Dennis Yu: Mentorship and Sharing Your Gifts With the World

Note: Transcript currently being edited

You’ve read over 4,500 books. Yeah. What drove you to read like such a fiend?

I don’t think it’s drive. I think it’s just, 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 like 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 see yourself as the biggest soccer mom or mama bear out there.

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

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Hello and welcome back once again to Hard Knocks, the show where we bring the people you always wish could have been your mentors in life straight to you by sharing all the wisdom, the hard knocks, the tough struggles and lessons they’ve learned in their life that made them into the people they are. So they can share all of that wisdom straight with you. Today we are bringing you Dennis Yu, a man who is immensely talented at training people on how to build their own businesses and market them to make them successful in all that they want to do in life and has a personal goal of creating over a million jobs in Pakistan by the end of 2027.

I hope you enjoy this one. All right, so Dennis, you’ve got to tell me, you have to take me back to the day that you decided, all right, one of my big missions in life is going to be to bring a million jobs to people in Pakistan by 2027. What happened that you were like, that’s what I need to do?

So there’s this crazy guy, his name is Rehan Aliwal. He’s got 15 million followers on Facebook and he messaged me on Facebook and he 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 off stage 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, some random guy from Pakistan because I didn’t even look him up or see who he was.

And sure enough, when I got off stage, 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, just like middle-class, not poverty, but just like an average sort of person.

How much money do they make?

It’s going to be really low. Maybe two, 300 a month or something.

$80 a month. Yeah. So this just showed me how ignorant I was.

And he said, Dennis, if you can offer them employment at a hundred dollars a month, doing the basic things like editing videos and building out WordPress sites and doing all that, like 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.

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 Alawala, who is like the super connector in this country.

It’s insane. Wow. I mean, what does McDonald’s pay?

$20 an hour now, right? 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, yes, yes, there’s amazing people in Pakistan. I’ve met people who are billionaires and I’ve interviewed them on my podcast and all that. Yes, 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, right? It’s the same kind of path that companies go through.

Some companies 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. That’s great.

And it’s great for them. 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 Musa Mill, 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. We have at every level, we have things you have to do.

So people will come and say, well, I’m instantly, 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, that you’ve managed clients, you’ve hired people that you’ve done. Everything we have is completely measurable, right?

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. 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 in the BBC campaign is from Bangladesh or whatever? 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, and prove to me you have the skills, right?

Yeah. So I’ve got to ask, so what has kept you excited and motivated about wanting to accomplish this mission? Because I know, a man like you, right?

You’ve got so many different things moving around, so many different things you’re excited to do, and there’s only so many things that you can dedicate your time to doing in a lifetime. So what has made it maintain that status of, no, I got to do this?

So it’s about multiplying myself, right? 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, right?

And this girl, Musa Mill, that 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 Amazing Mill, it’s not a commission thing based on your downline, but 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, cobblestone, shoemaker, whatever, you learn by apprenticing from someone who has master level expertise.

And then after three or four years as a, whatever you call that, 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 that got lost in the American model of the MBA and this whole kind of 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 or 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 you, 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 Google ads, whatever the thing is, and you leave a paper trail, then it should be documentable, it’s clear enough that someone else can follow your recipe. And thus 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.

No, you had to be certain. Well, I mean, Boeing’s got 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 it is, like there’s a clear 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.

So mentorship sounds like it’s a pretty big thing for you, like growing that. What about mentorship? If we looked at that, what is that driving factor of why that means so much to you?

Have you ever… There’s a couple angles here. So I feel like I’m a soccer dad or whatnot.

And I love, I live vicariously through my kids scoring goals, right? 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 to retire or anything like that, right? I’m 50 basically. But Jack Ma said that there’s three stages.

Jack Ma’s the billionaire, all the bubblegum, 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. And your second decade of 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, whatever.

And in your third decade of life is when you’re finding ways to leave a legacy and give back and help other people and mentor. Maybe you’re like a grandpa and you live through your grandchildren. And so for me, this is kind of like my way of leaving a mark because there’s so many other people that can say, I mean, 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 mean, I’m doing it because I love hanging out with cool people.

That’s how I prioritize my time. And if I can be around other people that can scale and 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. And they were like, with Brazil, you know, 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 big university, 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, that if students 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 years old, 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, bringing, connecting people on either sides of this planet.

You see yourself as the biggest soccer mom or mama bear out there.

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

So is it fair to position you as the Levi Strauss of digital marketing? Yeah, I don’t say why I’m asking that question. Can you explain to everyone who that is?

Yeah, so Levi Strauss, we always know him as the person that came up with jeans, right? But that, what the real story is, is that rather than participate in the gold rush, he actually produced the materials, the wear, the garb that the prospectors were going to wear. So he’s the one who actually made the gold.

I see, yeah. That’s people, right? So that’s the irony.

Yeah, so I’m hearing you’re producing and coming alongside to give them the tools that they need.

