How Ali Abdaal makes $5,741,266.32 a year on YouTube

22:48There was our editor, Christian, who's in Romania. He wasn't really involved in this. and there was Angus who is now my general manager and COO, whatever you want to call it. And so it was basically me, Angus and Elizabeth on a call, on a Zoom call. And we hit the launch button. And initially we launched it on a platform called Podia which is sort of like a cheaper version of Kajabi. And initially we were just like, oh, whatevs. And then Elizabeth I think said, oh my God, you should refresh the page. I was like, okay, I'll refresh the page. And suddenly we had like$10 ,000, like 10 ,000 pounds sitting in the account.

23:22Like what the actual fuck? Like 10 ,000 pounds? What? This is like four months worth of salary for a doctor that we made in like two minutes, literally by just mentioning it on Twitter. And I think in my email newsletter, like, hey, we've opened the course, who wants to sign up? And then we refreshed it and it went up to 12K and then 15K and then 20K and then 28K. And I'm like, fuck, Instagram story. Like this is cool, screenshotting the thing. And I still have the screenshots from back then. So you shared that on Instagram? Yeah. I was like, oh my God, guys, it's incredible. Like what the hell?

23:50And like my doctor friends were replying, being like, what the actual fact is. This is like half a year of salary. And then like by the end of that day, I think we'd closed about 70K worth of revenue. And it's the most money I'd ever seen in my life in like a single moment. What was the dopamine of that? Like, was that a moment of just like, do you feel scared? Do you feel excited? Like, what was the feeling of that? Yeah, it was a real sense of exhilaration. Yeah. It's like, you know, when that feeling when your expectations are so low and the reality is so high, they're just like, whoa, my God.

24:27Since then, every time we've run the cohort, it's been less about like, oh my God, yeah. And it's been more about like, fingers crossed, please God, let's hope we get the sales that we've had previously. But that was a moment of pure exhilaration and joy. But most recently, like, so I did a quick glance at all of these upstairs before I came down here when we printed them out. All these, your finances. And in every graph, there's this like big spike, right? In the February to March of 2023, which was the most amount of money you'd made in a month, right? Which is over a million dollars. That's your most recent launch of the course.

25:04Yeah, our final launch of the course. Your final launch of the course. Yeah, over eight. Which brought a lot of urgency to purchase. Yeah, so that was convenient. And so that one, like what are the pricing tiers like of the current version of PTYA? Yeah. and talk me through like the February explosion that happened. Like we all followed it on Twitter because you tweeted about it. And it was just like in our Slack, it was like, uh, holy shit, what the hell is going on? You know, and yeah, just talk me through that. Yeah. So that was interesting. I think in the February cohort, we had two price points.

25:36We had 2K and 5K. The$2 ,000 was for the final cohort. And you get the course. It's like four weeks live course with an extra two weeks of feedback and support and the whole shebang. and the$5 ,000 option was for the executive tier which previously gave you free access to all future cohorts but because this was the last cohort this executive tier gave you access to a new product which we launched called the part-time YouTuber Accelerator it took a while to find various thesaurus definitions for things and that's basically where my team are giving support to our students for 12 months so we are in the midst of this right now where we have about 180-ish students in this 5K package.

26:17It's a lot of people. It's a lot of people, yeah. It's a bit of a path to service the customer success component of this. But thankfully, it's not me doing most of the work. It's the team doing the heavy lifting. So we've got Allison, who's amazing, who's in charge of customer success. We've got a bunch of student supporters who've previously taken our cohort who are helping out with giving feedback to students on their videos every other week. And every member of my team runs a weekly office hour because now we've got specialists in podcast and SEO and social media and website and YouTube and video editing and all that stuff.

26:48So the fact that all like 10 of the 14 members of my team have a weekly office hour means that every day there's like two different support office hours that anyone in the cohort can just rock up to and ask whatever question they want. And so we've had some people being like, 5K for a year where every single week, every single day I can show up and ask your team who's literally helping you build a multimillion dollar empire exactly how they do stuff. Shit, that's a bargain. yeah that is really interesting i would think that like even when we were first starting to make some money on youtube five thousand dollars for a year to learn more about what we're doing like when you start to learn that that can be made in a single brand partnership yeah then it starts to come into context of like that is incredibly worth it you know like that's one brand deal or one really good month of ad sense if you're just starting out right so it's like or one freelance project that you do.

27:41There's so many ways to generate that. And access to knowledge, if you know how to use it, is really valuable. Way more time intensive for your team when you think about it. Because for us, when we think about a brand deal, you do it once. You've got one client. If it's difficult for the month that you're putting the video together or whatever, once it's out, it's out. That's it. If the audience doesn't like the video, it was free, essentially. But for you, everyone that purchases is a client. yeah honestly this is the conversation we're having in our team right now like do we really want to continue doing this because every time someone signs up we are literally signing ourselves up for another 12 months of like support yeah to hundreds of people to hundreds of people to unknown levels of support sometimes there may be a request that comes in that you've never seen before yeah and we try our very best to go above and beyond and all that stuff but it's a real kind of it's it's not as passive income as I would like to I would like to make on the internet and definitely not very passive in terms of the team requirement.

28:40For someone who I would assume likes consistency, I think that's a difficult business model to have so many different clients who might want so many different things. When I say clients, I just mean like customers. I've been doing a lot of journaling about this over the last few days because it was like a 12-hour flight to get here and stuff, I had a lot of time to think. And there's part of me that's thinking, let's just scrap this whole project because it's not worth it because of all the moving parts. There's another part of me that's thinking, and this is the part that's winning, that actually, this is quite fun.

29:14Like we know how to make a prerecorded online course. We're very good at that. But we're learning how to do customer success. We're learning how to do sales. We're learning how to kind of scalably provide what feels like a very concierge level of support. And if we can just dial in the systems and make sure the team knows what they're doing and is happy. that's actually pretty great because the margins on this sort of business are awesome like if we can close a 5k client for this for a whole 12 months and even if we can get them to renew now our LTV for a customer is like somewhere between 5k and 10k assuming they renew for one point whatever years that's actually a pretty good business and fundamentally the place I'm trying to get to with our stuff is where our business is not reliant on regular views on YouTube videos and that's I guess where we come back to the whole creator thing right because the people I know who rely on brand deals are quite stressed out with the view count on every individual upload because you're only as kind of good as your last 10 uploads on average.

30:14Look at us. Yeah. Who are us? Yeah. Other creators, sure. Other creators. I don't have any gray in my beard. Other than you guys, most creators are pretty stressed out by the thought of brand deals and kind of the view counts on their videos. Yeah. Whereas I feel that stress and I want to not feel that stress. Dude, what a, I've literally been thinking about this of my goal for next year is to have that relationship with our videos. Like, and, you know, also largely from a conversation with you where you kind of like gave us a kick in the ass on Zoom one time. You're like, just make a course. Did I?

30:48Oh, I don't even remember this. Yeah. Do you remember this? Yeah, I do remember this. I recommend courses to everyone I know. It's just a fantastic business model. Which, you know. I think you just couldn't believe that we didn't have a course. Yeah, I was like, guys, you have the perfect audience. You have a way more perfect audience than I do to make a course for YouTubers. for me it's like 1 % of my audience that cares about growing a YouTube channel and we are working on one and the thing that we're toying with is this concept of like cohort based feels really nice because and if you don't know what cohort based means it means like there's a set amount of time six weeks and you'll commit to the program for six weeks you'll get you know maybe we'll drip out the content meaning like you'll get one video on week one and two on week two and for me like that's how I could commit to learning because if you give it to me all at once I'll probably watch 30 % and then move on or something.

31:33And so I want to ensure completion rate, but I also think about we are very good. Like the business of brand deals is you have four to five, you know, maybe big advertising partners. That's how we work, right? We want to keep a small set of advertising partners and service them really well. Four to five customers is dramatically different from thousands of customers, which is the goal. For the models to work for us, for courses to make sense, we need to get to hundreds and thousands of people taking yeah easy you know the course but then we need to also make sure to service those people and we see it slightly in e-commerce where like having a merch shop you know you have customer service concerns where people are like hey this didn't show up right and i guess now that i'm talking it out and speaking it out loud we have a team that handles customer service yeah have you seen the space you've got yeah yeah yeah so i guess seen the people upstairs i guess i just yeah sometimes you just have to hear yourself say it out loud to figure it out.

32:27It is frightening though. Yeah, but it's scary. It's scary to open yourself up to that level of, like we have a very pure relationship with our fans and our audience. Pure than untainted by money? Yes. Okay. Yes, meaning like, you know, you get to watch this show at no cost to you outside of the time to watch the ads and the investment and, you know, watching our advertisements, our sponsorships and advertisements. That's the cost to the audience, which I think has become a very understood cost, right? As a consumer, even for me, I'm okay with that cost. So I assume our audience is okay with that cost.

33:02Once you introduce thousands of dollars, you know, or hundreds of dollars, I think it becomes, you start to evaluate yourself so much, right? On your value, the value of your information, the value of everything you have to provide. And it's where we're kind of getting into this point of like pricing. I look at the material we've put together and I'm like, this is everything from the last decade of us learning. Great. So it feels really high priced. Fantastic. Then I'll write a price next to it. Okay. Three grand. And then I'll be like, that's ridiculous. That's so high. And I don't know how to get to a point where it's like, I feel like it's the most valuable curriculum.

33:42Like I look at the curriculum, I'm like, so valuable. But how can I ask someone to pay in the thousands of dollars for it? Oh, that's the tricky part. Yeah. Do you think a bit of this is us imagining our audience as us 10 years ago? Yes. Because that's not necessarily the case. That's true. That everyone watching is someone who's just starting out on YouTube, has no idea what they're doing, doesn't have disposable income. The course is also not built for that. It's not built for that person. The course is built for people who are in the career of being creators. So who's it aimed for? It's aimed for like professional creators.

34:15Okay. So people who are making way more than 3K. Yeah. Yeah, and people who, okay, now, yeah, again, I just had to talk it out loud. Yeah, that was good. Again, people who 3K to them would be easily made in a single video. Yeah. It's not, you know, half a video. Great. What's the problem? All right. This is why you're here, dude. This feels like a - I would sign up to that course in an absolute heartbeat. Yeah, this feels like a therapy session. If the course was 300 quid, I would think, what the hell are you guys doing? Yeah, totally. This is a scam. Totally, totally. The fact that it's 3K means like, okay, this is serious.

34:42I'm going to get my general manager to take the course because he's negotiating our sponsorship deals. Even a 1 % movement in our sponsorship deal. as a result of the information you guys gave us. And I think we can actually, I think we can make a significant shift in a lot of people's sponsorship business. Because I think that's what we are very good at. Yeah, that's like your own for advantage. Yeah, yeah. You do deals with all these big companies. You've worked for companies like Nike and stuff before and like NBA and all that. Are you pitching the course right now? Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it.

35:08Wow, that's good to talk out. Yeah, we'll plug it to our YouTuber Academy audience as well. Yeah. Yeah. Wow, that was really nice. That felt like a weight lift. If people don't like it, you've got a money back guarantee. Yeah. Great. I love that. I think that's really important. We get so few people asking us for their money back. Yeah. The commonest reason people give for wanting their money back is, hey, look, I'm sorry, my grandma died or I got laid off. And it's just like, of course we want to give you the money back. We've got plenty of money in the bank. We don't need an extra couple of K from you if you're broken.

