Ali Abdaal Went From $2.72 To $4.6M+ From YouTube… Here’s How

Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel.

We have here today the, um, I would say you did both. You did both. You fulfilled the brown man's obligation. You became a doctor, but then you fulfilled the dream in your heart and you became a content creator and you are now one of the most popular YouTubers, productivity guys that people know on YouTube. This is Ali Abdaal. Welcome to the pod, man. I've been watching you for a while. It's fun to have you here.

Thanks so much. And I've been a fan of the pod for years now. It's hard to believe it's been years because I remember when you guys first started out and it was actually, you know, how did you make your first million? And I was like, whoa, what a great concept for a podcast. I was thinking of starting a podcast and everyone needed an angle and the my first million angle was just so good. And I've been keeping up with you guys on Twitter and stuff for ages as well. So it's super nice to be here.

You gave us a big shout out early on in our podcast. I think you did a video where it was like 10 podcasts that I like right now or something like that. And that was a big deal for us.

So that was when you got, that was when My First Million was still a small podcast. And I was like, I've discovered something. There's these two guys who like ask people how they made their first million. This is incredible stuff.

I remember when I DM Sam the name of the podcast, I was like, I think I'm thinking about calling it this. And then he was just like, it's so bad. And I was like, I was like coming up with my response. He goes, That it's perfect. Sam, why did you, why did you think it was so bad? What is that? So bad that it's perfect?

Well, I'm not particularly good at naming things. My company was called The Hustle, so I'm not good at naming things. Sean, you're actually quite good at naming things, but it was for some reason it was, it just, I think that we've done a good job of appearing to be like internet marketing shady, almost like on the surface. Like when I go to the barber and they say, what do I do for a living? And I, I want to cringe when I say the name of the pod. But then I'm like, but it's not what it sounds like. And so we, I think it's a good name because it grabs your attention, but we've done a good job of staying on the right side of, I think, like doing the right stuff and having good taste.

That's why I think, I think it's a fantastic name. I came across some occasionally people on Twitter like to hate on the clips in the podcast. I think because you guys are so open about talking about money. And there was a quote tweet that I saw being like, lol, I can't, you know, what would you expect from a podcast called My First Million? And I was like, It's perfect. That's exactly what you'd expect from a podcast called My First Million. And I think the name is amazing. And yeah, I just love, I just love how brazen you guys are about talking about money. Loved the Neil Patel episode in particular. You were just like asking him so specific questions. Huge, huge, huge fan of the show.

He, to this day, I give him credit. He's the only guy that has an absurdly high life burn rate. His burn rate per month was, I think, $180,000. He just said it matter-of-factly. He's like, that's what I spend for a month. Me and Sam fell out of our chair and we're like, what are you spending $180,000 on? And then he's like, what do you mean? Of course I need that. Here, I need that. And he's like, explained it. Yeah.

For my 3 nannies, my 2 housekeepers, my, all of that stuff. Yeah.

That TikTok clip has like 10 million views because it's the whole comment section just hates him in that for saying that. But I respect him for coming on here and standing. He told his truth. What do the kids say? That's your truth, man. You stood by your truth.

Just for the record, I love that. And I love that his CEO called him out because you do, you know, our good friend Andrew Wilkinson, and I think Sean and I are also victim to this as well, where we oversimplify things and we act like it's, it's no big deal. It's very low stress. And that's not the reality. I was just texting my friend Austin Reef who runs Morning Brew and like Morning Brew is a similar thing where on paper they're killing it on behind the scenes or in the public eye they're killing it and they are killing it.

And it's so simple. It's just a newsletter.

Wow.

It's just a newsletter.

Yeah.

How hard can it be?

Yeah. And you know what we were bitching to each other about? We were both saying how we had the Sunday scaries. I was like, I've got to do this podcast, I got to prepare, I've got this meeting and that meeting, and then I got to go do, run this errand. And I think that it is not, it looks cool, just like your life, Ali. Your life particularly looks cool. You share your revenue, you're making profit, you're living a nomadic life, you've got a book coming out, you seem well, you know, you're put together. All of our shit stinks and it's all significantly more stressful than I think than it looks like.

What's the hot mess part of your life, Ali?

The hot mess part of my life is that I generally don't enjoy filming YouTube videos, which is kind of annoying.

Love what you do, right?

