The Money Making Expert: The Exact Formula For Turning $100 Into $100k Per Month! 10x Your Income Without Working Harder! The Waiting List Hack That Will Make You Millions!

There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, but what is the first step? Daniel Priestley is an award-winning serial entrepreneur who has built and sold several successful businesses and written 5 books on starting and scaling businesses. He is the founder of Dent Global, an accelerator and venture studio, and the cofounder of ScoreApp, an AI powered marketing software. In this conversation Daniel and Steven discuss topics such as, the entrepreneurs journey, struggling with mindset shifts when scaling a company, why passion is crucial for success in business, and how AI is changing the business landscape. (00:00) Intro (01:15) The Most Exciting Time Of History For Businesses (03:22) Growing Small Businesses & Making Them Millions (04:39) Can Anyone Be An Entrepreneur? (05:20) How To Know If It's A Good Business Idea (10:09) How Important Is Passion In Being A Successful Entrepreneur (13:18) Don't Pursue Entrepreneurship For This Reason! (21:42) How To Be A Visionary (27:05) How To Be Great At Pitching Business Ideas (34:46) The Magic Of 'With Or Without You' Energy (40:17) The Steps To Know If It'll Be A Good Business (48:43) Fear Of Failure (51:34) Life Force Energy & Bringing Stories To Life (56:59) The Importance Of Changing Environments Regularly (01:01:59) Starting A Business/Personal Brand (01:06:11) Solopreneurship Doesn't Work (01:08:55) How To Make Money (01:15:01) Your Team Is Essential In Your Business (01:17:41) How Do You Invest Your Money (01:19:18) How To Build A Business From Scratch (01:23:46) Should You Work For A Big Company Or A Start-Up (01:26:19) The Humility Of Accepting Others Are Better Than You (01:29:01) What's A Management Buyout? (01:35:33) How To Structure And How To Sale A Deal (01:38:42) AI Will Revolutionize How Businesses Work! (01:45:25) Work-Life Balance (01:48:54) Last Guest Question You can check out some of Daniel’s businesses below: KPI Scorecard: https://bit.ly/49mYu2w Scoreapp: https://bit.ly/3OQ0lVg You can order Daniel’s most recent book, ‘Scorecard Marketing’, here: https://bit.ly/48tZksS Follow Daniel Twitter - https://bit.ly/49qhSMa Instagram - https://bit.ly/49EioWr Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/3kxINCANKsb Flight Fund: https://flight-fund-manager.seedrs.com Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Priestley?

  I've started seven businesses that have gone zero to a million in their first 12 months, three businesses that went north of 10 million. But here's a crazy thing. Anyone can do this. And I'm going to take you step by step through the best ways to start making a life changing amount of money. Daniel Priestley. Money and business expert.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  That's helped thousands of people start, scale and grow your own multimillion pounds businesses from scratch.

• 0:20Daniel Priestley?

  These are the best ways to start a business. We start with an idea, but we need to sharpen our ideas in the market, not in our minds. I see so many people, they raise money, book an office, buy computers, but after all of that, no one's interested in their idea. So we have to conduct tests where we fail fast and fail cheap. For example, waiting lists is one of the fastest ways to test an idea. And this is what really smart entrepreneurs do. Like Elon Musk launched a waiting list for the Model 3. He launched a waiting list for the Cybertruck, validating the idea. In fact, Rolex had a massive breakthrough when they stopped selling Rolexes and they started selling the waiting list. But if it's crickets.

• 0:54Daniel Priestley?

  Okay, fair enough. Let's have another idea. But what if someone steals my idea? Ideas aren't worth anything. The value is for the person who does it.

• 1:00Steven Bartlett?

  What are the fundamentals of being an exceptional salesperson picture?

• 1:04Daniel Priestley?

  First, you will have to.

• 1:05Steven Bartlett?

  You said business is a team sport. Is there anything you've found that is consistent across all of the best people you've partnered with?

• 1:10Daniel Priestley?

  So here's what I'm looking for. And there's a lot more to go through, but one of the other strategies for building a business is. And that should get you into the six figures of revenue just by doing that.

• 1:20Steven Bartlett?

  It's shocking because it's so simple. Let's talk about money.

• 1:23Daniel Priestley?

  Let's talk about.

• 1:24Steven Bartlett?

  If someone's out there and they've got a hundred pounds or a thousand pounds worth of disposable income, what should I be thinking about to making myself financially free?

• 1:32Daniel Priestley?

  The truth is that there's incredible wealth to be created. And one of the biggest opportunities in the world at the moment is.

• 1:47Steven Bartlett?

  Daniel. If someone has just clicked on this podcast.

• 1:54Steven Bartlett?

  Can you tell me the reason why they should stay around and listen and what you think they're going to get from this conversation?

• 2:00Daniel Priestley?

  I think we're living through the most incredible time in history. Never before have people had the opportunity to build something that is a global business, full of fun, freedom and flexibility, full of passion and purpose. And today that is accessible to almost anyone who'd be listening to this podcast. The baby boomers, they got access to affordable housing. We get access to affordable global small businesses. Now, the entrepreneurial journey is scary to a lot of people, but if you conduct the right experiments, have the right mindset, follow the right process, it's really predictable and safe for people to get involved in entrepreneurship. And I think anyone who's listening to this is going to see that it's a lot more process-driven

• 2:43Daniel Priestley?

  than they think, that we can go step by step to build a business that you absolutely love.

• 2:47Steven Bartlett?

  On the other end of this conversation, in an hour's time or two hours' time, or you know, whenever this podcast finishes, what are they going to have that they didn't have before this conversation?

• 2:57Daniel Priestley?

  We're going to talk about the entrepreneurial journey as a set of steps, predictable steps. And they're going to be able to have a map of how do you move through that entrepreneurial journey? Like, what do you do first? What do you do next? How do you go to the next level and scale up? And who do you contact? And it's based upon literally coming across thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs at each stage of the journey. So ideally, what I want people to walk away with is just that clarity around how this entrepreneur thing works.

• 3:22Steven Bartlett?

  And who are you? What's your experience?

• 3:25Daniel Priestley?

  So my background is over 20 years of entrepreneurship. I started my first company when I was 21 years old. I did two years working for a mentor from 19 to 21. We built a business from scratch to millions of revenue. I then left that mentor. I went out on my own, started my own first small business. It grew very rapidly. We went from zero to a million in the first year and then 10 million in year three. I've started seven businesses since that have gone zero to a million in their first 12 months. I've done three businesses that went north of 10 million.

• 3:54Steven Bartlett?

  And what about this accelerator? I read that you have an accelerator where you have thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs who come to your accelerator for business advice coaching from getting from zero to up on that, up to their trajectory.

• 4:06Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, so 12 years ago, I noticed this trend around this idea of global small businesses. And I basically saw that technology was making it possible for anyone to do the things that multinational corporations were doing. And I started an entrepreneurial accelerator designed for people to position themselves as a key person of influence, to build their personal brand, to build a core team of people around them, to digitize the value that they offer, and to take the most or make the most of the times that we're living in. And since then, about four and a half thousand companies have gone through this whole process. We've seen people go from zero to multi, multi-million pound exits. We've seen people build the business of their dreams where they get to live and work from anywhere. And we've also seen what people struggle with and what they've found difficult. We've gone through pandemics and

• 4:49Daniel Priestley?

  global financial crises and all of this sort of stuff with our clients. It's dancing classes for entrepreneurs. It's a high-performance environment where you get to be around people who want the same sort of things that you want. You get to have some accountability, some best practices. You get a community or a network around you, and you go through that entrepreneurial journey with other people who are going through it as well.

• 5:11Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think anyone can be an entrepreneur?

• 5:13Daniel Priestley?

  I think entrepreneurial spirit is something that we're all born with. Entrepreneurship is this idea that we want to create value for others, that we want to take a little bit of a creative risk, that we want to do something that represents self-expression. There are different stages to the entrepreneurial journey, and everyone can go through those stages. There's also not one type of entrepreneur. There are people who are very good at finance. There are people who are good at operations. There are people who are visionaries. There are people who are doers and get the stuff done. And there are businesses that suit those types of people. So it's about finding out who you are, finding out what kind of business would actually be well-suited to that person, and then making sure that you're doing the thing that you're well-suited to.

• 5:52Steven Bartlett?

  How does one know that a business would be suited to them? Because if you You know, gauged on the people that come up to me in the street or the taxi drivers I speak to or my friends or the DMs that I get, everyone's got an idea. Nobody seems to be short of ideas, but so many people seem to be stuck at that moment of making a decision to pursue a particular idea that they almost get like paralysis, like sofa printers. You know, all of their ideas stay on the sofa that they were conceived on, but they never seem to get out of the sofa because of like that paralysis. I don't know if this is the one. I get that all the time. Is this the idea?

• 6:28Daniel Priestley?

  The thing is, we need to sharpen our ideas in the market, not in our minds. So what we have to do is go make contact with other people and see what they say and see what they think. So we have to conduct tests where we fail fast and fail cheap if we fail at all. So here's an example of what I like to do when someone has an idea. I say, set up a very simple waiting list landing page and essentially let people know, I'm thinking of starting something in this particular space or we're launching something in this space later in the year. If you're interested, join the waiting list. Now, that waiting list concept, essentially if people will join the waiting list and if you get hundreds of people joining a waiting list, it's a pretty good indication that it is a good, good idea. If you launch a waiting list and you message 3,000 people and say, I'm launching, I'm launching

• 7:13Daniel Priestley?

  this thing, do you want to join the waiting list? And no one joins, then it's a good indication that's not the idea, right? Because we have to have a good marriage between what we're passionate about, what we want to do and what the market wants. There's six million businesses in the UK, 30 million businesses in the USA. And that basically means there's a lot of businesses doing a lot of things that already exist. So the market might not have an unmet need. The market might say, hey, I already have a great cupcake supplier. There's already someone who makes great coffee in my neighborhood. We don't need another one. Okay, fair enough. Let's have another idea, right? You can always have plenty more ideas. So you've got to test. The faster you can get on with conducting a fast and cheap test, the better you're going to, you know, go with your entrepreneurial idea.

• 7:53Steven Bartlett?

  Because that's one of the big sort of mental barriers that people have is they see that committing to any of these ideas is going to cost them three years, their reputation and potentially hundreds of thousands of their money or an investor's money. So that again creates paralysis because the discomfort associated with being wrong when you think there's so much on the line will hold you in place. But your idea there of just throwing up a landing page immediately kills the paralysis.

• 8:14Daniel Priestley?

  And also just a landing page of a waiting list. So you're not even saying that this thing's a dead certain. You're just saying, we're going to be launching something if we get enough interest. And here's the waiting list. And by the way, this is what really smart entrepreneurs do. Like Elon Musk launched a waiting list for the Model Three. He launched a waiting list for the Cybertruck. I think he launched a waiting list for a flamethrower.

• 8:35Steven Bartlett?

  I joined all waiting lists.

• 8:36Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, and he's, you know, he's essentially what he's doing is a very smart process of validating the idea. One of the best mindsets that we have as an early stage entrepreneur is the mindset of a scientist conducting a little experiment. And what we're trying to do is not be emotionally attached to what happens one way or another. What we want to do is we want to say, you know what, if people don't like this, okay, I'll have another idea. If people do like this, I'll go to the next step. So a scientist is just kind of like conducting an experiment and the best experiments are cheap and fast. A waiting list is probably the most powerful early stage experiment you could you could go with. Elon Musk, when he launched the waiting list for Cybertruck,

• 9:17Daniel Priestley?

  I don't think there would have been an investment bank on the planet that would have backed a factory for something that looked like Cybertruck. But when he walked in and said, I've got a million people who have put down a hundred dollar deposit. If only 5% of them go ahead, they can crunch the numbers on that and say, yeah, okay, we'll fund that. Fair enough. Let's build it. So it's very powerful. I did this recently. I had my team come up to me and say, hey, we could do a startup around an AI that helps people write a book. And I said, well, I'm not sure if anyone would like that, but let's launch a waiting list. So I launched a waiting list, put one post on LinkedIn, 750 people joined the waiting list. I was expecting 150.

• 9:58Daniel Priestley?

  And in the waiting list, we actually asked questions like, how much would you pay for it per month? And how many months do you think it would take you? And what would success look like? And what would failure look like? And what else would you try instead of this? If this didn't exist, what would you use? So we asked all these questions. We collected a ton of data. And then off the back of that, we specked out the product. I also went to angel investors and said, do you guys want to co-invest in this one? We raised 300,000 pounds on the SEIS scheme at a three million pound valuation for an idea, no lines of code, nothing built, nothing designed. And essentially, we got ourselves ready to to launch in a couple of months, just simply off the back of that waiting list and all the data that we that we collected.

• 10:41Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting. The other point you said within there was about, you said there's kind of two things, what you're passionate about and what the market wants. Now, on the point of passion, it's so cliche, people say follow your passions, do things you're passionate about, et cetera. How role, how important do you think the role of passion is in actually succeeding at any of these ideas? So if I've got four ideas, cupcake business, floristry business, soccer business, and I don't know, AI business, what role does my own intrinsic passion of any of these areas matter in the chances of success?

• 11:14Daniel Priestley?

