Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - Inside a YouTuber Success Story: Ali Abdaal’s Journey From Medicine to Mastery

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

On this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Ali Abdaal, one of the most prominent productivity experts on YouTube today. Ali's journey is nothing short of fascinating - starting from reading my emails as a 13-year-old, to becoming a medical doctor, and now being a highly successful YouTuber and entrepreneur. In this episode we dive deep into Ali's unique path and the powerful strategies he's used to grow his online presence and business. From structuring content to optimizing filming days, Ali shares insights that can simplify and expedite your approach to content creation and productivity. Ali and I discuss a variety of topics crucial for anyone looking to enhance their productivity and online business strategy. We cover everything from the importance of organic content marketing to the impact of having a robust sales and marketing knowledge base. Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned marketer, the tips and stories Ali shares are incredibly valuable and actionable. Key Highlights: Organic Content Marketing: Discover how Ali used YouTube to boost his business without initially knowing what content marketing was. Structuring Your Content: Learn how to effectively plan and organize your videos and filming days. Productivity Hacks: Ali shares his best practices for maintaining productivity while balancing multiple projects. Overcoming Imposter Syndrome: Insights on how Ali overcame his fears and started charging premium prices for his courses. Business Evolution: Understand the transition from a niche market (medical school prep) to a broader audience (productivity and lifestyle). Tune in to hear Ali's story and get ready to take your content creation and productivity to the next level! Don't forget to check out this awesome deal from Mint Mobile! https://mintmobile.com/funnels And if you want to enjoy the Marketing Secrets Show ad-free, check out http://marketingsecrets.com/adfree Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When it comes to Smart Water Alkaline 9.5 plus pH with antioxidant, there's nothing to overthink. So, while you may be performing mental gymnastics over whether the post-work gym crowd is worth it, if you'll be able to find a spot for your yoga mat, or if that spin instructor will make you late for dinner again, don't overthink how you hydrate. Life's full of choices. Smart Water Alkaline is a simple one. The word productivity didn't really come into it until I just kept seeing that word in the comments. Being like, oh, you're so productive. You're so productive. How are you so productive? I was like,

yeah, you know, I guess I am productive. You know, I was a medical student building a YouTube channel, a bit of a business on the side. And when I started making videos about productivity and like my productivity desk setup rather than my gaming desk setup, those started to take off. And eventually people started calling me a productivity guru. And I was like, damn, that's interesting. I'm a guru.

I'm a guru, yeah. I'm like that scammer Russell Brunson guy. In the last decade, I went from being a startup entrepreneur to selling over a billion dollars in my own products and services online. This show is going to show you how to start, grow, and scale a business online. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast.

Today, I've got a super cool guest. We just finished the interview, and I got a lot of insane value for myself out of it. He is someone who is one of the biggest YouTube experts on the world and probably the biggest productivity expert in the world right now. His name is Ali Abdaal. And what's fascinating about him is his story. He started reading my emails back when he was 13 years old. Then he went and became a medical doctor and now he's a productivity expert on YouTube and it's just a fascinating story. He started reading my emails back when he was 13 years old. Then he went and became a medical doctor and now he's a productivity expert on YouTube. And it's just a fascinating story.

During this interview, he goes deep into a whole bunch of ways on like actually how to structure your videos, your content, how to set up your filming days, like a whole bunch of really, really powerful things, things to tell yourself before you film any video to make sure the video is going to be great. And we got some really cool philosophy, like philosophy conversations as well about life and about business and about everything so i hope you enjoy this interview it was really really fun to do so that said let's jump right into the podcast all right everyone i'm excited to be here today with ollie abdall and uh you're in boise idaho

first off like why in the world are you in boise yeah boise idaho is kind of a random place um i'm here to speak at the convert kit craft and commerce uh conference thing and then randomly i met someone called molly at like another conference where i was speaking at adcon in london and she mentioned she lives in boise i was like this is like the second time i'm hearing of boise idaho and she mentioned that you live in boise i was like what russell brunson lives in boise idaho like what is this boise idaho place so now we're here and we're in boise yeah what do you think about so far is it it's so nice the weather's been amazing i've been because of the london to here jet lag i've been waking up at like 5 a.m and going for a walk in like the one of the parks by by boise state university and like walking along the river it's just so nice it's a good

place to be it's so cool okay so kick us off though i want i want to tell a story i think will be fun and then we'll get into some more questions I have for you specifically. So I first bumped into your world on YouTube, started watching your videos. I love what you're doing. And I just read your book which you know i was like oh my day it's super exciting for me right and then um after that it's like every like three or four months after that i started getting random texts from people in fact i pulled one up today from people who saw you speaking somewhere and in the in the video um if i can pull one up real quick it makes me laugh because um oh yeah okay i'm gonna show this one some adcon last week. So I'll just play the clip and we'll show it and then you guys, and we'll talk about it. So here we go. And so I had a chat with my CEO coach a couple years ago

and he was like, I was like, yeah, I don't feel like I know very much about marketing. He was like, well, have you read Russell Brunson's books? I was like, well, that's scammer. No, of course not. And he was like, bro, and he took off his bookshelf with four books that Russell Brunson's written and said, these are the ones we need right now.

And I read that and I was like, holy. Oh, okay. So even making shit up as we went along, because I'm going to make YouTube videos, but clearly I suck at business because I didn't know what a funnel was, I didn't know what an upsell was, I didn't know what a quarter bump was. I didn't know what copyrighting was. I thought it was copyright, like the legal version of copyright. I'll stop it there. But it's funny because the text always comes in like, hey, this guy named Ollie is talking about you on stage. Oh, man, he called you a scammer. And the next thing, oh, but it's not really good.

It's so funny. So I want to, before we start filming, we talked about this. So you said you got on my list when you were 13 years old. It was literally ages ago. When I was like 12, 13, I was trying to get into the world of like making money on the internet. And I came across like affiliate marketing as a thing.

This would have been in like 2007, 7, 8 time. I'd have been 27, you were 13. Yeah. And I remember I signed up to your email list. I signed up to Neil patel's email list and there were a few other there were a couple of other people's trade doubler was a thing at the time there was like uh clickbank and there was clickbait is also in boise by the way oh yeah there you go boise and and and so i was getting these emails and i remember i that was like back

back when you had to have an invite to have a Gmail account. And so I would just keep on getting these emails from Russell Brunson. And the emails were always, I don't even remember, but at some point I decided that like, oh, this guy's a scammer. Classified media. Yeah, it's like a scam thing. And I didn't really think anything of it. And then I would hear your name come up over the next 17 years, occasionally. And I would just associate it with those emails that I got when I was 13 years old and think, whatever.

And I was 27 years old at the time, so it probably were more scammy, because I don't know, I was just learning this game too back then. And then you had this conversation with my CEO coach like two years ago. We were talking about what are the areas in the business that I need to improve on to level up as a leader. And I realized I knew nothing about sales and marketing because I'd never read a book about sales and marketing. And he busted out your books. And I was like,

wait a minute, Russell Brunson, that guy whose email list I've been on since the age of 13, like what the f**k? And so I think it was in December of 2022 when I read Dotcom Secrets for the first time. And just my mind was just blown wide open. I was like, oh my God, like I've been trying to sell stuff on the internet for like 10 years at this point. I've never once read a book about sales and marketing. This is why our sort of my first business stalled because I just didn't know that you could actually make money by like advertising things and having a funnel and doing an upsell and it was it was like i got a firmware update in my mind of oh there's all this new stuff that i never knew anything

about and so i read dot-com secrets i read copywriting secrets by your friend jim who i had a zoom call with a few weeks ago randomly he gave me some good advice and i read 100 million dollar offers by homozy who is also one of your former students um and we applied all of the the step-by-step method in Dotcom Secrets and $100 million offers and Copywriting Secrets. And previously, our YouTuber Academy launches were doing like 400K revenue.