35:43It's just, I think the money back guarantee to me just takes all of the weight off the fear and the taint. I like that a lot. Yeah. So the concept of you moving away from PTYA is like pretty substantial because it's the primary revenue driver, right? Yes. Like how much of the 5 point, let's call it 5.2 million that you'll make this year. I mean, I guess we can look at the actuals right now of, you know, last year or even this year, 2.4 million dollars in year to date revenue. Two pounds. So what is that in dollars? Times 1.3 or something. That's good, man. Halfway through the year? Yeah, this is up to May, so not quite.

36:20Up to May, so not even halfway. That's great. Yeah, it's all right, but we've just finished our final cohort. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. There's a big question mark right now around, can we, yeah, can we make another 2 million in the rest of the year? So let's talk through the other advertising income, right? Or other income sources. You know, essentially you have here, PtyA sales, Google AdSense income, Which in May you did 51 ,000 pounds. Yeah, it's about 50K a month. 50K a month. Yeah. Okay. And that's pretty stable. Yeah. Sponsorship income, 45. That feels low, but I think also understandably so that you're not doing that many.

37:02Yeah. So we haven't done many sponsorship deals in the last couple of months. In fact, I haven't uploaded a video for about three weeks now, which is the longest I've ever gone without uploading a video because I've been working on my book. And one of the weird... I wonder if this was... One of the questions I always ask myself, I ask myself fairly regularly, is if I had 100 million in the bank, what would I do with my time? And I always think I would continue to make YouTube videos. But I think there's no way in hell I'd run a live cohort. That's a total nightmare. Would not recommend. I think for you guys, a drip course, pre-recorded drip course is very different to a live cohort.

37:37Totally cool with a drip course. Do not do a live cohort, please. Pre-recorded drip with available staff. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that's fantastic. And is there a tier where there's access to us or no? Maybe, but your time is worth like way more than you would feasibly, like you'd probably charge like 50K for that and then that would look really bad. And that would, yeah, that would look crazy. So if I had 100 million in the bank, I would never run a life cohort ever again because it's stressful and annoying. And secondly, I wouldn't do brand deals because brand deals have deadlines on them.

38:04And as soon as there's a deadline, suddenly there is a deadline on me making a video. And then we'll get to the end of the month. And it's like, Angus will say to me, Ali so you know we've got three days until the end of the month and we've got a video from Brilliant and Skillshare and you know this and Slack that needs to come out by the end of the month so yeah you know we really should be filming some stuff in the next few days and I'm like okay I get it but like the videos aren't ready yet like I want the video to be good I don't want to just put a video out for the sake of the brand deal and I guess it's like yeah but you know we said this last month as well and we get into this issue with sponsorship deadlines and so I realized in this world in which I've won the lottery.

38:42If I ever have a brand deal, I probably wouldn't. But if I did, it would never have a deadline on it. And so that is now the future that we're working towards where I've said to my team, guys, honestly, I never want to see a deadline ever again. And if that means that we lose out on a million a year of sponsorship revenue, that is a price I'm happy to pay for not having a deadline. Because the point of this creative thing is, at least the way I think about it, I got into this game because I wanted to build a career and a life on my own terms. I wanted to have the freedom to do what I want and the autonomy to not do things I don't want to have to do.

39:20And having deadlines on videos, I'm surprised I feel so strongly about this, but having deadlines on videos is like having another job. And that was what I left medicine to avoid the feeling of. So we sort of have cut down on our sponsorship deals for the last couple of months, kind of focusing on the book. We're probably going to ramp them back up, but Angus and the rest of my team are negotiating with sponsors to basically have the deadline so far in the future that I can act as if we never have a sponsorship deadline. So those are like the two areas of the business where this year I recognize.

39:52That's really great. For you too, it's really important that you don't have deadlines because your videos are about productivity and self-development. And as a viewer, my hope is that you actually use these tactics and these strategies and they are a part of your life and you're not forced to come up with a list of things that could be helpful for you. And we've had times where it's been like, oh shit, we've got sponsorship deadlines. Okay, cool. Let's figure out how we can repackage a previous video and give it a new acronym. And it's like thinking of the acronym, thinking of the system. And that is where, you know, this was, this last happened a couple of years ago.

40:28Thank God for that. But that's when it starts to feel really dirty and really like, yeah, that's pumping out media, right? That's like I think especially with self-development content and productivity because the last thing you want is someone looking at a short you make or a video you make and thinking alright he's just trying to keep up with the pace of the algorithm he's just trying to put out another video does he actually live this life? Right? You don't want to lose that credibility Yeah I just want to offer that that's also Colin's voice bit of a skeptic here on productivity content which is fair we were having this conversation before he came in.

41:04But I think it's a fair thing to point out that even when we interviewed Tim, Tim Ferriss on the show. I said a similar thing to Tim. I have grown up as a huge fan of content that's like productivity, self-development, how do you optimize your day? Like that is, I've adopted a lot of that and I find it really valuable. And Colin on the other side, I think is - I find it valuable as well. But the skepticism for me comes when I think about the person behind the content. and there's no way, and I'm sure you've talked about this before, about you can't be 100 % productive all the time, right? And that's fine, but I think with productivity content, the image is up here many times, and I find that my assumption about the reality is probably somewhere down here.

41:52Yeah, yeah. Are you ever conflicted about that, or how do you experience sort of your relationship with being a productivity self-development creator and the actual amount of content you know, development you're doing or strategies that you're implementing in your own life. Yeah. So this is, this is something I think a lot about. You know, one thing that Tim Ferris said a couple of times in his various interviews is that he always gets requests from journalists being like, hey, can we follow you around for the day? Cause you must be so productive. He's like, well, no, cause I'm not that productive.

42:23I just like, you know, walk around in my underpants, I prepare for a podcast or like, you know, whatever that thing might be. And, you know, it's, it's, it's almost a trope at this point where people all come up to me and being like, oh my God, you must be so productive. It's like, well, I kind of am, but also like, depends how you define productivity. I think productivity is using your time well and using your time intentionally. So like last week I played Diablo 4 and I had my little walking treadmill desk thing. And it's like, well, playing Diablo 4, which is a total quick waste of time, racking in 10 ,000 steps, which feels productive.

42:51It's like, you know, just multitasking and stuff. But no, so the way I think of it is like productivity to me is less a topic and more a lens or a philosophy. And so a video on how to be more productive. Yeah, that video would do well. A video on how to manage your time would do well. But we've started branching out into health and relationships. And, you know, our whole thing is, you know, helping people build a life they love, you know, business, creator, all this kind of stuff. And the lens of productivity is like, how do you use your time efficiently, use your time enjoyably and sustainably without burning out while feeling good about yourself.

43:28That to me is what productivity is. And that is infinite content that I can make for the rest of my life. Because everything I'm interested in is with the lens of how do I make it enjoyable and how do I make it sustainable? But certainly back in the day when we had lots of sponsorship deadlines, there was a case of like, okay, let's repackage something that we've said before. But then the other side of the equation is, I think our average viewer watches 2.2 videos. And so the fact, like I know all 684 videos that I've published, and I know that I've mentioned this thing about time blocking in a video in June 2019.

43:59No one else does. And every day we're getting like 3 ,000 subscribers joining the channel who've never heard of me before. And so actually the thing that people need to hear is be more productive, set some goals, put it in your calendar, sit down and do the thing, don't get distracted. And it's all the same kind of stuff. Everyone is, you know, every productivity book is the same content repackaged in various ways, but it needs to be repackaged for a new audience to hear it. And so part of me is like, oh, I've said this before. But then I have to remind myself. But most people have not seen all of my videos.

44:29And it's okay that that's part of your value. Even if one of your audience members hears the same thing again, that's helpful. A lot of my favorite books from authors like Seth Godin or Ryan Holiday. Same stuff. It's very similar stuff. But the value is, I'll read those books multiple times because I will forget about some of the tactics and I want to read them again to remind me. Yeah. The next line, because I'm back to the income, all of these will spin us into incredible stories which i love um the next line which is really impressive to me is 22 000 pounds on affiliate income affiliate income is not easy to come by in my opinion yeah like like commission rates are very low right so an affiliate link is when you you know put a link in your youtube video or in your newsletter and you know it's something you love but i guess you make a lot of videos about things you love so is that where the money comes or like how does, where does our affiliate income come from?

45:24It's because that's like, I mean, I've seen affiliate income like high affiliate income, but I'm always curious. Like how do people do that? That's like, that's so impressive to me. It's like truly kind of passive income. Yeah. So people like Peter McKinnon have very high affiliate income because high priced camera gear by Amazon. People like Graham Stephan have high affiliate income because of like Webull and all of the other US based stock market type things. We have way lower affiliate income than those guys do, but higher than most people. Because a lot of our affiliate deals are on software and a lot of software has 30 % recurring commissions.

45:58Got it. Which is really nice. Didn't know that. What type of software are you pushing? Oh, like ConvertKit, for example, has a 30 % recurring affiliate program. Wow, Nathan, nice. Kujabi, Ghost, which was what we used to use for website hosting. Interesting. And so at the bottom of it, I think a large chunk of this income comes from Ghost. At the bottom of the website, we just had Powered by Ghost. That was the affiliate link. As soon as anyone signs up, Ghost has paid plans from$9 through to like$300. Whoa, interesting. We get 30 % recurring every single month. Whoa. And so it's just like free money.

46:29Epidemic Sound is a good affiliate deal. I think that's like$30 per free trial signup or something absurd like that. We make a couple hundred, a couple thousand from them every month. But then you think about the scale of 22 ,000 pounds, right? Like$30 or 30 % of something. Like it is substantial. That means that's a critical mass. That to me means like a good audience fit. Yeah, I think, I do feel like it's usually 10K but sometimes they pay out in like weird quarters or something like that. Got it, got it, got it. So it's not always 22K a month. The next line is teaching income from Skillshare, which is 22 ,000 pounds as well.

46:57Yeah, that's absolutely nothing. If Skillshare income used to be about 70 ,000 a month for us, we've got like 13 classes on Skillshare. That's amazing. And then in October last year, they changed their monetization algorithm and everyone's rates got slashed. And this is something that I knew was going to happen because as soon as we started making absurd amount of money through Skillshare, like, you know, that first class was like 3 to 5K. the second class I made was how to study for exams that's been doing 10k a month on Skillshare every month since like May of 2020 completely mental and every single time we've released a new class it's just been like the numbers have been going up and up and up and when the numbers got to the point where we were nearly making a million a year from Skillshare I was thinking okay there's no way in hell this is sustainable this is a gravy train that's not going to continue pouring I don't even know if that's the right metaphor and so I said to my team and a big goal for myself was we need to own our revenue and we need at least 50 % of our revenue to come from our own products.

47:50And so that was when we launched the YouTuber Academy because it's like, what product can we make? Is something that we own? And then that was the thing that bumped us to the 1.2 million. So then you have other teaching income on here as well. Creatopreneur, which I purchased. That's like an$800 course, right? Yes. That's self-paced. Yep. And then teaching income from Camera Confidence. Yeah, that's$150 course. That's$150 course. It's amazing that they're both 3 ,000 pounds. Yeah, that's absolutely nothing. I think the way we went about making those two courses was like a bad idea. I've recently been consuming a lot of Brendan Burchard's content.

