MI339: Copywriting Unleashed w/ Neville Medhora

20:27And he literally had a bucket of it. And he would scoop it with a little scoop and put it in a hockey puck container looking thing and screw it on, put it in an envelope, write the address, and literally walk over to the post office. That's what his job was at the time. And he had tried a bunch of little things. I think they started a small company called Apartment List. It was Tinder for roommates or something. I think he got aqua hired and he worked at a different company for a year. Nothing big. It wasn't some big life-changing sum. But he was a hustler. Even back then, he was always trying something.

20:58He was super interested in business. And so I immediately liked him. He was cool. And then And what really made him stand out was he threw this thing called Bootstrap Live and he got 150 people to pay for things. And he was very doubtful. He's like, I don't know if I'm going to fill this up. He wasn't as confident as he was now. And it was like, this might fail, but was really impressive. He had a whole staff working there. I was like, how are you paying all these people? He's like, oh, they're all volunteers. I'm like, how'd you get 12 people to volunteer for this? And he basically said, he's like, there's all these kids that couldn't afford the ticket.

21:27So he's like, you could just work here, right? You'll meet these cool people. And I was like, oh, that's interesting that you got so many people to just come work with you for free. And keep in mind, he was not a big deal back then. Now I think if he did that, you'd be like, oh, of course he could do that. But he was not like anybody. So he was just a dude. So it was really impressive. And that's the part that I was like, oh, that's weird. I don't know if I could have done that. And so that's why I was like, okay, this gets onto something. And then from that, he tried to promote another event called HustleCon.

21:55And he realized by promoting it, you have to send out a ton of emails to the people to get them excited for it. And he quickly realized like, oh, you could probably make more with the newsletter than the actual event because the event is just one time. And people also get event fatigue. If you throw an event four times a year, people don't always want to come to every single one, right? Or they just can't. They're out of town or whatever. It's a physical location thing. So the newsletter was kind of like this thing like, oh, we could keep sending out newsletters and get sponsors rather than just these events.

22:24And eventually, the hustle became a newsletter instead of just an events company. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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24:08That's public.com slash T-I-V-P. Paid for by public investing, full disclosures, and 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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25:18And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. So you've been working, you've worked with him at The Hustle. You work with Noah at AppSumo. When did you start getting into writing and copywriting? Well, I was already into writing. I had already started with NevBlog in early 1999, started publishing stuff online. I don't even know if it's up anymore. I don't think so. I doubt I have the server that still runs it. It was called nevil1.com because I just couldn't get nevil.com. And I originally started writing on that and I wrote in HTML.

25:53That was the way you just did it back then. Yeah, you had to write in HTML. Or I used Microsoft front page at the time too. Blast from the past. And so I was writing online already. So I already had some sort of knack for writing. I enjoyed it. I didn't think anything of it at the time. I didn't realize that skill would translate to anything, but I would just write. And I never really thought about the style of writing. I was never interested in writing an English class. I always did well in English class, but they would write these bizarre types of formats of whom it may concern. And they would have these indexes and all these rules.

26:28And I was like, what's the point of this? I'm trying to just get my thoughts into your head. I don't need all this crap. This doesn't need to be like that. And also it was more boring to write in that formal way with big words. So I would just write kind of like I spoke, which is kind of like a tenant of copywriting. So I kind of naturally wrote like that a little bit. And people enjoyed that. People liked that style, that personal style. I also try to use a lot of images that I always prided myself on knowing Photoshop. And even back in the day, just like taking an image, editing it a little bit, cropping it, was hard.

26:57Like it was hard. You had to know Photoshop back then for that kind of stuff. And then to embed it, you would have to like upload it to a server and then manually link it by HTML. And so my content had a lot of images, a lot of graphs, a lot of things like that. And people liked that rather than just plain text. And that was another advantage I had. So that was my early internet writing. And I just always continued. I mean, I did it for free with NevBlog for years. I never thought it would turn into anything that it could be a monetizable skill in any sort of way. And then I found Gary Halbert in roughly 2012, 13, something like that.

27:25And a friend put me onto him, a guy named Ryan Levesque, who's actually kind of popular online as well. He has a book called Ask that got him really popular. And I had met him in China randomly. I went to China in 2007 and on NevVlog, I posted and this guy reached out and was like, hey, I'm here too if you want to meet up. And this is early days of meeting up from people from blogs. I didn't know anything about him. I was like, this guy might be trying to kill me or something. It turns out we ended up becoming good friends and he got me onto copywriting. He's like, you got to read the Gary Halbert letters.

27:51And so I started applying copywriting to my emails for House of Rave. And before they were not performing well. They had images, buy now buttons, everything. But Gary Halber was like, you got to tell a story about a product, give different uses for a product. Showcase. Quick example, I was selling these finger lights. It was our best-selling thing. It was just lights that go on your finger. And I thought it was for 16-year-olds that just dance like this with them on. But I knew from picking up the phone, because I was customer service as well, is that people would... A plumbing company bought 50 pairs of them.

28:19And I called to see, I was like, is this a fake order? And they're like, no, our plumbers use them to look under the sink because their headlight can't reach, right? limited space. And they're cheap enough to where we just throw them away if they get dirty. I was like, huh, never thought about that. Someone said that their child uses them to check for monsters under the bed. One person said they had an autistic child and playing these helped in some way. MTV bought a bunch to use for some show they were doing to make fake ray guns or whatever. People were using for Halloween costumes. I remember telling a story in an email about how all these people use this product, these finger lights for different things.