And our next one did 2 million revenue, like 1.95 or something. And now I'm like an evangelist for Dotcom Secrets, Copywriting Secrets and $100 million offers. So thank you for writing those books. Well, thank you for reading them and applying to that. It makes my day. So cool. So I'm going to go into your your story then i want to start back because you're

13 years old i know we'll jump in the timeline four but you you become a doctor but before that like 13 years old what were you doing because you weren't were you thinking about yeah i wasn't i was in school and um i was trying to make money so that i could buy and buy myself a laptop and then get an extra screen then my and then my brother got into sort of trying to make money online. And the way we were sort of like measuring our sort of success was, man, if I could make 300 pounds or like $400 this year, I can afford another monitor. And then maybe five years from now,

I'll be able to have a three monitor desk set up. So I saw you have a three monitor desk set up. I was very excited about that. So I was doing like freelance web development and web design kind of aged 13 to 17 ish and then every year i was trying to launch a new business idea i tried a forum to help teenagers learn how learn like secret spy skills like lock picking and hacking and stuff that completely flopped i tried a uh mlm pyramid marketing type thing where uh i would get people to sign up for free trials of Blockbuster Video and then refer their friends.

And then if you refer 25 people, you'll win an Xbox 360. So I made about 50 pounds through that. I remember those offers. That's cool. I tried building a game. That was really hard. A video game?

Yeah, like an online role-playing text-based game. Were you a coder? Like you were coding it or just outsourcing it? No, I was trying to code it myself. And I was like 15 and I knew nothing about coding. So I was reading tutorials and there were like books back in the day that would teach you how to code

because there wasn't that much of an online coding tutorial ecosystem. And then randomly at the age of like 18, just as in my summer before medical school, I ended up getting scammed out of my life savings because I tried buying a macbook air from some dude off craigslist and he ended up selling me a defunct model and so i i'd been painstakingly trying to earn this like thousand pounds that i got through like private tutoring and through like this web design stuff and i lost all of that overnight and i was like okay i need a way of recouping this money so i made an evernote

doc and back in 2012 which i still have which says says, all right, how do I make money? What am I good at? Then while I'm good at teaching things, because I think I'm a reasonable teacher, I got into med school and did well in the exams, and I'm good at making websites. So I was like, okay, what if I start a business that combines teaching, making websites? And I was like, okay, cool. So I'm going to teach courses, teaching people how to get into med school and build a website that advertises those courses. And so that year, I taught physical real life classroom courses at the age of 18, going to random hotel conference rooms, up and down the UK, teaching kids how to get into med school. And I did that for like five years. And so while I was in med school, you know,

first year, we did like 10k revenue. Next year, we did like 80, then we did 150. And we kind of stalled at 150k revenue. And 150k revenue, I was doing like 40K profit, 50K profit, which in the UK is how much a doctor earns full time. So when I was in med school, I felt really rich because I was like earning 40K a year. This is like they're paying to come to these events or the events you would sell a course or how to- Yeah, so it would be like a one day course.

Like, hey, you sign up to the BMAT crash course. It's this like medical exam. And so I'd show up to that with like 30 booklets printed that I wrote and got printed and bound. And I would be at the front of the classroom teaching a course with a white board of how to do, how to think about critical thinking questions and the math questions and stuff.

And so five years into this, we saw our revenue sort of stored at one 50. And I thought, you know what? I need more people to buy my stuff. So if I make YouTube videos and if I teach people how to get into med school, maybe some percentage of people will think I'm legit and they'll then sign up to my physical classroom course and rock up to a event space in

London where I'm going to teach the thing. And I now know this is called organic content marketing, but I had no idea that that was a thing back in the day. I just decided to start my YouTube channel based on that. How many years ago was that then? That was in 2017. So seven years ago now. And then I ended up selling that business two years later for very little money and just focusing all in on the YouTube stuff. Yeah. So cool. And then how long of a season were you doing medical school? Did you practice as a doctor? What happened? Yeah. So I started my YouTube channel in 2017. That was in my final year of med school. So I did one year of med school, then two years of practicing as a doctor. And then 2020 pandemic

hit. And I intended to go to Australia to do some emergency medicine and stuff, but they closed their borders. And so I accidentally ended up becoming a full-time YouTuber. And that was when loads of people kept asking the comments like, Hey, how did, how did you grow this YouTube channel? Cause I had like a million subscribers at that time. And I thought, okay, why don't I make a course? And that was how I got into sort of the course creation world. The info business. The info business. Initially, it was going to be like a $200 thing

because I had so much imposter syndrome. I was like, I've only got 1.2 million subscribers. What the hell do I have to teach? And then some friends, Tiago Forte and David Perel, who run live cohort courses, said, what if you charge two grand? I was like, oh, I've never charged two grand for anything. And I had all this fear, and then I took their advice.

I charged the two grand, I've never charged two grand for anything. And I had all this fear. And then I took their advice. I charged the two grand. And basically in a week, we expected like 12 people to sign up for like a beta testing cohort. In the end, like 350 people signed up and we made like $250,000 in a week, which would have been five years worth of salary working full time as a doctor in the UK. And I was like, oh, okay see i see it now and then it took another two years to discover dot-com secrets and realize oh okay there's more efficient ways to sell this course that's cool so when you the transition from you teaching the medical like

how to get into medical school to doing what you do now was it the same youtube channel you kind of transitioned or is it like you start stop and started over no it was it was the same YouTube channel um so I remember having this debate with myself back in the day where I was because my company was called six med six med and I thought do I want to start a YouTube channel under the brand name or under my personal name and I watched and read a load of stuff about this and basically the consensus was people follow individuals rather than brands so I thought okay cool let me just put it under my own name so the early videos on the channel actually are me trying to sing songs because I thought I was going to be a music YouTuber back in the day. They're still there if you scroll back.

Oh man, that's amazing. We should insert some right now. yeah well one of them i even unlisted it was it was me trying to sing thinking out loud by ed sheeran take me into your loving arms and it got three dislikes and one like back in like 2016 i was like okay i'm not meant for this i only actually republished it on the channel like a couple of weeks ago when i felt sufficiently confident i've had success then i'm like okay i can show my failures um so initially the videos were about how to get the music stuff and then i started doing this med school stuff and then very quickly i i sort of realized that you know the audience is growing each day i'm getting one or two new subscribers people are asking me for not just how

to get into med school, but also how I study for my exams. And, oh, they've seen that I take notes on an iPad. So let me talk about that. Oh, they've seen that, you know, I seem to have good work-life balance. Let me talk about that. And by just following what people wanted from me, my channel then sort of evolved away from just helping kids get into med school and more towards generally advice for students and then advice for life. But I also had in the back of my, in the back of my mind for almost from day one, that if I want to take YouTube seriously, I can't only make videos aimed at students because I will age out of that very quickly. And I tried to figure out, okay, what would,

what does longevity look like on YouTube? Cause most YouTubers don't have a lot of longevity. Like most YouTubers who are big today weren't big 10 years ago, except in a couple of niches. In the niche of tech, for example, the tech YouTubers who are big today, MKBHD, iJustine, Linus Tech Tips, they were all big 10 years ago. So it seems like in tech and in certain other niches, getting older actually gives you more authority rather than less. Whereas lifestyle YouTubers, you know, they have a sell by date. Student YouTubers, they have a sell by date. So I was like,

I need to get out of the student market ASAP and move more towards things that I can see myself doing for the longterm, which is how I ended up accidentally becoming a productivity guru. Was there ever like a consciously, productivity is going to be the thing or just it morphed?

It sort of morphed. The word productivity didn't really come into it until, I just kept seeing that word in the comments. Being like, oh, you're so productive. You're so productive. How are you so productive? I was like, yeah, you know, I guess I am productive.

I was a medical student building a YouTube channel. I had a bit of a business on the side. And when I started making videos about productivity and like my productivity desk setup rather than my gaming desk setup, those started to take off. And eventually people started calling me a productivity guru. I was like, damn, that's interesting. I'm a guru.

I'm a guru, yeah. I'm like that scammer Russell Brunson guy. I ended up being this productivity guru. And then a few years later, a publisher approached me to write a book.

