MI324: Mastering Money, Words, and Wellness w/ Dickie Bush

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25:04That's public.com slash T-I-V-P. Paid for by public investing, full disclosures in podcast description. Just like everybody else, there was a time when I was a beginner investor. And I have to say, investing is particularly filled with jargon that can just make it so difficult for new investors to understand what is going on. But it's never too late to get smarter about stock investing from the ground up. At The Investor's Podcast Network, we've made a habit of studying the world's best investors. And now I'm distilling those learnings into a simple course for you or for anyone in your life who you might want to share the gift of knowledge with.

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26:14And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. It's pretty wild, right? I mean, when you think of it, what's happened in just two and a half years? Definitely something that is still catching up identity-wise and it will continue to take a long time, but I'm just taking it day by day at this point and not trying to extrapolate anything too far into the future, just continuing to write, enjoy what I'm writing about. So what was the thread on specifically that Balaji retweeted and Naval retweeted? This leads perfectly into where I took it, which was, this was kind of a thought profile breakdown where I listened to like six different podcasts that he was on.

26:59And for myself, I wanted to say, what is this guy's worldview? And granted, this was, he's taken off quite a bit with his Bitcoin bed and the book and his podcast, but this was 2020, not very many people know about him. So it was very novel to write something like that. And it was basically the hook of the thread was the most fascinating thinker I had never heard of, Bology. I listened to 20 hours of his podcast here, the nine ideas that really stuck with me. All it was, was a distillation of things he said. And because that was useful to him, he shared it. And because it was useful to him, other people shared it.

27:30And then I took that framework and said, who are all the other thinkers that I'm interested in? And I started to do different thought profiles on them, where eventually, that's kind of what I became known for over the next couple months where I then had people reaching out to me who were asking if I could write a thread for them, summarizing their worldview. And then they would pay for it. That led to me ghostwriting that, that led to income on the side, which helped me meet Cole. I mean, that's where the whole story goes from there. And we can go down that rabbit hole if you'd like. I wanted to touch on the thread thing first, because we've got a newsletter that we put out called we study markets.

28:07And at one point, I was tasked with writing a thread every day on Twitter to try to generate new subscribers. Right. And so I studied your content. Like that was hugely useful to me. Like I had no clue how to write a Twitter thread. I've never done it. And your whole idea of like hooks. And I actually stole that idea of like the most interesting investor you've never heard of. And it was a British guy named Sir Chris Hone, who I truly had never heard of, but it had the most, you know, And like you said, you have no idea how something's going to perform once you hit publish. It had the most impressions of any thread that I did.

28:44But I was just studying your content, which was great, on how to write hooks. I like the whole idea of the moment in time. I use that a lot. There was just a lot of useful information that I just want to thank you for. I learned a ton. And it's truly an art form, I think, to learn how to write a thread. It's really the art of capturing and keeping attention. and the vehicle that you apply that to could be video, could be this podcast, it could be a Twitter thread, it could be a book, but it's something that fascinated me. It's just the world of copywriting and Twitter is just copywriting and in a social media feed.

29:18The person who writes the most concisely, delivering the most value in the most readable way while solving people's problems are going to see success. So the reason that that thread worked for you was a proven hook where you're kind of implying, here's, I did a bunch of work researching someone that you don't know about. And then I distilled all that work for you right here. So it's like little cost, big outcome based on all the work I did. And there are tons of templates that you can follow that once you see something that works and you're writing consistently, you just kind of can reapply that to your niche just as you did.

29:50That's what I did. It was like five or six different templates, I think that you have on how to write a hook. And it was great, super useful information for me. So I wanted to hear more about the writing for you. And when you first started making money, I think you said that you made$10 ,000 as a ghostwriter. That was your first income that you made as a writer. Was that always the thought in the back of your mind that eventually you were going to monetize this somehow? I accidentally monetized it. So this is where I was kind of leading to, after I was writing those threads, I had someone reach out and say, hey, could you write one of these for me?

30:24And this was someone I really looked up to that I was going to study anyway, which is important. So I did a bunch of free work where I basically did 30 of these for free in public for other people. And then someone started to ask, could I pay you to do it? Now, they asked, how much do you charge for this? And here I am, I'm terrified to charge money for anything on the internet. I'm like, uh-oh, what if he says no? So I didn't quote a price. I said, and this was smart in hindsight, I said, I don't know what to charge. How about I write it and do it for free and you pay me however much time it saves you or however valuable it is.

30:56He agreed, great. So I went down just his rabbit hole, every podcast, every newsletter he's written, every blog post, every Ted talk, every keynote, everything. Can you say who it is? Yeah. Uh, well yes, because no, I can't. It was Craig Clemens. Craig Clemens is a legendary copywriter. And so I was doing it for him and it's so fun to tell a story because of all the ways it connects from here. So he eventually ended up, uh, I published it for him. I said, hey, you got to write this book. This was awesome. And we started to work together where by going down his rabbit hole, I learned about the world of copywriting.

