Dan Koe Podcast: What It Takes To Make It

Dude, I grew by like a million in six months.

A big machine, like the one you've got.

What's the percentage distributed like?

I think with his last launch, he made like 67k, his 24,000 followers.

So somebody messages you as in, hey Dan, how much for an hour of consulting?

You just turned them down?

Correct.

But I knew that the larger the community grew, more work I'd have to do in there.

I think of it as AI is the gun, but it still needs you to aim it.

I bought $1,000 courses just because I had like one thing that I was trying to figure out.

I didn't give a shit about the majority of the course.

It's like, I just went through it to get that one little piece that was worth that money for me because I needed to solve it.

You get ideas so much faster than your fingers can touch.

I know that you don't want to do this, but like I want to see J.K. Molina.

What's up, Dan?

What's up, man?

How are you?

Been good.

Been a while.

It has.

I'm excited.

I am too.

So today we're going to play a little game.

I found this random app on the internet.

It's kind of nice, but it's kind of underground.

It's called Eden.

You've probably heard about it.

Nope, I haven't.

Yeah, probably not.

But Eden is Dan's app, by the way.

And we're going to play a game of questions.

And so we're going to pick up kind of the notes that we want to talk about.

And that's what we'll cover.

So I'll pick up one that I think is interesting.

And then you pick up one.

And whenever we run out of topics, we just keep switching.

All right.

All right.

View, it's OK.

I'll just pick one.

Sorry it's...

Well, you're pretty good at this for the first time you see this stuff.

You're pretty good at this technique.

Yeah, it'll look a bit different soon, as in like next week.

Well, let's start with a big question, because I wanted to ask this in the beginning, because I want to make this a little bit of...

I feel like you have a certain skill level and your audience and some people...

The content that you may create are some things that you learned a while ago.

And so there's this kind of gap.

And I want to cover that gap as in...

I want to see what Dan thinks today.

So I want to cover percentages first about your business.

And so let's start with percentage of income distribution, because now you have software, you have info products.

I don't know if you've got access to you in another way, but a big machine like the one you've got, what's a percentage distributed like?

It's 100% info.

Well, the software doesn't make anything, right?

That's more of a long-term game.

And when I say it doesn't make anything, it makes a decent amount.

If I were to put the percentage, it would be like 50-50 info to software, but I don't make anything from the software, because you've got to pay for team, you've got to pay for the AI credits that everyone uses, you've got to pay for so on and so forth.

And Eden is technically still in beta.

Like, we haven't actually launched it yet, even though people can sign up.

So when we actually launch and start pushing it and start getting creators as ambassadors slash affiliates, then it'll start growing a lot more and eventually will have a decently large profit margin.

But yeah, until then, my personal source of income is really just paid tier of the sub-stack and workshops slash cohorts that I run occasionally.

In terms of service or consulting-style work, I hate that, so I avoid it at all costs and I do not do it.

So somebody messages you as in, hey, Dan, how much for an hour of consulting?

You just turned them down?

Correct.

Okay.

At what point was the info and the audience big enough so that you felt confident doing that?

Because you didn't start like that, you had a shift.

Yeah, I mean, I shifted pretty quick.

When I started on Twitter, I was doing the web design stuff and landed a few clients from that, but then as I started writing more, I'm like, I feel like everyone eventually makes the switch from freelancing to consulting, especially in the marketing space, because when you have an audience, that's kind of what people want,

at least for the type of content that I was creating.

Like I wasn't really teaching how to build websites in my tweets, I was more so talking about mindset, strategy, self-improvement stuff.

And so it's more of like a teaching educational style content.

So I would assume that people want more teaching educational style offer if they were to work for me, they don't want me to do the work for them.

And personally, at least back then, I didn't hire many freelancers, right?

Me personally, I want to, if I'm just starting out, if I'm somewhat of a beginner or even like a smaller business owner, I want to learn how to do things myself before I have other people do them for me.

So I kind of applied that mindset to what I was offering, switched into the marketing consulting, brand consulting style thing, because I was pretty good at growing an audience, writing content and made a good amount from that.

And to actually answer your question, by the time I reached 40 to 50,000 followers on Twitter is when I launched the modern mastery community.

And that was like my big push to really get out of client work and that worked.

But looking at other people now, specifically Hussein Ibarra, he has been, I think he's taken most of my courses.

We have a very similar method in how we write.

And he isn't too large and he wasn't that large previously.

And I think with his last cohort launch, he made like 67K.

And I think he has, I can find this really quick.

Hussein has 24,000 followers.

So very good and that's a lot of money.

And even for myself, the switch wasn't, I didn't go straight from marketing consulting to modern mastery.

I had the web design course.

I had the freelancing course.

The community was more so me wanting to get a recurring style of revenue.

And I didn't like that either.

But- What didn't you?

Because I forget, I think it was Dickie Bush who I heard this from, but I think it's a common saying.

Recurring revenue means recurring work.

And not that that's a bad thing, but I knew that the larger the community grew, the more work I'd have to do in there.

I have to respond to more people.

I have to do a lot of non-scalable things.

Unless I hire other people, but since the community is largely based around my knowledge, it's kind of hard to do that.

I guess- They want you.

Cassie would come into play.

But yeah, yeah.

Exactly, they want me.

So I saw that coming up, and I saw myself having to continuously just go into the community, focus on that a lot.

And now I do more of the workshops and cohorts.

One, because I have the audience that allows me to.

And two, it's like a short and intense burst of work rather than I need to log in for two to three hours every single day.

Yeah.

All right, cool.

You want to pick a card?

Ooh okay.

What is your thesis for the future?

