The Wealth Ladder: Unlocking Financial Freedom with Scott D. Clary

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I think what people think they want is stability, but what they actually want is a little bit of safety and freedom. And I think they incorrectly associate safety and agency with stability. I think if they think if I figured out my career, that means that I'm safe and that means that I can now make my own decisions about where I spend my money and where I raise my kids. But I don't think that stability always equates to safety. I think that betting on yourself and agency equates to safety and freedom in a much more meaningful way. Once you understand how to play a game that, yes, there could be a little bit more of an emotional rollercoaster attached to it, but that emotional rollercoaster will take place over your entire career in terms of ups and downs, almost to the point where you become immune to it. On the flip side of that idea is if you think stability equals safety and you spend your whole career working for a company 9 to 5. W2 for our American friends are both Canadian, but I know W2 is what they have down here. And then what happened during COVID You get laid off after 30 years and you haven't upskilled in those past 30 years. And now you find yourself struggling to figure out how to get a job because you've never put yourself in an uncomfortable position, truly uncomfortable position before. So I think that having a little bit more acceptance of risk and a little bit more of these small little ups and downs in your career journey, in your life, and your entrepreneurial journey from a young age and maybe not focusing on stability but, but focusing on just future, proofing yourself is a word that I use a lot, is going to lead to, ironically, a much more stable life in the future.

I need some traction. You need some traction. Hey, what's up, innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your Business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more. You need some traction. Hey, Traction fam. Super stoked today to hang out with my good friend Scott Clary, entrepreneur, investor and host of one of the top entrepreneurship podcasts, the Success Story podcast. And his podcast has been featured top 10 on Cheddar, Amazon Prime, DirecTV, Hulu, and it's a top business show. So today we're going to talk about all things wealth and wealth creation and how to create financial freedom. We're going to go through four levels of wealth creation and how to drive financial freedom in your life. We're also going to dive into personal branding, which is going to be huge. In a world where AI is eating jobs faster than one can upscale and AI agents are commoditizing all kinds of workflows, the only thing that's going to differentiate you going into the future is your personal brand.

Right?

There are foundation models where you could give prompts and create movies, and there are models that automate accounting to legal and everything in between. What differentiates you from the next business? It's your unique expertise, it's your institutional knowledge ultimately that ties to your personal brand. We're going to talk about all of this stuff with the man, the myth, the legend in personal branding. Scott, you, you've built this personal brand from nothing to what, like 1.7 million followers on Instagram and 300 plus thousand subscribers on email. Those top 10 show. Super excited to dive right into it.

Yeah.

How did you get into all of it?

How did I get into all of it? I think that like most entrepreneurs, I didn't come from an entrepreneurial family. I dove into entrepreneurship. And entrepreneurship is like the high level idea, right. So all personal brand, podcast building business, all of it just falls under entrepreneurship. And I think that's an important point because people sometimes don't think of personal brand and podcasts. And that is a entrepreneur, entrepreneurial endeavor, but it is. You're building a product. The product is you, right? The product is your ideas and your thoughts and your lived experience. When did I get into entrepreneurship? I think, and I've thought about this a lot because my family wasn't entrepreneurial. My mom and dad worked very relatively safe, stable jobs, government and university respectively. And I think what prompted me to go into entrepreneurship is because I saw the reality that I think many of us are feeling and facing where the same amount of work and effort and input that we saw our parents put into whatever career they have is not yielding the same output, the same quality of life. And I think that a lot of people, I'm 34, I think a lot of people my age, a little bit older, a little bit younger, are wrestling with that because to give you some context, my dad bought his first house cash, not because of a handout or an inheritance, just because he was working at 22 or 23 in Toronto, which, as you know, buying a detached home cash, in Toronto at 22, just based on a salary doesn't exist. It really doesn't exist. So for me to get that it's not the same amount of input would yield the same output. It's an extraordinary amount of input and career success it would yield buying a detached home at 22 without some sort of handout from your parents. So I think entrepreneurship was safe for me. It was like a safe way to bet on myself that I could control my future, I could control my quality of life. That I think traditional 9 to 5, nothing wrong with them, but I think that they don't yield the same output that they used to in the past in terms of job safety, security, pensions, etc. Etc. And that was a scary idea for me. And I just wanted to find a way to future proof myself. And entrepreneurship was the. It's always been the answer, in my opinion.

What's really interesting, you talk about buying a detached home, cash, and that's what my parents did.

Yeah.

Is is my dad bought a house. My parents, I grew up in, partially grew up in Toronto, and my parents live in Markham. They bought this detached home because for them, debt is a big worry. And why would you pay interest? And I keep telling them right now is if you put that 3, $400,000 that you did in a cash home in 2000 or 99 or whatever, and you put in the s and P500, it would be millions today. And you could just live off the dividends. But people just think through safe bets.

Right.

And I think one of the key traits here is, and that's very important to recognize, is the stability mindset versus agency mindset. And agency mindset is let's break boundaries, let's create the box, not live within the box. And you're aiming for things that are freedom. Right. I think if you look back at our parents and grandparents, my parent, my grandparents wanted to put, just put food on the table. So my parents weren't very educated. Everyone's like, let's eat. My parents wanted things like a house, TV education. And what you and I want is Freedom. And freedom is not attachment to things, but it's experiences.

One thing that you mentioned which is very important, stability versus agency. Because I think what people think they want is stability, but what they actually want is a little bit of safety and freedom. And I think they incorrectly associate stability, safety and agency with stability. I think if they think if I figured out my career, that means that I'm safe and that means that I can now make my own decisions about where I spend my money and where I raise my kids. But I don't think that stability always equates to safety. I think that betting on yourself and agency equates to safety and freedom in a much more meaningful way. Once you understand how to play a game that yes, there could be a little bit more of an emotional roller coaster attached to it, but that emotional rollercoaster will take place over your entire career in terms of ups and downs almost to the point where you become immune to it. On the flip side of that idea is if you think stability equals safety and you spend your whole career working for a company 9 to 5. W2 for our American friends are both Canadian, but I know W2 is what they have down here. And then what happened during COVID you get laid off after 30 years and you haven't upskilled in those past 30 years and now you find yourself struggling to, to figure out how to get a job because you've never put yourself in an uncomfortable position, truly uncomfortable position before. So I think that having a little bit more acclimation, a little bit more acceptance of risk and a little bit more of these small little ups and downs in your career journey, in your life and your entrepreneurial journey from a young age. And maybe not focusing on stability, but focusing on, I don't know how to describe it, just future proofing yourself is a word that I use a lot of, is going to lead to, ironically, a much more stable life in the future. This is sort of like all theoretical, esoterical, but I hope people understand what I'm saying. The traditional 9 to 5, I think is broken for a lot of people and it isn't what was promised to you.

And that's why I like to use the word agency versus stability. Right. And there's a key path here is bringing back to my dad. Right. Like you brought up a good point that you work and then you got laid off during COVID But my dad's been a career executive chef, self taught, and in many ways he was an high agency guy. He needed to learn to cook himself and he was passionate about it and he became a celebrated chef in the Middle east. And then in Canada one day. Fortunately they owned the house outright, right? Didn't have any mortgage. But one day he wasn't feeling well at work and he had now been working like 30 plus years. And he said, I'm not feeling well, I'm going to go home. This chain that the GM at that hotel freaked out and thought, oh, he's an older guy, he's going to file for long term disability. He FedEx our house a letter saying, we accept your resignation.

Wow.

To screw him out of his severance. And so my sister and I, we fought for him to get that severance. And that was an eye opener for me because I was just finishing university and I was always this rebel, right? So I think people who are agency minded are generally rebels and missionaries, right? They're rebels or like pirates and romantics. If you're a rebel and a mercenary, then you might be a terrorist, but you're a rebel and a missionary. Meaning you don't like to see the world the way it is, you want to change it. You don't want to live in a box, you want to create the box. And that was a massive eye opener for me. That instant, one incident shocked me.

So what you just described is exactly what I just said I was scared of. That's it. The difference is for some reason, for some blessing, I saw and was scared of this future that hadn't happened to me yet, as opposed to it happening to me when I was 30 years into a career.