48:27He's like a real OG in the personal development space. And he's got a fantastic course called Experts Academy where he basically teaches the online thought leader kind of business model. And I'm going through that course as we speak and I'm just like, I wish I'd discovered this stuff five years ago. because this guy is doing the thing that I'm trying to do and has literally made a course on how to do the thing. And I've been trying to make up the playbook as I go along because I just didn't know he existed until six months ago. These OG info product gurus built, except Brendan where he had organic, mostly built their fortunes off of paid ads.

49:00And so all of their stuff is how do you convert cold traffic from a Facebook ad into a funnel, into a lead magnet, into a product or whatever. But as creators, we now have stupidly large organic reach. And so if we can combine the principles of marketing from the infoproduct gurus, combine them with our organic reach, hopefully we can get to someplace interesting. And so if I had my time again, I would not release camera confidence or creativepreneurs courses. I would weave them into our YouTuber kind of product offering. Yeah, interesting. Because it's a lot less confusing that way. So with, you know, this year to date, you mentioned like it's what, $1.2 million have come from PTYA or maybe more?

49:36I think it's just about$2 million. $2 million, okay. So$2 million year to date on PTYA, That makes up right now 62 % of your revenue year to date. Yes. How do you make that up if you drop, like how do you sit here and go, yeah, let's drop that. Wouldn't you have to let go a lot of teams? Totally change your - We're hoping to make more money beyond that. So instead of just getting rid of PTYA, we're converting it into a self-paced course. Got it. Okay. Which will be like lower priced and hopefully a higher volume. I see. And honestly, when I look at this, like one of the stories that I see here when I think about and listening to you is like what was happening on Skillshare prior with like making 70 ,000 a month on Skillshare.

50:21That to me is like a high margin product because you put it out and you don't have to tend to it. Exactly, yeah. It's passive. It's actually passive. Genuinely passive. It's genuinely passive. That's a dream. That's the goal. Yeah. So like the thing that I think sometimes young creators or young entrepreneurs miss is like big, shiny, exciting revenue opportunities, but they don't think about cost, not actually hard costs, like money out of the account to make it, but like life cost of operating that business is high. Yeah, it really is. This is why I would not recommend live cohorts for anyone.

50:55Right, because a live cohort is like, that's a high lifestyle cost. It is, yeah. And the goal is to build low lifestyle cost products that are high revenue. So - If the goal is a lifestyle business. If the goal is a lifestyle business. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. But I think that's really interesting that like, if you can make that up in self-paced, that would be incredible. That would be cool, yeah. And there's probably a possibility it could go bigger. Yeah, maybe. I try not to worry. I try to actively not think about numbers outside of my control. Interesting. I let Angus deal with the whole financial projections-y side of things.

51:26Yeah, I guess like how much are those like revenue goals, how much do they matter to you of like, we did 5 million this year, we need to do 7 next year? Or is it just kind of like... yeah so this is a question i i i always come back to of like what is the actual goal yeah because right now i am it's gonna it's gonna sound a bit weird but i just say i'm just kind of like living the dream where i can rock up i can make whatever videos i want we get like decent income from brand deals hopefully without deadlines we get to make a decent living from courses the team is happy i'm happy like that's a pretty good gig and we'll probably do like two point something million in profit this year.

52:06It's like fucking mental. Yeah, that's crazy. And then I think like, do I need more money? Not really. So what's the goal? And one thing that, one thing that a friend told me at one point was that growth can be found in ways other than in revenue and profit. And so to me right now, growth looks like, how can I, how can I, for example, take three months off filming and it not affect anything in the business? In October, when my lease in London runs out, how can I travel the world and just film, have my studio in a suitcase and film videos when I feel like it and it not affect our revenue. It's like the growth, if honestly, if we could just continue doing this and make two million a year in profit, I'm very, very happy with that.

52:45That's a good place to be. That's an absolutely good place to be. So I'm not really trying to shoot for higher revenue numbers. But then there is always a part of me that's like, oh, but like if we released a productivity course, now we could do the big numbers. Yeah, I wonder, you know, as you have more passive income, what do you fill your time with? Do you truly fill it with traveling the world or do you fill it with more work and more revenue opportunities? Because I have that fear. Yeah. Sometimes when we say no to an opportunity to give ourselves more time, in the back of my head, I'm thinking, did we do that to give ourselves more time?

53:16And then we're just going to come up with something else to fill the time. Yeah. You know, I don't know if you share that fear. Yeah. I share that majorly that like, we've talked about that. Could we actually take a break for three months or six months, a true break? I think I romanticize about it a lot, but I have a terrible fear of it. Like we've been in such a forward progress, you know, motion for the past 12 years together. And, you know, I don't know if you had this experience of like kind of your first mega profitable year where you receive a big check. And you're like, I've been working so that I could receive this big check.

53:53And then you get it and you're like, what do I do with it now? Did you have that experience or no? No. No. Not really, because I think for me, I haven't been working for the big check. I've been working for the goal of financial freedom, which I already have, depending on how you define it. And beyond that, I'm working because it's fun and meaningful and fulfilling, and it's what I would do if I won the lottery anyway because I enjoy teaching and all that shit. I do the brand deals for the big check, for the big check, and I do live cohorts for the big check, which is why we're now stopping doing both of those things.

54:25Interesting. And so I think it is just about optimizing for that lifestyle business where if my time is freed up I may well decide to create another product but I'll do it because it's exciting. And the thought of making our productivity course feels fun. We're potentially building our own productivity app that feels fun. We're trying to build our own mechanical keyboard laptop backpacks, that seems fun. It's just like I'm unlikely to just sort of twiddle my thumbs and play Diablo if I suddenly had time freed up. I'm more likely to do things that seem exciting. Yeah. I also want to push back a little bit on the big check thing.

55:01I think there's definitely an element of wanting to be validated financially for the work. But I think a lot of what really drove us was validation from the industry and from peers. And even you, before we started recording, saying like, wow, you guys seem like you are the creator show or the creator hub. I was like, oh, well, that's exciting to me. That level of validation is part of what we, craved and wanted. And Samir, you are also really good at understanding and navigating the monetization side of this business. Yeah. Agreed. I think that comes from like, there's a lot to unpack of why, but I think my relationship with money has been very complex.

55:49And so like receiving it was even more complex because I realized it wasn't the thing that was validating. You know, it may have been necessary in terms of a opportunity to take a breath. Yes, for sure. It was a weight off my back to be like, you know, it's, it's a quantifiable version of value. And we operate in these crazy, in this crazy industry where everything is a quantifiable number that associates a value to you. Right. Like I was talking to my brother about this. Every piece we put out has a value metric next to it. Right. Then there's a dollar metric next to, you know, how we're performing.

56:29There's a subscriber metric. There's so many public metrics that are quantifiable versions of how valuable you are. It is a strange experience to have your whole life surround those. But yeah, I think I recognize that like, you know, the outcome of the financial outcome is exciting, but there's a certain cap to like, Like, okay, this is enough. No. That's enough. I have a pretty simple life. So like, I don't need that much money, but I come here every day and work on projects and work on, you know, irrationally, irrational creative projects that are just, we just do because they're fun. You know?

57:11That's a good place to be. Yeah, it's a great place to be. I guess, so there's a guy who I spent a bit of time with called Bill Perkins. He is a ridiculously rich guy. He's written a book called Die With Zero. It's a great book. It's basically about how to make the most from your money and your life. And his kind of whole thesis is that fundamentally money is a tool and you should therefore aim to die with zero in the bank account kind of thing. So, you know, cash in the money for experiences when you're young. Give the money away to your kids when they're younger and they actually can use it not when they're 68 on average.

57:40Give the money away to charities because people are dying right now, not on your deathbed. All of those things. And I kind of asked him that like, you know, what about the people who say that they enjoy their work and the work just happens to bring the money. And his point was that like, well, you know, a heroin addict says that they enjoy heroin. A crackhead claims to enjoy crack. And what are the chances that like the thing that you would genuinely do if you could do whatever you wanted just happens to be the thing that you stumbled into? Because most people stumble into their jobs from like various accidents.

58:13Like, what are the chances? Come on, have a bit more imagination. And he was saying that like, he's at least like a billionaire and knows loads of other billionaires. He was like, rich people are the dumbest people because they continue to work for this tool. Because at some point, it stopped becoming about the fulfillment that the money could buy them and became more about chasing the money for its own sake. And they convinced themselves that that's actually fun. And I speak to entrepreneur friends because whenever I interview someone on my podcast who's like a multi-millionaire entrepreneur, I ask them, why do you still do this?

58:44You've made all the money. You actually don't need money right now. and they always say because it's fun like I enjoy buying and selling companies I enjoy building businesses and so I don't know the answer here but like clearly there is some part of if you genuinely had all the money in the world there's probably some things that we would that we would that we would stop doing like I'd like to think that if I had all the money in the world I'd continue making YouTube videos but I'd probably make them on my own schedule whenever I felt like it certainly when making them at the frequency that I'm making them now then why am I making videos of the frequency I am now.

59:17Is it because I'm chasing more money, even though I claim not to want more money? Because more money is always like nice and it feels more safe and more status. Is it because I'm chasing like more subscribers because then I get to feel as if I'm a thought leader and I have more subscribers than other people? Like, what am I actually chasing here? Like, what's the idol that I'm worshiping at the feet of? And I don't know, I think it's complicated. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs end up building themselves a prison sometimes. Yeah. you know and they have the key to it but they sit inside of the prison cell and they're like I don't like this anymore but now I am here yeah you know and I don't have a choice anymore honestly I think I journal about this most weeks just like this question of why am I really doing this because like it still somewhat surprises me when I realize I can take a week off and when I realize I actually don't have to film a YouTube video?

1:00:15Yeah. Like, yeah, wait a minute. I can just do what I want. Like, I've got enough money. I've got enough money coming in. I don't need to film this YouTube video. We don't have deadlines on the sponsorship. But I still feel this compulsion that like, the upload schedule. Yeah, yeah. The algorithm. For sure. You know, they've not yet added the take a break button that you guys advised with your Emma Chamberlain thing. And so, what is this prison that I've created for myself? I don't know. I think I'd like to, again, sort of build a business that's not reliant on view counts where I can just genuinely make a video whenever I feel like it.

1:00:47And it's almost like that midwit meme. You know, it's like that IQ bell curve or on like the dumb end of the IQ spectrum, you know, the person says, I make a video whenever I feel like it. In the middle, they're like, oh, I make a video on an upload schedule. I do title and thumbnail beforehand. I optimize the hooks. I look at analytics. I look at retention. And on the other end of the curve, I make a video whenever I feel like. And I'd like to get to a point where on the other side of all of the bullshit, I make a video whenever I feel like it. And I don't think too hard about it. We're probably both sitting in the middle there.

1:01:12Yeah, I think so. It's got to be tight and thumbnail before. Otherwise, what's the point? Like, right? Yeah. I do want to talk about YouTube. You know, like, I think, like, obviously we are all really into YouTube. That's what we're doing here. It's what we talk about. And I'm curious about, like, the, as you sit down to think about YouTube videos, like, how much you think about some of your formats that you explore. And like, what, what is fun for you about some of these formats? What is fun for you about the process of making videos? What have you learned about making videos? You know, what do you teach in your class basically?

