Right. And on the other hand, I made over $50,000 an hour for moving a deal. Like one of these things is not like the other. And again, it's hard to talk about without sounding arrogant. It's not like I'm swimming in those deals. That was the best deal I've ever had in my life. Right. Absolutely the best deal. And it just was like this awakening, like, dude, just let it go. Because honestly, like I live well beneath my means, right? I live in Montana. I have a 1,200 square foot house. It's almost paid off already. I'm trying to, like my average, like I could live off less than $10,000 a month. So $100K deal, I'm set for like 3 years. So if LinkedIn doesn't come my way for a while, like maybe you'll see me back in 3 years. Right.

I don't know.

Or maybe there'll be something new or maybe we won't have jobs because AI is the apocalypse and we'll have to figure something else out. But hopefully that, that provides some context of, of where I was going with there.

No, I think it's good. And I think what I want to try and do is is contextualize it a little bit. You know, I think what you've done really effectively, which is super important, is modeled like radical clarity on what you're trying to do, right? You've done so many different things on LinkedIn and you've used that tool in a variety of different ways to a variety of different audiences. And your most recent decision isn't, uh, this is what everybody should do. This is, uh, this is what Jacob Warwick Warwick did and here's why. And, you know, I always want to get to sort of, okay, the rest of the audience listening isn't Jacob, right? So what is their lens into this? And I think there's something here that I'd love to hear your thoughts around. Your just radical clarity on who do I absolutely need to talk to? Because part of the intoxication of the platforms, and LinkedIn is among these, is sort of the emotional uplift of feeling like you're talking to everybody. And it, in some ways, that's this enormous distraction from actually talking to who you need to be talking to. Right. Which, which I think you've learned a lot about and is applicable to everybody that, you know, people, people listening in today that aren't in your personal situation.

Yeah, I'm, I'm torn on how to answer this because on one hand, it's not purely a revenue decision. What I've wanted to do was share what I've learned from some of the wealthiest and most successful people in the world and make it grokable for everyone else. What I didn't anticipate was what they're doing pisses other people off, right? Which is understandable to a degree. I agree with it being a distraction. I agree that my decision, I'm not trying to put this decision on anyone else. I'm even in this, this article that I wrote, which I give you a little heads up on it. It'll, it'll come out tomorrow, the 12th, which it'll probably be well available once the podcast is out. But, uh, totally.

We'll, we'll link to it in the show notes.