And that was such a massive eye opener because I was just starting out, man. I was in my 20s and I see this happen to my dad, which confirmed all my thesis, right? And the thing is what, what I started to realize is my entire circle, my wife's circle, everyone around me were like looking for jobs in large companies and I was the bad guy. I was the misfit working at startups. 1, 2, 3, person. But this future that you're worried about is a reality right now. Look at what's happening, right? These AI models are getting better and getting more and more commoditized. Rappers on top of AI, especially agentic rappers, are more accurate than the LLM alone. Autonomous work is finally possible. Thirty years ago, I don't know if you recall, Wall street said, replace 20, 30% of the workforce with offshore. We need more bottom line. So everyone went to India and the Philippines. Offshore became a thing. You know what people are saying right now on Wall street, replace 30% of costs with AI. The issue is AI is moving at a pace that you won't be able to outpace. If you upskill, that's then you could course correct and upskill. Today you go to Coursera and learn something else and AI is going to take that job. So you need to have agency more than ever before.

Correct. Now the scarier thing is that I also know about 30 years ago, I mean my first job ever was at Dell Canada. So obviously, you know, Bell and one of my managers that hired me, he, he told me stories because he'd been in the company for a long time about how he went over and he was training all these call center agents when they first started outsourcing call centers to all these different countries around the world. He was one of the guys that would go train up the local force and then come back to Canada. And that was like you mentioned, 20 to 30%. But that was all entry level work that they were replacing. So that wasn't decision making, that was all the sort of the front line of the organization. Right. Customer service, some sales. Very basic in terms of knowledge worker work. The thing with AI is it can permeate management, it can permeate director level and actually make calculated decisions that. I don't have any data to support this, but I would not be shocked if it can perform at a higher level than some executives and companies. I think that there's a couple proof points that we can look to at early stages of AI that allude to this. I think there's one company, if I'm not mistaken, in China that incorporated an AI CEO that was like outperforming like traditional CEOs or benchmarking against past CEOs. This company has, if you Google this, I can't remember the name, I'm sure you'll find it. Another interesting data point about replacing exceptionally experienced people is I'm pretty sure there's an AI app that right now you can use. And what it does is it scans your skin for cancer and melanoma and other sort of skin diseases. And I think it outperforms a dermatologist in terms of correctly identifying cancers. So these are not entry level, these are not entry level roles. So the same thing that you're discussing that happened On Wall Street 30 years ago is happening now with much more advanced skill sets, which is very scary. So how do you defend against that?

The only way to defend that is to quickly move yourself to agency mindset and then try to use these tools to make you better and help you Build financial independence that doesn't rely on government handouts or jobs. I am very afraid for the education system. See, you and I had these incidents or trauma situations in our life that probably expedited our path to agency. But most parenting is around stability. Right. You go to school, you check the boxes, you do all of these things, you go to university, but what are you pumping out if AI is going to eat jobs faster than you can upskill? Education system needs to change. And it's not happening right now. Right? It's not happening right now. And I think one of the key lessons for us is how do you develop kids that are agency versus stability as you go into the future now.

Yeah.

When we. When I was on your podcast a couple years ago, how many email subscribers you had? And YouTube and Instagram when you came on. Yeah, that was a couple, three years ago.

Interesting. So I've been doing this for almost six years now. 2. Just one point. So if you actually want to look up this story I just mentioned. So the company is Netdragon Websoft and they've appointed the first ever AI as their CEO. So go down that rabbit hole one day. It's very interesting.

I'm going to take it out. You should.

So when you came on my show, say two, three years ago, we were probably doing about two to 300,000 downloads a month. I would assume at that point it's been a pretty steady linear growth trajectory. That's the one thing about podcasts that has been frustrating, but also it forces you to do your reps. The growth is not exponential. There's no bell curve at any point. I found that it's very predictable, slow up and to the right. There's no viral moments in podcasts, so that. That makes sense.

But yeah, and YouTube had some level.

Yeah. Then I started focusing more on video. A couple things to answer your question, I would say about two to three hundred thousand downloads per month on my email list. Maybe ninety, a hundred thousand emails. I'm just trying to think back to around three years because I've been doing this for six years. Yeah, is the answer. That's how long I've been doing it. Instagram, YouTube actually has been a big. A big growth lever for me. So when I first started the podcast, I had less emphasis on video, more emphasis on audio. But as you can see now I'm sitting in a studio that we built out. So now a lot of the podcasts are in person, but the emphasis has been on video mostly because with any personal brand, any audience, you want to build. Organic discovery is a huge piece of it. And with podcasts there is no organic discovery. So when you upload an audio file to an RSS feed, it sits there and if you don't promote it, no one's going to find you. The only way you get organic reach on a podcast is if you, if you chart on Apple. And really it's not even like top 100, it's if you're getting top 10 or to top 50, you're going to get some organic subscribers because that's where people discover you. So YouTube and video in in particular is a great way to get organic subscribers because they'll start to discover you based on the guests you bring on, or the keywords that you put in the title or the thumbnails. And there's all these different things you can try and optimize. But if you're trying to build a personal brand, podcast or otherwise, video is very important because you want people to discover you when you have no audience. And YouTube is an easy way to do that. That's why I focus so much on in person podcasts now. I take long form, hour long podcasts, clip them into 10 minute segments that are a little bit more YouTube friendly. I also turn those into a whole bunch of shorts. I also do solo videos that are more YouTube style just to grow the YouTube, because that's where I get the most podcast subscribers and downloads. And then eventually some of them think of YouTube as like a top of funnel or lack of a better description. Again, everything you build is a product, is a company, right? So if you're going to build a personal brand, you have to understand your funnel. Where do people discover you? Where do people consume your content? Where do people subscribe to you? Where do they become fans, evangelists? You have to understand your whole funnel, the whole customer journey, except audience journey. So understand that. But that's why YouTube and video so important. That's why I invest so much time and energy into it. Because then you see the people that find you on YouTube, they start to follow you in other places. So when YouTube goes up, audio goes up. Basically all the other social. I can track email subscribers from YouTube and all my other social as well. But YouTube is a huge refer for everything. So yes, YouTube's huge.

Awesome. You know what I want to ask is off this theme of world is we're heading into the autonomous future. AI will take jobs faster than one can upscale. Having a high agency mindset is one of the only ways you're going to thrive. Building Your personal brand and your community as we head into the autonomous future is a huge part of it. If two people get the same AI agents to do the same job, how do you differentiate in a world where people are not door to door buying anymore, it's relationships. So how do you put that on steroids? It's personal brand. If somebody had to build a personal brand today in 2025, what are the steps you would recommend?

That's a loaded. That's a big question. I would say.

The channel and just like maybe seven steps or five steps.