They were like, well, you're a productivity expert, so you should write about productivity. I was like, I'm a productivity expert? Really? Okay, if you say so. Isn't't it fascinating how like you view yourself versus how the market views yourself i've had similar things in my career where it's just like

huh i had no idea that's how people perceived me yeah what was that like for you like well being a scammer apparently you know just kidding i think for me it was like um like it's it's similar like um it's it's trend it's shifted over the years the most recent one more so it's like people that join my inner circle now it's fascinating because i always think they're coming to me because they want funnels and marketing and stuff and they do that that's like the gateway that gets them in but then we do open q and a's our big events and stuff like that um no one ever asked me a marketing question ever it's always something like lifestyle how do you have a fact how are you doing uh how do you have a family and a marriage and a business like how do you do like

those are all the things people want to know is like the the thing behind the thing and not the thing does that make sense like um always fascinates me and like the videos i do or stuff i talk more about that those ones do better than like let me show you how to sell a thousand copies of your book a day you know like it like, it's just fascinating. Yeah, I was thinking about this in the car ride on the way here around how I think when gurus are like smaller, the advice has to be very tactical. Whereas like, as you get bigger and more successful,

actually the advice becomes less about the tactics and much more about the philosophies like now when i if i watch your stuff i'm i i care a lot more personally about how you're managing all of this and what we work life balance and all this sort of stuff because you you've got you've got that success now that i just trust that okay you you can now give me life advice not just business advice and i'm finding it for myself now when i give talks i i'm still in tactical mode and people like the tactical stuff but then when i take a step back and start philosophizing then people really hang on to my words and i'm like holy i can i can now talk about philosopher i'm a philosopher i'm a philosopher guru i can now

talk about like bigger picture things and people are listening now whereas if you're a youtuber with like three subscribers and you start trying to give people life advice, it's like, it's not really going to land. You kind of have to tell people how to use ClickFunnels. And then that gets you a certain base and now you can start giving life advice. It's interesting too, because like, I'm sure you've heard the phrase, like you never want to meet your heroes in life.

And I think it's, I think this is why this happens. It's like a lot of times you'll find somebody who you connect with them on one part of like, something they value, right? So like productivity or marketing. And then you follow that person. They become your hero. You look up to them.

And then the problem is like everyone's got multiple values. And when you meet the person, if you have values that don't align, that's when people like freak out and like, oh, you know. It's interesting. So I think, yeah, because like some of my, like even my, like Dan Kennedy, he's my first mentor. I bought his company. I love the guy. We align on the business value so strong. But then other values in life, we do not connect at all.

But I have to love him for the values we share and not dislike him for the values we don't share. But most people struggle with that. You know what I mean? And so that's the scarier thing because you'll start seeing that as you start getting you know you know this but for people listening like you start getting bigger and more people start following you they start wanting all these other things and that's where a lot of hate starts coming is like oh well i followed you for funnels but i didn't know that you believe this or you and it's like this weird this weird thing so it's kind of a double-edged sword sometimes yeah i find it i i find it really hard to to figure out so for example, I attended a couple of Tony Robbins events last year

and I thought they were phenomenal. And I mentioned it in my newsletter and I had so many responses being like, I can't believe you're promoting Tony Robbins. I was like, what? And then I Googled it and watched a bunch of YouTube videos. Oh, okay. Tony Robbins had all this stuff about him

that I just had no idea of. But I still got loads of value from the events. And even mentioning it now, there's part of me that's like, oh, people are going to watch this and think, and it's like this thing around like, I think that people expect that if you're like recommending someone's stuff

that you also then endorse literally everything they've ever done and will ever do. And especially if someone has a very long career, it's like, you know, it's it's yeah like you're probably not massively proud of the stuff you did 20 at age 27 in terms of my 27 yeah please delete those yeah yeah so i don't know i think i think it's a tricky one yeah definitely um interesting so what's up everybody this is russell brunson i've got something really cool for you today from my friend Taylor Wells. Taylor spoke at our last Funnel Hacking Live because I wanted him to

share a really cool concept about what he calls the revolving pricing method. And today he decided to sponsor the podcast to give you guys more access to this super cool strategy that you are going to love. It's something we've been implementing into our high-end coaching program as well, and it is amazing. But to kind of give you some context about this offer he's making for you guys, as you may or may not know, a few years ago, JPMorgan Chase did a study, and guess what they found? They found that the average small business only has about 28 days of operating expenses in reserve. That's right, less than a month of cash on hands. Now, if you're like me, the idea of your business being one bad month away from disaster is enough to make your stomach drop.

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slash secrets, you can grab The Re revolving price method book and over $150 worth of bonuses and get this all. It's at 70% off. And I promise you guys as a customer of this, you are going to love it. So if you're serious about growing your business with real stability, this is the model you need to add into your funnels. So go over to wealthyconsultant.com slash secrets, grab your 70% off deal, and let's start turning your clients into long-term revenue. Again, that's wealthyconsultant.com slash secrets. Do not miss out. Hey, this is Russell Brunson, and I want to jump in really quick to share with you a new assessment I found out that is insanely cool. You guys know I'm obsessed with personality profiles and assessments, but this one is different because not only does it help you understand yourself,

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Like this test, I had actually blocked out an hour to take it because I was so excited for the new assessment. And it only took me like 10 minutes or less to get it done. Yet, even though it takes only 10 minutes, you you can actually apply this immediately. Uh, I took it for myself. I had my team take it. And what's cool about it is from there, we figured out exactly what people's working geniuses are. And that's important because if you're building a team or

a company, you got to figure out, make sure that you have first off the right people, but make sure the right people are sitting in the right seats on the bus. And this is what this assessment will teach you how to do. Now, normally this assessment, you can go to workinggenius.com and there's two Gs in the middle, workinggenius.com. But I got you a 20% discount on the assessment, which is only $25. So don't stress, it's not an expensive test at all.

But you get a 20% discount off when you put in the keyword secrets at checkout. So go to workinggenius.com. Again, two Gs, workinggenius, two Gs in the middle, workinggenius.com. And then use promo code secrets, S-E-C-R-E-T-S at checkout, get 25% off. But then go take the test. Again, it takes you 10 minutes, but even in a 10 minute session, you will get something that is so insanely valuable to help you understand yourself, to make sure you're working in a spot that's going

to be the most joy, number one. But then number two, it's going to make sure that you are with your teams, getting them in the right seats as well. So, um, anyway, I love this assessment. Go check it out at working genius.com and enter the promo code secrets for 20% discount. Uh, take this test for yourself and for your team. And I promise you it'll change the working dynamics amongst everybody and help your company to grow. What was like the first, I don't know, did you have a video like pop? There's the first one like took off that, you know, they, you know, I'm talking about about like was there something that was like you're doing stuff and all of a sudden something hit and it's like oh my gosh like for me i had certain funnels right i was struggling in one hit where it's like oh my gosh that was the thing that changed the career

and changed the trajectory yeah was there a certain video or something that hit for you there actually was and i'm sort of still somewhat proud of myself that this was vaguely intentional. So in my third year of uni, this was like 2015, way before I started the YouTube channel, I got really into the science of effective learning and like how to study for exams in an effective or productive way. Although I didn't use the word productive. You gotta use that word now. I know, I've got to start using that word. And I decided to just hold a talk at like, I was part of the Islamic society.

And so there was a prayer room that would hold like 10 people. And I said, Hey, I'm going to do a talk for the students in the year below teaching you how to study for your exams effectively. Cause I was into this stuff. And I created a Facebook event and that Facebook event went viral around the university.

And it got like 28,000 impressions and like 3000 people clicked attending on this event in this tiny ass prayer room at Cambridge, which is the university I went to. So we had to then hire a bigger lecture theater and stuff. And a few hundred people showed up for this talk. And I just gave a talk about how to study for exams. And people were like, oh my God, like, this is amazing. No one's ever taught me this before. So then like three years later,

when I decided to start my YouTube channel, I had in the back of my mind, I want to make a banger video about how to study for exams effectively. But it cannot be video number one because I don't know how to make videos. I'm going to make a banger video about how to study for exams effectively, but it cannot be video number one because I don't know how to make videos. I'm going to make a hundred videos and then this is going to be video number 100 and hopefully in that time I'll get good at the craft of making videos. In the end, that video ended up being like video number 81. And around that same

time, I had landed a collab with this other bigger YouTuber and I was like, okay, the stars have aligned. I've got this collab with this bigger YouTuber. I've got this video in my back pocket where I've validated demand for this idea because the Facebook event went viral and people loved it. So let me pull out all the stops. So I didn't rock up to my medical school placements for like a week, just working on this one video,

thinking, okay, this is my chance to go viral. And that video went viral. And it's now got like 8 million views, something like that. And that was the thing where I was like, oh, okay now we've got trajectory here that was one video that took off the second video that took off was also a little bit intentional

in that this was around video number 100 I'd seen a video on YouTube titled something like how I take notes on my iPad Pro as an engineer and that video had two million views and that channel had like 100 000 subscribers i was like huh it's weird for a channel with 100 000 subscribers to have two million views so something about this topic is is interesting

and i thought i mean i've got an ipad pro what if i do a video called how i take notes on my ipad pro as a medical student let's see what happens and then boom that video went viral and now this is a strategy we teach in our youtuber academy viral viral replication the easiest way to go viral is to do your own take on something that has already gone viral so instead of engineer student i was like oh you know being a medical student is more cool no offense to any engineers so let me just do that video in my own way and that video went viral and so we've tried to i mean it's not a 100 success rate strategy obviously uh but our first two big hits were actually those intentional approach to viral videos.