Yeah, I'm not, I'm not suggesting you follow me. Like there's a ton of, I'm, I'm also not suggesting I'm better than the platform is what I'm trying to be clear about. It's like I quit Facebook 10 years ago to eliminate some toxic reminders of my childhood and people that were still remaining in it. And I don't miss it at all. And I noticed that nobody came to text me anymore. Nobody like, and I think that's just part of growing up too, like that just Sometimes that happens. I never had those relationships. Maybe like some others do, right? I don't have extended family that I want to keep in touch with. A lot of them are in jail or into drugs or things like that. I don't want them around my kids. So cutting Facebook pretty easy. Haven't noticed. It's been 10 years. Like I deleted Twitter probably 7 years ago and I had like 20 or 30,000 followers on Twitter and don't miss it at all. Don't even notice. Not a thing. Instagram was a little tricky because basically I only had Instagram for my own satisfaction of looking at my pictures and how awesome my life was. Kind of thing and feeling blessed, but I don't need to put that on other people. Right. It's like, I'm looking through them like, yeah, my wife is hot. Yeah. You know, it's like, like that, that doesn't serve a purpose. Like I might as well just have my own camera roll, you know? So, and having grown up as a social media manager, like going anti-social media is a pretty weird hypocrisy to deal with. And so for LinkedIn, like the big thing was like, I have 2 kids now. One turned 3 yesterday and the other is 9 months. And the amount of times that he has shaken my wrist or tried to get my attention and my eyes were in my phone, pissed off at somebody on LinkedIn instead of engaging with him. That's not okay. Like I remember when my stepdad would just watch TV and ignore me and drink and I would just be left to my own devices and I had no brothers or sisters or like I had no siblings. I was an only child. Go figure. Somebody probably called that in the comments. This guy sounds like an only child. I had no one to fight with. I was alone, very isolated, which is probably why I'm such a tryhard to get people to like me now. Right. Which is probably why LinkedIn's a good platform for that. But I don't want my kids to remember a blue glowing screen in my face instead of the colors of my eyes and how excited I am to have, like, to be in their presence. So I'm having a lot of, and a lot of this has just changed from the last couple of years that I value my time much more than I ever have before. So before, the Jacob that would send out 1,000 connects or whatever, I didn't care. It was like, um, I used to do this. This is disgusting too, but this is inside. I told you I'd just share what the way it works, but like on Tinder, for example, right on Tinder, I didn't waste my time reading profiles to see who I liked or even looking at pictures to see who I'd like. I'd swipe right on everyone. And then I wait to see who liked me back. And then I would choose to engage there. Right. I called it the Tinder crawl. I would just go on my phone and I would crawl to the right. Everyone gets a right swipe. And then after someone engaged, I'd see if I wanted to talk to them or not. Right. And so that was me before, just spray and pray, see who's interested and go. Like that was the same concept I applied to LinkedIn. Just apply and go see who connects. Don't belabor the point and see if the CEO of Uber wants to connect with me or whatever, or the CF, whatever, you know, it was. Send them out there. If they don't respond, so be it, surrender to the outcome. But now with, with children, I want as much time with them as possible. I want to spend time with my family. I want to spend time with my, the system that I built, my safe place. Like this is, these are the relationships that matter the most. And I've noticed that every time I'm pulled into my phone, it's a distraction. And so if it's a distraction, it's got to be an expensive one. Right. And one of the things I value now is I open my laptop once a week. That's it. And it's to write the article, right? Otherwise you'll see me in front of this camera. This is my studio setup. I do it for podcasts and for monthly ask me anything sessions and those, but I'm not on the computer as much as I can be. It's not just turning notifications off and deleting the apps from your phone. It's deleting the actual site itself and never being tempted to go back to it. So my, what I value in life has changed. Now, for those getting their businesses off the ground, for entrepreneurs, for those needing to network, for those needing to be in the know, especially in early stage go-to-market sales context, those types of things, LinkedIn's a great platform for you still, even with all the fluff and BS, right? It's a phenomenal platform for getting off the ground. And just because, you know, I say it doesn't work for me anymore doesn't mean it's not going to work for somebody else, right? And I have addiction problems. Like not, not with substances necessarily, but with other things. Social media is one of those things that can trap me and just like it traps all of us and it'll bring my head down and it'll help that horn grow in the back of my head and all that. Right. Those are things that I don't want to be a part of anymore, but I don't think that I'm better than you because of that. There are genuine reasons and things to connect with.

Let's explore a little bit like, You said, well, LinkedIn's still a good platform for XYZ category of people. Do you think that's still true? Like, I appreciate the humility of like, I'm not trying to, you know, shove my ideas down everybody's throats. I mean, you're very cautious about authenticating your unique position and that that's not the position that everybody else is in. But I am genuinely curious. You have deep, deep knowledge of this platform and its tooling and Do you think it's still a good platform for people to build a network?

So it's, it's a very general question, right? And so is it the best platform for it? Honestly, I don't know. I'm not looking for an alternative platform. I don't think anything beats being in office and going to events that are real. I just don't, I don't think anything beats that. And if you have the opportunity to be on stage and it'd be scary and speak to other people like that, to me feels great. I think writing content and connecting with others is the best way to network, like creating something of value. So for example, if I wanted to interview 10 podcasters in the space and Nick came up and I sent you a DM on LinkedIn and said, hey Nick, I saw that you write a podcast. I'd like to feature you in something. Like, I think that's a good way to connect with somebody. I want to provide you value. Now that's not the contract we're under on social media or on LinkedIn specifically. And a lot of it is algorithm based and it's, it's about the feed and it's a slot machine. Right. I talk about this in the article, like I'm engaging on my newsletter because a newsletter is a contract. Nick has agreed that he would like to get content from Jacob Warwick Warwick Warwick. I want, I want to be a place where people come to learn and they can disagree with me too. It's not about being afraid of dissent. It's just about at least acknowledging that I'm not trying to be a bad person. Like there's positive intent here. Let's not just throw stones.

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So my business model has changed, right? And even this, like when you go into Fortune 500 sales and stuff, more deals are done on the golf course than they are done over a phone or a demo. That's where the deals are closed. Boardrooms, golf courses, you know, Topgolf even.

