183. This is Boring But It’ll 10x Your Personal Brand in 2026 ft. Dan Koe

26:51Another thing to think about here is how many times have you seen the same idea over and over again without even really realizing it, right? I love consuming fitness content. Fitness has been a big part of my life for the longest time. I still watch it today, but they just repeat the same shit over and over again, and I don't care. I like it. Like I can be reminded of the fundamentals or the things that matter. And if I get one little tip or trick out of it, cool, I get to try something new. And now I understand that it's the same with anything, right? You listen to a specific artist because of their sound, their, their specific way of making it.

27:31You listen to a song and you can instantly tell it's from that person, but it's the same sound. Like, you know, it's them. You're just listening to it because you like it. It can be the same thing with a personal brand or creating content. You have this unique tone that you need to pull out of yourself and you will craft it over time just through practice. But that's why people follow you. It's like you're giving out good, valuable ideas from your own perspective. That's really it. I mean, you think about like Sam Sulik. He's going to do bench, dude. It's the same shit. I've watched it a thousand times and I watched this dude do a 35 minute video while I'm like eating lunch.

28:08I'm like, let's go, Sam. you're driving to the gym i also drive to the gym you're hitting bench like man so relatable god so relatable we're kind of the same in stature you know it's like very it's like it's like very embodying to like just kind of see that you feel like you're looking in the mirror yeah i'm just like kind of like i wake up and i'm like oh it's me and sam right there going to the gym together yeah uh is there is there something online that you see a lot on the topic of personal branding or just creating consistent content that you just absolutely don't agree with that you think is just utter bullshit that you're seeing it.

28:40You're like, I need to put a stop at this. I need to tell people that I think this is absolutely wrong. I want to say yes. I guarantee there's something that I've seen where it like hits me and I'm like, oh, that's wrong. Like I need to respond to this immediately. I tend not to like, I'm not a reaction account. I tend to stop myself from doing that because I realized that everyone has a point and I don't think people can lead you in the wrong direction. I think that you can continue going in the wrong direction because you don't realize it's the wrong direction. I think it's up to the individual to kind of take everyone's opinion in, try them all, and then derive truth from that, right?

29:25I think the worst thing you can do in some cases is follow one specific person's advice's law potentially make it, but probably not make it because you're missing the critical ingredient that leads to success, which is iteration. So I do think it's helpful to really laser in on one specific thing at a time until you practice it, you get the data points, and then you know whether or not you know what works and you can integrate that, but then you move on to the next thing, right? You research a bunch of different things. You, if you want to become an expert at a topic, you read five different books on it.

30:09You'll notice the overlapping patterns. And then you can usually pull your own opinion from that. It's the same thing with when you're trying to start a business, grow a business, whatever it is. Usually you're going to get the best results when you can articulate what you need to do on your own. Hope you're enjoying this episode real quick. Want to let you know about an awesome free product that we got linked in the description. It's our personal brand kickstart. What's in it? Okay, we got five prompts for you. It's going to help you define your personal brand, get clarity and start posting content that really resonates with your audience.

30:38It'll literally take you less than 10 minutes. And it's been super apparent with all the guests that we've had on our show. They have really strong personal brands and it's allowed them to scale their businesses. So go check it out. Top link. Let's keep it rolling. You're really good at articulating. I feel like that comes from, would you say that comes from just like how much you've put in the work of reading and studying topics that you're interested in? Because I feel like after consuming your content a lot over the past couple of days, I told Brandon, I go, I just don't think I'm reading enough.

31:07Well, I mean, there's not a lot of picture books, so that's tough to deal with. I also bought Flow because we're going to Hong Kong in two days and I'm very excited to read it. I've just, I got like, dude, that's could be your start. It's an 18 hour flight you know a good friend would have ordered two you know we're gonna be on the flight i know i know i should have got a second we'll go to barnes and noble and we'll get a few pictures as well as last word would you say that people need to just read more and and consume more content as opposed to just doom scrolling on social this one's tough reading more definitely helps if i were to peel it back to the one thing that has really helped me the most

31:53it's getting through or it's fully understanding one idea before I move on to the next. And sometimes I skip this process where I'll find a really good idea or have a really good idea. And then I write it down or I think it's very just apparent that that's a good idea. And then I don't do anything with it. So with ideas that I'm really obsessed with, like the main idea from flow or the books that I've read, I'll tend to like tell people about it. I'll tell my, my fiance will ask me like, oh, what did, what did you learn from the book? And then me trying to articulate it in my own words, I'll struggle to, but I can usually get it out.

32:37And that just like locks so much of it in my brain. After I do that, that's when I take to writing. So a very easy step is trying to turn that into a post for social media. That's kind of what I mean when I say social media is a note-taking platform. How do I write this in a way that I understood it, that it was very impactful to me? The next step is fleshing it out in the form of a newsletter because then you really have to understand it and you have to research opposing viewpoints. You have to research supporting points, maybe stories. statistics, other things of that nature. And then that further locks the idea into your head.

33:16Now doing that over five years, extremely helpful because you repeat those ideas quite a bit. One thing I hear with my content, and some people mean it as like a jab, is like, oh, I've watched all of your content, you just sound like you're repeating yourself. and it's like I don't really have other ideas that I see more important than these so why would I not repeat myself it's the same thing with the music industry like they repeat the same sound because the bass audience really enjoys that if an EDM artist were to switch to country all of a sudden just for the sake of not repeating themselves not many people are gonna like it right because that's not what they're used to.

33:59So it's a lot of coming across the right idea at the right time, really attempting to teach, right? The protege effect, the teacher learns more than the student. So teach it to your friend, even if they don't want to hear about it, teach it to your wife, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, whoever, and just try to articulate it in your own words. You can't look at the book when you do that, so even better. And then three or four is try writing about it. That can be in a private journal, but if you're doing this whole social media thing, you might as well take on that creative challenge, right? This is the, your chance to, um, try to make another person interested in your interest.

34:46That may not be your main skill. And that takes a good amount of finagling with how you're going to position the idea and how you're going to introduce it. Has writing always been a part of the process? And do you do it in a physical journal or do you do it on the desktop? Because I have recently started waking up earlier, which is really new for me. I was always like 9 a.m., bro. I was always a part of the late night crew. And maybe that's because my thyroid wasn't working. I mean, that's a story for another day. But I was always like staying up till one, two in the morning and like working like that.

35:20And I do feel a hell of a lot better waking up closer to when the sun is rising and like writing in the morning. I find myself much more, much more like in a flow state of mind when no one else is awake for that like hour in the morning. Have you found that that's been pivotal for your growth as just an individual personal branding business, all of the above? And is it physical or digital? It's mostly you could, I'd say digital. Yeah. Cause on my phone too. Um, one practice that I love is going on a walk. Obviously I talk about that a lot, but when you, when you do go on a walk, try to jot down an idea, like right as you do it, because then that gets the water flowing that like unclogs the faucet.

36:09And then more ideas just come to mind related to that one. And then that's like my style of journaling, I guess you could say, but then that transfers over into content pretty easily. The writing process in my eyes is like, I just take ideas anytime, anywhere. It's kind of a habit to write them down. And you do have to get into that habit. If you have an idea, force yourself to write it down. And then in the morning, especially since I'm a writing based creator, mostly it's kind of my job. I sit down and then I look at all of the ideas that I've accumulated. And then I try to create something with those.

36:46I'll take one idea, turn it into a social media post. I'll be like, oh, this one's really good. Let's draft an outline for a newsletter next week, so on and so forth. And then I'll spend a bit more time fleshing out the newsletter I have for that week. So it's mostly digital. I consider the type of writing that I do also to be journaling because a lot of my personal experiences are in it. So it's kind of like a holistic style of writing. I want to go back to what you were saying earlier about repeating yourself. And I think early on when I got into creating content, I always felt like I had to have a brand new idea or like you couldn't say the same thing again.

37:30And I feel like a lot of people probably have that same mindset of like, I can't say the same shit. I have to say something new every single time. But that's not actually the case. you just kind of like you say the same few things but you repackage them and I want to get your um I want to get your opinion on about how you go about repackaging your ideas saying the same thing over and over and being like constant with your like ideologies and what you're saying on social but just repackaging them slightly as you continue to post more content yeah I don't really have a system for doing it. It's more so, okay, what I tend to have a theme for my week and I try to make that theme something that has the potential to get a lot of engagement, a lot of eyes, right?

38:20Because that's a big lever in anyone's business is just eyes. So I'll have a theme this week it's agency and I have a newsletter around that topic. And so I've talked about agency before, so I have to kind of think, okay, how can I, what can the topic of this newsletter be that incorporates agency, but is still slightly different? Because the thing with a newsletter, why I like newsletters so much is one, they turn into YouTube videos. So think of it, if you don't want to write a newsletter, think of it as outlining a YouTube video. it has to be a certain length, right? So you can talk about only agency.

39:00You can break down what agency is, why it's important, how to cultivate it, or you can work in various other topics that are kind of connected. So it's really difficult to articulate, but I watched a YouTube video the other day that was three hours long on the psychology of conformity. So why people conform goes really deep into the psychology of conformity. Now, like this kind of lines up with agency. Why don't I talk about conformity, but package it under the agency lens that I know will work? And that when people go through that, then they're going to get this fresh look on agency and give them a deeper understanding of it.

39:42But I could only do that because I'm exploring different interests, right? I'm pursuing my curiosity outside of my writing and then incorporating that into the ideas that work really well for me under my brand. Yeah. I also think it goes back to what you're saying about how like you just got to like have more experiences and like go out and bring stories. And if you feel like like if you want to talk about something again, you can just bring in another story that you have or another lived experience and kind of like say the same thing, but slightly different. I also want to talk about I want to talk about making money as a creator.