Yeah, exactly. There are lots of aspects about being a YouTuber that I really like, and sometimes I enjoy making videos, but I've made like 750 videos to date where I just speak to the camera, and I've maybe enjoyed filming like 20 of them. And it's kind of weird because like, I love the reading, the synthesizing, the learning. But when it comes to sitting down, like, you know, I love doing podcasts because there's someone else on the other end and it's like there's energy, it's more fun. But just speaking to a camera on my own, like, it's kind of depressing. But hey, you know, that's the price to get the message out there. And I do enjoy other aspects of the process.

What else do you hate about it? You said that there's a few things you like and there's a bunch of stuff you dislike. What else do you dislike?

I don't like doing sponsorship ad reads. This is going to sound like very like first world problems because You know, a sponsored ad read is, I have to sort of stumble through my words doing it every which way. The brand says that, oh, you have to say the wording in this specific way. And then I'm kind of like, yeah, it takes me 20 minutes to do like a 60-second ad read just because of all the stumbling and stuff that's, that's, that's going through there.

By the way, our producer Ari, to be honest, our producer Ari is like grimacing because Sean's actually pretty good with words. I stumble a lot, but I, you, so HubSpot's our main sponsor. I use HubSpot. I like the product. I own the stock, whatever. And I still freaking hate reading what they tell me to say because they phrase it in such a way where I'm like, that's not how I would say it. I didn't even know this feature existed. So like, it sucks, man. I'll do, it'll take me an hour to do about 5 minutes worth of reads.

Hey guys, it's Q4. It's winning time. Yeah, it's winning time. It's with the new sales prospecting tool. It's like, oh God, do I have to? Are you sure I have to say this?

Or listen to this. I can't even do it for our podcast.

On the script they write, read this word for word.

Please do not change this one because like we have one, we have some we get to improvise and some we don't. Or we'll do our reads and it's like, check out My First Million wherever you get your podcasts. You know, like, I don't even like doing our reads.

Yeah, we actually switched to HubSpot like 2 weeks ago for, or rather have started using HubSpot for our CRM because we never really had a CRM for our course sales and RevOps and all that stuff.

Is that because it's Q4 and it's winning time?

It's Q4 and it's winning time. Mate, actually, like, I did my first HubSpot ad read yesterday because they're now sponsoring my videos as well, which is cool. It's like, as soon as we switched to them, they gave us a discount on the package. They're sponsoring the videos. They're really good. Love HubSpot. Check out HubSpot, everyone.

I wanted to ask you about some of your productivity stuff, because if I go to your YouTube channel, which I have many times, and I'll be honest, when I usually go there, I'm like, okay, he seems like, like such a good guy. Like someone you'd want to be friends with. But I was like, in terms of YouTube success, he's not the funniest, he's not the sexiest, he's not the smartest, he's not the most successful guy on the platform, but you really win and you do really well. And one of the things you do well is you just share very useful, just useful things. And I think useful is actually kind of underrated. So instead of trying to impress everybody, you just try to be a little bit helpful, like a, you know, like a friend helping you out. And you had this list of productivity things you do. You probably got like 50 YouTube videos about productivity, but you did this Twitter list that I thought was really good, which was how you are more productive than the average person. And I want to read you some of these and I want you to explain what they are because I didn't—

but by the way, Sean, for the record, he ranks pretty high on like the sexiest. He's got the good London accent. He's a doctor. Like he's dressed nice.

He's at least 2 notches above average on all of those things.

Yeah.

I'm just saying he's not the most in the world, right? Like, uh, Like if I go on Twitch, there's some Twitch streamers where I'm like, I understand why she's doing well. This, this makes sense to me why this would appeal to people on this platform. I get it. Um, all right. So anyways, let's go back to your productivity stuff. So you have a technique you call the daily highlight. What is the daily highlight?

Uh, one thing I would say before is that before talking about this stuff, this thread that you're referencing was actually a bit of an experiment I did a year ago where I got ChatGPT to write the whole thing before ChatGPT was cool. So the first two are legit and the rest are just pure— it's all bullshit made up by AI. Great. A few days—

I was blown away. Your best work, I thought.

With my kids, whenever I need them to do something or like walk somewhere to do something, like if I just say, hey, let's go over here, they'll never— like, they'll wander around, they won't come. I'm like, come on, come on, let's go. But if I'm like, hey guys, it's a mission, we have to find your jackets before we go outside, and I'm like, it's a mission, they're like, it's a mission, and then they get really excited. And then yesterday, by myself, I couldn't find my, uh, my laptop. I was like ready to do some more conf— I didn't have no idea where I put it in my house. And I just told myself, Sean, it's a mission. And I got kind of excited. I'm not gonna lie. The third grade teacher technique works. Sam, do you do this kind of one highlight? Like he says, he calls it daily highlight. I call it the one big thing where I, my to-do list, I have a to-do list of one. Do you do something like that or do you have a long to-do list every day?