Yeah.

But it’s still up to them.

I see the analogy there.

And formulate that.

Yeah. I mean, you look at the airline industry, there’s more money made in the ancillary services of providing baggage and real estate and IT services than in the airline itself. It wasn’t the prospectors that were mining gold.

It was the people selling the shovels all the infrastructure. And so we are 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 1% or 2% because to operate digital marketing, how many tools do you need?

I mean, none really. But generally, the average agency how many tools? Probably like five or six.

Yeah. And so if we create training together with GoDaddy, with Infusionsoft, with Fiverr, with I’m naming the ones that we do stuff with, Descript, right? And they have like gold toll story.

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.

So there’s a Zapier, for example, there’s a tool that helps you like non-programs to connect data sources together, right? Well, we’re featured on the Zapier blog. So how does Dennis, you 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, you know, Zapier wins and they win. 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 that 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.

Yeah, we have a course on how to do a podcast. How do you set up this video studio with all this stuff here?

Yep.

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, right? We make a little money when there’s a course.

We make a little money when they’re an agency. And, you know, there’s all these things that happen. Make a little bit of money along the way.

But our people make money first before we can make any money, right?

So what’s the biggest barriers that you run into? What prevents you from having success? What is it that is a measurable thing that you’re like, here are the three things that I really run into all the time that’s preventing success.

You are not like what I have to say. The number one thing is this thing called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Okay.

Heard of this? I have not. Tell me about it.

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. The Dunning-Kruger Effect, to summarize it, is people who, they don’t know anything about a topic, but they think they know, right?

And so the opposite of that is the, when people, what is it called? When they actually are experts, but they feel like they’re not. The imposter syndrome, right?

So the opposite of imposter syndrome is Dunning-Kruger Effect where people think they know the answer because so-and-so wrote a book about this or because they really believe their logic is this way. It’s also called HIPPO, 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 eliminate, 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? There’s a checklist on how 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, right? And so this process of learn, do, teach. You learn firsthand following the 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. Then yeah, then yeah.

No, that was at Yahoo. Then yeah, then yeah. Then 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. It’s called Yahoo.

And I know a lot of friends over there. Oh, Danny, it’s that big, big thing is Google. You need to go work at Google.

I’m like, mom, I know about search. My search engine engineer. Why are you telling?

She’s reading the paper about how Google is becoming, this is 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.

I made some money when I sold my Yahoo shares, but 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 Pick.

He was the fastest biker on the Ironman circuit, that whole thing. Like 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 like try to get him like, you know, if I can make Mike Pig 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 it?

Yeah, yeah. Then like, 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 Pig. And this guy is like, look him up. You can Google him and see who this guy was, right?

He was like the Lance Armstrong before. And he didn’t do PEDs or any of that, okay? But I’m going to take advice on how do I bike better for Mike Pig versus some random dude that I meet who’s, you know, read books on how to do whatever, right?

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 Pig 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 they don’t know anything about?

Sure.

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.

So what do you tell people as far as how to choose? Because there’s hundreds of different digital marketers out there. Yeah.

All of which are teaching different courses. Sure they are. So how is it that you’re saying that your process that you’re talking about is superior to some other also?

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 like Dan Henry teaches? Dan Henry’s 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 Jean, or Perry Marshall has this.

David Fox has a course on how to do PPC. Great. But let me ask you, 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, you 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, it’s a ridiculous question because best for what?

So if you are a concrete coding company and you want to drive more leads and you want to sell more floors, then the best in the world is Marco Cipola. Because he’s done this for like 200 concrete coding companies. He has a track record.

If you’re a concrete coding company and you want to generate more phone calls and whatever through drip jobs 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 the Marco Cipola.

If you’re a real estate person, I would look at Tom Ferry’s thing. I would look at there’s Jason Pantana. I’d 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. There’s no like, who’s the best in the world at Google ads?

For what? 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, work with Facebook so that we can put a dollar in improvably. Mark Zuckerberg talked about this in his annual report. Sheryl Sandberg gave awards for us.

Put a dollar in, 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.

You didn’t ask the question. People ask the wrong question.

You didn’t even ask that question, right? It sounds like there is immense value. And something that you found is when someone says they’re the best or you’re looking for the best, it’s a very common thing in data analysis I see.

And why so many people out there, I find are like, oh, I hate data scientists. Like they don’t know what they’re talking about. Because the thing is, is that what matters is the segmentation.

That’s what matters. It’s the great, this is the best, but in what specific segment? Doing what and when and how?

And you need to answer all those questions to really understand, well, what does best mean?

Best, I would redefine kind of to your question on who do you choose? Find someone who has achieved the thing that you want. Not because they say so, but clearly you can prove it.

So Gordon Ramsay is a well-known chef. We’re gonna go eat food in a little bit. And you can watch his 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? How do you like all that stuff?

He like 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 that you want?

You like chicken Parmesan? Great. What’s the recipe for chicken?

