Dennis Yu: Mentorship and Sharing Your Gifts With the World

I don't think it's drive. I think all of us have drive. I think it's direction. I think if you give people direction, everyone has the drive. It's not motivation. I don't need a Tony Robbins walk on coals my way to get there. So if you have a gift of digital marketing, a gift of prophecy, a gift because you're the strongest man in the world, a gift because of some skill that you have, you have an obligation to share that. How selfish if you just hoard this gift and you don't share it with other people?

Yeah, I'm a fierce mama bear. You do not want to. I protect my cubs.

So there's this crazy guy. His name is Rehan Allahwala. He's got 15 million followers on Facebook, and he messaged me on Facebook and said, “Hey, Dennis, I'm Rehan from Pakistan.” And I'm thinking, there's tons of these people from Pakistan, and they're like all the other thousands that hit me up.

But he said, “I want to meet you in Silicon Valley. And I know that you're super well connected in Silicon Valley. So I know that because I'm so well connected in Pakistan and you're so well connected in Silicon Valley, that if we could bring things together, we could create jobs.” And I'm thinking, yeah, sure. I'm going to be speaking at this conference in San Francisco on this date, and I'm going to be offstage at 5 p.m. Meet me there, and we'll talk. Right? And I'm thinking, this guy's not going to show up. He's from Pakistan. I mean, he's some random guy from Pakistan, because I didn't even look him up or see who he was.

And sure enough, when I got offstage, there's this guy who was waiting down there at the bottom. I'm like, “You're that guy, right?” And he says yes. And he had a rental car, and we had dinner. He drove me to the airport, and he told me about his vision. He said, “Did you know, Dennis, that you can hire people for almost nothing in Pakistan if you have training on how to do digital marketing?” He said, “I know you have training on dollar a day and how to do SEO and how to do all this kind of stuff.”

And he asked me, “Do you know how much the average person in Pakistan makes per month?” Just like an average person, like a housekeeper or a dentist or a bus driver, middle class, not poverty, but just like an average sort of person. How much money do they make?

$80 a month. So this just showed me how ignorant I was. And he said, “Dennis, if you can offer them employment at $100 a month, doing the basic things like editing videos and building out WordPress sites and setting up Facebook ads and all that, then I have a million people that you can hire.” Oh my God, you've got to be kidding me. He said, “Come to Pakistan and I'll show you.” So I did.

I've flown out to Pakistan many times in the last 10 years, and now I'm a celebrity. I can walk anywhere in Pakistan and people will know who I am. I'm some random American and people know me, not because I'm famous, but because I've been rolling with Rehan Allahwala, who is like the super connector in this country. It's insane.

Right. And I'm not saying Pakistan is just cheap labor, because sometimes I get hate, saying, “Oh, you think Pakistan's like India was 30 years ago, where it's like cheap offshore stuff?” But we have people who are... there's amazing people in Pakistan. I've met people who are billionaires, and I've interviewed them on my podcast and all that. I'm saying that's there, but what I'm saying is the bulk of the population, I'm not saying they're third world. They're a developing country. Their biggest resource is labor, right? Just like the Philippines, just like India was 30 years ago. It's the same kind of path that countries go through. Some countries have oil as their natural resource. Pakistan has labor: 200 million young adults, eager, ready, smart, motivated to learn how to do digital marketing and serve us. And it's great for them as well.

Everyone speaks some degree of English, but we have a screening process where they not only have to speak English, they have to write well, demonstrate active listening, demonstrate they can take this video, for example, and repurpose it into an article. And so that's how we screen people. We don't hire them based on an interview or a resume. That's subjective. We say, here's a video. Here's a podcast. Here's a Zoom call with a client. Turn it into an article, following their article checklists. And if they can do that, we hire them at $3 an hour, which is $160 a month or something like that. And then they move up to $4, $5, $10, $12 an hour.

One of the VAs that we hired, I know VA sounds derogatory, but they're cool. Everyone's cool with the idea of VA, okay? Her name is Musamil, and she is now a manager in operations, and she made $1,400 the last two-week pay period. So she's making $3,000 a month, $36,000 a year. She started at $2 an hour. But she moved her way up. She learned how to qualify, went to level one, level two, level three. At every level, we have things you have to do. So people will come and say, “Well, I should be paid at level five,” right? Says who? Based on what? Can you do level five work? Show me that you've done that. You've hired people that you've done. Everything we have is completely measurable. How good are you at math? Take the math test. Demonstrate algebra, trigonometry, calculus. Demonstrate that you can do all these things, and it's not subjective anymore.

And so we're just trying to apply an objective standard to digital marketing, because digital marketing, as you and I know as agency owners, is very measurable. So you could live in Pakistan in some random remote village that barely has electricity, and you could be making $3,000 a month if you can demonstrate you can do the work. Because does Google care if the person who worked on the PPC campaign is from Bangladesh or whatever? See? Isn't that amazing? But you could also say, “Yeah, but my last job, I was VP of whatever, and I should make this amount of money.” Prove to me you have the skills.

So it's about multiplying myself. It first started 35 years ago or so. I had a mentor who was the CEO of American Airlines, and he mentored me and opened doors for me, and you can read all about the kinds of incredible advantages I got. You could say it's like cheating. And I thought, how do I ever pay this back? Well, I've mentored a lot of people too, one-on-one, and then I've started to have those people mentor other people and do group coaching. You know, like create a virus, but in a good way.

And I told you about, in order for her to move up, she's had to hire and train three people to do the thing that she did to move up to the next level. So it's not an MLM. It's not Amway. It's not a commission thing based on your downline. It's the model of apprenticeship that has always been around since the beginning of time. If you want to be a banker or a locksmith or a baker, butcher, cobbler, shoemaker, whatever, you learn by apprenticing from someone who has master-level expertise. And then after three or four years as an apprentice, journeyman, up through the levels, you eventually can now open your own bakery and open your own whatever it is, because you learn from someone who has done the thing.

And I think that got lost in the American model of the MBA thing, because it's not that you get a degree, it's that you have on-the-job experience working with a real practitioner. So you already are doing your job in a safe environment. You're actually doing the work. So I thought, well, in digital marketing there's a lot of self-proclaimed gurus. And who did they learn from? Oh, I paid money to Richard Branson or Russell Brunson or whoever, all these different people, right? And so, yeah, that's great. You went to a mastermind or you took someone's course, or, oh, Tai Lopez taught me social media marketing agency, whatever, I bought his program. Nothing wrong with the courses and videos and all that kind of stuff.

But I believe that if you do the thing you say you actually do, like run Facebook ads or build WordPress, with whatever the thing, Google Ads, whatever the thing is, and you leave a paper trail, then it should be documentable, enough that someone else can follow your recipe and other people can achieve the same result. And it's not a secret, right? You're getting on a Southwest flight, a 727, tonight in a few hours. Do you think there's a secret on how do you fly a 727? Not anymore.

Well, I mean, Boeing's had other things going on, but don't cancel me. I'm not a Boeing safety engineer. I did not say anything bad about Boeing, but there's a clear established process. You go to the doctor and they do a CAT scan or whatever process. It's based on measurement. It's based on people that are certified. Every other profession, like a plumber or a chiropractor or a fitness trainer or a lawyer, they have to go through a certification to demonstrate they can do a certain set of things, pass the bar, the MCAT, whatever the thing is, right? Why not in digital marketing? That's what we want to do. And that's how we create the million jobs.

There's a couple angles here. So I feel like I'm a soccer dad or whatnot, and I live vicariously through my kids scoring goals. I'm like one of those sorts of parents, like, you're not giving Johnny enough playing time, right? And so you get to a certain point in life where, unfortunately, there's more of your life behind you than ahead of you, and I'm not ready like that, right? I'm 50 basically.

But Jack Ma said that there's three stages. Jack Ma's the billionaire, Alibaba, right? He said in the first decade of your life, you're a worker, and you're working really hard to gain skills as an individual worker. In the second decade of your life, you are a manager, like a business owner, and you're running the business and doing all these business-y things, maybe you sell your business, you know, whatever. And in the third decade of your life is when you're finding ways to leave a legacy and give back and help other people and mentor, and you live through your grandchildren.

And so for me, this is kind of like my way of leaving a mark. Maybe it's a selfish thing, that, hey, you know what? I learned digital marketing from Dennis Yu. I learned the dollar a day strategy. And there are people that have grown $200 million a year businesses from me helping them start out from nothing. And I feel so good about that. I'm not doing it for money. I'm doing it because I love hanging out with cool people. [inaudible] my time. And if I can be around other people that can scale, multiply, like a Rehan, not because he's famous, but because Rehan can take our training, and all he has to do is make a post on Facebook and millions of people will see it. And we're creating value. People are getting jobs.