Yes.

Like they're closed in these situations. And it's also one of the reasons that like forcing everyone to go remote has been so damaging for their careers. Like it's great. I love hybrid. I love flexibility. I get that. You are missing out on what it means to like be in office and is the getting your shoulder tapped or whatever, especially younger leaders who haven't had the chance to have mentorship or guidance. Like it's very hard to remember, oh, I need to mentor somebody on my Slack channel or on my Teams message. Like, let me make sure to take 5 minutes and buy someone a Chipotle to change their career kind of thing. Like you don't get those opportunities anymore. So LinkedIn is kind of a water cooler, I guess, kind of, right? If you know how to use it and rub shoulders with folks and follow the right people and engage, but a lot of it is just devolving into AI slop and performance of nonsense. It was already the humblebrag capital of the world. Now it's turning into like, at least on Reddit, when people are bashing you, it's because they're hiding behind anonymity, right?

Yeah.

LinkedIn, they'll bash you and they don't even have to hide. Like it's devolving into like, we're now fearless enough to not hide our faces or where we work or anything.

Well, I think it's like, I don't want to project onto your experience, but I don't think these things happening at the same time are accidental. So much of what was happening last year on LinkedIn was this rise of kind of an alternative way of producing content on the platform. And that platform was sort of more Reddit-esque. It was kind of irony-poisoned and sardonic and let's just, you know, we're not going to let this place be so stuffy. And I get the spirit of some of that, right? But it ended up being really, as these things often do, it veered into the far end of the of the spectrum where if you weren't performing counterculture to the way that, you know, this group of people wanted you to, then you were then the target of, of sort of that Reddit culture seeped its way into LinkedIn. Then by January, there was this sort of gamesmanship of like who could get on LinkedIn Lunatics the fastest. And, you know, it just the, the impact of the algorithm on just the content feed of the platform. Let's just specifically talk about the content feed. The content feed on the platform was really degraded. And that may not be the, the reason you left, but the timing of those two things happening at the same time, because so many people think of LinkedIn as the content feed when it's many other things than, than, than just the content feed. Those two things happening at the same time are not accidental, you know, your impetus to leave and this sort of weird shift in the feed.

It's interesting you brought that up because I was, there are two things that I try to do on a social media platform. And the first thing is move it to dark mode. And then the second thing is remove the content feed. And I couldn't find like a plugin that killed the LinkedIn content feed across all of my devices kind of thing. Cause I wanted to just be mute.

Right.

I wanted to not say anything. I wanted to just get the DMs and I would, I typically get a handful of leads every week, but what I realized is that there were a lot of tire kickers. This is where, again, it sounds weird, but I, I put a fee on my discovery calls. Like the sales call is charged. I mean, it's $500 for half an hour. Right. And I, and a lot of people think, oh, the audacity of this guy. Well, if I don't do it, my calendar is murdered. I have no time at all. And so I had to do that because of— well, I mean, but that wasn't even the point. But yeah, I mean, but that, that also wasn't the point, right? Like, and, and it doesn't mean that I won't still talk to people for free because I will. Occasionally, you know, like if I have time and, and I can really help in the situation or they're a friend of a friend or a friend of a client or whatever, like there's, you know, there's a way around it, I guess. But if I didn't do that, my time was just disrespected. And then especially on LinkedIn and the messaging and I suspect what's going to happen is all those BDR requests are going to stop coming in too.

Just that the feed, I think because of the algorithm degradation, the AI slop, but also I think people were willing to bring more of a Reddit-style sensibility to it in the, in the last 12 to 18 months that I think has made the feed a much more difficult place to be. And I— my thesis is— I don't have a lot of data to support this, so it's anecdotal, but my thesis is that not only your clients, but people who are hiring, both from the employee standpoint and from a contractor standpoint, people who used to come to LinkedIn every once in a while, the CEOs, the CFOs, the COOs of the sub Fortune 500 companies who are like, oh, I wonder what's going on at LinkedIn. I don't think those people are stopping by anymore because, or at least they're doing it at a much reduced rate because it's just, it's just not an interesting place to scroll anymore. I mean, it used to be in a different way.