40:24So you're someone who like infamously has created a very successful one person business and you're making a lot of money doing it. If someone wanted to follow in those footsteps and start making either ten thousand dollars a month or they have the goal of making, you know, a hundred thousand dollars as a creator, like what pieces of advice would you have for them? Like where should they start and how do you go about monetizing as a creator yeah uh to preface that uh the one person business videos are like my most popular so a lot of people see those first and assume like those were created like two or three years ago i'm no longer a one person business so uh i have two teams for two different companies and i have an editor for my own thing so i'm technically a two-person business under like my personal brand now, but just prefacing so people know.

41:19How I would get started, I like to think of it as like a cascade of validating ideas. And this is assuming that you're starting from nothing, right? You don't know what you're going to do at all. The first thing is take your interests and just start posting on social media, right? You have to get into that habit. If you want to be a one person business, you have to understand that you as an individual have never had as much power as you do now with technology, with the internet, with AI, you can actually build a business as one person, right? You can reach millions of people. You can create some kind of a product that can serve millions of people.

42:04that's incredible how you start with that and the base of that because it has to be with social media because that's where the attention is right now a lot of people want to get out of that but that's where the attention is right you're not going to go and start a business and acquire your customers on the radio you might but that's kind of a stupid decision and it doesn't seem very fun so social media not the newspaper not tv social media it's accessible you can start today, whatever. Social media is great. Start talking about your interests. Start learning the skills necessary to succeed on social media.

42:40If you want to study something specific, I would study copywriting, marketing, sales, kind of all at the same time, because you have to be able to articulate an idea in a way that another person is going to be attracted to, right? You're not trying to sell people on a product here. You're trying to sell people on the idea. And the conversion is them clicking follow or clicking like or clicking retweet. So that's kind of what you're optimizing for when creating on social media. Now, after a month, two months, three months of doing this, you should have a base amount of followers. And from there, you can look back and see, okay, which of my ideas were best?

43:21Which ones did I enjoy writing about? which ones could I see turning into a product or service. Then from there, you take it and you turn it into some kind of high leverage business. For most people with a small following, I would say that that's a high ticket service. It's just common. So an agency or freelancing or coaching, even though that has a bad rap nowadays to other coaches, not really consumers, consumers still love signing up for coaching. So one big trap there, don't get too wrapped up in what other people in your industry are saying. Just focus on value for your audience and you'll go a long way.

44:06So some kind of high ticket service because if you only have a certain amount of followers, selling a$50 product isn't going to take you that far unless you're extremely good at generating traffic, right? If you're getting millions upon millions of views, go low ticket product and just sell the crap out of it. And you'll make a lot of money. If you are growing at a decent pace, then you're going to have to probably do some manual outreach. You're going to have to get more strategic with your promotions and you're going to have to sell at a thousand to$5 ,000 for what it is that you're selling because you land one customer and you're close to replacing the average salary, the average US salary.

44:53That's crazy. From there, now you have cash flow. Now you have a path to going full-time on this whole personal brand, social media, online business thing. After that, it's like, okay, how can I productize this further? And that can go down in kind of a cascade because now if you have clients, you're getting results, you can flex those results, and you can turn your offer into something that can be sold to a wider audience. What I like to do personally here is turn it into some kind of a cohort-based course. So this is kind of like a hybrid between group coaching while also having a curriculum, but also only being open for a specific amount of time.

45:34That bakes in the scarcity so you don't have to fake it, right? A digital product, it's hard to say, oh, there's only nine products. There's only nine left because that's just not true. But if there's an enrollment date where people can close and scarcity is a huge part of driving some form of conversion, that's awesome. It's just baked into the model itself. So cohorts-based course, you have the option of pricing it still somewhat high. So reaching out to people, manual client outreach is still enticing to you and you can still do it. If you're selling a$50 product, like you're not going to want to go into the DMs or cold email people to make 50 bucks on that.

46:11It's just not fun. But also it's at a price range where people can join if they just go to the landing page and sign up. So it's kind of like hybrid take there. Then you have that and then you can take it even further as your audience grows to some other kind of a product. If you want to go the course seller route, feel free. If you want to go the software route, you can turn really any kind of educational or high ticket service into a software. If you want to go the e-commerce route and sell a complimentary product, you probably have the cash flow and audience to do so now. So that's awesome.

46:52So what that allows you to do, in my eyes, is keep your work times low, right? This is where the four-hour workday philosophy comes in, where if you're only taking on high-ticket clients, then you can probably squeeze most of your lever-moving tasks within four hours, give or take. Like as you get pushed to going over that four hours, that's when you start to think about, okay, now I need to productize. And then once you go, let's say the cohort-based course route, that's going to take a lot of time on your hands because you're able to serve more people, but you can also take on high ticket clients to fill up the rest of that time.

47:33Then once you surpass that four hours again, then it's like, okay, I should productize further into something else that is going to take most of the client acquisition and client fulfillment off of my hands unless you want to scale those things further me personally i was for some reason dead set on just being a one person business probably because i didn't want to have to learn how to hire people or do any of that so i didn't scale the service business any further but if you want to do that that's perfectly viable does that all make sense any holes need plugging there no i think that makes that makes a lot of sense what would be one of the best places to sell like a digital product?

48:12Like a... Is there a platform that you recommend for people? Right now it's just Stan. God, you know what, Stan? Stan is the sponsor of today's video. Are they actually? They are actually the sponsor. Let's go. Yeah, shout out to John. Shout out to the Stan crew. I think it's one of the best places to sell a digital product. God, go check them out. Link in the description. I did a podcast with John and Vitaly. Oh, you did? I've been to their office in Toronto a few times. Super cool people. We're doing the one with John right before Thanksgiving. But we're excited to talk to him. It's going to be super fun.

48:50It's amazing. What were some of the biggest mistakes? And you go back and think about building out a digital product to save someone a little bit of a headache. I'll give you one of mine right off the bat was I first ever, first ever during COVID, I sold a product that people didn't want or need. and so I spent about eight months building something out and I'm like hey it's here no one bought it what was it it was um it was a program that was helping um videographers and I just did not survey enough people and then I later on did one on sports and it absolutely crushed so it was more like a general like a general videography and I wasn't making content about it at the time I was doing nothing I'm like oh yeah I know how to do this really well like I should make something about it and it sold like 10 or 20 and i'm like this just is this is not this is not it i probably could have kept going with it uh and done really well but i niched it down to sports and it absolutely crushed um but that's yeah so you're thinking about building a product you should survey people first that'll be my piece my one takeaway and piece of advice but i'll let you go uh mine would be pre-orders where i would say depends how long you take to create the product, right?

50:04If it's like a big thing, you're going to have a lot of videos in there. You're going to edit the videos like you would a YouTube video. It's going to take a bit more time for, uh, actually I would say, do this, start with just an ebook and then expand it. So here's kind of the process. You're going to start with an ebook that should take no longer than a month, right? You're not writing a full book. It's not going to be crazy edited. Just start with the ebook a month out. Just give yourself a month. Don't start writing it yet. set a specific date a month out. You're going to build the landing page first and write the copy for it first.

50:40That way you can kind of craft how compelling or persuading it is and what's going to be inside up front. The landing page is like a persuasive summary of what it is that you're selling. Then what you need to focus on is fulfilling on that landing page. Throughout that month, you're going to practice promoting. And the thing here is don't get discouraged if people don't actually buy right away because they're less likely to buy a pre-order and they're only going to start buying in swaths as it gets closer to that launch date. Now, that's going to be your initial like validation mechanism. So you're going to promote a lot until that launch date.

51:25And if it is not meeting your expectations a week before, like if you know that this thing just isn't going to sell, then cut it off. Refund everyone, start fresh, and then plan to do something else two to three months from now and spend a lot of time figuring out what that's going to be. If you are getting sales, great. Finish it before the launch date, put it in people's hands. And now, well, one, because of that, you're going to price it a bit lower because it's just an ebook, right? It's something that you're just trying to validate. Then from there, you get testimonials, you get customer feedback, and then you turn it into a more full-fledged course, maybe a cohort-based course, maybe something else that has videos, that has expanded modules, whatever it may be.

52:15And at that time, you're going to increase the price. And you're going to treat that as a second launch date because that creates another scarcity point where people are going to buy a lot in that week leading up to the price increase. Trust me on that. If you've never done that, it leads to a lot of sales. Now you have your course, right? If you want to expand it further, you can. But that's kind of like my thing is don't spend the eight months trying like thinking it's going to do well and then it flops. Just validate as early as you can by starting small, expanding from there and giving yourself enough space to increase the value and increase the price.

52:58Right. MVP first in many cases for myself. When I started my community, that was pretty successful. Modern Mastery, it's closed now. But I started that at like seven bucks a month because I just wanted to get the first 100, 200 people in. So it looked active and I wanted to fill it up with content before I increased the price. Then when I increased the price, those$7 people wanted to maintain their price so they didn't cancel. When I increased the price, a lot more people joined because they wanted to get in at that price before. Then as more things got added to the community, I would do that every three to six months is have like a big promotion for the price increase.

53:43A lot of people would join and it kind of locked people in at the lower level. And if they didn't find value, they can cancel and they probably wouldn't come back anyways. But I see a lot of people, they're like, okay, I'm going to start a paid community. Boom,$99, which is fine. That's a decent price. But you're not giving yourself any wiggle room. If people don't find the value in it and someone joins at$99, then you can't decrease the price. You can't test anything else. The only way you can go in this product game is like up in price, right? If you go down, then you're doing a disservice to everyone that's bought before.

54:15So you just literally can't do that. So give yourself a lot of runway because you think you, a lot of people are telling you to increase your prices. so people start at the high price, but they need to start low and then increase because it's going to lead not only to a lot more sales, but a lot more loyalty and you just feeling confident that you're providing a lot of value for the price. Do you think a creator needs or should have something to sell from the get or do you think it's put some time in, build an audience and then craft your offer. Either way, but having something to sell absolutely helps with clarity.