  Passion matters a lot because business is hard and you have to stick with it through the downs. So the reason passion is valuable is because you are going to go through valleys and they're going to be painful and they're going to be, the gratification is going to be very much delayed in any business journey. So, passion is the thing that gets you through. It's not the thing that you ride high on, it's the thing that you get through the hard times with. I have a very weird definition of passion. I kind of like tried to strip it back to its bones and I look for an alignment between origin, mission and vision. So I essentially say, what is your origin story? What's your background? I want to see that you're doing something that aligns to what you've always been doing. I want to see that

• 11:55Daniel Priestley?

  this goes back to age 10. For me, when I ask people about why you're doing this thing, I want them to start the story a long time ago and I want them to tell me about little wins that they've had along the way that have led to this moment, which is why they're starting this business. To me, that's great. Because anything that we keep coming back to as a recurring theme is what we're meant to be doing. So for me, I've, going right back to age 10, I have experiences throughout my teenage years and going back to age 10 that were about business as a force for good. And it goes right back to a garage sale that I did when I was 10 years old. We had a house fire. It was a horrible experience, but it turned into a positive experience because I set up this garage sale and made some money and something bad happened and I turned it into something good through business. And

• 12:40Daniel Priestley?

  for me, there's this recurring theme that all of my little wins line up to these, these themes. So the origin story is really powerful. The vision for the future is what do I want to see happen in the future? If all of this goes well and other people are doing it too, what would this look like in the future? What would 10 years from now, 20 years from now be if we are celebrating? What would we love to be celebrating? And then the mission is what is the most high value thing that I could possibly do that's in alignment with that vision? So essentially,

• 13:10Daniel Priestley?

  If there is a strong alignment between origin, mission and vision, something happens where you carry yourself in a different way. You sit differently, you speak differently, you're in this alignment. Other people pick up on it. They want to quit their job and go and work on your team. They hear about the vision, they hear about your origin story, they hear about the mission and they go, oh, I'm going to leave what I'm doing and come and join that. And that's the magic of entrepreneurship. So for me, that's passion. It's not about like superficially, I like snowboarding or oh, I've always enjoyed baking a cake. It's the alignment of origin, mission and vision.

• 13:50Steven Bartlett?

  Interestingly there, I was trying to think about what the opposite of everything you've said just looks like. What's the opposite of passion in your definition? What's the misalignment look like? So can you give me an example of what the opposite of that definition looks like?

• 14:07Daniel Priestley?

  The opposite is I heard about some guy who pumped a crypto coin and made millions of dollars. So I want to go and find out how to pump crypto coins. Or I heard someone who made money flipping property. So I need to flip property and I'm going to do a course on flipping property. I've got no interest in property. I've never been interested in property. I've never shown any interest in any of these things. I just want to make money and it's got nothing to do with my background. I've got no little wins in this. I have no real vision for the future other than being rich. So essentially this is of no value to anyone listening. No one cares. In fact, when people hear that, they're repulsed by it. In most cases, just hearing someone talk about that makes you feel, I definitely don't want to see you for the next two years.

• 14:52Steven Bartlett?

  Why are they destined to fail?

• 14:54Daniel Priestley?

  Because they can't attract a team. Essentially, all of business and life is a team sport. And it's your ability to attract great, talented people around you who want to work with you. That is ultimately the reason we succeed and it's ultimately the reason we feel good. So if you're saying things that repulse people, then talented people leave and talented people don't want to be involved. If you're saying something that feels resonant, that it feels aligned and it feels like something's happening. It feels like this guy's up to something or this, you know, this woman is up to something. She's enrolling people in this vision that she's got and people love her story. It's destined to succeed because good people are getting involved and more and more good people are getting involved.

• 15:34Steven Bartlett?

  Do you, knowing what's a good opportunity and what's not a good opportunity. Do you think that when you're younger, you should be saying yes to more stuff? Because like in the position you're in now, you're bombarded with opportunity. So you have to use a kind of a different mental framework.

• 15:49Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think when people are younger, they should have a different bias towards accepting opportunities or fucking around and finding out?

• 15:56Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, definitely. We should definitely go through that phase and also be willing to say, oh, that wasn't it. I'm gonna stop and go try something else. So you dropped out of university, I dropped out of university. I was so excited to go to university. And then as soon as I realized that this is not going where I want to go, I had to make the decision to leave all my friends and walk away from university.

• 16:16Steven Bartlett?

  That that sort of dark valley you have to walk through of uncertainty, when you make the decision to leave the well-worn track of university or a corporate job or the nine to five, that, how does one prepare mentally? Like, what's the mindset of someone that goes, you know what, I'm gonna go through the stinging nettles, through the bushes and be lost and find my own way?

• 16:37Daniel Priestley?

  I always enjoyed all of this, by the way. So my mindset was that I was always quite excited that being lost, I felt, was probably gonna be part of the process. I have a simple view around mindset, which is you're either being a reptile, an autopilot or a visionary.

• 16:53Steven Bartlett?

  What's that reptile thing you mentioned? What's the definition of that?

• 16:56Daniel Priestley?

  Oh, well, reptile mode is fight, flight, freeze, freak out, throw tantrums, be angry at the people you should not be angry at, feels unfair that the world's against you, all of that.

• 17:10Steven Bartlett?

  And the visionary, what's the definition of that?

• 17:12Daniel Priestley?

  So the visionary, I don't know if you've had these moments where you feel anything is possible and you feel very expansive. You think in long timeframes, so you think in maybe 10, 20 years out. You also might see the world as one small place. So you might mentally, your mental model might be that the world is just one little ball that flies around the sun and there's markets everywhere and that there are opportunities everywhere and that there are people trying to get stuff done and I could have a business that's anywhere. And you.

• 17:43Daniel Priestley?

  Feel a sense of love and compassion and optimism. And you typically become more influential in your circles. The other strange thing about the visionary mindset is that they did some research with Indian farmers. And they found that these particular people, they got paid their yearly salary in one lump sum. And then they had to make that last for the whole year. And as they were getting close to the end of that cycle, they had an IQ test, which showed that they were 15 points of IQ lower than when they had just been paid the lump sum. So the lump sum allowed them to think long term. It allowed them to feel affluent and abundant. And their IQ, the scores on the IQ test went up as a result of feeling good and feeling amazing

• 18:28Daniel Priestley?

  and feeling affluent. And then by the time the money had run out and they were, you know, not sure whether they're even going to make it to the next one. Their emotional intelligence, their actual IQ intelligence had dropped significantly. So one of the things that is a real challenge, if you're doing it tough, is that you're essentially regularly putting yourself into these situations where your IQ is right down. Your emotional intelligence and your IQ suffers as a result of being in reptile mode. I remember a time where I got a parking ticket for $40. And I freaked out, like I flipped out. I had a massive fight with my friend and, you know, like I was in a place where $40 was seriously an issue.

• 19:11Daniel Priestley?

  And I remember thinking, I'm just gonna eat cereal for weeks to try and get through this. And so full reptile meltdown mode.

• 19:21Steven Bartlett?

  What would the visionary have responded to the parking ticket?

• 19:25Daniel Priestley?

  Well, the visionary has a different view of life. And the first thing is that if a resource exists on the planet anywhere, that resource is really just a couple of conversations away. So essentially, a visionary would say, well, someone's got $40. I'll just have a talk with them and see what they need and I'll help them with whatever they need. And they can help me with the $40 that I need. Maybe I need to wash their car. Maybe I need to, you know, help them with their video editing or something. So the visionary is all about. The idea that there's really not a lot of boundaries between the resources on the planet, that it's just a grey zone around who owns what and who's got what and we can just have conversations about that. So visionaries can easily raise money and raise funds because they just think, well, someone's got the money and they want to put it to use. So I'll just

• 20:08Daniel Priestley?

  give them a plan as to how we're going to put it to use. There's a great story that I love, which is, I think it was the producers of Top Gun were creating these little models of aeroplanes and boats and they were trying to figure out how they would do like a Star Wars style Top Gun movie. And someone said, have we actually called the Navy and asked whether we can use their planes and their boats? And everyone's like, no. And it's like, well, they've got planes and boats. Let's see if they want to do it. So they ring up the Navy, as you do, and they speak to the general and the general says, oh yeah, we want to enroll more people in the Navy. So we would love for you to make a Hollywood blockbuster film. What do you need? And they basically say, well, here, have the jets, have the boats, have the aircraft carriers, whatever, whatever you want to do. So it's kind of weird to think that someone woke up this morning with the resource that you

• 20:52Daniel Priestley?

  want. And if you have a conversation about how that resource gets used, right, essentially you are now as, it's as good as you having the resource. Someone woke up with an aircraft carrier. If you've got a good use for that aircraft carrier, why not have a conversation about how that aircraft carrier gets used today?

• 21:10Steven Bartlett?

  It's shocking because it's so simple. And, but it's so resonant with me. There's two examples I'll give. The first I've talked about many times was when I was 16, 17, in sixth form, saw Carly Stokes sat in front of me, who was a girl in my school. I think she was head girl, but she was picking the vending machines we were going to get in the school. And in my brain, I thought, we have 2000 paying customers here. Surely there's a vending machine company that would love to put these machines for free and give us a cut. Went to the computer room, sent five emails based on Google search rankings. By the same day, and Mr. Sprinkle, who was our head of Key Stage Five, has confirmed this on live TV, someone showed up with a tape measure to fit the machines. Because one of my emails had gone to a former student who was now the CEO of a vending machine company and he had been looking to give back to the school. Example B comes-

• 21:53Daniel Priestley?

  In that one,

• 21:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Daniel Priestley?

  Did you feel what it felt like to be a visionary where it's like anything is possible? Like, why are we not just, of course, we've got 2,000 clients, like, like, did you feel, because you must have felt reptile versus visionary in your life. You've had reptile moments where you're like,

• 22:08Steven Bartlett?

  Hundred percent.

• 22:09Daniel Priestley?

  I hate everyone. I want to kill everyone.

• 22:10Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:11Daniel Priestley?

  You know, and then you've had moments where it's like, oh, you know what?

• 22:14Steven Bartlett?

  Bend the world.

• 22:15Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, we can, we can bend reality. Exactly. We have conversation about how reality works and we'll just, you know, bend it.

• 22:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And so my question has always been like, where does that come from? Because I view our beliefs, all of our beliefs, as a stack of evidence we either have or don't really have. And for me, the youngster for siblings, I had so much space compared to my siblings when I was young that I got to, like we said earlier, like fuck around and find out. I got to conduct experiments. And that led me to believe that the world is bendable. I used to say when I was 14 that if someone said to me that we need to go to the moon next week, I believe there's a way because I think there's probably a rocket, rocket going. And all I need to do is contact the person and make a compelling pitch. That's how I get to the moon next week.

• 22:55Daniel Priestley?

  You thought that at 14?

• 22:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yes. I used to say this all the time, like my, my difference between myself and my peers, they were academically better. But in my head, there was the only thing that stood in the way of where I am now and where I want to be is a bunch of people.

• 23:07Daniel Priestley?

  A bunch of conversations, yeah. Pitching. Essentially pitching is enrolling people into new ideas. So what entrepreneurs do to advance their ideas is we pitch them into existence. We start with an idea and we pitch it and we pitch it and we pitch it. We sharpen our pitch by talking to people. But what we're doing that's different is we're not just explaining the idea to people. We're trying to enroll them into that vision. We're enrolling people into this vision that we've got for the business. And that process of getting people to do something that they didn't wake up thinking they would do that day is pitching, right? That's, and that's one of the first tools that you learn as an entrepreneur. And actually on Dragon's Den, that is the main tool that people are given in order to enroll the dragons into investing or getting involved or not.

• 23:52Daniel Priestley?

  So where does it come from, I think was your question. I believe it's built into every single individual that it's an evolutionary function. That essentially, at the very base of our brain is this reptile mode, which is fight, flight, freeze, which is rarely appropriate, but in a survival situation, probably is appropriate. And then there's autopilot mode, which is essentially just do what you've always done, repeat the past, you know, just get into a loop. If it worked last week and I didn't die last week, well, then I might as well do the same week again. And then there's visionary mode, which is what could I do differently? What, you know, what might, what would be a creative way to solve this problem? So I feel that a lot of people think they're missing something and actually it's all built in. And if you can get yourself into that visionary mode, often it's the people you hang out

• 24:37Daniel Priestley?

  with, it's the books that you read, the podcasts that you listen to. If you can get into that mode, then a lot more becomes possible. You get more IQ points, you get more EQ points, and you see the world in a very different way.

• 24:51Steven Bartlett?

  The key question there is like, how do you get into that mode? I have a very one dimensional biased journey, so I'm not sure if my journey is the best one to take notes from. But from what I've seen personally, people are either in some kind of upward spiral towards being more visionary because it's compounding in their favor. They're sending the email and then it's working, which means they have the evidence to send more, they're more likely to send emails with more conviction and more frequency because it worked last time. And then more work, they get more responses, so they send more emails. It's this upward wonderful reinforcing spiral upwards and they become more and more visionary. Like Elon Musk is at the very top now. He's like spaceships to Mars.

• 25:33Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 25:34Steven Bartlett?

  He's like chips in your brain that monkeys can control computers with. That's someone at the very top of that visionary cycle. And at the bottom of the reptile cycle is someone who, you know, at work. The CEO says, does anyone want to stand up and share their ideas? And they just slouched back in the chair because they've had their confidence negatively reinforced. Maybe last time they tried, it didn't go bad. Maybe their father or their mother gave them bad feedback one day and they're in this downward spiral. Well, when they do show up, they show up with low confidence. They put in a bad performance, it goes bad.

• 26:08Daniel Priestley?

  I would actually call that autopilot mode, which is I've never done this before, so I won't do it next time.

• 26:15Daniel Priestley?