Look, I know what the audience is thinking. They think, Sam, you're this wonderfully attractive man. You're so charismatic. You're so productive. The truth is, is I actually struggle with this. I just have a to-do list. I keep a notebook here and I just like make my list in the morning. And frankly, I find it very stressful and like not— my productivity scheme is, I find very unproductive. What I believe, and I actually think this is, uh, I believe Sean might do this too. And I think this is actually maybe wrong of us is I leave a lot of open space and I just kind of follow my heart of like what's going on. And I used to tell myself, well, Paul Graham said it's the manager versus the artist. Yeah, the maker schedule. And it's okay to have open space. And I find myself getting really stressed when I have things on my calendar, but I find myself just messing around far too often than I should be, probably.

The manager schedule, the maker schedule, and then the skater boy schedule.

Yeah. Just like, you know, like, uh, what Warren Buffett said, we made a joke, but it was real. Warren Buffett says he just reads all day. So I would just read like fiction books and I'm like, oh, I'm productive. It turns out he's reading like annual reports, you know, he's working actually, but no, I find my, my, I find my productivity schedule to be pretty shitty. And I'm actually, I wrote down the daily highlight and then the next one you have is the hourglass. I find some of those like little tricks actually helpful, but I don't do anything.

Do you, Sean?

Well, I do the one big, I call it the one big thing. In fact, I had somebody build me a Chrome extension so that every time I opened a tab, it would say your one big thing is, and it's just a huge like text of what's the one thing. And the beauty of this is what I used to do, like I used to do a to-do list and here's how you, here's how I would do the to-do list. It would be written down. So there's no particular order. Like I wouldn't rank it by like kind of most urgent or important. I would just sort of write down the things as they came to mind. And then I would like, it's like if it's a plate of food, I would just go for the french fries first every time. So I would always do the thing that's not actually the thing I need to do. I do the easy one. I would talk myself into, oh, it's getting me momentum. And then I would go on a tangent and I would just never get the important shit done and I would never finish the to-do list. Everything I did would add stuff, add more things to the to-do list. Oh, I emailed this guy. Okay, I got to follow up. He said, send him the deck. Now I got to make the deck. I got to, right? So I was always adding and it just was a source of stress. So I had this, my coach, my trainer, he said this thing to me. He goes, you know, what if you did it a little bit differently? So, you know, like what's one thing where if you just had this one outcome, of the day, the whole day is a success, whether you did anything else or not. Is there such a thing? And if there's not, then you're sort of like hunting mice. You're just nibbling on little stuff. You don't have anything that's actually impactful that you're, that you're striving towards. But if you have one impactful thing, then that one thing should be enough for the day. Imagine just doing the one most important thing every day for 365 days out of the year. You would outpace all the productivity nerds out there.

I've got these days, Ali, where like, it feels like I was busy all day and at the end of the day I've got nothing done. Do you know what I mean?

Mate, I know exactly what you mean.

Yeah. I feel bad at the end of the day. I don't feel good.

Yeah, I find that that happens for me a lot when I have like the day chock-a-block with calendar events. And that's when I find that like, you know, as Sean said, I haven't made time to do the one big thing, the daily highlight, the adventure, whatever the fuck you want to call it. And just honestly, just doing that thing makes such a huge difference to everything else. 'Cause it's like you've hunted the big thing and now you can hunt the mice if you really want to. 'Cause like the small stuff does build up and it's important to, you know, send that email, send the follow-up, all that crap. But actually the thing that's really gonna get you to where you wanna be is generally making big progress on that one big thing.

And by the way, it's not one big task. I don't do it as one task. It's one like outcome you're going for. Like, oh, today I'm gonna find the right person for this role, which might involve me doing 5 tasks. Like, go through the applications, shortlist the best 5, email them and research them or whatever, right? Like whatever it is, schedule a call with them, but like it's one outcome that you're going for. What's this hourglass one? Is this, is this for like timeboxing?

That's fascinating. So you're saying, that's a fascinating insight. Procrastination is not I'm putting off finishing the thing. It's— I'm putting off starting the thing. And as soon as you start, you're like, you know, you're— it's actually quite easy to just keep going and finish the thing for most people.