54:56And it gives you something to work towards. A lot of people that start and aren't being paid for it or don't have the potential for being paid for it, they either tend to burn out and quit or they go on to be huge creators, but then they can't monetize their audience because they haven't focused on that at all. They launch something and then their entire audience turns against them because they're like, oh, I thought you weren't going to sell anything. So I would say start selling from the get-go. Make that very apparent to the people that are going to follow you just by how you speak, how you promote, so on and so forth.

55:33It comes with the territory. But it also, if you don't know what to write in terms of ideas or what type of content to create, you always have a fallback. If you can always go to whatever product or service you sell, take an idea from that, and then turn that into a piece of content. And you know that it's leading directly or indirectly to more sales. So it's a very, you have that feedback loop. You also brought up your newsletter. And I think you have one of the best newsletters out there. I also saw that you have like over 180 ,000 members of your newsletter, which is absolutely insane. Can you talk about newsletters, why they're so important, how to do them properly, and why they're so important to be able to sell?

56:24Because people on social media, like they're not really in a buying state. It's really hard to kind of disrupt, especially if you're selling something high ticket. So if you could go into the importance of a newsletter and how to do it properly, I'd really appreciate it. This can be really long. So bear with me. Let's lock in. I'm ready to get your pen and paper. Get your notebooks out. Okay. Why a newsletter is important. It is owned distribution. Sure. It's on a platform like Substack or Beehive or Kit, but a social media platform, you're kind of at the whim of the platform. If you get banned, you don't take your followers with you.

57:02If you get banned from a newsletter, you can download your list and you can transfer over to another platform. Second thing, it's long form. As much as people love short form and the growth and virality that comes from that, I would argue that a thousand newsletter subscribers is more valuable than 25 ,000 followers on social media, just in terms of how much they actually want to hear from you, how much they're going to buy from you because they care about you and will benefit directly from your products. And two, time under attention. So James Clear, you've read his book, Atomic Habits. If you hear the word habits, you immediately think of James Clear.

57:45Like he owns that word of all things because you spent time with his ideas. He wrote a bestselling book on it. A newsletter isn't a book, but it's much longer than a 60 second post on social media. It's going to be 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes of reading time. And the more newsletters you have, the more times people spend with you, and the more people are likely for your ideas to pop up in their head as they're going about life, and the more likely they are to trust you, which is going to be a big factor when AI starts coming even more into play, and they're going to buy from you. In terms of how to build the newsletter, I think I have a unique take on this.

58:28This ties in with sales funnels and everything else. My entire sales funnel is my newsletter. I see it as more of a content ecosystem and you building a world of ideas and topics for people to explore. So if you think of your brand as like a small scale Marvel cinematic universe, Marvel has the Avengers. It has all the different comic books. It has movies. Then it has action figures, which are the products. And it has various lore and other spinoffs, spinoff TV shows here and there. So you can think of your newsletters as your movies. You can think of your products as your products or the action figures.

59:11And you can think of your social media posts as the TV shows. with that that gives people so much to binge watch they have something to go to after the fact with a traditional sales funnel not that the purpose of it is education it's sales but education leads to sales so if i just give people this entire library of content that i build over time takes time then i'm much more likely to gain a lot of their trust so that's the first thing is it takes a lot of time and effort to build, but one newsletter, one YouTube video can be perfectly fine. The newsletter is like my highest priority. So I spend about an hour in the morning on that.

59:54And then the other hours, like on social media content and putting that on all different platforms, but the newsletter gets turned into the outline for my YouTube script. So when I film YouTube videos, I just have the newsletter pulled up. I read a sentence, I read the section, and then I try to articulate it to the camera. And for certain ideas that I don't want to mess up, I just read it off the script and we put a text screen or B-roll over that makes the editing process super simple. That also gets posted as a podcast. So if you're wondering if people will care about that, it being the same content, refer back to us talking about repeating yourself.

1:00:33People just like consuming in different mediums. And a lot of people are only going to consume in one medium. So it's great. Where that comes into play with being a sales funnel is that in my newsletter, it's kind of like a process for me to link my offers, usually just two links. So if I have a digital product, I'll include that in the middle. If I have, let's say a service or freelancing service, I'll link that at the bottom. It doesn't really matter where it's, wherever you can tie it in. So if I have a section that has anything to do with writing, then I'm going to link to our writer, right?

1:01:13And that just naturally follows into the YouTube videos because when I look at the script, then I just say that to the camera and the links in the description. So now I have two points where people are potentially going to pay me for what I do. Now, in order to grow the newsletter, a lot of people go the lead magnet route, which is great. But if your newsletters are really valuable, each one of them are a lead magnet. So now you have two things. You have the newsletter as a lead magnet, if it's valuable. And two, you have your offers promoted in there. So it's kind of like a indirect sales page.

1:01:52On social media, I've gotten bad at this recently, but in my prime, you post the newsletter once a day under a social media post. So I have this reminder in my calendar. It's at like 9 a.m. where I'll go to my sub stack. I'll well, first I'll look at the social media post I had for that day. Let's say one is on the topic of focus. It's like, OK, I've written a bunch of newsletters on focus. Let's go find one. Go to my sub stack, scroll down, find one about focus, reply to that tweet and be like, if you want to read more, go here, link it. Boom. They connect to one another. People go to that. People read it.

1:02:39They're very likely to subscribe if they liked it. So that's how I gain newsletter subscribers. And they see my products or service. So they're somewhat likely to buy as well. And since they're on the newsletter now, they're going to get the other ones and they're going to be quote unquote remarketed to, because my products or services are going to be in there. So now for my entire sales funnel, all I really have to do is stay consistent with content. I have to post on short form social media. I have to write my newsletter once a week. I have to create the YouTube video and link everything in the description from products to newsletters.

1:03:13And then once a day, I need to paste a relevant newsletter to the topic I was talking about on social media that week. And that's kind of it. I love it. I love it. Selfishly, what platform are you using for the newsletter? Is it Substack? And it's free, correct? Yeah, Substack. And can you do the tagging and whatnot? Like if you had a list that was like, oh, someone got in from over here. Can you do that or no? No, I can't do that. No, that's the unfortunate thing. And that's why I put it off for so long because Substack seems great, right? They have the social media aspect now, and I started on Twitter, so I'm good at writing the short form written posts.

1:03:57So those get a decent amount of engagement for me, and it's a way to grow your newsletter. But they don't allow the automations. They don't allow the tagging. I would go with Beehive if you want to do that. But for my quote unquote content ecosystem since i'm not really focused on the automations it's more so what i just went over then yeah it makes a lot of sense for me yeah i feel like you're at a benefit though being a writer like because your newsletters are long and i feel like most people there's there's people that are doing it shitty like they just get your email and like every time their newsletter it's just like hey buy it a couple sentence and then they fucking link it they're not actually providing any value but i think if you really do take the extra time and effort to think of the newsletter as like a separate piece of content that you can then repurpose into other pieces of content but like the fact that it's your highest priority like it allows you to repurpose that content and have it be an actual piece of content as opposed to just like i'm getting another fucking email from so and so trying to sell me something yeah yeah people look forward to it um but you can't you can't force it to be long.

1:05:13It's really hard to force it to be long. Like when I'm outlining it, sometimes it'll be 2000 words, which is still long for a newsletter. Sometimes it'll be like 5 ,000, 6 ,000, just because like, I have a lot to write about that thing. Like ideas just coming, start coming to mind. And like, I'm not going to stop myself from writing about it if it just comes out. So the, the magic of newsletters is in the outline. Absolutely. It's one, the topic or title, same with YouTube, but also writing an outline at the start of the week, right? I usually don't just go straight into writing the actual newsletter, like stream of consciousness.

1:05:51I'll outline five bullet points. And then as I go on my walks, as I listen to other things, that kind of becomes a magnet for ideas where I don't know if you've experienced this. It's kind of just how the brain works. When you have a goal or a project, you tend to notice things that help you do that thing well, where like if you have an idea to start a business and you're in a conversation with a buddy, the thing that is going to stick out to you most in that conversation is the idea that's going to help fuel your business. And then you tend to write that down. You're like, oh, that was perfect.

1:06:25And then you go and implement it. So I kind of fabricate that process by having the newsletter outline so that whenever I'm listening to something, having a conversation, it's like, ooh, that idea definitely isn't the topic I was writing about, but it's a really good idea and I could tie it in. So with my newsletters, I really focus on idea density. That's like how I grade my own content in general is how many dense good ideas are people being exposed to throughout this newsletter. And a lot of the times my best newsletters are usually like, I don't sit down and write them all at once. It's like, I have one idea.

1:07:07I pop that in somehow in the newsletter and then I expand on it a bit and it, and then the same thing happens over and over. So the newsletter kind of writes itself when I really focus on the outline for that week because I'm just pulling a bunch of these ideas together like Legos to create something very unique that people aren't expecting. But I title it as something that could potentially go viral, right? So it's like, it's not clickbait, it's legit bait because I am delivering on the promise, but definitely baiting to get into that broad audience. But people like it because I'm exposing them to something new.

1:07:46They learn something new and they're like, oh, I never thought about it that way so that's the newsletter we need more legit bait on social media i was gonna say i never heard put that in the comment right now some legit bait you've seen this week you have a ton of great ideas it sounds like i mean you're you're pulling them from books you're pulling them from different youtube videos that you're seeing in different places whether it be a newsletter that you also read twitter and whatnot i think creators also believe that they they need more ideas you you've you've said this many a times that you think they actually need better filters.

1:08:18But what does that mean in practicality? What does it mean to have better filters for your ideas? And how can someone implement that? Yeah, that's kind of like the newsletter or the project or whatever it is. If social media or writing content is your filter, then you're just going to notice a lot of things that may go viral, which may work. But the more unique you try to make your newsletters or the businesses you're working on, the products you're building. That's kind of your filter for learning. For those that struggle to come up with ideas, it can go either way. The solution is either to just overwhelm yourself with more good ideas until one sticks out or to just cut yourself off.