That's really fascinating. So I want to walk through your process. So I want to get tactical for a minute and then we'll come back to some philosophy. And then I have loads of questions for you because I want to ask you questions about how do we scale from 5 to 10 million. Yeah, that part's easy. Funnels and ads. This organic thing is way more confusing for me. So obviously you've gone through this and you've been doing this channel for a long time but you've also

worked a lot of people who are starting channels so for people who are listening who are like okay i want to i want to do organic i want to like what are the first things they should be focusing on like to to actually start a youtube channel to get it kind of kicked off the ground to get things happening because even for me like my biggest frustration was like we talked about sort of like the ads reason i turn to add i get a million views right i post my first youtube video i get like eight views and it's just like oh you know and like how what what's the beginning phases and stages that someone should be thinking about as they're kind of jumping into it yeah that's a really good question i think it sort of depends on what game you want to play

where we kind of go into into two two. Are we trying to play the famous game, or are we trying to play the I want to make money game? So I guess with your audience, it's probably the make money game. They probably want to drive leads towards some sort of offer rather than trying to get famous, as it were. Now, the way that you get famous is by trying to make very broadly applicable viral videos that appeal to large amounts of people, so that you get followers and stuff like kind of like the Mr. Beast approach. It's a very different approach to YouTube than what I do, for example. What I would generally recommend, and it sort of comes down to basic

marketing stuff, which you talk about in your books as well, is figure out who's the target avatar, figure out what's the value proposition, figure out what are their pain points, and then figure out what's the free content I can out what are their pain points, and then figure out what's the free content I can make that targets those pain points, which then ideally directs people to my funnel. It brings it back to your solution. Yeah, it's just like, I think the YouTubers I know who have the most fun are the ones

who are not trying to make money from YouTube. They're the ones who are using YouTube as lead generation for their own products, their own offers, their own funnels. I know YouTubers with millions of subscribers who make you know 100 grand from a sponsored video but that video has to get 2 million views otherwise the sponsor is gonna reduce their rates and then they won't be able to pay their team and so there's all this pressure of like every video has to get at least a million views that is so hard to do it's so hard

to get everybody to get at least a million views. It becomes harder every year because every year there's more people on the platform. Things become more saturated and more competitive. I think it's so much nicer for people in our sort of space if you've got your offer and you're using YouTube to drive leads for that offer. Definitely. Let me think. You're not doing any paid strategies on your channel, right? I'm asking because when I first launched YouTube, we had our YouTube organic,

and then we were buying ads on the same channel, and it jacked up all of our videos. And so someone told us, don't run ads on the same channel you're running content on. So we had to pull it off and separate it because it was somehow messing up the algorithm where none of our organic stuff would work anymore. Yeah, so we don't do it. But I know a couple of people who do,

and they swear by it. So I know three YouTubers who have 2 million plus subscribers who all run ads to their own videos and they say it's been really really good i'm still scared to do it because i don't want to up our like crown jewel which is our youtube channel and i i gave a talk at google a few weeks ago and i spoke to our youtube channel manager who you know asked asked this question and what she said is she said that right now, the organic algorithm and the paid algorithm are completely separate. So in theory, if you run ads to a YouTube channel, it shouldn't screw up organic, but I'm still so scared to do it

because I don't want to get burned by my channel suddenly dying and be like, oh my goodness, I've... I killed the goose that laid the gold eggs. Yeah, that's the one. Actually, on that note, we literally call the youtube channel our goose and so we have like a goose system which is our sort of like our process for creating youtube videos and um one of the big things that my team optimizes for is uh you know we we sort of think of me and the youtube channel as sort of the goose we're like we collectively me and the youtube channel of the goose that lays the golden eggs and we want to

make sure the goose is happy and so it's about getting that balance between making sure that i'm making videos that i feel proud of and that's stuff i want to make content about not just the stuff that will work or will go viral and i think i think there's always this interesting balance between the soul of the content and the statistics of the content if every video become is like clickbait title like listicle trying to drive growth and engagement it starts to lose a little bit of personality and i think personality and the a lot of the feel-good factor of a youtube channel comes from the under-optimized stuff so yesterday while walking around the local park in boise, I decided to film a video using my little handheld DJI pocket camera. And it ended up being a half an hour video about, you know, my advice to someone who's dealing with

perfectionism. Now that's a pretty under-optimized video, but we're going to put it out on the channel anyway, because we know that it adds a dose of soul. And plus I felt good filming the video. So we're always kind of doing this balancing act between the enjoyment of the process and kind of doing the thing that we think will work and sometimes a video that i would have had no idea would do well ends up doing really well and people really connect to it um so i think yeah it's always this interesting balancing act between like the stats and the soul yeah i've had that issue with ours because um in the past we've had some uh channel managers for us who've been stuff and they're like same thing they're finding videos that are going viral

sending me and and the ones they always send me or the ones they were sending me were always like the scammy ones like I made a million dollars in 25 seconds I'm like they make one like this it'll go viral I'm like I don't want to make that video a video sounds like like you know I mean that was the hardest thing and then I create stuff i wanted to and like and it was tough because like they don't give as many views but it's like this is what i actually want to talk about this is what's important to me and so i definitely struggle with that like trying to know like how do you yeah like the ratio even or yeah no it really is a balancing act i think i think also in our sort of space um if there's there's optimizing for views and then there's optimizing for the right sort of views so homozy found this with this with their content recently when you

know they did very broad clickbaity stuff they would get more views but those weren't business owners they wanted to attract business owners and i stopped watching homozy's content a few months ago because it was just like it's not for me it's showing all his weight weightlifting stuff all of that random stuff where it's like two ago, they switched to pure business stuff. And now I'm a Hormozy fan again and I'm watching everything. I'm listening to it at double speed and sending it to my team.

And they've realized that by under-optimizing their view count, they're actually getting the right sort of views. And so I think if you're optimizing for just views, you end up doing how to make your first 10K a month as a teenager type content, which is going to get millions of views

just because of it. But if you're trying to target people who are like seven figure business owners trying to go to eight or nine, there's way less of them, but they're also the sorts of people that would go to your inner circle, for example. So it's, it's a balancing act. Now, do you, when you, after you post a video, do you do any kind of promotional things or do you just post it and let the algorithm do the work? What's the, what's that part of it look like for you? Yeah, we pretty much just let the algorithm do the work or what's the what's that part of it look like for you yeah we pretty much just let the algorithm do the work uh we have tried all sorts of things uh we have never seen any transformation of like any sort of movement from viewers from any social platform to youtube we've all roads have just led to just focus on making a really good video

and let the algorithm take take care of it because the algorithm is really good. It is very good at finding the right person. It's so frustrating. I want to send emails and text messages. So proud of the video. I want everyone to see it. But the times we've tried stuff, it hasn't worked. I was hoping there was some secret you got. There was this YouTuber's conference I went to in Valencia a couple of years ago.