28:53and it was my best selling day ever. And I was like, holy crap, maybe there's something to this copywriting thing. And happenstance was Noah was building AppSumo as a little side project off of my couch. You guys were living together? He had a place living with another guy and he would come over to my place and we would just work. Just keep in mind, most people had jobs back then. We were just two losers with no job, just working on dumb stuff on the side. I mean, we were making money and stuff like that. We're making as much money as people with jobs. So he would just come over and work with me.

29:22and that was always fun. And I had a nice little setup at my apartment. We had a coffee machine and a pool out there, all that kind of stuff. And so he'd come over and he was building AppSumo and I would look at some of the emails he was sending. I was like, dude, you got to apply this copywriting thing to these emails. These emails suck. And so I tried writing one and it was his first$10 ,000 profit day ever. And then from there, I kind of became part of AppSumo. And then, so I was writing all the emails. I had equity in the company, that kind of thing. And then I sold House of Rave to a competitor.

29:50And at that time, and that was a nice transition time because House of Rave was a dropshipper, right? I was just a middleman. And at the time, more and more people started coming on. And that was also Amazon's kind of meteoric rise time. And I was noticing it was getting harder and harder to make the same amount of money. It was just more difficult. I was getting really good at SEO. I dominated the search engines for all the search results. I crushed it with that. But it was just really difficult to compete with Amazon, right? And like thousands of different sellers from all parts of the world, the margins was getting squeezed for certain products.

30:24So I remember like towards the end, my bread and butter was disco balls, actually. Disco balls was like the thing that they couldn't sell. They were just too big and like those logistics didn't work out. And I was making a lot of money off of those. But at that time, AppSumo was also coming up. There's so much going on with that that I was like, I got to get rid of House of Raid because I can't split my attention too much. And so I sold it to a competitor. I was like, look, we crush on SEO. Just take this and pay me off over two years. And that's what they did. And then at that point, you went almost full-time with Noah growing AppSumo?

30:53Yes. And it was weird. I was not an employee of AppSumo. I owned equity in the company, and I was definitely helping out, but I was selling my courses through AppSumo. So I was making courses on my own and then selling them oftentimes in conjunction with AppSumo. And that worked really well. I was making way more money than I ever had before, like way more money than with House of Rave. And so that was pretty cool. So it was kind of like, it was like a hybrid. I was like working for myself and then not working for myself at the same time. It was an interesting thing, but it was a great combo. So the course was copywriting, right?

31:26No. The first one I ever made was Behind the Scenes of a Muse. And the reason it was called that was because Tim Ferriss had come out with a very viral blog post called like a Muse business. And just keep in mind the context of the time, it was like, there are people out there that are making money off of their computers and they only work on it a few hours a day. And I was just like, huh, this sounds a lot like House of Rave that I do that provides me a full-time income. And I work on it maybe one or two hours a day, sometimes eight hours a day, but sometimes not that much. And so people were always asking me about it.

31:58And whenever I would show people in person, how it worked, log them into the backend, be like, this is how many people ordered. And this is what I do to send the orders over. They were always fascinated. And so I recorded some screen share videos and sold it as a course. And that actually did quite well. I was making a bunch of money from that. I was like, holy crap, this is pretty cool. And then with AppSumo, so many people were responding to the support email being like, how do you write these emails? These are so fun. I'm not even going to buy anything, but these are so fun to read. And I would respond about, oh, actually it's this thing called copywriting.

32:26And then when you have to answer email 100, you're like, okay, perhaps we should make something to demonstrate this. And so that's where Copywriting Course was born out of, how we wrote the AppSumo emails basically. So I made copywriting course and that was like a smash hit. So I was like, okay, we're onto something here. Yeah. So it was born out of people just asking me that question over and over. Right. It was almost telling people telling the market, telling you what you were good at and just kind of following the hints and the trails and doing what's next. Apparently it's a good, that's a good strategy.

32:55Yes. Yeah. Right. You had Nick Huber on recently and he talks about writing being a superpower. It has been for you, obviously, you know, it's done. Writing has been a superpower for you. I wanted to get into like, I've heard Sam talk about the ADA. Can you go into like a little bit of the basics of copywriting and how you grab people's attention? Like you said, it's your job is to put your ideas into someone else's head. So I wanted to hear a little bit about the ADA process. Yeah. So a lot of times if you're trying to get someone like in the classic example I use, it's been ripped off a bunch of times.

33:26It's like water. If I want to get you to drink more water every day, how do I do it? And I can't, if I just say like, you need to drink more water, kind of like a nagging mom. That doesn't work great, right? That's not like a great way to do it. Instead, you use ADA, which is attention, interest, desire, action. This is an old formula from back in the day. And trust me, I've written so many blog posts about copywriting formulas. I've been through all of them. ADA is just the one that you can use over and over again, and you can modify it, add more things to it. But ADA is the basic structure. And what it means is you first have to get someone's attention and how it relates to them.

33:59So I'd say, Patrick, do you work out at all ever? I do. You lift weights and stuff like that? I do. Okay. So how about this? So you're already spending time in the gym or lifting weights. You're already dedicating time to this. If there was a way that you could get 30 % more gains with a very small hack, would you do it? Would you be interested in hearing what it is? Okay. So the interesting thing is the way your muscles build more muscle is they have to have water. Water is the universal solvent. All your amino acids and everything need water in order to build muscle. And if you have more water in your muscles while you work out, you will gain more muscle.