1:01:52Yeah. That's about six weeks worth of me spieling about. You can bill us.

1:02:00There's a lot there. So what have I, I think at least the way I approach it is.

1:02:07I want to share something that could be useful to at least one person watching it. that's a it's not necessarily the advice I would give to a complete beginner because I think once you have scale then you have the luxury of being able to sort of make whatever videos you want to an extent the way we think about it now is like title and thumbnail comes first and my team will work on the title and thumbnail because I don't really enjoy that part of it because that's like marketing and I don't inherently enjoy that and they'll just give me a title and thumbnail and they're like alright, this is the video and I'm like cool, I'll make it happen and then I go within and I go to a coffee shop and I think about it and I'll do some research on the internet and I'll think what personal stories from my life have got that vibe with this particular title and thumbnail and I'll turn it into a thing like a list of talking points and then I'll film the video.

1:02:54That's our process now. Before it was very different. A lot of like trying to look within and figure out like okay, making productivity videos oh you know I'm currently working as a doctor and I'm doing this YouTube thing on the side so what are the strategies I'm genuinely using? and making the videos about that. But the whole like, yeah, how we do YouTube is like a big, big, big thing. Yeah. That's hard to. Here's what we pulled when we looked at some of the formats. We felt like you were following some, you know, formats. The most popular one that you do is a list. Nine productivity or nine passive income.

1:03:30Yeah. 17 things I can't live without. Especially those strange numbers, the nine or the 17. Oh yeah, it's always an old number. This must be incredibly specific. Of course there's 17 things. The thing is, everything is a list. I think this is advice from nonfiction writing. Fundamentally, every nonfiction book is a listicle. It's just sometimes packaged up in a non-listically kind of way. Atomic Habits is a listicle. The Four Habits of Behavior Change. The Four Workweek is a listicle. Everything is a listicle at the end of the day. And so this is something that we say to our students in the YouTuber Academy.

1:04:01When in doubt, just think about lists. Just like, what is the list of things? If you were talking to yourself from two years ago, what is three or five or seven, we like odd numbers, three or five or seven things you would have wanted to know and then just talk about those things. And that's it. An online course is a list, three to five modules. Each lesson has, each module has like three-ish lessons in it. The first one is about the philosophy and the overview. The second one is about the step-by-step method. The third one is about like do's and don'ts. You've got an online course. It's a listicle.

1:04:29Everything is a listicle at the end of the day. So we lean very heavily into listicles. That's good. I like that. That's good. It helps you organize your thoughts. He is a storyteller. And then for the audience, you have to get to the end. I mean, our retention codes are still like good. Okay, you don't have to get to the end. The usual ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that is interesting because I find that actually to be just good advice in general. Like if there's anything, whenever I feel overwhelmed, I make a list. That's just like what I do. Yeah. Or like if we have a video project and I'm like, how's it going to get done?

1:04:57I write steps, which is a list. Yeah. What a fascinating thing. I wonder why, why does a human mind work like that? just because it's like algorithmic almost of like first this, then that, or if this, then that, and then this, then that. I don't know. It's basically things in a, like the reason I like numbered lists rather than bullet points is because the numbered list forces you to organize it in a sensible way. Whereas bullet points, you can sort of organize it all over the place. I just love a numbered list. Like, you know, whenever people say to me, like, oh, it's really hard making a course.

1:05:27I'm like, all right, let me speak to you right now. What are the five things that you would tell me if you could only pick five things, what are the five things you would tell me about how to land better brand deals? We may need to adjust our course. And it's like, well, I'd teach you about... Well, ours is in a... Yeah, it's in four modules with each module having steps. Great, that's listical. It's list within lists. Everything is a list. That's so good. And the nice thing about this is, one of the philosophies that we teach on our YouTuber Academy, which is like my whole philosophy of YouTube, is find a way to systemize it as much as possible.

1:06:00because it's just really, really hard to try and create something from scratch every single time. And, you know, one video a week for like years, we've done like 600 and something videos over the last six years. That's on average two videos a week. It's completely unsustainable if you're having to reinvent the wheel every single time. Which is why I don't envy entertainment YouTubers because they are having to reinvent the wheel every single time. But as an educational YouTuber, all you need is a title, a thumbnail, and a list. And title, thumbnail, list, with like a reasonable hook or promise.

1:06:28I don't even like the word hook because it sounds too like a promise. Yeah, exactly. It's like a promise. What is the video actually about? You know, the title is 17 Purchases That Saved Me Time. In this video, we're going to talk about 17 Purchases That Saved Me Time. Number one is a padlock. Here's why I use a padlock. Number two is this. Talk to me about the padlock. Because I brought that up to Samir today. I watched that one this morning. And I was like, this guy carries around a padlock in his bag and a padlock in his jacket. Yeah, it's fantastic. The skeptic in me is like, do you have one right now?

1:06:58It's probably in my bag, actually. because I want to have unboxed it from the bag. I came in this morning and I was like... He was a bit angry. I was like, this guy really travels around with two padlocks? I mean, I'm not wearing a jacket right now. The weather in LA is pretty good. But certainly in winter, I would have a padlock in my jacket, a padlock in my bag. So, you know, if I'm out and about, I can go to the gym whenever I want to because I don't have to worry about the padlock situation. It's actually really practical because you can like... It's almost like liberating because you can actually leave things in places if you lock them up.

1:07:27You go to a place with a locker. Oh, yeah, which is the gym. Or you lock your thing. Oh, shit. I don't know. Yeah, you lock it to like a pole or a table. Yeah, what a great idea. Yeah, padlock your things. Okay. Yeah, maybe I'll be converted. Dude, you should launch padlock as merch. You know, padlocks as merch. Mate, physical products. Physical products. That one stood out to me. So the padlock really stood out to me when I was watching the video. I was like, this is fascinating. Yeah. But I like that framework of like, you know, all you need is an idea, thumbnail, or you say title, thumbnail, and a list?

1:07:55Yeah. Yeah, that's so good. I like that a lot. That's so good. That's like very liberating for, I have like this desire to make YouTube videos like that. I just have a lot to say about things that I've observed and learned about even non-YouTube topics, just like life and self-discovery and relationships. And I sit down to write and I almost feel ridiculous when I'm like 10 things I wish I knew before I was 20, you know, or like. I'd absolutely watch that video. Yeah. Sounds great. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, I guess it's, it feels like too cliche and I get in my head of like the creative in me gets really upset with that, you know?

1:08:31And I'm like, I'm like, no, dude, come on. You gotta like push that. What's that title? Or like Atomic Habits, that, that book really impacted me dramatically. And I have a lot to say about how that impacted me. And I've tried writing it in so many different ways, like creative entry points. And like the filmmaker in me goes insane with these topics, but that actually is like, I'm going to try the simple version of that and just try and film it. You need some strengths to get it done. Even when you just said, tell me the five things that, if you could only tell me five things about how to get better brand deals, it's actually really helpful framework.

1:09:05Cause that's the final, like the culmination of our course ends in like you really learning that meat. And I'm like, I have a hundred things to say about this. And what we got to, when we got to that final chapter was like, I got stressed out of like, is this another course did we just build this all into everything builds on top of each other until you're ready to to build kind of your pitch um and when we got there i was like i have so much to say and now i think even thinking now of like taking a finer look at that and going is there five really important things that's actually more yeah that constraint is really helpful or or even just packaging it up into five different categories of things yeah because if you have like 15 things to say you can probably turn it into a five by three list probably dude you are you're a list master yeah i think i think one of the things that i that i find separates me from the more creative type people is that i don't think of myself as a creative i don't think of myself as a filmmaker because my background was in teaching and my background was like teacher like yeah web designing type stuff yeah and so i it it was like three years into my youtube journey before i realized what ISO meant on a camera.

1:10:17Because I was just like ISO auto. It's like people would be like, oh, you know, you're shooting a flat picture profile. I'd be like, no. I'd be like, I'd look at Becky and Chris's video. How are they so good? It's like, they shoot an S-log3. I tried that one time. Screw that. Never again. And so the way I think is always just like, how do I transmit this information in a sensible fashion without worrying about like the fact that it's a video or it's a film or it has any creative elements. I let the editors, you know, deal with that. That might come from your experience, live teaching, like being in front of students.

1:10:49Oh yeah. Right. And being like, I'm just, it's just a way to scale that. Yeah. Right. It's like, I'm just speaking to this lens instead of this group of people. Interesting. Man, that was just the first format we observed. So then. I do, I do think everything is a list, but like, I'm curious if you've. So I'm curious about this. Like the, the next one was the external factor that impacted me. so the book that changed my life oh okay fine do you agree with that as a format again it's a listicle but the title the title is formatted yeah but inside of it is a list oh yeah absolutely these are the five lessons i took away from the courage to be disliked these are the three lessons i took away from atomic habits yeah easy the other one is like the personal journey which is like you exploring you know you're super transparent again like things your biggest mistakes right as as an entrepreneur.

1:11:39That's a list. Which is a list. There is something, the hero's journey template that we do sometimes use, which is basically, you know, it's like the story across civilizations. It's always like every interesting story follows the same template. You've got a main character and they're in a place like the Shire and then someone comes to them and gives them a call to adventure. And then they're like, oh, I don't want to go. And then the mentor is like, yeah, you should go on this adventure. And they're like, all right, I'm going to go on the adventure. and they leave the Shire, they go on the adventure, there's trials and tribulations, there's struggles along the way and they ultimately overcome the struggles and they come back to the Shire.

1:12:16They're changed externally because they've been through this adventure but there's something about them that changes internally as well. There is a lesson that they've learned along the journey. So it's Harry going to Hogwarts and coming back home, Anakin Skywalker from Tatooine and then he comes back home at some point to slaughter all the people. It's all part of the hero's journey. And so essentially it's like, who is the main character? What do they want? Why can't they get what they want? What's holding them back? How do they get what they want? And then what's the lesson? It's just like a five, six.

1:12:42Is that a list? Honestly, it's like seven things. We have this as part of our sort of how to like video notion template. Just like these seven questions. And if a video does not lend itself to a listicle, or if I'm feeling a bit more creative, I'll answer these questions to the video and it will become a hero's journey type video. You are an excellent teacher. Thank you. That was so concise and well, it was so articulate. it. It was visual, even though it was just auditory. Right. I'm glad you think so. In my head, I was thinking, oh crap, I'm kind of rambling here. I was like, is it not coming out right?

1:13:14I hope they fix it in post. I could like see it in my head. Yeah, I was like visualizing graphics in my head. I don't know if that's because we're YouTube graders, but like I was like seeing graphics come together. And then you went and backed it up with like tangible things that we could understand like Harry Potter or Star Wars. That was so interesting how you just did that. This is what the course is about. You've been talking about this ad nauseum for three years now. It's one thing that I find really interesting about your YouTube videos is like, you are very camera confident. Like you do show up and speak in a way that's so approachable.