And on the plane, I was sitting next to a guy who had like 20 million subscribers who was a gaming youtuber who was doing daily content for like 10 years and was like a decamillionaire from these gaming videos and i was just sort of like mining him for advice it's like you know how often do you sit next to a guy with 20 million subscribers and he said that the way he thinks about the content is I'm not making a video for my subscribers right now. I'm making a video for the person three years from now who has no idea who I am and who will see this on their homepage. And so that's his mindset when creating the content. And I thought that was really nice because when we think about, well, when I think about, oh, how do I make a video for my audience right now? I'm actually just kind of blink. I then sort of think, well, I can't repeat myself.

I can't, well, I made a video about that like in 2019. And so maybe my fans, my audience will know that I made that video until like on average, an average viewer on my channel watches like three videos. I've made 900 videos. And so by switching that mindset from views right now to I'm optimizing for the three-year long tail view count of this video in the hope that the right sorts of people find it and get value from it and maybe go into one

of my funnels that to me takes a lot of the pressure off the how many views did it get in the last seven days that's really interesting um yeah i was gonna ask about like how you get content ideas and stuff but that's a big thing because i was i'm very similar like i've said this story three times. I never want to talk about it again, but you could bring it back. Um, yeah,

I mean, I, I think we all, we all can repeat ourselves way more than we already, the way more than we do. And especially like, I, so I would ask you who,

who are the sorts of people you're trying to attract for your YouTube channel? Um, for me, it's, it's, um, it's people who are, are in business.

Like, I don't, I don't want the beginner beginners. There's too much. They bought someone else's course. They did the first thing. They got something to sell. And the next phase is like, well, I like it. Where it's kind of like you. You come in.

It's like, I've got something to make some money. Cool. We can light it on fire. Let's build a funnel, drive some traffic. So those are ideal people. They have a business, but not, I'd say they're probably six figures and below. That window is where I want to find people

because then we can take them. It's easier to take someone from good to great than from nothing to good. You know what I mean? So you want someone who's doing at least 10K a month in revenue? Or 5K a month or something like that? Anywhere that window's great, yeah.

Nice, yeah. at least 10k a month in revenue or like 5k a month or something like that anywhere that windows great yeah so yeah I think then when it comes to ideas trying to optimize for views will take you towards a beginner camp which is not where you want to be make a video like this

so I've been sort of on and off tracking your YouTube channel recently because it's like, oh, Russell Brunson's taking YouTube seriously. This is interesting to see what happens. And you've done a few videos that are like seven ways

to make your first 10K online type stuff. And I'm not going to click on them. I'm like, whatevs. But I can't remember, I think it was about a year ago, there was some more philosophical stuff that I felt was really targeted at me as a business owner.

And that made me have so much goodwill towards you. I was like, Oh man, this Russell guy is so cool. Of course I read his book. I thought the book was sick, but now seeing you in video helped me build that parasocial relationship with you where now I feel a bit starstruck like coming here.

I've been like, Oh shit, hang out with Russell Brunson. Um, and I, and that video almost certainly has fewer views than your beginnery aimed ones. So I think the thing I would encourage you for whatever, for whatever it's worth is keep your target audience in mind

and do stuff for them and don't think so hard about the views yeah okay that gives me really excited i think also the the nice thing is the algorithm is so good like when if if you only made content aimed at people already doing 10k a month and trying to get them to seven figures or 6 or 7 or 8 figures or whatever the thing might be, the algorithm would then find other people who are like them. But if you then do videos aimed at complete beginners, the algorithm

is going to be kind of a bit confused. And now the channel is going to lose some of its traction. And it's sort of like in the short term you have to be totally okay with just sticking to your lane in terms of your target audience and just making stuff that's really applicable to them and what i've seen with a bunch of my youtuber

friends is like the video gets no views no no views no views a year later suddenly starts to take off because now the algorithm has enough data to realize oh this is the sort of person who this sort of video is appealing to and then the channel really starts to grow but it's really playing the long game yeah interesting so you say you do 900 videos for your channel? Something like that, yeah. Of which like 700 are probably long form and 200 are probably shorts. So what's your publishing schedule?

How often do you post? Yeah, so we film once a week and we publish like twice a week. So on each filming day, I aim to film at least two videos. But last week I actually filmed five because I realized I could just lower the bar and talk about stuff without feeling

as if I had to prepare so hard for it so now I'm excited to aim to film five videos each filming session so to do that are you doing the rest of the week are you doing prep work for it or are you just kind of like how much what's it look like give this a week in your life from the YouTube business I want to see how

because I'm still trying to figure out how to optimize it for me it's very much like hit and go where I'll do a bunch of videos and like for four weeks i'm doing anything then the team's freaking out like they're out of videos i'm like ah they gotta quick be creative you know and like i haven't figured out the the cadence yet to make it consistent nice yeah so we've run the whole gamut on trying to trying to find a process that works for this whole thing with like too many team members too few team members just me like the whole shebang the thing we've landed on is one filming day every week or it's just all day so my producer tintin will rock up at 9 a.m with a coffee uh for me and then we'll chat a little bit and we'll and he'll tell me okay ali the first video we're

filming today is you know the title is my honest advice for someone who wants to grow on youtube that's the video and then i'll think okay cool what do i want to do this video about and then i'll come up with the three or four bullet points and we'll film that video so you're thinking it's you're not pre it's all happening in the filming day yeah so we do the concept we we actually have like a whole five level process for this i it's it's kind of niche but sure uh so level a level one video is one where i just get given the title by my team because i don't like thinking about titles because it's like that's the clickbaity side when i'm like okay i just get given the title by my team because I don't like thinking about titles because it's like, that's the click-baity side where I'm like, okay, I just get given the title

and I'm just going to hit record and just speak. So actually my highest performing video of this year was one of those. It was completely randomly. A level two video is one where I get given a title and then I think about it for 10 minutes and write down three to five bullet points. My whole shtick these days is

I only need to say three things in the video. If I say more than three things, the video gets really long, it becomes overwhelming, people can't retain it. So I'm only need to say three things in the video if i say more than three things the video gets really long it becomes overwhelming people people can't can't retain it i'm just going to say three to five things um a level three video is where we've got a title and we're like okay you know five steps to become becoming more disciplined i'm like okay well i can think of five things but actually for thing number three and four oh there was that study that i came across a few years ago can we go and find that study that like backs up this point over there? And can we find that study that backs up that point? And then one of our researchers will, well, our one researcher on the team will go through and

find that study and we'll like say, study from 2017. Here's the link, study from Harvard. Here's what it found. Here's the graph. So I'll have that in front of me when I'm filming the video to then be able to say, oh, this study found blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A level four video is a video usually when I do a podcast. So what I would love to do with this conversation is we'll chop out sound bites of you saying stuff. And then the team will construct like a video based on those sound bites. So a cool example of this is I interviewed a professor of circadian biology at Oxford a few years ago, Professor Russell Foster. He's written a book about circadian biology at Oxford a few years ago, Professor Russell Foster. He's written a book about circadian science.

That was a three-hour long interview. No one cares. It got like 20,000 views. But then we decided to take soundbites from that because he said some really good stuff and turned it into a main channel YouTube video where the title was Why You're Always Tired, Seven Myths Ruining Your Sleep.

And that video has got like 7 million views. And it was just a 15-minute long video with soundbites interspersed with me just explaining stuff throughout that was really cool that's a level four video and a level five video is one that's fully scripted word for word where i read it off a teleprompter i hate filming level five videos because i hate talking to a teleprompter but most of my videos are like level two where i'll get i'll get given a title we'll think about it some sometimes my producer will give me a title it's a bit too clickbaity and i'll be like oh no you know let's soften the title a little bit.

I don't like it. It doesn't feel right. Come up with three bullet points, and I'll just speak from the heart and say the thing. That's amazing. You said, you talked about the podcast got 20,000 views, and you said the other one you posted on the main channel. Do you have different channels in? Yeah, so we had a different channel for the podcast and for the main. This was because I started

my podcast three years ago. Now YouTube has its own podcasting feature. So if I were to start a podcast today, I would put them on the same channel. Assuming it's the same audience. Same audience, same channel. That's so cool. And then average length for most of your videos then?

Yeah, so our videos are kind of annoyingly long, like 25 minutes, 30 minutes, 35 minutes. One thing that I've been working on with my CEO coach is to reduce that time. So an experiment we're doing for the month of June is, what does it look like to do 15 minute long videos and only film for like half an hour

rather than filming for like 90 minutes, which is just a way heavier lift. And I think- So if you film 90 minutes to get a 30 minute thing? Yeah, or 90 minutes to get an hour long thing or 90 minutes to get a 45 minute thing.