34:29It is just that simple, 30 % more. Now, the way you do this is you drink about a liter of water before your workout, not after. Most people will chug a lot of water after. The key is you drink about a liter of water just like an hour before your workout. That's it. So your body is flush with water that has all the stuff it needs to build more muscle. And so is that a deal? Now will you just like drink a little bit more water, like chug a bottle of water before your workout, like an hour before your workout. That's it. That's all you got to do. That sounds easy, right? So what I did was I did the ADA formula.

34:59What I just told you was completely false. I don't know if that's true. I don't know if you build more muscle, but it sounded very convincing, right? It did. You were getting my hopes up. And what I'm doing in my head is I'm going, okay, how do I get his attention? It has to be something about him. I think most guys kind of work out, want to look strong, you know, if they can maintain muscle. And then I'm going into something interesting. So I give an interesting fact, an interesting testimonial, an interesting thing about that topic. So I say, if your muscles need water to grow and most people are dehydrated when they work out.

35:26And then desire, I want to make you desire this action. So when the new iPhone comes out, it's very expensive, but people just want it so bad that they desire it. So therefore, they must have it and they get it. So I need to make you think you want to drink more water. And that's what I'm saying. All you have to do is the guys who build a lot of muscle, they just drink a bottle of water before they work out. And so then you start thinking in your head. I could do that. It's not that bad. And then action, I get you to take the action being like, okay, made me a promise. You're going to start drinking a bottle of water before you work out.

35:56So that is the way that you convince someone to do something. And you could apply that to a kid cleaning his room. You could apply that to someone buying a product. You can do that to getting someone to buy the copywriting course. So instead of just saying like, buy this, this is a nice little framework to get people to want to buy the product and understand the reason they should buy it. A lot of people just say like, you should buy this because it's really cool. But it's like, how does it impact their life? How does it make their life better? And that's what selling is all about. And ADA is kind of like the basis of it.

36:25And you can use ADA on to tell your kids to clean the room. You use ADA on a sales page. You could use ADA on an email. You use ADA in a conversation. So it's a fantastic formula for life and business. I love the ADA formula. It kind of changed the way I write completely. Yeah. I've heard Sam talk about, I think he use it to get his wife or, you know, like he would use it like getting girlfriends. And because me and Sam have talked about this, yeah, we've talked about it extensively. He picked it up for me and I picked it up from Gary Halbert. Gary Halbert picked it up from the 1800s, right? And so it's been a formula that's been passed along.

36:58But it is one of those things where you think about even dating or anything. People have asked like, can you help rewrite a dating profile? And you think like, okay, how do you get someone's attention on a dating profile? It's not like by holding up a picture of a fish or anything like that. What you do is you talk about them. The most interesting thing in the world to you is Patrick, right? If you see yourself, if you see a photo of you with 20 people, what do you immediately do? You look at yourself, right? And you're like, oh my God, I have a pimple in that picture. No one's looking. No one's looking that, no one's caring.

37:27You didn't notice a pimple on anyone else, right? No one cares. You are the most interesting person in the world according to you. And everyone's like that. And so how do you relate it to them? And I think that's what Ada teaches people that No one really cares about you as much as they care about themselves. For example, I don't really care about Warren Buffett. I just care that he's rich for so long. So therefore, I care about his advice in that it will make me rich. That's why I care about Warren Buffett because it ultimately reflects a selfish thing. And I don't mean selfish in a bad way. That's just how it is.

37:53And so that's why Ada is a big thing, especially with dating. It's just like, maybe you can ask the girl about what she wants. Or weed people out. Tell them, I'm going to save you time. If you don't like anime hardcore and go to anime conventions every weekend, I'm not the right guy for you. whatever. You got something like that, just put it out there and people respect when you save them time like that. So, ADA is a very important formula to learn for people. I love it. Talk to me a little bit about the copywriting course. If I were to sign up for it, I like to write. I've been doing some Twitter threads just for our art company, TIP, and I really enjoy it.

38:26I mean, it's like there's a whole art and process that I enjoy studying. I've learned from a lot of different people on the internet and Twitter. But talk to me about the copywriting course, what somebody would learn going through it, the cost of it. I want to know the detail. Yeah. So writing is a bit of a superpower and a lot of people don't know how to do it. They have the old English style mentality of like, to whom it may concern. That's not the world we live in anymore. So the copywriting course is a set of courses that's going to teach you how to write better. The first copywriting course, you can get through it in just like a few hours, not even a few hours, but a couple of the lessons will get you to think in a totally different way.

39:00For example, ADA is one of the things that we talk about. And I go through examples so people really get it in their head. But the other thing about the copywriting course, it's not just courses you watch. You can do a lot of that stuff on YouTube, but you can actually practice. So we have practice things where you can write ADA formula. I try to make you sell me a boat. That's one of my favorite ones. I get you to sell me a boat by writing an ADA formula. So you get the practice. You actually get your fingers on the keyboard. And then we have writers and myself who go through and give you critiques and be like, what if you did that?

39:26What if you did that? So I've noticed the best way to get people better at writing is to get them to write and give them feedback on it. Not to just train them with a bunch of videos. That doesn't do much. But instead, we also have a forum and office hours where you go, you're writing Twitter threads, post it in there, and we'll give you feedback on how to make it better. If it didn't perform too well, let's try to see how we can make it better. So people post LinkedIn posts on there for their company. And we're like, what if you did this? What if you put those in bullet points? What if instead of these four different lessons, you break it into one lesson that's really good and make that the whole post?

39:57And then they go and repost and repost. And after a time, they're like, holy crap, that did so much better. That went viral. That did so well. And so that's the way to learn whiting by learning some principles, applying it by publishing it, and then revamping it over and over. So the copywriting course is courses and you get access for$97 a month or$750 a year. But you also, and this is the killer feature, you get access to our forum. And it is a forum because you can actually post long things like sales pages and emails. And we go through and modify them and make them better for you. And that's the real value.