Yeah, absolutely. The law of inertia. It's like if you're, you know, one— I still struggle with working out, but if I just get myself to the gym and just do something for 5 minutes, I'm there already. I might as well keep going. And it's kind of fun and I kind of get the endorphin rush and all that. But it's that first step of like getting You know, going downstairs to the hotel gym or wherever I am these days and actually just lifting the first weight. That's by far the hardest part. And that's the hardest part of any task is just getting started.

I, um, I went to this like conference on Thursday and Friday. Sean, do you know Nick Gray?

Of course I know Nick Gray. He's the, uh, the inventor of the 2-hour cocktail party. There really wasn't one until he made it.

Ollie, do you know Nick? Have you seen Nick Gray?

Yeah, we hung out in Austin a few months ago.

Great guy. Yeah, so he's a character. He's like a type of guy where you think you're hanging out with him and you're like, is this a shtick? Are you just acting? And it's not. Like, for example, my wife and I got lunch with him one day and he goes, all right, I have a list of topics. First, I want to talk about my dating life. And then at 11:24, we're going to switch, Sarah, to what you're doing at work. And then at 11:44, Sam, I want to ask you an update on this thing. Like, and it's like, that's like his real life. And it's like, exhausting at first, and then you realize it's pretty wonderful to hang out with him.

He's super intentional. He's like the walking equivalent of, "May I have a kiss?" Yeah.

He's like, he's, he's, he's wild. And for his 41st birthday, he wanted to host a conference. That's what he wanted to do. And so he convinced Cloudflare, which is a stock that he owns and he loves. And so that's why he did it there. He convinced them to let him have this 40-person event there. And he had all these people come. And it was 40 people or so, and we basically just went into groups of 8 and we would discuss a topic that was like, it could have been parenting and you go to the parenting one, it could have been whatever. And there was a bunch of YouTubers there. So there was Paddy Galloway, who's a really fascinating guy. And this other guy I met who I didn't know at the time, his name was Josh Wiseman. Have you guys heard of Josh Wiseman? He's a chef. The chef. He's a chef.

Yeah, he's an incredible YouTuber, like 9 million subscribers.

Yeah, or more. I think it's like $11 million. It's a lot. And he was in the investing one with me. So we were talking about finances and then I, um, there was a bunch of other YouTubers there and it was, first of all, it was one of the best events I've ever been to. I met so many interesting people, but second, there was like maybe 10—

Best birthday conference you've ever been to?

Best 41st birthday conference I've ever been to. Dude, there was this one time. So Nick owns a bunch of Cloudflare stock and he goes, hey, I convinced a VP of Cloudflare to come down here. To meet me. He has no idea what he's walking into. And he goes, when you guys get here, I need you to start cheering for him and telling him how much you love Cloudflare. And so this guy, this like, he's the VP of engineering. He just walks in and he thinks he's just meeting Nick. And we're like, woo! Is that the VP of engineering of Cloudflare? Tell us your mission. And he goes, oh, Cloudflare's mission is to make sure the internet doesn't go down. And we're like, I believe! And we're like screaming and cheering. And he like convinced this guy and he never told the guy that this was a joke. So to this day, this guy is still thinks that we were there to like discuss how much we love Cloudflare. Uh, it was amazing. But anyway, all these YouTubers were there and about half of them didn't— first of all, they're making so much money. I didn't realize it would be like a 26 or 27-year-old guy who's making maybe $10 million a year. If I had to guess, a lot of them don't. It didn't— and by the way, you want to know the craziest thing? A lot of them, they're— the biggest problem that they were discussing was like they kept a lot of their cash just in a checking account as opposed to like investing it because they were afraid to put it even into a high-yield savings account, which blew my mind of how many successful people do that. But a lot of them, it seemed, didn't run their business like a business. They ran it like almost a hobby, but the numbers were astronomical, making a million dollars a month, I imagine. But it seems like you're running your business like a real business and like you've hired like, I don't know, 15 or 20 people. Have you seen this with a lot of these YouTubers where they're just like, it's like run like a 26-year-old who's just creative as opposed to a business?

Yeah. Yeah, I see this quite a lot. This is like the biggest thing I talk about when I hang out with other YouTubers. I haven't met many who are like 27 and doing tens millions without treating it like a business. I think that would, that's a very unusual state to be.

And by the way, I'm not referring to that guy, Josh. I'm just referring to in general. I met people. I don't want to like break any confidentiality.