Yeah, I, I will say that when I made the announcement, there were Plenty of people being assholes about it, but most people, I would get text messages or emails, like several hundred that were, I'm jealous. I want to, I'm scared. That was the overwhelming majority. Like people want to, but they're scared to. And I think we felt that way about other platforms. Oh, I want to delete Facebook because it sucks. But what about Grandma Gerthy? You know, like she's going to miss pictures of their kids. Like, you know, whatever, except in this case, your livelihood's tied to it. Because what recruiters aren't gonna find me? Well, recruiters aren't finding you anyway.

Right.

Right.

And I saw people in the, in, 'cause I had a quick, I had a quick post to say we, you and I were gonna chat. And I saw some people in the comments of that chat say, I, I would leave, but my network is here and my, my career depends on it. And some of those people, and I, no offense to them, I love them, I have relations with them, but some of those people have been trying to use LinkedIn for over a year to find a job. And, and they're afraid to leave. I'm like, well, wait a second. If this thing was good at finding you a job, you know, why have we been at it for a year?

Yeah, it's, it's certainly not as good as it used to be. Right.

Right.

Well, and there's this, so there's something that happens here too. So this is hard for people to under— I talk about this in some of my career classes, but when you're an executive at a company, and you have a problem, where's the first place you turn when you need to get it solved?

Your peer network.

Right. So you, you go, maybe it's, maybe it's someone else in the organization. Hey, do you happen to know anybody who's an expert at this part of go-to-market? Right? Yes. So if you have a network, that problem's solved that way first. That's where they go first. Second.

Yes.

Well, nobody around here has any friends or has ever worked with anybody that's solved this problem before. Wow. That sucks. Like, what kind of people are you working with? Are these total amateurs? Right? So they don't have anyone. Now it's like, okay, or it's a very specialized problem, right? Very, very specialized. So I'm not trying to say you don't have a network. I gotta, I gotta go to a recruiter or a headhunter, right? I gotta shell out 30% of that salary in advance to hire that problem, right? Which is sometimes a couple hundred thousand dollars to headhunt these folks. Oh, the company doesn't have the money to do that, right? Now we're going to go to commodity recruiters or whatever. Or we're gonna just publish the role publicly. It's the last option. And it's the last option for the, the drag of the drag, right? Unless it's required by law to publish the position internally, right? Which, and sometimes that position's already filled internally, but they have to by law publish it, right? And then we have to, on the other end, when you're a job seeker, what's the first thing you do when you go look for a job? You look for the part where they go to last. Right? We go, what's easily available for everybody? And it's commoditized. And then we look, what's the salary range that's required by law to put on there? That must be gospel and true, which it's not. Like, we break hiring, like, we break the ranges all the time. I actually find that when they share salary ranges, it hurts the very people that they want to protect more. Right? It hurts them more because the aggressive white dude's gonna be like, fuck the range. I want this. And they go, okay. Right? And then someone else who's more passive, right? Who oftentimes doesn't look like the aggressive white dude sales guy, right? The very people we try to protect, they go, oh, that's the range I'll live within it. I'll try to push for the top part. Thanks for sharing it with me ahead of time. Right? So you're still hurting those people and keeping them down when they can be broken. Right? But we look at, like, as job seekers, we look at the entire thing in absolute reverse of how it should be. Now, I'm not suggesting that I have the answer because I hate just waxing poetic about all the problems and be like, well, Jacob, what's the solution? I'm not sure what the right solution is. Right? I'm not sure what that is today. I think there's ripe opportunity for disruption in this market for someone who finds that answer. It's a multi-billion dollar problem and somebody's going to solve it. Right? LinkedIn is a system built on— they're monetized by your data and your contacts. They are not monetized on helping you find a job. So understand, if you follow the flow of money, you'll understand that they're not there for you. Right? Just like, if you're not paying for something, if you're not paying for something, you are the product.