I'll brain dump a little bit. So first I think you have to understand why you're doing this. So you always set a North Star first and that's important because if you don't have a North Star, you're not going to know what to optimize for. And I mean said very simply, if you're just trying to build a brand to build an audience, was that useful or do you want to niche down a little bit and build something that can actually support your company? Or what's the purpose of the brand? Understand what the purpose is because that's going to inform all of your other actions after you figure that out. I think that in terms of platform, I am very bullish on video for a variety of reasons, some of which I just mentioned. Also outside of the fact that if you create video content, it's good for tapping into an organic audience, the other component is it's very high trust building because if somebody sees and listens to you, it's going to create a level of connection that, that is hard to easily emulate by just writing a newsletter on substack or just tweeting. So I think video has a high trust building component which at the end of the day is what we're all trying to accomplish anyways. Regardless of what your North Star is, the goal is to build trust. As much trust and as meaningful a way as quick as possible with the audience that we're trying to tap into. After you pick your medium, I would say that say your North Star is for a business. Your content should reflect the pain points and the questions that your ideal customer profile would be asking. It's very straightforward. The same way that you would tie your marketing messaging back to your ICP or customer avatar. That's what your content should be centered around. And the X factor in good content outside of just answering questions that your ICP would be asking would be, you have to include your lived experience. So anybody can be a knowledge broker on the Internet. But you have to include your lived experience, your own stories, your personality, your spiky points of view. The shit that happened to you five minutes ago, that's top of mind, that sort of layered into the stuff that your ICP cares about, creates the best content. Because I can go find tactical content about whatever I'm trying to solve anywhere on the Internet, but I want to, I want it solved by this particular person for some particular reason. And it's usually again, their lived experience, their point of view, their perspective. I want to go to this person to get content that I could find anywhere else. And I think that once you figure your North Star, you figure out the medium or the platform, you figure out the actual type of content, the questions that you should be asking for your icp, and then you include your lived experience into it. Those are four steps just to get you off the ground. And then you have to build your distribution system so that you can show up for an unreasonable amount of time and you do not burn out or quit. And if you just follow those steps, you would be more successful than probably 99% of people on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, anywhere. It is. It's a very straightforward process, but I don't think, I don't think many people put that much thought into it. I think you have two main problems with people creating content businesses, they don't think through that funnel and instead they just create content that sell, like salesy and pitching, and that turns people off immediately. And then secondly, you have content creators that are not associated with business that are just creating content and they haven't put thought behind what they're trying to accomplish. And then they're just spraying and praying and they're putting out all these different kinds of content, but they're not accomplishing anything. And then over time, that's very hard to sustain and you burn out. So I think that just putting a little bit of thought into, into your process will already yield results. Because the people that anyone you look up to, that does it, well, this is how they started. And then once they've built their core audience, pick a business influencer. If you want to expand your buckets into other types of content, that's okay as well. But this is how anybody who's successful started. Hermosi, Gary V. Grant Cardone. Pick a guy, pick a girl who's big on social media. This is the process they did. And they were very purposeful about who the, who they were trying to target with the content they were creating. And that's how you start awesome.

And you should add Scott Clary to the list because you've also got millions of followers and you're one of one of my favorites. And what's really interesting is how you've broken it out. A lot of people just want to create for the sake of creating. They start with the medium or the content. I think you hit the nail on the head. You got to start with the ideal customer profile. Yeah, the pains. What are the gains? What are the aspirations? What are the needs? Where do they eat, breathe, drink, sleep? And then start with one medium and consistently create content and just modify for them. And then we'll just get better and better at it. I like the video focus.

Video focus is huge for me and I just, I open it up to other mediums because I know not everybody's comfortable on video. I could go on a rant about just do it. And there's a lot of ways to just do it. And for people that are nervous about showing up on video, one strategy I always recommend is, oh, you know, when a camera turns on you, press record. Then you turn to a different person. That happens quite often when you're just starting out. Sit down across from a friend, your parents, somebody you work with, a videographer, doesn't matter. Sit down across from somebody you know. Your chair's here, they're right in front of you. Get them to print out a list of questions that your ideal customer profile, your avatar would care about. And you're going to put a camera off to the side and just press record. You're not going to be staring right at the camera. That's not important for right now. You're just going to start recording. They're going to ask you the questions about two to three to four questions into this list. Put 30, 40 questions on this piece of paper. You're going to forget that there's a camera there and you're just going to start talking to your friend and you're architecting an environment where you get rid of your imposter syndrome and your anxiety about recording content. And then you'll take a look at that, that whatever 45, 50 minute recording that you just did, and you realize that that's already like two months worth of content already. And you can just emulate this process again and again and again and again. Because the goal here is twofold. Number one, to get rid of your anxiety about creating video content, and number two, not to sound like a robot when you're creating video content. If you can get rid of those two things again, you are already better than like 99% of companies creating video content on the Internet. So I think that there's a couple different like tips and tricks to just get you started. But all these ideas are all correct at the same time. If you don't want to do video content and you don't listen to that idea I just gave you, fine, pick a medium that you're comfortable with. But know that if you can create video content, in my opinion, that's the highest form of content that you should aspire to create. This is like a quick little hack to get over your own anxiety about it. But yeah, I mean, you just got to start and you got to start. And one more just to reinforce what I just mentioned, you do have to start. But that process I just laid out forces you to start purposefully. So you're not just spraying and praying and just creating random ass content about anything and hoping that it sticks, right? You're actually formulaic about how you start to put out content. And when you are formulaic, it just speeds up whatever results you're trying to achieve. If you aren't formulaic, you will figure it out. But doing something with purpose is always a better answer than doing it just ad hoc with, with no thought at all. So I would say that's how you start. That's how you get over you sort of your anxiety. And another idea that I think is important is your first piece of content will always suck. You see these cliches, it's very true. Putting the reps in is a very important and real part of it. But know that you cannot get to good content until you put the reps in. It doesn't matter how shitty your first piece is. It's required. It's mandatory to suck at the beginning. Gary Vee says this all the time. Come talk to me after you put out your fiftieth or your hundredth piece of content and then tell me that it sucks. Because just by putting in the reps, most of us are smart. Most of us can learn from our mistakes, most of us aren't. Our ego isn't so big that we keep on putting out things that suck just because we like it. Most of us after 100th rep will have much better content when we first started. And if you combine those ideas and you start now, you will be successful. Especially if your goal is business results, not just fame. Because being famous is not required for most people. The results of content, I think that business results revenue leads customers for most people. That's what the KPI should be. So I think that you don't have to be famous. I think for most of us, you just want to use content as a cheaper way to attract customers because we don't want to throw money into ads or whatever. We want to find ways to secure new customers. This is a great way to do it. You don't need a million followers to have a massively successful organic content marketing strategy for your business. Just do this and three, four months, you're going to start getting leads.

Max, I like what you said. There is consistency leads to mastery, and ultimately consistency is the secret ingredient that turns small actions into big outcomes. But the other thing is if you're afraid to suck at something before you get better at it, then you may as well not try, right? And if you look at Mr. Beast, to any business, the first iteration of Everything Sucks, the tenth iteration probably sucks, and then you just get better and more and more comfortable. I take it back to my time. Although I graduated engineering, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So the first job I took was cold calling for a founder in a small startup. And I sucked that first call. But I knew so much from talking to people that the only way to build a successful company is one of the founders need to learn to sell. And I think I practiced like for hours for that first cold call. And when the buyer picked up on the other side, I hung up and everyone laughed. But I was in this environment where everyone was cold calling. So I just did more and more ups and. And you get better.

Now you want to know a funny stat. You want to know if you've done more than this is from. If you want to start a podcast just to show you how low the bar is. If you've put out more than 10 podcasts, you're already in the top 1% of podcasters, so that's how low the bar is. That's how few people want to put the reps in. Because of what I do for a living now, I podcast, I create content. Everybody in my world is like, hey, Scott, how do I start a podcast? Hey, Scott, how do I grow an audience? It's not hard. I give them the steps that I took. I've been doing it for six years. There's 650 episodes. I've been doing it for a very long time. For me, a very long time. Not compared to a Joe Rogan or a Tim Ferriss that or a John Lee Dumas that probably have over a thousand, fifteen hundred episodes. But the point is six hundred episodes, I have a little bit of I've done a couple reps, right? I just tell them, do it for the next six years with no expectations. Just, if you do it for the next six years, I can guarantee you you'll be one of the top podcasters. I think that's another Alex from Mosey quote, right? Do things for an unreasonable amount of time. And if you do things for an unreasonable amount of time, they'll always take longer than you think. But ultimately, you will eventually achieve the desired result. And that is an idea that carries over to entrepreneurship, carries over into business. Ask yourself how many entrepreneurs who have found themselves able to stay in the game, meaning they've structured their life, their finances, whatever it is, their expense that they can build the thing for 10 years. How many of them are not successful, how many of them are not earning minimum $1 million a year, which is, of course, much more than the average person who's working a W2.9 to 5 salary. So if you can stay in the game long enough, if you're not an idiot, if you structure your life as well as you structure your mindset so you can outlast every single other person on this planet, which really is only about 10 years, because not many people give that much of their life to one thing, you'll find yourself living a life that is significantly better than what most people live. So, and the crazy thing is, 10 years is it seems like a lot of time, but we're alive for a very long time, and you only have to get one thing right. You don't really have to win multiple times to have sort of this incredible life that most people only dream about. And again, success doesn't equal money, but money is a piece of it, and money buys freedom. I think that's what most of us are looking for. We're not all looking to be unicorns. I think a lot of us are just looking to travel when we want, live in the best cities, go send our kids to the best schools. If there's additional expenses that pop up, emergency expenses, we can take care of it. We can take care of our parents when they're retired and they don't have a good retirement or a good pension or good savings. A lot of us just want freedom. And I think that it doesn't take much to achieve that freedom. And that's an idea that I really try and drive home. You don't have to build a unicorn, but if you put 10 years towards something, you will live a very good life. Content, entrepreneurship, whatever, anything worth doing is.

