The Russell Brunson Show - 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

Air Transat presents two friends traveling in Europe for the first time and feeling some pretty big emotions. This coffee is so good. How do they make it so rich and tasty? Those paintings we saw today weren't prints. They were the actual paintings. I have never seen tomatoes like this. How are they so red? With flight deals starting at just $589, it's time for you to see what Europe has to offer. Don't worry, you can handle it. Visit airtransat.com for details. Conditions apply. Air Transat. Travel moves us. Yeah, you know, I guess I am productive. I was a medical student building a YouTube channel, 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. 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 Ali Abdaal. And you're in Boise, Idaho, first off. Why in the world are you in Boise? Yeah, Boise, Idaho is kind of a random place. I'm here to speak at the ConvertKit Craft and Commerce conference thing. And then 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 it so far is it it's so nice the weather's been amazing i've been because of the london to hear 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 kind of connected that way through you. And then I think last year, or maybe two years ago, I messaged you

about potentially speaking at one of our events. And you go back and you're like, oh my gosh, I read your book, which I was like, oh my, 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, then we'll talk about it. So here you 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? And 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 he's been making shit up as we've been 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. Um, 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 2000 and like seven, seven, eight time. I've been 27. You were 13. Yeah. And, um, I remember I signed up to your email list. I sent him to Neil Patel's email list and there were a few, there were a couple of other people. Trade doubler was a thing at the time.

There was like a ClickBank. And there was 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, 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 like over the next like 17 years, occasionally. And I would just associate it with those emails that I got when I was 13 years old and think, ah, 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. I feel like that guy whose email list I've been on since the age of 13.

Like, what the f***? 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 dot-com 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 dot-com secrets copywriting secrets and 100 million dollars so thank you for writing those books well thank you for uh for reading them and applying to

that makes my makes my day. So, cool. So I'm going to go into your story then. I want to start back because you're 13 years old. I know we'll jump in the timeline forward, but you become a doctor. But before that, like 13 years old, what were you doing? Because you weren't, were you thinking about that or just? Yeah, I was in school and I was trying to make money so that I could buy myself a laptop and then get an extra screen.

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 $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 setup. So I saw you have a three monitor desk setup. 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. I tried building a game. That was really hard. Like 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'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 back in 2012, which I still have, which 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. There'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 whiteboard of how to do, how to think about critical thinking questions and the maths questions and stuff.

And so five years into this, we saw our revenue sort of stalled at 150. 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? And 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 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

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, you can see it. 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 yeah i've had success and 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 the 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 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 long term, 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 you know i was a medical student building a youtube channel

a bit 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 i'm like that scammer russell brunson guy and i ended up being this productivity guru and then like a few years later a publisher approached me to write a book they were like well you know you're a productivity expert so you should write about productivity it's like i'm a productivity expert really okay and now isn't it fascinating how like you view yourself versus how the market views yourself i

had similar things in my career where it's just like huh i annoyed it that's how people perceive me yeah what was that like for you like well being a scammer apparently no just kidding but i think for me it was like um like it's it's similar like um it's it's trans it's shifted over the years the most recent one more so it's like people that draw 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 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'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 now talk about- I'm a 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 give people life advice it's like it's not really gonna land you kind of have to tell people how to use click funnels and then that gets you a certain base and now you can start giving life advice it's interesting too because like um 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 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 freak out. And they're like, oh, you know. It's interesting. So I think, yeah, because some of my, like even my, like Dan Kennedy, he's my first mentor. I bought his company. Like I love the guy. We like, we align on the business value so, so strong. But then other values in life, we do not connect at all.

But I have to like 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 it's like the one, and 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.