There was this one guy there who had this big audience and he said, we were talking about cancelization, like getting canceled for saying the wrong thing, particularly with Israel and Palestine going on and like taking a stand. And do you have to? That was like the discussion. And this one guy was like, I've basically created an audience that's going to cancel me sometime in the near future. I don't know when, but I know it's going to happen. And, uh, and like that, it was a really stressful, uh, uh, a stressful life. He seemed like he had, he's like, they're going to like, I'm their monkey at the moment and I'm dancing for them, but they're going to come after me eventually. And it seemed really stressful to be living that life.

Yeah, it's a pretty stressful place to be. I know one of my big things is all about like treating the creator thing more like a business because like almost no one that I speak to actually treats it like a business. And I think if you do learn, if someone's listening to this and they're a creator, if you learn like the basics of business, like what is an SOP and reading books like The E-Myth and Traction and things like that, you end up with like, oh shit, I can apply all of these principles of business, OKRs and KPIs and shit to my YouTube channel. And therefore I can like, oh, I can use a CRM, I can use HubSpot, I can drive sales to a product. Oh, that's cool. And you get this whole new skill set, which then serves you for the rest of your life, but also really benefits your YouTube channel or whatever the thing might be.

Well, let's put up on the screen on YouTube, you did this, you're very open about how much money you make. And You show your revenue year by year. So 2017, you did $2.27, which was your AdSense revenue when you got started, but then it goes $24,000, $130,000. So I want to point out here, you're now 3 years in and you were a doctor. So you're in 3 years basically making less than what a kind of a traditional full-on doctor would make. I think you were like in your, whatever the UK version of residency is. Some version of that. But then in 2020, you jumped from 130,000 up to 1.2 million. Uh, what happened there in that jump? Was that you released the course?

$130K to $1.2 million, then $4 million in 2021, $4.6, I think that was the last one I saw in 2022. I think you finished a little higher than that maybe. And you're profiting, you know, the profit margins were very good. So when you made $1.2 million in revenue, your profit was $950K. So like incredible profit margins. I don't know what that is. That's roughly 80% or something. And then you, you know, you've done $2 to $2.5 million of profit the last couple years. I'm curious of two things. One, why do you think your course hit when so many courses fail or just fail to get get the same type of traction? Is it, um, what do you attribute that to?

Isn't that hilarious? I went to the exact same thing where I'm like, Russell Brunson, Neil Patel, scam. And then I like start reading their stuff and I'm like, no, it's not a scam at all. Maybe I think a lot of scammers consume that stuff and implement it, but it's definitely not. It's really helpful stuff.

Yeah, it's incredible stuff. When I first read Dotcom Secrets, I was like, I cannot believe I've been sitting on this for 15 years. Like, I should have been reading all the Russell Brunson stuff from day one. Essentially, the before and after was before, when I was selling a course, I was like, oh, I'm making a course and then selling the course. It's like, right, so like, what, how can I just explain what the course is? Basically, it was like a very sort of unsophisticated way of doing things. I didn't have any formula for writing a landing page. It was just like, oh, I think maybe this should go on it. I was just sort of making shit up as I went along. And 2 years later, when I read $100 Million Offers and Dotcom Secrets and explored this world of marketing a little bit more, that was when I realized, hang on, people have been selling courses online for like 20 years plus at this point. They've got a playbook, they've done all the testing. And one of the big mindset shifts was separating the offer from the fulfillment of the offer. Like the thing that people are buying is the offer and the offer needs to be a grand slam offer to the point that people feel like they're a dumbass for saying no to it. And then you can always worry about the fulfillment later. And there's something weird about separating it into those two of like, oh, okay, cool. So now when we make a course, we just focus on the offer. We're like, until the offer is amazing and the landing page is amazing, we're not even going to bother creating the course because like, what's the point? And the creation of the course will be sort of based on what the offer is based on, like, you know, talking to users and talking to people in our audience and being like, hey, what do you need to know about productivity? And then just following a formula for like funnels in terms of like upsells and downsells as per the Russell Brunson method. And there's a really good book, Copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards. He's like one of Russell's like acolytes and that's really freaking good. And I was like, oh, the headline's really important. The subhead is really important. Shit. This is the structure of a landing page. You should talk about the user's problems. Okay, let's just do that. And we did that and that, you know, final cohort of the course did like 2 million in a week and I was like, fuck, I wish I'd done this earlier.