  Reptile mode is very destructive. You're actively breaking your world. So it's where you do the worst possible thing. So you are throwing tantrums and you're lashing out against the people who you should. You're actually lashing out against the people who are trying to help you probably. So that's where you're really at the bottom of reptile mode, very destructive. Autopilot, in your situation where you said about the person who is given an opportunity to speak and they say, oh, it's not what I do, is the autopilot response. The visionary is like, oh, this is a chance to mobilize resources. I've got an opportunity here to expand my sphere of influence and become a key person of influence in this room. You know, so the visionary is like, oh, great, this is a good opportunity.

• 27:00Daniel Priestley?

  I can do more with this.

• 27:02Steven Bartlett?

  If the pitch is the keys to everything you want to be, because if we're saying that it's really conversations that stand in the way of where you want to go, and it's the pitch that is essentially the key to wherever you want to go. What are the attributes of a perfect pitch? What are the fundamentals of being an exceptional salesperson pitcher?

• 27:24Daniel Priestley?

  Well, you've seen some great pitches on the den.

• 27:27Steven Bartlett?

  Not a bad ones too.

• 27:28Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, so here's what I look for. Clarity is the base level. You just don't want to confuse people. Authority is the ability to communicate that you are worth listening to. That there's something about your background or what you've done or the data that you're possessing or the mentor that you've got that gives you some sort of authority to be talking about this. So clarity and authority, defining some sort of a problem that the customer has or some sort of problem that exists in the world that needs solving and that you've identified an insight or a solution for that problem. Then the why, which I would say is about communicating why you care enough about this that people would buy into you as the person to drive this forward.

• 28:12Daniel Priestley?

  You then want to define the opportunity. What is the bigger opportunity for anyone who gets involved? The next steps? What should someone do next? And then the emotion or the essence that you want to leave people with so that they remember you based on that essence or that emotion that you made them feel. So that's the great arc of an inspiring pitch.

• 28:31Steven Bartlett?

  What was the last one there? Was it the emotion?

• 28:32Daniel Priestley?

  So clarity, authority, problem, solution, the why, opportunity, next steps and the essence. And it spells out capstone.

• 28:40Steven Bartlett?

  Capstone.

• 28:41Daniel Priestley?

  So that's how I remember a great pitch. I had to come up with a way of remembering this because I was pitching so often. I had to be able to come back to, okay, how do I pitch this?

• 28:49Steven Bartlett?

  So the essence, that's the one I wanted some more definition.

• 28:51Daniel Priestley?

  People remember you based on how you made them feel. So you want to think, how do I want to leave people feeling? What's the emotion that I want people to remember?

• 29:00Steven Bartlett?

  When I'm pitching?

• 29:01Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah. So you want to finish the pitch on an emotion. You want to finish the pitch by expressing what it is that you, essentially, what is the emotion or the feeling that you want, you want this business to be about?

• 29:14Steven Bartlett?

  And what's the opposite of that then? The emotional piece? So what's a pitch that is lacking?

• 29:18Daniel Priestley?

  Well, a lot of pitches finish on next steps and it's very logistical. So I've seen a lot of pitches that are going great and then they go, and then here's what we need to do next, blah, blah, blah. And then it becomes a little to do list and everyone goes, oh, that kind of landed flat. And if you finish on the essence, then you actually just bring people back to this is what it's really about. So that we, even though we've talked about opportunities and next steps and the finances and all that sort of stuff, you want to finish on this is what we're really about. This is what we're up to in the world.

• 29:45Steven Bartlett?

  I've been thinking a lot about, you know, some adjacent subjects to what we're talking about here, but this idea that if you just asked five times more than you're currently asking, your life would change. The secondary example I was going to give after my coffee machine example from when I was 16 was when I was 18 and I was completely broke. And that's when I was shoplifting those Chicago town pizzas to feed myself. And I need, I started, I was starting this business called Wall Park and I needed camera equipment. I sent 20 emails to camera companies saying, hey, I've got this website I'm going to launch. We're going to record videos on campus. I need some cameras. If you lend us the cameras, we'll put your logo on all the videos. As we make on campus, within seventy two hours, Samsung had sent ten thousand pounds

• 30:26Steven Bartlett?

  worth of camera equipment to my front door in my side. I got an email the day after the cameras arrived and it said, these are returns, send them back when you don't need them anymore. And I'd solved someone's problem for him because he had returned cameras in a warehouse that he didn't know what to do with. He sent me ten thousand pounds worth of camera equipment for free within seventy two hours.

• 30:44Daniel Priestley?

  You just asked.

• 30:45Steven Bartlett?

  And I go, oh, my God, like, when you're at the bottom and you have nothing to lose and you have an internet connection and a Gmail account, why aren't you sending out twenty, thirty, fifty emails a day asking?

• 30:59Daniel Priestley?

  You think in emails, I think in calls, because when I was eighteen, you pick up the phone and make a call. I always had this rule called make three calls. And I remember a nightclub party that I saw these fifteen year olds sitting in the street. I'd just turned eighteen and I was loving going to nightclubs. And I saw these fifteen year olds and they're skateboarding and they're hanging out in this little area. And they were asking me what it's like to go to a nightclub. And I said, oh, someone should put on an under eighteen's nightclub party so that you can experience it and see what it's like. And they're like, oh, that would be amazing. And I thought, oh, I'm gonna do it. So I called the nightclub I'd been going to and said, oh, I have a promotions company and we run nightclub parties for under eighteen's during the school holidays. We've

• 31:40Daniel Priestley?

  selected your venue to be one of our venues for the next holidays. Would you be interested in discussing that? He said, like, yeah, send through a proposal. And then I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, we'll send it through. And anyway, we ran, we ran a series of nightclubs at that thing. And we, it was the first time I'd ever made ten grand in a night because we had a thousand people pay ten bucks a head. And that was a lot of money and it was all cash. And it was, it was wild. And it was just literally just asking.

• 32:06Steven Bartlett?

  I have to say, a lot of people send me messages. I get many thousands of messages a week across my inboxes, LinkedIn, Instagram, the podcast, etc. And because I'm exposed to so many thousands of messages, as I'm sure you are, you get to see the variance in a good ask versus a bad ask. Now, I want to drill down on that. What are the core components of a great ask?

• 32:29Daniel Priestley?

  The best ask has with or without you energy. With or without you energy is the energy that you have when this is going to happen with or without you. So essentially, when you say, we're going to be doing this filming and do you want to send some cameras and we'll put your logo at the bottom? It's happening with or without you. You can be the company that gets the logo or not, but it is happening with or without you. The worst asks are, I desperately need this to happen and if you don't say yes, no one will ever say yes and therefore I'll give up. So if I think about the best asks that come through, something is going to happen and it's going to happen whether I'm involved or not and I get to choose whether I want to jump onto that or not.

• 33:10Daniel Priestley?

  And those are the most compelling, most exciting opportunities that get pitched. So I'll give you, I'll give you an example. When I first arrived in the UK, I had a suitcase and a credit card and I'd never been above the equator. I arrive in London and I'm going to launch a business in London. And within the first two weeks, I message all the people who are influential in my industry and I basically say, I'm hosting a dinner party. There's going to be about 30 amazing people there who are the who's who of the industry. I've just arrived from Australia. If you'd like to come along to the dinner party, let me know and I'll allocate a spot to you. And within two weeks, I'd filled 30 spots at my, at my dinner party and they were all people who had massive databases. The biggest database was like 600,000 people.

• 33:53Daniel Priestley?

  So I've got this dinner party and I stand up and I say, I'm Daniel Priestley and I've just arrived from Australia and I'm going to be launching a business here. I thought I'd put together a dinner party just to kind of get to know everyone. I've got my diary with me. I'd love to make a time in the next couple of weeks to sit down and have a chat with you about how we could do a commercial partnership or a joint venture as part of our launch. I'll just come around and I'll make a time and, and, and then other than that, enjoy the evening. So I walk around and I booked 28 one-to-one meetings for the following two weeks. And everyone who I had a one-to-one meeting with knew that I had 28 other one-to-one meetings and they could see that I hosted this party. Mind you, the party, this dinner party cost like 1,500 quid. It wasn't, it wasn't nothing, but it wasn't a lot.

• 34:38Daniel Priestley?

  So I then end up having these meetings and everyone starts agreeing to support my launch. So I'm pitching into existence that we're launching this thing. And then the biggest database with 600,000 people, they say, yeah, we'll support your launch. So when we did the launch email campaign to everyone's database, we booked hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. We did two nights in Manchester, two nights in Birmingham, Milton Keynes. And then we did like three or four events in a row in London. We did four million pounds worth of sales off the back of it in the first few months. It was interesting, that whole experience of just putting together a dinner party and getting everyone involved, but it had with or without you energy.

• 35:17Steven Bartlett?

  What's the sort of psychology underpinning that? Is it like scarcity? What is it that's causing with or without you energy to make people choose to buy from you or go with you?

• 35:28Daniel Priestley?

  I think people like to get involved in something that they feel is happening. And it also demonstrates that you're a key person of influence, that you're actually an influential person in your industry, that you have the confidence to say, I'm putting this on and it's going to happen. We're going to make the movie, we're going to launch the business, we're going to do the thing, we're going to raise the fund. You're free to join or not, totally fine. There's no neediness and humans respond to the idea that they don't want to miss out on something that's going to happen. Very rarely exciting things happen, right? Most of the time, for most people, everything's humdrum. And then occasionally something exciting is happening and you don't want to miss out on something that's happening. So, you know, I don't like, no one likes neediness.

• 36:12Daniel Priestley?

  People like things that are happening and people like to flock around key people of influence. So by demonstrating that you're a key person of influence who's putting something together, people just naturally gravitate around that.

• 36:23Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting because it reminded me of an example from a company that I invested in five or six years ago. And in one of my first meetings with them, I looked at their website and they had this button on there that said, become a member now. And I said, we should try changing that to join the waiting list. And when I had my first board meeting with this company, they said, Stephen, of all the things you've done for us, the most valuable thing you did was getting us to change that button from become member now to join the waiting list. And I said, why? They said, two things happened. The first is the amount of inquiries we got, the amount of people clicking that number rose by 500%. The second thing is conversion went up by about 300%.

• 37:04Steven Bartlett?

  Because previously, just by changing a couple of words on that button, people would click the button, they would then get scheduled an appointment to have a tour of this facility, they would then not even show up for their tour. They would, because they didn't value it.

• 37:18Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 37:19Steven Bartlett?

  The minute we changed it to join the waiting list and then they got an email saying, hey, you've been selected for a Q jump or whatever. They would never, ever miss the tour. And if they were late for their scheduled tour by one hour, they would profusely text and apologize and try and reschedule. Tiny shift, tiny shift in just a couple of words.

• 37:39Daniel Priestley?

  Well, it's not a tiny shift because if you look at how human psychology works, in order for someone to want to buy something, they have to be about a hundred percent certain. In order to join a waiting list, you only have to be five, 10% certain that you want to do something. And people like to warm up to things a little bit slowly. So join the waiting list means that, hey, you only have to be slightly sure that you want to do this. Then the uncertainty of do I get through or not? I've joined the waiting list, I've made a micro commitment. Now it's, there's a, an uncertainty gap. And it's like, oh, I need the certainty. I need to know whether I'm off the waiting list or I'm through to the next phase. So now we enter a different, like, oh, will I, will I or won't I get through? But it also gives the business a great opportunity to warm people up.

• 38:23Daniel Priestley?

  So you talked about doing a tour of the club. Let me give you some other examples. Glastonbury Music Festival, they tell people that they can't book a ticket, they can only register for a ticket, that they're interested in a ticket. So a registration of interest, but not a ticket sale. So what they do is they get 700,000 people to register interest. And then they tell you slowly who are some of the bands and they warm you up to will you get it or not? And they tell you 500,000 people are now registered, 600,000 are registered, 700,000 are registered. And they said, but there's only 140,000 tickets. So then they say, we're going to make the tickets available at 5am. So only the true believers are going to be there. Only the true music fans who are willing to get up early.

• 39:05Daniel Priestley?

  And then there's this whole like suspense and excitement of like, will I get a ticket or not? People set their alarm in the morning. They know that 700,000 have registered, 140,000 will get through. So they just fight for those tickets. Rolex had a massive breakthrough in the way that they, in becoming a big brand, when they stopped selling Rolexes and they started selling the waiting list. So you can't buy a Rolex. The way it works with the Rolex is you go into a Rolex retail store and the only thing they will sell you is getting onto the waiting list. So they won't actually sell you a watch. So first you will have to get on the waiting list and register. And then about six months later, they'll say, good news. We have the watch that you want available, but it's only available for three days.

• 39:50Daniel Priestley?

  Right. Other than that, we can hold it for you for three days, but after that we'll have to sell it to somebody else. And essentially everyone goes rushes down and gets the Rolex. So that cycle of join the waiting list and then make the sale is brilliant. And this translates perfectly for people at the early stage of the entrepreneurial journey. Because it doesn't matter whether you want to do a rocket to Mars. Or whether you want to launch a cupcake business, or you want to do a fashion brand, or you want to do a service of bookkeeping and accounting. All of those, you can launch a waiting list with minimal cost. You set it up very simply and basically. You use a template, boom, you've got a waiting list and you can also collect the data. So you can't just join the waiting list. Name, email, answer five questions to get on the waiting list.

• 40:35Daniel Priestley?

  How much are you willing to pay? What are you trying to achieve? What's your biggest fear of that could go wrong? What would you try if this didn't exist? So you ask a few of these questions and then people get on the waiting list. You've got all that data.

• 40:48Steven Bartlett?