It's like, oh, well, I followed you for funnels, but I didn't know that you believe this. And it's like this weird, this weird thing. So it's kind of a double-edged sword sometimes. Yeah, I find it, I find it really hard 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 really hard 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 yeah like you're probably not massively proud of the stuff you did 20 at age 27 in terms

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Head to Northwest registered agent today and start building something amazing. What was like the first, I don't know, did you have a video like pop? There's first one like took off that, you know, they, you know, I'm talking 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 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. 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, because 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 big electric 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, 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 hundred videos and then this is going to be video number 100. And hopefully in that time, I'll get good at the how to make videos. I'm going to make 100 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 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 eight million views something like that and that was the thing where i was like oh okay now we've got trajectory here um that was one video that took off the second 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 2 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 2 million views. So something about this topic 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 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, 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, 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. I want to get tactical for a minute, and then we'll come back to viral videos. That's really fascinating. So I want to walk through your process. 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 five 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 with 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 are easy 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, 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 routes. 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 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 going to 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. Um, do you, and let me think you're not doing any paid strategies on your channel, right? Um, I'm asking cause like when I first launched our 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 our YouTube organic and 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 like my channel suddenly dying and being like oh my goodness i've killed the goose yeah that's the one actually on that note like we we literally call the youtube channel our goose And so we have like a goose system,

which is sort of like our process for creating YouTube videos. And one of the big things that my team optimizes for is, you know, we sort of think of me and the YouTube channel as sort of the goose. We're like, we're collectively me and the YouTube channel are 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. So I think, yeah, it's always this interesting balancing act

between like the stats and the soul. I've had that issue with ours because in the past, we've had some channel managers for us who do stuff and they're like, same thing. They're finding videos that are going viral and sending me. And the ones they always send me, 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 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 finding this stuff. Yeah, no, it really is a balancing act. I think also in our sort of space, if there's optimizing for views, and then there's optimizing for the right sort of views.

So Homozy found 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 Hormozy's content a few months ago because it was just like, it's not for me. It's shown all his weightlifting stuff.

Yeah, all of that random stuff. Whereas like two weeks 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. I'm 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. 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

uh we have tried all sorts of things uh we have never seen any transformation of any sort of movement from viewers from any social platform to YouTube. All roads have just led to just focus on making a really good video and let the algorithm 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. I'm so proud of the video. I want everyone to see it. But the times times we've tried stuff it hasn't worked i'm like i'm hoping that i was hoping there's some secret you got um there was this youtuber's uh conference i went to in like valencia like a couple years ago and i was sitting 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. And like, like, 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 you about like how your 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 I mean, I think we all can repeat ourselves way more than we do. And especially, like, so I would ask you, who are the sorts of people you're trying to attract for your YouTube channel?

For me, it's people who are in business. Like, I don't want the beginner beginners. There's too much, you know, I realize they bought someone else's course. They figured out, like, they did the first thing. like i don't i don't want the beginner beginners um there's too much you know i realized they they bought someone else's course they figured out like they did the first thing they got something to sell and the next phase is like well i like it where it's like kind of like you like you come in it's like i've got something to make some money like cool we can turn that we can light on fire let's build a funnel drive some traffic and like you know like so those are ideal people they have

a business but not you know i'd say they're probably like six figures and below like that that window is like where I want to find people because then we can take them in. It's easier to take someone from good to great than from nothing to good. You know what I mean? Sure. So you want someone who's doing like at least 10K a month in revenue or like 5K a month or something like that?

Anywhere in that window is great, yeah. Nice, yeah. So, yeah, I think yeah when it comes to ideas trying to trying to trying to optimize for views will take you towards the beginner camp which is not where you want to be all the biz off one scam yeah i was like hey make a video like this like no i don't want you so um i so i i've 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 to see what happens and you've done a few videos that are like seven ways to

make your first 10k online type type stuff and i'm not going to click on them like whatevs but i i can't remember i think it was about a year ago there was there was some more philosophical stuff that was that i felt was really targeted at me as a business owner and that like made me have so much goodwill towards you i was like oh man this russell guy's so cool of course i read his book i thought the book was sick but now seeing you on video helped me build that parasocial relationship with you where now i feel a bit starstruck like coming 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 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 eight or six or seven or eight figures 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. Like, oh, okay.