Yeah. Yeah. So, well, I know we're not going to come up with the answer today and we're running short on time, but I do want to, I think for people listening who are in two categories, people who are trying to make career moves, I think there's an application here. I think also for people who are in the ever-expanding solo professional economy, right? We're looking at statistics that say that by next year there will be more people as independent workers than as W-2 workers for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, which is unbelievable. Complete shift in the marketplace. A lot of those people listen to this podcast. I think for both of those categories of people, I think there's two extrapolated ideas from your story that I want people to think about, and then you can validate that to whether I'm making them up as I go. The first is I think what you did, Jacob, is you really, really, really understood who do I need to talk to right now? And if you look at each of the eras of your career, that answer was very different, right? But you were really, really clear on who do I need to talk to right now? And you organized your activity around that. Now you're self-deprecating. You're like, well, it was addictive, or I didn't care, I was up all night, or, you know, like, And I appreciate that, and I appreciate your intent for humility. But I think that's really, really important is what can anybody do? They can figure out who they absolutely need to talk to right now. And mass-producing snarky content for LinkedIn is probably not the pathway to get there today. I think the second application point is you have a long history of doing the work of understanding— this goes back to behavioral finance, the incentives of the people you want to talk to, what incentivizes them and why they're doing what they're doing. And I think for anybody on this call, if you want to get serious about increasing your fees or moving up market as a, as an independent person or getting your next big thing, you have to really think about the incentives of the people that you want to talk to and engage with them in a way that's meaningful for their incentives. And if you can learn to do that, I think Jacob, as you've modeled for us, then you get to buy yourself some freedom from some of this stuff that's not working for you.

Yeah, I would say that I tend to agree with that. Now, the crystal clear on who I want to speak with has always been a little wishy-washy because the data doesn't always suggest the right answer there. There's like an aspirational person you want to speak to, but there's also this self-deprecating talk in your head. Like, what gives you the right to be there? Right? Maybe you should keep, keep focusing on these other folks because they're paying your bills right now and you don't have what it takes to get there yet. So there's almost an internal dialogue that you're constantly trying to push around. And if, if you've reached too many rungs up on the ladder too quickly, you'll get slapped down and you'll fall into place. And if your mortgage is due, you know, if I couldn't pay my mortgage, I'd be selling LinkedIn profile rewrites right now. Like, I'd be like, let me rewrite your profile. I'll make it look great. You know? So like, there's that, that's been a moving target. Now, the other point I think could be summarized into empathy, right? If I were receiving this message, what would I like it to look like? Kind of thing. What would actually be effective here? And empathy is, I don't know how to teach empathy. I might not be the best person to talk about empathy. I think a lot of people would say I'm probably the worst person to talk about empathy. Though I will say that once I started concentrating more on behavioral psychology, influence, and persuasion. By reading the likes of Aristotle and Robert Cialdini and the likes of even Chris Voss and Herb Cohen and any, any negotiation book that's out there. And when you're thinking about what's in it for them constantly, what's in it for them, that helped me turn my business model around.

Well, we'll, we'll have to circle back with you in a year or so and find out how all of this experiment is going.

Yeah.

And what you're learning in the process. One of the things I hope people take away from you is, is What I find to be incredibly refreshing is just your radical authenticity. You and I have had agreements, we've had disagreements, you know, but your consistency to show up and say, this is what I'm trying to say and this is why I'm trying to say it. And if I said it the wrong way, let's talk about that, is, has just been really refreshing to me and one of the really big reasons I wanted to have this conversation. So the question we ask everybody at the end, which is a little bit odd given our conversation today, but I'll throw it to you, is there's a lot of things that are despairing folks in the economy, in the marketplace, in whatever. So I always want smart, incredible people who are on this show to, to, to just give us your visibility and your experience. What's giving you hope right now? Hmm.