This is going to be an interesting one because we've both pivoted a little bit recently.

So you mentioned that a lot of people with audiences, we start with freelancing work.

And I did it too.

And then consulting, and then we go to info.

And I think there's a lot of money to be made in all of those.

But then I liked the SaaS aspect a lot.

And again, the SaaS is smaller than my info side of my business.

Yours is as well.

But I think that is kind of my thesis.

As in, right now if you sell a course, it has a pretty negative connotation.

As in, ah, you just sell a course.

Like it's not sound well.

Yeah, it's got that.

I still hate that stigma.

I still fight against it, like in my content.

Like, yeah, obviously some people have bad courses.

But honestly, all of the courses that I've taken are pretty good because I know I'm going in to get something out of it.

And I usually get one thing out of it.

I think the people that don't like courses that much are just those with a bad relationship with money.

And they don't see the course as, like when you go to college and you pay $40,000 to get a four year degree, you don't really care.

I know people make this comparison a lot.

But then, oh, a $150 course, that's a scam because it's not a credentialed professor teaching it.

And maybe it's not grammatically correct in some sections or so on and so forth.

But like, where are, I wrote a tweet one time where it's like, knowledge not found in schools is the source of money not found in employment.

And it's like, where else do you think you're going to get the knowledge to do something that a school doesn't set you up for?

You know what I mean?

Like, you go to school to get a job.

That's the entire purpose of schooling because the schools are government funded in many cases unless you go to a private school.

But an individual person who did the work to make their own money, whether they're lying about it or not, it's hard to tell.

When you buy that $150 course, usually the returns on knowledge are outsized if you actually implement it.

Most people don't because they're not at that stage in their life where it just clicks for them and then they go into it so they see it as worthless when they're just not there.

They didn't go through grade zero to 12 and they bought a grade 13 course.

And then they're like, well, I can't do anything with this so it's a scam.

You're what I would call somebody who is a value buyer.

You buy things and let's say it has a hundred modules.

If 99 modules suck, but one gives you a really good insight, you might consider that as this was worth it.

Maybe not, you wouldn't call it good.

But it was worth it because it gave you something.

But most are volume buyers.

And I've done volume buying too.

Like I've gone to buffets and ate way more than I should, right, like sometimes it happens.

Yeah.

Being there.

Now since we started red though, the best.

Yeah.

But yeah, you know about that.

But yeah, if you go on a value buying mindset, you're gonna be volume buying mindset, you're gonna be disappointed.

But I interrupted you.

What were you saying?

I was just gonna say like I bought anywhere from like $300.

Yeah, like $300 to $1,000 courses just because I had like one thing that I was trying to figure out.

I didn't give a shit about the majority of the course.

It's like I just went through it to get that one little piece that was worth the, that money for me because I needed to solve it.

Were you always like that?

No.

I was more of a volume buyer before because when I was in school and doing the web design stuff, I was trying to learn to code.

And so I, do you know the website Udemy?

I do, courses, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's just a bunch of courses.

A lot of them are really good.

It's kind of like Skillshare.

I've actually never bought anything on Skillshare, but on Udemy, they always run, like everything is always like 95% off with a countdown timer at the top, it is.

And so like the courses were like 10 to 20 bucks, I think.

And that was affordable to me.

So I just buy any of the courses that sounded interesting to me.

And I went through a good amount of them and learned a lot.

Yeah, now it's like, honestly, don't buy much unless I really have that specific problem.

So back to kind of the thesis and I wanted to ask you that one.

Like courses have this stigma of, oh, you just have a course, right?

But it's because, well, in 2015, 2016, we might think differently about it and I agree with you.

I think some courses are just fantastic.

And I remember making $250 a month and I bought a $295 copywriting course.

I haven't read anything.

Yeah Testosa Testosa.

I read the whole thing.

I love that shaped like everything for me.

I was like, oh shit, this is my goals.

It's great, it teaches you great fundamentals.

Yeah, yeah, it's good.

It's really good.

Or maybe I, well, if it were good or not, I wasn't the mindset of this has to be good.

So like the value, the mindset you have before you buy something leads to a lot of the experience.

My thesis is just like the courses have a bad stigma.

Well, because in 2015, 2016, people sold courses and they made a lot of money and they still make a lot of money.

So it worked, it happened because of something, right?

And so I feel like now we're kind of in this era where when selling courses was easy back then, maybe it's harder now, harder to sell info.

Now it's when selling AI clones of people, their own GPTs of themselves that create a certain process, that's gonna be the new thing where in the future, people are gonna think, oh, you just have a GPT.

You just cloned down Co.

That's all you've got.

I can scrape his videos too.

But now it's like, if you have something like that, now it's kind of like, it's selling really well.

It's pretty hot.

I'm getting good responses, at least in my business, when I sell things related to that.

So that's my thesis.

In the future, everybody's gonna have their AI clone, then it's gonna go down and then somebody else is gonna come up with something else that's cool and that's gonna make a comeback.

Yeah.

What's yours?

Well, I don't think info products are gonna die.

I think AI is gonna find their way into them in many different ways.

So whether that's like AI assisted education to help people learn faster, or as you said, just being able to talk to the specific person or like what Hormozzi did with his book launch, where it's pretty much a GPT based around the book.

So it's like a different way of going through the information and getting the information because- And that's very compassionate, by the way.

Have you ever consumed one of those?

It's very, you can ask questions back.

It's actually pretty compassionate.

Cause sometimes I watch your videos, man, and I love your videos.

They're fantastic.

Everybody should watch them.

But sometimes I'm like, man, this is dense.

This is high level stuff.