We're working with government officials in Colombia, in Kosovo, in the Philippines, and these other sorts of places. I'm not a politician, but I've met a lot of politicians, and they want to put our training in. And with Brazil, I've flown... all these other countries are sponsoring training for us to bring our programs. I was in India, just to show you it's not an India-Pakistan thing. I was in India a couple months ago with basically the dean, or the lady who runs the biggest university there. And she wants to put our digital marketing programs there for students to be able to come through, because she knows, and I told her, I have pictures, it's on Facebook, you can see it, [inaudible] can pass this bar that we set, we guarantee them work.

Why? Because we know lots of agencies. We know a lot of young adults in America, young adults is anyone younger than me, so less than 50-year-old young adult, who are starting agencies that are serving plumbers, that are serving landscapers, serving painters, serving whatever, and they would love to get more people who are qualified in doing things the way we teach: content factory, dollar a day, digital plumbing, all that. So it's just a great ecosystem. It reinforces itself. And I'm nothing more than a bumblebee that's pollinating, like bringing, connecting people on either side of this planet.

Yeah, I'm a fierce mama bear. You do not want to. I protect my cubs.

Yeah. You can say why you're asking that question. Can you explain to everyone who that is?

It was the people selling the shovels and all the infrastructure, basically doing an infrastructure platform SaaS kind of play. Because in order for digital marketers, who are the modern-day gold prospectors, to operate, they need tools. And we are partners with lots of tool providers. As you know, I'm friends with a lot of these CEOs, and it's not because I'm an affiliate getting my little, like, one or 2%. Because to operate digital marketing, how many tools do you need? I mean, none really. But generally the average agency uses like how many tools, like five or six?

And so if we create training together with GoDaddy, with Infusionsoft, with Fiverr, I'm naming the ones that we do stuff with, Descript, right, they have an incentive to co-create training with us. Why? Because we have thousands of people that are using their tools and documenting exactly how we're doing it, right? So Zapier, for example, is a tool that helps non-programmers connect data sources together, right? Well, we're featured on the Zapier blog. So how does Dennis Yu and BlitzMetrics use Zapier to connect all these different systems that run a digital marketing agency, right? We win by doing that because we show our community, this is how you do it. And at the same time, Zapier wins.

I'm not doing it for the commission. Fiverr, we've put together training on how do you become a better freelancer? How do you do Facebook ads? How do you do personal branding? I just got a check from them a few hours ago. They send a check every quarter because we put out all this training that they broadcast to their six and a half million freelancers on Fiverr. Fiverr is the world's largest freelancing platform. And we're literally just teaching what we do, right? Train the trainer. We have a course on how to do a podcast. How do you set up this video studio with all this stuff here? And it's me literally having experimented, messing around, learning how to do this stuff.

And so everything that we have done repeatedly, successfully, leaves clues, so that we can sell that as a course and other people can follow it. We make a little money when there's a course. We make a little money when they're an agency. And there's all these things that happen. We make a little bit of money along the way. But our people make money first before we can make any money.

You might not like what I have to say. The number one thing is this thing called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Have you heard of this?

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the world's largest club that most people don't even realize they're members of. And you can look it up. It's people who don't know anything about a topic, but they think they know. And so the opposite of that is when people, what is it called, when they actually are experts, but they feel like they're not? The imposter syndrome. So the opposite of imposter syndrome is the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people think they know the answer because so-and-so wrote a book about this. Logic is this way. It's also called HIPPO, the highest paid person's opinion, because the big boss thinks they know because they have 20 years of experience instead of the data.

So the way we counter this Dunning-Kruger effect, which is people making illogical decisions because of emotion, because of how they feel, because Dennis is a jerk, because whatever their reasoning is, their excuses, is we say, factually, what is the checklist to get this particular thing done? You want to remove a pimple? You do that. You want to change the oil in your car? There's a checklist. And you can get all mad about whatever it is. Don't get mad at the math teacher. Don't get mad at the lock that you're not able to learn how to actually do the thing.

And so this process of learn, do, teach: you learn firsthand following a checklist. You've done it multiple times to success, proven. Someone else can judge and see that you've actually done the thing successfully, actually driven leads, actually installed the tag properly and it's firing. Whatever it is, you've done the thing. Then and only then can you weigh in and provide your opinion.

My mom, she loves me to death. I love her, right? She's amazing. And she wants to give me advice on how to run agencies and how to build software. “Denny, Denny.” No, I was at Yahoo. “Denny, Denny. A company called Google. Google, you come work at Google search engine.” And I'm thinking, mom, I work at a company that's very similar to Google. Yahoo, you know, and I know a lot of friends over there. “Oh, Denny, it's that big thing, Google. You need to go work at Google.” I'm like, mom, I know about search. I'm a search engine engineer. Why are you telling that... She's reading the paper about how Google is becoming, you know, good. This was 25 years ago or whatever. Turns out that she was right, because if I had switched to Google at that time, I would have made a few hundred million dollars instead of the little bit of money I made when I sold my Yahoo shares. She had to be right. But she didn't... There's a lot of people that are friends and family that love to give advice, because everyone has an opinion, just like everyone has a sphincter, right?

But I want to take advice from people who have done the thing. So one of my buddies is Mike Pigg. He was the fastest biker on the Ironman circuit, that whole thing. He dominated back in the 90s. You know who he is, right? So he and I would go biking sometimes in the Pacific Northwest, and I would try to make Mike Pigg sweat and have him cry. And we would go up these crazy inclines up in the Sequoias, and neither of us would say anything, because I'm trying to pretend like I'm barely sweating because I want him to be the one to say, “Oh, can we slow down? Can we slow down?” Because if I can get the world's number one biking triathlete to say, “Oh, we need to slow down, can we just stop,” then, I know it's a selfish thing of me to do that, but I've done it a couple of times.

I'm hanging out with Mike Pigg, and this guy is a... look him up. You can Google him and see who this guy was before, and he didn't do PEDs or any of that. But I'm going to take advice on how do I bike better from Mike Pigg versus some random dude that I meet who's read books on how to do whatever. And you and I know the same thing. Take advice from people that have done the thing. Now, I've spent over a billion dollars on Google and Facebook ads. I've got a lot of proof of mistakes that I've made and things that have, you know, our common friends and Perry Marshall and all these other sorts of people.

So Dunning-Kruger is the biggest problem. The antidote is credible people who have done the thing to give you advice on that thing. But if I were to ask Mike Pigg about how do you set up an ATEM Mini, I'd love him to death and he's a great triathlete and all that, but he doesn't know a thing about that thing. But how many people want to give advice on something? Everyone would love to give you advice. They're wrong, right? That's the problem. That's the biggest issue. You would think it'd be like some technical thing or solving some algorithm problem. No, the biggest issue is humans overestimate their competency, which causes all sorts of issues.

I'm not claiming my stuff is any better or worse than anyone else. People come to me and say, “Well, how about you versus Dan Henry teaches?” Dan Henry is a good friend of mine. I'm not here to try to compete. “Yeah, but should I buy your course? Or Tai Lopez teaches a course. Or Billy Gene teaches. Or Perry Marshall has his. David Fox has a course on how to do PPC.” Great. But let me ask you.

Okay, so I'll give you an example. Five years ago, someone online said, like, Dan Henry is the best in the world at Facebook ads. And then my followers chimed in on that post and said, “Oh yeah, well, Dennis Yu is actually the best at Facebook ads.” And then Dan said something like, “No, I'm the best.” And all my friends said, “You should chime in on that post, chime in and say you're the best, because you're better than him, right? Because you spent more, and you're connected with people at Facebook, and even all these, like, credentials or whatever.” And instead I said, well, that's a ridiculous question, because best for what?

So if you are a concrete coating company and you want to drive more leads and you want to sell more floors, then the best in the world is Marco Sipola, because he's done this for like 200 concrete coating companies. He has a track record. If you're a concrete coating company and you want to generate more phone calls and whatever through drip drops and whatever system you use to paint CRM, that's the guy who's done the thing. He's done it so many times. He's built a course around it. It's free. There's YouTube videos. If you're a real estate agent, I wouldn't go to Marco Sipola. If you're a real estate person, I would look at Tom Ferry's thing. I would look at Jason Pantana, who has run LSA and Facebook ads and whatever for real estate agents, and he's done it over and over and over again, right? That's the guy.