You want chicken cacciatore. Okay, great. But you want beef stroganoff.

Well, don’t use the chicken cacciatore recipe. 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 wanna do, right? What is the most specific thing that you wanna do?

You’re a roofing company. Okay. Then you wanna drive more leads through SEO.

Find another roofing company that’s succeeded in SEO and get their SOPs. What’s so hard about that?

Was there a time that you didn’t have a process that you failed, let’s say?

Oh, every day.

Right. And so everything you’ve talked about so far is about process. Yeah.

A repeatable process, right? I add water to this formula and I get $1.10 out, right? Okay.

Got it. But I’m assuming there must’ve been some time that you finally realized, ah, I needed that process. What was it like before that process?

It’s painful. Then you finally discovered you needed to do that. 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 you… 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 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 and 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. I don’t have to follow the SOPs 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?

I think they probably do. That’s right. Right.

And that gives me great comfort that they’re doing that.

Yeah. 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 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 that’s just like, you know, you want repeatability.

In the right, the thing that’s unique is maybe some like personality things or your content’s unique, but everything else needs to be the same.

What would you say was your biggest mistake along the way that you, maybe it was a happy mistake, if you will. Something that turned out way better, but nonetheless, it started out as a complete failure.

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 and 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, you know, I’m, I’ve come clean on all the stuff that happened back then, okay?

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 and the phone companies take half the money because of, like, 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 wanna say 2008, back then, it just exploded.

And I, before I went on, I talked to one of my mentors, Jillian Musick, who’s the co-founder of SEOmos. Jim and Fishkin founded SEOmos, which was the big SEO company, SEO thing back then. Yeah, you have his book right here.

Yeah, I’ve got, you can look and see, you know, me and Rand in different places pretending to fight and all, it’s all, all just for show, okay? It’s like WWE, it’s for show. And Jillian told me, she said, cause I said, should I do this?

Cause Mike Arrington called me up. She said, well, think carefully. A, if you do it, you’re gonna become famous.

This is like, everyone gets their five minutes of fame. I mean, you can even be like Hawk Tua girl. Everyone gets their five minutes of fame.

And, but if you do, you’re gonna get a lot of hate. Cause a spammer, you’re gonna be kicking the bee’s nest or whatever it is. And these people are gonna 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 gonna get shut down. And they’ll think I shut them down. Facebook was gonna shut it down anyway.

I had lunch with Zuckerberg to talk about this thing, right? And we agreed, you know what? This thing can’t sustain, need to shut, I’ll shut down my ad network.

Everyone else is gonna, 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 the, you know, fill the void. So when that happened, oh, actually, before I decided to do it, I’m like, you know what?

She said, yeah, I’m willing to do it because I have a tough enough skin to take all these haters that are gonna 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.

You know, like they’re gonna attack me because I got death threats. Oh my goodness. So I started traveling more at conferences because I was kind of afraid, like if I went to my place, or maybe I turned the key in the ignition, you know, maybe something.

And you don’t know, like I got a death threat two days ago. Right? I made a post on Instagram from some guy in the UK saying that he’s going to, if he sees me, he’s gonna kill me and cut my whatever out and parade me naked.

And some random, some, I don’t know who this person is. And, but, 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. 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 Sean Collins, who was the founder, and Jeremy Shumoney. 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 like the big boss. It’s like this Jake Paul, Mike Tyson kind of thing.

And when I got off stage, and I was walking back towards the hotel room, someone came up with a cake and white cake frosting caked me with this whole thing. And I didn’t even, I mean, I’m just walking with a couple of my friends. He comes up behind me and does this, comes up behind 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. Like, ah, you know, we caked Dennis Yu and I don’t know.

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. Right?

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, right? Yeah.

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 New York with that, 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, right? I’ve had a lot of close calls 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 I have been…

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 has 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 not earned it.

It was all given to me. But you are an incredibly hard worker. The harder I work, the luckier I get.

I’ve worked very hard. Right. And on social media, you see these highlight moments.

You see like these cool places that 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?

It’s like, 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.

Yep. The reason I know that you’re a hard worker, and we don’t really know each other all that well, right? But I know that you said that you’ve read over 4,500 books.

Yeah. So in order to do that, let me see. You said you’re 50 years old.

That’s a lot of books. Yeah. That’s at least a book a day, right?

So or something. Every five days. Every five days.

Yeah. So what drove you, if you don’t mind, what drove you to read like such a fiend?

So I didn’t speak English when I was six. So I was made fun of. And I was put in the classes for- Because you immigrated?

I was born and didn’t know how, 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. Okay.

And the kids at school are, kids are mean. So they say, and they don’t mean to be mean. They don’t know any better.

Right. They say, hey, David, if you want to say someone, say to someone that you really like them, you call them this, right? And so I got, 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 walking through a minefield. I didn’t know who to trust because people would say, say this and say that.

And 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. And then 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 gotta be, why would I get mad about?