And I wish I could just like pause and like bring you out of the screen and be like, yo Dan, what did you mean by this?

But you can when it is like an AI assisted course.

So they're actually pretty nice.

Yeah, yeah, no, I like those.

That's what I'm doing in my workshops now is like, one is going, one is starting tomorrow and it's gonna be 14 days long, pretty much 14 modules with like the actual written portion, the video portion.

So normal, what would be a course or workshop?

But then each one has a prompt as well.

That helps them either learn or implement the actual lesson of the thing.

One thing I want to see in software is like, we have school, we have Stan, we have Kajabi, we have Teachable, we have Sohn and so forth.

Like when are they gonna, who's gonna come out with the part where you can actually chat with the module?

Like I haven't seen that yet or like be able to create the AI assisted course.

Some can, WAP has this small thing.

WAP does a little bit of it, but I think you have to buy credits.

I'm not sure on that, don't quote me on that.

But yeah, that's the hard part.

Yeah, who pays for the credits?

Yeah, right, cause they're expensive.

You know this, API credits are expensive.

Well, I'm building a version of that for myself, but I'm gonna talk a lot about that.

This is gonna be on my channel so people are gonna know about it.

I wanna know your thesis for the future.

Okay, so my general philosophy of it from what I've read, what I've consumed, kind of like connecting the dots and where evolution has led us to now.

And where we derive meaning from, there is a massive scarcity of meaning right now, just in general, right?

I haven't watched any of John Verbecky's videos, but I think he has the concept of the meaning crisis.

So in the past, like long ago in like the agrarian or horticultural times, we kind of looked up to the gods to give us meaning.

And then as we started to industrialize, that shifted to seeing productivity as our God.

And then now kind of consumerism or just stacking more stuff, more knowledge, more material items, whatever, that's our God, along with productivity.

But that kind of leaves us feeling empty and there isn't really anything there.

There isn't anything that brings order to our mind.

I remember you like the saying of like the Minecraft order when I was talking about it, but it really does.

It's like a meaningful life is kind of an oscillation between like a chaotic mind, so not really knowing where you want to go with your life, what you're gonna do.

And then as you experiment, learn, discover, you kind of put the pieces together and you receive this burst of clarity and your mind is very ordered with what you found and you're very focused on this vision or this long-term goal and your actions create this feedback loop of good dopamine because you're making progress toward that goal.

And that's a very meaningful way to live.

That's like what a lot of people associate with the feeling of meaning or fulfillment.

And now that like when social media became a thing and the internet became a thing, we started to get access to all of these different opinions globally culturally and people started to question their beliefs and be exposed to opinions that they didn't agree with.

And then now AI is kind of accelerating that where you have access to all of this information but it's kind of useless if you, one, don't have something singular to work towards and two, if you don't know what to ask it.

So in that sense, I think courses are still gonna be a thing, content from people is still gonna be a thing, AI assisted or not, because people simply like, you're not just gonna chat with AI and get a social media feed generated in front of you because when you're scrolling on social media or you're reading a book or you're listening to someone talk,

you're stumbling upon things that you hadn't before, you're discovering things.

You're being surprised and learning things that you didn't know you needed.

And if you didn't know to ask that to AI, how are you gonna get that information?

So that's number one.

The second thing, since we've reached this point of really not knowing where to derive meaning from, from any external source, be it work, productivity, whatever God you praise, we've reached this point where we kind of have to generate meaning for ourselves.

We have to decide what our value system is gonna be.

We have to create the beliefs that we operate from and adopt the beliefs that we believe will make us happy, that we're going to act towards and align our behavior with.

And with that, I mean, I'm very biased toward content creation and my own way of life because that's what I do in writing.

And I think that that's gonna become more of a thing is individuals doing that, creating a life worth living, and then documenting that in some way from their point of view so that others can consume and adopt those beliefs as well if it aligns with them.

And that's these people, these content creators are gonna become meaning makers.

And I like to distinguish those.

I like to distinguish the meaning maker from the personal brand and the influencer because the influencer is like, I'm just posting about my trip to Erwan in LA and all this shit that nobody really cares about, but it looks nice.

And then the personal brand is kind of just like, at least now, that's symbolic of, I'm gonna use this template to get engagement, go viral, drive people through my content funnel and make some money, so on and so forth.

The meaning makers kind of adopt the principles from both because you have to get attention in some way or else you're not really gonna go anywhere.

You have to look the part, I guess I would say.

You have to have the brand.

You have to have something visual and appealing for people to come and listen to you.

You have to have some kind of authority.

And then the meaning comes from, I think it will be more long form content, more just straight up raw point of view style short form content.

Like we see kind of happening on Instagram, at least I do on my feed, maybe that's confirmation bias and maybe I'm completely wrong here.

But I see a craving for more of that.

People want the community.

People have been saying this for a long time, but they haven't gotten it out of social media just because the social media companies aren't incentivized or the creators aren't incentivized by the social media companies to actually produce that kind of content.

The incentive is just likes, engagement, shares.

So people are going to create content that reflects that and kind of abandon truth meaning and other meaningful things simply for the sake of just getting engagement and driving more sales because they need to survive.

There's a lot of shit that goes into this.

And that's any questions.

It is a very optimist frame.

Not a doomer frame at all.

Which I respect.

I don't see a reason to be doomer because that's the thing is like, I don't know where things are going, but I believe in my ability to figure it out and take advantage of opportunities that are there.

And the other thing is that if we are doomed and the world does go to nothing, just turn it to a monk.

Well, does it matter?

And you can still be happy.

Like we know that the monks living with nothing are like the pinnacle of happiness and fulfillment.