The best in the world at Google Ads? Right. For what? Like, arguably, I'm the best in the world for NBA basketball teams to drive sales through Ticketmaster. Why? Because we've worked with Ticketmaster and made changes to their API so we can get secondary sales and whatever, and configured their system, worked with Facebook so that we can put a dollar in. And provably, Mark Zuckerberg talked about this in his annual report, Sheryl Sandberg gave awards for us for doing this. Get $38 in provable Ticketmaster revenue. Proven, right? And done it for other teams. But if you are a chiropractor, will that same model work for you? No, you don't use Ticketmaster. The thing you're selling is different. The nature of the customer journey is different. The targeting is different. What you say to them is different.

This whole, like, who's the best at TikTok ads? Who's better at going viral on YouTube? But for what? To ask that question is dumb. You're stupid by asking that question, right? I'm not saying you didn't ask the question, but I'm saying people ask the wrong question. You didn't even ask that question, right?

So Gordon Ramsay's a well-known chef. We're going to eat food in a little bit, and you can watch YouTube videos and he shows how exactly to cook a perfect burger. How do you season it? How do you flip it? How do you do the cheese? How do you do the bun? He literally shows this recipe, right? It's not a secret. I didn't have to pay him $5,000. It's free on YouTube. And I followed his recipe just like he did, and I got a burger that was amazing. I followed the recipe.

So I'd ask you guys, follow the recipe. Who has done the thing? Chicken parmesan, great, follow... where's the recipe for chicken? You want chicken cacciatore, okay, great. But you want beef stroganoff, right? Well, don't use the chicken cacciatore recipe, right? Do you have a recipe? Why don't people talk about the recipe, instead of, like, this guru is better than this guru, just bought a Lamborghini, he must be better? Where's the recipe for the thing that you want to do, right? What is the most specific thing that you want to do? You're a roofing company. Okay. Then you want to drive more leads through SEO, find another roofing company that's succeeded in SEO and get their SOPs. What's so hard about that?

Oh, every day.

It's painful.

I've discovered this 35 years ago. I learned from the CEO of an airline. You think the airlines don't have processes on exactly how you board and exactly how, if the landing gear doesn't work or if a flight attendant doesn't show up? They have all these backup processes. Avionics, they have like three levels of backup for avionics, right? Because you can imagine if something breaks, like you run out of fuel or your flight navigation doesn't work or air traffic control is whatever, you could have a catastrophic failure, right? So I learned from the airlines. I learned how the airlines operate, and I wanted to build SOPs in digital marketing based on that.

Yet, I'm a human. I'm emotional. I'm often illogical, because I decide sometimes that I know better because I've done it for 35 years, [inaudible]. And I decide to do something and I'm wrong every single time. And then I relearn that lesson every single time. You're going to get on that plane tonight, and I bet you the pilot's probably flown for 20 years or something like that. Do you think they're like, you know what, screw it, John, I'm not going to use the pre-flight checklist, I already know the pre-flight checklist, right? Or do you think they use the pre-flight even if they've done it for 20 years?

That's right.

Right. What if you get on the plane and the pilot makes the announcement, “Hey, guys, today I'm going to try out a new way to fly.” What do you say? Completely new. “You know, we're going to wing it. We're going to innovate. I'm going to test out the exit row,” is what I'm going to do. Look, I get it. In digital marketing you're trying to innovate and be different and unique and authentic and all that, but please, there's the right time and place to be unique. And just because you're following a process doesn't mean you're some kind of brainless automaton. You want repeatability. The thing that's unique is maybe some personality things, or your content is unique, but everything else needs to be the same.

I built an ad network in 2007 on Facebook, and this is when I had the opportunity to become famous. So Mike Arrington, who was the editor of TechCrunch, which back then was the biggest tech... I mean, if you got mentioned in TechCrunch, your servers couldn't even keep up with it. And he called me. He said, “Dennis, everyone tells me that you're the one that knows more about this whole Facebook ecosystem and ads and the spam and the affiliate.” And I was in the middle of that whole thing. I ran an ad network, which I've come clean on all the stuff that happened back then. Everyone's had a little bit of that in their past.

And I wrote the definitive article on how spam works on Facebook and how the whole ecosystem works and how the money flows and the ads that are deceptive and how they go through the phone companies. The phone companies take half the money, because everyone's in on it. Okay, just follow the money. I explained how that worked. And it was an eye-opening article. And one of the top articles, I would say 2008, back then, it just exploded.

And before I went on, I talked to one of my mentors, Gillian Muessig, who's the co-founder of SEOmoz. Gillian and Rand Fishkin founded SEOmoz, which was the big SEO company, the big SEO thing back then. You have his book right here. I've got, you can look and see, you know, me and Rand in different places pretending to fight and all this. All just for show, okay? It's like WWE, it's for show.

And Gillian told me, because I said, should I do this, because Mike Arrington called me up, she said, “Well, think carefully. A, if you do it, you're going to become famous.” This is like, everyone gets their five minutes of fame. I mean, you can even be like the Hawk Tuah girl, everyone gets their five minutes of fame. “But if you do, you're going to get a lot of hate, because you're going to be kicking the bee's nest or whatever it is, and these people are going to get mad at you and claim that you're a spammer and a fraud.” Because when I explain how the spam works, which I did, then all these people, they're going to get shut down. And they'll think I shut them down.

Facebook is going to shut it down anyway. I had lunch with Zuckerberg to talk about this thing, and we agreed, you know what, this thing can't sustain. I'll shut down my ad network, and everyone else is going to shut down. I'll shut my ad network down if you agree to shut down all the other ad networks. Otherwise, it's like you kill one drug dealer and all the other drug dealers step in to fill the void.

So when that happened... oh, actually, before I decided to do it, I'm like, you know what, I'm willing to do it because I have a tough enough skin to take all these haters that are going to say Dennis is a fraud and Dennis is this and Dennis is that. And it's not personal, because I don't know them personally. I've never done business with them. They're going to attack me. I got death threats. So I started traveling more at conferences, because I was kind of afraid if I went to my place, or maybe I turned the key in the ignition, maybe something. And you don't know. I got a death threat two days ago. Right? And I posted on Instagram, from some guy in the UK saying that if he sees me, he's going to kill me and put my whatever out and parade me naked. And some random, I don't know who this person is. And, you know, maybe it's AI generated. Maybe it's someone who doesn't like me who just paid, because you can buy fake fans and fake reviews. So you don't know if it's real or not.

And then I remember a month after that, when this thing happened back in 2008, 2009, I became kind of famous because I went on TV and this whole thing. I was speaking at Affiliate Summit, which is the big conference for the affiliates. And I was on stage, I think, with Shawn Collins, who was the founder, and Jeremy Schoemaker. So it was like the most anticipated thing, because people thought it'd be a showdown between me and Jeremy and all this, like who's the big boss. It's like this Jake Paul, Mike Tyson kind of thing, right?

And when I got off stage and I was walking back towards the hotel room, someone came up with a cake, and with white cake frosting caked me with this whole thing. I'm just walking with a couple of my friends. He comes up behind me and does this, comes up behind me and does that to my face. And I'm not expecting it at all. Right? And then someone was there to record it and then put it on the different affiliate, SEO, Black Hat World, those sorts of forums. They go, “Ha ha ha, we caked Dennis Yu.” And I thought, like, you know what? I could be like Steve Aoki. I could just laugh it off and be fine. So I thought, you know what? This is fun. I don't consider this to be harmful. I don't think someone's trying to hurt me. I think it's just these kids. Right? There's a bunch of teenagers. You know, most of affiliate marketing and social media marketing is kids. I had no idea. And so they're doing that. They don't realize that there's real businesses, there's real humans, there's real lives, there's real things at stake.

But you never know when there's going to be a real threat. So I don't really ever know. And so every time I go to a new city, I just have to say, you know what? God is protecting me. And if it's my time, it's my time. But because God is my protector, I have nothing... I have nobody to worry about. [inaudible] in different situations in life, and I've always been protected. I've looked back. I'm not saying I'm like, you know, got the magic touch or anything like that, but so many good things have happened to me, and I consider that a blessing. And I don't consider it like me being... People say, oh, Dennis is like a genius or whatever. Like, no, it's nothing to do with me. Everything I've ever had, I always say, was given to me. I didn't deserve it or any of that. Everything, you name it, any good things I have, I have not earned it. It's all given to me.

