Inside Dan Koe's AI Content Engine

0:00If you've been on the internet, you've seen Dan Koe. He's got millions of followers and I've seen him everywhere. So I reached out to him and I was like, how do you do it? And he told me that his secret is LLMs, AI, and prompts. So in this episode, he shows his exact playbook for coming up with ideas, creating the content, and most importantly, content that is going to go viral. Now, why I find this interesting is right now there's an unfair advantage to create X accounts, to create YouTube channels that get distribution. If you can figure out distribution, you can create a bunch of startups for those audiences.

0:39So if you stick around to this end of this episode, you will understand how to create content like Danco. And, you know, people generally charge thousands of dollars for this. It's free. All I ask is for a like and a comment on this episode. I can't wait to see what you build. Have a creative day.

1:05What's up, Dan? Great to have you. By the end of this episode, what are people going to take out of it? Glad to be here, dude. Thank you for having me on. I have a few things to share, but the outcome as a whole will be a big picture overview of my content ecosystem. So before we just started, you're mentioning like, you're curious about how my output is so high, when I personally don't think it's that high, it doesn't take too much. So I think it just comes down to having a really smart system. And then being able to augment that with AI in a unique way, which we're going to learn. But the other thing that we have to learn in order to do that well is just how to use LLMs in a way to get them to do exactly what you want.

1:54So I'm not a coder. I don't use too many of the fancy tools, mostly just Clawed, Chat, GPT. So how are we going to use the base tools that most people have access to and understand to create something incredible? I love it. I only have one ask from you. You know, I just ask that you don't hold back any sauce. You give the prompts. You show how it's really done. Because what would be success for me is if thousands of people consume this episode and understand how to use LLMs to be like you. Because when I see Dan Co., I see millions of followers. I see you everywhere. I see content here. I see content there.

2:35And I'm like, how does this guy do it? Dan, can you commit to it? Absolutely. Yep. All right, let's get into it. Cool. So the first thing there, just to touch on millions of followers having so much content and so many different platforms. The thing about that is all of my content is the same across all different platforms. So the base of it all comes down to two things. It comes down to my newsletter, which I write every week, sometimes twice a week, but once a week is like baseline. and then two is two to three social media posts a day and those are usually written and so I write Twitter first because it's like the 280 character limit and then since that's like the limiting factor out of all the platforms that can pretty easily transfer over to any other platform so that gets posted to threads by Instagram I turn that into an image and post that onto LinkedIn onto Instagram.

3:39Sometimes I use them as a real script. So I pull up my camera, look at my phone, read my best tweet, recite it to the camera, maybe add a bit on there. And then I have reels, TikToks, shorts, et cetera. And the good thing about that is since the ideas themselves are almost always validated ideas or have the potential to do very well, if I can nail the first idea that goes out on Twitter, then I'm practically nailing all the other content that goes out on all other platforms because I'm not much of a trend follower. Sometimes I am, but most of the time I believe that the algorithms are based off of human psychology.

4:24And if you understand human psychology and can use AI to help you understand that more, your content will see a notable increase in engagement and other things of that nature. So first I'll just give an overview in this canvas style so you understand my weekly process. So every week I plan out my newsletter and the idea for the newsletter, it's based on a few different things. It could be a top performing tweet of mine that I had before because I know that that tweet has already done well. So I'm just going to take on it, take it, expand it into a newsletter that turns into a YouTube video podcast.

5:09Good to go. Or it can be based on a video that is already doing well on YouTube. So a good way to generate ideas that help you grow is to go to YouTube, look at the accounts in your niche or the people, the kind of like tribe you want to join online, go to their account, go to videos, filter by most popular, and then just write down 10 of the videos that you think you could recreate. Now, the secret there is you're not watching the videos. You're not trying to steal anything from the video itself. You're trying to take the topic, the angle, and write your own perspective on it. Because if other people are watching those videos, since they have a lot of views, then they're going to just by the nature of YouTube and people binge watching things, they're going to be recommended your video.