So my issue with the thing— I've read all those books too, and I think they're awesome. My issue that I've always personally challenged, struggled with is like, for example, in Alex Hormozi's book, he was like, for Gym Launch or whatever business he had, he was saying like, you know, we'll prove that for you spend $40 grand with us and then you make $150,000 in additional revenue. Like, we'll somehow prove that. And if you don't, you get your money back. So he was like, you got to make it irresistible. So of course you should spend $40K, you'll make $150K. And I was like, yeah, that's irresistible, but I got to figure out how to do that. And that's actually quite challenging. I mean, like it was hard just to come up. I mean, I could make a landing page sound amazing. It's actually quite challenging with the course. It's a bit easier because it's sometimes a one-time purchase and you just have to like be like, well, here's just the information that I've got to give them. How do you bridge that gap between fulfillment and promise?

Yeah, this was another big, um, sort of before and after moment.

You don't.

You don't. Exactly. Yeah. That's one of your team's values is just fuck them. Um, yeah, exactly.

Do you have a— so the business is going well. I think in your latest video, you're living, you said you're living nomadically now. You said you're going to do $5 point something million in revenue. Um, what's— do you have like a, like a North Star where you're like, I think the business can get to here? Like, is there a world, are you one of these guys where you're like, I want to get to $50, $100 billion business? Do you have an ambition and what is it and what businesses are you going to launch to get there?

Yeah, that's a great question. I actually don't. And I'd love to get your guys' take on this. My North Star is when I'm dead and people are speaking at my funeral, I just want them to say, A, I was a nice dude, but B, that my my stuff helped them in some way, like helped them live a better life, or like I taught them something or something like that. Like, my whole North Star is how do I continue being able to learn, synthesize, and teach forever? So I'm super inspired by, for example, people like Tony Robbins. Uh, he's got his downsides, but like, the cool thing is he's been doing this stuff for 47 years, and millions of people around the world say his stuff changed their life. That's pretty cool. Tim Ferriss has been doing this stuff for like nearly 20 years, and Loads of people around the world would say he changed their life. I would say Tim Ferriss changed my life. That's pretty cool. So that's the North Star. It's like, how do I just— it's that thing of like, once you're playing your infinite game, which is what I'm playing right now, like the only objective that makes sense is to be able to continue playing the game. And so I don't have any revenue goals. I don't have any profit goals. I have a bit of a profit goal. It's like, let's just make as much profit as the year before, at least, please. But beyond that, I'm not shooting for 10, 20, 50 million, 100 million. We are building like a SaaS product on the side that I'm a sort of co-founder in. You know, I like hearing the ideas that you guys come up with in the podcast. I'm a subscriber to Trends just to see, is there anything interesting that I can come up with here? But honestly, for me, the main thing is how do I just keep on being able to make content, write books, make videos, do podcasts, whatever formats are going to come along in the future to be able to teach. And so being a good teacher is my North Star. So please do challenge me on that because I don't know if I'm bullshitting myself.

Uh, well, I think you're definitely telling yourself a story, but we all tell ourselves that whatever the answer is, it's a story. That one sounds like it serves you pretty well. So, so keep it, I would say. Um, you know, it is probably worth, worth questioning. Like if I just asked you, what would be a more true answer?

I think what would be more true is I love teaching and if someone offered me an easy way to get to 10 million, I wouldn't say no to it, but If, yeah, so there is a 10 million.

Yeah. The funeral thing, I think, is the part that smelled like, you know, where we borrow from others versus what's actually true in our core, like what makes us want to do something. I personally have never been very motivated by like my actual funeral. I do think it's a good signal. It's a good side effect of a life well lived. But it's not something I would get excited about is like, I'm going to do this because at my funeral, they'll this will be remembered, you know, that sort of thing. Whereas it sounds like what you really have said is you love the learning part, you like the teaching part. You may not actually like the format you teach today, which is, um, like YouTube videos. You, you kind of admitted that, you know, you liked maybe 20 of the 700 videos, that you enjoyed making those, but you really enjoyed the research and the learning part. That, that resonates with me. I remember we did a, a set of interviews in LA where we tried to book bigger name guests, Mark Manson and Bryan Johnson. We booked all these guests and to do it, I was like, okay, I'm going to do the best job I possibly can. I'm going to research like as deep as I can go on all these people. And I went, I did, I went like, I spent basically like 2 or 3 full days researching each of those people. If you spend 2 or 3 full days researching somebody, you have a PhD. I have a PhD in Mark Manson. I like, I have fully researched him. Like I went and found he was like, had this pickup artist alter ego back in the day, and I went and read all his stuff. And then I read his first book that nobody even talks about, Models, rather than The Subtle Art of Persuasion.