A long freaking slog. You might get lucky like in Instagram, but you got to make peace with the fact that it's a long slog and if it wasn't, everyone else would do it. I like also your framework you talked about, right? Pick the ICP niche down. A lot of people want to go broad, but I think it's important to start with an inch wide and a mile deep and then scripting out. I also like this framework of write down several questions like he said, and record an hour long, two hour long, just have a conversation, maybe have a friend ask you for comfort. And that gives you lots of content for video, maybe a couple months. But it also gives you like one long form podcast. It gives you like maybe two reels a day. It gives you like five, six posts for LinkedIn a week for Twitter. So you can turn that into a multi format and then you can bring it all together and substack like you do and just do that very consistently for a small niche. A lot of people have broad content and those are bigger influencers, but there are like so many micro niches that you can pick that are large enough that people will pay you eventually a lot of money. Just you and tune in.

Right? But every big influencer started niche. Yeah. I said my first my podcast, now I open it up. We have conversations about health and wellness and relationships and business and entrepreneurship. When I started it, it was called sales versus Marketing and it was only revenue like that. I was a CRO at the time and it was only revenue conversations about how do we drive revenue through sales or marketing. And I was speaking to CMOs and CROs and some of those episodes are still up. And then I got bored and I'm like, I want to open up a little bit. And then I started to include not just sales and marketing, I started to include more entrepreneurship and then some more fundraising and then some other like business topics. And then I realized that those topics lend themselves well to people that had high performance mindset. So then we speak about flow state with Steven Kotler or strategy with Seth Godin, and then it starts to build on itself and that there's some positive response and you can open it up a little bit more. But I started niche. I'm thinking of again some of the people that we mentioned now. Grant Cardone does everything under the sun, but he started off with sales. Gary Vee started off with wine and then took that audience and then turned it into a little bit of a following and then did a hard 180 pivot into social media. And now he does everything. He does sports, he does wine, he does NFTs, he does social media, he does just life commentary, motivation. So the point is, everybody who you follow started off in a niche and then once they built their core following, they could have just stuck with that niche and built the business on that niche. Now some of them, maybe they feel like they, they want to grow and go into different verticals. You mentioned Grant Cardone, mostly because he's probably the best example of somebody who started in sales training and then use social to go into real estate. And again, I know people have various opinions of him, but he's a very good example of how to build an audience. He niche down and then he widened it, and then he niche down again, he keeps widening it, now he's going into politics. The point is you don't want to do. If he did what he's doing right now, day one, people wouldn't follow him because they wouldn't know what to follow him for. But when he first started, he was, people knew to follow him for sales training. Now they know to follow him for a whole bunch of different shit because he just has commentary on the world and what's happening. But don't start so wide. To your point, an inch wide, a mile deep is the best way to start. But that's the same wisdom and the same idea that you'd give an entrepreneur starting a business. It's no different. You can't service every customer under the sun. Pick your icp, pick the person that you know that you can service their needs better than anyone else. And that's also why the most successful entrepreneurs are not the Stanford dropouts or the people that, you know, the Zuckerbergs of the world that are going to go build the next unicorn Fang the Mo. Those have a 99% failure rate. The most successful entrepreneurs are the ones that live in an industry for 30 years and then they see this very unique niche pain point that no one else sees because they've been living in that industry. Then they go build a company to solve that pain for that one particular industry because they're so tapped into this super hyper focused niche ICP that nobody else in the world even knows exists. Those are the ones that are actually quite successful. I would even make an argument, and you probably have ideas on this, but I make the argument that if you live in an industry and you see a pain point that no one else sees and you build a company to solve that pain, I would say that the traditional, oh, 90% of entrepreneurs are failures. Only 10% of successful are 95. 5. I would say that ratio flips. Maybe not exactly, but I would say that your chance of being successful is exceptionally high compared to if you just shoot from the hip when you're first starting out in your career and you have no lived experience. An example of this, I wish I could remember their revenue numbers because it was insane. It was a guy who was an architect his whole life and they did a presentation at Emerge in Miami. They were pitching, they were like pitching Kevin o' Leary for an investment as like a Shark Tank style thing. Emerge is a big tech conference in Miami and I was in the audience watching and the guy was an architect his whole life. And it was at the advent of AI, so maybe two, three years ago. And he created an AI tool that looked at these autocad diagrams of a home that they draw on a sheet before you build the home. And then a human goes in and measures all the different walls and puts all the measurements on so that the developer knows like what they're doing. So he developed an AI that could look at a drawing of a house and with greater accuracy than a human, instantly put measurements on every single wall, window and door in the house. When that would take a human with less accuracy maybe a week to do it, could do it in under five seconds. And he would only ever have known that because he lived and worked as an architect his whole life. Beautiful use of experience with emerging technology and AI to solve a pain point that most people don't even know exist with incredible efficiency. And it was some. And you can tell he had product market fit because he almost went on stage to pitch is like not a joke. But I think he was, I think they were offering like a hundred thousand dollar grant and it was like something like six months in and he already had the four or five million dollars in committed business that was going to be after the product's built out. Like he's going to be killing it basically. So the point is experience, leverage, emerging tech, look for niche, develop an ICP that nobody even knows exists. If you can do that, I think that's like a startup, startup magic. Basically. It's like the hack to build something successful and de risk the entrepreneurial journey as much as possible.

You know that I think there's some truth. There's a lot of truth there. Like you pick an industry, it's pained you, you solve it very manually, then you build the automation. Yeah, a lot of people start to find an industry they don't know and build technology a Lot of the times and not a lot of times actually this is a sure shot way to de risk in a risky environment. It's never the technology doesn't fix a bad process. You need to understand the ontology of the service you're delivering the process. Usually if you look at the process, it's a crappy one, right? If you observe the end to end user flow. So then you gotta design a newer process that removes all the garbage from it and then run the refined process and see if it's better and you can augment that with existing off the shelf tools. And then you realize, man, I can just eat the whole thing with technology. Right? And that's what people deeply understand the industry. They do. Now I want to shift focus to your recent post on the wealth ladder, right. And or foreign levels of wealth creation. A lot of what we talk fits right into it is number one is sell your time, which is a job, then sell your skill, which is being a freelancer. Then sell a product which is a business and then sell a system which brings you to freedom. So walk us through that framework with some examples. I mean job we know 9 to 5, anyone can get a job and then you start freelancing. Freelancing often is a great way to if you actually are a niche freelancer, it's probably a great way to then take those learnings and build a product business. But I'm particularly interested in how do you go from like job to freelancer to then product. But eventually a system is what enables you to get freedom and operate without you. So let's walk through that.

So I think that how I define a system is something that you can build once and sell unlimited times. The line between a business and a system is small. But if I think about the most leverageable businesses in the world that are true freedom would be SaaS. You build it once, you can sell it unlimited times. It's not like it's not a business, but ultimately you're not. You don't have to ship a widget or you don't have to, you don't have to render a service every single time somebody buys from you. And I think that if more people thought in the build once and then sell unlimited times system mindset, they would not build a business that accidentally turns into a job. So I think the goal, I think this happens quite often. People end up building this business that ends up being so time consuming and so labor intensive, energy intensive, cost prohibitive that they end up building themselves a job and they do not have Freedom. So the goal. And there's other ways to achieve freedom as well. There's systems, there's processes, there's hiring, of course. But I think that if we think of just starting out, if you build a software company, if you don't have technical expertise and you build a digital product once and you sell it a million times, if you build a model that works and then you franchise that model out to others, each franchisee, each purchaser of that software, each purchaser of that. Of that course, or whatever it is, does not require the equal amount of input for you to deliver that product or service. So I think that that's a very. I think that as you move up that wealth ladder, have building a system as the end goal where you should eventually end up, you do not have to build with that in mind immediately. And I think that actually the biggest hurdle people have through all four stages. There are hurdles for sure, but the biggest psychological hurdle would be to move from job to skill, because that is something that I think is the first level of risk that people will ever experience in their life when they start to take their future into their own hands. But once you start to freelance again, you don't want to. You don't want to turn it back into a job. So the goal of this wealth ladder is to keep moving farther and farther away from a job. Ironically, what a lot of entrepreneurs do is they keep building themselves jobs again and again and again, and they think that it's a business or they think that it's a skill that they're selling, but they just keep building themselves jobs. So I think that the goal is to move further and further away from the job that you originally tried to escape. And in my mind, the final step, the final boss in this wealth ladder would be to be to build a system so that you do not have to be involved every single day. So you do have complete freedom and control over your life.