The harder I work, the luckier I get. I've worked very hard. And on social media you see these highlight moments. You see, like, these cool places we get to go to, and you see the great meals. What you don't see is that when the camera's not on, I'm on my laptop working. I'm doing all those, like, unsexy things. I'm not posting those things on social media. But what you see on social media, on Instagram in particular, you see these highlight moments, right? So, oh, they see Dennis and Jake Paul, they're hanging out, and Jake Paul must just goof off all day long and hang out with the hot girls at the pool. No, the guy's working the whole time. When the camera's off, he's working the whole time. I'm working the whole time.

Yeah.

So I didn't speak English when I was six, so I was made fun of, and I was put in the classes for...

No. I was born in [inaudible], but my parents didn't want to teach me English, because if they did, I'd have a broken accent. So I learned English from the kids at school. And the kids at school, kids are mean. And they don't mean to be mean. They don't know any better. They say, “Hey, David, if you want to say to someone that you really like them, you call them this.” And so I just went to the principal's office, because the first words that I learned were not the words that you're supposed to say. And I didn't know. It's like [inaudible] trust, because people would say, “Say this,” and “Say that.” I'm like, I don't know. Are they fooling with me or should I say that word or not?

And so I remember one time I was in second grade, and the teacher was walking down the aisle and handing back the quizzes scored. And she handed mine back to me and I said, “Thank you.” I was trying to say thank you, but I said, “Thank you.” And she thought I said the other thing. She thought I used the F word, sent me to the principal's office. I said, no, I didn't. I didn't. And I'm in the best English I could possibly try to say. I did not say that. I didn't. I mean, why? I got a B. Why would I get mad about that? I mean, I'm not mad. I'm not the mad kind of person. I didn't say that. But then it's like her word versus my word.

And so I got in trouble. And I got in trouble a lot of times for things I didn't do, which wasn't fair. But I said, you know what? Instead of getting mad at those people, I'm going to learn English better than all those people. I was born in America, right? I can understand if you immigrated here and you're from India or whether you had to learn, but I was born in America, and I don't have an accent in Chinese. I don't have an accent in English. I just didn't know what the words meant. Have you been around foreigners where they don't know the words you're trying to say?

And you see the other people, what Americans do is they talk louder. [inaudible] somehow going to understand words. So people would say things to me, I don't know the word, I don't know what that word means, right? So saying it slower and louder at me like I'm dumb isn't going to help. I had a second grade teacher, first grade teacher, her name was Mrs. Gore, and she would jiggle my cheeks and say, “Oh, you're so cute and you're so dumb.” Right? Oh my God. That was cute and dumb and fat. And I'm like, I'm going to learn English.

So I read and read and read and read, and I studied the freaking Oxford English Dictionary, which is like that thick. And I went to the public library, for example, in the morning before school, and I would read. And after school, I'd walk down the hill. There was a middle school I went to. And then anyway, I would go to the library in the evening. My dad would pick me up at 8 PM from the library, and on the weekends I'd go there in the morning and I would read at the library, and I'd get picked up when the library closed. If I wasn't at the public library, I would be at B. Dalton, if you remember. I think they're out of business now. Or Crown Books, I think they're out of business. And I would just go there and I'd read the periodicals. I'd just wander down the aisles. Whatever the topic was, I would just read it. And I just read and read and read. And I was a loser. I didn't have any friends. So I just spent time with my fictional friends, the books. I read these Choose Your Own Adventure books.

I remember one summer, the public library had a reading contest. And every time you read a book, you'd go to the librarian and she'd put a little sticker. And you get like one sticker for everything. And they're all the kids' names. And some kids would have like four or five books. And then mine went all the way across the end. I had like 60 books. They ran out of space for me, right? I read way more books than all the other kids. Like other kids, you know, five or six books for a summer. That's a lot of books. I freaking dominated, because I spent all the time in the library reading the books, right?

I love reading books. And the more I read, the more I enjoyed it, the more I became sort of an introvert. People tend to double down on the thing they're good at, which creates what's like a slanted profile, because you tend to want to do more of the things that you're good at. So I represented California in the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. in 1988. I made it to the quarterfinals. I didn't win. But I made it to the quarterfinals.

I'm going to have this PTSD on this. It was cynodont, which is a dinosaur tooth.

No.

I had it correct except I missed the T. I just missed the T on it. There was so much pressure. There's 50 TV cameras, there's a huge stage, I'm just a child. It's just so much pressure, because you have a placard around your neck. And the other person, you can see the people in line in front of you, and when they say, “Spell the word,” and say the word again, there's like a pause of like 10 seconds, and they say, “I'm sorry, that is not correct.” And then you can just see them go like, oh. And then the next one's up, and they see it, like, are they going to make it? “Yes, that is correct.” And then it's my turn, like, “Okay, your word is...” and they're about to say the word, you're thinking, oh, better not be a ridiculous word. But I learned English better than the average American. And I took it all the way to becoming a public speaker. And I thought, I mean, this is like my way of overcompensating.

Sure.

I wanted to win because I was abused as a child. I was nearly put in the foster home. That's a whole other story. But this is going to sound weird: I had these imaginary friends. I did. And these were characters in the books. I've had stuffed animals, and my favorite thing to do, which I guess because of the way you talk to AI or whatever, but I would read autobiographies. My favorite thing is autobiographies. Like J. Willard Marriott, who started the whole Marriott chain. He talked about how he started as a farm boy and raised the cattle and eventually became hotels. You know, A&W, like in the LSG Sky Chefs, they started that, and real estate.

And as I was reading his story, I would pretend to have a conversation. Like, how did you know that when you started the A&W franchise, you know, A&W root beer, right, and that was really great during the summer because they did the frosted root beer floats and all that, but during the winter people didn't want the root beer floats, they wanted something else, they wanted like hot chocolate, so you had to reconfigure your restaurants? Like, how did you know that you needed to reconfigure? How did you know that drive-thrus were going to become so important? So you had to reconfigure your restaurants so people could drive their cars around.

So as I'm reading the books, it's not because I can read quickly too. It's not that I'm reading quickly, it's that I'm pausing. I'm thinking, let me ask you a question. So I read Grinding It Out by Ray Kroc, who popularized McDonald's. He bought from the McDonald's brothers, started with four locations, then became the whole Ronald McDonald empire, that whole kind of thing. And I would stop and think, so what made you decide to put a layer of cheese on the Filet-O-Fish sandwich? That's disgusting. The Filet-O-Fish sandwich is a fried Atlantic cod with a layer of American cheese. That's nasty. But I could hear him answering me, saying, “Because it's delicious.” And he'd talk about it in such a way. And his friends said Ray Kroc was such a good salesperson, he can make that hamburger taste like the most amazing steak. Talk about it in such a way that you wanted in on that. You wanted to open a location. You wanted to work there, right?

And same thing. Like I read Sam Walton, Made in America, right? Founder of Walmart. I went to school with one of his grandsons, Benjamin Walton. And even though I never met Sam Walton in person, I've heard so many stories and I've read his book. There's a point in his book where he said, as we were expanding like crazy, because they started with the five and dime and buying sorts of cheap things in Arkansas, and they grew to find cheap things and set the price floor and become the low-priced leader. As they were expanding, he got deeper and deeper into debt, because they had to take out more and more loans. Yet on the outside, it looked like Walmart was becoming so successful because they were growing all these stores everywhere and expanding and all that kind of stuff. But deep down inside, he felt the pressure increasing because his debt got higher and higher. And his health was worse and worse. And he wasn't spending time with his family. And on the outside, it looked like he had all this money and whatever.

And then at the end of the book, I was kind of hoping that it would change. But I was having this theoretical conversation with him, saying, “Sam, but if you did it another way, would you have not done Walmart? Or would you have expanded slower? Or would you have hired a number two? Or would you have taken out a little bit of money earlier? I know you said that in order to set the price floor and show that Walmart cares about being super frugal, they can't spend money on the private jets, and their offices are just the most ramshackle, cheap, hotel-looking sort of...” I mean, they live cheap. They don't pay their people all that much compared to tech. “But would you have changed that? What would have happened if you changed that, Sam?” So he and I would have these theoretical conversations. Obviously, I didn't talk to him, but I would pretend to have these conversations with him.