40:26And then we also have a weekly office hours where people come talk directly to me like this. And we go through and actually share screens and redo their stuff. And people ask about all sorts of crazy type of stuff. We've had people launch books in office hours. We've had people do viral promotional campaigns. One guy went from zero to 115 ,000 Instagram subscribers in the last two years and then launched a suite of books off of that. But we've had people make bigger companies than ours out of it. We've had people hire our writers. It's pretty cool the amount of wins that people get from just like a little bit of training and a little bit of practice.

40:57So that's what the copywriting course is. Yeah. So it's a way to amplify your writing to the world much better. And think about it. When you write, not only are you writing on social media, if that's your bag, but you're writing emails to sell things. You're writing sales emails. You're writing product pages. You're reaching out to people. You're putting pages on Google, local listings. You're doing a lot of writing that you may not know. And if you can make every single piece of writing 10%, 20%, 100 % better, imagine the results that compound from that. And that's what the copywriting course is about.

41:25How is your average day? I mean, is this how you're spending most of your day on the copywriting course? Are you involved in a whole bunch of other things? I just am interested in what your days look like or is it buried? Yeah, it's kind of random. People are like, what do you do on a different day? Mondays, I have one meeting with an employee that I try not to like... All the writers and stuff, I don't have regular meetings, nothing. I don't regularly schedule anything except one employee. And we just kind of go over like to-do lists and stuff like that. And then the rest of the day, I'm either writing, playing around on social media, or just literally my job is to read the internet and browse the internet and find cool stuff.

41:58That's a lot of my job. So a lot of my job is browsing Twitter. I use Twitter quite a bit. I browse Instagram quite a bit, and then I browse Reddit quite a bit. I used to browse Dig quite a bit, but they've been acquired by a different company. I don't use them at all. So those are the main things I'm doing all day. I'm meeting with friends, having conversations. I kind of kicked up my podcast again in terms of I haven't called it a podcast. We just publish these YouTube interviews, but those have been really fun. And I can't believe that's work or even that this is work. This doesn't feel like work to me.

42:26We're having an interesting conversation. And usually I'm the one asking questions. So I'm getting a ton out of it. And I just asked, I had Jason Cohen of WP Engine, and this guy started$2 billion companies, two separate ones by himself bootstrapped, which is rarefied air. There's not many people that have done that. And he's a nerd. He's what I call an endearing nerd. That even though he is so post-economic at this point to where money doesn't factor into decisions, he is still so interested in things and following along on Twitter and engaging and programming. I mean, I love people like that.

43:00And so it's like, do I have questions to ask someone like that? I'm like, hell yeah, I have a lot of questions. And so I get them on the podcast and just ask them selfishly all the questions I want and get to publish it. And somehow that's work. That sounds like a good life to me. So a lot of that's my work. Yeah. Working with freelancers to get things out the door, chopping up all these clips, all that kind of stuff. I don't do it myself, but managing a team that does. So all that kind of stuff. That's just what I do on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. And then I'm getting married this year. So that's a full-time job.

43:26And that isn't a full-time job. I just got married a year and a half ago and it literally felt like a full-time job planning it. And it's a lot. So congratulations on that. That's great. It totally is. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. But my days are kind of varied. I like working like that. I stuff regimented. I'm going to wait until I have kids before I get more regimented. I feel like then you're going to need some structure, but I do enjoy just the randomness of it.

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47:14All right, back to the show. You had a Twitter post I saw, or it said that you wanted to do more crazy experiments in 2024. So it sounds like you're getting married. Do you have other plans for crazy experiments? I love some of the, I want to get into some of the fun, interesting things that you did in the past and then wrote books about them. But I wanted to hear about any other plans for 2024 trying crazy experiments. Yeah. The ones I used to do back in the day were like very crazy. I don't know if you remember, I went homeless for a week or actually four nights, five days. That was crazy. That was also 10 years ago or maybe a little bit more.

47:49It was 2012 or something. But I don't know if I would do it again. I think - I saw that and then wrote a book about it, right? I did publish. It was like a long blog post I self-published as a book. Yeah. And I actually gave away for free. It wasn't a try to be a money grab. I just thought it was like an interesting social experiment. And so I did write a book. I think you have to charge 99 cents on Amazon at the time. So I had to charge something for it, but I put the lowest amount. But those were crazy experiments I might not do as in my 40s. But I did try. I like validating ideas. And a lot of my friends, even like Noah, Sam, they'll validate ideas all the time, even though they have successful things going.

48:24And that's what I really admire about a lot of these people. And so at the beginning of the year, I tried to validate a newsletter writing company. And I backed away from it because I validated it and saw that I think this is not the right company to start. Right. Say more. Why is that? Well, a lot of people are like, you should start a newsletter company. This seems like the right thing to do. And what happened was a lot of the leads that reached out were people that had had businesses that were struggling and they thought the newsletter would be the answer to the bad sales. And it's like, that's a lot of pressure to put on me to like, now I have to really improve your company.

48:54So that was difficult. So I realized, okay, I have to make it to companies that already sell something profitably and are doing well, like a software company, but they just don't send out emails or good emails. So I realized there needs to be a lane that we pick. It needs to be a very narrow scope of company that we work with. And then I also realized there was a price ceiling because after a certain amount, like we charge 10 grand a month, well, they can hire a full-time good writer for 10 grand a month to just come in house. So there's a certain amount of money that you can charge. It's going to be a certain amount of churn that happens.