The key there is repeatability, or you're aspiring for repeatability. You acquire a customer and they keep paying you. They're not leaving you. And that drives that freedom, that drives enterprise value in the company, that makes it sellable. So you're not selling it for pennies on the dollar. You don't have to get new customers every single time. A lot of people have this job. And I think the first hurdle is going from job to skill and freelancing. And I think one way to do that is to get gigs off the side of your desk, and then they move to product. But a lot of the Times people get stuck at 3, and I was there, you end up creating a job for yourself that what you call a.

Business, you are selling a product. But the point is there's so much, there's so much of your own time and energy invested into it and you'll never. Yes, and you'll never. Like enterprise value is a whole other conversation. And yes, if you ever do want to sell a company, I can guarantee you somebody will put a much higher valuation on a recurring revenue product than a one time transactional sale or widget that you ship. But a lot of people are not systems thinkers, so they think very transactionally because again, if you've never built a system, if you've never built once and sold a million times, it's hard to conceptualize that. But that's why software eats the world. That's why this is why you should focus. And software isn't the only example either. But this is why you should focus on building systems that turn that skill to a job, to an entity that operates without your input. That is the goal and not just operates at the same status quo as when you were involved in it. Operates exponentially so that there is no limit. Yeah, exactly. So it's not one thing because you could make the argument I built a business and I hired an operator coo. Then I took a step back. Yes, great, it's a fabulous business. But think about all the other ways that you could turn that business or that one time sale to your customer into a system. Are there franchisee opportunities? Are there licensing agreements? Is there, is there a recurring revenue product that you could include? Could you turn your one time sale into a recurring revenue like a Chewy or a boxycharm or any one of these other types of seemingly subscription models, businesses that turn into subscription models. So there's a lot of different ways to do it. But I think that when you think about wealth, the most wealth and freedom will always be when you build a system versus any of the other three steps.

And then the core values of that is consistency and repeatability, which essentially means the same thing. What in your view, mistakes that keep people stuck at each phase.

The easy answer is themselves. The easy answer is the way it's always been done. The easy answer is their own ego. Because when you remove your ego from the equation, then you naturally see that you have not achieved as much as you could have. And then you will find ways to progress to the next stage. I think a lot of it is. I think a lot of it is ego. And a lot of it is fear because outside of that, the tactics are all there.

It comes back to the stability versus agency mindset. Right. Like people's mindset, kill them before they get started. And what I found now in a lot of startups that I mentor or angel invest in and things like that, there's one, there's three key things that destroy things. And it's like you said, the tactics are there. It's the personality, the human component of it that always destroys it. Right. One is for some reason people are so enamored and fixated on control versus making money. Right.

If you care about ego, that's full ego. Yeah.

When you care so much about when you prioritize control, you destroy relationships. When you prioritize money even so much you, that's when you don't build repeatability, you make short term decisions like Wall street. In many cases the only way to build something lasting is to prioritize impact. And I see this happening and this whole control money driven mindset like fixated on controlling money versus impact comes from, I think three things that you and I talked about is like what informs stability mindset versus what informs agency mindset. And I see a lot of stability mindset is informed by fixed thinking. I got to hold onto this. My failure is my limiter. It comes from scarcity mindset which is, oh man, if I give out stuff, if I share stuff, I'm just going to lose out. And then the last thing, it comes from just being nice and being a yes person because you've been a rule follower. So I'd love to get your feedback on that.

Yeah, I think that one factor that can help overcome a lot of these mental models or mental blocks, it's the ability to question everything and anything. And I think that when you question and you apply more critical thought, I don't even think you can have true critical thought if you have too much ego because you don't want to accept anyone else's opinion is better than yours. But not only questioning other people's opinions, questioning your own assumptions. I don't know, I think how I've overcome it is the best way that I can teach over to people. It's really just having the self awareness to be like there's a 99 chance that the way that I'm doing things could be better and there's probably something that I, I don't want to deal with. There's some sort of idea that's uncomfortable to me that I've rejected because it's not what I know and it's not what I've ever done before, but there's an off chance that if I lean into that, it's going to make my long term life much easier and it's going to make my long term business much more successful. A lot of it is just questioning your assumptions, questioning other people's assumptions. Not in a way that you like untrusting of your own experience in the world, but in a way that you are always a student. I know, I hope it doesn't sound so cliche, but I think that's a very important mindset because the second you stop, the second you are no longer a student is the, is the second you plateau. When you go into everything you do. Let's get a little bit more tactical. So when you have your week laid out in front of you, look at the things that are the highest friction things, the things that you don't feel like doing, the things that you probably should delegate, the things that have a quote unquote always been done this way and maybe just analyze some of those processes in your life and your business and really question is that the best way of doing it? And if you do a little bit of research and you do a little bit of self reflection, at least for me, like for example, how we, how we edit the podcast, which is really the most recent example I can come up with outside of the businesses I've built in the past, how we edit the podcast, how you put together the thumbnails, like I love them, I love the look, I love the aesthetic. But you're ignorant if you think that what you did a year ago is the best or most optimized version of what you could possibly do. So that forces you to go out into the market and to research and to understand what competitors are doing. And then you bring some of that knowledge back in and you disrupt yourself, you disrupt your own processes. And I think that's the best way to move up the wealth ladder, get over these hurdles, progress the next level in your business, whether or not it's through the wealth ladder or through your revenue numbers or to the next revenue target you're trying to hit. Like you do have to consistently disrupt. You have to process so that it's not all ad hoc, but you do have to. You have to bring new ideas in and disrupt yourself or else, in my opinion, someone else will. And I think we can look at that at a much larger scale. Like why does Blockbuster not exist? Because they didn't to disrupt themselves. They never chose to disrupt themselves. They were okay with the status quo, there was ego in that organization and that's why they no longer exist.

In the last 15, 20 years, more than 50% of the Fortune 500 have evaporated. And it can be boiled down to this one thing, that if you keep hiring and promoting people on tenure versus trajectory, you end up becoming the very dinosaur you set up to disrupt. But there's caveats here. I think one thing is, although you go and seek out new knowledge and I love Learning from community, ChatGPT has changed a lot, right? I chat GPT a lot, but nothing changes personal experience, right? We both have large communities and anytime I have a massive stump, I'll just hit up like 7 to 10 entrepreneurs and be like, can you give me a perspective? And I do the same for them and just, it's more brainstorming. It's not just getting GPT to give me an answer, but it's just brainstorming, hey, like, what is the emotional side? Because everything is part data, part emotion. But I think there, there's a key thing when you seek out disruption risk ideas to, to get you out of disruption risk is you gotta take advice from people who've been where you wanna go or people who are closer to your goals. Yes, a lot of us, what happens is we confuse this. We listen to people who haven't earned the right. Like opinions are like a holes, everyone has one. And everyone, everyone wants to give you an opinion. But I'm like, if you haven't earned the rights one, I'm a fool for asking you once. And if you keep making my life miserable, then I'm a bigger fool for keep coming to you. You got to go and listen. Take advice from people, I think who are closer to your goals than people who just have an opinion. Because even though they've done nothing.