1:13:48And I think it's what softens the blow sometimes of sharing revenue numbers and sharing money. Because we've tried to do some of that in different ways. We were working on a studio tour of this place. Oh, yeah. And it never came out because we were very, it just didn't, the format didn't work for us. Like it just didn't, didn't hit it. I feel like it didn't deliver. It didn't like, we're very self-conscious about it. And at one point in the tour, we also talked about how much rent we pay for the studio. And it was so uncomfortable to share. Like it just didn't, it felt like we were bragging or maybe we were like, it didn't feel authentic in the way that when you share stuff, it's like very, I don't know.

1:14:29No, it's smooth. It's smooth. And we have developed this show because the best version of myself is when I'm not looking at a camera, I'm looking at you. The camera's here and everyone can hear me, but now they can hear me being myself because I'm not looking in the lens. And I find myself, like I think I'm a pretty confident person. Like I can do it on a stage, but when I'm alone with a lens, it's so different for me. I needed this show to be able to be myself so I don't look at the camera. I feel a lot of this is in your head. So like, would you be comfortable saying how much the studio costs on this?

1:15:04Yeah, yeah. I mean, mainly because we talked about it before. So how much does it cost? We pay$16 ,000 a month. $16 ,000 a month. Yeah. And if you said that to the lens, how does it feel? I can't look at them. No, I mean, it feels interesting because what it feels like is like, you know, immediately some, like there potentially is like a snap judgment or like there's a narrative that goes along with that. what's the narrative that you're concerned about? Is it excessive? Potentially. Like, do you need it? And I think the reality is you don't need it. No. Why do you do it? A lot of money. That's more than I pay on my studio.

1:15:42It's a lot. And this area is expensive. When it comes down to it, we want a space like this. It's a little bit of the die with zero mentality of like, this is how we want to spend our days in a place that's really nice and has natural light, fresh air, a kitchen, is in a really beautiful area. Yeah. We are enjoying these days. I would go even one step further of like, when we sat and evaluated this expense, we thought about the context of the show, how we wanted to grow was being a space that creators wanted to come hang out at. Yeah. So that to me was like, so now that's the most important expense.

1:16:24Yeah. Do we have a space that when you walk in, you're like, this is cool. And that was your experience, right? Yeah, I freaking love this place. It's fantastic. You walked in and you were kind of like, oh shit, this is really cool. And at the same time as you were here, we had a bunch of other creators here. And they were sitting and having lunch on the couch. And they weren't even here to do something. They weren't here to collaborate. They were here to hang. And that was important to me. That we were building a space that can invite creators in. as you're describing that do you feel a sense of like self-consciousness and cringe at the fact you've said yeah not at all i actually again you're here to help me work through this what i worry about sometimes uh with the studio tour video is are we saying this without any context of right why we pay this much or why we want to be in a space like this do we i get so in my own head of that.

1:17:17And it does feel for like two guys who didn't make money for a long period of time, it feels crazy. And it felt like a huge risk at the time. And now, you know, with the way we run the business, it's like clear that we'll be fine. Yeah, it was a justifiable risk because of what I just said. Because if we weren't doing that, then, you know, if we weren't living out what we actually wanted, which was to have a space, a physical hub that creators felt good about coming to and you know that was in a in a space that was um really cool and safe and we felt good about it and then yeah and we've thrown events here uh we run look at us justifying this to you yeah no it's really worth it man i'm telling you yeah you you've become our therapist um just so you know i think it's like the thing is so it's it's interesting hearing you guys say to me that you feel I come across as like smooth or whatever when I'm sharing numbers and things like that.

1:18:19Because the amount of like takes I have to do to get the tone right when talking about numbers, it's just fucking absurd. It's just like so many of them. And, you know, this is probably why I don't like the hooks of videos, because as soon as I hit record, it's like all of the pressure is on the first 30 seconds. And so what I've started doing is I'll just record the hook at the end. I'll just launch straight into, all right, well, point number one is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then at the end of the video, once I've made the video, in this video we're gonna be talking about i'll do the redo the intro um but in my head it's like oh every time i reveal revenue numbers it's like scary and like people are gonna judge me and it's gonna be awful in your guys minds you're saying that's smooth it's fine similarly i would absolutely watch your studio tour i think it'd be absolutely fascinating and hearing you talk candidly about the numbers even where maybe you switch to a podcast segment where you're talking to each other about the numbers or even just including this segment done it's like it comes across as so natural and so like, wow, that's so inspiring.

1:19:14I feel inspired hearing about the fact that you're spending 16K a month on this place. And I'm like, wow, you guys know what you want. You've got your dream. You've been working your asses off for the last like 10 years to get here. And now here you are in this absolutely sick studio surrounded by friends and team members and random creators coming to hang out, inviting people like, you know, Tim Ferriss into your studio to hang out. That's so sick. This is fantastic. What a setup that you guys have created. What a testament to like the hard work, the inspiration, the grinding and the strategy that you guys have combined to get here.

1:19:44That's so sick. Super inspiring for anyone watching this stuff. I really appreciate that. And I would say that also when we set out on the channel, we had two goals, which is really interesting. The two outcomes we wanted from having the Colin and Samir YouTube channel was a creative office on the West side of Los Angeles and a creative team that we liked working with every day. Those were the two goals. You got it. And we've achieved it. Which is actually a strange experience. Strange as it? It's a strange experience to, like I find that at any given point in my entrepreneurial journey, I've been either in pursuit of, or constantly been in pursuit of something.

1:20:24Ooh, yeah. Yeah. And then when you arrive at something that felt like a ridiculous pursuit, like it wasn't going to happen, it's almost like this reestablishment of like, is the pursuit over? have I arrived? Is it now time to be present or is it time to develop a new pursuit? And - And am I working to maintain? Yeah. Or am I working to grow something new? And I got to speak to a business coach who was kind of like a life coach, great guy, who put it into context for me of like, having arrived at this moment is like meeting a new version of yourself. And that's like meeting a stranger. So like prior to this, there was like a scarcity mindset of not having things.

1:21:11It didn't have opportunities, revenue, viewership, didn't have the things. When you arrive to the place where you do have those things, you're now in an abundant mindset or you're living in abundance, right? And you're now meeting a new version of yourself, the abundant version. And that is like developing a relationship with a stranger and will take the same amount of time to meet this new version of yourself. there's a quote I heard recently which is your internal identity lags about two years behind your external reality 100 % dude 100 % yeah it's like I definitely feel that for myself where you know the book I've been writing for the last almost two years now at the start of the journey I felt so much imposter syndrome around like who am I to be writing a book like what the hell why would anyone listen to what I have to say and my agent my writing coach and our editor everyone it was just every session would be like a therapy session to be like, oh, it's okay.

1:22:05You got this, like people care what you have to say. Don't worry about it. Like all of this kind of stuff. And even now I think, you know, we were looking at the stats and according to the publisher, I'm like the world's most followed productivity expert, depending on how you define productivity expert. I was like, okay, but it still feels weird to be releasing a book about productivity because I don't feel like an authority. I don't feel like I know anything. It's like, why would anyone listen to me? But from the outside, even when I, when I launched the YouTuber Academy, I said to Tiago and David Perel on the Zoom call, I was like, guys, why would anyone want to learn about YouTube from me?

1:22:38I've only got 1.2 million subscribers. And they just laughed. They were like, dude, you have no idea what you're talking about. I was like, yeah, but like Mr. Beast has like 40 million at the time or something like that. And they were like, yeah, Mr. Beast is not teaching. Of course, people want to learn from you. They want to learn the systems. They want to learn the part-time thing. And I think often it takes, at least I I find it takes speaking to other people to kind of give me the permission almost to step into that new identity and feel comfortable with it. It feels kind of weird otherwise.

1:23:07Totally, man. I've had a similar experience with public speaking. We've done a lot of public speaking in this career. And in the beginning and every time leading up to speaking, I always think, I'm not someone who does public speaking. I'm not good at this. There's no reason for me to be on stage. And then I'm terrified that I'm going to bomb. I get off stage and I go, I'm pretty well. People laughed, people found it interesting, people were engaged and it took so many, it still does, but it took so many reps of doing it to then now look at myself now and go, oh yeah, no, I am someone who does public speaking and I actually think I am relatively good at it and that is now becoming a part of my identity but it's taken truly, like you said, two years, three years to feel that way.

1:23:50I think it's similar with when people start making YouTube videos for the first time. Everyone is terrible on camera. And, you know, what we find from all of our students is like, oh, you know, it took me half an hour to film a video that was only 10 minutes. Like half an hour, it's not bad. It takes me about an hour to film a video that's only 10 minutes. And they're like, oh, really? And at one point we just put out a sort of raw version of like, we just uploaded it unlisted and shared it to all our students. Just your raw take? A raw take of like me recording a video. And everyone was like, oh my God, that's so reassuring to see.

1:24:23Like the slip ups and the swearing. and the sort of the sweating and all that stuff the sweating and all of that kind of stuff vomiting yeah and then I remember early on in my YouTube journey on Hank Green's second channel he uploaded one of these videos it was like a totally raw version because you know his normal video is like four minutes long this was like 24 minutes long and it was a lot of it was it was this kind of thing and it was so painful to watch and I was like oh that's so reassuring because that's how it feels to film a video. And the fact that I know that Hank Green, who's been doing this for 10 years, also films a video like this.

1:25:00Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fills me with profound relief that this is exactly how I film a video as well. It says so much about comparison, you know, just our like inherent desire to compare. Yeah. You know, at every juncture, I just find that to be interesting. Yeah, I think during the pandemic, recording YouTube videos in the loft I was living in with my now wife, she would get so annoyed because I would repeat the same line a hundred times. Yeah. Yeah, I think Madeline thought I was crazy. Yeah. You're in a studio apartment and I'm just like talking to this camera and getting angry at myself. She was like, and you enjoy this?

1:25:36This is sometimes what I say. I feel like a lot of the time filming is the least enjoyable part. Yeah. But at some point I get into the groove of it and the more I can think of the camera as like a friend almost. Yeah. And actually I find that having a microphone in front of me helps because if I don't have a microphone, I kind of feel the need to kind of perform like this. and this kind of stuff. And it's a bit more, whereas if I had the microphone in front of me, I can just be myself a bit more. It feels a bit more chill. And that feels really comfortable. So I'm trying to get to a point where talking to a camera feels like talking to a friend.

1:26:09So I'm shuffling around all these papers still. It's the most amount of papers I've ever had in front of me. I mean, it's literally your entire financial breakdown. Nice. But the one thing I did want to address, because like the process of making videos, starts out as like a very individual experience, right? It's just you, the camera, and you're editing. And then as you grow, you add team members. How many team members do you have right now? We have 14. 14 team members. And those are split between the courses and the YouTube channel? Yeah, so we have Content Squad and we have Money Squad. Okay, that's how you think about it.

1:26:45Content Squad is, you know, their job is to help me make free content that helps people build a life they love. And Money Squad's job is to help make the money that sustains the business. Got it. And how many people are on each? And tell me some of the rules. Okay, so Money Squad, we have, Alison is head of customer success. We've got Tommy, who's a head of product. We've got Jakob, who's a head of marketing. And that's it. And then Content Squad is the other 10. The other 10. Yeah. Got it. Yeah, because we've got two editors, podcast producer, YouTube producer, social media person A, social media person B, website guy, Barb, my assistant, who used to be in Money Squad as head of operations for the YouTube channel, YouTuber Academy, and then Angus, our general manager.