And then by the time I got to the end of the book, when he's about to die, and he talks about how he regrets not spending more time with his family, I'm like, okay, I do have your answer, right? But I felt like we had the conversation in advance of him telling me the answer. So I've had hundreds of conversations with these people theoretically, but I've had hundreds of real conversations with people. I've been very lucky to meet these people. For real, I've had these conversations. You know, I've flown a million miles in first class. And I love asking people in first class, so why are you in first class? You know that bigger seat and the meal isn't worth the extra $1,500. And so you get the most amazing stories. And then I ask them, why do they do what they do? It's like not even fair the number of conversations I've been able to have.

And all of this goes back into me getting a better understanding. I have a ball of twine, or like a gumball, whatever, and I keep adding to it and it gets bigger and bigger. [inaudible] piece of gum to put on it. And if it doesn't check out with my model, then I discard it. But every now and then, like you say something, it's interesting. It's interesting what John said. Okay, I'm going to add, where does it fit? Where does it fit inside? Oh, it fits here. So my big thing is growing, right? This big structure. It's a singular structure inside my head. That's how I organize what's up here.

But now I have more resources, more mistakes, education and training, right?

Yeah. And even like this Ironman thing, I approach it the same way. So how do I swim faster? There's a technical component to your stroke and the catch, you know, this whole thing. There's a technical component to setting your bike the right way. There's a component to how your body processes carbohydrates and muscle recovery and all. Like, I look at any particular thing. Like, I have a guitar down there, and I learned there's components to how you learn how to play a bar chord and build calluses and circle of fifths, all of these things that you learn. So everything I've learned, there's an approach to how to set up this microphone, right? And everything. I know there's like a subjective artistic left brain, right brain thing, but I've always come at it from, what's the thing that I feel very confident about? You can break down a complex problem into a checklist and then just repeatedly solve against that, repeat the recipe over and over and over again.

Yeah.

I'm like, you guys can talk about the weather and sports and all that. But meanwhile, I'm having these amazing conversations. I don't want to hang out with other 12-year-olds. I'm a 12-year-old hanging out with guys that are 70 or 80, right? Which, by the way, is super fun to do, because I went to community college when I was 14, 15. And I was hanging out with people who were like 30 or 40, and it was so much fun. It was so awesome. You learn so much more wisdom literally from these people, because they see you and you're like, oh, you're actually interested in talking to me, and hearing me, because most people just kind of brush you off usually.

I wouldn't even know how to... I'm just an oyster where the sand got in here and I made a pearl out of it. So I don't think it's drive. I think all of us have drive. I think it's direction. I think if you give people direction, everyone has the drive. It's not motivation. [inaudible] my way to get there. I mean, I think I do have a certain level of grit, because, you know, we're all endurance athletes and run marathons and climb up these inclines and things like that. So there's a certain level of whatever you want to call that. But I don't think it's that. I think it's, you take a seed, and if you put the seed in the right soil, not in the thorns, not in the briars, in the right soil that will grow, all that, right? I believe we all have the seed.

Yeah, I'm doing it. And for those who can hear the dog whistle, you know what I'm saying. Okay, for those who don't, I'm just talking about gardening. I like to slip those things in there without saying it, right?

The entire time before ChatGPT. Before that, I was doing it in here, the old-fashioned way, the way, you know, the good Lord intended to do it, right? And now I can just do it over here.

And I still have these conversations. So I'll go on a walk outside and I'll open up ChatGPT and I'll have conversations with it, right? Just like the conversations I've had for the last 40 years.

Okay. Because everything has to be provable. Not just because someone told me, not just because other people said it's the right thing, not just because I think it might be a good thing. I need to see the proof. I need to see your oxygen levels. I need to measure it. I need to see it in my body. I need to see the improvement. I need to see bioavailability. I need to see studies that are done.

So I think it was Arthur C. Clarke, was it? You can Google it and find out. He said that modern technology is indistinguishable from magic, right? What is magic? What did people 3,000 years ago, if you showed them an iPhone, they would say it was sorcery or witchcraft. There's this thing, it talks to the satellites, and there's a way that everything works, the way the camera works. Like there's an actual explanation. I believe that for almost anything there's an explanation, right? I can go into all sorts of detail about things that don't make any sense, and there's a real explanation behind it.

Cocoon Water, same thing. There is oxygen in this water. You don't have to believe it. You don't have to have faith. You just need to drink some and then measure your tissue. Tomorrow morning, we're going to measure your tissue level, not your blood oxygen, your tissue level oxygen. And okay, fine. So the machine says that your tissue level oxygen is higher. So what? Well, maybe we go and we do a hike. Maybe we do something that's aerobic. Maybe you measure a little difference. Maybe there's a five-mile bike ride that you like to do all the time. That's kind of your baseline. And now you do it after doing this, and you randomize between sometimes it's this, the placebo, and you see if there's an impact, just like the scientific method. You're testing pills or cancer treatments, same thing for this. They've done this, right?

So I'm a believer, because it's not that this painting is beautiful, and that's subjective on whether I believe John believes the painting's beautiful. I can't win that way. I need definitive. I need to know that my oxygen levels have increased. I need to know that I can run faster. I need to know cancer has gotten smaller. I need to see evidence, right? Everything. So this is no different. And I came into this looking at this thing, I have no ownership. I have no whatever. I'm a customer like all these other people, right? I'd love to invite people to Vegas. I pay for their baths. I'd like to do that. I have my credit card on file because I love to see other people grow.

And I believe everyone has some level of, you know, you call it discipleship, or you could call it a ministry, right? Ministry is not just telling everyone about the Bible and you're going to go to hell unless you repent. Ministry, you know, it's loaves and fishes. It's education. It's housing. It's what are the things that you can do to make people's lives better, right? That's ministry. So if I know something that actually helps people with their health, that helps them live longer, that helps them not die because of illness, I have an obligation to share that. So if you have a gift of digital marketing, a gift of prophecy, a gift because you're the strongest man in the world, a gift because of some skill that you have, you have an obligation to share that. How selfish if you just hoard this gift and you don't share it with other people. You can't bury it. You can't put it under the bushel, all of that. We all have gifts. What are the gifts? Leverage it. I'm very good at the whole data analysis thing, right? Why wouldn't I teach that?

I'd say I was just like them. When I was a child, I thought, well, you see Michael Jordan or you see Elon Musk or whoever these other people are. They just seem so successful and so perfect. Well, I could never be like that. I could never go to Harvard. I could never speak on stage. I could never make a million dollars. I could never see myself owning a Lamborghini. I could never... and so it's a self-image thing.

But here's the answer. First, choose the thing that you want to achieve. Maybe it's, I want to start an agency and make $10,000 a month. That seems to be like the number for some reason. Most people want to do the $10,000 a month. Okay. Well, great. That's the goal. Find other people that have done it. Not other people who are selling courses on it, but people who have done it. Sit down with them. Have lunch with them. Follow them. Be around the other people that have done the thing. You're the average of the five people you spend the time with. Pretty soon you'll realize that those people are just normal people like you.

I used to think that when I was in middle school, because this is Asian kid, I'm thinking, like, going to Harvard is like the thing. I had perfect SATs. I almost had a perfect SAT. Good grades, all that, right? Harvard. You think the people who go to Harvard must be like these angelic, perfect people. And the first time I met people from Harvard, I'm like, you got into Harvard? Dude, I know more than you. And now, you know, 40 years later, I interview people who have Harvard MBAs. Or, you know, when I was at Yahoo, I'm interviewing people from Harvard or Berkeley. I'm not hating on Harvard, okay? I'm just using that as an example. And I'm interviewing them and I'm thinking, these are just normal people.

I've met presidents of the United States. I've met CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. And the first time I was intimidated. I'm having dinner with the CEO of Allstate Insurance. What if he judges me and reveals that I don't know anything and I'm really dumb? He was the nicest guy. And I don't think he was just being fake nice to me. But when you've actually been around these other people, you realize they're normal people. And then the thought happens: you know what? I could do that too.

Two nights ago, I'm not going to reveal his name, but he sold his company for $300 million, and he calls me up at 3:30 in the morning and he's drunk and he has this idea. He wants to raise $7 million for this. Once people make a lot of money, they start investing in other companies and they become like this chronic addicted start-more-companies kind of thing, okay? So he had another one. He says, [inaudible] to invest with me on this new company. And clearly he was drunk and clearly whatever, but this guy is super connected, got plenty of money. As far as anyone else knows, this guy is very, very successful. You probably know who he is, but I'm not going to say his name because it's embarrassing. But then I've spent time with him, just hanging out with him in New York. And I realized this is a normal human being. He's still very intelligent. He still achieved all those things that have happened.