So this one's a little tricky. So I am a, I am a, a person of faith. Right. And I have, I have grown more in my faith over the last decade. I want to say I found God when I found my wife. And there are, there are moments where I get signs that I can't explain. It'll be driving past a sign that says you have nothing to fear. And of course it's on a church or something, right? But it's like, you have nothing to fear like this, nothing to fear. I'm trying very much to have faith. And one of the things that's scary for me is sharing faith because a lot of my clients are from Silicon Valley and faith is a bad word in some ways, or at least I perceive it to be. So maybe that's my own fear coming out. And so I would say that my faith comes in the Lord and trying to be the best man that I can, knowing that I'm coming up short and just about everywhere possible. And I prioritize things differently. So I used to prioritize my career first, and then it was like sex, and then it was like fun, and then it was maybe friends and then family. And then now it's Now it's faith. And the second is health, because if I don't have those two things, I can't show up for my family and I can't show up for my friends. And so, and I can't show up in my career at the end of the day. Like if, if I am on a hollow foundation, I have no faith and I'm not healthy. I'm not actively engaged with my family and my friends. And then I'm giving you advice on your career on social media. Like there's so many other elements of my life that are broken that you shouldn't follow. And yet here I am trying to tell you the way things are. So at the end of the day, you have to do what's best for you. And what gives me hope is that I think everyone is doing the best that they can and we could all be doing better. Right. And so even when I try, I try, I'm not very good at this, especially if you look through some of the comment things, right. I'll be like getting in a pissing match with somebody. And I'm trying to pause and give grace and be like, I don't know, maybe so-and-so had a bad day. Maybe I said things wrong and I'm trying to do that. And then what frustrates me is when those things will be put on display, even if you are being genuine or trying to be genuine, you just don't have the words to say, because God forbid you haven't triple-checked everything through AI to see where all your blind spots are before you post something. Right. It's like, when everybody is there to just dig on you and push you down, like, that's just a sign that you need to have faith and you need to flock towards things that work for you. And then for me, the elimination diet was the only one that works. Like, I have to go cold turkey on things. It's just, it's not like a drug or alcohol problem. It's like a, it's a different substance abuse, right? Social media is a weird substance abuse. And even the, the ego and the vanity and the, attention and the dopamine hits of the likes and the shares. And when somebody really important comments on your stuff and likes it or sends you a text, you become so dulled down to it, but it still feels good. And I just, I need to put my faith somewhere else in something that's unmoving. And for me, that is Christ. And it's awkward for me to talk about, but I also prayed that I would be more vocal about it. And just if people want to judge me for that, then they can.

Well, I appreciate your honesty and I appreciate your transparency. And I think what I hope it gives people the freedom to do, even if they don't necessarily align or not align with your religious convictions, is that there's a courage to step away from the thing that may be sort of numbing you out, right? You've given lots of examples about how these tools have impacted you. And I do think, you know, one of the things I tell the people in my coaching program is that almost everybody you talk to is lonely, afraid, and mentally exhausted. Because of the systems that we're all participating in. And why I wanted to have this conversation with you is because you're a guy who said, okay, well, let's try and step away and see what happens. And so we'll see. We'll get to learn with you. Again, everybody can find Jacob on execsinthecity.com. And I would absolutely recommend his newsletter. It's incredibly good, whether you're negotiating for a half-million-dollar contract or not. So thanks, Jacob.

Thank you, Nick. Appreciate it.