No, I agree, I agree fully. I think that in my life and career, the most useful inputs and influences have been people that are just slightly beyond where I am now. So I don't want advice from somebody who obviously has not achieved the thing that I want to achieve. I don't think that's, I don't think that's the right person to look to. I also don't think that the traditional definition of mentor, somebody who did the thing like 20 years ago at such an exceptional level, is a good person to learn from either. So somebody who just recently crossed a milestone that I hope to cross in the next year and a half, that's somebody who I want to learn from because their knowledge is so recent. And to just one. One more idea on what you just mentioned. ChatGPT. All these generative chat tools are great for brainstorming ideas, but then I need the lived experience. I want the context as to what happened and what didn't happen. I want the good and the bad. We were just talking about a really shitty experience that you dealt with in your past life and in your career, and that's not going to show up in ChatGPT. Those, those ridiculous edge cases are never gonna show up in ChatGPT. Now, what would prompt the discussion is if I was trying to solve the problem that you were dealing with. And I said, hey, these are all the different things that could go wrong in this particular situation. And then I took that list of ideas, maybe something I didn't think about myself, and I say, hey, yo, Lloyd, what do you think about this, that, this and that? What have you experienced with when you do all these different things? By the way, I have a story. This is what could go right, this is what could go wrong. And I think that when you use ChatGPT as, like, this first pass at research, at brainstorming, that's where it's useful. Don't outsource your thinking to it. And definitely do not replace lived experience with ChatGPT, because it will never understand the multitude and millions of outlying circumstances that could impact your results. Which is why a mentor or a person who just lived it is probably your best bet. And many of them, not just one, but all these ideas together to bring it full circle will be what allows you to move through your wealth ladder, will be what allows you to disrupt yourself. Maintain success. Not just achieve success, but maintain success in your business and also in areas outside your business, too. These are the same things that you would want to do. I know that you just went on this bodybuilding journey. Yeah, you can get advice from somebody who was bodybuilding in the 80s, and there's gonna be a lot of advice that may not be so relevant anymore. So you want to get. You want to get advice from somebody who's. Yeah, they started two, three years ago. They look pretty good. All right, but what. What did you do? I want to learn from you. What are you. How are you training now? What are you eating now? What are all the different things that you're doing that have worked for you recently? Because I don't know, I think that's the most useful input, 100%.

You know what? A lot of people pick mentors that haven't done it. They're just professional coaches or they pick mentors who've done it in a whole different paradigm. And I think what's really important is to. To bring the immediate relevance. So you have part data or information, which is the chat GP stuff, but you also have part emotion and relevance. And any building success is both things. And so, like from the bodybuilding example, like, I used to train 25 years ago, and after the majority sale of Boast, I almost died of COVID I'm like, I got to go on this fitness journey. I went and picked a calisthenic trainer who is the best at his game, and I train with him. And I picked a fitness coach who is a men's physique guy whose physique I wanted, and we just trained together. If I pick somebody who's out of shape, I can't even respect, right? And that's the same thing in business or anything else. If I want to grow my podcast audience, I'm hitting you up. I'm like, dude, like, be my coach, let's figure it out kind of thing. And the same thing with community. That's why Community, right. Having multiple points to inform your thinking is key. Your community is your currency as you head into the future. I did, I did want to ask you this one question, though. 1. With a podcasting business that you have, how do you build a system where you have repeatability in terms of revenue?

It's a great question. A podcasting business is a business, at the end of the day, in terms of repeatability of revenue. All the products that you could sell for a business sell as a business. You can sell through a podcast. So think of podcast as media leverage. Again, I know, you know, naval and. And his four forms of leverage. And there's media, finance, tech, and people, right? Those are the four forms of leverage. So podcast is media leverage. Now, how do you build predictable revenue on top of that, predictable revenue would be monthly recurring revenue. That's a traditional definition of predictable revenue. You could have a good sales team that predictably closes deals, but that's not the classic definition of predictable revenue. So understanding that podcast is media leverage, I have a sales team that sells ads. If I wanted to, I could build a SaaS product that I sell against the audience. I could build a paid community. Those would probably be the two, like, obvious ones. Any kind of subscription product or a subscription product coupled with ad sales, coupled with if you wanted to, coaching or community or events or masterminds, the options are endless. I think that if what I do right now is most of the revenue comes in from ads. And I've been very hesitant to launch like a coaching consulting event business because that's not predictable revenue. That is transactional sales. You can make money, a significant amount. But I think that if I'm going to build something, it would be like some sort of monthly recurring subscription product to community because I can build a software too. I. That. That's a whole other conversation I don't feel like bringing in like a technical co founder. That's like a. That's just a me problem. That's not a podcast problem. But I think a paid community would be a very smart play for a lot of creators because then you have that monthly recurring revenue that you can depend on and you can do that yourself. You can do it through discord, Facebook, WhatsApp. Can you school? This is not my area of expertise. This is your area of expertise, but.

You can use a lot of stuff. I'm particularly bullish because we're in this technological shift, right? So the first was I guess on prem software like you need to erect your own servers. Then we went to the cloud and within the cloud came site courtesy of.

A campaign from Benioff and sfdc.

It changed the world, right? Anyone could build and launch technology without erecting infrastructure. And so within that came mobile apps and everything else. We're now in a shift that's gone from. That's going to go from buying software to software as a service, right? So we went from on prem, which is a software that was transactional. Then we went from software as a service subscription to now buying service as software. Meaning with AI replacing humans, you can sell services as software. And that is really an interesting play because now people like yourself and me and others who are podcasting or doing these personal brands can then create AI agents that communicate with their audience and multiple levels of subscription for your own personalized ChatGPT. There's a company, a friend of mine runs this company called Personal AI that helps you create your own large language models or small language models on all your historical data and then drive chat conversations with your audience and then maybe you could have subscription tier. So I'm super excited.

For the world.

Yeah, for the world we're getting into. And you probably don't even need a technical co founder in the world we're getting into.

But no, you're right, you probably don't. I was. You know, it's so funny. We're moving so fast and I still consider myself like quite technical. We're moving so fast that even as technical and I would Say, as finger on the pulse as I am, I still am thinking of like my how I productize my podcast and my community in ways that were very relevant. Five years ago, I'm thinking about paid community. But now you're like, okay, so let's do a paid community. Then let's like just brain dump all of Scott's podcast wisdom as and instead of having to hire somebody to manage his paid community and answer questions, now you can have an agent that could be helping people with podcast questions behind a paywall 24 7, 365 based on Scott's entire brain and library of knowledge, which is phenomenal. And then yes, you could if you wanted to. If you wanted to build a community around podcasters five years ago, obviously the least friction would be paid community, no tech. And now you could do a paid community. And then if the community wanted it enough, you could do a no code tool that allows people to like edit their podcasts or any of the other function that I do on a day to day. And then you could charge separate. And that could be a SaaS product, right? That could be. You could have a service as a software. You could have software as a service. You could have all this shit with no technical background. So it's absolutely phenomenal what you can do, but you have to be. It's a lot for most people, even this conversation, they'd be like, what are they talking about?

But you know, this is very fascinating because you have a podcasting business, right, that you are now. So I've looked at several companies, friends of mine. The way they bootstrapped to massive success is they were just their own lab. First they were selling direct to customer. Then their process got so good that they automated. Then it became a SaaS production. Then they started providing that as an infrastructure to other businesses like them. So selling arms to arms dealers kind of thing. And then they got exponential scale. I think one of the companies is Jane app that started as a clinic. Then they built management software for themselves to handle more patients. And they eventually provided that to all the other clinics. Now everyone uses it. Shopify the same thing, right? Toby had a skateboard store. He built Infra to take his skateboard store online. His friends asked him, I'm like, help us do the same thing. Then it became Shopify, right? Solve my own problem, then solve it for other people. So in your case, you've been built a successful podcast. I think now you're in a world where you could create agents or your community. You could take multiple parts of your Processes and agentify it and sell that as subscription. I'd like to see that. Anyway, we're just brainstorming up and down.

I love it. I think it's very smart. And this is another lesson. It's so easy to riff off and sound smart on the Internet. But it's sometimes entrepreneurs like succumb to shiny object syndrome. And I've succumbed to that many times. Like I've tried to build, I've had the podcast over here that you're building Media leverage. It's leverage is leverage. You can use it for anything. So I have to ask myself, like, why have I tried to build all these other businesses in the past that do not align with the podcast? And it's because Shiny object syndrome. So as much as you know it, you know it exists and, and you feel like you're immune to it when somebody comes to you with a really great idea, it's very hard to say no sometimes. And I think that's, I think another idea that's very important is the ability to say no and focus on the long term, not the short term, which is something that I'm focusing on right now.