1:09:05Do like a small scale dopamine detox for three days, just be okay with boredom and let your mind get back to its natural state of having those great ideas. And with that, during that boredom, try to implement some reflection, right, on your past experiences, because the best ideas are just ones that you can pull out of everyday moments. Like right now, this is really the skill of becoming a content creator, is can you pull an insight or a great idea out of this moment that you're in right now. Like there's probably something within the last five minutes that we could take and turn into something that would go viral.

1:09:47A lot of people don't think that's possible in their day-to-day life because they think it's just boring. But if you really think about it, there's something that you can observe. There's something you can look into that sparks one idea. Like if I look at, I have a tripod sitting over there. If I look at that and I just start questioning, how was that made? Why was it made? Who made it? What's the manufacturing process? Does a camera go on that? Yes, obviously. Okay, how is the camera made? Who uses the camera? What are they filming with the camera? Like you just continue going down these rabbit holes of questions.

1:10:24You pick anything as your starting point, your phone, the screen, the leaf outside, whatever it is, you'll come across something that can turn into content. So it's really about thinking, right? And a lot of people don't do that very deeply today because they tend to get distracted before they can reach the next question. Brother, I've been hijacked by this thing right here. Okay. I went, I was just, I was just on a hunting trip for like five days in the Idaho wilderness and obviously no phones. I'm just sitting in a hole for like 12 hours, one of these days. And I can't, I had a journal and man, if I, I've never filled more pages in that damn journal.

1:11:01Cause I was so bored. I was like, this is so boring. the elk or asleep like what the heck is going on and like 50 pages like i'm so bored you have to say how many times you can write it i'm cold but i i felt like i had so many great ideas and i feel like i came out of it so rejuvenated and really just rethinking how hijacked my attention was from the moment i woke up to the moment i went to bed uh and i have started this last week and I'm so guilty of this. I'm not going to lie to you guys. I fucking check my phone in the morning. I wake up and I fucking scroll, dude. I scroll. You too? Dude, I scroll.

1:11:40I fall in and out of it. God damn it. It makes me feel a lot better. Fuck you. We're not alone. We're not alone out there. Okay, I thought you were trying to say you weren't. No, no, no. Anyways, the last week I consciously have picked up the death machine and set it back down. And I'm like, you're my bitch. I fucking got you this week. And it's been a process, but it's crazy because I really want you all to think about this. When you wake up, I mean, dude, it's like there's a magnet on my hand to grab the phone. And it's immediately Instagram, cheap dopamine. It's the first thing I go to. It's our YouTube analytics.

1:12:10How many subscribers did we get overnight? What is this at? What did the last video do? What are we at in the last hour? And it's ridiculous. Instead, for the last four or five days, and I'm new to this, okay? I'm going to mess this up in the next few days, but I'm telling you guys what is worth. A couple of days left. A couple of days left to make this a seven-day sprint. To wake up and just like pop out and look at my plants and be like, holy shit. OK, we're here. We're having a good morning. It's calm. It's quiet. And that has changed a lot. It's like really helped me, I think, get in a more like I notice I have more ideas in that morning space.

1:12:43You mentioned, though, something I want to go back to about virality. You're talking about how you're thinking about these different topics and you can look at it and you ask all these different questions. What is something that you've noticed about the content that does go viral? I've studied your posts over the last month as we were thinking about even having this conversation. And I've pulled a lot of your outliers. And it's very interesting to me what does stick out for for those posts that end up getting half a million plus views on YouTube. What do you notice about them that you can tell our listeners today that they can pull into the things that they're doing?

1:13:14Because it's a skill, man, and it's possible. Like someone so we're chatting about the other day is like you can't promise virality. And I'm like, I think a guy named Jimmy, Mr. Beast, can promise virality. You know, I think there's certain people, Orion Trahan. It's like there's something there inherently that makes us want to keep watching and gets these million plus people to be interested in in the topic. I think there's plenty of people that we can all pull. But I'm curious what your thoughts are. Yeah, I've actually mapped these down. I'm pulling something up. OK, yeah, I wrote a newsletter on this.

1:13:50I wish I could just articulate them off the top of my head. I call it the value equation, right? It's like whenever I don't know what to write about, I'll tend to try, I'll have an idea and I'll try to break it down into like these different categories. So the first three is problem. So, I mean, if you've studied copywriting, you know, like the big problem, that's what you start with. That's very attention grabbing that all of these are attention grabbing. So problem, what is the big problem? Why does it relate to other people? take the idea you have, even if it's weird or something esoteric or very like poetic, ground that in a relatable problem.

1:14:32That's a great way to start any newsletter, any piece of content is just start with the problem. Goal, obviously the opposite of that. What's the desired outcome? People love desired outcomes. Process. So from problem to goal, what are the steps that people can take? The more unique those are, the more you actually think them through. Like think of the goal? How do you start a business? Okay, that's an overdone topic. How would you start it? Is there something unique and novel you can throw in there that makes people actually pay attention to it? The next is concept. So how can you take a concept that has done well before and repackage it as your own?

1:15:15The one person business is a concept, right? The solopreneur, freelancer, whatever, a company of one, you take the one person business and it gives people this new way of thinking about something that's been talked about millions of times before, right? And just reframing and giving people a positioning and idea so that you can teach it well. Proof, social proof, obviously that's pretty sticky. Risk reversal. So how to start a business without working 12 hours a day. It's like the risk of working 12 hours a day, you reverse that. Pain points, similar with problem benefits, similar with goal, and then level of awareness.

1:15:56So in marketing, there's unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, very aware. And on social media, you usually have to target between one and three. So between unaware and solution aware. So I usually incorporate a lot of problems or pain points to make them aware of a problem. In my newsletter, my introduction is usually for the problem aware or the unaware, and then I lead them into the solution, which is typically the step-by-step, the concept, whatever it is. And then at the end, if I want to promote something while they're aware, they're more likely to buy. Now, all of those things, if you wrote those down, can be or just search the value equation Danco on Google and you'll find the article.

1:16:48But those are kind of the building blocks for my YouTube titles. So how to learn anything 10x faster than anyone else. That's a process, right? A novel process that I named. The one-person business model, how to productize yourself. That's the concept and the process together. There's a few others. But if you look through really any YouTube video, you'll tend to see that it's a mixture of those things strung together into some kind of narrative. Was there something in your journey, whether it's a system that you implemented into your content creating process or a framework that you implemented that really made the difference for you as a creator and allowing you to monetize your work and your writing?

1:17:38Like, is there something that you implemented that was like, holy shit, this is a huge needle mover and it really made a big difference? It was the newsletter, not to sound like a broken record, but like the content ecosystem of like, oh, the newsletter I can post to YouTube. Like that can just be the script. I'm overcomplicating this too much. I think people won't like it because it's the same content. But if I were to read a newsletter and watch a YouTube video on it, I could choose between either or I could read both. And repetition is very helpful with learning. So why wouldn't I do both? It's a different style learning mechanism, but that gave me the oomph to write a newsletter consistently, which a lot of people don't do because they think it's kind of useless or only so many people are going to see it or it's only going to go out once.

1:18:32But if you use the content ecosystem and you link it under your content every day, then a lot of people are going to see the older newsletters. And since it turns into a YouTube video, you're more likely to put a lot of time and effort into the newsletter. So it's just this circular thing. And I guess the big thing there is that long form is one so much more fun and meaningful to create, be it a podcast like this or a newsletter or YouTube video. you feel like you're actually helping people but then the rewards you get from that in terms of trust money anything else brand deals whatever you want to do it's just so much more so if you can kind of create this weekly system that not only incentivizes you to write the newsletter post the YouTube video, but it makes it fun, then that's like the big insight is really focus on how to integrate long form into your workflow, especially if you started on social media and kind of got stuck in that like reels, likes, followers trap.

1:19:41It's something that I think, I think that's something that a lot of people get stuck in is that that cheap dopamine hit, man. Like I was explaining that i was explaining a little bit earlier it's a tough little game to break out of yeah one so i have like big hopes for what i'm working on right now but if i were still a solo business or uh if i really wanted to give myself a challenge i feel like a lot of people sleep on writing but then you look at justin welsh makes more than enough money only by writing doesn't create YouTube videos. He's been on a few podcasts, only newsletter, only Twitter, only LinkedIn.

1:20:23That's it. And he's doing great. A lot of people think that they have to create the reels. They have to create the YouTube shorts. The editing alone on that can get very time sucking. You can just write and you can build an incredible business just based on the writing. If I wanted to put myself up to the challenge, just stop posting on YouTube. Don't post reels. Only post written content across all platforms i definitely wouldn't go to zero would it be as effective maybe maybe not but i could still build something great the most viewed 505 podcast is by someone who doesn't do any social content and just writes seth godin master of marketing oh yeah yeah i remember i remember during the pod we were like asking him about that he goes i don't need to be on instagram or on this and it's really interesting because after we were chatting about i was like but Seth isn't of this.

1:21:12He's not like, you know, he's not a younger guy like us, but I'm like, dude, well, it kind of shows we have the most viewed podcast ever by far. It's like 140 something thousand. Uh, and it's, it's amazing because he's right. He doesn't need to. And he's like, my, my ideas and what I do just needs to be remarkable. He's like, I don't need to sit and think about something that's cheap and small. I can spend a year writing a book and put out amazing thoughts that I think will actually change someone's life. I could put my focus into that and I think I'll be really successful. And I was like, I mean, we were debating it after.