  When people hear that, they'll think that putting someone through a set of sort of rigorous questions to give them access to the product on the other side would deter most people. But it reminds me of a psychology study that I read about, then wrote about in my last book, where they got two groups of people. And they had a boring community forum online as the sort of the product. They let one group of people straight into the boring community forum. And then they asked them how much they appreciated and found value in the boring community forum. That group of people said it was boring. Right. Then they had this other group of people in this study. And they didn't let them into the boring community forum. They made them go through a rigorous selection process.

• 41:31Steven Bartlett?

  And the people that got into the boring, the same boring community forum, when asked in surveys after, how much do you value the boring community forum? They said, it's great.

• 41:39Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Steven Bartlett?

  And it's this psychological bias because you've had to fight for something.

• 41:43Daniel Priestley?

  What you're describing is Harvard.

• 41:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 41:46Daniel Priestley?

  Harvard University, it's exactly that. It's the same university subjects that everyone teaches, but it's hard to get in.

• 41:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 41:53Daniel Priestley?

  I use, one of the other strategies for building a business is waiting lists, but also discussion groups. So one of the things we do when we launch a business is we don't launch the product or service. We launch the discussion group. So the first thing is, let's say, let's say I was going to launch a gym in Wandsworth. I might say, we're going to do Weight Loss Wandsworth, an online discussion group on WhatsApp. And we just promote the hell out of that group. And if we had 4,000 people in that group, we could then launch a gym pretty easily off the back of the discussion group. So I'm a big believer like in waitlist, discussion groups, anything like that, that is super fast, low risk, low cost. These are the best ways to start businesses that, that you, you know, and you're collecting data. You're getting people to answer questions to get in.

• 42:37Steven Bartlett?

  And you're learning about what the product market fit probably is going to be the right product for those people in Wandsworth.

• 42:42Daniel Priestley?

  Exactly. And sometimes you get very surprised. You, you find out that, oh, I thought this was going to be for men who want to build big muscles, but it's actually for women who are excited about CrossFit. It's like, oh, okay, didn't, didn't know that. Like now I've asked the questions, I'm finding out that it's slightly different to what I thought. I thought everyone would love red, but everyone loves blue. Okay, we can, we can do that. So in those early stages of, of business, you want to, when I said before about conducting fast, cheap experiments, waiting lists, discussion groups, online assessments are amazing. So an online scorecard or an online assessment, great way to think of them is a readiness assessment. So readiness assessment, like, are you ready to launch a podcast? Answer 10 questions to find out. Are you ready to build your brand? Answer 10 questions to find out.

• 43:25Daniel Priestley?

  Are you ready to be an investor in this type of investment? Answer 10 questions to find out. So it's an online assessment where you answer a series of questions to get a readiness score. And then based on the readiness score, you, people will then find out if they're 30% ready, 40% ready. And people love these readiness scores. This is one of the fastest ways to test an idea and getting signals of interest. Everything is downstream from lead generation in business. So you essentially have to, you have to generate leads and then you figure out if you've got a business or not. So the fastest you can get into the lead generation, the better. One of the worst things that people do when they're starting a business is that

• 44:06Daniel Priestley?

  they think that having a business is about the supply side of what they're doing. Supply side means your ability to look after a customer and keep a customer happy. But actually, a business has to start with the demand side. You've got to test the demand side before you test the supply side. If you can't manufacture demand, there's no point manufacturing supply. It doesn't matter. If you say, oh, I've come up with this chili and basil flavoured ice cream. Great, you can make that, but does anyone want that? You've got to check out whether you have the ability to get that product into a market. So I see so many people, they take qualifications, they get certifications, they might raise money, they might set up a venue, they might book an office, they might buy laptop computers,

• 44:50Daniel Priestley?

  all of this stuff, and they might spend three to six months doing that. And then finally, after all of that, they then experience, oh, no one's interested in this. Now what do I do with all that stuff?

• 45:01Steven Bartlett?

  So in the chili and ice cream example, what should they have done?

• 45:04Daniel Priestley?

  Join the waiting list. We're launching chili and basil ice cream. If you'd like to try it and taste it, join the waiting list.

• 45:09Steven Bartlett?

  People don't know what they want, though. Because in the ice cream example, it's a taste thing, right? So it sounds good, but in reality, it could be like...

• 45:16Daniel Priestley?

  So, I mean, this is a crazy idea. It's a terrible idea that we're... But anyway, let's go with it. So you create a waiting list. We're doing really wild flavoured ice creams and it's crazy flavours like chili and basil ice cream and salt and pepper ice cream and blah, blah, blah. If you're interested in really different, exciting, new flavours of ice cream, join the waiting list and we will invite you to a taste tester when it's ready. You'll get to come to an exclusive event where you get to try and test our latest recipes in central London. So now you promote the waiting list and you see, can I get lots of people? And some of the questions might be, which flavour are you most looking forward to? Are you looking forward to octopus ice cream? Are you looking forward to, you know, which one? Ugh!

• 46:01Daniel Priestley?

  Right, so you go through and they answer all the questions and then they join the waiting list. Then you say, join the ice cream discovery discussion group. Right, so now they're in there talking about their favourite ice creams and what crazy flavours they like and you can actually have a daily poll and you're doing that all in WhatsApp. And then you say, now come to the event that we've got, the taste testing event. You could launch the ice cream assessment. All right, what kind of, what, which type are you? Are you the savory ice cream person or the sweet ice cream? Are you the, you know, so you could have four ice cream personalities. And they take the test and find out which ice cream personality they have. So you can do all of this stuff for free or almost for free without making a scoop of ice cream. None of this stuff involves actually any commercial kitchens. None of it involves packaging or branding or any of the expensive stuff.

• 46:46Daniel Priestley?

  You're just doing the things that's testing whether people are actually interested in this. And if it's crickets, if you put a lot of effort into trying to get people interested in this and you've got 12 people in your little group and they're all, you know, sadly looking at each other going, where's the basil ice cream? You know, this is never going to fly if it, you know.

• 47:05Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking there, some people might come to the discussion group, you know, your friends, whatever. Your mum comes down, she goes, yeah, your ice cream's great, Daniel.

• 47:12Daniel Priestley?

  Well, you want to do cold outreach. Cold outreach, I don't know how long we're going to talk about ice creams, but cold outreach is, is where you essentially make a list of all the communities and groups that exist online, all the, all the accounts that already have followers. And you just cold outreach a thousand people and, and get them involved.

• 47:32Steven Bartlett?

  But Daniel, what if someone steals my idea?

• 47:36Daniel Priestley?

  Well, my, my experience tells me until you've got a Ferrari, no one steals your idea.

• 47:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Daniel Priestley?

  People steal ideas from people who have Ferraris, right? So it's that bias towards if you've been successful in the past, then your ideas are worth stealing. The beauty of having nothing is no one's going to steal your ideas ever. They're going to look at your account on Instagram and go, oh, you've got no followers. And, you know, you haven't got a Ferrari, so I'm not going to steal your idea. So you've got this great advantage when you're starting from zero that no one, no one will steal the idea. And here's the other thing, ideas aren't worth anything. Here's a great idea. Let's rip down all the old buildings in London and build brand new buildings. What's that idea worth? Trillions. Well, it would be worth trillions if we did that. Well, actually, no, the value is for the person who does it. So if someone else steals your idea but does it, they deserve the money. Let them have it. They're better

• 48:25Daniel Priestley?

  at executing. Get on with the next idea and be better at executing next time. So if someone's able to execute better and faster than you, they deserve that money. That's fine. Let them have it. Get on to the next idea.

• 48:36Steven Bartlett?

  Thinking about it like this podcast, there's lots of podcasts, like three million podcasts.

• 48:39Daniel Priestley?

  A lot of podcasts.

• 48:40Steven Bartlett?

  The idea itself to start a podcast isn't where the value is derived from.

• 48:44Daniel Priestley?

  No, so much of it is pitching and also the commercials behind the scenes, you know, creating the right offers, making sales. So this is the other thing that early stage businesses need to do. You've got to stop calling yourself an entrepreneur and start calling yourself a salesperson. You're going to get out there and make sales in the early days. So a lot of people are really uncomfortable with the idea of making sales, but that's what an entrepreneur does. An entrepreneur is a salesperson, especially in those first couple of years. You are the chief salesperson. If you can't sell it, nobody's going to sell it.

• 49:15Steven Bartlett?

  At the heart of a lot of these topics is this idea of failure, because you're talking about experimentation, we're talking about asking with all these things, and people's relationship with failure seems to correlate to their eventual success. Over the last couple of years in particular, especially from doing this podcast and a lot of other more recent businesses that I run, I've realised that that experimental mindset, the type of person that quickly runs the test versus sits and procrastinates for years, is really the winner in most pursuits. And then I studied Amazon and Jeff Bezos's shareholder letter says, this has to be the best place in the world to fail. I looked at booking.com and they have that moment where they launch their experimentation platform because they were sick of arguing about what the best feature was in the boardroom. I look at Thomas Watson

• 49:59Steven Bartlett?

  back, I think, 1950 or 60, where he says, one of his employees had just made a huge mistake which cost the company $600,000 and he's asked in an interview, are you going to fire them? And he goes, fire them, I just spent $600,000 training them.

• 50:14Daniel Priestley?

  These people seem to have a different attitude towards the value of failure. Yeah, this goes back to the school system. The school system is designed for component labor and you don't want components to fail. What we're doing now is different. So especially now we're entering the age of AI. So in a post-AI world, most of the things that we think of as valuable that the school system could possibly teach us are not going to be very valuable very long. So functionality versus vitality. When something is functional, it performs a task reliably. When something is vital, it's irreplaceable life force energy. So what we have to do is recognize that the value has swung from something that is reliably able to perform a task to something that breathes life force energy into a project.

• 51:00Daniel Priestley?

  So I know this is kind of woo woo, but essentially this is the difference. When you are breathing life force energy into something, you're okay with failure. We're just conducting experiments. We're finding the way that works and we just found 900 ways that don't work. And now we're going to find the next one and you're bringing something into existence. It's just like being a parent. You know, when you see the child fall down, you get the child back up and you get them on to the next thing. And when we learn riding a bike, we have to go through falling off the bike. So there's all of these experiences that you know what it's like to bring life force energy to something and that involves a process of failure.

• 51:40Daniel Priestley?

  And then functionality, if we're really putting our value around the idea that something has to be functional or that I have to be functional, that my value is in my functionality, then failure is such a bad thing. So this is a big difference in how the pendulum is now swinging. We have to remove the idea that you are valuable because you're reliably functional. And we have to swing it back to this idea that you're valuable because you breathe life force energy into something.

• 52:05Steven Bartlett?

  For someone that doesn't know the definition of life force energy, how would you define that?

• 52:09Daniel Priestley?

  So this word vitality has two definitions, irreplaceable and life force. So if something is vital, it's irreplaceable and it's life force. So you need to find something that you are the irreplaceable life force. You pitch it into existence, you create it, you innovate it, you take ownership of it, you enroll others into it.

• 52:27Steven Bartlett?

  That's the alignment kind of thing you're talking about, you're aligned to that thing.

• 52:31Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, you're fully expressed, you're alive, you're enjoying this because it's your life journey. And, you know, we're so tuned out from, from the idea of this, that, that essentially we have to relearn what the hell does this even mean, this definition? Life force energy is what kids do, right? Think about, you know, everyone's talking and everyone's serious. And then a five year old bounces into the room, look what I've found, right? And it's like, look, there's mud and there's this and there's, you know, it's like, whoa. And suddenly everyone's disrupted and they bring energy into the house, they bring energy into a room. So they just know what it's like to fully express themselves and breathe life force energy into something. Let me give you another example. There are magicians and they have these like fake thumbs and these things.

• 53:16Daniel Priestley?

  Those fake thumbs are functional things, right? There's a functional thing called a fake thumb and that's how you do the magic trick. But it doesn't mean that everyone who has that fake thumb can do the magic trick. In fact, some people do the magic trick and people go, you're just wearing a fake thumb, right? Then there are magicians who completely make you believe in the magic. And they're using just the fake thumb as well, they're just doing the same functional thing as the other magician, but they're so good at doing it. They're so good at enrolling you in it, they're so good at getting you, your attention and your engagement and your beliefs aligned to what they want you to believe. That suddenly bringing that magic trick to life is what the magician is doing. When you study magicians, you realize that it's not about the gadgets, it's not about the functionality, it's about the way they do the trick. It's the way they breathe the life force into the trick.

• 54:03Daniel Priestley?

  The, the life force is the magic. It's the way you, it's the way you bring it to life. So the idea that I noticed years ago when I wrote the book Key Person of Influence was that there are these people who make stuff happen around them. And these people, they build reputation, their names come up in conversation, they have more fun, they build reputation, all that sort of stuff happens. And when they're involved in something, it all comes to life. And when they're not involved in it, it almost dissipates. It gets, something magically doesn't happen. Your involvement in 40 different countries, companies, people would ask the question, but how are you involved in 40 different companies? And the thing is, is that you're not functionally involved in 40 different companies, but you're breathing a life force energy into 40 different companies.

• 54:43Daniel Priestley?

  There's something that your, your energy brings that stuff happens with you involved that wouldn't happen if you weren't involved. You're the irreplaceable life force. And if that irreplaceable life force comes, gets, gets removed, the result won't be the same. If you're involved, the result will be different. And that's what people want from you. And it's not functionality. No one's saying, can you come and work in the office?

• 55:07Steven Bartlett?

  It's very, very interesting, very, very true. And I, the two sub questions that spiraled off that were, how does one know? And does one need to know what their vitality, their life force energy is? Do we need to know? And is there a way for us to find out what it is?

• 55:22Daniel Priestley?