49:22There'd be a certain amount of hiring that I would have to do to scale it large. And I thought that there was a cap on how big this could go. And so I did put out a landing page. I got leads for it. I called all these people what they really needed. And I was like, this isn't hitting. It's not like I hit. I felt like it just didn't seem like the perfect fit. It felt like what I could do was start your newsletter cohort where I say, hey, you're a small business. Instead of like five grand a month that I was going to charge, what if you pay 1200 bucks and we help you together to create a newsletter over the course of a month or two?

49:55That could be a thing still. But I thought like the newsletter only company was not fun. Also, it's kind of like, what do you really want to work on? Was I just doing it as a money grab or did I really want to work on this? And I never really wanted to work on it. It was just like so many people are like, oh, you should totally start this. And they weren't thinking about it. And then when I explained why I wasn't going to start it, they're like, yeah, that makes sense. So yeah. Now there could be something out there like that still, but I just, from my experience, I was like, I don't know if I'm the right person to start this.

50:23I wanted to get into productivity hacks. I saw an interview that you did with Dan Martell, who wrote the book, what's it called? How to Buy Back Your Time or Bind Back Your Time, something like that. Tell me about that, some productivity hacks. He had some good ones. I'm actually in the middle of reading the book, I just started it. Somebody recommended it in one of my interviews that I did, and I thought it was pretty good. Did you have any thoughts or takeaways and productivity hacks that you're trying to implement from that interview with him? I'm a lazy person. I have to fool myself into working.

50:53And so this is my to-do list for today. And what I do is I'll scratch out the first one, and then the next one, and then the next one. And if you just keep going, you finish the whole to-do list. And I'm not saying it happens every day. But generally, that's how I try to work. And what I do is I take a sheet of paper and I cover the whole thing so I can't see anything. Then I move it down one line and I'm like, okay, I just have to work on this thing. And that's the one thing I work on. And then I scratch it out and then I move the sheet of paper down and I go do that thing. And that's the way I kind of try to get things to work.

51:22And that's been a big productivity hack for me. I also like to work in different places. So I'll walk over to the library and work. There's a library near my house, but unfortunately, about three o 'clock school gets out and all the school kids from next door come into the library and then they're all really loud and I leave. So that's another hack for me. I go work at different places. I used to live next to a WeWork and I loved WeWork. WeWork, it's a bad rap now, but everywhere I went in the world, WeWork was awesome. I think it's a great place to work out of. And my trick was I need someone to see my screen.

51:51So whenever I go to the library, I purposely won't sit in a corner where I could just read Reddit all day. I go sit to where someone might walk behind me and I think they're seeing my screen. Now, here's the thing. No one cares. Have you ever looked at someone's screen? You're like, well, what are they doing? You don't care. But I think they're judging me. And so therefore, I work harder by showing my screen to other people. So I like working with others. So I frequently invite friends to co-work with me too. And I always say, we have to work on the same side of the table because they can see my screen.

52:19And that makes me work harder. So if someone can see my screen, I work harder. That's why I think people work really hard in planes because you don't want to see someone, you don't always be scrolling Twitter for two hours on a plane. You're like, someone's going to see me. So you just do work. So those are my main productivity hacks. The other thing is I put my phone upside down all the time. I think that's a good productivity hack. Putting your phone upside down so it does like ping and ding you with all the notifications. That's a big one. I put focus mode on my phone. You get a focus mode, click for one hour and it just completely meets you.

52:48No one can get through. It's an impenetrable fortress. So that's another productivity hack. Another one I have is earplugs. So I wear earplugs when I work sometimes. Now these new AirPods Pros are so good that they act as earplugs. So that's another way to do it. But earplugs is also like, I don't have the option of watching something on them. With these, they're always connected to your computer too. So if you watch something, you're like, hey, now I can watch. With earplugs, you can't do anything. You just write. But yeah, those are my main productivity hacks. Everyone's got their own, but I have to fool myself into working and guilt myself into working.

53:20And then the other thing is, if I want to do a big project, I'll put it out online and tell people about it. And that holds me accountable. I feel that really helps me actually. What about the Dan Martel stuff about buying back your time? He had some good ideas in that book, just outsourcing a lot of stuff. It's a little bit of Naval's idea of if your hourly rate that you put for yourself is$1 ,000 an hour or whatever your arbitrary number is, anything below that, I have somebody else do. Do you do anything like that? Outsourcing stuff? Yeah. I have an assistant that does a lot of stuff. I have someone that's worked with me for a long time that does a lot of that kind of stuff.

53:55So if I need to make an image or post up a blog post, I'll have her help me with that just so I don't... And it's not that I'm against doing it and I like being able to know how to do it myself. But the thing is, if you're doing that stuff all the time, I get distracted. So if I log into my WordPress and make a post, I'll see like, oh, there's an issue with updating a plugin on WordPress. And then I'll start going into that and then I get distracted. So I have someone else do some stuff like that. I mean, of course it saved me time, but man, I'm a distracted person. So it really helps keep focused by having someone else do that.

54:24So I've been doing that for a long time. Yeah. I don't agree with doing everything. So I think some people are like anything like cooking, whatever, I want to be totally optimized. I think some of that stuff you kind of need, and it just depends on person to person, but I enjoy grilling and stuff like that. I think it's some time to take your mind off things, listen to a podcast, have some fun. It's a good time. So I think stuff like that, I enjoy doing myself, even though I could outsource it. But I do think people I know that have tried to outsource everything, they're like, there are some things in life that are fun to do.