So at the end of the day, there are homeless people that can probably be pretty happy.

It's like a mind thing at that point.

So if I have to, I feel like I can make any situation work.

I like it.

Writing in long form, this meaning thing you're alluring to, is something that it just fills me up with so much joy.

It's just great to see thoughts connect.

So I have this thing.

And I write notes because I have this folder with chapters of a book.

And so it's a book that I'm gonna give to my unborn son when he's 18.

I'll be like, yeah, I wrote this for you, take it.

And I'm like at 200 chapters deep now.

And one of the lessons, one of the chapters is, if I ever catch you writing with AI, instead of like you first thinking about the writing, I'm gonna be more angry than if you did any drugs.

Like that's the equivalent of drugs in our house.

I don't want you to do any of that because this is how you think.

You're gonna get dumb if you start like that.

AI is a little bit, I think of it as AI is the gun, but it still needs you to aim it.

Like you still need to tell it where to go.

And so yeah, son, if you've ever watched this, 18 years in the future, don't write with it.

That's kind of the other thing is I see a lot of people just using AI to do everything for them.

And short-term, that seems fine.

Like it seems very cool that you can just start a business by asking AI to give you all the shit to start a business.

But long-term, like one, that's not gonna give you any form of fulfillment.

Two, it's not gonna be sustainable because when everyone can do that, technically no one can do that.

When people actually catch onto it, it just becomes another commodity.

That's how the world works, right?

If everyone does it, then it is no longer valuable.

I don't know how that's gonna take shape, but it will.

And if you castrate your ability to think critically and make decisions, then how are you going to pivot?

Like your entire success was a lie and you're not gonna be able to replicate it because you don't have the years of accumulated experience and from the failures and mistakes that you made along the way that allow you to make the better decision.

That's what happened to the crypto guys in 2021.

They made a ton of money flipping PNGs or JPEGs and then they just, well, they just lost.

Like they just lost the money, lost many, lost everything.

All right, clearly you could have grown your business further growing, selling info products.

It wasn't something hard for you to do and you still have them, right?

But you made a bold move and you said, no, I wanna launch a software and then you rebranded that software.

And I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about this, but now you're talking to a different pivot of the software.

So why switch to software and SaaS?

Why did you do it?

Like why not should everyone do it?

Cause if I learned one thing from your videos is everybody should think for themselves, but why did you do it?

I feel like it's always kind of been a desire for me.

So on the surface level, it's like I wanted something that I could do for a long period of time for outsized results, right?

Like right now I could go on and just run cohorts and workshops for the rest of my life and be kind of sitting at a certain level of income for the rest of my life and that's fine.

Like I'm honestly happy with how much I make and I don't really need to make more, but then the deeper, I guess, philosophical reasoning behind that is my journey up until this point.

The amount of money that I've made has been a reflection of like how much I've developed my skill, my knowledge, my beliefs about the world.

It's kind of represented my growth in a way and that's brought a lot of meaning to my life.

With software and to bring in, if you know Mihalych, except Mihalych is kind of flow psychology model of the challenge and skill ratio, where if you take on a challenge that is higher than your level, a lot higher than your level of skill, then you get anxious, broadly speaking.

If you take on a challenge that is too low for your skill level, then you get bored, right?

So the meaningful life or the good life or staying in some degree of flow for a lot of your life kind of lives in that area of consistently taking on a challenge that is like just above your skill level, barely above it.

It's like you're stretching and growing to achieve that thing and that's where you find a lot of meaning in your life.

This is why I think nine to five jobs are a cool thing.

Like they're very good for a certain amount of time, but eventually you reach the skill plateau and then every day is just repetitive and that gets very boring and then you start looking for other sources of stimulation and then your life kind of slowly dwindles down and you don't know what happened.

So applying that to my decision to go into software is I see software as this very long-term game that requires a lot of skill that is a very big challenge and the skill cap, so to say, the skill and challenge cap is very high.

So I can do that for a long time.

I can learn a lot, I can grow a lot, I can obviously make a lot and that was appealing to me because it's just something that I can do for quite a long period of time.

However, I'm not only doing software, the stars kind of aligned in terms of people that I met this past year and I'm building a physical product, Neutropic, which kind of aligns with my brand pretty well, like Focus, and it's really cool.

Like I had no plans to go into like supplements or Focus, but I have- Is it a pill?

No, it's like a powder stick pack, but my trainer, Randy, had a friend, Pedro, who is a biochemist and just super genius.

Like you get on a call with this guy, you talk to this guy, one, he's very just like, he's a bro, he can talk to you and be funny, he's like that type of person, so you know he's a cool dude, but then you just hear him start like going off in like one direction of neurochemistry and how to interact with biology and all this stuff and that's all he studies, all he does.

And you're just like, this is fascinating, like so cool to listen to, he knows the shit.

And we talked about potentially doing a Neutropic and if we could do something that stands out and he started like sending us products on Amazon to buy, I literally have like at least 30 bottles of pills just like lying on my counter from doing these different types of interactions.

So I saw that as an opportunity that I kind of can't pass up right now.

So that's like a second thing that's being manufactured right now.

So it's kind of two things at once, which I probably shouldn't do, but yeah, that's one thing where it's more of like a passion project than the long-term software I can do for a long time.

I have so many questions on this.

So it's, cause it's cool, it's cool.

In the first part, well, when I asked the question, you said something about I make enough so I can, along the lines of I make enough so that I can maybe do other things, right?

And for somebody who makes money, it would be something like, you know, how people start making money and then they start really interested in like health, philosophy, philanthropy.

You know, the biggest flex you can ever have is somebody introduces you as Dan Ko, philanthropist.