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 then, 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 should, I can understand like if you immigrated here and you’re from India or whether you had to learn, you know, like what, 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? Yep.

And you see the other people, what Americans do is they talk louder at you of somehow going to understand those 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?

So I 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.

Yeah.

And I just, 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.

It was at, 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 p.m. from the library. And the weekends, I’d go there in the morning and I would read at the library. And I get picked up when the library closed. I spent all my time at the library.

If I wasn’t at the public library, I would be at B. Dalton. If you remember, I think they’re like out of business now.

Or Tom Books, I think they’re out of business. Sure. And I would just go there and I’d read the periodicals.

I just wandered 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 go to the librarian and she put a little sticker.

Yeah, I get those. And you get like a 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 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.

Yeah.

Right. I love reading books. And the more I read, the more I enjoyed it, the more I became sort of an introvert.

And so, you know, 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, right? 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, right? But I made it.

What was the word you lost? I’m going to have this PTSD on this. It was Cynodont, which is a dinosaur tooth.

Wow. Is it like P-S-I-D-A-U-N-T? No.

Or P-T…

What is it? I was so close. It’s C-Y-N-O-D-O-N-T.

I had it correct, except I missed the T. Yeah, I just missed the T on it. Yeah.

And there was so much pressure. There’s 50 TV cameras. There’s a huge stage.

I’m just a child. I mean, it’s okay. It was there.

It’s just so much pressure. Because, you know, you have a placard around your neck. And the other person, you can see like the people in line in front of you.

And when they say the word, 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 away.

Oh, right. And then the next one’s up. And then 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 like, oh, it better not be like a ridiculous word. Yeah.

Right. 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.

Okay, so hold on. So two things. One, how did you as a…

Was there anything else in terms of like the driving factor for how you had this immense amount of… Like there are a lot of kids who have been bullied and told, oh, hey, you don’t speak good and all those things. Sure.

And what was it that enabled you to do this?

Like this is… I just wanted to win. It’s unnatural.

I wanted to win because I was abused as a child. I was nearly put in a foster home. That’s a whole nother story.

But I, this is going to sound weird. I had these imaginary friends. And these were characters in the books.

I had stuffed animals. And my favorite thing to do, which I guess if you could look back now and maybe it’s okay, 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-throughs 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. But 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. He’d talk about it in such a way that you wanted in on that.

You wanted to open a location. You wanted to work there. And same thing, I read Sam Walton, Grinding It Out.

Or not Grinding It Out, 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. And 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 like the low price leader. And 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 conversation, this like 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 like taken out a little bit money earlier?

Because 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 thing. Very true. I mean, they live cheap, right?

They don’t pay their people all that much compared to tech. But would you have changed that? Like what would have happened if you changed that, Sam?

So he and I would have these like 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 that bigger seat in the meal isn’t worth the extra $1,500, right? And so you get the most amazing stories.

And then I asked them, why do they do what they do? It’s like not even fair the number of conversations I’ve been able to have, right? And all of this goes back into me getting a better understanding.

I have like this ball of twine. And I keep, or like gumball, whatever. And I keep adding to it and it gets bigger and bigger.

And somebody gives me a piece of, you know, 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, as you say something, it’s John interesting.

It’s interesting what John said. Okay, I’m gonna 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.

So it sounds like what you’re doing today is just another reconstituted version of what you did when you were a kid.

But now I have more resources, more mistakes.

Education and training, right? So you’re either training yourself or training other people.

Yeah.

Is that fair?

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 a mechanical component to how you learn how to play a bar chord and build calluses and circle of fifths. I mean, all of these things that you learn. So everything I’ve learned, there’s an approach.

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.

It sounds like part of what really was able to get you to the point where you’re like, all right, I want to become, I’m being made fun of for my English. So instead of what I’m going to do, I’m going to become the best and like the best, the best at my English. And I’m going to start doing this.

And what kept you doing it? Like you started, it sounds like you discovered by reading these different books, like you have conversations with these people and you can go back. Did you ever start to think like, these are like the friends I never had.

Like I could talk to all these people reading. Yeah, it’s kind of sad. No, I feel you.

I love reading books and be like, oh yeah, like, you know, I think.

They’re more interesting than these other, like I don’t want to talk to the high schoolers about what happened on Seinfeld. Like you could talk about, oh, so-and-so won the baseball game yesterday. Oh, did you see so-and-so made the big catch?

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 hanging out. 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 they’re like, oh, you’re actually interested in talking to me.

And hearing me because most people just kind of brush you off usually. That’s fascinating. What percentage of people do you think have your level of drive?

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 to drive.

It’s not motivation. I don’t need a Tony Robbins walk on coals my way to get there. I mean, I think I do have a certain level of like 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, not in the right soil, that will grow all that.

Right. I believe we all have the seed. Good parable you’re mentioning.