54:52And it could be like, yes, assembling IKEA furniture can be solved for a hundred bucks on TaskRabbit. I get it. But it's also fun, right? It's also fun and you feel proud that you built something and it's like, sometimes it's fun to work on a project with someone else or something like that. And it's a fun time. So I think outsourcing is great to a certain degree, but yeah, I do buy back my time quite a bit like that. Yeah. I wanted to talk about, back to the books that you've written, you've got one, it's called what, this book will teach you how to write better, which is great. But I wanted to talk about the one, You're Gonna Die.

55:23I wanted to hear about that a little bit. I think it's more like your life philosophy. So, I wanted to hear a little bit about some of the ideas. That intrigues me. I love like kind of philosophy. I want to get into some other questions about like models for human beings that like you think have lived a good and happy life. But first, I wanted to talk about You're Gonna Die. Yeah. So, You're Gonna Die came out of a thing I've always thought, People always ask the meaning of life. I like reading and people ponder this meaning of life. And I'm like, I mean, I think I know the meaning of life. And it's that we're a bunch of particles that got together in some sort of self-replicating thing.

55:55And so at our core, we're like a self-replicating piece of DNA. And this is the manifestation of it. And our job in life is to replicate or perpetuate the species. So I think if you're young and your genitals are working, replication is, I believe, what you were designed to do, right? I think that's a pretty well-established fact. And if you're older and childbearing is no longer in the cards, then perpetuating the species. That's why grandparents love taking care of their grandkids and passing on wealth and things like that. So it sounds like that is the purpose of life, that there's no other big purpose.

56:25And the problem was, I think a lot of people try to make up a purpose that sounds better than that. And I think it's just built on false premises. And so just understanding that, to me, understanding that this is the basis of life. And therefore, if there is no other purpose, then the goal is like, let's have a good time. Enjoy the journey, not the destination, the kind of thing, because the destination is dead. So you're going to die. I was like, okay, accept that you're going to die. But what I had that was interesting since high school was I always picked a date that I was going to die. And that date is November 17th, 2067, my 85th birthday.

56:57And people were like, that's so morbid. I'm like, why is it morbid? And they're like, well, you know where you're going to die. I'm like, yeah, but everyone's going to die. And statistically, I'm going to die before that. I think 78 is probably what my average lifespan is statistically. And so let's say between 70 and 90, I'm going to die. So I just picked a date in between, 85. If I know that I am going to die and I pick a date, now I can work backwards to optimize my life for a good life. And so I think a lot of people will wait till they're retired, especially back in the day, they will wait till they're retired to go travel.

57:29And it's like, well, when you're 65 and retired and finally have the means to go for fancy travel, well, you're going to be too old to really do anything. If you want to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, you're just not going to be able to do it at that age, or it's very unlikely, or you're more likely to get hurt. Instead, if you're 25, hey, you might not be able to afford luxury travel, but you'll be able to get there and climb Mount Kilimanjaro and be great. And so, it's just like, do things now, because at some point, this isn't going to end up well. It's not like you have a great life and then just die.

57:59It's usually like a slow decline that happens before you die. And so I saw that a lot in India, like going out to India every few years as a kid, is we saw like distant relatives and stuff that had like grandmothers that were like 101 years old and they were just skin and bones and they would pray for death every day. They're like, why won't God take me? And I'm just like, someone put this lady out of her misery. I mean, like, what is the deal? Like she's literally asking for it. She's not going to get better. And so But for someone to... We do this with dogs as a humane way to put them down. We do it with horses.

58:32Why don't we do it with humans? And so, I thought, well, if no one's going to do this for me, I'm going to do it myself. And I'm going to have a date where I'm just out. And it was also... Jerry Seinfeld always talks about there's this few seconds or few minutes too long you can go. You're really killing with the audience and doing a great job. If you're on too long, they start to go like, all right, let's wrap this up. So a good comedian knows to go off a little bit early, leave them wanting more. And I always thought that's probably a good way to approach life. Let's go out on a high note and just leave it there.

59:03Sure, it's sad that you got to get off stage, but it's also sadder to watch a slow decline. So I think that's where that came from. And it's kind of like a mental framework. And I never really pushed this book too much because I'm not like, you need to think like this. In fact, I'd say 50 % of the people are like, that is a crazy way to think. To me, it sounds totally logical to think back, when do you think you're going to die? How old do you think you're going to be? How old will your kids be when you die? You don't know that answer. And that's probably an important thing to know. And most people never even think about it.

59:36And so, I think just dispassionately thinking like, okay, let's say 85, how old will I be? What do I need to do before then? And also, let's say someone needs to take a job in a different city or something for a long period of time, for five years and go to some place they don't want to go to. Well, if you're thinking like, this is five years of the prime of my life, would you do it? You're never going to get that time back. I wouldn't. I would say like, I don't want to do that. So just like I was talking about the newsletter thing, like the newsletter company, it's just like, I could do this, but I don't want to.

1:00:07And there's only so many years of life that you have and I don't want to spend some of it doing that thing. And so I think it's a great way to filter out bad ideas or bad decisions and make better decisions with your life by thinking backwards. It's a fun way to think that just not a lot of people do for some reason. I like it. I mean, it's a little, like we mentioned Ryan Holiday, I think, before we started the podcast, but he's got this whole idea. Well, it's a stoic idea really about memento mori. Remember your death, basically. And you're familiar with Kevin Kelly, the thousand and True Fans guy, right?