That's how you know, that's how you know you made it.

When did you start, if at all, if you ever started or if it was like this since day one, to kind of give yourself permission as in, I can go into other interests as in the tropics or multiple things.

You've always been into water building as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah.

Other than just make money because when you don't have much money, well, that takes all of the mental ram, at least for me, that's what I did.

So was there a number at which you said I can play?

No, I think this is what makes my way, so to say, like a bit unique or at least the thing that I talk about is business was almost one of the last things where I've been into bodybuilding slash weightlifting slash fitness in general since forever.

Like since I was a kid and I came from from school and was just watching people on YouTube and doing like wrist curls with dumbbells in my bedroom.

Like I didn't even think business was a possibility for me at that point.

As I was like starting to dabble in that kind of stuff in college where I had like a YouTube channel where I was doing food challenges with another person that lived on the same floor as me in the dorms, I was doing like talking to videos.

Was that the I-8 10,000 calories in a day challenge?

Is that a video?

I remember that, yeah.

That's the only one that I like didn't delete and I'm kind of mad that I deleted the other ones because they were all just so cringe.

Like they were so bad.

And yeah, so I tried those things and then I think you know of the story where in my freshman year of college, I got arrested for smoking weed in, this is like literally the first month of me being in college.

We were in my car at the time.

I don't know this story.

Okay, well, I guess the story is my roommate at the time, his girlfriend broke up with him like soon after we moved in because it was long distance.

He moved from Utah.

And that night he was just like, dude, I need to like calm down.

I need to do something.

And our sweet mates connected through the bathroom were like, oh, well, yeah, you just need to smoke.

You just need to smoke.

And so me and like three other people went to, across the street to the top of the parking garage in my car and we're just smoking, you know, as you do with a group.

And then we look behind us or a friend looks behind us and is like, dude, there's a bike cop behind us.

And we're all kind of just like, ah, dude, don't joke around right now.

We're having a good time.

And then I look and he's like taking down my license plate and I'm just like, oh, we're so screwed.

We're so done.

And he comes up to the window, tells us to put our hands on the top of the car.

And we're like, like why?

Like we can just get out.

We're fine.

He's like, no, there's five of you and there's one of me I need to call backup.

So backup came like two other cop cars.

They got us out, sat us all down, handcuffed us and then questioned us as to like who's weed it was.

And so they took me and my roommate into custody.

We didn't like stay in jail but we got like fingerprinted and all this stuff.

And then they let us off.

I had to, oh, okay.

This leads to the next part of the story.

They let us off.

I thought we were good.

Like I thought it was just like a slap on the wrist and I went home for the summer and I got this letter in the mail that was like, okay, it was from the court and it's like, okay, you have two choices.

You can either do this drug diversion program and pee in a cup randomly every week for the next like six months or you can try to defend this in court and possibly be convicted of felony.

So I'm like, oh my God, my life is over.

Like I'm so done.

Like I can't show this to my parents.

My parents weren't home at the time.

And I kind of just sat there like contemplating what I should do.

And then I remembered a book that one of the fitness guys I watched on YouTube recommended called The Power of Now.

Many people are familiar with it.

I read through that book religiously with an open mind.

I did the meditations, all of these other things.

And that's what kind of got me into spirituality, so to say, or at least like those me putting my feet in the water of it and philosophy as well.

So that has shaped a lot of my content too.

But those were like two interests that I kind of got into before business is the spirituality stuff, the fitness stuff, the philosophy stuff.

And then when business started, I was really focused on the web design.

I was focused on a bunch of different things to try to just make one work.

But when I got on Twitter, I didn't really plan to only write about web design.

I plan to sell web design as an offer and eventually turn it into like a few courses because I saw another web designer doing that.

But I also saw him and other people talking about self-improvement, emotional intelligence, all of these things that I was already pretty well read on.

And it felt like I had developed myself in a decent amount of ways.

And so I started writing about those with the occasional web design stuff, but it wasn't even specific to web design.

It was like, what are the best skills you can learn in 2019 or whatever year it was.

And I would just list off like copywriting, email marketing, and then web design listed in there.

And then I would plug the course under it.

So it was like, it was still very broad in general.

That's kind of been my bread and butter for a long time, but hinting at something related to what I sell.

What was the initial question again so I could tie this together?

What was the initial question?

Yeah, so I asked if there was a point, a number at which you said, yeah, I can play now.

And then you went into my, just my upbringing was just a little bit unique, so it wasn't for me.

Yeah okay.

So what comes to mind relating to that in terms of play, is that's always kind of been a value for me.

And on YouTube and my newsletters, the concept of the four hour workday was something that people thought was really interesting, where when I first started on Twitter, and I still don't understand how people don't really get this, but it doesn't take a lot of time to write content.

And if that's the singular fuel for my products and services and how I make money, then I don't really need to work that long if I don't want to.

And a lot of the times I found it detrimental to work longer than a certain amount of time because I just find myself doing shit that doesn't need to be done right now.

I like Naval's philosophy of working like a lion, not a cow, where a cow just sits and grazes the field all day very slow, but a lion like rests for most of the day.

And then when it's time to hunt, it's like a quick sprint, a quick burst.

So I kind of built my days around that where the first two to four hours of every day is that quick sprint.

And then the rest is like, if I need to do work, sure I will, but it's mostly admin work, light tasks.

If I'm building a product or have a deadline for something, then yeah, I'm working longer hours.

And it's more intense than just grazing the field, so to say.

But in my normal average everyday life, where I'm just writing like one post a day and maybe 250 to 500 words of my weekly newsletter, or I'm filming the YouTube video for an hour out of one of those days, that doesn't take any more than, if I do it correctly, it doesn't take any longer than one hour.