1:27:25Interesting. Do you think that sometimes people on Money Squad want to be on Content Squad? Like, is there like a rivalry between them or like any like desire to be like, I wish I was like, Money Squad has such a cool vibe, like inter-company sports or anything? Yeah. You know, one thing I do occasionally here is that like, oh, it seems like Content Squad has so much fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because Money Squad is the one that's like doing the launches. This is when our launches was quite, and it's like, we've got all these students that are paying a lot of money. It's really stressful. And Money Squad always has deadlines.

1:27:52whereas they'll hear me say guys, screw the deadlines I don't want deadlines and they're like oh, you know I wish we didn't have deadlines but now we're going to evergreen money squad will also not have deadlines so Angus your general manager can you talk to us about that role what does he do? okay, so this is interesting Angus started off as a freelance like writer because I was thinking oh, if someone can convert my videos into blog posts it's good for SEO something like that back in like 2020 and then he joined for like one day a week then two days a week then four days a week and then pandemic hit and he lost his other freelance gigs.

1:28:24So then we joked that he moved up to eight days a week as like his role. And he was sort of basically the first, I mean, other than Christian, our editor, he was the first like actual employee of the business and sort of became my right-hand person, kind of doing literally anything and everything. It's basically his first job fresh out of university. He also went to Cambridge and so we happened to be in the same town, which was awesome because we could meet in person. And so the thing that I generally advise people is once you've outsourced your editing, which is like a huge weight off your shoulders find someone who is like a jack of all trades who can be your right hand person and then like I think people make the mistake of trying to hire specialist writers or specialist XYZ but actually a generalist is so helpful in the early days and so now what Angus does is like he's sort of become sort of the general manager of the business over time there's kind of a model that there's a guy called Daniel Priestley who's become a friend and mentor he's written a bunch of books about business his whole model for sort of how a creative business can work is you have a key person of influence who's like usually the YouTuber, i.e.

1:29:22me, in the thing, in the top seat. And then underneath that person, you have a general manager. And then underneath the general manager, you have the whole team. Now, in between the key person of influence and the general manager, there is a cloud. And the job of the key person of influence is to stay above the clouds. And the job of the general manager is to stay below the clouds. And any time the key person of influence has to come below the clouds down to the ground to get involved in meddling in the business, you know you've got a problem. And this is like, you know, the way he describes it is like, you know, Michael Jordan with the Chicago Bulls.

1:29:52Michael Jordan should not be selling tickets. He should not be sweeping the floors. He should not be editing the videos. He should not be doing the social media posts. He should be just doing whatever the fuck he wants and occasionally rocking up and shooting hoops. And if he's winning, the whole team is winning. Everyone's happy. And the job of Scottie Pippen and the rest of the team is to allow Michael Jordan to be Michael Jordan. And so it's a bit of a grandiose analogy. But I think that's the kind of role of a general manager. It's like they are the person who handles everything in the business so that the creator can focus on doing what they fundamentally enjoy and are great at, i.e.

1:30:25talking to a camera, building the key relationships with people, going on podcasts, doing the public speaking, doing that kind of stuff. And all of the day-to-day is taken care of by the general manager who manages the whole team. But now I don't actually manage anyone. The only person I have one-on-ones with is Angus. And Angus manages everyone else on the team, the other 12 people. that's so good dude the that's that was so helpful and that's something that we're actively working towards because you know I find that I like my dream is to be above the clouds but I live below the clouds yeah I live below the clouds and like I am very in the weeds of everything and at the same time this craft I love like the craft of how do you have this conversation How do I follow my natural curiosity, but also make something that is valuable to others?

1:31:19And that craft, I would like the next chapter of my career to focus on this craft. I would like to focus on this craft of being an interviewer and being a conversationalist and also the craft of exploring other creative ideas. But I find that I spend so much time in the nitty gritty of the business that I'm drained by the time I have to focus on the craft. Why do you spend so much time in the nitty gritty of the business? I think there's a lot of like trust that I, you know, that it's hard for me to get over of like, I only trust myself to run it the way I want it to be run. Right. And I'm letting go quite a bit of that.

1:32:01And I have let go quite a bit over the past couple of years. but finding who is that right-hand person that I can wholeheartedly trust or just have a relationship with, that's, I think, the X factor. I think there have also been years where, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but self-worth and identity was also somewhat tied to - Being that person. Being that person who runs the business and deals with that side. So I think it's been a little bit of a changing of who you identify as and who you are. I think what I've learned, and Amar from Yes Theory has really helped me understand this, is that I started out wanting to be a creative, but no one would give me a chance.

1:32:42So I built my own thing to be a creative. Now that it's here, I'm ready to come back to that identity of like, wait, this whole thing 12 years ago started because I had the desire to be a creative. So that's the thing is like, now can I build something where I'm allowed to be that person again? Yeah. you know yeah honestly for me that's been the the twisty turny journey over the last two three years since first hiring the first team member how do I get to a point where I genuinely can be in the clouds and just do the creative stuff yeah because like the business flourishes when I just when I focus on making YouTube videos the Michael Jordan thing was really good yeah that was good it's a Dan Priestley analogy this is this was a very long way of me asking you the question of like you know as I mentioned like finances tell a story 2021 you made you know over four million dollars you spent 1.5 in 2022 you made 4.6 million and you spent 2.5 and you said this year you're on track to do over five and spend one two ish oh two ish 1.5 to 2 ish 1.5 to 2 ish so the the expenses is what tells me a story um of like did you grow too quickly between 2020 and 2022?

1:33:58Oh, hell yeah. And if so, yeah. Talk to me about incurring that much expense. Yeah. Cause 2.5 million in expense is significant. Yeah. And that can be a prison of like overhead. Yeah. Right. And it absolutely was. Yeah. And I have these wages to pay. I have these salaries to pay. I have this rent to pay. I have this. And that's the thing I feel like, yeah, go ahead. Cause I feel like I've, I hear the story from a lot of creators and I'm related to it in some ways. Yeah, okay. So basically during the pandemic, everyone had an accelerant on their trajectory. That was when we launched our YouTuber Academy and all of a sudden our revenue skyrocketed.

1:34:33And then we launched a second cohort and boom, that also did like 600K in revenue. Then we launched the third cohort and that did like 700, 800K in revenue or something absurd like that. And so it really felt like, oh my God, money's growing on trees. We're just, we've got this money printing machine, the part-time YouTuber Academy. Shit, like, okay, cool. We have all these students coming and we need to hire all these people. It's like, okay, while we're here, let's also do this project and that thing and that thing and that thing and that thing. And all those things need people. And so let's hire all these people.

1:34:59And so at one point we jumped from like eight people full time to 18 people full time in the space of like a month. And that was a terrible idea. Everyone I know who runs a business, when I tell them that, they're like, yeah, that's a terrible idea. And I just didn't realize it at the time. In theory, every hire made perfect sense. in theory if you know we want to make more youtube videos and the bottleneck is the writing let's just hire four writers and then they can write in my voice because my voice is nothing special i just read off a teleprompter and you know we'll make four times as many videos in reality with four writers we made half as many youtube videos because it turns out that in theory that all works in practice it's really hard for someone to write a script in my voice it's not it doesn't feel authentic i spent hours and hours and hours editing the script i don't even record from a script i record from bullet points like why the hell am i trying to record from a script it's like we made the mistake of bringing people in before the system was created and then like that the the thing that i normally tell people now which is like the real lesson learned is don't hire in the hope that the hire will lead to will will drive revenue drive the revenue first and then make and then do the hire to like service the demand that you've already created.

1:36:17For example, now we have loads of people in our part-time YouTuber accelerator that needs lots of customer service. So I have no qualms with hiring more customer success people because we've already got the revenue. But if I try to hire someone more thinking, oh, that hire is necessary because we want to create a new thing, then that's going to become a problem because what if we don't create the new thing? And that person's salary is sort of just adding to the overheads. Every new hire is like an exponential increase in the complexity of the business with all of the managerial overhead, communication overhead.

1:36:45And these are all things that I just, again, I knew in theory, because I'd been reading them in business books, but only really appreciated them in practice. When all of a sudden we had this enormous team of 18 people. And again, to quote Daniel Priestly on this, um, one thing that he says is that 12 is the sweet spot. As soon as you add a 13th person to the team, suddenly everything breaks because 12 people can fit around the same table and 12 people can all basically be managed by the same general manager, just about like a general manager can have like 11 direct reports or 10 direct reports.

1:37:15As soon as you get to 13, now all of a sudden you need to split up into different teams. You need managers to manage those teams. And he calls it the desert territory, where you're too big to be small and too small to be big, in between 12 people and 40 people. 40 is when you're at the point where you're a big business, you're operating like a big business, you've got the systems, you've got the managers, you've got the leadership team, blah, blah, blah. But if you're trying to be a lifestyle business that's highly profitable, optimizing for fun, freedom, and flexibility, 12 is the sweet spot.

1:37:41and we just blew past 12 into the desert of 18 people and I think it's just so true like now we have 14 so we kind of moved some people over to freelance contracts and stuff and sort of clawed it back down to 13 and now 14 people and I'm starting to feel the pain of the desert now where it's like we can't just fit around the same table we are having communication issues now and so it's like I think a lot of creators make the mistake of waiting way too long to hire the first person because the first person you hire is such a big sort of massive leverage. But then beyond the first person, I'm now like just hire really, really, really slowly and take probation period seriously.

1:38:21Ideally start people off as freelancers if you have to go part-time and if you absolutely have to go full-time and bring them on payroll. Because fundamentally it's about prioritization. Like this is another kind of big realization over the last year or so, which is that there's only ever one bottleneck. And that bottleneck, like trying to fix anything other than the one bottleneck. It's just a total waste of time. It's like if you're at a grocery store and the bottleneck is the checkouts and you're trying to kind of optimize the sales funnels and stuff, or you're trying to optimize the experience for the customers, but the bottleneck is like there's only one checkout.

1:38:53You've got to open more lanes. You've got to fix the bottleneck because without fixing that bottleneck, nothing else upstream of the bottleneck or downstream of the bottleneck makes any sense to fix. And so what that really meant was that really drilling it down to what is the actual goal? Like, what is the thing that we're trying to do? Are we trying to optimize for like a metric, like monthly views? Are we trying to optimize for email subscribers? Are we trying to optimize for book sales? Are we trying to optimize for revenue? What is the metric? And then what is the one needle moving thing that will move us most towards that metric?

1:39:23What is the bottleneck? What is stopping us from 10Xing our revenue? Well, that's because we haven't got enough products. Cool. Why is no one working on products? Good point. Someone should probably be working on products. Cool. What's the next thing? Okay, well, we're only making one video a week. What if we made two? Would that move the needle? Yes. What's stopping us from making two videos a week? Oh, because we don't have enough editors. Okay, cool. Now let's get another editor. And so really like my whole thing has just been about bottleneck analysis and really ruthlessly prioritizing things.

1:39:51Because this is something I think Mr. B said in his interview with you guys that he filmed in that random warehouse in the middle of nowhere. He said something like, and this has really stuck with me. He said that the mistake creators make is that they grow big and then they start doing all these things. And then they neglect the YouTube channel and the main thing stops becoming the main thing. And they realize, oh, all of these businesses were reliant on the YouTube channel and everything crumbles. And when I heard that when you interviewed him a couple of years ago, that really hit me because I was like, fuck, that's literally what we did.