1:21:45I know. I still am debating it. I mean, I know. I think I think this is the quickest way to see success for your ideas to manifest into whatever it is that you want. When it comes to your writing, are you using AI to like help you flesh out your ideas in any way? Are you going on a walk? You're writing down some new ideas are you talking to chat gpt or clod to help you flesh out those newsletters or are you just fucking old school being like i'm a right i'm a writer i'm gonna spend an hour writing this myself are you using ai in any way shape or form to like help you with your newsletters uh yes it really depends where it depends on the requirements of the newsletter So if I need to research a good amount, then I usually tend to use AI now because it's just so much easier and I can get what I need to get a lot faster because I can prompt it specifically as to what I want.

1:22:45In terms of idea generation or writing, I have tried, I've never posted anything that is written by AI, but I've tried to get it to replicate my writing. It's never gotten exactly where I want it to be. but that taught me a lot about how to use AI in general. In terms of idea generation, I have created various thought partner prompts that I create in a way that questions me in the right direction, right? It doesn't give me the idea. It makes me come up with it on my own. Now, in terms of social media posts, something that I find very helpful is I've taken the patterns of all of my best social media posts.

1:23:35I put them into this huge mega prompt. And now whenever I create a newsletter, I pop it into that and it generates like five outlines they're called, but the outlines have kind of everything I went over in that value equation list. But with a few other things like the core paradox, the key quotes, it has the big problem, goals, pain points, so on and so forth. So it's less about actually writing for me. It's giving me the, the like creative building blocks to have my own idea. So that's kind of my frame is I want it to prompt me to have my own, but I have definitely felt the effects of like relying on that too much.

1:24:27And so once I noticed that, like right now, it's just pure writing because I feel like I have to get back to just being able to generate stuff myself. I don't know if that's because of AI or because like a stressful period in my life or something else that could cause that. But either way, when that happens, I tend to just like peel back, go back to the Neanderthalic basics. And you feel like a lot of people are relying too heavily nowadays with AI. Like it is so easy to type out an idea that you have and it could fucking write a full newsletter or a full script. And I feel like it's made people really lazy.

1:25:08It's really fucking cool. Like it's insane to see what something like chat can give you and produce. But I feel like, I don't know, it's going to make people lazy. and you almost feel like the idea isn't fully yours because it's like you used AI to like help you do it and like make the decisions for you. I'm curious also to hear about how you prompt it to like question you because chat is very like. Dude, just kisses my ass. Yeah. I better get mad at him, dude. Crack the whip on the guy. Knock it off. Yeah, dude. He's like, dude, you're so smart. Shut the fuck up. I do think over the next five to 10 years, how we view AI is going to be vastly different.

1:25:50It's just going to be an integrated part of everyone's workflow, but how people use AI is going to determine whether they get results or not. Because what you put out, especially over time, you still have to discern and choose what it is, right? Like it's still determined by the taste of the individual what they choose to include in their own work that is from AI, right? Because everyone can write a newsletter. Anyone can get research from AI. Anyone can bounce ideas off of AI. But when you prompt AI, especially if it's not specific, you're just asking a question, ChatGPT is just guessing as to what is the best, right?

1:26:35And it's going to tell a different person in a different thing. So you need to be able to tell whether or not that's a good answer and whether or not you're going to include it as an idea in your own thing. Because if I read a book, I get an idea and then I'm like, oh, I should include that in my newsletter. It's usually because like, that's my taste signal going off. Like, oh, that's really good. I need to share that with other people. If AI or chat GPT doesn't do that for me, but it sounds nice, then I'm not going to include it. But if it's a really good idea and just because chat GPT had it, I'm going to try to set aside my biases so that I can include a very good idea that other people could benefit from.

1:27:18So it's really dependent. And I've been very dogmatic and polarizing about it before. A lot of people have, especially when it was first becoming new and accelerating, but I think we just don't know what shape it's going to take. I don't think that art is determined by the tool that you use. I think art is determined by the story that you tell, the piece of your soul that you put into the work, so on and so forth, right? You compare AI, the tool now, to the tools of the past and just look at how they've progressed throughout history, I could imagine that when Photoshop came out or CGI especially came out, people would be like, oh, you aren't hand drawing this thing.

1:28:04Like this isn't authentic. This isn't yours. And there's a way to use AI that is authentic and can, in fact, amplify or enhance your workflow. One of the ways that I think you can do that is by getting extremely specific on what you want AI to do. the first way I discovered this was trying to get it to write like me and I was trying to get it to replicate tweets so how I did this is first I just said okay write 10 tweets on these ideas it spat them out I'm like okay these suck like yeah they could do okay it doesn't sound like me I'm gonna have to rewrite them anyways I wouldn't even write about eight of these ideas so kind of useless.

1:28:48Then I got a bit more specific because I know how to write tweets. And so I was like teaching it, kind of like giving it a guide on how I would write tweets. And then it got a bit better. And then I refined it a bit more, got a bit more specific. And eventually I ended up with like this 2000 word prompt going through like, do this, don't do this, do this, don't do this. Okay. Here's the principles of writing tweets. Here's a few examples. Here's the exact output format I want you to use. I didn't understand much about prompt engineering at the time. So I was looking at like really good prompts that I'd seen before and kind of like pulling over the structure of that for how I'm going to structure it.

1:29:27Where can somebody find those prompts? Like if somebody wanted to learn how to prompt AI better, like where do they go to find that? I'll get to that. And if you want to include something in the description, we'd love to. We'd love to. Okay. I'll give you like a Google doc extremely freaking valuable but that I created like the 2000 word document how to write tweets and it was pretty good I I had it spit out in each response I would give it like a newsletter or a piece of content and it would spit out four one-liner posts uh four paragraph posts and then four like bullet list posts and I could tell it which one I wanted more of, how to refine it, so on and so forth.

1:30:09It was really good. And so I realized, okay, in order for AI to do what I actually want it to do, if I have an idea of what I want it to do, I have to teach it exactly how to do that thing. So then I started thinking, okay, well, is the usefulness of AI only determined by what I'm really good at? And in a lot of the cases, that's correct. Yes. If you're very good at it, you're going to be able to do that thing 10 times better than anyone else with AI. But the beautiful thing here is that there are YouTube videos and courses and PDFs that have everyone's process in it. So what I see this as is AI allows me to focus more on my craft.

1:30:57It allows me to focus on the thing that I don't want to outsource to AI. For everything else, I can pull from experts in the field and teach the AI how to do exactly that. So I like to focus on my writing, but now for things like landing pages or a lot of the promotional stuff, because I don't really care about that unless, it depends. If I have the idea for it, then I'll go through and bust it out. But if I wanted to create a landing page, then what I could do is I would say, okay, first thing I need is specific instructions on how to create it. So with that, I could take a book like Breakthrough Advertising, which is like a classic copywriting book.

1:31:44Then I can take a website that I want to use. And I could, let's start with the website first. I take the landing page or website that I want to emulate. I copy paste that into chat GPT and I say, break down exactly what makes this landing page work. Break down the structure of it, the psychological tactics that went into it, sentence by sentence, just like comprehensive breakdown, teach me how to replicate this. Now I have a document, exactly what to do. Then I take breakthrough advertising and I say, okay, you're going to give me a comprehensive guide on how to write great copy. Now I can take both of those instructions and I can feed it into this meta prompt, which is what you guys can link in the description, which is pretty much a prompt that helps you create prompts.

1:32:38Sounds funny, but it's freaking incredible. So you take that, you send the meta prompt, and then it's going to ask you, okay, what kind of prompt do you want to create? And then I'm going to type in, I want to create a prompt that helps me write landing pages. What you're going to do then is you're going to say, okay, you're going to first interview me for any context that you need that will help you create this landing page. After that, you're going to take all of those questions that I answered, and you're going to use these two guides on how to write copy and how to structure the landing page.

1:33:17And you're going to write that based on my own ideas and the context that I gave you. From there, it'll give you a billion times better landing pages than just asking ChatGPT to write you a landing page, right? So there's so many different ways to do this, but the two things that you need are, one, just straight instructions for what you're trying to do. Two, turn that into a prompt that asks you questions so it can gather the necessary feedback required to do so. If you wanted to use this to quote unquote, start a business or do really anything you want to do for a business, you have to break down, okay, what am I trying to do?

1:33:57First, I need a brand. I need content. I need a product and I need marketing for each of those things. It's like to do all of this with AI, you're not just signing up for a software that does it for you. You're going through that process with each aspect of your business. You're creating a bunch of these little employees called prompts that help create the first draft or prototype of those things that you can then refine and deploy as necessary. Are you saving those on just a Google Doc? Like I know we have that one for the tweets. When you come up with these and you finally really get it working for you, because I think that's something that many people have struggled with using an AI platform is, you know, yeah, it can give you it can give you every answer in the world you've ever wanted but getting it to say it in a specific format is very difficult like you just explained how you have it you know do it with the tweets are you saving those on a document that's the easiest way to do it are you creating your own little chat gbt at the top like what what is the what's the situation am i allowed to shameless plug fuck yeah come on uh so the new software eden it'll have prompt items in it.

1:35:06So they're just stored in the prompt items, but that'll have the meta prompt baked in as well, because I feel like a lot of people don't know how to write prompts. So when you first create a prompt item in Eden, it'll guide you through that process of like, what do you want to create? Do you have any references, any examples? What do you want to use to create the instructions for this? Okay. And then you can refine from there and then the prompt is stored and you can share it or you can just use it in a chat or on the canvas so on and so forth what's been one of the most difficult things of creating eden and creating an actual like an actual physical thing i know it's digital but like you know an actual thing not just selling a not just selling like a pdf or a cohort or i think that the natural progression for many people in the online business sphere is you sell you start exactly how we we started you sell something that's digital you work your way up, you do some sort of core model, you work into maybe a beverage, a t-shirt, a hoodie, a software, a SaaS.

1:36:08What have been some of these huge learnings going into that space that you can share with people? Oh, it's, man, there's a lot. I'm doing an entire podcast with the team on it soon. But the biggest one is like me coming from being a one person business is like I'm still learning how to do this whole team thing, right? I feel like that's one thing I'm good at leaning into is like, I don't know what I'm doing. So this entire process is on learning experience. That's the first thing. Second is we had to rebuild the entire app because it used to be called Cortex. But the reason we got stuck there is because we built it like a big tech startup in terms of infrastructure and how the teams were siloed into front-end, back-end specific parts of the product.