Yeah, I’m doing it. And for those who can hear the dog whistle, you know what I’m saying. OK, for those who don’t, I’m just talking about gardening.

I like to slip those things in there without saying it, right? Yeah.

Nice rewards. Yeah. So you read 4,500 books.

You have this. Now this is starting to make a lot of sense for why, when we were talking, you became so intrinsically just fascinated with all these things, like language models all of a sudden, because you’re like, this is what I was doing in here. Yeah.

The entire time. Before chat GPT. Yeah.

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.

That makes so much sense. And I still have these conversations. So I’ll go on a walk outside and I’ll open up the chat GPT and I’ll have conversations with it.

Just like the conversations I’ve had the last 40 years.

Yeah.

It’s very familiar.

Yeah.

So I’m gonna, I’m gonna, you’re gonna judge this a little bit here. Okay. What the heck is up with cocoon water?

How, how do you get, you’re teaching all these people, these things you’re learning so many different things. You’re now, you’re now speaking to bring this to even more people. At the same time, you’re bringing jobs to people in Pakistan.

You are loving to teach people. All right. It’s, it’s not about seeking the best.

It’s about seeking the best in something that you need to do. And, and helping really correct some people’s, you know, improper learning that I got. And all of a sudden then we have, you know, cocoon water.

And it’s actually the same thing. Okay.

Because everything has to be provable. It has 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 Clark. Was it?

You can Google it and find out. It said that modern technology is indistinguishable from magic. Right?

What is magic? What did people 3,000 years ago? Well, if you showed them an iPhone, you know, they would say he was sorcery or witchcraft.

And you could say, no, there’s this thing. It talks to the satellites. And there’s a way that everything works.

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.

But tomorrow morning, we’re going to measure your tissue level, not your blood oxygen, your tissue level oxygen. And OK, fine. So the machine says that your tissue level oxygen is higher.

So what? Yeah. 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 that the scans show that my cancer has gotten smaller.

I need to show. 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.

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. 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 that chronic 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 like 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. Yeah, 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?

For someone who doesn’t, so this is something I’d be very interested to ask you. I have quite a few friends who don’t believe they have any gifts. What would you say to that person?

I’d say I was just like them. You know, 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. And well, I could never be like that, right?

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, you know? 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. Young adults want $10,000. Or 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’ve 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 know, you spend the time with. And pretty soon you’ll realize that those people are just normal people like you. I used to think that, you know, when I was in middle school, you know, because this is Asian kid, I’m thinking like going to Harvard’s like the thing, you know, at perfect SATs.

I almost had a perfect SAT. Good grades, all that, right? Harvard.

You think like the people 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, I’m or when I was at Yahoo, I’m interviewing people from Harvard or Berkeley. I’m not hating on Harvard, OK?

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, you know, he judges me and reveals that I don’t know anything and I’m really dumb?

He was the nicest guy, right? And I don’t think it was just like being fake nice to me. But when you’ve actually been around these other people, you realize they’re normal people.

Sure. And you think, 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, OK? So he had another one. He says, Dennis, you want to, you know, invest with me on this new company?

And clearly he was drunk and clearly whatever. But this guy is super connected, has 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, right? And I realize 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. I don’t know. Whatever it is, like I see him as a human being, right?

I see him like, forget his keys. And this is so-and-so. That’s 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 and a couple of achievements that are kind of 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 like treat celebrities like they’re nobodies.

But just realize that people who’ve achieved something are just like you and me. So Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple, arguably like the most successful product company ever, whatever, Apple, right? 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, Dennis, congratulations on your thing. And advice I’d give you, you can even do a search for Steve Wozniak, Dennis Yu. 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 or we didn’t have any money and things were just like all over the place and it was a disaster. But 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 this is not some like BS motivational speech. This is from the guy himself telling me this personally, 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. Yeah.

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, six foot one. He’s super skinny. He’s like a toothpick, okay?

Goodness gracious. And his idol is obviously all the big bodybuilders, Ronnie Coleman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jay Cutler. I happen to 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. Elias, dude, I totally get it.

You just turned 16. And I’m telling you, man, when I started bodybuilding, I had ups and downs. I got injured.

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. 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 just, 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 motivations, the realization. It’s not because like I’m more determined than other people. You see what I mean?

It’s a reframing, right? It’s the context.

I really, I’m, I’m, I’m digesting all that you’re saying. And I feel like when we were going into our talk here, I wasn’t really sure where we’re going to go. And I feel like you’re talking directly to people who are mentors.

And I think that’s a process and some training that most of us who mentor really don’t know how to do it, right? So the fact that you’re reaching out to your network and introducing those people to the people that you’re mentoring is really a lost art, right? So we think about the craftsmen and the artisans and the whole process of apprenticeship, right?

And that meant that you had to have some real learned individual connecting with that individual. And it sounds like that’s something that really drives you. I’m curious, what is it about that that drives you, that gives you such satisfaction of making that kind of connection?