6:02They're going to watch that. And if they hear you say the same things as the other person, then you're not going to stand out or be unique. So that's what this process is. So that's usually the two ways that I come up with newsletter ideas. And I keep a document where I tend to, I just have a list of ideas that I can pull from. I pick the one that I think is going to do the best that week. Now, what I do for that is I, of course, have a place where I write the newsletter just in a note or document. But I tend to find a few things that I've either talked about before relating to that. So previous newsletters, previous tweets, whatever they may be.

6:45And then Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, I just said that it is the era of the idea guy and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built idea browser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox and it's all backed by high quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building and then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out.

7:36We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat GBT for ideas with it. But you can start for free, ideabrowser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. A lot of the times I like to weave in other concepts from specific books or videos. So this is where AI really comes into play because I'm talking about survival and how to reinvent yourself in this newsletter. And when I say survival, I'm talking about psychological survival, something that I find really unique and interesting. And I've previously watched three videos on that.

8:20They're each by a channel called actualize.org. And they're like three hours long. So it's a lot of learning when I'm on walks and other things of that nature that allows me to write in-depth newsletters, but I'm usually not taking notes during this time. And this is where LLMs can come into play because they can usually pull from YouTube videos or PDFs, allowing you to talk to them and pull up the relevant points that you want to talk about in a newsletter. So the research process there is thinking about the newsletter and the topic I want to write, talking with AI a bit and just getting specific key points and summaries and other unique perspectives and maybe throwing in a few things about the topic that I'm talking about, just so I have a chat that I can refer to that turns six hours of videos into a thousand words, right?

9:21So So then I can write about it myself. Now, the other thing here is if I bake in something I've written previously. So this is on reinventing yourself. That's kind of my thoughts on that. So you can think of this newsletter as like combining these two. So when I take the summary, paste it into another chat or link it to another chat, then I can say, OK, what are the similarities here? Is there anything that I'm missing? I'm kind of just in this process of ideation with the LLM until I feel like I have enough firepower to start piecing together an outline and then to start writing it. Now, I don't have the LLM right for me, like the actual newsletter.

10:06But with what we're going to talk about, you could technically do that. And if we have time, I'll actually show you how to do that specifically. But that's the research process. Nothing special here. Just getting information from the getting the ideas so that I can put them into the newsletter. Otherwise, you just get stuck staring at a blank screen. So I have a question on this. So what your thesis is basically you use X Twitter as a litmus test on ideas. Yes. And then once you have an idea that gets validated, then you're like, okay, this might have legs to extend this to other mediums. Then you look to YouTube as a encyclopedia of knowledge.

11:00you find popular videos or videos that just are high quality that might be hours long and then you use, it looks like you use Gemini in the first example to summarize it. You can use really anything you want, right? Yeah, I tend to go with Gemini 2.5, especially when there's, oh, this one's only nine minutes, But for like the three to six hour videos, I'll use Gemini just because the large context window. Right. So you get smart about the videos. And then from that, you you extend it. Right. And you're you're not using the LMS to at this point write it. But I guess my question is because someone someone listening to this is going to be like, OK, but you never talked about the hardest part, which is.

11:57your great ideas on Twitter. You know what I mean? So how do you think about that? So it's kind of circular, right? The ideas for Twitter can come from two different places. It can come from the newsletter itself. So I'll show over here in a second, but they can come from the newsletter itself. And that's a good way to generate ideas. But the mistake that people make there is they'll have a really good newsletter and they'll think, okay, I'm supposed to pull ideas from this and they'll read a certain sentence or paragraph and just try to copy paste that directly and post it on Twitter with maybe a few changes.

12:37When in reality, what you're looking for is just the idea that you can turn into a high performing tweet. so it's kind of the same thing there where the first step is learning how to write high-performing tweets and there's courses on there's there's courses on this there's youtube videos on this the best thing i can recommend is actually what i'm going to show you but you need to kind of immerse yourself in good writing and ideas i think the best thing you can do to write better social content in general is to just keep a swipe file of really good ideas that you'd like to emulate under your own brand.

13:22I think of brand as the ideas that you associate yourself with. And so you're not necessarily copying other people's ideas or taking other people's ideas. You're synthesizing a bunch of different ideas that are technically what compose your mind and your worldview and you're bringing them together in a very articulate way under your own brand. And then as people consume those over time, you gain that authority in their head. So, uh, that's one way to come up with ideas is just keep a swipe file. You have to become like a ruthless note taker and just consistently save ideas until it's, until you've read so many of them and written so many of them that it's become second nature to you on how to just structure an idea.