1:37:03And as a startup and small team, that wasn't working for us. We were just constantly getting stuck on maintenance and bug fixes. And we had this big vision for the app, but it felt like we were just moving so slow and what should have taken six months was gonna take two to three years. and that just wasn't acceptable to us. So Matt and Ari, the other co-founders went off, started building a prototype, knew how to build it in a way that would allow us to iterate faster. And now that's going pretty well. During that time, we decided it'd probably be better to rebrand to something less techie and masculine, to something that fits the market we're going into more, which is where Eden and the more, I guess, feminine white and green branding came into play rather than like blurple and dark gray or black.

1:37:52So I guess if we extracted from that, what the greatest lesson is, it would be to be okay with starting over, knowing that you aren't losing too much, right? Because you keep the experience. So call it a pivot, call it starting over.

1:38:18The biggest thing there was not getting trapped in the sunk cost fallacy. Like we spent two years building this. I've sunk millions of dollars into it. It's painful to be like, we're not doing this anymore. We are literally rebuilding it. It's going to take longer, but it's just the right thing to do so that's the big thing is be okay with fucking up starting over dude we know about a pivot brother we got you yeah mom we know about a pivot i've pivoted so many times i've fucking made it 360 just like keep pivoting okay so on the topic of pivoting and and sunk cost fallacy how do you know when it's time to pivot verse i just haven't put enough time and effort into this and I should keep going and see it through.

1:39:11It's when it's too painful not to pivot is when you just reach a point of knowing and it's like you have to trust that gut feeling. You know it deep down, but your mind wants to tell you like, no, you should keep going. But then you don't think any further than that. Like if you really think further, like where is this going to be in two years am i okay with that where's the other one going to be in two years is that better go with the other one no matter how painful it is now yeah so also from your haircut i would say that you're in war mode is that correct yeah versus monk mode so what is um for those who don't know what is war mode and like what is your day-to-day output looking like and like what is a day-to-day schedule look like for Danco right now?

1:40:07Yeah. So what I call war mode is like the opposite of monk mode where monk mode kind of means in today's world, it's like, oh, disappear, work a lot, achieve your goals. I think that's more like war mode. Actual monk mode is like asceticism and being bored, not doing anything, abstaining from sex drugs whatever the monks do but war mode on the other hand is like it's this mindset you get into of like i'm just gonna achieve my goal at all costs right it kind of it kind of converges on that you feel it it's kind of it's hard to like force yourself into it but you know when it's time like you need to enter that season of life so i signify that by buzzing my hair off and embracing the terrible hairline that I have.

1:40:59So it like forces me to not focus on the insecurity there. But what my day looks like is I'm typically up at, it fluctuates a lot. It could be 4.30, it could be six, but whenever I wake up, it's pretty early. And then I'll go on a walk. That's when I start to just like try to get ideas flowing for the day. And then I'll spend, or I'll come home, I'll shower and I'll get straight into writing. So that's the first thing I need to knock out. If I finish that, I feel like I've had a good day's work because those are the levers, right? That's the foundation. So social media posts and at least like a quarter of the newsletter written because I send that out weekly.

1:41:46So if I finish a quarter, I'm making good progress on that. I record the YouTube video for the week. That takes about an hour. One day out of the week. So I'll exchange newsletter writing for that. After that, I'll go on another walk. And that's like sun, kind of like exercise, trying to hit my 10 ,000 steps, more ideas in the morning. Those are like the main two walking sessions slash non-lifting style exercise. And then after that, go to the gym. Then I come home. Then I eat. And then during quote unquote war mode, I usually go to somewhere where I can work that's out of the house. So a coffee shop or a lobby of a hotel or something of that nature.

1:42:36And then I can usually bust out a good amount of work for like three to four hours there. Then I'll come home, eat again, start the night. If I have any more ideas or things to do, I'll sit down and do it. But that's typically what my day looks like right know so nothing like crazy nothing 12 to 16 hours a day but a good amount where i feel like i'm putting out a lot you're doing quite a bit before you even eat which is interesting are you crushing oh yeah i i used to do intermittent fasting i don't really consider it that anymore um i may have missed when i eat i eat before the first before the second walk so that's around like 9 30 10 a.m okay just so i have food in me before the gym uh but yeah i used to not eat until one and it was fine you helps you focus a lot but that's usually like a stress induced focus starving from not eating uh so yeah i i definitely feel like body composition's better energy's better if you eat earlier in the morning yeah do you are you going with fruit do you like are you big fruit guy?

1:43:51Um, no, I did the, the fruit till noon or the sugar fasting for like two or three months. I enjoy it. Makes it very simple. But, uh, when I'm more, when I'm more focused on like lifting, I know that more of a bro diet or like a bodybuilder diet, just, I feel good. It digests well. Energy's there. I feel pumped. I feel full. I look good. Like everything's there. I'm not really concerned with losing weight right now and i feel like a lot of the the sugar fasting really any kind of diet everyone's marketing it towards those who want to lose weight which is fine and it works but yeah i'm not i'm trying to just like feel really good and feel good and be yeah being overall be an athlete man just oh man just a unit just a rock i love there's a video that you put out you're like when i was kid i just wanted to be a fucking unit in all aspects of life and i'm like fuck yeah dude we're gonna be fucking rich we're gonna be fucking ripped really knowledgeable in a lot of aspects of life dude let's fucking go dan give me give me a couple of book recommendations i got flow in the cart for this long 18 hour flight to hong kong before we get out of here i would like a couple more give me a couple more enlighten me what else you got in the cabinet i've got a good amount uh think on these things by christian murty okay you pulled it out tossing that on dude tossing on the amazon cart okay easy i got one right next to her um if you want like esoteric stuff give me give me a psychology one i feel like you know quite a bit about psychology give me a psych one to take on the plane one that i really like is integral psychology integral by ken wilber that kind of goes if you like spirituality or any of that kind of talk it grounds it in modern psychology it's more of like here's psychology across history and everything related with it and it caused a lot of things to click for me.

1:45:59So integral psychology is really good.

1:46:05There's a lot, man. The way of the superior man, I feel like self-improvement YouTube took that in a direction it wasn't meant to go in. But if you want to learn how to be a better man in relationships, that's a great one. uh red pill stuff aside

1:46:24a brief history of everything by ken wilber that one may blow your mind depending on how interested you are in that stuff but like very generalized overview of history as a whole and why things happen the way they did really cool i'm gonna be i'm telling you i'm gonna come back from this trip to hong kong The funniest thing about this conversation is Brayden thinks he's going to be finishing multiple books on a fucking week-long trip to Hong Kong. Every time I've ever gone on a trip, you don't know. Dude, I'm a fast little reader. Fast little reader. I'm going to finish like a chapter and a half.

1:47:01No, I'm going to be locked in on both of these flights. Long flights. Okay. You're under arresting me. I have so much more that I want to talk to you about, but I have one last thing that I want to talk to you about. And it's getting clarity on your goals and clarity in life. And you like the way you think about that is you preach that like it's important to know what you want, but it's almost like more important to know what you don't like and what you don't want and how important it is for your goals to have gravity. And so I would love to leave the listeners with like you kind of expanding on that and like if they have goals or they want to go out and achieve these, you know, grand goals that they have and accomplish things like how do they go about that and why do their goals need to have gravity?

1:47:43and like what does that exactly mean yeah i'll start by making you think as your life and where you want to be as like a map in a video game so if you've played world of warcraft or any game you know that where you are on the map that's like the only thing that shows it's like a bit bright there and you can see in the vicinity around you but everywhere else is dark right You would call that the unknown. So where you are or where you've been is known. Everything else is unknown. Everyone's so focused on like, oh, what do I want? What do I want? When you don't know, right? It's in the unknown. There is no way of you knowing it until you discover it.

1:48:27So let's not focus on that. And let's focus on making mistakes and figuring out what you don't want, because that's tangible and readily accessible to you right now to give you direction in life. right? You can think back on your life and be like, I don't want for me, it's like, I don't want to work that job. I don't want to go through that argument in my relationship again. I don't want to feel like I did when I was waking up and going to McDonald's and getting two sausage egg McMuffins and a nice coffee and sitting down and washing the office for six hours and then not doing anything with my time, right?

1:49:06I know what I don't want. I know how it makes me feel. Those are the data points from which I can then create an aim for my future, not necessarily where I want to be, but where I think I want to be, that gives me direction. I can start pursuing that thing. And along the way, I'm going to make the unknown known. I'm going to experience new things and I'm going to have more data points to refine my aim. So it's less about focusing on what you want. It's more on about moving in a direction that you think is good and being very conscious of mistakes you make along the way so that you don't end up at the top of the mountain that you didn't mean to climb so it's like this process of just trusting the process so to say now one thing you can do is once you have that aim you have an idea of where you want to go you have an idea of what you should do to get there you do that by pursuing goals right if it helps in the context of a video game, these are quests.

1:50:07So if you think of it in that context, you know that a quest that is reserved for level 50, you can't even see it. Like you can't even comprehend that. If you were to start that quest, you would die fighting the first monster. You start at level one, then level two, then level three, and the quest available to you there. So if you know in the future or in the path. If you know that you don't want to be broke and everything that comes along with that, you know that you have to make money in some way. If you choose to start a business to do so, you're not going to go and try to start a unicorn software startup.

1:50:44You're going to start with the digital product because that's what you have the resources and access to do. Cause that's like a new quest that spawned on the map when the internet came up and it's really cool. So you start that and the way when you say goals that have gravity right everyone wants to start a business many people do but they're kind of just doing it because they're conforming because other people said they should and they're following people on youtube and it's a smart thing to do i think a lot of people should do it or at least try it because entrepreneurship is a vessel for personal growth to an extent, but the way you kind of, uh, it's not discipline, but the way you kind of become obsessed with that goal is by again, inverting it.