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 is so important. He’s talking to senators and dealing with government kinds of, I mean, he’s 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. He’s the guy who funded Costco and Best Buy.

He’s going to 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 we’re just hanging out. And I’m not at all intimidated by him at all.

Yet you see these people that you named 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. And that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not saying like go try to find Jeff Bezos’ 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.

And 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, money isn’t everything once you make it. Oh, that’s easy for you to say because you made all the money.

But you realize that there’s this multiplier. Like money, like 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, that’s not less 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. 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…

And 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 I’ve used all your things and I’ve grown my company. And that’s just such a cool thing when you see that.

I just want to give those people a hug when they come up to me. 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 putting your information out there for free, showing exactly how you do stuff. Not my personal hero’s journey story, but actual valuable things that people can follow.

Then there’s 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. And then there’s kind of like this group mentorship. And there’s kind of train-the-trainer kind of 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 and 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 with 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 help anybody because you went, no, that’s not what I’m saying. If you follow the mentorship, if you want to be a mentor, publish your recipes. See who’s following it.

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 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. 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 did 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 like 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 and you can do it.

And yeah, but what about the freaking process? Both, right?

Yeah. So how does one find a mentor? What’s the process?

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, I asked him, 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 gets asked millions. No, Dennis, you didn’t hear me. Just ask.

That’s it. But don’t ask Elon Musk. Ask the person who’s, 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, like that sounds like a resume bullet, right? What is the thing 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, you know, turning the sunlight into the flame, like all those analogies, right?

It’s not that people don’t want to be a mentor. It’s not pick up artists, 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 me the secret to make my first million dollars? 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. Does that Dunning-Kruger thing get in the way again, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Ray Dalio wrote a book called Principles, which is all about that.

I have that book, yeah.

And it’s all about logical thinking and 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, right? A lot of what you’re saying reminds me also a struggle I have had and I’ve seen many other people in terms of just being able to ask someone, but asking the right way too, which is critical. Is some wisdom I learned several years ago, which was when you’re doing that, you have to make sure that the person you’re asking knows why you believe it has to be them.

Why am I asking you? And going the extra mile, say, Dennis, I want you to consider mentoring me after we meet in person because I’ve seen you do X.

Because you put in the time and research to show that. People who have done no research and are super lazy will say, oh, you know what? I Googled you and found that you’re really good at Facebook ads.

Will you go ahead and teach me how Facebook ads work and all 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 specifically choose one kind of company.

I’ve chose 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.

And I know a lot of other people who mentor just like me. And like Jeremy Ryan Slate says the same thing. I 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 Googleable, I’m not going to mentor you. Because that means people tell me, oh, Dennis is so smart.

He knows so much. You don’t need to use Google. You can just ask Dennis.

Just DM Dennis anytime you have a question and he’ll stop whatever he’s doing and answer your question. Because it’s so easy. Why would you have to 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 is like a little bit of nudging, a little bit of encouragement, just slight adjustment, I carry you.

I’m not going to carry you.

So from the people that you’ve mentored and the ones that you haven’t or don’t feel that really have the right direction, the majority of people out there are not doing anything. We understand that. What do you believe is the components of the characteristics of those who have really nailed this?

It has to be something in here. They’re very coachable. And they’re very driven.

What do you believe has actually led to that? Is it their upbringing, the neighborhood they grew up in?

I don’t know. 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 of 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. Very 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 goes on and on.

Other people that don’t grow, they don’t listen. I’ll just sit there. 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. I’d love to give you some feedback on this stuff but fortunately, you just talked the whole time. 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 that causes people to be coachable. 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. Not here to convince you. You can do it that way if you want.

But if you don’t respect me, then why are you coming to me?

So as you’re… You don’t have children as I understand, right? But put yourself in the shoes of a young parent.

And you’re now wondering, how do I set my kids up for perhaps a lifestyle that I never had, right? So maybe, I think you said your mom and dad came to the United States. So I’m assuming that they must have looked at you and said, I’m going to give you a life that is way different than mine.

And I’m willing to invest a lot in that. What do you tell parents today that, you know, whether you call this the lost generation, which is in the description of every, you know, younger generation forever, right? All that kind of stuff, right?

What would you tell them? What would you have them…

There’s no limit to the positive encouragement you can give them. So my friend, Brian Eisenberg, had his son 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, 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? But he found swing coaches and he found other people that were baseball players. And he found, he surrounded 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 of like 98 miles per hour or 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 I would, we’d play basketball out there and I would dunk on Sammy. Yeah, 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.

Yeah, because I have better technique probably. Hey, yeah, right. But 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? There’s a certain, just like athletes train, those Fortnite players actually have a thing where, I didn’t realize there’s a technique on how you make your fingers faster, right?

That’s wild, right?

They have a regimented eating schedule and stuff like that too. This burns calories as well.

So help your kids go further. It’s not that kids are lazy. I have a friend of mine.