Right, and if I have these products and services already built and one post a day and one newsletter a week is allowing me to grow and fuel those products or services, then like, I don't need to do more, right?

It just doesn't make sense.

I'll tell you why they don't get it.

And this was because I was watching a podcast of yours that you did recently where you explained your daily routine.

And so I know what your daily routine was like like three years ago, because when we lived together and like I could observe it.

So I watched that, which was a recent podcast like three months ago.

And you explain, you wake up, you take the dog for a walk, you come back and then you write.

So then I thought, ah, same thing.

Same thing.

It hasn't changed much.

That's the day and I know.

And so it's, you're, you are somebody who has really good dopamine control.

And so I can imagine ideas bombard you.

Like you get ideas so much faster than your fingers can type.

You know what I mean?

Or even your voice can dictate.

I would imagine that's maybe how it feels sometimes.

That's a sign that, yeah, things are going really well.

Cause, okay, the one thing that I honestly failed to mention whenever I mentioned like my daily routine is like technically I'm working all day because the quality of my work relies on the quality of my ideas.

In order for me to have ideas, I need to live a very specific type of lifestyle.

Like you look at Charles Darwin, who's kind of notorious for working two to four hours a day, going on a lot of walks, spending time with family, having deeper conversations, so on and so forth.

For me, when we live together in Austin, I would wake up, I'd walk to the coffee shop, I'd write for an hour or two, and then I'd like come back, I'd eat food, and then I'd go on another walk for like an hour.

And I'd just be listening to either an audio book I was interested in, or a lecture, or something else, or just nothing.

And that's what creates the environments and constraints for ideas to come to mind.

And then I would write those ideas down in notes on my phone, and then I have this fuel for the next work block in the morning.

I can reference the ideas that I wrote down and put them into a post, or a newsletter, or whatever it may be.

So it's like this feedback loop of the more that I rest, the more ideas that I have, the more ideas that I have, the less time I need to work in the morning because that work is just so high quality.

All right, your turn.

This is an interesting one.

What wave did you take advantage of back then that you can't write again?

Ooh, 2020 Twitter.

You had to be there.

Yeah.

You had to be there.

It was so easy.

Sorry, on the note of 2020 Twitter, the nine left stuff still works.

The scarcity, the scarcity emerges here, interesting.

Even though people know that what you're doing, it still works.

I like doing that in my own business.

I like cycling offers, taking things down and up because me personally, I believe it sends a message as in things go away in this world.

And that is how we do things, which is another component of I do things live.

So yeah, it's real.

But back then the nine left, eight copies left, seven copies left.

Anyway, it still works.

But it was just so easy to grow back then.

And I was lucky because I just wrote that wave.

And then in 2021 and two, I wrote the SaaS wave when I partnered up with TweetHunter.

And I missed on a few.

So I missed on crypto.

I missed on kind of 2022 coaching and consulting was really, really good.

Well, side note, this might be something interesting to you, but I feel like there's a lot of value in, you look at what other more developed markets are doing.

And if your market is adjacent to that, but not as developed, you can kind of predict the future.

So I can tell that, for example, I speak Spanish and when I go to Guatemala, I see things that I think, that happened three years ago.

And then I see others that happened four years ago, like in the English market.

So you can predict the future like that.

But that's a wave that I did take advantage of and I wrote it hard, man.

That Twitter growth, it was so juicy, so easy.

You would get a, you don't remember the Retweet groups when we used to have this like elaborate sheets that we stole from somebody?

Shout out Michael.

And then it's like, they, on Wednesdays, I Retweet Dan.

On Tuesdays, Dan retweets me and it was great.

But that was mine.

What was yours?

Well, I think one important thing here is that you, it's hard to take advantage of a wave because you don't know the wave is happening unless you're spotting it in similar markets.

Like as you said, but a lot of people right now, like someone first has to create the wave and then other people ride the wave until too many people ride it and then it dies down.

So on Instagram, I could probably still ride this wave, so to say, but the like minimalistic animations on Instagram.

Dude, I grew by like a million in six months.

I remember that.

You did that thing in March 2nd on March 14th, Instagram was full of that stuff.

They were like, take this, copy that.

At that point, I didn't want to do it anymore.

That's the thing.

And I think what a lot of like with AI and writing small tangent here, I have a very specific taste for my writing.

I've had AI try to replicate how I write.

And what a lot of people don't see is that if AI were to write it and then I read it, I don't want to write it anymore.

Like it's just not something that I want to post anymore because that's not what I value in writing.

I value something, a different point of view.

A lot of it is stuff that's already been said before, but I try to present it from in a unique way with some kind of philosophical concept or just some interesting thing, something, one thing novel per newsletter or video.

And so yeah, a side tangent there, but that's the way if I can't, I could ride and it would probably do decent, but it wouldn't get me a million followers in six months anymore.

You had to be there, man.

Good times.

You did.

Dude, it's so crazy.

Like I remember it was in Austin.

Like walking, no, it was a bit after Austin, I think.

But I remember just like walking and opening Instagram and seeing it at like 10 million views and not even being able to refresh my notifications feed because there were just too many followers coming in.

It was insane.

For you, man.

Tough times.

But that's another thing is I didn't know it was a wave.

I just liked it.

Like I wanted to make that a part of my brand and I was honestly like kind of mad when everyone else started doing it because then it like inadvertently diminishes my brand.

That's one thing I kind of get pissed off at now, but it's part of the game and I'm partially to blame for it is when I teach people how to write, their first thought is to just talk about the same topics I've talked about.