  We need to get into environments where it becomes normal to explore this stuff. And we need to be around people who are full of life. So when you are around vital people, you discover things about your own vitality. You've had this experience of launching a podcast that gives you access to the world's most interesting people and me. And you've got this, I bet from every single person, you've raised your energy, you've raised your vitality. Something inside you was awoken in each and every interaction that lifted your vibration up. When you're in a low vibration environment where everyone's functional, everyone is suppressing their life force in order to be functional. You essentially just resonate with that and you suppress your life force in order to be functional.

• 56:07Daniel Priestley?

  So we need to get into environments where vitality is the norm, where we raise our energy, where we feel good about thinking about vision, mission and values, and we feel good about exploring origin and what what value that might add to the world. It feels normal to be conducting experiments. It feels normal to be making sales. It feels normal to wanna be a key person of influence in your industry. It feels normal to have a conversation about what resources already exist on the planet and how they could be used differently. So all of those things happen inside the right environment. So I have a saying that environment dictates performance. I went into a number of prisons with a charity called Key for Life. And what we discovered is that a lot of these young men are entrepreneurs, but in their

• 56:51Daniel Priestley?

  environment, the product that you would sell is an illegal product. But they're in that environment, the only successful entrepreneurs they come across and the only successful entrepreneurs they meet are selling drugs. So they go, oh, that is my pathway. That's what I do. That's my mentoring. That's the environment. If you were to take this same entrepreneurial spirit that these young men have and showed them, oh, here's an IT services company, they'd go start an IT services company, or here's a book publishing business. Oh, okay, now I'm gonna be a book publisher. So their entrepreneurial spirit, the only place they saw in the environment of someone who's on the rise was this drug dealer friend, so they got involved in it. So environment dictates performance. What we need to do is we need to find environments that lift us up.

• 57:31Steven Bartlett?

  What if we're not in an environment that lifts us up? Because there's gonna be a couple of million people right now that when you've described the definition of life force energy, and you've also used the word stagnation as almost the antithesis of that, they're thinking, oh, my God, I would love some life force energy. I'm in a corporate job in the city. I've been doing it for 10 years. I'm institutionalized in this place because I've been here so long that I don't even know what the outside world would look like. And I've got all these ideas, but I've been, they can feel their soul has been drained to some degree. They've got a mortgage.

• 58:02Daniel Priestley?

  Change it. We'll change environments for at least an hour or two a week. And what I mean by that is, I'll give you an example. When I was 21, I was going out to pubs, drinking with friends all the time. We're getting drunk and that was the normal night. And there was this one night where these people turned up who did La Bop, uh, Latin jive dancing. And I looked across the room and I saw them jive dancing and I went, oh, that's incredible. And I get talking to the, the guy and I say, how did you, how do you do this? And there's like six beautiful girls and this one or two guys who, and they're all waiting for a spin. And I'm like, how do you, how are you doing this? He goes, come to dance classes. So I'm like, go to dance classes? That's, I would never go to dance classes. I rock up at dance class.

• 58:45Daniel Priestley?

  And then when I was there, I was in this environment where it was completely normal to dance. That was just the normal thing. In that environment, you grab a partner and the music comes on and they show you the moves and you do the moves. When they demoed the moves, and I can vividly remember this from 20 years ago, when they demoed the moves, I thought to myself, there is no way I'll learn that in three months. And then by the end of that first two hour session, I'm doing the whole routine and I'm comfortable with it. And I'm like, wow, I can do this. So being in the, you can't do it outside of the environment. You can only do it in the environment. So entrepreneurship is an environment thing. You, you do it inside an environment and you, it's very hard to do that outside of the environment. So you basically have to find entrepreneur meetups, entrepreneur groups.

• 59:30Daniel Priestley?

  You, you find a mentor. You, you know, in every city around the world right now, there are entrepreneur meetups every night of the week. Uh, online, there are entrepreneurial events every day of the week. So you just get in, you just get in the environment.

• 59:43Steven Bartlett?

  There's this thing called social shedding, which I've never actually shared with anybody before. But it's this idea that when you take that first step into dance class and you get to see behind the curtain of another world, you slowly no longer resonate with your other friendship group. And what, and there's often a friction there where they say, oh, Dan, you've, Dan's dark. They start cracking the jokes. Oh, Dan's a ballet dancer now, lads. Oh, and what they're doing there is somewhat linked to this phrase misery loves company. They don't want you to leave. No one wants you to change. You're Dan Priestley. We know you as this. Do not change your identity. If you try to change your identity, we will mock you. We will disguise as a friendly roast and we will try and hold you back. Because if you change, what does that say about us?

• 1:00:26Steven Bartlett?

  Well, that's, that's holding a mirror up to me. It means that I'm less than you in some way. And I hear this from entrepreneurs or startup entrepreneurs, that when they did that decision to start building a personal brand or starting that cupcake business typically causes resistance from their existing social circle. And then this decision, whether they wanna socially shed, which means letting some of those people go.

• 1:00:51Daniel Priestley?

  If we were born at any other time in history, you would grow up in a town, get a job in that local town, go to school in that local town. And everything would revolve around just the local issues of that particular place. You probably would know a thousand people for your entire lifetime. And you'd have this very tight circle. There's something in our evolution about being part of these little local communities. And for the first time in history, you can choose to be tapped into a global community. Anyone in the world who, who shares values or you wanna share their values, it's now freely available to, to us. There's something that feels very foreign about that because it's never happened for the last 5,000 years. And then there's something very exciting about this where you go, actually, I'm living in a different time now. This is an incredible moment.

• 1:01:34Daniel Priestley?

  I think that what's happening is that we're going through an empire shift. And the current empire shift is this empire shift away from geography to digital, which means that we connect on values and we connect on purpose and we connect on origin, mission, vision and those sorts of things. So what the larger shift that's actually happening is this shift of, do I wanna play by the old rules of the geographical based system? Or do I wanna play by the new rules of being in the cloud? And in the cloud, anything's possible because I can go anywhere. I can do anything. I can access any information. I can connect with any person on the planet. And as soon as you make this shift into the new empire, that's where everything starts to shift. And now you, so we all have to make that shift.

• 1:02:16Daniel Priestley?

  So the big shift is not even just changing your friendship group. It's the courage to change empire. It's the courage to say, actually, you know what? The world is a very different place than what I was born into. It's now going through a big change. The faster I can actually get into this wave and surf this wave, the better.

• 1:02:31Steven Bartlett?

  That's so interesting. And one of those shifts from the old empire to the new empire is seen in building a personal brand, because the old gatekeepers of media and reputation were just newspapers and the radio. And there was like, you know, 10 of those. So you've got to be lucky to get on one of those. Now, in the new empire, in the clouds, you can build your own media company around you.

• 1:02:53Daniel Priestley?

  Permission free, you can digitize your value. You can connect with anyone in the world who resonates with what it is that you do. So when we launched the most recent business, Score App, we launched it in London, but because it was the pandemic, we ended up with employees all over the world. And we've never had an office, and we still don't have an office. And it's this incredible business. And what's happening is that we now have clients signing up, every single day, over 100 people sign up. And we have clients in 152 countries, I checked yesterday. And they resonate with a message. And there's no, the business doesn't exist anywhere. There's no actual place that you can go to visit Score App. It's just a digital business. The employees are everywhere, the customers

• 1:03:34Daniel Priestley?

  are everywhere. But what holds it together are these intangible things, such as values and vision, and the value that we offer, and the ideas, and the, you know, all the stories. And all of that intangible stuff now exists in the cloud, and the whole business exists in the cloud. So it is an incredible time. Personal brand is one of these incredible things where you don't need permission. You can just go straight to the market. You've done that. And anyone who resonates with your story, your ideas, you know, your, the things that you want to get done in the world, they can just follow along. I hate the idea of personal brand being like, showing up and doing dances. It's actually, it's about sending out a signal of this is what I'm up to in the world. And do you want to come

• 1:04:17Daniel Priestley?

  along for the ride? Do you want to be part of that? Like, are you up for this game that I'm playing? Do you want to, do you want to take part in what I'm interested in? So it's, it's a connection. It's, it's not. An image, it's not like a voice or a message that gets repeated over and over. It's I'm up to something in the world and I would love more people to be part of that. Come with me.

• 1:04:37Steven Bartlett?

  I think I heard Adam Grant speak in one of his books about the big misconception with personal branding. Is it that it's this kind of pursuit for fame, whereas great personal branding isn't self-promotion. It's idea promotion. It's this is what I believe. This is my perspective. Gather round if you think the same. Self-promotion sounds like we just won an award last night at the marketing awards. And you're all on the table, taking a selfie. We are amazing. That doesn't cultivate a personal brand. Personal brand is this is my perspective on the world. If you've got the same perspective, which we call idea promotion, come join me.

• 1:05:09Daniel Priestley?

  It's not look at me, it's look at this.

• 1:05:11Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:05:12Daniel Priestley?

  It's not chasing the spotlight. It's becoming a spotlight and spotlighting the thing that matters most. And it's it's shining the light on something else, especially on an idea. So we see people online who are shameless self-promoters. I went to the gym today. Look at my avocado on toast with chili flakes. And they're saying, look at me, look at me, look at me. And the people that we most want to follow are the ones who say, don't look at me. Look at this. This is what's going on in the world and this is what you should, you should be excited about this. And and that's the difference because on the surface, we might see you and say, oh, you know, Stephen's all about like, look at Stephen. It's like, no, no, no, you're missing the point. If you think it's about that, you've missed the point. He's shining a light on something that's going on in the world and he's bringing stuff into the spotlight.

• 1:05:57Daniel Priestley?

  He's not trying to say, check me out. He's saying, check this out.

• 1:06:00Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting that the podcast, it was the most accelerating thing for my personal brand. And it's really bringing people here and then do my very best to listen as much as I can, which is interesting, right? Because we've kind of cultivated, it's almost like the campfire. We've cultivated more people sat around the campfire, listening to conversations like this.

• 1:06:16Daniel Priestley?

  It is incredible that these times that we're in, these are the conversations that would have been behind closed doors 20 years ago. And you would have been incredibly privileged to be able to sit and listen in on those chats. And now they've been democratized, these type of high level conversations, the types of conversations you have that you share with the world. You've democratized something that was once a very elite activity and you've made it freely available.

• 1:06:43Steven Bartlett?

  People. I've come to learn, especially over the last couple of years, about the importance of people. You talked about people at the very beginning of this conversation, hiring people, finding the right people to join you in your mission. How central to being successful in both business, but just more broadly in life, is assembling the right group of people?

• 1:07:03Daniel Priestley?

  So business is a team sport. There's no, there's no getting around it. I don't believe in solo entrepreneurship. I don't believe that you can be a one-person entrepreneur. I think entrepreneurs are team players and that they assemble teams, they put together teams of amazing people. Sometimes they put together teams of ordinary people at the beginning and then they become amazing people. So I'm a believer that two-person co-founders or a founder plus an assistant is a great place to start. Four-person campaign teams, eight-person core teams, 30-person performance teams. So I love the British military's approach to team building. So in the British military, they have two-person scout team, four-person fire team, eight-person section, 30-person platoon. So they go two, four, eight, 30.

• 1:07:45Daniel Priestley?

  And I've used that myself in my own scale-up approach, where if there's a new idea, we put two people on it. Once it's proven, four people are on it. Once it's up and running, eight people are on it. Once it becomes a business that has its own standalone value, 30 people are on it. So it's two, four, eight, 30. And that's been, that's been a British military learning that I, that I kind of went, well, if they've done 400 years of HR experiments, why wouldn't I just learn from how they organize their teams?

• 1:08:14Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything you've found that is consistent across all of the best people you've hired, worked with, co-founded a company with, partnered with? Is there any consistent thing?

• 1:08:25Daniel Priestley?

  I'm always looking for complementary energies. So here's what I'm looking for. In the deck of cards, there's four suits. So you've got clouds, so head in the clouds, spades, doing the work, hearts, connecting with people, diamonds, money, finance, data. So I always look for a balanced team of someone who's visionary, with someone who's a spades person doing the work, implementer, someone who's hearts connector, with someone who's money or data. So I'm looking to try and perfectly balance my team with the four suits. And I've seen visionary people who get nothing done because they don't have an implementer around. I've seen amazing connectors who don't have anyone balancing them out, so they never retain any of the money that's flowing around them, because they're an amazing

• 1:09:10Daniel Priestley?

  networker. People are doing deals around them, but they're not involved in any of it. So for me, it's the it's the connection between those four energies. And when you get all four energies firing and in one team, then you get the value creation and retention.

• 1:09:27Steven Bartlett?

  Let's talk about money.

• 1:09:28Daniel Priestley?

  Let's talk about it.

• 1:09:30Steven Bartlett?

  We're in a cost of living crisis in the UK and many countries around the world are either in or on the brink of recession. So one of the most popular questions we've had at the Diary of a CEO in the last three to six months is about money. People's concern about their own money, spending, finance and saving. If I'm someone out there now that has, I don't know, a hundred dollars or a hundred pounds worth of disposable income every month, or if I have a thousand or 10,000 pounds, what should I be thinking about as it relates to creating more money and making myself financially free?

• 1:10:03Daniel Priestley?

  The first thing is you just want to earn more. People massively settle for how much they could earn. So the first place to, I think, to invest is in yourself. But here's the first principle. The first principle is income follows assets. Income follows assets means that the more assets you have, the more income you'll earn. If I, if I want rental income first, I need a house. If I want dividend income, I need shares. If I want to be paid as a brand ambassador, first I need a brand. So essentially, the more we can accumulate assets, the more easy and effortless the money flows. So we have to figure out, well, what assets could you accumulate? And what assets could you formalize and own?