Well, that was a wild ride. We covered a lot of ground. I want to thank Jacob Warwick for coming on the pod, telling his story, showing up with a ton of authenticity. That's not easy to do. And, you know, we didn't get a lot into this, into the discussion, but like he had his personal life reamed. He got thrown up on LinkedIn Lunatics as being the worst human ever. And it's just a lot of stuff that, you know, of course the internet is really good at producing. And so, you know, it's, it's not for nothing that, you know, you show up and have a more honest conversation about where you're coming from and what you care about. What I want to get in the habit of doing at the end of the show when we have a great interview like this is for those people who want to stick around to the end, um, to really try and talk about 3 questions, the kind of questions that I would get if someone was sort of interviewing me, uh, afterward. I know some of you are here as sort of an educational experience into some of the work that I do with Trustmade Growth. And so the 3 questions are really simple. The first one is How am I still carrying this conversation or how is it still landing with me? The second is what do I want leaders to get out of it? And then what does it mean for trust? So the first question kind of is more personal, which is sort of how is the conversation still landing for me? We did the interview right after he deleted his LinkedIn. Like it was so, it wasn't even wet cement. We were in the mush of it. And he had just finished the first draft of his, of his email to his subscribers about why he did what he did and all of that. So it was really, really fresh. And I think, um, there was an advantage to that because we got really, really raw conversation. I think the disadvantage of it is it takes some time for dust like that to settle. And, um, I think part of how I'm still carrying this is I, get caught up in the platformification of it all. I wish I didn't. I hate that I get caught up in the platformification at all, but you know, we are all sort of projections of our own psychological need. Our experiences are such projections of our own psychological need. And, and I was in a period and have been in a period in much of 2026 of trying to ask really concise questions to myself about what does my digital engagement need to be? How many times do I need to touch the internet to really have the life I want to have, have the business I want to have. And I've never really framed it in that way. You know, I've spent a lot of the last several years having to kind of deconstruct my relationship with the online spaces. Um, I know many of you are doing the same, and that's been a personal process, but it's also been a very public professional process. I mean, I kind of blew up my LinkedIn profile a little bit last year by spending a lot of time banging on about AI, and I have some level of regret about that. Not because I hurt AI's feelings, but because it's just a weird way to leverage a public profile. Everyone's asking these fundamental questions of how does a real-world business that has real-world consequences, makes real money, is sustainable, isn't caught up in fads and trend chasing— how much does a real-world business have to sort of live its life in, in what I've, you know, sort of labeled the algorithmic or, or artificial society? I think, I think, uh, Jacob's answer is compelling, and his answer is as little as possible. Let's do this as little as possible. And I'm, you know, a little bit warming up to that too, because all of the stuff tends to eat away at times I could be having coffee face-to-face or having, being on a phone call or being in a discussion with someone about what really matters about their work and their business. You know, I used to spend 60 to 90 minutes a day trying to figure out my exact LinkedIn plan for that day and what my post was going to be and building carousels and commenting and all of that. And it was fine for a season. But today, what I really want to focus on is how do I get back to cities and regions where my clients are and we can have lunch and we can really spend more face-to-face time together? How do I build more face-to-face time in for those of you who are in my community at the Trustmade Guild, right? Like, how do I do the things that are actually going to produce long-term sustainability And Jacob's answer isn't everybody's answer, and nor should it be. But I think that at the core of it, how it's still living with me, is a question that's just going to keep taking time to answer, which is, what will courage ask of me? If I want to build a great business, what will courage ask of me to do it? You know, so it kind of leads into the second question that I end the podcast with, which is, what do I want leaders to do with all this? I think I want you to ask that question. I want you to ask yourself, what will Kuroda ask of you? When I'm doing individual coaching or group coaching through some of our coaching programs for leaders, the thing I consistently find is not skill, it's not readiness, it's not value, it's not pricing. All those things can be— dials can be turned and we can make very real meaningful progress in turning those dials. At the heart of it, the biggest hurdle that smart, good strategic leaders are having are facing in growing their own businesses is courage. I see it in professional services. I see it in software. I see it in individual, you know, solopreneur-type contributors. I see it all over the place. We've had sort of the courage sucked out of us and it's going to take leaders who are trying to build something to really look courage in the face every day and say, what do you want from me today? What do you need from me today? And then tell courage what you need from it. I know that sounds sort of like a psychotic experience having a conversation with courage, but I'm telling you it can matter. And it can matter as you develop the fortitude to make the choices you want to make to build what you want to build. And what does that mean for trust? Courageous people are trustworthy. I don't mean people with bravado are trustworthy. Like that's a really distorted alteration. We got plenty of bravado. We got plenty of people who are trying to show off made-for-TV and literally blow up entire societies with other people's risk to prove how brave they are. That's not what I'm talking about. People who live by deep values and then make hard decisions to see those values come into fruition in the public sphere, that's what it means. That's the future of trust. Trust isn't always super dependent on courage. Sometimes trust is dependent on kindness. Sometimes trust is dependent on silence. Sometimes trust is dependent on ease and sensitivity and gentleness. Sometimes it's dependent on knowledge. It can be dependent on so many things, but because of the season of time we are in, if you want your business to be trusted, if you want your venture to be trusted, if you want your school to be trusted, or your community or your club or whatever it is you're trying to build, if you want it to be trusted, it's just going to take courage. And weirdly enough, I hope that this Funny Little Podcast is a place for you to find some of that. Thanks for spending some time with me again today. If you made it to the end, congratulations. Make sure that you're fully subscribed on your podcaster to get, uh, or to get the every episode and not miss an episode. Absolutely give us a review on Apple and on YouTube. That really, really helps what we're doing. And then if you want to make sure and get all the notes and all the comments and all the, and all the et cetera, damsgiven.com. Make sure you're subscribed there. So thanks for your time, everybody, today. This has been a really good adventure as usual, and we'll see you next time with Amy, who's going to just really rock our world with what is the future of software, what is— and has AI eliminated the need for engineers and all of these big fundamental questions that Amy has answers. And I think you're going to absolutely be fascinated by what we find. So thanks so much.