1:00:40He's got this whole idea of slack. Up until you're 30, have a bunch of time, a lot of slack time to go do these interesting, adventurous things that when you're 70 or 80 years old, you're not going to have the energy, health, strength to go do. And I like some of those ideas. So I'm going to have to check out the book. Was there anybody that influenced you while the writing of it? You said you read a lot, but any philosophers or... I read a lot of biographies and autobiographies about people and it's just like, okay, so if I was an alien looking at this, what are the similarities between all these people?

1:01:13It's like, well, they're born, they do things, then they die, right? It just happens billions of times over with every species, animal, and human on the planet so far. So I thought like, okay, this death thing is such a natural part, but no one thinks about it, right? It's always sad when someone dies or unexpected and you're just like, but is it that unexpected? Like everyone dies, right? Like, how is this unexpected? Like, you know it's going to happen. And it just, whenever I would talk about it with people were always just so repulsed by the idea of thinking of their death. I'm just like, but why?

1:01:42Like, what's, yeah, it's going to happen. So, wouldn't you rather plan it out and like have it in a bed by your loved one's side? And also, I have seen people's families be ripped apart by like, and not even large amounts of money, but when someone leaves money or a property to like siblings and like, who gets the property? Well, I lived in the property, that kind of thing. And so it's just like, wouldn't you like to disperse all of your wealth before then and split it up evenly and equitably and give it to the right places and put all your ducks in a row and then take off? Wouldn't that be better than rather just leaving things to - Yeah.

1:02:15And see people enjoy it while you're alive. Rather than you're not going to see it once you've checked out. Well, I also think there's a tough call a lot of retired people have to make. Let's say they're living on a fixed income or they have a certain amount of money. it's like, how much money do you draw down? Because how long do you live? And you just don't know that. And then also as you get older, the amount of medical attention that you need, it gets higher. You need more pills, you need more stuff. Everything is harder. So it's like your expenses are kind of going up while you're earning potential is tanked.

1:02:45And so it's like this weird thing. If you knew when you were going to die, I think a lot of people would have a better retirement of like, I know that this is the latest I can go. And I think this is a morbid thought for a lot of people. I don't want to think about it like that. But I don't know. I somehow don't have a problem with that. So yeah, that was the book. And I wrote a book called You're Going to Die. And actually, if you go to copywritingcourse.com slash death-calculator, actually have a calculator that you type in your age. And based on US statistics, it'll show not only how many years roughly you have left to live.

1:03:16And this is just based on averages. So you might be more, you might be less, of course. But it also shows, and this is an

1:03:28People think like when they're 20, they're like, well, I would still want to do things when I'm 80. It's just like, okay, but when you're 80, 98 % of the people you know are dead. They're all dead. So your siblings, your parents are long gone. Like for the most part, all the people you love and care about are dead. So, and of course, this is averages. I'm sure there's weird exceptions here and there, but that's an important thing to know about. And so it's an eye-opening thing for people to see sometimes. Also, women typically live four years longer than men. I also learned. Like in every case.

1:03:58Yeah. There's that. Yeah. There's a quote. I forget. Something like nothing focuses the mind like your own. Death is like a great mind focuser. So it gets you to think about these bigger questions and how you want to live. And it's definitely a good thing to think about. I want to hear, you mentioned biographies. I wanted to talk about, you asked Sam, what's a model for a good and happy life? Or who are some people that you look at their life and you're like, that's a good life, or that's a happy life. And I think he mentioned Joseph Kennedy. I think he mentioned Ted Turner. I forget who else.

1:04:31But do you have any models for a life, how you want to clone them? Anybody that comes to mind? Yeah. There's no one like exactly. I think you pick and choose things. Warren Buffett, I admire his investing strategy. It sounds like he's not a great father. He's not a very present person. His kids are all like, yeah, he's in the house, but he's upstairs just reading. He never really talks to us. And so I'm like, well, I don't like that part of it. But I think that's the sacrifice. You have to be a psycho to be that successful sometimes for that long. And so I'm like, okay, perhaps I could give up that level of success for a little bit less.

1:05:06So I try to pick and choose what I want, just like a grocery store, pick and choose whatever I want from someone's life. But ultimately, from reading so many biographies, what you realize is it's the little small things throughout the day that make you happy. Watching your favorite show, grilling on the grill, cooking for people, having some friends over, chatting with people, having a drink with someone. Those are the things that make life things happy. I think kids are a big factor of it too, can probably cause a lot of stress, but also a lot of happiness. Grandparents, I know grandparents that'll pack up and move across the country just to be closer to their grandchildren.

1:05:38And you're just like, it just depends what section of life that you're at. When you're 20, I'm like, I don't want to live next to my nephews. I don't really care all that much. I want to get rich. But then when you're older, your priorities shift so much. So I think it's hard to say what era of time you're talking about. So like Ted Turner may have been a corporate raider in buying companies, but when he's 85, he's probably like, I just want to play with my grandkids and have a good time. It just depends what era someone is in. But I think people are happy. It's an effort. You have to make effort to do it.

1:06:07So I think, for example, living close to friends is a big thing. I don't know if you know, notoriously, me and Sam live next to each other. We were four houses apart. We bought houses four houses apart because I grew up like that where we had family, friends very close by. And those people are lifelong friends. It's like your brothers or something. And so that's always important to me. Those little moments throughout the day, just having friends to go, little fun things are fun. In terms of life, I'm more pragmatic. I don't think I need a crazy level of success, but I would like to be to where I don't have to think about money.

1:06:40I think that's the medium I would like to be at, where I have enough money coming in regardless of what I do, where I can live and live a good life, not just survive. So I would like that, but also to pay attention to friends and just remember the point of life is not to work all the time, but rather to have fun and do fun work. And so I like to think of it like that. That's the life I would like to live. You're familiar with the 4 % rule. Do you have an X number that once you hit, whatever, you'll spend time with family, friends, traveling, whatever, non-work activities? Yeah. Well, the funny thing is there's a slippery slope of once you reach a level, you want to get to the next level.