Use the same structure, use the same examples, use the same things that have made my point of view unique.

And so I get kind of pissed because then I don't want to do that anymore.

And so I have, it's a double itch or it's blessing in a curse curse because it sucks that everyone's doing it now blessing because I know that I'm the type of person that can then do something new.

Like I can again do something different from all of them.

And I think that's what really matters because if they're just gonna, I mean, I copy people at some points too, I think everyone does, I see a good YouTube title and I find a way to adapt it to the newsletter that I was writing or I see a good idea on Twitter and I'm like, shit, that's really good.

I thought the same thing a month ago.

Okay, I need to write this down so I can like turn it into my own voice because it is something that I would post under my brand.

I get that, but if that's like your singular strategy for anything is just always copying what works.

It's great as a beginner.

It's great as some form of thing that you implement when you need to grow.

But you're not like develop, you're not doing your own thing.

You're not giving people a reason to trust or follow you specifically over someone else.

I agree.

You have, I like to like give you props but if the person says it, it's kind of lame.

So I'm gonna say it to you and then it's not lame.

So it's cool.

I wanted to ask you about like, how do you have so much poll then?

Cause dude, man.

It's like, yeah.

With women, but no, but like in with your audience, right?

Dude, I'm this proponent of likes ain't cash.

And dude, every time I say it within like three minutes, somebody just has it in their front two teeth.

They're like, but then co has like four million followers.

Yeah, dude, but you're, but you're not him.

It's a different situation to understand the context.

But tying a little bit to the writing.

So I am very amazed at some people and I envy how much of a sociopath they can be.

You're not a sociopath, but some people are.

And so they would turn on the camera and they would be person A.

Camera turns off, there's somebody completely different.

It's just, I am honestly kind of envious.

I'm like, how are you so fake?

But like in an admiration, I'm like, damn, like you'd be acting, but like really good.

Like I look at them like I look at, you know, like, like Al Pacino, you know what I mean?

Like, man, that's good.

But the conversations, like I feel like we're just walking again to Kava to get a bowl, right?

I'm like, we talk about these things together.

And I feel like you have, you have this pull and I have a theory and you can say it's like not accurate at all, but you have this pull because you've got this original thinking and this original thinking comes from you deliberately typing and writing for yourself.

I consider myself a writer first and a businessman second.

I'd never like to be considered the other way around.

And so because of, I can, I can understand and relate so much to your love and dedication to writing.

So that's how I explain the pull.

Likes still ain't cash, but this guy's different.

Doesn't apply.

Yeah, you can transcend it at a certain point.

Well, okay, so in terms of my pull, like what I think it comes down to is just it's going very big picture, but making it makes sense.

It's like starting big picture with something novel that people haven't heard about before or that is only in like niche circles.

So like you kind of have to have niche interests.

So me in my most recent video and newsletter, I talked about writing essays.

So I'm very good at like bridging something like niche and unique with something that has already done well.

So there are a decent amount of videos on YouTube about writing essays that have just gone very far, writing essays as in like thinking on paper, so to say, not like college essays.

And so I take that and I think about all of these big picture thinkers and points of view that I've heard of before.

And I come across someone like Daniel Schmockdenberger who has the metacrisis point of view.

And I start to think about, okay, how can I relate these two things?

Cause they're kind of similar.

And that's what I do is like I introduce the topic and then I go into Daniel Schmockdenberger's metacrisis and like how I apply it to what I do.

So how short form content or social media right now can lead to the collapse of civilization, so to say, cause that's what he talks about, because it kind of can and people see that and they're like, oh, shit, that's really interesting.

I haven't heard about that before because not even Daniel Schmockdenberger talks about that because I apply it to like short form content or social media in general.

Then after that, I'm like, okay, well, here's how essays or writing essays and learning how to think and maintaining your capacity to think is very beneficial.

Not only do you learn faster, you think deeper, you so on and so forth, but you contribute to the information environment, something beneficial that helps people rather than hurts people.

So I give this very specific tone in my videos rather than going the traditional like, okay, here's the topic, here's step one, step two, step three, step four.

It's like when I write something, I can tell whether or not it's unique or either it's too like bland and flavor of the day, what you already see on social media or something that isn't, but that's something that isn't, people take too far.

Like they speak too clever, they think they're Marcus Aurelius and it doesn't hit or they speak in like two abstract of concepts.

And so I can see that as well and I can say, that's not gonna go anywhere because it doesn't have the practical aspect.

Like people can't make sense of it, they don't understand it.

Like the power of now, I took the time to understand it, but for a lot of other people, it's just gonna go over their heads and they're gonna be like, this is woo woo nonsense.

So my job is to take something like that, very abstract and woo woo or philosophical or it doesn't make sense or doesn't have any direct application and then give them something to apply it to.

And now they have this deeper reason as to why they're doing the thing rather than just like, you're gonna make $10,000 in a week.

Yeah, I love that.

When I create pieces of content, one of the underlying questions I think is, how can I help them see the world differently?

And that's kind of like my basis.

And from that, more often than not, I come up with something that is, well, not bad, to my standards, I'm like, yeah, this doesn't suck.

It's fine.

Ship it.

I got one more if you're fine, which is the last one.

It's, this is interesting.

Advise, with give, with give each other.

It's hard to say because you make more money than me, but I'll say something that I think like, man, I wish this guy did this because it'll be like so cool.

And we talked about this earlier.

I think you have this talent for coining ideas for our work week.

You're the niche, the one million, one person business.

And I think if you were to tie it to something like an identity, like calling it, you've done a lot of it too, but calling it something that's like, people can wear in a shirt, people can identify, ask, have this tribe, you know, like kind of make a side project and a group chat as in, guys, we're going to pull money, we're going to buy an island,

and we're going to call it this.