14:10Like you can give me a word and then if you give me a minute to think about it, I could probably come up with a really good post about that thing. And do you use any tools for that? I use, if we go to Twitter. So I've used both TweetHunterX and SuperX. It feels like a lot of people or no company has really mastered this yet, just the Twitter sidebar in general, where when you go to a certain person's profile, this is the super X extension, and it just shows their top performing tweets. So if you write down five to 10 accounts that you really like, and you kind of want to, I think you refine your writing style by reading the writing you aspire to have.

15:04And so if you have the accounts that talk like you want to talk and you consistently visit their highest performing tweets with Super X or Tweet Hunter X and save all of these down and try to exchange either the structure or the idea and practice posting. What I mean by that is right here, there's a clear structure. Go on more walks, walk for no reason, walk to solve a problem, et cetera, et cetera. You can take this structure, replace, or bring another idea into it. So rather than walks, it could be code, code more, code every day, something of that nature. And then the more you, or that's exchanging the, taking the structure and exchanging the idea from it.

15:48But you can also take an idea, like go on more walks and exchange the structure of it. So then you look at another structure where this is just a single sentence.

16:02I don't know, platitude of sorts, this one at least. And you can just take the idea of walks, try to write it as a single sentence. Now you have two tweets from one idea. And the more you do that and practice it, then really any idea has the potential to do very well because you can just pop it into a pre-existing structure or you can take a structure and plug in one of the ideas that you're trying to include in your brand. So one thing there that I'll talk on and then we'll get into actually doing all of that. What the after I write the newsletter, I have three prompts that I like to run it through.

16:45So this first one is just a YouTube title generator. And I'll show you how this one's structured. And if you do this, Greg, I can put all of these in a Google Doc so people can copy paste them and read through them and dissect how they're structured. But for this prompt specifically, I wrote a prompt. I took my best like 15 titles on YouTube and I, whatever I plug into it, the newsletter I plug into it, it pulls out the key points from that newsletter and tries to spin them into 20 to 30 YouTube titles that are similar and follow the same psychological patterns and principles as my best performing titles.

17:35And so it spits these out here. And then I tend to read through these cross out ones that I don't think would work, highlight ones that I think would potentially come up with a better one from my own mind, test that out on YouTube. If it doesn't work after two weeks, I'll try changing the title. Usually that'll get it to a decent place in terms of views. and the reason I create YouTube titles for this is because my newsletter is a practically an outline for my YouTube videos right I have it pulled up as I'm looking at the screen I mean at the camera I'll look down read a sentence recite it to the camera sometimes I'll riff sometimes I'll read straight from it if I'm looking down and reading at the newsletter my editor just adds b-roll or text screens over my face so people can't see me looking down but that's the general structure of it and people quite like it the objection there usually is uh well if you're posting the same thing on two platforms won't people notice that or won't they get bored right and most of the time i've seen the opposite like there are people that read it And then when they watch or listen to it, they get something entirely new because it's a different medium.

18:51Other people prefer to watch or listen rather than read. And I just feel like my philosophy behind it is I'd rather produce one amazing thing a week and just put all of my attention into that and put it out across all platforms rather than try to create something new for each platform. and each of those things not be as good. And there's probably marginal difference between the two paths, but I've really gotten into this flow of the weekly flow of newsletter, YouTube video, social posts across all platforms. And it's worked out pretty well. People don't get angry and it's seems like it's working.

19:38But the next thing I do is I'll take the newsletter or the YouTube video and I'll plug them into a deep posts generator prompt and just a content ideas generator. And these are both kind of the same thing for the deep posts generator. I wrote a prompt that breaks, it breaks down the newsletter or whatever you feed it. It could be a PDF, a YouTube video, anything. And I came up with this prompt still kind of fuzzy how I did it because it was like a huge conversation, but I broke down, I asked it to break down a bunch of these social posts that I really liked, uh, the way they were structured, the way they were written and the key things that made them do really well.