1:07:20And people always say, that's a bad thing. I'm just like, that is natural. Okay. You will never just be 100 % content. And I don't think you should be. I think you should always be 80 % content, but there should be 20 % of you that's like, could I do something more? That's how you grow, right? And so I think that everyone I know is at that level. And I know people who are very rich who once you get used to that, it's not crazy anymore to you. You mentioned Naval Ravikant. He had a great quote. He's just like, the first four times you fly in a G6 across the country is so awesome and you're so proud of it, but I guarantee you, you will get bored of doing it.

1:07:51It will just become another experience again. You mentioned Costa Rica, you mentioned Palm Springs. Have you ever rented a really cool house on the beach? Amazing house. You get in, you're like, holy crap, this view. It's unreal. And then by day three, you're like, I didn't even notice it. It just blends in. It's just the background. It's just the background. Yeah. It's the whole hedonic treadmill or whatever. Exactly. And that's how it is. I think you'll always maybe think like, okay, I have 20 million in the bank, but what if I had 100 million? Then I could buy a private jet or something, right?

1:08:21There's always going to be this next level. And I think that's fine. But I think being able to live on 50 grand or 100 grand a month would be sufficient to like, that would be a nice spot to be in, I think. There's a level, I first heard it on the Tim Ferriss podcast or maybe Bology or something where he said post-economic. And I always thought that was a great term that someone is post-economic, meaning no matter what it is, they can buy it. And we're talking jets and everything, right? You see the new G700 ,000 comes out and you're like, yeah, I have enough money to purchase that. I don't want it, but I can.

1:08:52I think that's when you're like post-economic. That would be a cool place to be. Yeah. How do you structure your own portfolio? Are you like index fund guy? Are you a Bitcoin guy, real estate guy? How do you think about your own investments? I try to think like, what am I going to invest in that in 10 years is probably going to be higher and preferably much higher. And so I think a lot of it is like, I think Amazon's not going anywhere. I also think of like the bare metal of the internet is not going anywhere. So the companies that run the internet are technically Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, at least the American companies that run.

1:09:25And then there's some Chinese ones. So those are the types of investments I'll make. And I know those are all big companies, But if you look at all the big stuff coming out, like Apple, MetaQuest, Google gets a lot of flack, but they're still so dominant. I use them every day in every part of my life. And it's like, those companies are almost too big to fail. They run everything. And not in a bad way. We like using their products. Their products are so good that we all use them. So those are the stocks I invest in. And then I have two crypto things. It's Bitcoin and Ethereum. So Bitcoin, I think just because it has the story, it has like, you can't really change it that much.

1:09:58It's never really going to change all that much. It's such a democratic process that it's going to be slow to change. But I think Bitcoin will be the largest for a long time and could probably be a competitor to gold, it seems. It already kind of is. So I do see that those two are my favorite trade. And then I invested VOO, which is just the S &P 500 index. And that's just like every month, a certain amount of money goes into it, cost average basis, whatever the term is for it, cost average buying. And then that's a Warren Buffett strategy, just S &P 500 index. And so it's literally... And I remember back in the day, people would tell me that, buy a S &P 500 index.

1:10:32And I'm like, what does that mean? I'm like, I'm telling you the stickers, VOO. That's the one. And there's other ones that are exactly the same, but that's particularly the one I put in. And it's just like an average of the American stock. So that's my entire investing strategy. I do have a 30%. I had in college, I had a 30 % investment account. An investment account means I will never, ever think about buying a book. I will just buy it. I will never consider the cost of it. some sort of educational product, I don't consider the cost of it. If I'm going to use it, I will buy it. That type of thing that I can invest unlimited stuff.

1:11:02I have bought things under my investment account, such as a suit. When I was crashing parties and stuff, I needed to look nice and I just looked garbage. So I bought a suit for 150 bucks, which for me at the time was a lot. And those are investments in yourself, I guess. Don't go buy your whole wardrobe on that. But at the same time, there's certain things that to make yourself better, you need this and I'd need to spend the money on it. So yeah, that was 30 % of my income in college when I was starting. And that was very important to me because you just don't have a lot of money. You do think about a$30 book sometimes, right?

1:11:34And I was like, I don't want money to hold me back from learning something that can make me millions because I'm trying to skimp out on 30 bucks. Neville, this has been a lot of fun. Where can people learn more about you, learn about what you're up to, get in touch with you, things like that? Yeah, best way to work with me and learn and support me at the same time, if you want, go to copywritingcourse.com slash join, sign up for, but preferably the whole year. That's always the best when people sign up for a whole year. They have time to learn everything, absorb everything, do lessons, get feedback, and it dramatically changes the way people write forever.

1:12:04So I'd say$750 in exchange for changing the way you write everything in your entire life and communicate is pretty good. You could also follow me on Twitter at NevMed. I also do a YouTube channel. So YouTube's got copywriting with a K, the old spelling of it. So I put out some free trainings and a lot of interviews over there, and those have been really fun. So I'll continue to do those. And yeah, so YouTube. And then I also have Instagram if you want to look me up. I also post some personal stuff there. So Neville Medora, check me out there. Yeah. Cool. Good luck with the wedding. Best of luck.

1:12:33It's exciting times. It's a lot of work. Thanks so much, Patrick. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate the honor. Thanks, Neville. Thank you. 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.

1:13:14We'll be right back.