But when I'm around him as a human, I see all his foibles. I see him stumble. I see him slur words. I see him say goofy things. I see him make fun of Donald Trump. Whatever it is, I see him as a human being. I see him, like, forget his keys. And this is so-and-so, and so-and-so forgot his keys? How can that person who's so perfect, who is like in this... I put him in this ideal box because he has this achievement tied to that achievement. But he knows so-and-so. And he had dinner last night with Steve Bannon or whatever. I mean, then it's like, oh my goodness, this guy's like such a big deal. And then you hang out with him. I'm not saying treat celebrities like they're nobodies. But just realize that people who have achieved something are just like you and me.

So Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple, arguably like the most successful product company ever. Think of Apple. And I talked to Steve Wozniak, co-founder, not as big as Steve Jobs, but those are the two Steves, right? And I can play a video that he made for me. Made a three-minute-long video just for fun. And it says, “You know, Dennis, congratulations on your thing, and advice I'd give you.” You can even do a search for Steve Wozniak, Dennis, you'll find the videos probably on YouTube. And he says, “The advice I can give you as a founder is, it's not what it looks like. Because I can tell you, Steve Jobs and I, there are times when we thought everything was going to fall apart, where we didn't have any money and things were just like all over the place and it was a disaster. But, you know, if we can do it, and we were the guys who built Apple, and now Apple is... everyone's got an iPhone. But if you saw...” And this is the advice he gave me. He said, “If you saw how things actually were when we started Apple, you would realize that this is possible,” and [inaudible].

This is from the guy himself telling me this personally. He told me this. I didn't read it in some book somewhere or some TED talk. He told it to me and I have it on video. I told him about my situation. I told him we're helping these other agencies scale. These young adults are trying to build the next big thing, and they say they could never build an Apple. Or, do you have to be an asshole like Steve Jobs to succeed? And so he answered that.

I have a friend of mine. His name is Elias Bartu, and he wants to be a bodybuilder. The guy must be like 110 pounds, 6'1". He's super skinny. He's like a toothpick, okay? And his idol is obviously all the big bodybuilders, Ronnie Coleman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jay Cutler. I know Jay Cutler. So Jay Cutler made a video. I can play it on my phone, and it says, “Hey, my buddy Dennis wanted to give you a little encouragement. [inaudible] to get it. You just turned 16, and I'm telling you, man, you know, when I started bodybuilding I had ups and downs. I got injured. You know, I was confused. And it wasn't until 10 years later, after all this working... I mean, they see, you know, I've won Mr. Olympia five times, all this kind of stuff, right?” I don't know how many times. Eight times he's won Mr. Olympia, some crazy number of times, okay? I mean, look him up. You can see.

And here he is, he's freaking Jay Cutler, and he's giving my buddy... he says, “My buddy Dennis wanted to give you, you know, I wanted... he wanted me to give you some advice. And here's my advice.” And he did this whole, went in depth about what his life was like. He says, “You know, even today you might think, like, because I'm now super successful and I have my own supplement line and all this, even I have hard days. Even I have to deal with nonsense. Even I didn't have enough sleep last night, so I'm tired, but now I got to go to this meeting and do this other thing.” And he's explaining in very real terms. And you realize, that's Jay Cutler. That guy's at the very top in the world of bodybuilding. Even Jay Cutler has problems. You know? Shoot, he has the same problems I do. Well, okay, now I'm motivated, right? That's what creates the motivation, the realization. It's not because I'm more determined than other people. You see what I mean? It's a reframing. It's the context.

I see myself winning in other people. And the mentors I've seen, like Al Casey, who's the CEO of American Airlines, I would go up to his office, and other people wouldn't want to go up there because that's like a dangerous spot. I mean, it's the CEO's office. He could fire you. I mean, this guy's so important. He's talking to senators and dealing with government kinds of... I mean, an airline, 20,000 employees, and all these things going on. And so I would just hang out with him and it'd be super chill. And it would be like hanging out with a friend. Like we're just hanging out.

I have another friend. I won't do the name dropping, but he's a billionaire who funded Costco and Best Buy. He's the one who put the money in, right? And we would just hang out at one of the condos that he owns. He owns like ski lodges and things like that. And we're just hanging out, eating lobster or going to Costco. And I'm not at all intimidated by him at all. Yet you see these people that, you know, you name them. They seem like they're just way up there. But if you realize what it was actually like, they are actually very accessible.

And this is not to say go out and try to reach out to Elon Musk or hang out with whoever. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying go try to find Jeff Bezos's cell phone. That's not what I'm saying. But you can find these other mentors, and if you approach it the right way, they will help you. Because I see people that are successful, they give back, because they realize that once you've made some money or whatever... because you hear these people say, oh, money isn't everything. Once you've made... oh, that's easy for you to say, because you made all the money. But you realize that there's this multiplier. Like money, if you give someone money, you have less now. That's just how the math works. But if you mentor, and if you help by publishing your knowledge, that multiplies. The more people who learn how to use my dollar a day strategy on me. There's people who have taken my training on dollar a day and ripped me off, straight up, and tried to sell those courses. And people are like, “Dennis, so-and-so stole exactly your dollar a day.” Awesome. That's just validating the concept. That's making it more powerful.

That's mentorship without actually being there. You can mentor someone without actually. People have come up to me saying, “I know we've never met before. It's going to seem creepy, but I've been following your stuff the last seven years and I grew my agency because of what I learned from you. And I feel like I owe you a debt even though we've never met, because I've never paid you any money.” And that's just such a cool thing, right? When you see that, I just want to give those people a hug when they come up to me. Right? It's so cool. I'm not afraid of all this other stuff.

And then you realize there's actually a structure to mentorship. So there's like putting your information out there for free, showing exactly how you do stuff. Not my personal hero's journey story, but like actual valuable things that people can follow. Then there's like one-on-one mentorship, which is great. So I mentor a few people privately. And a lot of people do that through masterminds. You have to pay a lot of money and whatever. Then there's group mentorship, and there's kind of train-the-trainer mentorship based on the underlying SOPs that other people can follow. So ironically, or unfortunately, Tony Robbins kind of popularized this model where you create a certification program and other people go through it, get certified, and they train other people, and it creates almost an MLM kind of thing. That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying put your stuff out there for free. Everything you know, put it out there for free. Charge for your time. Time you never get back, but still be willing to open doors for other people. But if you put everything out there for free, your time becomes worth more. You can do more of that time. But other people say, “Hey, I want one-on-one time with you.” Yeah, but that's not what that is. “Oh, no, but you do mentorship, so you do one-on-one coaching for anyone on the planet for free, right?” No, that's not what I'm saying. “No, but I thought you'd help anybody because you went...” No, that's not what I'm saying. If you want to be a mentor, publish your recipes. See who's following it. If you're freaking Mrs. Fields and you've got a chocolate chip cookie recipe, who's going to follow your recipe? If they follow the recipe and they actually make delicious chocolate chip walnut cookies or whatever, then your recipe works. If they can't follow the recipe, then it's the wrong oven, or they're not properly trained, or you didn't teach them properly how to use the oven. There's something there, right?

But I know based on the 150 courses we have out there that a lot of the stuff we teach works. But because of Dunning-Kruger and whatnot, or people's mental, like they don't want to do it, or, you know, it's like teaching people to run their first 5K. I try to get them to run the first mile, but they have all these excuses about why they can't put their running shoes on, or what our barrier is, this whole subjective, not willing, stuck in this old person's way of thinking. Not willing to try it. “I've always done it this way the last 20 years.” “I'm too old to do it.” “Social media is not for me.” “I don't want to be a public figure.” “I can't make a one-minute video.” There's all these barriers that get in the way that prevent mentorship, that prevent growth.

And so I'm all about relationships and connecting and whatever, but there needs to be a balance. I believe in a structural, verifiable, do math, achieve the recipe kind of thing, right? I believe most of the coaching out there is like motivating, “you can do it.” And yeah, but what about the freaking process? Okay. Both, right?

Start with the thing that you want to do and who's achieved the thing you want to do. It's that easy, and call them. Steve Sims wrote a book, Blue Fishing, and shows how do you create the most amazing experiences, because he's hanging out with Elton John and Richard Branson and doing all these things. And I asked him, I saw him at a conference and I said, “So Steve, you're just a bricklayer from London, you say, yet I see you hanging out with Elon Musk at the Gigafactory or whatever. How did you possibly become friends with this person, this person, this person?” And he said, “Dennis, you know the answer. Just ask.” And no, no, no, there must be a secret, because I'm sure he can ask. “No, Dennis, you didn't hear me. Just ask.” That's it. But don't ask Elon Musk. Ask the person, unless you want to build a Tesla or whatever it is.