I won’t say his name. Anytime there’s 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, and I understand you can make a lot of money as an airline pilot and all this, but your kid may or may not want to be an airline pilot. 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. It’s not it at all.

So talk to the people just for a minute to explain that you’re not Michael Jordan. Because I think it’s very easy for people to count themselves out when they meet someone like you and then they say, well, it’s just natural. It’s natural talent.

You are amazing. You have all these things going for you.

It’s a cop-out for sure.

I understand that, right? But what is it that you tell people? Because certainly Michael Jordan had to deal with that as well, right?

Michael Jordan had got cut from his varsity basketball team even though he’s six foot six. People tell the Michael Jordan story. Or they tell the Andre 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. And that’s the number one 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? Right.

That’s been popularized. We put enough time, Simon Sinek, that whole thing. I put in 70,000 hours into digital marketing.

And it’s not, and it looks easy, doesn’t it? Cause 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- Every single spot on the court.

You don’t practice. Usain Bolt, you know, world record holder in the 100 meters. And he talks about, 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 you, like I could never, I could train all day. I’m never going to beat Usain Bolt, right?

Yes.

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. 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, 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, right?

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, right?

Yeah. I’m hearing an implicit challenge that if you’re able to do this with people in Pakistan, who may or may not have the capability of understanding the English language, Not too dissimilar from you.

There’s a parallel.

Right. You’re almost saying anybody can do this.

I am careful about that because that sounds a little too easy. Okay. If you put in the time.

I understand. 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 you know, 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, yeah, I’ll make $100,000 a year and have a great life.

They don’t want to be Sam Walton.

Right.

Wow. That’s very powerful.

Yeah.

I know we’re kind of coming close, but I do have a question just going back to Yahoo because I’m fascinated because Yahoo literally had lightning in a bottle.

Yeah.

And when you think about search engine optimization and you were a search engine engineer, And people still want to argue with me.

Come on.

Exactly. So you understood all of this and I’m thinking, what in the heck happened? 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 twenties. Yeah. 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 coworker.

He was at that point, the richest man in the world under 40. Wow. And we would eat pizza and we would code.

And his, if you looked at his code, his variables were swear words, right? He probably, if there was HR, he would have gotten canceled, right? All kinds of stuff.

If we tried to do that today, we would all have been canceled.

Yeah.

But it was, we didn’t know it was going to be the thing that it is today, right? 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 hired all these other people. And then pretty soon we have all these meetings because that’s what managers like to do.

They like to have meetings. And then people like me, they like to actually code and build things. Now my calendar is freaking seven meetings per day.

There’s no time to do any work. You just want me to meetings. And I go to these meetings and be 12 people in the meeting.

And I’m like, who are you? None of you can write any code. Oh, we’re, 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, no, like making fun of like saying 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 can have all these other people that do management, but like pretty soon our ratio of managers to workers was like eight or 10 to one.

Yeah.

And we were, then all of a sudden, we were like 5,000 people by the time I left Yahoo or something, 4,000 people. Friends of mine are like, so then it’s like, how does Yahoo have 5,000 people? Like how many people do you need to have this search engine?

Like give you the result. You search for something, you know, you use your own mail, Yahoo shopping, dating, travels, horoscopes, 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 people?

What do they do? Yeah. Right?

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?

Yeah. Well, you have meetings. That’s what managers do.

So it just, and then all the good people started to lead. And then we had Terry Semmel come in as the CEO. He was the chairman of Warner Brothers.

Right.

He would fly in Monday morning. I knew his driver, Jonathan, which I thought was hilarious. Jonathan would tell me all the secrets that was going on, the deals.

And Terry would always be trying to like buy other companies because he wanted to grow through acquisition, through partnership. So the partnership with all the telecoms where we bundled the mail with your internet and all that. You could see it.

That’s what they did. And then us engineers became second class. And so Jonathan would drive up in the Range Rover, the black Range Rover to the back of building D3, which is the manager 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’s, where’s Terry going? Oh, tomorrow he’s going to go fly to the UK and try to do, he’s going to meet with the people at British Telecom. Oh, okay.

So that’s what’s up, huh? Okay. Yeah.

And then he’s going to do this. He’s, oh, what else is going on? Oh, well, there’s also this.

He’s, he was like, when I was driving him to 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.

Right? Right. So I knew, I was like an insider.

I never traded. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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 we, they didn’t want to build things. I wanted to build food. You know, I read like all the properties at Yahoo.

I wanted to build food.yahoo.com. I wanted 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, SeamlessWed or Yelp before there was a Yelp or these, like, why would we build our own thing?

Yeah. Because when you build your own thing, it can be integrated in 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 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?

I want to say none.

None of them worked out. Yeah. They spent billions of dollars, gave all the equity, watered the thing down.

Meanwhile, what kind of message do you think that sent to the engineers like us? Right. Then all the engineers like us left.