You think you have one of the things that takes people generations to build and figure out. You have media leverage. You have an ICP that tunes in every day, every week and can you sell more and more products to them in an automated way? I think is the future like one person multimillion dollar businesses. As we close out, I have a couple of questions. In rapid fire, what are some financial habits that help you and your friends maintain and grow wealth? Because a lot of people, they make money, but it's hard to keep money and it's important to live free. You got to keep money and you got to grow it.

Obviously lifestyle creep is a big thing. If you make a little bit of money and to stave off lifestyle creep, obviously you want to invest. I think that one thing that I've learned is just because you're good at making money doesn't mean you're a good investor. And I also think that diversifying is helpful for some people. But if you are as aggressive as an investor as you are as a operator or builder, you are probably not going to be happy just diversifying across like blue chip stocks. You're probably going to get aggressive and you're probably going to take some risk. And I'm not against risk, but I think that taking on risk as an investor, if you spread that risk out and try and understand too many high risk things at the same Time is a recipe for disaster. What I mean by that is if you're trying to figure out stocks and Crypto and Section 8 and multirez and all these other randomized things all at the same time, I think it's very hard to succeed. Anything's possible. But my best success has been focusing on one asset class at a time that is high risk and understanding it as much as I would have to understand a new company. And when I do that repeatedly, that's when I have success. So I think that a financial hack is, if you want to do things yourself, spend just as much time studying that thing as you spent building your company, or at least as much time as possible, because that will lead you to the highest chance of success. And whether or not it's crypto or day trading or again, section 8 real estate or whatever it is, if you spend enough time studying it, you'll be successful at it. But put that same amount of energy and effort is how you made your money into that thing you want to invest in. That's one of my best.

Same rule applies, is get advice from people who are closer to your goals, because oftentimes your friends or family members be like, oh, you should do more real estate. Oh, you should buy the stock. Yeah, I.

Or angel investing. I just. Yes, angel. Same thing, same difference. Right. If you don't just become a good angel investor just because you sold the company. Yeah. You. You know how to like vet founders and shit. And look at a piano.

It's gambling.

It's gambling. But if you do it a hundred times, you'll be good at it. Yeah, but it takes energy and focus.

And some of the best angels I know, they do it because they want to. They want to do good. And if something great comes out of it, it's a cherry on top. And I think I probably did 20 angel deals, invested in a lot of friends funds, and my banker calls my wife and this guy won the lottery and he's just buying more lottery tickets. Can you just lock them out and like, invest in a balanced portfolio? Because you guys are on this long sabbatical.

Last question.

In your journey this far, what was the lowest freaking rock bottom point and how do you navigate it?

My lowest rock bottom point, there was a time in my life when I tried to do some consulting. So I quit. I quit a job. And I was like, I'm going to be a consultant. I'm going to bet on myself. And what ended up happening is I ended up taking like a fractional. Basically, I had no Money. When I did, I didn't have a lot of money at all. And I was going to bet on myself. And when you consult, you jump back and forth between different clients and it's very, it's a lot of work because you're putting in your 40 hours, available hours, then you got to go find more clients because this engagement's ending in a couple weeks or months or quarters. It's not fun. And it's really hard to sell yourself if you don't know what you're doing and price yourself properly. So you end up just replacing the job with a shittier job is basically what you do anyway. So basically I was not good at being a consultant because I thought that I would make 10x what I could make being a full time CRO as a consultant, not the case. And anyways, long story short, I was in a role as a fractional cmo and they're like, scott, we don't need you anymore. They let me go. I had no money. And I've always cared less about my own circumstance, but more about the people that surround me. So I don't have kids yet, but if I had kids, I'd be like, obviously you just get so stressed about not being able to provide. But at the time I was with Gina, who I'm still with today, and I came home and I'm like, listen, I have no money. I have, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I'm not sure what I'm going to work on next. I, I'm sure I'll figure it out. But when we started dating, I kind of like hyped myself up a little bit. I was like, don't worry, money's going to be good. We're never going to be stressed. And at that point I was very stressed about money. And I told her, this isn't what you signed up for. You can go. And that, that to me was rock bottom because I was letting someone else down. And she obviously, she looked at me and she's, Scott, you're an idiot. I'm not with you for your money. Trust me, you're good. We'll figure it out together. And that was again, it wasn't like homelessness. It wasn't anything where I was going to be in dire circumstances. But for me it was taking a bet on myself and in the moment feeling like I was an absolute failure because again, I didn't have a job and I didn't have money, I didn't have another gig lined up. And what Brought me out of that was a really strong partner. I think that's. I don't know. That's something that I think is not discussed enough. Like having somebody in your corner for when you feel like the world's crashing and zooming out. The world is usually not crashing because you've been through it, as do many of the people that listen to this. Like, when you are in that moment, there's very little that people can tell you that make you think the thing is that life is going to be okay, even though hindsight is 2020 and it will always be okay. But for me, that was that moment because I really felt like I was letting her down. And her response was something that really stuck in my head. It's like I still remember it. Like, I remember exactly where I had the discussion with her and we're still together. And I think that there haven't been moments in my life that have been as tough as that, even though there's been moments where that version of me would have been super stressed. But I guess stress is all relative. But yeah, that was like the one moment where it's like having somebody in your corner who loves you, cares about you and believes in you is a superpower. And I'm very fortunate for that.

And yeah, that's the most underrating, underrated thing, right? Like, I could do what I did because my wife had a stable job, she managed the family, she knew she's stability, I'm agency. But it can work well together as like a Deadpool, Wolverine kind of combo, right? Because they're making the paying the bills. They know that their life is going to be hard, but not as hard as you. And so they balance out your ups and downs by doing the things like looking after the family, the kids, paycheck so you can swing exponential. They do the linear stuff. And I think that's really key, having somebody by your side that tells you, I know it's effed up and I know it's going to be hard.

But.

You'Re going to do well. Not only are you going to do well, but I'm going to help you. I've got your back. I think that is very underrated because when you start out, you're often your own sort of promoter. You got to be your own motivational speaker because nobody will. But this brings another closing point that I wanted to close out with is this is also another thing that doesn't get talked about a lot is the concept of nice people versus good people. Nice people prioritize being Light and tell you what you want to hear. They commiserate in your miseries. It's like anytime there is a celebrity or an athlete or an entrepreneur, they hit this first milestone. Maybe I raised a bunch of money on an idea, or I, I won my first match. Conor McGregor won a big title. Then you got all these friends that tell you that, no, you did it on your own and screw everyone else, and you ditch the team that got you there. And then eventually your spiral stars, that's nice people, good people, they tell you how it is. They call your bullshit. It may hurt in the moment, but it's good for you in the long run. And I think having a partner that's a good person and having a circle that's good people and not nice people that just commiserate in your miseries and tell you what you want to hear is key there.

I think it's huge. I was, I just had a podcast before this with Rebecca Zung, and she is a expert on narcissism. And one thing that narcissists do is they actually are nice to people. Like, they're on the surface nice, but then they'll gaslight you and make you second guess yourself, but they'll still pretend to be nice. And that's, I think that's one of the most difficult ideas to get around. I'm not saying everybody who's nice is a narcissist, but nice and not good, nice is almost like a vanity metric. Nice doesn't solve anything. Nice doesn't help you out. And in the odd case, nice could be a veil for more malicious intent if they want to cover up their true intention. Because nice is. Nice is easy to fake. So I think that people that challenge you, people that tell you where you have to improve, I mean, that Kim Scott book, Radical Candor, whether or not you're applying it to your company or your friends, I think it's important. And in my mind, being good and being honest, that is candor. And I think that's what people need to surround themselves with, because nice is useless. And nice also is not just useless. I, I think in some cases, it could actually be detrimental if you can be harmful. Yeah, yeah.

Because people that commiserate in your misery say you did it yourself, and then you end up going in this ditch. Right. And I, I, I need to listen to your podcast on narcissism. I've been following that recently.