1:40:17We tried to grow too big too quickly. That line from him struck me a lot at that time. And I would say that Marquez said something really similar too about creators just grow so big and then they forget that the craft is making really good YouTube videos. That's what unlocks everything. Yeah, that's super interesting. I think it's very exciting to experience growth. It's very exciting to like understand that revenue is like abundant all of a sudden and it's coming in and you know how to generate it. Yeah, it's like, you're just like, so let's just get more people and that'll free me up. And then that does not, that does the opposite.

1:40:50You know, I think it's a common tale for a lot of creators. And then like going, even from going to a lot of projects to being like, let's simplify, what are the two? Yeah, exactly. There's the YouTube channel and there's one other thing. Yeah. you know i've noticed that like no matter what we have a bunch of different creative projects right now and when we focus on one it flourishes and the other fail yeah or not fail but they just aren't as they they don't flourish yeah right so it's like you can only really creatively focus on one thing at a time so having youtube channel plus one is kind of how it works yeah you know and you think otherwise you think it's like this youtube channel is an empire that can launch all these different things, but it's just not like that.

1:41:34Yeah, absolutely. I think like, again, I find myself giving this advice to so many creators now. It's like, just really understand what is the business model. Yeah. For most educational creators that I know, it's the YouTube channel and then sell a course. That's it. What do you think the leanest possible team is for that model? I think it's a video editor and a jack of all trades assistant. That's it. Three people. Three people. Yeah. The video editor handles all the video editing and then the consistent you know you work on a product at one product at a time they help with titles and thumbnails for the youtube videos yeah boom everyone's happy because it'd be really easy to go like generate 10 million and spend eight yeah you know but the you can actually really comfortably do that in generating 10 and spending one yeah yeah you know i mean i don't yet know how to generate 10 but yeah we're working on it but you can like do the math to find it you're halfway there yeah the other thing i've been thinking about a lot which um i think is a sort of a step change from how I used to think about YouTube.

1:42:31Previously, I used to think that like, spend ages building an audience of people who know, like, and trust you loads and loads of free content. And then at some point when you feel like pressing the monetization button, you can just build a product and then that product will suddenly will suddenly sell. I think increasingly that's not the way to do YouTube anymore because increasingly subscriber count is becoming more and more meaningless over time. Even the people with millions of subscribers have to work really hard for their views. Oh yeah. Every video is just like a, such a heavy lift. It's not like back in the day where, oh, you've got 10 million subscribers.

1:43:01Great. You're guaranteed 5 million views on every video. And so if you're working so hard for your views and the only, only thing you're getting out of those views, it's like, obviously there's the value to the audience of the view itself. And maybe there's a sponsor on the video, but usually that's it. And so all of this effort to get those million views is kind of wasted. But if you had a product to sell at the end of it, where maybe those million views, you mentioned a lead magnet in the video. If it's like, I don't know, one of my videos about how to grow a YouTube channel. In that video, we'll say something like, and if you want to get my templates completely for free for how I structure videos and listicles, click the link below.

1:43:36That link, yes, it takes people off the platform, so a negative factor in the algorithm, but it takes people off the platform where they enter their email. Now I've got their email. And now I know they've expressed interest in starting a YouTube channel. So now when I send them an email, you know, obviously, you know, they opt in for permission and stuff. Hey, you know, I give them more and more value about how to start a YouTube channel or how to grow a YouTube channel. And then I sell them the course for$1 ,000. And so it's now like every view in that video, maybe 5 % of people, 1 % of people will click the thing to get the free template.

1:44:04Now they're in my email list and now I can sell to the email list. So you're getting the double dip effect. You're getting the revenue from AdSense. You're getting the inherent value from helping someone by giving them, you know, the view on the video. You're getting the revenue from the sponsor and you're also building your own email list and getting your own revenue. And I kind of think that like, maybe not from day one, but maybe like day, you know, six months into the journey, people should really start thinking about what is the product they want to sell. Because I know so many YouTubers who are dependent on AdSense and brand deals who have to hit a million views for the next upload because otherwise, like, uh-oh, our sponsorship rates go down.

1:44:37Uh-oh, can't afford the team anymore. If you just had a product to sell. And you can find a way to keep that in mind as you're building the audience so you don't end up with an audience of broke students who only want free entertainment content because it's really hard to make a business off of that. You keep that in mind. And now you're not so reliant on the views in theory. Would you recommend that most creators, start building an email list? Yes. I think it feels like...

1:45:08Okay, it kind of depends on the order. So I would say most creators should really think about making some sort of product, like an online course or something like that. It's way easier to sell an online course when you have an email list. And it's very easy to get an email list by giving away free stuff, like free assets. so I don't recommend people start an email newsletter necessarily because I think that's the thing people default to because they see mine, they see yours they're like, oh, start a newsletter it's actually really hard to start a regular newsletter it's like a YouTube channel it's absolutely like a YouTube channel whereas if, for example, the creator is, I don't know doing finance content and they could give away a free PDF that has like 10 different side hustle ideas and that's behind an email sub now they're building an email list but without actually having to provide the weekly thingies the weekly content but generally the thing I'd recommend is instead of trying to grow an email list just try and make an offer I'd usually recommend people read .com secrets and$100 million offers but Alex Formozzi those two books single handedly have taught me more than anything else about how to build an offer and actually I think part of the reason why this latest cohort of our YouTuber Academy did so well compared to previous ones yes there was the final cohort urgency but we completely revamped the offer and the landing page based on literally just reading three books .com secrets $100 million offers and copywriting secrets.

1:46:26It was kind of bizarre for me because I've been selling stuff on the internet for 10 years and I've never once read a book about how to sell stuff on the internet. And then I read those books and I was like, oh my God, if I'd read these 10 years ago, I would have been a decamillionaire by now because I would have just learned so much. And this is something Alex Formosi talks about a lot. In the early days of a journey, you're paying off ignorance debt. And the reason I'm not making 10 million a year is because I don't know how to make 10 million a year. And so not knowing how to make 10 million a year is costing me 10 million a year or like 6 million or whatever the delta is.

1:46:58So I should really spend a lot of time trying to find the people who are making 10 million a year and seeing what are they doing and try talking to them and literally fly to wherever they are to hang out with them. Because then I'll be like, oh, okay, these people are not working any harder than I am. They've just, they're playing the right chess moves. Right. They understand how the game works a little bit differently. And so if I know that those chess moves exist, it means that I can then make those chess moves myself without having to spend all the time and effort trying to figure it out myself.

1:47:25So I don't know. I just think I've learned so much by reading these specific books about sales and marketing over the years. And I think creators increasingly need to really think about monetization almost from day one because the old model of build an audience for free for years and then sell something I don't think is a very sustainable way to build a creative business. I think that's really good advice. I think it's a quick path to being reliant on the advertising business. And that, I think, has proven to be challenging for a lot of creators. So I agree with that. I did want to talk about, like, you are, even through this podcast, like, it's very, whenever I speak to you, it's very inspiring for me to pursue different online businesses, specifically courses.

1:48:09Like, I find myself very inspired. But I also find myself in the way that you've designed your life to be inspired of like, even just listening to frameworks and ideas. Do you ever think about the concept that you are, your story itself is a pitch to not become a doctor? And like, what, how does that impact like the future of humanity having doctors? Like talking about being a doctor was more lucrative, you've led to a career that's more lucrative than being a doctor? Yeah. I occasionally think about that. I think there is a distinct set of, you know, at least in the UK, it seems about half of the medical students that I know really look up to me and they're like, oh my God, it's a dream lifestyle, I want to leave medicine.

1:49:03The other half think I'm the worst thing ever because it's like, oh my God, this guy's terrible. He's like trading off the brand name of being a doctor and then he's leaving and like encouraging other people to leave. way I think about it is like you know if me showing a lifestyle that's possible outside of medicine is really the thing that's encouraging people to leave and those are people we actually don't want in the system anyway you know ideally I would like to be in a healthcare system where the people who are practicing as doctors are the people that actually want to be there rather than the ones who made a decision at least in the UK at the age of 15 to go down this career path and are now stuck in there because of all of the life that's built up on top of it though occasionally the thought crosses my mind that like if you know I had so much influence that everyone suddenly left medicine obviously that would be bad but to be honest in the UK it's an oversubscribed degree at university there's always more people wanting to be doctors than there are places for doctors so as long as that continues to be the case I don't like lose sleep over it at night that's a good answer we want the doctors who really want to be doctors yeah it weeds people out weeds people out because money is no longer part of it yeah I mean you can make more money doing other things yeah and in the UK like doctors don't make that much money anyway.

1:50:10That's interesting. Like 40K for like eight years and then you earn 100K max. No. Yeah. Pounds, so like$120K. So yeah. Wow. Very few go into private practice. They can earn maybe 300, 400K, but it's really, really stressful and you have to be really old and like it's a very, very different like economic incentive than it is in the US. Interesting. In fact, I think the doctors were on strike last week trying to campaign for increasing wages from the government. Makes sense. I would hope that doctors get paid well. Yeah, exactly. I would hope that they get paid well. Lots of stuff on Twitter about this.

1:50:40Like, you know, a neurosurgeon 10 years into training is being paid like 35 to 40K a year. That's absolutely mental. That's insane. Can you walk us through though? Like, you know, I would imagine telling your mom the decision to leave medicine. Like, was that an impactful moment of like, I'm going to leave medicine and, you know, not be a doctor anymore? Yeah, I mean, she kind of knew it was coming. Initially, it sort of happened accidentally. I was always intending to take a break after two years of working as a doctor. In the UK, there's a very natural gap where, you know, a lot of people go to Australia or like do something else for a year or like we'll do some research work for a year.

1:51:19And so it was that year that happened to be the pandemic where I happened to accidentally become a full-time YouTuber. And so it's, I mean, it's been three years now. So my mom has broadly gotten over it. Got it. But it's still a bit of a, in the back of my mind, you know, the whole Asian parents thing. Yeah. And my mom never pushed me to do medicine. Like she was never like campaigning for that. But it's in, you know, so sometimes I'll have conversations with my grandma when she's in Pakistan and she'll be like, you know, Ali, you know, just do some kind of specialization. You know, just become a GP before I die.

1:51:48You know, just something like that to give her the sort of peace of mind that I'm not going to end up starving and homeless and stuff. Because I think medicine is a very stable career and the creator thing is not that stable. And so for my mom and grandma, I can totally see why they don't want me to end up broken, bestitute. Yeah, yeah, yeah. stability was so, um, highly touted for our parents and grandparents. Right. And low risk. Yeah. And the internet has exploded that, right? Like that is become a land that's like the internet's like the modern America, like how people used to pitch America as the land of opportunity.