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 see you're 900 videos for your channel something like that yeah of which like 700 are probably long form and 200 probably shorts yeah 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. Okay, so to do that, are you doing like the rest of the week you're doing prep work for it or you just kind of like how much what's it look like give us a week in your life from the youtube business i want to see how because i'm still trying to figure out 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 the route of videos i'm like ah i 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 a little bit. 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 all happening in the filming day, the idea, the concept. We actually have a whole five-level process for this. It's kind of niche, but sure. So 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 click-baity side. 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 the title and i'm just going to hit record and just speak so actually my highest performing performing video of this year was one of those it was completely randomly um 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 people can't can't retain it i'm just going to say three to five things. A level three video is where we've got a title and we're like, okay, you know, five steps to 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 a level four video is a video usually when i do a podcast so what i would like to 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 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. And 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 given a title, we'll think about it. Sometimes my producer will give me a title that's a bit too clickbaity,

and I'll be like, oh, no, you know, let's soften the title a little bit because 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 he said the other one you posted 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 uh 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 yeah 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 with uh with uh 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'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. 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, I say stuff. I'm like, where did that come from? That was interesting. When you're scripted, it's 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 Tintin would ask me, okay, Ali, why is discipline really important? I would say, okay, so discipline is really important because blah, blah, blah. And I would come out with some good stuff. And he'd 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 it's sort of like an interview 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 they're 25 and they're super overwhelmed and they have a day job how would they apply this thing this thing that you've just said and i I'm like, oh, interesting.

I wouldn't have thought of that had he not asked the question. And so we're doing a bunch of videos in this Q&A format where it just feels as if I'm just speaking directly to the camera. Yeah, that's really cool. Interesting. 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 names 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 a, 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 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 about blah, blah, blah, blah. Thirdly, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. Blah, blah, 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, this is like, for me personally, because I'm like in the middle of trying to figure this out. All those things were so helpful. Yes, I'm glad.

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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 long term the plan for you more so yeah i think about this a lot and i'd i'd i'd love to get your take on this which is kind of why i asked you that question because 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 um 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 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 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,, 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, 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, the game of entrepreneurship goal, like 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 and I'm like, okay, Russell, how do we get from five to 10? But that's just because it's like the game, you know, I'm playing horizon forbidden West on the PS five.

I play on very hard difficulty. Cause 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? So for me, I can explain it for a long the game of entrepreneurship. That will end up each time, yeah. Yeah, I'm curious. What's it like for you? 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, who we were talking about earlier.

He told me, because he's got tons of big businesses, but he told me, 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 and entrepreneurship so I can get my art out there. And I honestly – it's weird for me because a lot of people think I'm like very entrepreneurial and I am. But like for me, like entrepreneurship is my art. So like the reason I wrote 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 my 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 seekers 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 what 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 gonna go and so i think that's what gets me excited and then the business around it's still blurry. But I'm excited to see where it's going to go. And so I think that's what gets me excited. And then the business around it is just the way that I support. I can monetize it.

It helps me to buy really old, expensive books and manuscripts, stuff like that. It's the necessary thing to make. And then eventually, when I discover what this art is looking like, I'm excited to share it and to talk about new events and seminars, 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 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 really out. I really like that. So for you, it's like, it's'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 designers but he worked for like five years designing tombstones for people so I literally told him I was like one of your projects is you were going to design so I keep thinking about like what's going to be on my tombstone what's it going to look like like because for me it's like I have areas in my life like father, husband

wrestler you know so like 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 like 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 like return investment money. But it's like ROI on any situation. It's like it's why I struggle in school, like sitting in school.

Like what's the return? I can't understand like the return on this investment, right, or things like that. And so for me, ROI is a big thing. And so honestly, 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 it within the generation they're forgotten forever right there's very few that that live beyond it and the ones who do usually through the written words through books um 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 to

the foreground i'm trying like to to 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 ry in 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 term roi of my own life and work in 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 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 2000 you know whatever so like i we're launching one time i was launching a new product every single week i launched a product because like we'd not launch product makes money then you know so i was like launching stuff and then do other things then it slowed 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? And then inside there, I still want to launch. I still create an art and launch.