1:51:37So what happens if you don't achieve that goal? What's the anti-vision? What's the, the force that's pushing you toward that goal, right? It's not really about the goal pulling you towards it. It's about what are you being pushed away from so that you're encouraged to work on that goal. So you just have to really keep in mind and internalize until it becomes a part of you is where do you not want to end up in life? What's going to happen if you keep doing the same thing you're doing today for the next 10 years, right what aim are you working towards unconsciously and if you want to go even deeper there your aim is your frame that's good i need to write about that one your aim it's already in my newsletter don't steal it so what i mean by that is if you've heard of adlerian psychology or even like cybernetics psycho cybernetics, the mind or the human is this goal striving machine.

1:52:44That's what we do. We're like a heat seeking missile where we're trying to aim for the heat and the heat is our aim. So if your aim is to do what your parents or teachers or society said was the best thing to do, which is go to school, get a job, retire at 65, you're going to view life through that lens and you make decisions based on the opportunities available to you. So you're not in control of your own mind or the direction of your own life unless you question that and attempt to reprogram it. So think of it like this, a person who wants to be a good student or has the goal of graduating school and a person who wants to start a business, they read the same book.

1:53:29They're going to go that book and they're each going to pick up ideas that help them achieve their goals, right? Because back to the project discussion, that's the magnet for ideas. So that's like, that's it. That's all of it is if you can be in control of your aim and have this, these like opposing forces, like a life that you really want to live, that you come through, through the mistakes that you make and refining that vision and the anti-vision, that force that pushes you away, the life that you don't want to live. And you've experienced a lot of that. So it's really deeply internalized in your mind.

1:54:10Then you create like this thing where you're just moving in. You feel like you're moving. You're the character of your own story and you feel like it. And you know, when you're in that state of mind and it's one that you wouldn't trade for the world. So find that state of mind, be with it, internalize it, and just keep moving, refining, iterating. Dan, I think you've left the rocks with so much wisdom today. This has been an amazing episode. I feel super inspired. I'm very excited for just this conversation. Thank you so much. This has been episode 182 of the 505 Podcast with Dan Coe. If you're still here, please leave us a subscribe, drop us a comment.

1:54:51We'll see you guys all next week. Peace. You made it to the best part of the show. Some say they only come for the PPD. It's a ritual at this point. Okay, so work less, earn more, enjoy life. Not a bad motto. I feel like we should get that tatted on our wrists. Yeah, I'm thinking about it. I think that we should all collectively go to the parlor. It's a great motto. At least throw it on a fucking shirt. At the very least. At the very least, right? Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. How do you do that, though? Dan explains it in this pod. Dude, wait, it kind of reminds me of the small team big checks, dude.

1:55:30You know what I'm saying? Small team big checks, work less, earn more, enjoy life. I think it's something we're all after. I think you hear that and you're like, yeah, no fucking shit. Sounds nice. How do you actually do it? And it's by building a personal brand online. It's by building a personal brand online. It's about starting that email newsletter from day one. If you start building your brand, do yourself a favor, don't do what we did and wait three and a half years to start your email newsletter. Yeah, I think one of the, yes, I think one of the biggest things that Dan talked about is he's like, it should only take you an hour.

1:56:06And if it's taking you longer than an hour, you're not actually working on or focusing on the things that are actually moving the needle. And I think a lot of us, we can get into this fake productivity where it's like, let me pretend or let me act like I'm busier than I am. And you're not actually working on the things that are going to move the needle forward. And so, I mean, if Dan Coe is like, yo, all you need is an hour a day, I kind of take his word. I take it as scripture at this point. All right. Stephen Bartlett had an amazing video that he put out, I think like yesterday, about a philosophy that Steve Jobs had where as creative people, we get distracted very easily.

1:56:48We talk, I mean, we probably have a bazillion ideas. If you looked at our notes, you'd be like, wow, these guys are just coming up with... And they're not doing any of them. Yeah, we're not doing any of those ideas. The problem though, I think that a lot of creative people have is you go in like 64 different directions. You're like an octopus. You got like way too many arms going out, doing all these things. And we've talked about this, but the reality is the most important thing that we can do right this second is put out the show every week and get better guests every week. That's like our number one, most important priority.

1:57:17And everything else that falls outside of that bucket is probably not the most important thing right now because guests are like the, uh, the fire that keeps the show burning. You know, we don't have guests. We don't have a show. Right. So really figuring out at the beginning of your week like what are the most important things and everything else is noise focus on the most important things and then once those are done like you have okay my goal is x amount of podcast guests that need to be locked in till that's figured out we shouldn't be focusing on you know this the sock drop putting out new songs you know what i'm saying and and the sock drop is arguably more fun way more fun than trying to figure out people yeah and doing guest outreach but it's the most important thing yeah it's very difficult to do that unless you have it like written on a board where you can see these are the things that we're trying to to hammer out and i also think like on on that same topic i think people can get really caught up in like gear and like how they're making their content that was what the newsletter that was the newsletter today i don't know if you read it yet oh no i didn't yeah that was the newsletter i put out today about how like people think gear is super important yeah they're just like waiting for the right thing or the right time or the right mic and it's like never going to be right yeah it's never going to be the right thing and if you have to spend more than an hour you're not focusing on the right shit god god i love that yeah i love that another thing that he said that i really enjoyed was the when you post something like the algorithm doesn't hate you you're not shadow ban your stuff probably sucks but it's not hitting for a reason and so reverse engineering why something isn't working going to, okay, great.

1:59:01This was, let's, let's categorize myself in said niche. Let's go to the top 10 best performing people in said niche. And let's understand like what it is about their communication style. How long are their posts? What do they start with? Do they have an interesting visual hook? Is it something they say? Is it thought provoking? Does it have a question loop that I'm like rethinking in my head the entire time they, you know, they have this 60 second video. Those are the little things that are going to actually make your stuff way better. Not bitching and moaning about why your post didn't hit X amount of views.

1:59:30I also think if something worked for you a year ago or two years ago, or maybe you got hot because of X thing, you have to continue to ideate and continue to like push yourself to get better because what got you to one place is not going to get you to the next level. And so it can be easy to be like, this is working. I'm just going to stick with this. and like this is the end all be all, but like continuing to try to push yourself creatively and continuing to think of new ideas and like new content formats is super important because just because it worked, you know, six months ago or a year ago, especially with how fast social media is changing, it's not necessarily gonna be the thing that is gonna continue to work.

2:00:19Yeah, definitely. And I love this that Dan said about repetition. I think a lot of us think that we got to come up with something new every single time we post and we I mean we chatted with Gary V about this he's really saying talk about constancy brother saying the same five things but he repackages them in a thousand different ways or a thousand different stories from his lived experiences it's not like it's you're just like oh I'm pulling this fake made-up story out of my ass it's like he's done said thing in business he believes it he tells it and it like repeats the process over and over again until it's drilled into your head kindness happiness uh you know work really hard whatever those things may be for some person and dan has like philosophies that when you say dan co's name they pop into your brain if you're a consumer of his stuff i also think there's always going to be a new set of eyes and ears to consume your content and i think that we can get caught up in i've talked about this before I've talked about this a ton.

2:01:19Everybody has already heard it, but you're consuming your content more than anybody else. And so there's, I feel like you can get into a bad place of thinking that like everybody has kind of like already seen your shit or your content. You take somebody like Dan Ko who has, you know, millions of followers and to us, because we've consumed his content for so long.

2:01:48What do I want to say? Like for us who's consumed his content for so long, you can easily like look at his content and be like, he's kind of been talking about the same few things over and over. And I've heard him talk about this before. That's one. But because he's like repackaging it in a different way, you're like, fuck, I needed to hear that again. but also like because maybe five or 10 percent of your audience is seeing your stuff when you first post it it's like you can look at it as like well nobody really saw it the first time and the people with the most successful personal brands they're just kind of saying the same stuff they have a couple different ideologies that they really believe to be true and they're just saying that over and over.

2:02:38They're constant with their message over a long period of time. And they're consistent with that. They're just repackaging it a different way. But man, I think that like, there's, you never know who's going to come across your content today, tomorrow, next week. And just because you talked about it today, or last week doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't say it again this week without a doubt he talked about his goals having gravity as well and like those bigger goals really pulling you towards something and so i think as this new year comes around and we all start writing our little goals down for 2026 to really think about what's going to like get you up in the morning get you super fired up to to push forward not just having like an excessive amount of goals that are we have 100 goals for this year horrible way to do it like really think about i believe it's smart goals it's like uh specific measurable actionable don't remember the r and time bound like though that that's like really easy way to think about what it is that you're building maybe relatable forget the r dude sure smart smart smart a smart goal yeah those are the best goals smack goals you don't even you don't even the r dude it's like timothy shall we swat forget the r yeah doesn't matter that's i didn't remember it maybe reasonable yeah i think um relative i don't know forget it forget the r dude it's matt but i think when you are setting goals to have gravity like it needs to be a has to have has to resonate with your why super deeply or else you're just kind of throwing stuff uh on a piece of paper or word doc of like i want to accomplish this it's like okay but why do you want to accomplish this like what will this bring you We've talked about it before on past episodes, but when you're setting goals, like instead of saying I want to hit 100 ,000 subscribers, you could have that goal.

2:04:34But think about the inputs as opposed to the outputs. But think about like why do you actually want to achieve this goal? What will hitting 100 ,000 subscribers do for you? Like what is that feeling that it will give you? It's not a vanity metric. it actually signifies you've put in the work, you're building a show or a YouTube channel that people really resonate with. And if I reach this goal, my life will change or my life will look like this. I will have more freedom or whatever it is you're chasing. Like think about when you're setting goals, like he said, the gravity behind them. Like why is it that you want to achieve that goal and focus on your why?