1:52:22Right. Like the internet is the infinite land of opportunity. So it's almost in the same way that, you know, my family ended up moving to America. It's like, I moved to the internet yeah you know to explore and just see and like make new land and make a life um it's fascinating but it's hard for them to understand even though they did something really similar yeah i think so i think it's it's even hard for us to like it's only it's only recently that i've really started to realize that actually i can just do this internet thing basically forever because before i was like oh you know like my channel could die at any point what if youtube the platform breaks down what if I become irrelevant and stuff but I think I've sort of I've kind of realized that the skills that you develop in this career path this creative path all of the skills that we all have give us will give us the ability to make money whatever happens yeah I agree it's a big skill set I've lost that fear I've fully lost the fear of like well what if this all goes away like what do I do next I've lost that fear because I feel like the skill set we have now The understanding of storytelling as well is like so valuable.

1:53:31Starting from zero would not feel like zero. It wouldn't feel like zero at all. Yeah. What's your book about? The book, it's called Feel Good Productivity. It's about how to do more of what matters to you in a way that's enjoyable and sustainable. I've been working on it for the last two and a half years now. And as of today, I think I made the final changes to the final copy edit draft thing. wow so we sent those today yeah this morning this is like a big day yeah but I mean okay come on give me that this is a big day loads of like final drafts it's like now it's gonna come back and then there's gonna be some amount of like typos and things we're gonna cut all of that out we're gonna add that we're gonna use this and just be like so you finished the book today and then you came on the show yeah that's amazing it's been a big day yeah this morning I didn't have anyone to meet with for breakfast I was meeting with Sarah Dicci for lunch I was like you know what I've got four hours and we just actually just finish off this book that's great it's been looming over my head for the last three years.

1:54:24And now it's done. Wow. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, congrats, man. I think there was one thing you asked me about when we were on the phone yesterday. You were talking about longevity and how do you build like a brand in this space of like thought leadership. Yeah. And I actually think that, I thought about that overnight. And I was like, I actually think the two pieces of that equation of longevity and like a premium brand in this space are going to come from scarcity and timeless work. So like you becoming potentially more scarce as you release the book, less available. And the second is a book can be timeless.

1:55:02The book I read from Seth Godin that really pushed me on YouTube was Unleashing the Idea Virus, which was written in the 90s. I read it in the 2000s and I would still prescribe it to anyone who wants to start an online business. That's a timeless piece of work. So the thing that I sometimes think we forget as YouTube creators, that impulse to make something next week because that's what we do. We wanna be a part of the conversation. We wanna make stuff. We wanna be present and relevant. And I think we forget that when you put a lot of time into one single piece of work, it can live forever. Yeah.

1:55:37And that's like music, that's books, that's movies, right? Those pieces are timeless. Yeah. Yeah, that was a big part of why I wanted to write the book. I looked at the careers of people like Tim Ferriss and Ryan Holiday and Cal Newport and these sort of people that I looked up to and still look up to. And a lot of their longevity, I think, has been because of books. And it just seems like a cool life. Like, you know, you get to wake up, you get to do some reading, some learning, some writing, and every few years you release a book. And it's like, some people will read it. Yeah, I mean, that's super cool.

1:56:05That's a pretty sick one. It does feel like a legacy moment, too. Because it exists in a physical form, you now can be remembered for your ideas that you put in that physical thing. Yeah. I feel like for me, I don't really care about legacy as much. Maybe that'll change once I have kids. I've spoken to people who have kids and they're like, oh yeah, at that point you start caring about legacy. I think for me, it's more like, it's a fun journey. And it was, you know, quite a lot of learning and tackling inner demons around imposter syndrome and self-worth and all that kind of stuff. And now it's the whole journey over the next six months of, you know, trying to actually enjoy the process and not being overly attached to outcomes like, I really want to hit the New York Times list, even though I do, or I really want to get this many pre-orders or I really want people to give nice reviews of the book.

1:56:52Because fundamentally all those things are outside of my control. And so what I've done is, you know, I've written a book I'm proud of that I think is at least reasonable and I've learned stuff along the way. And so I'm trying so hard to just focus on that and not at all worry about numbers. I think you can split those into two buckets. Like that's the, when we talked to Tim, it was like, that's the non-financial reward, right? What you just described is the non-financial reward. You have received that reward. Yeah. Now you're about to start a new process. Yeah. Which is the financial reward. Yeah, I guess the marketing side.

1:57:20Is it financially rewarding to write a book? Not massively. So it's financially, so I think the author will get around about$1 per sale. Do you get an advance? Are you with like a publisher? Yeah, so we've got the advance. We got a UK publisher, Penguin, and US publisher, Macmillan. Got it. So there's an advance, but you have to pay off the advance with royalties. So like, yeah, I'm not going to see a penny for a while. Yeah. And I think we will have to sell several hundred thousand books for it to pay off the advance. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, it feels to me like a brand building. Yeah, it's more like a lead magnet than it is a revenue generator.

1:57:51And is that a lead magnet to courses? It's a lead magnet partly to courses, partly just to, I guess, my brand in general. Yeah. Because if I think like, what do I want to be when I grow up? It's less that I want to make courses. Like the only reason I make courses is because they drive revenue. I want to be sort of, I want to have the impact on people that someone like Tim Ferriss had on me. Whereas like I read his book when I was like 17. And profoundly changed the trajectory of my life. And so if I could have that kind of impact on someone else, that feels really cool. And I think you'd get that through a book more so than through an individual YouTube video.

1:58:30And so I guess that's kind of why I've written the book. It's all part of this infinite game thing. Like even if I won the lottery, I would still continue to write books. But I probably wouldn't make courses and I definitely wouldn't do brand deals. I kind of feel like we're following your path, but like years behind, where it's like now we're going to start our course journey, right? And then we have an incredible desire to write a book. We've talked about it. We have an idea. We kind of have a pitch to ourselves on it. We've started writing. We've started writing, dabbling, a couple sentences here and there.

1:59:05But like that is something I don't think I'll be able to live with it if we don't write a book. That's interesting. That's a creative project that I want to do. It's a curated moment of intense transformation for the audience, which I think is really cool. because if you come across our YouTube channel, you may watch a video here, a video there, and it's disjointed, the transformation and the experience. Or it's different. Each video is different. But I think what I love about a book is thinking, what's the last five, ten years of what we've learned and can we put it into this intense moment of transformation?

1:59:34Same thing when you read a Tim Ferriss book or a Seth Godin, you get to the end and you're just like, I'm a different human being. I've transformed. Taking me from there and moving there. Yeah. That's really fun writing a book. Well, it's fun having a book. It's fun writing if you don't have a deadline living over you. I don't want you to leave without me taking you up on your offer to check out your YouTube studio. Can I just poke around? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. On your phone? Sure. No problem. We're with like the transparent man, you know? I feel like there's a funny meme to be had there of like the most transparent man.

2:00:09We cut to you and you're just no one in the chat room. Yeah, feel free. Okay. we haven't published a video in a while so I actually have not looked at these numbers in about two months okay cool so you can read them out unfortunately it's all in British pounds yeah so we can't even nightmare it's like a different language yeah all the arrows are probably grey because we haven't uploaded in a while wow that's honestly extremely substantial yes all the numbers are grey except for one number which is subscribers which you've gained 114 ,000 subscribers in the past 28 days we have oh cool wow that's incredible that's right right I mean I think we've gained 20 ,000 to 30 ,000 subscribers in the past 30 days.

2:00:44But we've also stopped. Do you think a lot of that comes from short form content? No, not very much. Not very much. That's all from the library. It's like a few thousand in a month. Yeah. Interesting. And what's your relationship to short form content? Do you enjoy it? Do I enjoy it? I'm going to take that as a... It's okay. So it's like, I enjoy putting them out and I enjoy the fact that we have them. Yeah. I don't inherently enjoy the process of filming them, but I also don't inherently enjoy the process of filming a video. Yeah. But I'm glad to have filmed the video at the end of it. Yeah. Or like at some point I'll enjoy it.

2:01:14So the way I think of short form content is very much like, you know, broad top of market awareness. Right. Almost like a billboard. And there's so many people that it's like, I think the issue with short form is that people will consume 50 shorts in one sitting. You'll be like, oh, there's this really good TikTok that I saw. And it's like, oh, who's it by? It's like, oh, I don't know. I can't remember. Like, I'll find a link. It's like, how do I find a link? Unless I share it with someone. And so what I'm really hoping with shorts is that like 0.1 % of the people that see it might then be more likely to click on a thumbnail of me if they see it in the future, who might then be more likely to realize the book is a thing, who might then be a little bit more likely to buy the book.

2:01:50Like all of those things. But then at the same time, I think it's cool that we get to share an interesting idea in less than 60 seconds. So part of it is fun and then there's all the other. Yeah. It's always fun to poke around, you know, and just explore someone's YouTube studio. It's like very intimate and super interesting. It's amazing how consistent your revenue is, like you were mentioning, like close to 50 ,000 pounds a month. Like it's extremely - It's mostly from the back catalog. Extremely consistent. For those interested, Ali's RPM is six pounds and 36 cents. Cool, what's yours? I have no idea, but I would assume higher.

2:02:28Oh, yeah. Yeah, just because we have very long form content. Yeah. Now we're in the YouTube nerd section. but I was just I just wanted to look I was very interested $9 our RPM is$9 okay similar yeah so not that much higher I find my I'm just healthier and happier when I don't look at the numbers and I occasionally find like it's on like page 5 of my phone occasionally I find myself scrolling and I'm like you know what actually I don't have to look at it yeah yeah it doesn't matter especially it doesn't matter when you don't have brand deals connected to it which is helpful yeah or we do but the team deals with it that's great and I don't have to worry about deadlines that's why we have Angus When you telescope out five years, maybe, you know, what do you hope your life looks like?

2:03:14Married, kids, living somewhere nice, continuing to make videos and writing and having a business that sustains that lifestyle without me having to do the things I don't want to do. Without me feeling wedded to an upload schedule. is there any certain amount of money that you have in your mind that's like that would get me to a place where i'm very free honestly not really like i've heard people who have got like 10 million plus in liquid net worth who feel like they need 100 to feel financially free um i know that i'm always going to feel a sense of scarcity when it comes to money and so there probably isn't any number that i would think you know what now i'm finally free of this person i no longer have to worry about revenue.

2:04:02So I'm trying to get better. It's just a part of life. I'm always going to feel a little bit of scarcity when it comes to money. But as long as every year where the business is profitable and we're doing something fun, then that's all good. And my favorite quote of all time is from the book Anything You Want by Derek Sivers, in which he says something like, never forget why you're really doing what you're really doing. Is it making money? is it profitable are you happy are your customers happy isn't that enough and it's like I'm getting surprisingly emotional just like talking about that because there's just so many journeys in this entrepreneur creator thing a lot of it is tied up with money a lot of it is tied up with growth and self-worth being attached to numbers and metrics and stuff but at the end of the day if we're profitable and having fun and our customers are happy then that should be enough I just try and remind myself of that whenever I feel like too much on the the hamster wheel of like, oh, I need another video to come out.

2:05:02It's a beautiful place to stop. Yeah, I like that. Dude, thank you so much. Thank you. I can't wait to read your book. So excited. I hope you sent us. Hopefully it's all right. Yeah. Send us some copies. Send you a bunch of copies. Yeah, you can give free copies to anyone who brought books up by there. Yeah, and you can pre-order it right now, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Shit, yeah. We'll figure out something interesting. Yeah, by the time it comes out, we'll have some kind of incentive. But we'll put the link to pre-order it in the description. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. Nice. Thanks for having me.

2:05:26See you.