I think that'll be something so cool for you.

I've thought about it with Modern Mastery, like we had that for a bit.

What was the identity?

I forget what I called them, but that's the thing is like, whenever I try to think of a name, and then whether or not I'd identify with that, I just think it's corny.

And so I end up not doing it because, and then I justify it to myself as like, like if I wouldn't do it, why would I expect other people to do it?

Like isn't the entire point not to adopt this identity and to think for yourself?

But yeah, I've done it in the past unintentionally of like calling like the...

The Modern Creator has been one, meaning Maker's another one.

I've heard you say both.

Value Creator.

Value Creator was one that surprisingly, I didn't think, again, it was unintentional, it was just a way of like distinguishing, hey, there's personal brand, there's influencer, there's Value Creator, here's what they do.

And then I'd get emails of like, embarking on my journey to become a Value Creator.

And I really wanna thank you for the content that you put out.

And I'm just like...

That's awesome.

People like that term, like I don't see myself as becoming a quote unquote Value Creator.

But...

Yeah.

It has nice, has nice initials too.

I'm a VC, I'm a venture capitalist, now I'm a Value Creator, but eventually a VC.

Yeah.

No, I could see myself doing one as long as it like, sounds good.

I tried the top, like the new 1% or the new rich for a good amount of time.

But again, it's like, there's always something that causes a bit of disease, like the new rich.

Like rich has this connotation with it that's like...

Kind of douchey.

Like scammy core seller.

And then there's the top 1%, which is like two red pill masculine.

And it's like, I need something that's like, once I find it and it's perfect, then yeah, I'll talk about it more.

Synthesizer was another one that I talked about for a while, but I think that was Andrew Kirby's thing.

I think that one's most descriptive, but it also sounds like kind of music, like a music synthesizer.

What do you like about it?

What do you like about it?

Synthesize.

Why is it the most descriptive?

Because what you're doing, or like what I do in my work is I pull from all of these different perspectives and ideas, then I synthesize them into my own point of view.

And that's really like what you're doing is you and your unique lens and how your beliefs shape, how you perceive things.

You're reading books and listening to certain lectures.

You're making these decisions and picking up this unique set of ideas, right?

I've said this example many times, but if I read a book and you read the same book, we're gonna have different highlights just because of how we're reading it, what goals we're pursuing, what problems we have in our lives, what sticks out to us.

And so it doesn't matter that we're pursuing the same thing, like a lot of money in business, or reading the same thing, what matters is how I interpret it and how I share that with a person that not necessarily perceives the world in the same way as me, but has a similar identity, right?

You are the niche, so to say.

A lot of people just think that means like just talking about yourself all the time.

In reality, what it is is like, you do what works like most people do, but you do it from your own unique point of view.

Like you have to be imbued in the content.

And then when people read it, some people will resonate, that's like what causes people to resonate with you over someone else.

And that's like, there's no competition there.

Like someone's gonna resonate with your way of doing things more than they are me, or my way of doing things, and they're gonna get more results going your way simply because they resonate with you more.

Like it doesn't matter if yours or mine is objectively better, what matters is if the person can actually make sense of it and get the results with it.

So it doesn't matter if you're inexperienced at all of this stuff, someone could just resonate with your way of explaining things more than me or you.

So, yeah, then you attract this, I guess tribe of people that are, they may not even be one step or two steps behind you, but they're just people that you can help the most because of how you articulate things.

And AI can't do that either because you don't know how to tell it, how to teach you specific things.

I'm gonna come up with some ideas and I'll send them to you.

I have some, yeah, I'll send them to you.

Oh, if it's good, I'll create a video because since you brought that up, I haven't done that in a while.

And a lot of my older videos, I think the main reason they popped off so much is because of the novel concept, like the one person business, the four hour work day, so on and so forth.

Yeah, I think that's your most viewed video on YouTube.

Yeah, that one is.

No, the one, that was the one that started the whole how to get ahead of 99% of people thing.

You see that everywhere now because I had a tweet on it like five years ago.

And then I knew that tweet did well.

So I turned it into a YouTube video on Christmas when it wasn't supposed to do well.

Now that's my highest performing video.

And then like over the years, I just see people using that title.

I can't take credit for it, so yeah.

Yeah, it's the create an anti-vision video.

Well, the thumbnail was different.

The thumbnail was Monk Mode before, just Monk Mode.

Oh, how can I forget?

Baldstand and The Times.

That contributed to it doing really well.

But then I wanted to create another one with the thumbnail of Monk Mode and I didn't want it to be a repeat.

So I changed that thumbnail because it wasn't gonna go any higher in views.

I'll go selfish for the last one.

So now it's your turn to give me some of them.

That's, okay, that's kind of the thing.

I know that you don't wanna do this.

So it's something that I wish you did is you're very good.

I mean, your whole thing for a long time is just coming up with big ideas.

I feel like those big ideas need more light.

I think you deprioritize social media a lot.

You're deprioritizing YouTube a good amount now.

But I wanna see famous, micro-famous J.K. Molina

because the ideas are so good that a lot of more people could benefit from them.

Thank you.

Amen.

It's good to talk to you always.

Always a pleasure, Dan.

Thank you for being here.

Yeah likewise dude.

That was fun.

It was fun.

So guys, Dan, so for iren.so,

that's what we hosted the canvas on today.

That's what it leads to.

To find conversations with Mr. Dan.

So, I mean, you know where to follow the guy.

Just look him up, you know.

He'll be repeated one way or the other.

See ya.