The difficulty is not that these people are so famous they won't give you the time or you don't have the money. People will say they have all these excuses. The issue is you've not clarified with extreme specificity the goal you want to achieve. And if you broadcast that, if I look at your Facebook or LinkedIn or website and it's not clear the thing that you want to do, “Oh, I just want to maximize my skills and apply them in the best way at a company that respects my...” that sounds like a resume bullet, right? That you want to do. I want to be so good at Google AdWords for plumbers. Well, that naturally will start attracting plumbers and people to do Google ads. You have to be super specific. The magnifying glass, turning the sunlight into the flame, all those analogies.

It's not that people don't want to be a mentor. It's not a pickup artist, not how do you approach it? What's the secret line that you say, hey, baby, do you want to be a mentor? No. It's because you know how many people have come to me? I'm sure they come to you too. And they say, “Hey, can you teach...” You're barking up the wrong tree. Create $10 million of value. That's how you make a million dollars. What can you do that's repeatable, that creates value for somebody? Who has done that thing? How do you make it more repeatable? You do it yourself. Have you documented how you do it? Okay, now hire 10 people to do the same thing. It almost sounds too easy. But they don't do it because they're not logical. That's that Dunning-Kruger thing getting in the way again, right?

Ray Dalio wrote a book called Principles, which is all about that. I have my book, yeah. It's all about logical thinking, seeing around your blind spots. And he takes like 500 pages to say something that could be said in 10 pages, right? I discovered that.

No, that's lazy. People like me don't have time to teach that. But if you say, “Hey, I've gone through your dollar a day training, watched all your free YouTube videos and all that, and I'm trying to grow a digital marketing agency. And I know that you say specifically choose one kind of company. I've chosen painting companies. I have this one client and there's this one issue that I'm trying to struggle with in this campaign. Can you help me?” Yes, I'll help you. Very specific, but it also shows the respect that they put in the time to take a look. Right?

And I know a lot of other people who mentor just like me. And like Jeremy Ryan Slate says the same thing. I'll help other people build their podcast and whatnot, if you put in the respect to follow what they do, not just ask stuff. Because if the answer is easily Google-able, I'm not going to mentor you. Because it shows. Because that means you're going to depend. People tell me, “Oh, Dennis is so smart. He knows so much. You don't need to use Google. You can just ask Dennis.” You have a question and he'll stop whatever he's doing and answer your question, because it's so easy. Like, why would you have to, you know, go through any of the training? And the last thing you want to do is encourage that. That's like enabling an addict. You want the people that can do the work, and then with a little bit of mentorship, like a little bit of nudging, a little bit of encouragement, just slight adjustment, not “I carry you,” right? I'm not going to carry you.

I know a lot of successful people, and I'll tell you the characteristic, and I'm sure you'll agree, is that they have a certain level of humility. I love Tommy Mello. He's on track to do a million dollars a day within the next couple months and then be a billion-dollar company doing garage door stuff. Yet he will hire me for two or three days one-on-one, just him and I, and pay a lot of money for that. He's coachable, doesn't know it all. And when we get together, I prepare stuff that I think is valuable for him and his team. And he listens, versus, like, goes on and on. Like other people that don't grow, they don't listen. They just want to... I'll just sit there.

Like this one guy called me, I won't say his name, two hours ago, and he wanted help. And we spent 30 minutes on the phone and he did 29 minutes of talking. Like, I'd love to give you some feedback on this stuff, but fortunately you just talk the whole time, right? Like no awareness of that. But to answer your question, I think with those people who are successful, something's happened in their life. It could be something dramatic that caused them to realize, you know what, I need to... there's something bigger than me. It's Jesus. It's my dad. It's a mentor. It's something that causes them to be coachable. I don't know what it is. But if they're not coachable, the last thing I want to do is try to convince them of something. “No, but we have always done it this way.” Like, not here to convince you. Okay. You can do it that way if you want. But if you don't respect me, then why are you coming to me?

Right.

There's no limit to the positive encouragement you can give them. So my friend Brian Eisenberg had his son, who was not very athletically gifted, but he wanted to play baseball, okay? And he was chubby, wasn't coordinated a few years ago, but that's what his son wanted to do, is play baseball, because, you know, watch TV heroes. And so Brian, instead of saying, “Son, you should try something else, you should try to be like a PPC person,” right? He found swing coaches and he found other people that were baseball players, and he surrounded him... to take whatever it was that his son was interested in and found other people that were pretty good at that, and sent him to the different camps to learn on how to pitch and how to get stronger and how to lift weights the right way, and got him personal training and all that stuff. And now Sammy is six foot four, he's like 280 pounds, and he's throwing fastballs at like 98 miles per hour, some nonsense like that, right?

And I'm so proud of Sammy. And when I knew Sammy, he was like up to here, and they had a basketball court and we'd play basketball out there, and I would dunk on Sammy. Sammy's like this. I can't dunk on Sammy. Sammy can throw me. Unless you go in the gym in Vegas where you're like bouncing on the trampoline, then you could dunk on Sammy. Because I had better technique, probably. Hey, right.

The point is, for the advice for the young parents, is your kids are naturally interested in stuff. Fine. They're interested in playing video games, then go to a video game conference, or find out like the story of that company, or find out like who are the top people who play Fortnite and what do they do. And there's like, just like athletes train, those Fortnite players actually have a thing where, you know, I didn't realize there's a technique on how you make your fingers faster. They have a regimented eating schedule and stuff like that too, because, I mean, this burns calories as well. So help your kids go further.

And it's not that kids are lazy. I have a friend of mine, I won't say his name, this is embarrassing, anytime I have something bad I'll try not to say their name, but he says, “My kid is lazy and he just sits around and watches social media all day.” I'm like, “Michael, that's not true. That might appear like it is, but your kid has interests. What are those interests? What are you doing to encourage those interests, instead of getting the kid to do... like, I know, Michael, you're an airline pilot and you're trying to get your kid to become an airline pilot. That kid may or may not want to be an airline pilot. And I understand you can make a lot of money as an airline pilot, and all right. But your kid may or may not be an airline pilot, right? Your kid wants to do these other things. Encourage those other things.” I think it's literally that simple. Because then when this kid doesn't show interest in wanting to fly an airplane, then the parent thinks like, oh, this kid's not motivated. Right? It's not it at all.

For sure, I understand that, right? Tell people, because certainly Michael Jordan had to deal with that as well. Michael Jordan got cut from his varsity basketball team, even though he's six foot six. And, like, people tell the Michael Jordan story, right? Or they tell the Andrés Segovia story, or KFC. The guy started when he was like almost 70, became the colonel late in life. There's all these stories of people who weren't gifted that then became something amazing. And that's great. I love those stories, but there's something that's missing. And that is that you don't realize how much time they put in. [inaudible] indicator. And you'll hear all the experts say, someone who puts in the time will beat someone who's an expert and has natural talent.

So for me, you've heard of the 10,000-hour rule, right? That's been popularized. We've put enough time, Simon Sinek, that whole thing. I put in 70,000 hours into digital marketing. And it looks easy, doesn't it? Because you've seen me optimize campaigns. I do it live. I do it from stage. I show how to use the AI. Looks easy. 70,000 hours of experience. Steph Curry, right? He shoots three-pointers. It looks really easy. So all these kids love full-court shots and they miss. Do you know how many hours, how many shots Steph Curry has taken? When you shake Steph Curry's hand, it feels like sandpaper, because the guy is shooting four hours a day. Every shot you ever see him take has been practiced. He's practiced that shot many, many times. You don't see him. Every single spot in the court, practiced.

Usain Bolt, you know, world record holder in the 100 meters, he talks about how he had to train 12 years super hard for his 9.7 seconds of fame, right? Then again, he's six foot seven and all that kind of... I mean, there's certain things, like, I could train all day, I'm never going to beat Usain Bolt, right? But when it comes to things that don't require physical talent, the mind, you can follow a checklist, you can surround yourself with the right people.