2:05:19because if you just want to, if you just are setting out this goal to achieve something that like, maybe you don't even actually want, you're just like, oh, it would be nice to have, or I want this because X person is also going after this goal or achieve that. And I want that. Yeah. I think the gravity with the goals is like super key. Okay. Speaking of that, that specific goal, we do want a hundred thousand subscribers, but we know, dude, we're putting out an episode every week. We're chasing the rock. We're chasing the rock. Dude, tell them about the rock. So the rock is that silver fucking plaque.

2:05:52We got, we want that plaque so bad. And so that's our next, um, that is on the goal. That's the new motto for 2026 chasing the rock, chasing the rock. Yeah. We're chasing. So what's that rock that you guys are chasing? What is the rock that you're chasing? That's what you got to remind yourself. Dude, we went to Hong Kong. We even talk about Hong Kong. We have like a huge debrief on Hong Kong. What'd you think? That was crazy. I think that we had two banger pods. We potted with Ali Abdaal, Jeff Su, which was phenomenal. They were super fun. Daniel Daylin. No, I think we did talk about Hong Kong in the Ali Abdaal episode.

2:06:25We did? I think we did a post-paw debrief. We weren't done, though. We weren't officially done with the trip. Oh, sure. Yeah, we're back. We're on U.S. soil. We have time to really. Oh, yeah. No, because we did it. We did it in bed. In bed. We did it in our beds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right next to each other in bed. Daniel Daylin took us to a factory in China, which was insane. Yes. We literally went to mainland China. We crossed the border, went over there. We went on a mission. Got a visa. You know that they're not doing stamps anymore and passports in Europe? Sorry to derail the conversation.

2:06:55Really? Couldn't believe that shit. My mom told me that last night. I'm like super butt. There's no point in traveling. I know. What's the point if I can't get a stamp? Anyways, we got a cool Chinese visa. Had to like go over there. None of your debit cards and all that stuff don't work. You got to use WeChat or Alipay. It's a wild experience. We had to download like three apps. Three different apps. Like Uber doesn't work over there. It's something called like DD, but we figured it out. We managed to show up and Daniel's like, we're coming down. I'm like, there's a 50 % chance that we're just not at the right location.

2:07:25Cause Daniel sends me this location just in complete Chinese. I'm like, Daniel, we get in the taxi after we cross the border and we show it to the taxi driver. He's like, yeah, I know where that is. I was like, there's no way this guy knows. And then after like five minutes, he was, can I see that again? I'm like, dude, do you know where we're going or not? And he's like, I don't speak English. I'm like, okay, we're fucked. We might be in a completely foreign area. This guy might be trafficking us for all we know. No, dude, he showed up, dropped us off. He goes, you're here. Daniel comes right down.

2:07:53I'm like, there's no way. We just made it out here. It was so fun. What a crazy day. Then we went to get dinner. Yeah, but with the factory, I think there is a certain stigma around these Chinese factories. If you hear the word made in China. Yeah. If you hear made in China, you think it's made. This is a West thing for sure. Yes. This is like Americans might think this. Americans think that made in China is made cheaply. It's not like handmade or I guess it is handmade, but the working conditions aren't great. Okay. That's what my mindset going into this factory. Brother, we walked in and I was like unbelievably clean and just like run like militant.

2:08:38To the nines. And we saw the brands that this factory was making. And you owned... The big brands. You owned a pair of sunglasses from one of the brands. This was just an amazing process of seeing how a factory operates at the highest level. And luxury is a scam. Oh, yeah, for sure. Because you had a pair of sunglasses and you paid a lot of money for them. And then we asked the girl like, oh, how much would these sunglasses cost to make? She told us$15. But Daniel told us that when she told us$15, she was embarrassed because she thought we were going to think that was really expensive. It was crazy.

2:09:18It was so cool. It was like genuinely the most fun day of all time. Yeah. So cool to see the process for like what goes into making a pair of sunglasses. Yeah. It's like 64 steps. It's not like, oh, you're just in a mold and they crack them out. This 3D printed mold. It's an entire thing. And it was so freaking cool. Looked handmade to me. They were freaking handmade. It was crazy. I mean, they're going through like 64 different steps. You have a quality control team, a team that just does the sides, a bezzling team. We learned something too. Fucking, if it says made in Italy, 99%. Cap City. Cap City, bro.

2:09:5799 % of it was made in China. and then they fucking ship it. They put the last little screw in and then they put the screw in in fucking Italy and now it's considered made in Italy. It's insane. This whole thing is a scam. It's insane. Unbelievable. Made in Italy, made in Germany. Fucking bullshit. Made in France. Dude. Yeah. But I think... Dude, but it just doesn't matter because they're making it just as good as whatever other country. It doesn't matter. It was so freaking cool. It was genuinely awesome and we're putting out our first vlog. Yes. So tell them about what's going on, dude. Tell them about our realizations while we're out there.

2:10:35So sit with Daniel. We got a lot of time with Mr. D. Which we wanted to podcast with him, but he's been going through some stuff. He's kind of hitting a little reset. He's like, we will pod at some point. And he brought up the idea of doing a live podcast, which would be super cool. Not mad at that. Not mad at that at all. But because we didn't podcast with him, we actually got to spend more time with him, I think. And we got to hang out with him on three separate occasions and we when when we went to um shenzhen we really got to spend some time with him it's unbelievably inspiring being around somebody his age and like how successful he is and just the way he thinks it forced us it forced us to think bigger i'm like oh we're thinking smaller but i think one of the biggest things that we came out of this hong kong trip with is the fact that we want to do a YouTube vlog.

2:11:29And the reason why is because the podcast, as amazing as it is, it's very focused around the guests, which is like totally great. And that's what a podcast is. That's how a podcast is, huh? That's like how they go. But we realized, yeah, yeah, it's how it goes. But I think that like for us, when we started the podcast or like as it started to grow, we were like, the podcast is the end all be all the main thing. Like this is how we're eventually going this will be i'm retiring retiring dude that's it and it's not gonna work like that it's not gonna work like that it'll still be like a it's like it's like 1a and then i want i think the youtube vlog to be like 1b or like 1a 1b whatever it may be the youtube i think is going to be a place where we can really bring our personalities into it showcase the whole behind the scenes of the operations of the podcast and everything else that we're working on and that That will be how we build our personal brands much more than the podcast.

2:12:35Because we were talking about, it feels like the podcast is almost rented. Rented eyeballs. Rented attention. It is for sure. It's 100 % rented attention. If you guys go to our views, if we get someone on that has a million plus subscribers, it dramatically affects how many views it gets. We could have, and let's just pretend, this is all hypothetical. Let's say someone that we had on as a much smaller personal brand, but the combo was A1, top tier, best fucking combo we've ever had. Congratulations, it doesn't really matter. Until we get to a level of where we have, you know, quarter million plus people on this channel listening, and we have really built up a ton of trust with a group that's like, hey, no matter what, we're coming because we know it's going to be awesome.

2:13:19it doesn't really matter for us at this point which is super unfortunate because we could have someone on that's smaller like that was the best conversation ever doesn't matter if nobody watches it you know it doesn't it doesn't doesn't do anything and we've also been doing some research and looking at people who are doing like the building in public and the youtube stuff and you don't need millions of views no you don't even need hundreds of course you would like that yeah yeah everyone would love that but just seeing the sentiment in some of these people's vlogs and videos man they're getting maybe like five to ten maybe 20k but that is like a die hard group group yeah for sure and i think that for what we want to do in building our the different companies we're building still i'm still doing blue stripe that's super fun i want to show more of that i couldn't i can't really show that here i mean where where we you know what i mean i would where we're on the pod yeah where would i show it i can't yeah i'm not like showing you guys a spot that we made right we got to shoot for nike in like two weeks that's going to be so sick where am i going to show that besides on instagram like you'll get a snippet of it for 30 seconds you'll see the spot maybe like a couple behind the scenes photos but you won't really be there yeah and i feel like this that's a perfect place for us to be able to just show our personalities more uh and we talked about this i think last year we officially made 505 studios which is the youtube channel that all this shit's gonna live on uh 56 of you guys subscribe appreciate that you guys should we keep it 505 studios what else would you want to call it 505 rocks no like i don't know 505 show or i don't know but 505 i don't know studio studio 505 studios makes it feel like it's going to be like in a studio sit down talking head what about studios like it's like a sure whatever we'll think about it does it really matter it doesn't really fucking matter i can't believe you almost changed the fucking name dude ali of doll tried to get us to change the name of the show he was like dude you guys should change this ali we love the 505 iPod name, dude.

2:15:27But yeah, dude, I, this Dan Coe episode was like really cool because we've been consuming his content for a minute and he's someone who, I mean, another thing, dude, he's just so intelligent and he's able to articulate his thoughts so clearly. And it made me realize like I need to write, read and write more difficult, but you know, we'll struggle through. and um it's just it's cool that we have gotten this show to a point where like somebody and i feel like we say this every fucking time we have a guest on but like we're able to get people on that like we're genuine fans of and it's the coolest fucking thing ever because we can also structure the conversation and ask them whatever the fuck we want which is awesome and usually a lot of it is what you guys yeah which is just great it's a little win-win for everyone involved I'm excited, though, for 2026.

2:16:18I feel like, dude, we're a little over four years into this thing. And it feels like that's what it took to build the base. And we've gotten so much clarity over the past couple of weeks of like where we want to take this thing and how we're going to really level up. And so I think that if you guys have been longtime listeners, I think what we're going to do in 2026 is going to be super exciting. In-person events. You're on a rocket ship. We're going to get the rock. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been such a fun episode with Dan Coe. If you're still here, please hit the subscribe button. Drop us a comment.

2:16:50Leave us a like. Subscribe to the fucking pod, please. And we'll see you guys all next week. Peace. Peace.