31:30And then I summarized it for him. And at the end, he goes, okay, great. I'm going to connect you with my assistant. This is amazing. Thank you so much. I'd like to pay you blah, blah, blah. I'm like, cool. Heck yeah. I never collected payments before. I didn't even know this was ghostwriting. I was like, because it's really not. He wasn't publishing this stuff. He just had it all there. And I was like the synthesizer for But it's kind of like, and that's really what ghostwriting is at the end of the day, is you're synthesizing someone's worldview and then you end up publishing it. So he connects me with his assistant and I send his assistant my Venmo because that's all I had at the time.

32:02And she sends me a message back and goes, hey, the amount we'd like to pay you is higher than the Venmo daily limit. Do you have a PayPal or something like that? And I'm like, what's... Here I am Googling, what is Venmo's daily limit? And it's a thousand bucks. I'm like, yes, a thousand bucks. Let's go. And so I make a PayPal, I send it to her, and then$5 ,000 hits my account within 10 minutes. And that just completely broke my brain because it was the first time that I'd made any kind of income from this whole nine-month journey. And I recognized that... So there's a couple frameworks you can extract from that.

32:35But my message back was, hey, did you make a typo thinking they meant to pay me$500? And their response was, yeah, is$5 ,000 enough? thinking that they might have underpaid me. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's funny. Thank you so much. Talk later. And that was my realization was that my skillset applied to my expertise was not going to generate much income at the time. But to a lot of other people, I could save them time and generate more income where the$5 ,000 that they were paying me was not very much money to them at all. And so that was where the arbitrage was. I was then going and providing that same service to other people who$5 ,000 relative to the amount of time that would save them is a great trade.

33:16And so that's for anyone starting any kind of beginner service. It's figure out what you can do that if you were going to try to monetize yourself might not lead to income, but helping someone else with a problem who values their time much more, then you get to unlock that spread. So that was where I had the first taste of internet freedom was, wow, something that I completely started on my own, did all the work for, it took nine months to get here, and this is the payoff. Great. How do I double, triple, quadruple down on this idea? Because there's clearly something here. And he introduced you to your current partner, right?

33:51Correct. So then there's a cold email that came about two weeks later that the title is, or the subject line is, not sure why, but I think you two should know each other. And then the email goes, subject line explains itself. I'll let you two take it from here. And And Nicholas Cole, my co-founder, his real name's Cole. He had written a book called The Art and Business of Online Writing. So The Art and Business of Online Writing, I had read it. It was very influential to me. And so I'm like, of course, I want to meet this guy. And we ended up partnering up on Ship 30 for 30, which is our co-opage writing course, helps beginners take that first 30-day journey if they want to start writing online, the same one that I did and the same one that Cole did, but on Quora in 2015.

34:29So his whole story was he started writing a daily answer on Quora. His first couple went viral. Then he monetized that into an agency and has been writing ever since. So a lot of interesting pieces where when I zoom out, it was writing on the internet generated more opportunities than I could have ever thought possible. And so for the last two and a half years, Cole and I have been trying to help other people unlock that same level of opportunity and as many different vehicles and platforms as possible because it's changed our life. And we know that it only takes 30 days of publishing. And I was proof of that when I wrote my 30 threads in 30 days.

35:04So that's kind of the genesis story and it's fun to recap it. Yeah, no, thanks for sharing that. It also changed my co-host, Kyle Greve is his name. He took ship 30 for 30 and was posting on Twitter, really posting great content on value investing. And as a result, he was hired by TIP as a podcast host, which I don't know if it would have happened without Chip 30 for 30. He speaks highly of it. I really appreciate that. And it's a testament, right? When you share things, you give a jumping off point for people to reach out to you. It sounds so simple, but if you have 30 pieces of content out there on one topic and someone is interested in that topic, they're going to read one, then read all 30, then reach out to you about it.

35:47And the internet guarantees that if you write about something, it's the job of the social algorithms now to show that to as many people as possible that were interested in that topic. So it's kind of democratized access to attention where write about something people are interested in, we'll take care of the rest. Yeah, it's incredible. So I wanted to step back and talk more about Ship 30 for 30. At what stage of the game did that idea develop and how did it progress? So this was November of 2020. I had gone on that individual 30-day challenge. My life was changed. I landed the ghostwriting client.

36:22I was making income. And now I said, great. I could do my full-time job. I can continue the ghostwriting because that's generating enough income where this is great. If I want to do one or two clients and make an extra$10 ,000 a month, that was absurd to me. That was matching my BlackRock salary at the time. And then I said, okay, this worked for me. Why wouldn't it work for other people? And I wanted to continue writing every day, but it was hard to do those 30 days alone. And so I tweeted out to my couple hundred followers at the time, hey, who would be interested in a 30-day accountability writing challenge?