A lot of our videos take 90 minutes to film, but they really don't need to. And I filmed two, in the five that I filmed last week, two of them took under half an hour. And actually, one method that we found is quite interesting, which you might want to experiment with, is where my producer sits behind the camera, and is just asking me questions.

And it's like I'm being on a podcast. I don't know if you find this, but I find that when I'm on a podcast, I say good shit. Or if I'm on stage'm on stage i say stuff i'm like where did that come from that was interesting your script is like yeah when i'm scripted when i'm speaking to a camera it takes the energy out of it so we're trying to mimic the podcast format where he tinted would ask me okay ali why is discipline really important i would say okay so discipline is really important because blah blah and i would come out with some good stuff and be like okay what is your best tip for someone who's really struggling with discipline okay so if you're

really struggling with discipline my best tip is going to be to whatever and so he hits sort of like an interview and then obviously we cut out the questions you restate the questions you cut it out exactly and then it comes across it comes out as a really nice video it's more targeted because he's asking me the questions and keeping my answers in mind he's thinking like the audience he's like okay what if someone was watching this and the 25 and the super overwhelmed and they have a day job, how would they apply this, this thing that you've just said? And I'm like, oh, interesting. I wouldn't have thought of that. How do you, had he not asked the question? And so we're doing a bunch of videos in this Q and a format where it just feels as if I'm just speaking directly to

the camera. Yeah. That's really cool. Um, interesting. Do you do, um, do you do reels as well? Are you using those at all on YouTube or not? Yeah, so we do YouTube shorts and also publish them on Instagram. All the reels are different. Yeah. And then we also copy and paste them on TikTok. We've got a few different formats. One of them is where my team will give me just the hook, i.e. the first line. So for example, a team member will say to me, okay, I'll leave this next video. The first line is, here are three books that will change how you think about money. I think about it, I'm like, here are three books

that will change how you think about money. Firstly, Dotcom Secrets by Russell Brunson, amazing guy. Secondly, The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, amazing book. Thirdly, The 4-Hour Work with Tim Ferriss, blah, blah, blah. Check them out. That's a short. And we'll do 40 of those in like two hours. And then, boom, that's content for the next three months. Okay. Huh. That's awesome. Dude. Uh, this is like for me personally, cause I'm like in the middle of trying to figure this out.

All those things were so helpful. So thank you for that. Hopefully I can help you with your ads next. Um, no, but,, but that's really, really cool. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. So now I can step back from tactical and just strategic or more philosophy.

Like, what is your what's your long term goal? Like, what is your vision? Like, what are you trying to? I think everyone gets started. Like, I'm going to create these things. But eventually you asked me the question backstage. Like, you've got enough money now. What's like, why are you still doing this? I'm curious for you,

like you've got viewers, you got things happening. Like what's the longterm, the plan for you more so? Yeah. I think about this a lot and I'd, I'd, I'd, I'd love to get your take on this, which is kind of why I asked you that question. Cause I'm always intrigued by people who are like further ahead of me on the journey that I'm on. It's like, what's, what's driving them? Because one thing that I realized back when I was in med school is that when I looked at doctors who were 10 years ahead of me in their careers, they were all miserable. And I was like, okay, I don't want to end up like that. But when I look at entrepreneurs who have good work life balance and stuff who are 10 years

ahead of me in their careers, they seem to be chilling and having a good time. So I'm like, oh, okay, that's interesting. Like, what can I learn from the people who are rich and seemingly happy, which you seem to fall into that camp, rather than the people who are rich and really miserable. So I think about it a lot. For me, it's a question I often ask myself is, if I had 100 million in the bank, like, how would I how would I spend my time? And what I land on is I'd still make YouTube videos, because it's fun. I still write books every few years, because it's fun. I probably wouldn't do online courses. But I would do stuff in real life. I really like events. I like the idea of doing like seminars and teaching people how to be more productive and plan their goals and stuff. So I do YouTube videos. I would do books. I would do events. And that to me is

sort of like my infinite game. And now when I wake up in the morning, I sort of remind myself that I actually do have enough money. I don't need to make more. I'm choosing to show up to work to build cool products and make cool videos because it's the thing that I would do even if I wasn't being paid for it. And so it's not really a,

in that sense, it's more of a process goal, I guess. It's like, I just want to be able to do more of this stuff. Then alongside this, like the game of entrepreneurship goal. We did 5 million revenue last year. Why not? Let's go for 10. Because it'll just be kind of fun. But I feel like I'm quite non-attached to that goal. And so when I come to places like this, where I meet

someone like you, I'm like, okay, Russell, how do we get from 5 to 10? But that's just because it's like the game. You know, I'm playing Horizon Forbidden West on the PS5. i play on very hard difficulty because it's like it's a good level of difficulty once i've done that i might switch to ultra hard so just sort of to me it feels like playing the game of entrepreneurship each time yeah yeah i'm curious what's it what's it like for you um so for me i couldn't explain it for a long time and then i remember my first time i had a conversation with tony robbins we were talking about earlier um he he told me like because he's got a big business he's got tons of big businesses but he told me he's like he's like I didn't he's like I don't consider myself an entrepreneur he's like I'm an artist and this

is my art but for me to do my art at the scale I want to do he's like I had to learn business entrepreneurship so I can get my art out there and I honestly it's it's weird for me because a lot of people think I'm um like very entrepreneurial and i am but like for me like entrepreneurship is my art so like you know the reason i wrote my write my books is because like i wasn't just like i'm gonna make a lead magnet to sell this i can sell click funnels it was like no i spent 20 years obsessed with funnels looking at a diagram and thinking about like google like doodling things that like just became obsessed and then like the book was like was like the art where it's like this this chapter of my life now it's art that i can

give to somebody right expert secrets same way i took all the stuff i learned about selling and storytelling and stuff like that and put it in the thing traffic secrets like all my things it's always it's art for me and so for me just like i'm painting my next picture like what's the next thing of art i'm doing right click phones has been art but it's been you know i've been a decade doing this like right now you saw a little a little glimpse but you know i bought 18 000 uh books and manuscripts in the last two years old first editions um and for me it's like like this is my next art project i'm working on and i don't know exactly what's gonna look like yet but there's something there and i'm gathering stuff and repurposing and change

and like there's something there and i'm trying to create the next art piece and so that gets me excited like there's this thing i'm painting i don't even know it looks like yet like i'm i've got some of it done but a lot of it's still blurry but i'm excited to see where it's going to go and so i mean that's what gets me excited and then the business around it's like just the way that i support you know i can monetize it i can you know it helps me to buy really old expensive books and manuscripts you know stuff like that um it's like it's like the necessary thing to make it. And then eventually I want to like, when I discover what this art is looking like, I'm excited to share it and to talk about new events and seminar, you know, like the next phase. And so for me, it's just, it's a big art project. Oh, that's really fun. That's a really nice, wholesome way of looking at it. I've, I've,

I've not thought of it in that framing before, but that, that also really resonates with me. I feel like for me, and I guess maybe similar to you, like my art is teaching. Whenever I, I, you know, I sometimes think of the question, what would I want written on my tombstone? And I always land on some combination of good father, good husband, and inspirational teacher. And it was actually doing that exercise back in 2019 that made me realize, oh, great doctor or like amazing surgeon just wasn't on that list. Huh, that's interesting. I care more about being a teacher than I do about being a doctor and that was like the beginning of the end of my of my medical career and i'm out yeah it took me about two years to come to terms with that identity shift and then i was i was really out i really like that so it's for you it's like it's an art

project the business is like a fun thing you've got the team it's in person yeah you could probably be more efficient if you had remote employees but it's just way more fun yeah in this sort of format i get energy from people and all that kind of stuff yeah for sure that's super cool anyway interesting actually i don't know jake's still here jake's one of our designers but he worked for like five years designing uh tombstones for people so oh i've literally told him i was like one of your projects is you were going to design my so i keep thinking about like what's gonna be on my tombstone what's gonna look like like because for me it's like i've areas my life like father, husband, wrestler.