Models. Oh, great book.

Read all of it, right? And so then, and I had so much fun doing it. I didn't do 3 days because it needed 3 days. Frankly, it probably needed 3 hours, but I got into it and I could justify it because I had this big interview booked and we booked the studio so I could justify doing whatever the hell I want. And so I indulged myself and just went further because I was enjoying it. Then came the actual interview and he's a great guy. The interview turned out fine, but it was like a 7 or 8 compared to the fun I had in actually like going down the rabbit hole myself and actually trying to learn things. It sounds like that might be true for you too, where you, the 10 out of 10 is the learning and the 7 out of 10 is recording the content for YouTube.

Yeah, I think for me the learning is 10 out of 10. I think teaching in real life is also a 10 out of 10. Like when I go back through my life and think of the most meaningful moments, like I quite enjoyed being a doctor, but I enjoyed it way more when I had a medical student attached to me who I could teach along the way. And, you know, on days where I didn't have someone I was teaching, I would kind of be looking forward to going home so I could make YouTube videos. But on days where I did have someone I was teaching alongside, the time would just fly. I wouldn't be thinking, oh, you know, when's this day going to end? I'd be thinking, fucking love this. This is so fun. Um, so I want to do more like live seminar, live teaching-y type things next year. That's something we've got in the pipeline.

My therapy, my end of my therapy session for you is I think the actual North Star should be if your learning is a 10 out of 10 today, find a way to turn the teaching into a 10 out of 10 and then you've won, right? Because then you're literally just doing the shit you truly enjoy in the infinite game. You can do that forever.

I also think, Ali, that like, so my bullshit detector was going off when you were telling me what your goals are, because I think that you can have multiple goals. So I think that, I think that I believe what you're saying about how you, how you want to be remembered and all that. But I think that it doesn't sound, I think it sounds like crude to say like, well, I would like to hit $10 million in revenue maybe by year 8 or whatever. And I, and I think that maybe you didn't say that because it sounds crude, but I think that that's perfectly, that's a wonderful goal. I think that like with me personally, I think of this business thing, you're past the point where it, you have security. I think that it's the same way that when you're exercising, you know, you're like, I want to run a 5K at this time. I'm not going to be devastated if I don't do it, but it's just a really fun goal to chase after. And I think that's the same with a lot of business stuff, which is you want a net worth by this age, or you want your business to hit this much in revenue or profit or users. And I don't think that you need to stake your personal or your self-esteem or your personal self-worth on it, but I still think it's exciting. Like when it's like, man, this new SaaS thing I'm working on, maybe one day this could make this much in revenue. And if it doesn't, it could still be awesome so long as I enjoyed it. But that's just exciting, you know, like it's an exciting thing to shoot for or, uh, and I think that's okay to admit that, but it's for some reason it seems like you didn't want to.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm— the thing that excites me is, is, again, this could just be a story, but it honestly is that thing of I just want to learn and share cool stuff. And that focus on the process, focus on the things that are in my control, has led to like— the score takes care of itself when you focus on the things that are in your control.

Let me ask you a question. You had this story about your, the first business you ever launched and you were 18 years old and it didn't go well. Tell the story of this $1,000 business that you had when you were 18 years old. What happened?

Sam, have you ever had that? Have you ever had like a big L that's turned that What felt like a big L in the moment that turned into a W?

My whole thing was like just growing up where like my parents controlled money and where it was like, you're not allowed to do this. Or, you know, like when your parents say like, well, if you're living under my roof, you're going to do this. And I, there's been many times where I was like, at a very young age, I was like, all right, fine. Money equals power then. And then Basically everything that I've done since then has been because my parents probably, because they said no to me a handful of times and I said, all right, then I'm going to be completely free and money is one way to achieve that freedom. Yeah, I mean, it all stems, basically every great business person, I think, probably stems from some type of childhood trauma, whether it's your parents telling you no, or you see your mother be poor, or you get scammed out of a MacBook.