• 1:10:46Daniel Priestley?

  I wrote a book called 24 Assets and I listed out all the different digital assets that are new economy assets that people could have. Things like brand and positioning, things like databases, things like company culture is an asset now. So I talk about how do you formalize those things? If someone's just starting out and they've got a hundred a month, to be, to be perfectly honest, trying to invest a hundred a month or any of that, it's not going to do anything, it's not going to change your life. But if you put that into your own skills and your own development, let's say you don't have negotiation skills. Well, there are courses that you can take for a hundred dollars that give you negotiation skills. Let's say you don't know how to close sales. You can take a course on how to make sales. Let's say you don't feel confident in public speaking, you could do a public speaking course. So there are things that allow you to gain your skills.

• 1:11:31Daniel Priestley?

  The other thing too is money is relationships. So if you don't have a lot of money, you typically don't have a lot of relationships. You might have a limited number of relationships or a limited number of relationships with people who have a flow of money. When you have a high degree of relationships with people who've got money flowing, it's very effortless for that to flow to and from you as well. So you might have to invest in relationships. When I arrived in the UK, I knew that one of the places that I would meet interesting people would be private banks. So I didn't qualify for private bank, but I went into a private bank. And I said, I'm going to be launching a business and of course it's going to be great and successful. I want a bank with a private bank. Can I, do you have an entrepreneurs program? Oh yeah, we did. And they start selling me, joining the entrepreneurs program.

• 1:12:16Daniel Priestley?

  Now it cost me six hundred pounds to open an account with that private bank. But they immediately invited me to dinners and they invited me to networkings and all these sorts of things in the private bank. One of the things that I've recommended a lot of people do is host dining, dinner parties. And reach out to people who you don't know. Here's a, here's a silly story. I was just in Dubai and I know someone who has a hundred foot yacht. So I said, Jeremy, can I borrow your yacht for the evening? I'm going to be putting fifteen really influential people for a dinner party. We're going to have burgers on the boat. And he, and he said, oh, great. Can I come? And I said, of course you can come. It's your boat, right? And so he said, great, that'll be exciting.

• 1:12:59Daniel Priestley?

  So he basically said, you can, you can host this party on, on my hundred foot boat. So I reached out to all the people who I didn't know. And I said, hey, we're putting together burgers on the boat. Would you like to come along and have some burgers with interesting people? And then they came along and I made the investment into relationship. Now, the funny thing is, a lot of people will say, oh, but you know someone with a hundred foot yacht. Funny thing is, I, I think plenty of people who have a boat, especially in Dubai, it sits empty most of the time. You could reach out to thirty people and say, we're going to do it on someone's boat. Would you like it to be your boat, with or without your energy? So making investments into relationships is a really powerful thing. For a hundred dollars a month, personally, what would I do with a hundred dollars a month? Take people out to dinner. That would be my number one investment. I'd, I'd probably be taking people out to dinner.

• 1:13:45Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:13:46Daniel Priestley?

  The investment into the relationship. So I would be inviting the most interesting people I could possibly invite. If I had the ability for a hundred dollars a month, I guess that's one dinner. So I would reach out to someone interesting and say, I've seen your story. I've seen what you're interested in. Can I take you out for lunch? Can I take you out for dinner? It's my shout. I'd love to get to know you a little bit better. Obviously, don't do that with someone who's famous. You get a hundred of those a day. I get plenty of those a day. Reach out to someone who's not famous, but who's accomplished, who's successful, who's a mentor-esque type person, not necessarily a superstar, but someone who's a few steps ahead. Take those people out to lunch, take them out to dinner.

• 1:14:23Steven Bartlett?

  What'd you say in that message that, you know, you talk about calls, I talk about emails. What would someone have to say to you, considering where you are in your life now with all the inquiries you get, for you to actually go for a coffee with them?

• 1:14:38Daniel Priestley?

  Um, so.

• 1:14:41Steven Bartlett?

  Bear in mind, everyone's gonna email you and say the same.

• 1:14:44Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, it happened today, actually. Someone said, Daniel, I noticed in the background of one of your photos that you have an amazing Fender Stratocaster. I teach people how to play guitar. I would love the opportunity to do a guitar lesson with you and help you to shred on that guitar. And it was really nice. He had watched my podcasts in the past. He had noticed the guitar. He reached out with something that was valuable for me and he said, I'd love to have a chat with you and teach you how to play some guitar. And obviously I'll have a chat with him while we do that. But that was a really, it was a very sense, uh, it was very, it felt like a good connection. I also had a look at his profile and he looked like a really lovely person, you know, who's getting on with doing stuff.

• 1:15:28Daniel Priestley?

  There's a bit of with or without you energy as well in terms of, you know, I can see this person's up to stuff.

• 1:15:33Steven Bartlett?

  So I look at that and I go, he did some research on you. He offered you value in an area where you were potentially seeking or looking for the value.

• 1:15:43Daniel Priestley?

  Yep. Oh, that's definitely true. If you've seen me play guitar.

• 1:15:47Steven Bartlett?

  But that's, that's like the cool component. And I, I feel the same way that I, I, I try and figure out why sometimes I reply to these cold outreach messages, but 99.9% of the time I don't. And it tends to be the case that the person will say, they'll show that they've done some kind of research on me, which is good for your ego. Like everyone has an ego. You want to feel like someone actually cares. And then they'll offer me something in return for-

• 1:16:11Daniel Priestley?

  By the way, do you know I did this to you? I don't even know if you remember. You and I were both speakers at a conference.

• 1:16:17Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 1:16:17Daniel Priestley?

  And we were in the elevator and I'd prepared for you a really nice leather, um, briefcase. And it had your, uh, I created the happy sexy millionaire thing. And we, we gave all the speakers one of those. You weren't that special. We had, we had some-

• 1:16:32Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, fuck.

• 1:16:34Daniel Priestley?

  But anyway, it was interesting because I, I actually have done that with you and we never ended up following up with you and you never followed up with us. But here's the, here's the thing. I want to share that. No, I want to share that because sometimes it doesn't work. Right? Sometimes you have to send out, like when I sent out 3,000 cold DMs to launch a business, I didn't expect 3,000 people to respond. I expected 30 or 40 people to come back to me. When I gave, gave that to you, do you remember it?

• 1:16:57Steven Bartlett?

  I remember getting a briefcase and I'm trying to, I do, I do quite a lot of public speaking these days. So-

• 1:17:02Daniel Priestley?

  We only had like a five, like a two minute interaction. And I said, hey, this is a little gift for you. Inside, we've created something for you. Have a look.

• 1:17:09Steven Bartlett?

  Was it something I had to scan?

• 1:17:11Daniel Priestley?

  Probably.

• 1:17:11Steven Bartlett?

  Was there something scannable in there?

• 1:17:12Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, we'd, we'd built you a little landing page campaign.

• 1:17:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, I remember.

• 1:17:15Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:16Steven Bartlett?

  And I remember getting in the car and saying to my team, oh, this is cool.

• 1:17:18Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah. And then of course it gets passed to the team and they're like, yeah, yeah, fair enough. And put that on the pile of cool things. Um, so the point is, is I'm saying that to say, these things, you, you don't want to get hung up on the idea that one person's like, in that same event, we gave that same thing to another really well-known person. They've gone with it and they're like, um, you know, millions of followers and they're one of our clients now. So we have with or without you energy, which is when, when my team do this, we pick 30 or 40 people who'd make amazing connections and contacts in our VIP outreach team. And then we reach out to them and we expect maybe two or three of them to get back to us. So it's that idea of, you know, don't, like

• 1:18:01Daniel Priestley?

  if someone messages you and you don't message back, it's not the end of the world. There are other people you can message and there's a, and look what happens.

• 1:18:08Steven Bartlett?

  There you go.

• 1:18:08Daniel Priestley?

  It comes around again.

• 1:18:10Steven Bartlett?

  It always comes around again.

• 1:18:11Daniel Priestley?

  If it's, if it's meant to happen, it'll happen.

• 1:18:13Steven Bartlett?

  So what about people, you know, so many members of my teams speak to me and ask me about investing. They might have tens of thousands to invest or whatever, but I'm curious about your personal investment thesis. With the, with the capital that you have spare, what do you do with it to create more money?

• 1:18:29Daniel Priestley?

  So.

• 1:18:30Steven Bartlett?

  What does your portfolio look like?

• 1:18:32Daniel Priestley?

  It's extremely boring. I just stick any available capital into S and P 500.

• 1:18:39Steven Bartlett?

  What's the S and P 500 for anyone that doesn't?

• 1:18:41Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, the top 500 stocks in the US. So essentially, any government that inflates its currency anywhere in the world, that money will hit the economy and it will eventually make its way back to the top 500 companies in the US through spending, or that capital will end up being put into the S and P 500, which inflates. So one way or another, it's going back to the top 500 companies in the US. So it's almost impossible to beat the S and P 500. I hate investing. It's not my thing. I like expansive business creation. I'm an optimist. Great investors are often pessimists. They're very good at thinking what could go wrong and analyzing risk. I hate that shit. So for me personally, I want to, as much as possible, expand the portfolio of businesses that I think should exist in

• 1:19:25Daniel Priestley?

  the world. And I've always made my money by just saying, I romantically like the idea of this business existing, and I'm going to pour my energy into it and it's going to become worth millions. Rather than thinking about where I want to invest money, I want to create something that's investable for other people to put money into, because that's how you really make money. So the exciting thing is not placing my own chips. The exciting thing is creating something where others want to place chips into that.

• 1:19:50Steven Bartlett?

  So let's talk about that journey then.

• 1:19:51Daniel Priestley?

  Yep.

• 1:19:52Steven Bartlett?

  That journey from got an idea, want to start that ice cream business, that chili and basil ice cream business, whatever.

• 1:19:58Daniel Priestley?

  Exit for tens of millions.

• 1:19:59Steven Bartlett?

  Exit for tens of millions. I get off the ground. People love my chili and basil ice cream. What is the journey that an entrepreneur goes on from zero up until they exit?

• 1:20:08Daniel Priestley?

  So there's, there's a key stages. The first four stages where everyone gets caught is called chaos, concept, audience, offer, sales. So you have to develop your concept. So it's a good concept. You've validated it. You've conducted some experiments. You're aligned to it. Other people are excited about it. Audience is that you engage an audience. Waiting lists, dinner parties, scorecards, quizzes, discussion groups. All of those are great audience builders.

• 1:20:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 1:20:35Daniel Priestley?

  Offer is that you construct a packaged up offering so that people can buy something and that that audience can now act on something and buy. And then sales, which is the ability to talk and discuss with your interested parties to close deals, to actually get sales across the line and to do that predictably and reliably. So for sales, we establish something called a rhythm of laps, leads, appointments, presentations and sales. And we measure our pipeline every week. How many leads? How many appointments? How many presentations? How many sales? So those are the first four things. Concept, audience, offer, sales. And that should get you into the six figures of revenue just by doing that. The next thing is about team building. You've got to establish a key person of influence who's got a personal brand, who's the leader of the company, who's going to embody the brand.

• 1:21:19Daniel Priestley?

  And you've got to build a team of eight people around them. A general manager, marketing and sales, finance admin, IT, media and operations, those kind of roles. And essentially you now build this core team of eight. And the key person of influence job is to engage bigger and bigger audiences. And so they get out there and tell the story of the business. They get on stages, they pitch, they publish content, they raise their profile, they do joint ventures and partnerships. So they're leading from the front while the general manager or ops director is making sure things don't fall apart behind. Once you hit about eight people, you now have to digitize absolutely everything of value in that business. So now you go through the whole process of digitization of the value. So you're getting ready to scale.

• 1:22:02Steven Bartlett?

  Which means, for example, moving physical relationships to a CRM, some kind of database or?

• 1:22:07Daniel Priestley?

  Building a CRM, formalizing your intellectual property, building a brand, a company brand, formalizing your organizational culture, getting into.

• 1:22:19Daniel Priestley?

  Really good investor relationship and documentation governance. So all of these are developing systems, developing assets of the business, having online marketing and sales systems, having an online way of generating a lot of leads reliably, having an online way of making customers mostly happy most of the time. So you're basically trying to build as many assets as possible. What you're trying to do at about eight to 10 people is raise revenue per person. So let's say you've got 10 people with a hundred thousand per person. So you've got a million of revenue, 10 people times a hundred thousand, million of revenue. If you can add assets and get it to go to 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 million, now you've got 130,000 per person.

• 1:23:02Daniel Priestley?

  So what you're trying to do is add as many digital assets as possible to get the revenue per employee or the revenue per person up. Once you see that the revenue per person is going up, now you can add people because the more digital assets there are, times by the number of people, now you're going to be successful. Now, the really hard jump is from 12 to 30. From 12 people to 30, you're too big to be small, too small to be big, very difficult time in any business's life. And what you have to do is go through a transformation of a small team of rebels and misfits to a professional team that's manufacturing value. A lot of people have to go. Unfortunately, some of the earlier people who were there because they could breathe

• 1:23:43Daniel Priestley?

  and had a pulse and all of that sort of stuff, they unfortunately have to go find a new startup. And you now have to go and bring on team members who come through recruiters with a proper process and who they go through an entire process of how they join the team, they're on boarded correctly, and now you transform into a more valuable professional organisation. Once you hit 30, you've got a five-person executive team plus a non-executive director and an advisor, and then you've got some teams of teams, and now you're doing 10 million of revenue, 3 million of profit, and now you're exitable.