36:50And it's fun because my current Twitter that I'm still using has all of this archived on the timeline. So you can trace all the way back to that original tweet in November of 2020. And I resurfaced it all the time of like, hey, I had a couple hundred followers when I started this thing. And I did not have any kind of grand vision to help 10 ,000 people eventually do it. So there was no grand plan at all. But over Christmas break, November and December, the original ship 30 cohort, I was terrified to charge money for because yeah, I'd monetize with ghostwriting, but I never monetized with like a cohort or any kind of real product like that.

37:24So it was$50 and I gave everyone their money back if they wrote every day for 30 days, which was, I'm like balancing spreadsheets, making sure people are writing every day. And I'm like putting accountability slack. We had 80 or 90 people in a Slack channel where my whole goal was to validate the idea. So I held one-on-one interviews with every single person who completed all 30 days. And a lot of the people who didn't were asked, what worked well? How could this be better? Why'd you join in the first place? What are you looking to unlock? And then in January of 2021, that was the first live cohort.

37:55So that one was$99. It went for sale. I think total gross on that was$35 ,000 or something like that, because it had gained a lot of attention because I started to take the principles I had already learned, write to market the course, and then write emails, get people on an email list, to offer to them. And that first cohort in January was life-changing to me because I went from never making any dollar or any money from it to$5 ,000 to$10 ,000 for ghostwriting to taking that, doubling down on investing in some courses and coaching programs where I was better understanding how this whole world worked.

38:29And then launching the product. Product broke every belief I had around money. I still remember the first person that it wasn't a refunding or it wasn't like a refundable$50. Someone bought a product from me that's completely different than a service. And yeah, that was January of 2021, partnered with Nicholas Cole from there. And now we're currently, this is January 2024 as we're recording this. We've done 20 live cohorts, helped over 10 ,000 students and all from that original idea that was just, hey, let's get in a Slack channel and keep each other accountable to write. So that first iteration though, you were going to pay them or return their$50 if they wrote for 30 days in a row.

39:08Correct. So I'm like wiring money back out of PayPal. I got suspended by PayPal because I processed them all as refunds for their original charge. But that was the thing. I was like, I just want your feedback. And if you don't pay a little bit of something, you're not going to give it your full attention. So$50 was the minimum that I knew like you'll join and I'll promise to give it back to you. And most of them at the end were like, just keep it because this was life-changing. And to this day, we just continue to improve the product, improve, raise the price, all that. And it's only through 20 iterations now that we can say this is a home run experience for everybody.

39:41That's incredible. I want to touch a little bit on money blueprints and scarcity and mindset. So you have this idea, I think that just a scarcity mentality, right? And I believe you've done a lot of work on shifting that. So I wanted to go kind of do a little bit of a dive into that, like how you reframed things in your mind, what worked for you, the books, podcasts, whatever that were influential. So if there's one topic I plan on writing about a ton more in the next couple of years, it's this one because it's crucial. And there's so much advice out there about how to make more money, but there's very little advice out there on how to improve your relationship with it.

40:20And I see a lot of people who make a lot of money and never improve their relationship with it and then still end up miserable there, where this is a skill spending and reinvesting your money in yourself and your life and your experiences is a skill that takes a lot of internal work to do. Now, I grew up the poorest kid in my school and we were never in any kind of real financial trouble, but I felt it because it's really not your actual circumstance. It's your circumstance relative to everyone else where you judge your financial wellbeing. Anyone who's made more money recognizes that. You don't really ever make it.

40:51You just find a new group of people to compare yourself to. So this was all I was doing was I was comparing myself. Wow. Okay. Interesting. Everyone around me has a better house. They're able to do different trips. I bought my first car in cash while they all got it for their 16th birthday, just way different. And the framework I've been working on here is when you start a business, the bottleneck to your business will be your personal relationship with money. And as I looked backward on my journey, you can see that manifest in some of the things we've talked about. My original ghostwriting client, I was going to charge$250 to$500 because I thought that was a lot of money.

41:26And then when 5 ,000 hit, and I realized that the extent to which that 5 ,000 hit my account was, he thought about it for about three seconds and was like, what's a good number? Yeah, 5 grand. Okay, kick it to him. Boom, onto the next thing. As someone who to this day still thinks 5 ,000 is a ton of money, I had to recognize, okay, there's clearly a different level to this. And then as I've been building the business for the last couple of years, each time there was something uncomfortable, like raising the price to something or selling something for over$1 ,000. I have felt because my personal relationship with money wasn't there all the way, that that was what was holding me back.

41:59And so every lead in income, every original investment. So I mentioned in November of 2020, I bought a course that was like how to market and write different things on the internet and how to package things up. It was$150. This was the first course I'd ever bought. And I was so terrified to spend$150 on that, that I called up my friend and said, hey, will you split this with me and I'll share the logins with you? And here I am helping 10 ,000 people make the same decision in the future. And so this was something I've had to work on. And it all comes back to, are you operating from scarcity? Are you operating from abundance?