I was one of the last engineers to still stay. And then the engineers who did leave and started incredible companies, like my buddy Jan Kuhn and Brian Atkin. 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.

I’m like, no, no, I’m staying at Yahoo. Right. How dumb?

Who is the dumb one now? Right. So us, we’re 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.

Wow. Because why didn’t you? 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.

Right. 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.

Yep.

Right. And I was trying, I was dumb. I was trying to build an inside Yahoo, fighting all these managers who had 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? Right. Have you ever done SaaS before?

Do you understand how that works? You’re reminding me of something I’ve talked to John a lot about, which is, how are you familiar with the concept from Luke Wroblewski known as the company customer gap? Okay.

Where you went about to be a very big fan. Because that’s exactly what you’re describing. When a company starts, the company and the customer are basically the same person.

Because you’re doing it to solve a problem you hate. And then over time, as you add more management and all these different things, sometimes necessary. Look how far away I am from that customer now.

Yeah. I don’t see them. And the really smart companies make sure that they’re constantly, like, throwing a Hail Mary pass at least back over here on the football field to, like, learn.

Yeah.

But the vast majority of people don’t do it because it’s not fun and it’s hard.

And then- You have to connect to the customer. Yeah.

They all fall apart. And then you start asking the question, like we joke about all the time, which is, do the engineers actually talk to the customers who use this? And the answer is no.

I bring the requirements to the engineers. And I’m a product manager. I’m like, who is talking to the customer?

Right. Office space, right? Exactly.

What’s your favorite Michael Bolton song? Yeah. Yeah.

What would you say you do here?

Right. Yeah. I see such a- and I know we’re running short here.

But I just see a lot of connections here of the- there are certain times in your life that you experienced really big pain and regret, right? And how that has shaped where you’re at today is really remarkable. I mean, I’m saying that just candidly because I think you could have been- you could have used those opportunities to become very negative in how you responded.

But your response has been very positive on the other hand, right? And I mean, it’s been fascinating talking with you here about those stories and how you want to help other people avoid. I think that’s the whole point of our hard knocks is that many people want to take their time to say, here’s all the things that I learned along the way that I want to help you avoid, right?

And I’m hearing that in your voice of here are the things that you can do for your children, for your employees, for whatever you’re trying to achieve. And here’s why- here’s what the drivers are, what they were for me.

Well, people want to touch the wet paint. Why would you want to fail and experience the same paint? Look, mentors would tell me stuff, all kinds of advice.

I’m like, that’s some old person giving me advice. Oh, I know. And now, 30 years later, I’m like, those old people were right.

Oh, believe me, I have many of those cuts and bruises that I don’t need for you to- You know what?

He’s right.

Yeah. The one thing I definitely won’t do is learn from you that you don’t want to do electrical work with just one hand. You should definitely make sure you ground everything.

Right, exactly. Right, right. So I’ve got the closing question for you.

If you were to look back and that camera right there was a time travel device and you could send a message back to your younger self at any age, what message would you send back to him? What type of wisdom would you give him from Dennis right now to Dennis back then?

Focus on partnerships instead of being the nodal. Because I learned a lot from the 4,500 plus books. And part of it was maybe just to prove to myself that I could do it.

And you weren’t an issuant. I mean, I 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 and learning how to do all these different things in digital marketing and running ads that, you know, I’m just going to extend this lead. Well, if you want to go fast, go alone.

The African problem. If you want to go far, go together. Right?

Yeah. And I was just so, I don’t know, scared of other people. I felt like they didn’t, 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 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. Yep.

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.

Yeah. Like we’re hanging out. This is so cool.

Yeah. It’s very cool. I’m incredibly impressed.

Hey, I think so. Hey, dude. Hey, thanks so much for coming on.

That was amazing. That was fun. I have to tell you.

So, I mean, I usually say we’ve set all this up, but you set all this up, like the camera gear and everything. So, if you want to say anything else to any of the viewers out there, you want to talk about literally anything. Now is your, now’s your total time.

You made it through to the end. So that’s your little reward, right?

You’re only as good as the people that you’re around. And it’s those authentic moments. Like we’re going to go out and eat and whatnot.

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 a 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. Right. Even like we’re meeting people.

What would happen if we tried to do this, John, via zoom?

Oh, that’s why we’re here. Yeah. That’s why we, that’s why we travel.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s, you can’t do this.

Um, a, I assume your last moment, I feel bad. Uh, but one of my favorite authors, Chris Voss wrote, uh, the, the, the book don’t split the difference. You’ve probably read it.

He’s a negotiator. Absolutely.

But what I loved about what he said is that over half the conversation is lost. If you’re not there in person.

Yeah.

And it’s so true because I can’t see like, how are you doing this? Or if you’re moving back and forth, you’re like looking directly in someone’s eye. Like it, it means something.

Yeah, it does. Well, Hey everyone, this has been a pleasure and you’re going to love how we sign off to these, but by the way, everyone makes sure you always stay curious, everyone.