• 1:24:18Steven Bartlett?

  Have you got to make a decision early?

• 1:24:19Daniel Priestley?

  That was a mouthful, sorry.

• 1:24:20Steven Bartlett?

  It's so true. It's so funny.

• 1:24:23Daniel Priestley?

  Did you agree with that?

• 1:24:23Steven Bartlett?

  All of it. I agreed with all of it. The interesting thing as well is the part you said about of the first 10 people. You hire, very few of them are equipped or ready or able to adjust to the environment you have at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, a hundred.

• 1:24:37Daniel Priestley?

  Totally.

• 1:24:37Steven Bartlett?

  And it's part of the, what I've noticed is that when there's ten people, you're acquiring a different set of skills and you're, you're thinking more about multi, multi disciplinary individuals that can kind of wear a few hats but not do anything exceptionally well.

• 1:24:50Daniel Priestley?

  Swiss Army knives.

• 1:24:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51Daniel Priestley?

  They can do twenty five things badly.

• 1:24:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. And then when you get to like fifty, sixty, seventy people, it's really.

• 1:24:56Daniel Priestley?

  Specialists.

• 1:24:56Steven Bartlett?

  Specialists.

• 1:24:57Daniel Priestley?

  Bread knife.

• 1:24:58Steven Bartlett?

  Bread knife, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:58Daniel Priestley?

  Cuts bread really well, just that.

• 1:25:00Steven Bartlett?

  So on this then, when we're thinking about our own careers, we've got to ask ourselves that question, which is, are we a specialist that should be going into a company where there's fifty, sixty, seventy people? Or are we that kind of Swiss Army knife that should be playing in startups and then going from zero to one versus like one to two?

• 1:25:15Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, I, I have, I've had to wrestle with that myself. I personally absolutely adore the first two million of revenue. That's, that is where my fun, that for me is fun. It's where I find it exciting. I become almost pathologically distracted. Once we hit two million of revenue and I have to remind myself, oh, wait a second. We've got a fast growth business here. Stop thinking about other things. I really enjoy getting businesses past that first couple of hundred thousand a month. And then for whatever reason, I'm, I'm like dreaming of a blank page. I just want some like, what if we did this? What if we did that? But here's the cool thing. There are so many amazing people who are phenomenal at the two to twenty million jump.

• 1:26:00Daniel Priestley?

  So at the moment, the person who's leading dent global is Glenn Carlson. Glenn is, I've known him since I was fourteen years old. And actually what he's phenomenal at at the moment, we've discovered is that he's really, really good at driving that next jump, the two to twenty million jump. So there's the zero to, there's the zero to two hundred grand, like testing. There's the two hundred grand to two million, which is like, yeah, okay, this thing's got some legs. There's the two million to twenty million jump, which is we're professionalizing, we're becoming a proper business. We're becoming valuable. We're getting all the right people. What's shocked me, because I've known Glenn for so many years, is that we've just recently discovered that that's what he's suited to. He's really good at the two to 20 million

• 1:26:42Daniel Priestley?

  jump. He's so good at recruiting talented people. He's so good at pushing them through a process that weeds out like 15 amazing people down to two amazing people down to one.

• 1:26:51Steven Bartlett?

  How would you make the case to someone that's just heard what you've said about your companies and that you like that zero to two million phase? What case would you make to me to admit what I'm not good at for the sake of my business? Because everyone can relate. Like, I don't mean to share this without asking him, but I'm sure he's in control of the edit, so he can take it out if he doesn't like it. But did you think I was gonna do it? Jack turned around to our team the other day and it was, I've actually spoken to so many people about this moment since he said it. Jack said, you know what? Jack's run this podcast from zero, so zero subscribers to where it is now, it's five million subscribers. Jack turned around at five million subscribers and was like, I'm not the best in the world at doing lighting. So what I've done is I've gone out and I've

• 1:27:34Steven Bartlett?

  found someone who's the best at lighting and they're gonna teach me, they're gonna redesign my set. Five million subscribers, he's getting someone else to redesign his set, so that the lighting is amazing. It takes a certain kind of person to put winning over ego.

• 1:27:48Daniel Priestley?

  I love that, yeah.

• 1:27:49Steven Bartlett?

  You know what I mean? And I think about there's so many, yeah. Jack probably didn't know the profoundness of that moment to me, but someone who is applauded from everyone, oh, you've built the best, whatever, for him to go, do you know what? There's so much I don't know.

• 1:28:02Daniel Priestley?

  He role modeled a little humility and he role modeled the idea of winning is better than being right.

• 1:28:10Steven Bartlett?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:28:11Daniel Priestley?

  And overlings, not underlings. That a great company is great because you bring in overlings, not underlings. So an underling is someone who's not as good as you are and an overling is someone who's way better than you are. So it's that confidence to bring in the overlings. All of my businesses have been great because overlings run them. Everyone who is in my organization is way better than me at the thing they're doing. And I feel like, like the conductor in the orchestra can't play all the instruments and probably maybe is okay at one instrument, but actually their ability to bring in the best in the world at that instrument is what is what makes them a great conductor, the ability to enroll people. So the first thing I'd say is that there's value to be made at every level. If you're watching this.

• 1:28:55Daniel Priestley?

  And you're, you know, you're not a founder and you're sitting there going, all the people who make the money are the people who start from scratch and get something off the ground and look at Daniel and look at Steven. Those guys are the zero to one guys. Wouldn't it be great if I was one of those? But I'm not. Well, actually, that's not true. The truth is that there's, there's incredible wealth to be created if you can take something from two to 20 million. There's amazing wealth if you can take something from 20 to 200 million. Do you know, this is worth mentioning, one of the biggest opportunities in the world right now, biggest, there's, there's two major opportunities in the world, but one of the biggest opportunities in the world at the moment is baby boomers who want to retire. And a typical scenario is you get someone who's late 60s, early 70s, the business had a high watermark of a couple of million, and now it's dropped down to

• 1:29:40Daniel Priestley?

  maybe a million or six, high six figures because the person's semi-retiring and because the business has been on decline, it's almost unsalable. The person wants to retire and they just want to hand over the keys and they just want that business to go to someone who's fresh. And what they're willing to do is to do a vendor sale exit. Cody Sanchez, who you had, she talks about this. I've done deals like this. And actually Jeremy with the 100 foot yacht, that's how, that's how he does it. So you essentially, you buy a business that the person wants to retire and you take over that business with fresh energy and you bring it back to its high watermark. So there are so many people who, what they would be suited for is not starting with a blank sheet of paper like me, but

• 1:30:22Daniel Priestley?

  they would actually go and find, you know, Bill and Sarah who want to retire and they want to do a deal where they get paid out over five years to hand over the keys to the business.

• 1:30:33Steven Bartlett?

  Let's zoom in on this because a lot of people don't understand the concept of like a management buyout. So I see Bill and Sarah, they're running a laundromat.

• 1:30:41Daniel Priestley?

  Yep. Well, here's a real life example. A real life example from a friend of mine is called Kit King. And basically he approached someone who had that business. They built it up to, I think, a few million. And then he, the guy was ready to retire. When, when he walked in, the orders would get printed out and put onto a spike and spike number one was like, this is an order. And then when it was fulfilled, it goes on to the Field spike, a piece of paper. And then, you know, he, this young guy comes in and he digitizes the business. And he gets all the automated order thing flowing, cost about twenty five grand to get in a specialist who could do all of that. And then he basically re-engaged the team, the team were totally unengaged, I think there's about a dozen people.

• 1:31:24Daniel Priestley?

  And they'd not had a team meeting in ages, they'd not, there was no vision for the business. They'd not gone and spoken to customers in, in forever. And then he comes in, goes and talks to customers, starts hosting some online events, starts sending out messages, starts digitizing, builds a bit of the brand. And that business has, I think, gone like five hundred percent in like two years, it's massively successful. But he started with something that had been going for thirty years.

• 1:31:49Steven Bartlett?

  In that example, you don't necessarily need any money.

• 1:31:52Daniel Priestley?

  No, no, no, this was no money down.

• 1:31:53Steven Bartlett?

  So you can create a multi-million pound business theoretically, starting with zero money.

• 1:32:00Daniel Priestley?

  Remember that, remember that money is just a database. So it's a database of the value. So what you do is, like, if I wanna buy a house, I go to the bank and they lend me the money to buy the house. If I wanna buy a business, the person who already owns the business is probably the most likely person to see the value in funding the business. A bank probably won't, but the person who is selling it, let's say I, let's say I go to Bill and Sarah. I say, look, there's no question, your business is worth one point two million, I don't have one point two million. I have a little bit of money that I'm going to invest into the business to grow it. Can I pay you the one point two million over six years, seven years? And what we will do is, this is my business plan, you will be the board members, chairperson of the board.

• 1:32:44Daniel Priestley?

  And the business will be the security for that loan. So if we screw up and we can't make our payments, you take the whole business back with everything that we've thrown at it, everything that we've done at it. You'll be able to take it back and sell it to somebody else if we skip our payments. So you're securing the purchase of the business with the business itself. You're doing a business plan where it makes sense that the business could make the payments. Now, think about it from Bill and Sarah's point of view, they've got this thing that's driving them crazy, they wanna retire, they want, they wanna go south of France, they wanna go spend time with the grandkids. And now someone's coming along and saying, yeah, we're gonna pay you a hundred and twenty grand a year for the next seven years.

• 1:33:17Steven Bartlett?

  And if we don't, then you get your business back.

• 1:33:19Daniel Priestley?

  And if we don't, you get the business back.

• 1:33:20Steven Bartlett?

  And if they believe you, which is the key part, if they believe in your ability to execute, because.

• 1:33:24Daniel Priestley?

  And if there's, and if there's no one else offering anything else. They believe you and there's no other options. It's a great deal. Now, here's a crazy thing. Sixty five percent of the value of all business equity in the economy is owned by baby boomers right now. So if you were to take, if you were to throw a dartboard at all the valuation of every company in the UK or the USA, there's a sixty five percent chance that you hit a baby boomer. Right? So it's incredible. Now, all of those businesses have to be passed on somewhere. Now, all of these young people, they all want to have the latest psychedelic startup or though, you know, something like that. And they're like, oh, I don't want the elevator repair business that does eight million a year. You know, it's like, go get involved in that, right? So that's a huge opportunity.

• 1:34:08Steven Bartlett?

  The arbitrage and the opportunity here is boring businesses.

• 1:34:11Daniel Priestley?

  Boring businesses that you can, you can bring something to it. You can digitize it. You can make it interesting. You can create a culture that's exciting. The thing about a boring business.

• 1:34:20Steven Bartlett?

  Boring boomer business.

• 1:34:21Daniel Priestley?

  Boring boomer business, right?

• 1:34:23Steven Bartlett?

  I said that first. That's my next book. I said that first.

• 1:34:28Daniel Priestley?

  Trademark.

• 1:34:29Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, could you guys grab the URL?

• 1:34:31Daniel Priestley?

  Wait a second. I'll get my phone.

• 1:34:34Daniel Priestley?

  So the boring boomer business, the BBBs, you know, a business can be exciting. It can do a boring thing, but still be an exciting business. You, the way you run the team and the culture, the money that it spits out can be exciting. You can use that business to sponsor a charity. You know, I've got a friend and a client called Sebastian Bates. He's got an amazing martial arts school that's in the UK and Dubai called Warrior Academy. And he's used all of his, he's very profitable. He's now set up martial arts schools in Kenya, Nepal, all of these different areas that are struggling areas now have a martial arts academy. He's set up his own charity and he's basically doing martial arts schools for kids who have never had anyone look out for them.

• 1:35:19Daniel Priestley?

  They're often street kids and homeless kids. They come into martial arts and they get taught life skills and martial arts and confidence, character. The point is, is you can take a boring business and the way that you run it, you can do, you can launch a charity associated with it. You could hire young people who are coming out of prison and give them a second chance to get started. And that could be part of the excitement of the business. There are so many ways to make a boring business an exciting business. Most of the times Bill and Sarah have given up on that. They're just, you know, they've been doing it for 20, 30 years. They're not fresh and the business has been in decline. Anyway, that's a huge opportunity, massive, way bigger than starting something new. Like if, if I was starting from scratch, that's probably actually where I'd probably start.

• 1:35:59Steven Bartlett?

  It's so funny that that never dawned on me when I was penniless in Manchester and I was very persuasive. But my strategy for World Creation was to pitch a brand new tech company. Because I'd just seen that social network movie with Mark Zuckerberg. Whereas really I could have just, you know, as you said, gone for Bill's business.

• 1:36:16Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Steven Bartlett?

  And presented a young, fresh, digital, social first vision and mitigated his risk by.

• 1:36:22Daniel Priestley?

  And even if you wanted to do social chain, you could have started by buying a marketing agency.

• 1:36:28Steven Bartlett?

  That was declining.

• 1:36:28Daniel Priestley?

  That was already doing 2 million. That's high watermark was 4 million and it's halved over the last six, seven years. But it still has a core team and it's got a 20 year reputation and it has a contract with AWS and it has a contract with HarperCollins. And it's like, oh yeah, we've got all these things in place. You buy that business that's doing 2 million as a starting point. And then you say, now I'm going to do social chain on top of that. So now you go from two to, you know, whatever. But rather than starting from absolute scratch, you could, you could actually start with a couple of million of revenue just by, just by going in and doing a deal with someone who's already got a starting point.

• 1:37:05Steven Bartlett?

  Two key skills here. The first skill is sales. We've talked about that. You have to be persuasive. And the second key skill is even understanding the structuring of that deal. You know, and those are two very different things, but they're imperative. What I've come to learn over the last five years is the people in my life that are the best wealth creators have those two skills.