42:32And my definition of abundance is having more than you need of anything. And this is, as I think about a general operating system or personal ethos is what I call it. The main thing I'm trying to achieve in every area is abundance, where I want more than I need of anything. But there are two ways to generate that abundance. You can have more or need less. So a lot of people hear that and they're like, oh, that must be greedy. It's like, no, it's actually figuring out when you don't need any more and you can reduce the need and you still end up with a surplus. So on the money side and on really anything, any kind of resource, you can ask, can I make more of this?

43:08Or is there a world where I could need less of it? And I've been retraining that on the financial side, but relationship side, health side, everything. It's how can I just generate a more abundant and stop operating from scarcity? And we could talk about some examples of that, but that's the overarching framework. Well, it reminds me of in the four-hour work week, Tim Ferriss has got a thing about, I think it's like the experiment is called fear setting. And it's just the idea of like, how much do you need to live the life that you want to lead? Right. And like you said, you can either make more or reduce your needs, or I guess a combination of both.

43:40But are there any, like maybe Tim Ferriss was an influence. Were there any books though that changed your psychology? Because it's a psychological issue, I think. I think there needs to be money therapists. Definitely. And that could be a great topic right there. In terms of books that have done it, well, I'd say the biggest one by far was something that I did implicitly, but stumbled on Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. Now, why did this book click with me? He's a former hedge fund manager. And he described the concept, I read it last year, that has 100 % changed my relationship with money. And it's the idea of a memory dividend, where as I was accumulating a little bit more income on a monthly basis, I was very hesitant to spend anything.

44:24I was like, you get it and you save and you reduce everything else. And I think at a certain point, you have to recognize that you can cut your expenses by one to two grand, but that relative effort reapplied to earning more with skills is way easier. And same thing with credit card point hacking and budgeting, like all these things, the amount of effort and time that goes into that crypto investing, whatever it is, if you reapplied it to learning something, your long-term earning potential goes up way more. And that's aside the point of memory dividends, where a memory dividend is when you invest in something like an experience, it feels like, okay, let's say, and I'll tell the story of going to the Super Bowl.

45:01So it's 2020, 2021. And I'm from Tampa, born and raised, Buccaneers fan, lifelong, all that. Pandemic season, Tom Brady's our quarterback. We're going to the Super Bowl. It's the first time that a home team will play in the Super Bowl with a chance to win. It's Tom Brady's potential last, like every single thing lined up. Now to go in, you're looking at somewhere between five to 10 grand ticket price. There's a couple of ways you could look at that five to 10 grand. So my ticket, and I'll spoil the story, but I ended up paying to go in the game for seven grand. And that was a large percentage of the money I had saved at the time.

45:36But Ship 30 had just started to accelerate. I was trying to train this bet on myself mindset, where when you make some kind of investment like this, all you end up doing is raising your level of effort and intensity for the future. And that proved, but you could look at that seven grand and say, I got to go to the Super Bowl. That's it. Great. Instead, the memory dividend concept says you're actually buying an asset that is going to pay you dividends in the future. Every time you think about that memory, every time you look at pictures, right now, I'm collecting a memory dividend on that experience because I get to tell that story.

46:09Anytime someone mentions Tom Brady, I go, I got to go to his last Super Bowl win. Anytime someone mentions the Bucks. And so you look at all these different ways where how can I invest in an experience that pays a big dividend like that in the future? Now, I think that has changed the way I look at earning, where I want to make sure that a percentage of the income I earn every single month, I'm allocating to a memory dividend investment portfolio, just like I am stocks, just like I am crypto, just like I am education and any other asset class, because those are, I'm trying to collect them. Like we were talking about my trip to Germany before we started recording.

46:46Huge memory dividend opportunity, and we got to collect one at the beginning of this. So that's been a huge one for me. And there's a couple other spending areas, but highly, highly recommend that book and just general way of operating for anyone who is looking to improve their relationship with money in any way. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle.

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50:28All right, back to the show. Which is Die With Zero. It's on my Audible and I've started it, but I've not finished it. So I'll definitely listen to it after your recommendation. It is so good. So, so good. And I think the name is the only thing that kept it from being a smash hit because I think it implies give away all your money. And it's really just spend it on the way up. It's spend it on the way up because you're collecting dividends for the future anyway. So you might as well build that skill along the way. So you'll have a specific percentage for your memory allocation fund or whatever you want to call it?

51:03Exactly. So let's say$1 ,000 comes in right now. I skim 10 % right off the top that goes to a different account that I don't even look at. And then 35 % goes to taxes. The rest goes to cash or stock investing or whatever other allocation I have. And what that does is it forces me to invest in those experiences where I think the reason, and this was something I realized myself, when I was saving all my money and then putting it in cash, if I wanted to take a trip, I would feel that number decrease. and that was psychological where it was like, I was hesitant to invest in that because then the number goes down.