20:29And after that conversation, it said, okay, well, a lot of these have paradoxes and counterintuitive truths. A lot of them have a transformation arc. A lot of them have core problems. A lot of them have examples or they handle objections or they have action steps or aspirational statements. And so I was like, okay, take each one of these and

20:55break down the newsletter, whatever you're fed into like five compelling post ideas, like the most impactful ideas that could be turned into posts. And then I want you to ideate three core paradoxes, a bunch of key quotes, transformation arc, core problems, key examples. So with this, I'm not asking it to write tweets for me because the LLM isn't going to be too good at doing that unless you guide it to in a very specific way. But instead here is I have it give me the pieces of ideas, like the deconstruction of high performing content and ideas, and just give me a bunch of those. And so I can read through here.

21:40And when one thing sparks an idea for me, boom, I can go and start writing a tweet on that. Or I can combine a bunch of these together, since technically each of these, like all of these paradoxes, quotes, problems are all related. They're all about one idea. So I just have a bunch of building blocks for good content in here. The next prompt that I use is just a general content idea generation. I have it give me 60 ideas. And these are usually based around the tweets that have done really well for me or the social posts in general. I found that people really like when I give harsh life advice and I like that too.

22:27Counterintuitive truths, which is very similar to the paradoxes. Core problems or pain points, again, very similar. Key insights, wisdom, big ideas. So I can just read through here and I'm not technically, I'm not trying to copy paste these as a tweet. I'm just trying to generate a starting point for an idea so that I can have those ideas faster, right? Because I feel like good ideas are the fuel for content, but usually good ideas come from sifting through hours of YouTube videos on a walk or reading a good book or, uh, re finding a really good sub stack article and having that generate ideas or just sitting and thinking with your thoughts until something emerges.

23:09And those are great ways to come up with ideas, but this is just a way to kind of force that to an extent and still maintain the quality without having the LLM actually write it for you. Now, so we just went over like in general, how I go or how I create my newsletters and content each week. That's just the writing ideation process. How I actually structure that on a day-to-day basis is quite simple where where I wake up, do a little morning routine, shower, walk, whatever it may be. And then I sit down at my computer and the next two hours is just dedicated to writing. So in that writing, I have to finish one section of my newsletter and I have to finish three posts, three social posts.

23:58And then within that time, you usually have time within that two hours still to paste those social posts to all platforms or at least schedule them. And so that's kind of my routine every day. It's just two hours of writing. And that's the base of all of my social media, all of my newsletter. One day out of the week, I record my YouTube video and pass that off to the editor. And then boom, my content is done. And the rest is history. You got millions, millions of followers, millions of likes. Well, that was the other thing that I found relatively quick is once I had a post that started to generate more followers than other ones did, I knew that I just had to start creating spinoffs of that post because then it's like I almost had a predictable way to increase the follower growth.

25:02So it's like the key part here is one, you need to experiment until you kind of strike gold and know what brings in followers. Then you need to make that a consistent part of your process and consistently create spinoffs of that while with your other time. And let's say that's 30 % of the time. That's like one post a day out of the three. the other two posts are for continuing the experimentation on until you find the next one that is like you striking gold then you make that a part of your process now you have two posts a day that are just consistently most like they they're not all going to bring in a ton of followers but you're getting closer and closer to just consistently increasing followers over time by doing this and if you keep that balance of your core ideas that are consistently going to bring in followers with a healthy dose of experimentation until you find more and then you just cycle out the core ideas that's really the entire growth process on any social platform in my opinion so there's there's one thing that's missing from this which is visual assets like media so on x i've noticed that like if i tweet just words versus i tweet words with an image, the words with image, you know, call it performs 40 % better.

26:28Um, and so how do you think about that? How do you think, you know, okay, you do this process to come up with ideas, to write the content, but what do you do about the image? I don't do anything, but, but that's just me. Um, because I've ever since I started out, I kind of put the constraint on myself of like, I want to do this with just writing. I didn't start YouTube until I think two years after I was on Twitter. And just by creating that constraint, it made me be more creative. And I think it made me refine my writing a lot more. I've occasionally incorporated visuals in my Instagram posts and newsletters for like drawing out specific concepts or having certain infographics, or I even did animations on Instagram at one point.