• 1:37:26Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:26Steven Bartlett?

  They understand how to structure a deal and they understand how to sell the deal.

• 1:37:31Daniel Priestley?

  Yes. Yeah. Sales is, sales, that demand creation, the, the doing the deal and structuring phenomenal skills. And everything that you want is on the other side of a structure that exists. So with ScoreApp.

• 1:37:47Daniel Priestley?

  2022, AI comes out and I go, oh my God, AI changes the fundamental nature of this business. We need to be on AI. I thought the first thing I want to do is bring someone onto the team who is an AI expert. So I approach Professor Andy Pardo, who's the head of AI for Warwick University. And I say, we're setting up an AI advisory board. Would you like to be on our AI advisory board? Here's how much we pay per year and would you like to join the board? And he's like, yeah, I'll join the advisory board. So he comes and joins our advisory board. He starts making some recommendations about how we adapt to the AI challenge. We didn't need anyone else. That was absolutely perfect. He brought with him a team of researchers who came in and worked on the backend of our system as well.

• 1:38:32Daniel Priestley?

  But what was interesting is that that happened in two weeks. So from two weeks, we went from no AI integration to having Professor Andy Pardo, who's a PhD of AI, who's got 25 year background of AI as our advisor, because we set up an advisory board. So I just knew what structure to structure it as. You know, so had I said, can you help me? I need to figure this out.

• 1:38:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, you wouldn't. But how do you, someone that's, you know, at the very start of their journey, they don't understand all these.

• 1:39:04Daniel Priestley?

  They don't understand structures.

• 1:39:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:05Daniel Priestley?

  I mean, it's hard because in theory, you, you know, you go talk to CFO and you basically talk to an experienced CFO who's done a lot of M and A. And you just say, well, actually, do you know what's even wild? Today, you don't even need a CFO. You go on ChatGPT, act as a CFO, explain to me what structures I would use to do this. How would I structure, how would I structure a deal with this? Explain to me, I would like to buy a business, an existing 20 year old business. I would like to buy it so that I don't have to pay anything upfront and that the owners of the business finance my new ownership of the business, act as a CFO and advise me on how to do that transaction. And what's amazing is ChatGPT will do a good job of that, or it's a good starting point.

• 1:39:50Daniel Priestley?

  Draft the heads of terms.

• 1:39:52Steven Bartlett?

  You can ask ChatGPT today.

• 1:39:53Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, draft the heads of terms for that deal. Review the draft of heads of terms to see if there's any omissions or mistakes. Would you have changed, now that you've seen that, would you do anything differently? Yeah, I would change this.

• 1:40:05Steven Bartlett?

  You can send the email.

• 1:40:06Daniel Priestley?

  Draft an email to the finance director of this company proposing that we acquire the business with no money down.

• 1:40:13Steven Bartlett?

  Asking for a meeting, yeah. Isn't it crazy that we live in this new era where the possibilities in terms of communication, storytelling, persuasion, and the cost of a sale have completely, completely changed?

• 1:40:28Daniel Priestley?

  Dynamics have shifted, AI is changing everything.

• 1:40:31Steven Bartlett?

  We haven't realised yet, have we? If you think about how we're behaving, we haven't quite realised the potential of the technology we have.

• 1:40:38Daniel Priestley?

  We are like on the movie The Titanic, when they hit the iceberg and they're all just like dancing on the thing. And someone says, oh, it's an unsinkable ship. And the guy with a white face says, it's made of steel, it will go down, it'll sink. When I first saw AI do what AI does, I had that moment of like, oh no, this changes everything. We've just hit an iceberg. This is a fundamental, general purpose technology that is going to change everything. It's going to change every industry, top to bottom. Everything's going to have to reorganise itself around an AI landscape. But we're all pretending like it doesn't exist. We're all pretending like this thing isn't doing what it's doing. But yeah.

• 1:41:19Steven Bartlett?

  There's one thing that AI disagrees with you on. When I say AI, I mean Sam Altman from ChatGPT. You said earlier, business is a team sport. Now, he has a WhatsApp group, Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT. And in that WhatsApp group, he's got a bet with some friends that they'll be the first ever one-person billion-dollar company soon. And they're guessing on the date of the first ever one-person billion-dollar company. Because with AI, the team sport becomes you and a large language model like a ChatGPT.

• 1:41:50Daniel Priestley?

  I think that it's directionally correct, what he's saying. The one-person AI business will be beaten by the 10-person AI business. And that, like, yes, it probably will happen. It like, assuming, of course, it will happen. There will be a person who creates something using AI and it and it'll be a standout thing. But to replicate that again and again, having, what we will see a lot of is five-person teams with a CEO, CTO, COO, CMO, CFO, who work together as five people doing the work of 500 people using AI. That'll happen definitely, and that'll be, you know, that'll reproduce. But to a degree, business is is always going to be a team sport that essentially

• 1:42:33Daniel Priestley?

  five or six people will always beat one because they're they're they're talking to each other and they're covering different angles. And whatever AI strengths, AI is very good at content, but not context. And having five people who share a context and create a context together, then the content can happen using AI. AI without that context, it doesn't know what to do. So it doesn't have any purpose. Right now. Yeah, to a degree, it can start to, it still needs a first mover on what is the context? Why are we doing this in the first place? Right now? So, well, that's the one person. Yeah, I agree with you that there is, like, we are at a time in history where we can't

• 1:43:18Daniel Priestley?

  see around the corner. We don't know what society will look like. But here's a few things I do know about. I do know that as it as it stands right now, humans are great at context and AI is good at content. And if you can provide AI with an amazing context of to what it's meant to be doing, it will fill in all the blanks, but it needs the context first. I know that vitality versus functionality, AI is great at functionality, but it needs someone to breathe life force into it. It's the human life force that we that we breathe, that we breathe into things. So it still needs vitality, even though AI does a lot of functionality. And the warning that I have for people is that AI is very good at turning you into a creator or a consumer. So it essentially figures you out and it says, oh, TikTok, huh?

• 1:44:03Daniel Priestley?

  How about we get you to spend 16 hours on TikTok and hypnotize you into spending way longer than you thought on this thing? And the AI is really good at saying, we'll drive you down the to the edges of how much someone can consume. But it will also drive you to the edges of how much someone can create. And one thing that is going to happen in the next few years is everyone is going to have to make a conscious decision. Do I want to be a creator or a consumer when in relationship to AI? Because if if you allow AI to use you, it'll just turn you into a consumer. You'll listen to more stuff, watch more stuff, do more like spend more money because AI is good at that. Or if you use it to build stuff and make stuff and produce stuff, you will be doing superhuman levels of creativity because of AI.

• 1:44:48Daniel Priestley?

  But it's going to divide society into consumers and creators.

• 1:44:52Steven Bartlett?

  Work-life balance, Daniel.

• 1:44:55Daniel Priestley?

  Work-life balance.

• 1:44:56Steven Bartlett?

  Is it a thing? Is there? Is it possible to be wildly successful and not work exceptionally hard?

• 1:45:02Daniel Priestley?

  The people who talk about work-life balance as a as an important thing, they normally worked their asses off to the extent that they almost burnt themselves out. Then they had a come to Jesus moment. And then they now espouse work-life balance in hindsight, after having a massive breakthrough from the massive amounts of work that they did. And that is typically the pathway towards the work-life balance guru. So here's the unfortunate thing. You've got to look at what you've got to look at the statistics. People who earn over a hundred grand typically work 55 hours, but per week. But there's work and there's work. So you and I work enormous amounts of hours, but we're not digging up roads. We're not laying cables.

• 1:45:47Daniel Priestley?

  We're not doing boring repetitive stuff. In most cases, our work is creativity. It's publishing things. It's pitching deals. It's sitting there in dragon's den analyzing what's going on. It's doing interviews. So there's a new style of work. So when people get angry about work-life balance and they say, damn it, work-life balance has to be a thing. It's normally because their association to work is that work is such a negative thing and work is something you have to do in order to make money. And when people say, oh, I do 55 hours a week and I love it. They go, well, something's deeply wrong with you.

• 1:46:20Steven Bartlett?

  You're toxic.

• 1:46:21Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, you're toxic. Well, actually.

• 1:46:24Steven Bartlett?

  Apples and oranges.

• 1:46:25Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, I'm enjoying. I'm doing something that's deeply fulfilling and passionate and I can do it from home. And I do it online and it's digital and I see my kids all the time while I'm doing it. And I actually don't feel like I even work that hard. I'm just enjoying it, but I am, but I am doing that stuff. Keep in mind this. If you're doing a lot of hard work that doesn't develop an asset simultaneously, it's probably going to end up toxic, you may burn out. If you do a lot of hard work that simultaneously develops an asset, the asset value eventually takes over and then you're working completely by choice.

• 1:46:56Steven Bartlett?

  So simplify that as if I was a 10 year old.

• 1:47:00Daniel Priestley?

  If you create podcasts and those podcasts go onto YouTube and that people can watch them a year later, two years, three years later, you've developed something that has a life of its own and it's going to continue to create value without you having to physically be there. So if your work is creating a byproduct of an asset, if you own the company that you started and you own the shares in that company and that company becomes more and more successful and the equity value becomes more and more valuable, you're building, your work is creating a valuable asset. If, like my wife, you renovate horrible properties into amazing properties, her work creates income and an asset simultaneously.

• 1:47:38Steven Bartlett?

  What's the opposite of that? Where you're working but you're not creating any assets?

• 1:47:41Daniel Priestley?

  Well, Uber driver.

• 1:47:43Steven Bartlett?

  I used to work at McDonald's for two days.

• 1:47:44Daniel Priestley?

  I worked in McDonald's as well. I loved working at McDonald's. The asset that I created was a deep appreciation for systems. But the, the problem with being an Uber driver is that you can actually do 16 hour days. However, at the end of 16 hour days, that's it. You've earned that amount of money and you've not developed any additional asset. You've just performed a role. So you're not building simultaneously an asset. The people who love their work and don't burn out are the people whose work creates income and asset at the same time and they're doing something that's fulfilling and passionate.

• 1:48:19Steven Bartlett?

  And an asset could be reputation, skill, deep skills.

• 1:48:23Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, something, something that has a life of its own, something that lives beyond the, the day that you created it.

• 1:48:31Steven Bartlett?

  Daniel, thank you so much. We do have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is.

• 1:48:42Steven Bartlett?

  What is the one thing you'd wish you'd known about sex and relationships in your youth that you later learned?

• 1:48:49Daniel Priestley?

  A lot of the enjoyment of sex is the relationship that you're having with someone outside of that moment. So in my youth, I saw sex as a standalone thing. That was a compartmentalized thing. And essentially, you know, if you can pick up and have sex, then that's a win. But you discover pretty quickly that it's actually empty and meaningless and also awkward and really awkward the following day and all of that sort of stuff. Whereas when you find someone who you really love and you're building a life with them and you're sharing highs and lows with them and there's a deep connection, then it's actually something that is, it's almost like an ingredient that is infused

• 1:49:31Daniel Priestley?

  through all of that. So it's very linked to love and connection and life.

• 1:49:37Steven Bartlett?

  Does that fit into your framework of function and?

• 1:49:39Daniel Priestley?

  Functionality and vitality. Yeah. So it's either done from a space of love and life force energy, or it's done as something that's functional. Probably something that people have to go through to experientially learn. I think that, you know, that there's, you know, the other thing for young men is that, that the way that sex happens for a man is different to how it happens for a woman. And that, you know, you may have a feeling, or I had a feeling when I was a young, young guy in my late teens, early twenties, that I was unlovable and unattractive and that no one would want to have sex with me. So I'd have to trick them into, you know, having sex through pickup lines or things like that. And actually, when I built my confidence and when I built who I was as

• 1:50:24Daniel Priestley?

  a person, then it actually became much more of a natural experience. And I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here.

• 1:50:32Steven Bartlett?

  No, but it goes back to that energy you were describing, where you don't necessarily need the sale.

• 1:50:37Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, with or without your energy, that definitely happened. Yeah, so, you know, when I became an entrepreneur and I was speaking in front of big audiences and wrote bestselling books and all of those sorts of things, I had much more with or without your energy. And the beauty was is that when I met my wife, I was in a really great space where I, you know, she was, she had with or without your energy, I had with or without your energy, and we recognized each other as great, an amazing force of collaboration and partnership. And we realized that one on one would be 11 in this situation. And actually, it was, it was a magic moment. I knew I was going to marry her within about 12 hours.

• 1:51:15Steven Bartlett?

  Daniel, thank you so much for your time. You have so many

• 1:51:17Daniel Priestley?

  Thanks for having me on the show.

• 1:51:18Steven Bartlett?

  incredible books that are real smash hits. And it's funny that these books are growing in popularity despite the fact that times are changing, which I think speaks to how timeless they are. And you create a lot of content. So I think if people want to hear more from you on an ongoing basis and continue with this sort of education that we've had today, then they should definitely check out your social media channels, because I followed them. And the way that you create content is very much like the way you speak. You're very good at taking large, complex ideas, distilling them down into sort of simple, relatable, understandable concepts, and delivering them to people in a way that's actionable and accessible. That's what your books do. That's what your content does. And that's what you do so well. So thank you, Daniel, for being on my show.

• 1:51:54Daniel Priestley?

  It's a huge compliment coming from you. Thank you.

• 1:51:56Steven Bartlett?

  You're a master of what you do. So I appreciate you, Daniel. Thank you.

• 1:51:58Daniel Priestley?

  Cheers.