51:44But if you don't track that money that's sitting in your memory dividend account is like money you have, you're just like taxes. When money comes in, they just skim them out off the top. Then psychologically, it works because the number you get used to just going up your other allocation. And then when a trip or something cool presents itself, you have money already earmarked for it that goes, I have to go spend this. And I didn't even think I had it in the first place. So that's been the big hack for me is how can I optimize my own psychology around investing in this? And I spent last year honing in that system and feel really good.

52:18I love it. It's a great idea. You also had an idea that I'd liked that I read about, about it was basically like save a hundred thousand dollars in cash before you even mess with like, whatever, trading alt coins or trying to hit a home run, whatever, you know, like talk to me a little bit about that and how that idea developed. Cause it's good advice. Charlie Munger has a great quote. And he says, the first 100 ,000 is a bitch. You got to do it, though. That's his exact phrase. And he said that 20 something years ago. So it's a little bit higher. But I was giving some just money frameworks to someone on my team who's in the early 20s.

52:53And the single best one I said was, all the effort, people think like, oh, I need to just be dollar cost averaging to the S &P 500 forever. And that'll compound at 8%. And then I'll have $10 million when I'm 50. I'm like, yeah, but in 50 years, 10 million will really be like 25 ,000 today. So you're still going to feel the same way you do. Instead, you need to look for these big outcome returns. Rather than putting that towards crypto or something where you have to go pay a bunch of attention to it, I think you should have one spreadsheet with one bank account. And every morning you wake up, you put the date and you put the bank account balance.

53:28And until that number is 100 ,000, you should only make that number go up. So again, psychologically, how do you make sure that only goes up? You save it in cash because the worst feeling when you're accumulating is to see the volatility and then you freak out about it or have to go check your crypto account every 10 minutes or your stock account every 30 minutes when all of that time, and I'm only saying this because this is exactly what I did. Yeah, we've all done it, right? Incorrectly. Where I remember I'm like, I got to be trading options. That's a thing. And I'm like, trading options on my phone while I'm at work, like losing money.

53:58burning it to the ground. And that's all that happens. And so I'm trying to save people from thinking that's the way to do it when instead, and I mentioned it already, credit card point hacking or overly frugal expenses, all of that. If you just took that same effort and said, how can I earn more income? You're going to earn more income. It becomes as simple as that. So I talk about, I think there's five things you should invest your money in during that accumulation phase. And this is from looking back at where were some of the smarter investments I made. It's convenience. So anytime you can save yourself a little bit of time, as long as...

54:34And it's cool to feel this conversation become full circle. Because when you have a vehicle that more effort and time and intensity leads to more income, this all makes sense. But if you have that W-2 job where you don't get more skill or more income, it doesn't make sense. But when you have that vehicle, it's convenience. So save yourself time, optimize your energy levels. So whatever you got to do on a diet front, gym, etc. So you feel good all the time. Memory dividends. So making sure that on the way up, you're not just miserable the entire time. And I probably made that mistake the most of any.

55:07Education. So figuring out courses, coaching, anything that is going to build your skill set. And then the last one is normalizing success, where you pay to put yourself in a situation to see other people look at that same expense as normal. And so this was very subtle for me. But the first time I upgraded to a business class flight, and I looked around at everyone next to me, and I remember freaking out to spend the extra$400 to go first class on a four-hour flight to New York City. And I'm hovering over the button, quivering. And then I hit it, and I sit down, and I look at everyone next to me like, Oh, you guys do this every flight, huh?

55:43This is just normal. And then making those investments in yourself, all it does is force you to level up your effort where I want to keep this as normal. So how do I do that? And then you level up and you level up. So this is the whole art of spending money is figuring out how you can allocate it to align your spending with the ability to earn more. And I think it's normalizing success through your beliefs, building skills, or just freeing up everything that doesn't have to do with earning more and building more skill. I could go in a couple of directions with this. One idea that you've just sparked is like Noah Kagan, who I'm sure you're familiar with.

56:18He will interview people who are in first class and just talk to them. And he's got some funny YouTube videos that he's done on first class passengers that he just picks their brain. The other thing that you were talking about normalizing success, I read that you did a a mastermind class or group, it was like big amount of money,$68 ,000, I think the cost was. I want to hear about that. Actually spending that amount of money, I know how I would feel about that. And I'd have a tough time doing it. You obviously did it, obviously had a lot of benefit from it. So talk to me about the experience, the people that were involved and what it was like for you.

56:55So it was$68 ,000 for a year of support. It's basically a business coaching program where teaches you how to build a couple different fulfillment mechanisms that you can monetize your attention with. So rather than a digital product, you can do a group coaching program, which is what we offer now for our premium ghostwriting academy, which helps freelancers become ghostwriters or helps anyone who wants to take this as a path. Now, it's funny to look at that now because again, all the entire journey, every time I have invested in education or normalizing success within the next three months, my income has doubled in some way.