27:22And those things definitely helped, but the animations eventually died down because a lot more people started doing them. And then same with the visuals. Like I noticed they were a good pattern interrupt when I would post those after not posting them for a while and they would get a lot more engagement. But then if I tried to make that a consistent thing, they would just balance out as most of the posts did. And so then I'm like, I should just stick with writing because the ideas in my head, the thing that I feel built my audience the most, there's no way to know this, but I think it came from my focus on idea density and novel perspectives.

28:08So in my YouTube videos, especially I try to bake in at least one thing that I think will like blow people's minds as an exaggeration. It's like the thing that I found so interesting that I feel like not too many people know about. If I can find a way to incorporate that into a newsletter that has a pretty broad and validated angle. So people go into the video because it's already validated. They like that topic. They'll just watch it to watch it. And then I have a good hook, a good lead. And then I lead them into like that mind blowing insight that makes them think a bit deeper and learn something new and have something new to explore that gives them this unique connection with me that not too many other people do.

29:01Yeah. Does that make sense? It does. I think like if you have really good optimized ideas, you don't need visuals it's just so hard to come up with good ideas i mean you're sharing the sauce around how to come up with good ideas but it it's by the way it's not just good ideas it's good ideas that are optimized for feeds right because you need people to reshare it to get seen um or like it or comment on it you you need them to stop scrolling to to you know so for a lot of people the images or the videos are a bit of a crutch like you can take a not so good idea crutch it to a really nice visual and likely you'll get more seen i think i do think that if you added images and or videos to your ex posts you would see not that you need you know another five million impressions a month but i think the way i would i mean i think it's fun to explore like sora 2 just came out um you know what are some short films cinematic films that you can you know you could be creating that's one the other thing is you know nano banana gemini flash 2.5 you know okay i'll show you something real quick actually go to my my ex so i had a um post that i posted that got like no like scroll keep scrolling it's like uh it's a lot it's a lot down but i had a post um yeah i'll let you know in that basically didn't go anywhere and then i reposted it with an image there it is stop it went up went up there it is the cringe mountain one ah so i posted this everything i ever got in life was because i climbed cringe mountain you sweat you shake you look stupid and then one day it breaks open and suddenly you're the only one with the view it went nowhere without the you know yeah basically nowhere without the image but once the image combined with you know maybe it wasn't a great idea maybe it was a pretty good idea with i think a really great image it it got 148 000 impressions and by the way i hear you listening to this and you're like yeah but you have 500 000 followers or whatever the followers don't really matter anymore realistically you know it's actually easier to get impressions if you have less followers it's you know what i mean like i can post something that is just like a throwaway tweet and it will go nowhere it'll get like a hundred likes compared to a typical two to three thousand and yeah it's just the the audience is definitely a force amplifier but only if you're good at that thing.

32:07Like if, if most people who haven't practiced writing content for a long amount of time were given a million followers, I do not think that that would help them in the slightest. Yeah. Cool. But yeah, let's actually show a cool way to do this with, uh, Claude or in, in creating a prompt to help you write tweets or to help you, I guess, learn how to write those high-performing posts. So one thing I love to do is there's a two-step process here. Anything that I like and want to incorporate into my work, I will ask Claude or ChatGPT to break it down, teach me how to do it. I will take that as if it were an SOP or just a set of instructions, then I will take a prompt that helps me create prompts, send that, paste the instructions into it and say, I want to turn this into a prompt that interviews me for the exact thing you need in order to execute on this as best as possible.

33:16So as an example here is I said, break down the structure of this post so that I can recreate it from scratch, break down why it works, the psychological patterns involved, what context is needed from me and anything else I would need to understand how to recreate it. Then I just pasted, I believe this is one of my tweets that did pretty good, how to know you were doing something meaningful. You feel like you don't make any progress for weeks, months, or years. Then the growth hits you all at once. When you create your own path, results aren't predictable. And that keeps many people from sticking with it.

33:53So you find a good post. Well, first you write this, tell it to break it down. You find a good post that you want to understand why it did so well or how it was written. But this can also be applied to something like a landing page. Or if you're trying to write a book and you read someone else's book and you're like, damn, that paragraph was good. I want to understand how I can take my own idea and replicate the structure of this. So my writing flows the same amount. You can do that for writing YouTube scripts, if you're able to break down the transcript, there's just so many different things that you can do.