So I think about that way too much. It's like, how am I going to have Jake design my tombstone someday? So anyway, you can have him design yours too if you want. For you, how much do you care about kind of legacy beyond your life versus just like focusing on doing cool stuff and being a good dad and good husband while you're alive? Yeah, so for me, it's really big for a couple reasons. I'm big into personality profiles and stuff. And if you do the, when you do this profile,

they have ones called values or motivators. And my number one motivator is ROI, which I always thought meant return investment money, but it's like ROI on any situation. It's why I struggle in school, sitting in school. I can't understand the return on this investment, right. Or things like that. And so for me, ROI is a big thing.

And so, um, honestly, like the reason why I'm buying all these old books and manuscripts, like Napoleon Hill stuff and everything like that is because I'm trying to figure out how to take their legacy because most authors die. And then within the, within the generation, they're forgotten forever, right? There's very few that, that, that live beyond it. And the ones who do usually through the written, they're forgotten forever, right? There's very few that live beyond it. And the ones who do usually through the written words, through books. And then there's something in place. Like I'm trying to build something where I can bring Napoleon Hill, but also these other authors no one's ever heard of or forgotten.

And like bring them back to the foreground. And I'm trying to extend their legacy. I bought Dan Kennedy, my mentor's company, so I can extend their legacy i bought dan kennedy my mentor's company so i could extend his legacy and the selfish reason i'm doing is because i want to figure out like whatever i have to build to be able to do that i'll be able to use that same platform to extend my legacy and then my big question like what's the roi of my life like why was i here if i if i am here and i experience i do all the stuff and i die and it disappears like what was the point of any of it so i'm 100 probably overly obsessed with that like the long-termterm ROI of my own life and work and the art that I'm creating. So anyway, kind of weird, but.

When did that shit, like, were you always like that? Or did that happen at some point in your career? No, I don't think I was always like that. I think the first time I recognized it, I mean, you've been watching me most of the 2000, you know, whenever. So like, we were launching, one time I was launching a new product every single week.

I relaunched a product, because like we'd launch a product, make some money money then create no, you know, so I was like launching stuff and then do other things. Then it would slow down. Then we got, and eventually launched click funnels and click funnels was, was interesting for me because it was the first business that really blew up. That was just like, you know, like nine plus figures a year within like three years. It was just like, Holy cow, this is crazy. You know? Um, and then inside there, I still want to launch, I still create an art and launches. I created a course and it was crazy because you see like the Stripe account, right? And when you're at nine figures,

you know, every single day, it's pretty awesome. And then I do this big, huge product launch coordinating everyone to do saying we launch it and you see a little blip and then it would keep going. And I was just like, I did all that work and I barely got a blip for two days and this, and then nothing shifted. And it was like, I got depressed. I'm like, my art doesn't actually matter now. And then over five or six years doing events,

doing stuff, the only thing that people ever like came back to me was always my book. I do. I read.com series. Oh, I read expert. See, I read.

And like the, I realized that the written word was the only thing that lasted beyond the blip. The moment, right. Is the thing that, and so for me, that's when I started to become obsessed with books and writing and like other people's books and stuff.

Cause I was like, this is the vehicle that lasts beyond the life of the person is the written word. Oh, interesting. Yeah, for me, I landed on a similar conclusion, but not on the legacy front. I was trying to think long-term, like what do I want for my career, et cetera.

And I remembered the impact that the four-hour work week had on me when I was like 17 and just completely changed the trajectory of my life and then also a little book by austin cleon called show your work and i was like that also changed my life um and i can't remember any like videos or podcasts that i've watched that have changed my life but i can remember books and so i thought you know when the publisher approached me saying do you want to write a book i was like like, Hmm, if I can write a book and books over time, that those really have the potential to change the trajectory of someone's life. So in the same way that Tim Ferriss did for me with Before I Work Week, could I possibly do that

for someone else? And so that to me is a good reason to do the book thing. Because yeah, I just think people sit with the ideas more and i haven't yet heard your book changed my life so but it's a long-term project over the next few decades that i'm excited to excited to explore you working on the next one right now i'm exploring some ideas i have like a ulysses file with like 10 different book ideas and i'm thinking 11th one this morning and at some point there'll be a critical mass of one of them where i'll be like okay let's focus on this one yeah books are tough though as you i'm sure you know like for me it was of all things i've done it's the hardest um every time i write a book i'm like i'll never

do this again and then like a year later after the first one's been you know selling books you see the impact i'm okay i'm do it again it's actually hanging with brendan bouchard brendan told me he's like i do a book every other year for the rest of my life and finally i was like okay i'm gonna do the same thing so of course it's been four years since my last book that's a because i'm struggling with my next book it's been a lot harder to write but anyway you mentioned in a video recently that you're working on the next one like yeah can you share more details about it publicly or is that yeah um it's it's my first personal development book which is what got me down this whole path of buying 18 000 books like um because personal development meant the world to me but i don't want to write something that i don't want i don't want to write something else is written you know but i also understand it

at a different level because like you know most you know how most experts are nowadays like they saw something on tiktok and they're regurgitating as their own the next week right like i want to go back to the sources and figure out stuff so that's that's the book but man it's turned into a bigger project and also it's like when you start writing a book about success and personal development like then all the demons start coming up like who are you to write this like what's like do you know about these things in your life like if people find out this like you know it's like yeah i've been successful here but not here here i struggle here you know anyway so it's been a an emotional like hard journey for me to create um i've literally signed the contract to publish it four years ago and they messaged me

yesterday again like is it may they asked me if the management's gonna be submitted this month like i'm still in chapter one like i don't yeah so i'm just in this big deep research phase it's been super rewarding for me though to go and and read these things and see, again, what Napoleon Hill was writing 100 years ago. What was Orson Swett Marden writing at the beginning of the century? All that kind of stuff is really fascinating. It's fun because back then, people had these ideas that they were wrestling with. There was no scientific proof of it.

Nowadays, we have these same ideas. A lot of them have been scientifically proven or some had been disproven but it's just kind of fun because it's like trying to take like this old stuff but like match it with what's actually what we know is real and then create something new and unique out of it so that's why it's taking me so so much time it's it's it's interesting to hear that you're feeling imposter syndrome about talking about success and i'm like well if like why would you feel a positive about success but yeah it's interesting how it's the same thing just at different levels oh yeah every i think everyone's got things that they're their superpowers and the things they struggle with and so that's why it's fascinating because it's cool because i'm also trying to like okay these

principles that i know that work here they work in my athletic career work my business career the things i'm struggling with like can i apply them here and so it's like almost like a science experiment myself like is this actually real you know and anyway it's just it's been fun so what about your next one though do you know of the 11 ideas you know which one you're leaning towards or not yet not yet one thing it's a part of it is again sort of balancing sort of what would make sense versus what would feel good you know I'm the productivity guy it makes sense for the next book to sort of

further cement my position as the productivity guy and so I still like productivity as a topic I also think it's a cool lens with which to view the world like what does a productive approach to relationships look like you know me and my fiance for example for the last three years we've been with which to view the world. What does a productive approach to relationships look like? Me and my fiance, for example, for the last three years,

we've got a Notion database with templates and stuff, check-ins that we do every month and stuff. And that's super, super helpful. So it's little things like that. I love the idea of writing, at some point in my life, a book about how to systemize your relationships, but in a non-weird way, in a way that actually improves them. That's actually a really good title,

edit non-weird way. Yeah, in a non-weird way. So there's something interesting about that, but it probably shouldn't be the next one because I also don't have kids yet. So it's like, it's not the right book for this time right now. I also like the idea, a title I've been playing around with

is How to Not Waste Your Life, which I think is kind of interesting. Or I've been looking back through like the Jim Rohn and the Earl Nightingale stuff around like goal setting to see like okay what's what would what would the principles of how to not waste waste your life look like what does a wasted life feel like like what do people regret when they're dead and can we turn that into a bit of a book it's just a few ideas that i'm i'm playing around with so fun that's a really interesting question what's a wasted life look like i'm curious for you so so um you mentioned people ask you about work-life balance and things like how do you like what are

your principles for balancing the five kids the family life the business and everything yeah um so for me it's there's a couple things number one is like i learned some wrestling like i wanted to be a really good wrestler like i wasn't able to do a lot of things that people other people did like my friends were out partying they were having fun you know they were going on dates their girlfriends they were doing all these things i was not able to do if i wanted to be if i wanted to compete the level i want to compete right it's like that's one big thing that people always ask me like what do you do for fun and the stuff of that it's just like you know like i have core like four or five things i do but that's it like i don't have the bandwidth to do a lot of other stuff right and so then when

i know know these are things are important to me It's very much like things are blocked out and I'm not the best at this, but like when I try to focus on his presence, like when I'm doing something, I'm doing it a hundred percent. Right. So I know like this morning I got up early, um, cause I'm trying to write, uh, this stupid book that's taking forever. But I was like, I got to block that time out. So like, you know, five 30 alarm goes off, I'm getting up and I got an hour just to sit there and think and try to like, try to progress this forward. But then my kids start waking up, and it's like, okay, now I'm turning this off, and I'm turning into dad. I'm literally leaving the room, shutting the door, and now I'm dad.