57:28And I can point directly to each one of those. And I've been telling the story throughout of really nervous to buy$150 course, bought it, generated tens of thousands. Great. Next one, same decision, but it was$1 ,500. I went back and forth. I'm making a pro con list, whatever, bought it, immediately led to hundreds of thousands in revenue. Same thing, now just at a different level where once you are playing the game that we've been playing with our different products and whatnot, there's only certain, you can't find the information to get to the next level from a book. You need tactical information from someone who's done it before with the accountability and implementation to get there.

58:09And so this was the only vehicle that we could do that. Now I still, to this day, was quivering over the button to invest in that. And then what did I do the very next day? I woke up and said, I'm going to get my money's worth on this thing. And so I gave it my full. I mean, I had those programs in my ear for three weeks straight, 12 hours a day. Just, I'm going to learn everything here. I'm going to talk to everybody in the group. And all it did was put me around, again, normalizing success. Everyone in there was generating multiple hundreds of thousand dollars per month in income, way more than we were.

58:43And so I said, wait, you guys aren't doing anything differently. You just are choosing this as the delivery mechanism. Okay. That normalized it. And it made it much easier to continue. And we just renewed on that this year because of the return we saw. Now, I made a video talking about my takeaways. And one of my main takeaways was people hear that $68 ,000 number and go, that's a complete waste of money. And for 99.999 % of the world, yes, it is. That would be a horrible investment because you'd have no context to apply the information that you've learned. But for the 0.00001, where that is the only source of information, it's a home run, 100 to one return.

59:21And I assume in the future, there will be a similar investment that I'll have to make that will be bigger than that to get the next source. And then I will just continue to play that game forever. I wanted to touch on this. You had an idea about intensity versus consistency in learning something. So can you touch on some of those ideas about how you think about intensity versus consistency? You see a lot on the internet about consistency wins, right? You have to be consistent with whatever you do. If you show up every day, that is true for areas that are limited by biology. So health and fitness, diet, things like that.

59:57Yes, you need to show up with a certain amount of consistency every single day. But I think people are getting incorrectly in their heads that you should apply that to learning a skill where it's like, oh, 20 minutes a day of learning a language, you'll get really good at that language over six months, but you're not limited by biology there. Meaning the faster way to learn a language would actually be doing it for 24 hours a day for two weeks by living in that country. You will learn way more. But the counter example, running for 14 hours is not going to make you better at a marathon. You need to run for 30 minutes a day for a long period of time.

1:00:33But studying a language for 14 hours, you can then go to sleep and wake up and do it the next day. And so it goes back to the idea of obsession-based learning as well, where when you pick a topic and say, I'm going to only think about this, you can learn way more through that initial period of immersion than you will with just a little bit of effort towards that every day. So anytime I look at building skills and I had a great example of this in the last year Where one of my hobbies is to learn to dj. I want to be able to mix house music and play it and I tried To take a one hour lesson per week.

1:01:07I'm like, oh great. I'll just be consistent I'll do it on a weekly basis and I was doing one hour for the first 45 minutes every week I'd be pissed off that I couldn't remember what I did last time And then the last 15 minutes i'd be so tired from the week that I just gave up on it. Yeah It's Friday nights, right? You took Friday nights. Yes. At the end of the week, I'm like, oh, great. Like I'll end the week. And it was miserable. And I realized I was trying to apply consistency to something that I'd be way better off with intensity. So I have scheduled for July of this year, I'm going to do a one week intensive where I take a week off of work and I just do that for 10 hours a day.

1:01:39And I know that you can then maintain that initial skill you built with one hour a week after that initial period of immersion. So I think this is true for boxing and jujitsu is another area I want to do this. I think it's true for a language, anything that is a skill, you should start with immersion and then maintain it with consistency rather than try to apply consistency because I just don't think it works. Yeah, that's really great advice. I want to touch on your physical transformation too. Like you were a 280 pound center on the Princeton football team. You're now, I think you're 200 or whatever, but you got down to like 180.

1:02:16You lost close to a hundred pounds, I think. So you've obviously hacked your physiology and fitness and nutrition. I just want to hear about your journey and like what, you know, there's, this could be a whole, you know, a whole episode, right. But I want to hear just like some of the things that like really have been like the most important things to like your transformation that's worked really well for you. So it's been five years or I guess six now, right around this time. So it was 2017. So six years since I played football, I was 280 pounds. And I remember taking my last snap. And unfortunately, for most athletic sports, you end up in a shape that at the end of your season, when you retire, you can be pretty well off in the real world at that size.