We just did it this afternoon. I'll send it to you. We, we just recorded it. She's amazing. At it. But the point is, and narcissists and just nice people in general, they're not helping you. And they'll say all the things that you want to hear, and then they'll gaslight you when you need something from them. I think that's like what narcissists do. So you actually, you just feel like you're going crazy because you're like, some of the time they seem super nice. And then when I need something actually tangible, I need something, I need them to support me in some way, they'll say, yeah, no problem, I'll support you. And then when I ask them why they didn't send me the money or why they didn't do XYZ that I asked, and they'll say, like, why? You never told me to do that. They're going to gaslight you on purpose. But what they say to you, it'll sound nice. So that's why nice is useless. And it doesn't mean it's always a narcissist. But the point is, nice doesn't do anything. Nice doesn't solve any problems. And on the off chance that they're just being nice, not narcissistic, just being nice, because they're like, oh, I'm sure that telling Scott that he built the podcast on his own and he's the best podcaster in the world, I'm sure that'll be great. That doesn't help me at all. First of all, I didn't build it on my own. I have an audience of people that make me relevant. Plus, I have a team that definitely deserves more credit than me for actually helping out and getting the podcast edited and pushed out and helping me think through ideas and helping me when shit isn't going well. But outside of that, if I believe I'm the best podcaster in the world, I'm never going to improve. I'm never going to do all those different things that we just spoke about. I'm never going to disrupt myself. A person who's nice is not a useful person to have around. It doesn't serve any purpose. So I love that idea. I've never really thought through it until you mentioned it, but that nice versus.

Good, I think we need a whole conversation around that. Because the thing is, the world is full of these nice people that say things to you that you want to hear to get in your good graces, because you have an audience, you have the media leverage already. And sometimes they pass through the filter because they're coming through your community. And then you make these mistakes and they lead you down the right path. And now I have this filter. Is who's nice, who's just saying it, and is this person that's saying it. Because sometimes it can be disguised. Right. Good. Gets disguised with nice. But is this person closer to my goals? Or they want to be closer to my goals? And they're like, they haven't earned the right. And so I think one of the key things is having this filter around people is not being. Not surrounding yourself by people who are not closer to your goals that are. Come across as nice, because then automatically they're trying to get something out of you.

So that's a tough. That's tough to figure out because I've fallen victim to it. Not victim in the sense that these people were malicious, but a lot of the failed businesses were failed partnerships.

Yeah.

So it was not failed business. It was somebody who saw the audience who's like, hey, Scott, I love you. Have an audience. This is what I can do. They were very hyperbolist about their own skill sets and their own competence. And then they said, you bring the audience, I'll build. The business is going to be this perfect synergistic partnership. It turns out that they just wanted to latch on and leech what I've built and not put in any effort or work. And this happens with people who build an audience. This happens with people that have made a little bit of money. It's very difficult. It's. I don't know if there's a. Because some people are very good at, like, selling you on them, and it's hard to see through the bullshit. I think the only, I guess, way that I would filter is to know the person long enough before I make a decision to go into business with them. Meaning there's people that I've been to their weddings, seen them, have kids, known them for three, four, five years. I would go into business with them in a second because I know who they are. They've never heard anything from me.

Even sometimes that could be a misnomer because I feel like your childhood friends, when they see your success far ahead of them, they get envious of you because they're like, why this person versus me?

Yeah.

And I think there's two filters. If it's not a friend that you've known for a long time, I think it's important to say, hey, when have you done this? When have you driven this outcome or similar for somebody else? So when have you built a business solo to a million dollars in revenue? Or be part of the driving force behind helping somebody else drive this. Right. As an executive from the ground up kind of thing, that's probably an easy one with a friend, I think. Oftentimes a personal and business gets conflated and it's really important to just put no money on it and get some reps together on the business for six months, seven months, get customers, sell stuff kind of thing.

I actually. Yeah. So to. I want to clarify. I agree with you 100. What I was mentioning was more of a testament to this person's character, not their business competence. So the ideal situation is you've known somebody for four years and you've seen them do the thing, business competence. And then you've also seen them act with character that you would want to be aligned and associated with. Because it's two pieces. Right. It's not just that they can do the thing. Can they do the thing adhering to the same moral and ethical values that you hold? Because a lot of people can build a business and I wouldn't want to go into business with them because I don't. I'm not really happy with the. Their ethical compass or their moral compass. So I think that you have to find a way to gauge both of those things. And if you don't have some data points that you can reference because you haven't seen them do it, then I would say doing some sort of like soft launch, zero risk, zero commitment. No, even, even I don't want to say zero paperwork, but zero, zero anything that ties you legally together in a single entity. So if you want to go sell some shit together, do it. Do a 5050 rev split on a product, sign that agreement. It's very hard to screw that up. You're not forming an LLC. You're doing a 5050 rev split on a sale of a product. And if it goes well and then you want to enter into a business together, you can take care of that. But if they start selling the product and not paying you, they're like, oh, I've already gotten traction. I'm going to do it without you. These are great that you just found out that they're a complete asshole before you committed anything to them and you're not legally bonded to a corporate entity with them. So I think that, I think that's a really smart idea. Very smart idea. I like doing. I like that idea a lot. Just do some reps and most of us don't do that.

Most of us, most of them just.

Just LLC and go into it. And the crapshoot as to whether or not it works out.

It never works out, or it works out some of the times. But I think ultimately what fails is not the product, the company. It's misalignment of values between people, right? Whether it's any divorce or whether it's in a family relationship. And when there's no money and everyone's poor, everyone just stretches, right? They're like, yeah, we'll deal with it. And when money comes in, it just doesn't. It doesn't change people. They say money changes people. It just brings out your true self. Because you'll then start acting according to your values. And if you want to account for that, then work together before you have an entity set up and start making some money together. And then based on who's doing what, make sure the equity is assigned appropriately or else you're going to be in a freaking deadlock. So thank you so much, Scott. As we part ways, any parting wisdom?

I would say for parting wisdom, one last idea that I think is important. And then in terms of what's coming up, it's just the podcast, but the last thing I think that's important is outside of all the ideas we discussed today, I love the idea of reverse engineering success and reverse engineering what someone else has accomplished. I think that's a great research framework to apply to anything in your life, whether or not it's marriage, fitness, business, that mentor that gives you that context and gives you that story about how they got to where they are. They're going to tell you one thing, and not saying that it's incorrect. But I think that you should also look at their actions and reverse engineer how they got there. I think that's a very important idea because you can reverse engineer anyone's success. A successful relationship, a successful physique, a successful business. You can see the steps they took to get there, and they can add some color to that as well. But that's a great framework to start from. A successful podcast, a successful content strategy, a reverse engineer. The steps they took when they were at the level that you're at, if they. And this also opens it up, opens up your educational options, your library of resources to people that you don't know directly, because you can reverse engineer success of people that are on YouTube and in podcasts. And if you go to people that were, for example, starting a podcast and listen to the interviews they did when they were first starting out, they're going to tell you they're going to. They're going to let things Slip about what they did and what they didn't do. And you have unlimited mentors to choose from on the Internet now at different stages of their career because everything is, thank God, uploaded and available for 24. 7 access. You can find mentors in real life. Talk to them, find mentors off that don't even know you exist. Reverse engineer success. People that are giving wisdom from just a few steps in front of you. And it's very important. And outside of that, this was awesome. Thank you for having me on. If you want to connect with me, the pod, my podcast where I do the exact same thing as what you just heard today is called Success Story. So if you like this kind of stuff, maybe you'll like that show as well. And you can find Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to connect on social, it's at Scott Declary everywhere. That's pretty much it, dude. Thank you.

Thank you for joining, man. Scott's podcast for our listeners is one of the top podcasts. I listen to it. I love it. He's expanded beyond just sales and goes into all realms of just life as an entrepreneur and I haven't got there yet. Our stuff is still focused on traction and we're keeping on the same path. But I would highly encourage you to tune in to Scott's stuff because it teaches you around the different aspects of being an entrepreneur. Keep. Keep crushing it, man. Thank you so much.

Thank you, dude. I appreciate you.

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