I create 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 this thing. We launch it, 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 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-com series oh i read expert c i read and like 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 why i started become obsessed with books and writing and like other people's books and stuff because like this is the vehicle that 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 uh i was trying to think long term like what i want for my career etc 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, when the publisher approached me saying, do you want to write a book? I was 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. But it's a long-term project over the next few decades that I'm excited to explore. Are 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 was thinking 11th one this morning and at some point there'll be a critical mass of one of them where i'm gonna 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, I'm like, I'll never do this again. And then like a year later, after the first one has been, you know, selling books, you see the impact. I'm like, okay,

I'm doing it again. It was actually hanging with Brendan Richard. Brendan told me, he's like, I do a book every other year, the rest of my life. And finally I was like, okay,

I'm going to do the same thing. So of course it's been four years since my last book. That's a, it's 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 developments 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. Cause like, you know, most, you know, how most experts are nowadays, like they saw something on Tik TOK 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, 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 nation going to 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 like read these things and see again like what what napoleon hill was writing you know 100 years ago what was orson swett marden writing the beginning of the century what was like you know like just all that kind of stuff is really fascinating it's fun because um back then like people had these ideas that they were they were

wrestling with there was no like scientific proof of it and 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 like talking about success um but yeah it's interesting how it's the same thing just at different levels oh yeah 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.

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, they work in 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 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, 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 got like a Notion database with like templates and stuff, like check-ins that we do every month and stuff. And that's like super, super helpful. So it's like little things like that i i love the idea of writing at some point in my life a book about like how to systemize your relationships to it but in a

non-weird way in a way that actually improves them actually really good title edit non-weird 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 um a title i've been playing around with is how to not waste your life which i think is kind of interesting um or i've been looking back through like the jim ronan and the l19l 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? 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 playing around with. So fun. That's a really interesting question. What's a wasted life look like? I'm curious for you. So you mentioned people ask you about work-life balance and things. How do you, what are your principles for balancing the five kids, the family life, the business, and everything?

Yeah. So for me, 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 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, 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, no, 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, getting up and I got an hour just to sit there and think and try to like, try to progress this forward. Right. But then it's like, then my kids start waking up and say, okay, now I'm, I'm taking, I'm turning this off and I'm turning into dad. You know, I'm literally leaving the room, shutting the door. And now like now I'm dad and trying and I'm turning into dad. I'm literally leaving the room, shutting the door, and now I'm dad and 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. 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 to do a time study where it's like what's happening throughout the day it's like people only working on 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 because 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 we 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 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 okay fine so i had two kids out 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, you know, and we'd like wrap them up in these little blankets and like put a bottle and like prop a pillow, keep the bottle in their mouth while I was like writing copy on these things. I try 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 some entrepreneur friends who are parents I've spoken to said that when they had kids, it gave them even more of a desire to grow the business because now they're 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 hundred 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 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 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 most important thing.

So it's weird because like we put so much emphasis, especially 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 we'll do, 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 and filming and the way you structure things seems way less stressful than 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 just go film and it's like, I've got such a short period of time to film. I'm trying to nail the very, like the 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 interesting uh i think you can definitely do it in a more 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 like um 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 it's so much so much on the cutting room floor um yeah i mean i'll retake things or whatever i 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 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, 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. 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 in, get out of my head. Okay, here we go.

Uh, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 that I tell my entrepreneurs in business, 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 in business

it's 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 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 i happened to spend some time with him at a retreat a few couple 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're trying to be better. I was like, damn, there's so much truth to that. It's like, 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 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. Dude, so good. I think I should be paying you for this consult, so thank you.

Anyway, well, dude, I appreciate you. 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. You're going to see my YouTube game double up.

It's going to be awesome. Thank you very much for having me, and I'd love to ask some questions about like figuring out our value ladders and funnels as well so that'll be cool we'll wrap this one up and we'll do another one and then uh you can go to his channel check out the opposite one if you want to see see the other stuff so thanks man appreciate you thank you