1:03:00Offensive line is the one that you cannot of all sports out there. So I faced a choice where if I maintained my same nutritional habits to stay at 280, but I stopped playing football. I was going to go to 380. Which was just a massive amount of eating, right? I mean, I don't know how many calories you're taking in a day, but... 4 ,000 easily. It was absurd. We were talking before, I basically was getting paid to eat, lift weights, and hit people. It was a great life for a couple of years. And then I entered the real world and go, oh crap, I can't just do this forever because I'm going to end up in horrible shape.

1:03:35So I spent age 22, 23, 24 learning how to rewrite my health operating system. Because for the previous eight years, there was no negative reinforcement from eating more. It was, I ate more, I got stronger, I got better at football, reinforced, do that more. So I had to go untrain that entire pattern, which means I went down every rabbit hole, every diet, keto, low carb, high carb, carnivore, paleo, everything. I was just like, let's just figure out what works. And I can only say with the benefit of hindsight that almost all of that is a marketing ploy and you need to move more and eat less. And so if I could trace anything, it'd be take 10 ,000 to 15 ,000 steps a day and eat a little bit less than you are now and do that for three years and you're going to end up in great shape.

1:04:19But I maintained lifting. I went down the distance running rabbit hole. It's where I'd say outside of business, I've spent the most time and effort and thinking and I occasionally talk about it. But the last thing I ever want to get into is dictating to people or giving health and fitness advice because I think it's so context dependent. And I already shared my main advice where most people talking about this full time have to overcomplicate it to the point of getting people to continue paying attention, which is why you see a new diet or a new workout plan or new everything pop up. but the fundamentals don't change.

1:04:54And so I was like, Oh, so I'm just going to be like making things up along the way to keep people interested. It's like, I don't have any interest in that. I'd rather just figure out what works for me and then say, Hey, this is what works for me. Take some, if you want it and then just complete, you know, tell my story on that front. So you're getting at least 15 ,000 steps a day. You don't own a car, correct? So you're doing a lot of walking. Correct. My apartment's right there. This is our studio, which is about a two-minute walk. I have a 15-minute walk to the gym. I walk to 20 minutes to a coffee shop.

1:05:2415 ,000 takes care of itself when you don't have a car. And that has been the foundation of my creative habit far more than my health and fitness habit, where if I'm not walking a ton, I'm not thinking. And so when I can put my head down, not on my phone, just ponder on an idea for a 20-minute walk every time I emerge with clarity. So that's my morning writing routine is get a couple ideas out, then walk to a coffee shop and think about them as I go. And then I get there and I know exactly what I want to say. So the walking is turned into a byproduct of, I need to do this to remain creative. And it just happens that I pick something that helps keep me in good shape too.

1:06:01Double benefit. So when you're walking, are you listening to podcasts or are you just kind of allowing your mind to, or is it a little bit of both? It's a little bit of both. Sometimes if I want to generate ideas, I'll throw something because that's just going to spark creativity. But if I want to think about something, I put everything away. And I even try to go to the coffee shop with just a physical journal. So I get there and it's like, oh, you can't listen to music. You can't check Slack. You can't do anything. It's like, you got one outlet here. Get these ideas out of your head. And I mix it up, but there's no...

1:06:31I don't have a set walking protocol or anything like that. It's whatever I'm feeling at the time. I want to touch on writing before we wrap up. For people that don't write or are scared to write or afraid to put stuff out there, you had an idea that I thought was really great about this like two year test of how to generate ideas. So can you share some of those ideas? Because I thought it was super useful for people that like, what do I write about? What keeps people from writing is thinking they don't have anything worth saying. And the reason they think they don't have anything worth saying is because all the ideas that are sitting in their head are now completely obvious to them because they live it every single day.

1:07:06But if you do what we call the two year test, which is just look back two years and make a list of all the hobbies you've built, life transitions you've made, jobs you've experienced. So just on this podcast, we talked about my health and fitness journey, video games, business journey, writing, all these things that if I didn't have proof that people are interested in, I might think like no one wants to hear about that. But it's not until you recognize that all these ideas that are obvious to you now would have been incredibly valuable to your former self two years ago. And that is who you want to write to.

1:07:39So let's say in your case, how long have you done the podcast for? How many episodes? It's a little over a year. I started like December of 22. Right. So you could now write about all your lessons of starting a podcast where someone might go, why is he qualified to talk about a pod? Or you might think this, I'm not qualified to talk about a podcast. I've only done it for a year and a half. But that's if you try to take the frame of I am the podcast expert. Here's what you should do. Instead, if you just write over the last two years, I've recorded a hundred podcast episodes. Here's everything I wish I knew when I started.

1:08:16Here's the gear checklist. Here's how to interview guests. Here's how I found guests. Here were the three best podcasts that I heard. Here's who I learned from. You then have context to just talk about what you're doing. And to simplify it, if someone came up to you at a coffee shop and said, Hey, Patrick, could you tell me a little bit about what you've learned over the last two years with your podcast, you'd be like, oh yeah, I've done this and I've done this and I've done this. And we just assume on the internet that there's millions of people out there. So it doesn't, doesn't work. But we just say, how would you explain what you've done to someone at a coffee shop?

