When Gary V. says to win on social media today, you need another level of rigor.

Just sitting down and having a random two-hour conversation is cool for your diehard audience.

But Diary of a CEO is split testing 100 thumbnails and trimming the fluff and optimizing the beginning

and like thinking about the viewer audience retention through the entire episode.

It's a whole different level of rigor. And it turns out that those that are winning on YouTube today are just

putting in the time and they're playing the game at a different level. I actually do not think

that this is inaccessible for your average person. I just think the average person has to count the cost

if they're willing to do the work because competition is highest on YouTube for lazy content,

but you only have to get in the top 10% of content. 90% of people are just going to sit down

and start a podcast, record for an hour, turn it off, upload it, lazy title, and wonder why they don't get views. And if you go into the 10%, it's just you go in with an extra level. And you, it's the stuff you were doing. It'd be coming back to that, but you don't have to do it. You delegate it. Like, who is architecting, hooks, titles, angles? And then once it's all done, too, by the way, but a really great editor could turn it into magic.

If that person is not just sitting there like cutting out the ums and trimming the ends, they're an artist themselves, re maybe orienting what questions should be in there, thinking about the viewer, time codes and chapters, breaking down the sections, thinking about how those are worded and really packaging it they might you could even get a host like that host could

then take your conversations where you just want to talk real and raw and once it's done they're like

in today's episode you know maybe they've got world class energy they give an agenda our hook formula

for youtube is grab attention, set your authority, and set the agenda.

So it's attention, authority, and agenda.

You have to get attention.

That's the trailer, the opening quote.

What's the first sentence of the video, the opening lines, create a couple

open loops. Create some reasons in a world that's very busy of why am I going to stop and watch

this in 2026. When I got so many other things to watch and I've watched a lot of things before,

what are you going to say in the beginning of your video that's going to let people know there actually is fresh information in this, this is new, and this video is worth watching. There's a lot you want to get when you get attention. In every single video, you need to establish authority because there's cognitive dissonance. If you want to reach new people, they don't know why they should trust you. And there might be a lot of visual cues that immediately is like, oh man, you know, was just another entrepreneur bro. Even very shortly, but you being able to drop, if you want authority in a real estate room, you drop real estate math, you drop real estate numbers that you've hit. If you wanted authority in a content room, if you had a video on content, you might say, you know, I'm like, I can relate. This is you talking in your hook. And, you know, and I get it. I struggled for years trying to create content. But then once I really figured it out, I was able to generate a billion views. And I, like, intentionally bridging and correcting the cognitive dissonance that happens in authority. It might be one, two, three sentences.

And then setting the agenda, if it's going to be an hour-long podcast, here's what's coming up,

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