And that's why I have checklists, because I see other people that have been super successful and they'll say, oh, you just got to do what I do. Like I saw somebody, I'm not going to name him, but he's an email marketer. And he said, if you follow my system, watch me in one hour as I make a million dollars by sending out an email. So he crafts an email, sends it out to his list, and lo and behold, he sells a million dollars' worth of stuff. Yeah, but you also have a huge list. So I could write an email and I'm not going to make a million dollars. You can write a better email than him. I want to have checklists that any ordinary person can repeat and have success. It doesn't require you to be six foot six.

I am careful about that, because that sounds a little too easy. If you put in time, there's a caveat. There's a process. If you understand the thing of mentorship, if you don't try to take shortcuts every time, then you can live well. You might not build the next Google, but a few thousand dollars a month is not bad in Pakistan. $10 or $20,000 a month in the United States is very doable. You don't have to have a private jet billionaire lifestyle. There's nothing wrong with that. And I ask most of these young adults, and they tell me, “Yeah, I would be totally cool making $100,000 a year versus working 80 hours a week and making a million dollars a year, but then I lose my health and family.” Whenever I ask people to make the choice, they almost always choose, have a great life. They don't want to be Sam Walton.

Right. And so people still want to argue with me. Come on.

Bad management, bad decisions, all kinds of corporate nonsense. Look, when it was engineers, there was respect among other engineers, and we built stuff, and it was a proven model. It was a data-driven model. And back then we were all like early 20s. Most of us didn't have kids. It was a small company, and we would stay until midnight and code and eat pizza. David Filo was a co-worker. He was at that point the richest man in the world under 40. And we would eat pizza and we would code, and if you looked at his code, his variables were [inaudible]. If there was HR, it would have gotten canceled. All kinds of stuff. If we tried to do that today, we would all have been canceled. But we didn't know it was going to be the thing that it is today.

So how did Yahoo go wrong? Well, there were managers that somehow snuck in. Because when you become a public company, they want adult supervision. So they hire HR and they hire all these other people. And we have all these meetings, because that's what managers like to do. They like to have meetings. And then people like me that like to actually code and build things. Like now my calendar is freaking seven meetings per day. There's no time to do any work. You just want me in meetings. And I go to these meetings and there's 12 people in the meeting. And I'm like, who are you? None of you can write any code. “Oh, I'm a marketing director.” You are? What does that mean? You, what do you do? “I'm a product manager.” You manage products? What does that mean? Why don't you write some code? Why don't you show me your product by writing some code? “No, no, no. We have to have a meeting to talk about that, and wireframes and all this.”

And so what happens is that... and look, no making fun of marketing or product management or HR or whatever. We understand. But if your core is a search engine, you need to have people who are core to your core, who understand the data. You could have all these other people that do management. Managers to workers was like eight or ten to one. And we were then, all of a sudden, we're like 5,000 people by the time I left Yahoo, or something, 4,000 people. Friends of mine are like, how does Yahoo [inaudible] 5,000 people? Like, how many people do you need to have this search engine give you the result when you search for something? You know, use your own mail, Yahoo Shopping, dating, travel, horoscope, small business. Okay, fine. You have a group of people, but okay, fine, that's a hundred people. But what about the 4,900 other... They're managers. And if you look at all their names, they're like manager of this and manager of that. What do you do? Well, you have meetings. That's what managers do.

So it just... and then all the good people started to leave. And then we had Terry Semel come in as the CEO. He was the chairman of Warner Brothers. He would fly in Monday morning, and he had a driver, Jonathan, which I thought was hilarious. Jonathan would tell me all the secrets that was going on, all the deals. And Terry would always be trying to buy other companies, because he wanted to grow through acquisition, through partnership. Partnership with all the telecoms, where we bundled the mail with your internet and all that. You could see that's what they did. And then us engineers became second class.

And so, yeah, Jonathan would drive up in the Range Rover, the black Range Rover, to the back of Building D3, which is the management building that we were in, and Terry would go hang out in the office and I would hang out with Jonathan. Like, “Jonathan, what's up?” “Oh, Terry.” “Where's Terry going?” “Oh, tomorrow he's going to fly to the UK and he's going to meet with the people [inaudible].” “So that's what's up, huh? Okay.” “Yeah, and then he's going to do this.” “What else is going on?” “Oh, there's also this. When I was driving from the airport, he was arguing with this other guy about this one thing.” “What were they arguing about?” “They were arguing about the price of the whatever it was.” So I knew, I was like an insider. I never traded, okay? I was an insider. I never broke the law. But I knew what was going on. And it was all about deals.

And that told me, as a builder, and the rest of us, that they didn't want to build things. I wanted to build food. You know, with like all the properties at Yahoo, I want to build food.yahoo.com. I want to build all these other properties, and they all got vetoed because the mentality was, we're just going to partner with all these other people. So maybe we'll partner with, you know, Seamless or Yelp before there was a Yelp. Why would we build our own thing? Because when you build your own thing, it can be integrated to the Yahoo platform and we can own it. We have a 300 million user base, but why would we partner?

So Yahoo back then, if you remember, around 2001 or so, back when the big crash happened, they did all these partnerships and they bought, like you remember they bought Flickr, they bought other sorts of sites. How many of those partnerships worked out or those acquisitions worked out? None. None of them worked out. And spent billions of dollars, gave away all the equity, watered the thing down. Meanwhile, what kind of message do you think that sent to the engineers like us? Then all the engineers like us left. I was one of the last engineers to still stay. And then the engineers who did leave started incredible companies, like my buddies Jan Koum and Brian Acton. We played Frisbee twice a week for years. They started WhatsApp and sold it to Facebook for $14 billion. And they were Yahoo engineers just like me. And they said, “Dennis, come over here.” No, no, I'm staying at Yahoo. Right? How dumb. Who is the dumb one now?

So us engineers at Yahoo, we were the failed entrepreneurs. We were just the employees who couldn't get it going. And that was the joke among those of us who were still there at Yahoo. Because if you were any good, you would have started your own thing and been bought back. A bunch of my friends were engineers. They built the thing, and they tried to lobby through all the management, through all these meetings, “Hey, we need to build this one feature.” My buddy Eduardo was an engineer at Yahoo, and he tried the political game to have all these meetings: “Hey, we need to build this feature to help optimize on conversion performance and whatnot.” Yahoo didn't want to hear it, so he started a company, sold it back three years later to Yahoo for $100 million. The feature that he said, let's build it, let's build it, all the time. That's not just one off. It's not a one-off story. It happened over and over again. I had ideas. And I was trying... I was dumb. I was trying to build an inside Yahoo, fighting all these managers, but no idea what they were doing. They never built any code. They never launched a product before. They, you know, nothing wrong with your Harvard MBA and all that. But have you ever managed a P&L before? Have you ever done SaaS before? Do you understand how that works?

Okay.

Right. Office Space, right? What's your favorite Michael Bolton song? What would you say you do here?

Well, people want to touch the wet paint. Why would you want to fail and experience the same pain? Look, mentors were telling me stuff, all kinds of advice, like, that's some old person giving me advice. I know. And now 30 years later... Don't believe me. I have many of those cuts and bruises.

Focus on partnerships instead of being the know-it-all. I learned a lot from the 4,500-plus books, and part of it was maybe just, like, to prove to myself that I could do it. Ironman proved that I could do it, but that's an ego thing. Imagine how much time I could have saved if I had just started by learning how to build relationships and know who instead of how. I felt like, well, I'm so far ahead in learning how to do all these different things in digital marketing and running ads that I'm just going to extend this lead. Well, if you want to go fast, go alone. The African proverb. If you want to go far, go together.

And I was just so, I don't know, scared of other people. I felt like I didn't have the charisma. I had this thing in my head thinking people didn't like me, they don't want to hang around me. The only thing they would ever want to hang around me for is because I'm really good at optimizing your ad campaign. So, “Okay, give me your ad campaigns, John. Okay, I'll optimize them,” right? But they didn't want to hang around me. And then I realized 30 years later there are people who actually, I know it sounds ridiculous, but there are people who actually want to hang around me. Who care about me. Right? And I don't have to be this achiever or have all these things to be worthwhile for other people to want to hang around. Like, we're hanging out. This is so cool.

Digital is just an amplifier of the things that started in person. And the difference between people that are really successful, because I've been around these people to watch, versus people that fail but don't know what they're doing, is the successful people build relationships in person first. Then they use digital to, like, maintain. And the other people try to meet people online first and then meet them at the conference. Like, we are meeting people. What would happen if we tried to do this, John, via Zoom?

Yeah, he's a negotiator. Absolutely.

Yeah, it really does.