I'm trying to be present there. And I'm with them for the next, depending if it's summer right now, but during school, it's like getting them ready, taking them to school, driving them around, being dad. And then from there I drive and then I'm taking that hat off and I'm trying to, so I'm trying to like, when I'm doing something, I'm very,

very present. And I think I watch most people, I don't know if you've ever done time studies like with your time, but you take a traditional like employee and you have them do a time study where it's like, what's happening throughout the day.

It's like people only working on an eight hour day and they're making maybe like 90 minutes of actual work where I feel like, if you look at my schedule, like an eight hour day, maybe like 90 minutes of actual work where I feel like if you look at my schedule, like an eight hour day, I get eight hours of stuff done. Like I'm just very,

cause I'm so trying to be like, here's the things being present, try to get stuff done. But then when it's over, then I'm done. I go home and I'm dad again. And then when that's the kids go to bed, then I'm,

then I'm husband. And then, you know, so I try to like the things that are most important to me, block those out. And then their sacred time when I'm, when I'm in those, right.

That's cool. So that's kind of how I, I try to do it to do it and but it's tough because it it doesn't leave room for other stuff you know which is hard sometimes yeah i do a lot of those things on weekends and things like that but it's just like um anyway how did your um how did your approach to work change when you had kids i had kids young so um yeah i think i was i i got married at i was 22 when i got married i was just starting this whole business and then we got pregnant with twins yeah right after that okay fine so i had two kids out the gate while i was still in fact i remember like at the hospital writing copy on my laptop while my wife was sleeping and i had

the twins uh you know and we'd like wrap them up in these little blankets and they put a a bottle and prop a pillow to keep the bottle in their mouth while I was writing coffee on these things. I tried to learn this whole business and stuff like that. So I've always had that as part of it. I never had a chance to do it on my own. Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about recently because I think I also want to have kids in the next couple of years and so you know some entrepreneur friends who are parents i've spoken to said said that when they had kids it gave them even more of a desire to grow the business because now they're like doing it for someone theoretically but others said it made them realize that actually we've got enough money and it's more important to be a present dad than it is to be a sort of 100 million dollar ceo or whatever the thing might be yeah your kids at least

my kids don't care about any of this stuff at all you know i mean i think it's funny it's like oh dad got like we'll meet some of the airport a gas station and they're like you know oh it's rustle you know it's like dad got spotted but other than that like yeah they just want you to spend time with them you know what i mean they want you to be at wrestling practice or showing up for the soccer game or whatever and like that's the the most important thing so it's weird because like we put so much emphasis, especially here in America. I don't know if it's the same thing where you're like so much emphasis on like income and status and money versus like the kids are just like they just want time. You know, it's interesting. So, well, dude, this was a fun interview for me.

I got some super useful stuff for my YouTube channel. So hopefully you guys will see that the end result of all the stuff I'm learning um and filming and um you're the way you structure things seems way less stressful i'm doing right now like i'm for a whole week stressing about scripts and headlines and this and that and everything then we go film and it's like i've got such a short period of time to film i'm trying to nail the very in fact you spend 90 minutes or whatever to do a 30 minute video like for me it's like i get one take so i'm like stressing out and it's like anyway yeah i'm excited to show yeah things around. Yeah, interesting.

I think you can definitely do it in a less stressful way. Yeah. Are you doing section by section or you just, if you mess up, you just keep, you know what I mean?

You just seem so good and flawless. It's like, gosh, he's so good every time. He's just got all the points and the perfect. Oh God,

no, like, there's so much, so much on the cutting room floor. Yeah, I mean, I'll retake things or whatever. I find that the less in my head I am, the more fluent it is. Because if, like on this podcast, neither of us have had to retake anything.

If we're on stage, we're not like, oh, whoops, let me redo that line. But for some reason when we're on camera, we're like, we feel the me uh redo that line but for some reason when we're on camera we're like we feel the need to redo that line yeah i could do better yeah and so i yeah the more i can it's it's kind of weird i i actually have these like five like affirmations that i read to myself i can i can check them out whenever i film a video this is um this is what I tell myself. These are the five things I tell myself, which helps me get out of my head. Okay, here we go. Number one, I don't care about the performance of this video.

My only goal in making it is to share a message that I think is worth sharing for whoever wants to hear it. Number two, I intend to integrate my mind, heart, and soul to share this message in a way that feels authentic and natural. Number three, I'm not trying to force anything here. I'm merely speaking from the heart with the mind to inform structure and content and the soul to remain connected to the purpose behind the video. Number four, I'm going to enjoy myself and treat this process with lightness and ease. When I'm on my deathbed, I'd give anything to be back here in the present moment, doing what I love, sharing myself with the world in a way that's enjoyable and energizing. I'm going to keep that in mind, and not treat this process with too much seriousness,

heaviness, or importance. Next, I'm speaking to an individual who really cares what I have to say, and who really wants to learn from me to level up their own life. I am in service to that person, not to my own ego, not to the retention stats not to the algorithm i'm purely in service to the person who has clicked on this video and whose life could be genuinely changed by what i'm about to say these are the things that i literally read out to myself before filming every video and i've shared this list with a bunch of youtuber friends who have all found it helpful it's like oh okay like in in that mindset it becomes it feels more natural to talk about stuff rather than thinking it has to be right

yeah it's so fascinating i think in all areas of life when you're chasing something it's hard to get it but when like if you're trying to chase views and followers and subscribers it's hard to get it but when you don't focus on it the same thing i tell my entrepreneurs and businesses like if you're trying to figure out how to make more money those people always struggle it's the ones who are trying to figure out how to serve their audience that that becomes obsession those are the ones who businesses blow up yeah you get what you want by not focusing on the thing you instead of focusing on the opposite side yeah there's a so good for me to hear that right now there's a there's a really cool guy called joe hudson i don't know if you've come across him he's an executive coach to

some of silicon valley's like top ceos like fortune 10 companies kind of thing. And I happened to spend some time with him at a retreat a couple of months ago. And he said something that really, really stuck with me. He said that one of the things he always says when he's coaching CEOs is, enjoyment is efficiency. Instead of trying to do better at whatever you're trying to do,

just focus on trying to enjoy yourself. Because when you're enjoying yourself, the quality will just be better than if you were trying to be better. was like damn there's so there's so much truth to that it's like in the when i in when i'm enjoying myself making youtube video it is actually a better video than when i'm trying to make a better video when i was enjoying myself writing the book my writing is actually better than when i'm trying to write a better book so even like just optimizing for enjoyment in the process i just keep on

learning that lesson in so many different areas and it still hasn't quite sunk in where i'm like yeah we just got to optimize for enjoyment of the process and the outcome will just take care of itself yeah dude so good i think i should pay you for this consult so thank you anyway well dude i appreciate you i first of all pumped you're in boise appreciate you taking the time to come hang out with me in my office and just share the stuff with me specifically but also for our audience and you're going to see

my YouTube game double up triple up it's going to be awesome thank you very much for having me and I'd love to ask you some questions about

figuring out our value ladders and funnels as well so that would be cool we'll wrap this one up and we'll do another one and then you can go to his channel and check out the opposite one

if you want to see the other stuff so thanks man appreciate you thank you