For the past couple of years, I've been researching and learning about trust. It started as a simple question: "Wait, how do you actually earn trust?" and then became a rabbit hole I tumbled deeper and deeper into.
In my opinion, there's nothing more valuable than a person's trust. We hear so much about the value of attention and being in an attention economy, but attention is cheap. Attention can be bought.
Trust is the currency that precedes the transaction. Trust has to be earned. Trust is the force underneath every social interaction we have. Influence itself isn't the result of attention, but trust.
As much as I've studied this, I haven't published much about it publicly. But that's changing today.
Introducing: How Trust Happens
In partnership with my friends at Senja, I've produced a free, 7-day email course called How Trust Happens. It introduces my framework for building trust consistently and intentionally.
And you're seeing it before anyone else.
That link will ask for your email address again—I could use a Link Trigger, but I want to avoid any false positives and make sure this goes out first to those who really read it. Apologies for the extra step.
As you read, please reply and let me know what you think! This is just the beginning, and there's a lot more to dig into.
NEW PODCAST EPISODE 🎧
#317: Selling Smart Passive Income (And What We Can Learn From It) — Pt. 1 featuring Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland
This week I’m joined by two longtime friends—Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland.
Pat is the founder of Smart Passive Income, the creator education brand he started in 2008 and ran for 18 years. Matt came on around 2018—first as an advisor, then as CEO—and spent years making SPI operationally strong enough to stand without Pat at the center. They spun SPI out into a separate entity called SPI Media, pivoted from courses to community with recurring revenue, and quietly prepared the business for a sale they weren’t sure would ever happen. In September 2026, they announced that SPI had sold. The deal had closed five months earlier.
The buyer is Liz Wilcox, an email marketing expert who spent those five months operating publicly as SPI’s “director of community” before anyone knew the deal had closed. The community doubled in size during that window.
In this episode, we talk about:
How Pat and Matt deliberately structured SPI over 8 years so it could be sold—including spinning out a new company, removing Pat’s face from the website, and making the community the hero
Why Pat turned down multiple VC and PE offers worth more than the final sale price
The deal mechanics: seller financing, no broker, 160 documents of due diligence, and how it closed in 6 months when deals like this typically fall apart
What creators who operate entirely under their own name are missing when they eventually want to exit
By the end of this episode, you will understand what it actually takes to build a creator business that could outlive you—and what the groundwork for an exit looks like years before anyone is thinking about it.
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