1:08:46Now go write about that for the next month. And I guarantee you will end up in a different place than the one you're in now. If I post publicly. Exactly. Right. That's, that's the thing. But here's the beautiful part is in the beginning, more than likely, most people aren't looking at you where everyone wants all these readers in the beginning and And then, but they're also scared to publish. So at the same time, it's like, oh, if I publish, everyone's going to read it. But the beautiful thing is most people aren't reading it. So you're kind of like in an empty gym, just putting up shots. And that takes all the pressure off.

1:09:15It's just get 50 pieces out there and then we can have the conversation. And it could be as easy as writing 50 tweets where you're going to learn so much and the downside is literally zero. So there's, again, why wouldn't you take something like that on? worst case, the imaginary opinions of people that you don't even like that much are holding you back. So if you can just get over that fact that the person in high school is going to laugh at you when you hit publish, it's not going to happen. They're way too busy thinking about themselves. And again, that eliminates all the pressure. So it all melts away when you hit publish for that first time and you expect this big wave of everything and you just get the internet's crickets of indifference.

1:09:50And then you're like, oh, that wasn't so bad. No one's actually reading it. Cool. I'm just going to keep doing this until I get better. And then once I'm better, more people will read it. What I want to talk about now is just habits of writers that you admire. Like if I want to do this and I want to start sharing my lessons of the last two years, just what are some general lessons, habits that I can be doing that can create a writing habit? It's eliminate all the decisions that are keeping you from writing in the first place. And so this is what we do during the first week of Ship 30. 95 % of the things keeping people from writing have nothing to do with writing.

1:10:25It's what am I going to say? If you knew what you would say, you could easily sit down and type. When am I going to write? I'm busy. Cool. Figure out the 30 to 45 minute block of your day that you could be unreachable and you're most productive. So for a lot of people, that's early in the morning. Figure out where you're going to publish. Just make the decision, put it on X or put it on LinkedIn, pick a platform. And then once those trivial decisions are out of the way, you just generate ideas and hit publish. Again, I make it sound pretty simple. But at the end of the day, that is what it is.

1:10:55You have to pick something to start with. And then once you pick something and publish 10 times, you'll recognize, I actually don't like writing on this topic, but I liked this one. And now I can improve it. but most people delay hitting publish on that first thing for so long where it's like once work slows down or once my job is easier or once I move or once my kid graduates high school like then I'll do it but those once is never go away you're just going to find a new one in the future so we say look at your calendar or your team or something where someone has asked you a question in the last day write something and post it on twitter your answer to them and then poof you're a published writer.

1:11:35And then from there, you're just iterating on that little process. So you could get into the longer term tactical stuff. But I think most people in this world solve problems they don't have where they go, okay, so let's assume that I write for the next three months and then I have to do this. What should I do then? Well, let's go write for three months and then we'll solve that problem when we get there. So I think the easiest thing is just hit publish before you feel ready and then iterate day by day and you'll wake up in three months saying, I can't believe I waited three years to start that.

1:12:05And I guess that's the beauty of doing a ship 30 for 30 is you've got a cohort of people that you're working with, holding each other accountable. I think something, a program like that helps immensely. That's our entire goal is to, again, strip away all that complexity. We tell you when to write, where to write, what to write about, what platform to write on. And we give you a bunch of people where the normal behavior is to wake up, write and publish. with all those things, you kind of feel like the odd person out if you don't actually do the writing. And that's kind of the whole point of social accountability, where I think James Clear does a great job describing this, which is if you want to start a new habit, find a group of people where that is the norm.

1:12:44And so that's what we've tried to establish with Ship 30. I love it. Let's put a pin in it right here. This has been a blast. I really appreciate your time. Is there anything that you wanted to touch on before we wrap up? No, dude, that was, we hit on every single thing that I enjoy talking about. So that was a lot of fund. For our listeners that want to find out more about you, obviously Twitter, but are there any other ways that you recommend people to get in touch? So I'm Dickie Bush on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you're interested in starting to write online, we have a free five-day email course that walks through the fundamentals.

1:13:15It's startwritingonline.com. You can download a 13 ,000 word ultimate guide that has everything A to Z for anyone looking to start publishing on any of these social platforms. And then my personal newsletter is dickiesdigest.com. It's also on Substack where I'm going to start publishing more of these kind of financial ideas and just general lifestyle stuff as well. So all over the internet, you can find me. I spend too much time there. So in general, but I appreciate you having me on Patrick. I love it. Yeah. This has been a blast. And thanks again. I've learned a lot from you. So I truly want to say thank you.

1:13:44Awesome. Thank you again. Okay, folks, that's all I had for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I'll see you back here real soon. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes and courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. Follow us on TikTok at The Investors Podcast, on Instagram and LinkedIn at The Investors Podcast Network, and X at TIP underscore network. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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