When we sold Milk Road, I asked the guys, I was like, man, you guys have been, they've just been doing different businesses for so long and they had a pretty interesting track record, like small wins, big wins, shit like that. And I was like, what's the driver? Because like, you know, once you, if you bank $100 million and you're still taking risks and starting businesses, like you're not doing it for the money, I don't believe. And I was like, what's the driver? Or like, what's, and then he's like, I don't know what it is now. He's like, but for a long time, he's like, Both of them had the same story and it wasn't like, this wasn't on the podcast. This wasn't to look cool. This was like us hanging out. And he said it matter-of-factly. He's like, yeah, this girl rejected me when I was like 14 years old. And he's like, I literally felt like shit. And I was like, okay, I don't want to be rejected again. How do I make myself awesome? And he's like, I didn't know what the answer was, but I immediately started to be like, oh, if I'm okay at this, I'm good at this. I'm going to become awesome at this instead. And so he's like, I was good at like the internet, making websites, stuff like that. And I just like went into overdrive. And he's like, the other guy had the same story. He's like, yeah, I lived this. He's like, I had 6 friends and in college and they had, uh, we wanted to live off campus together and they got a house that only had 5 rooms. And I was the odd man out and I was just like, fuck these guys. I'm going to, okay, I'm going to go live in my, by myself, but I'm going to like, I'm going to go into the hole and I'm going to come out a different guy.

What's yours, Sean? Because you seem like you've had your act together. I mean, you seem emotionally stable.

By the way, Ali, welcome to my life. So I asked Sean a question. He tells me this amazing story where I'm totally enthralled. I was into it. He does such a good job of telling the story and I'm like, I don't even know what to say. I'm interested. Yeah. I like fall down this slope and I'm like, I don't even remember what I asked, but like, what else you got? Keep, keep telling me, tell me another, tell me another story.

I want to learn, uh, about titles. So I think that one of the reason your course does so well is that it's not called, you know, how to be, how to, you know, be famous on YouTube. It's called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy and part-time, I think just appeals to a whole different segment of people. And I always think about these choices because when you see the title, what you don't see is the 50 other options that were considered. And I think about this with like your entire channel. Like if I go to your YouTube channel right now, And I sort by, let's say popular, right? You know, some of your titles are just really good. How I type really fast, all caps, and then 156 words per minute. Or how I ranked first at Cambridge University, the essay and the thumbnails you're holding up like this notebook that looks like it's got, you know, the secret instructions inside. Or my evidence-based skincare routine. So even though I said you weren't the most beautiful guy, you got good skin and you, But saying my evidence-based skincare routine is so different than just saying my skincare routine. I'm curious, what's your method to madness on getting good at titles or how you come up with the stuff?

Yeah, nice. We think a lot about titles. What we found basically is that the only thing that allows us to predict the performance of a video is just the title. It's not even the thumbnail. Some people like thumbnail, but like in an educational channel, my thumbnails look broadly similar. Very rarely the thumbnail. It just tends to be the title. If we know that if the title is good, then by default, the content is going to be at least reasonable and useful. That's our main thing is like, is this useful? And so the video is going to fly or flop based on the performance of the title.

How do you know the title will be good though?

By the way, that's the same offer, separating the offer from the delivery of the offer is the same principle, right?

Exactly. It was the same thing for the book. You know, it took like about 100 iterations to land on feel-good productivity as like the thing we I've still got my Apple Notes file with hundreds of title options trying to get at this idea of being productive in a nice, fun, joyful sort of way. And the title actually came to me in the shower, like, 2 years into the journey of writing the book. On just on that note, one thing I would do differently next time is any feature book that I write, I would make sure I've got the title nailed before trying to write the book, because the title informs the concept and the hook, which informs everything else. And there was so much surgery we had to do on the book. Once we came up with that title to be like, oh, okay, that's the title. So now let's rejig everything in the book to make sure it like matches the promise, you know, the offer, the title and the thumbnail of the book. But when it comes to YouTube videos, we just do a lot of iteration.

He's like, how do you know a good title from a bad? Like when you're trying to decide what are your— obviously it's just a judgment call over time, you get a bunch of intuition, but is there anything you do or anything that led you to be better at titles?

I was like, huh, I suppose this works. Yes, 6 million views and it's how I take notes on my iPad Pro in medical school. Is that the one?

Yeah, that's the one. Um, and that was the first, that was about a year into my channel. Yeah.

Are you using software to help you do this or are you just browsing?

Our producer, by the way, I just saw her look down. She's like taking notes on how we can improve our channel. What's the software that you're fooling around with? Because I bet you've seen a lot of interesting creators launch cool businesses. I bet you've had a lot of opportunities run by you. Why did you settle on this one and what is it?

How much are you going to charge?

Yeah, we're thinking like $10 a month initially. Um, we've already got like 20 paying users, uh, from the alpha friends and family test that we did where we sort of found 30 people, like 20 of them were like super, super power users and almost all of them converted to paid when Pablo, the co-founder, reached out to them to be like, hey, would you like to buy early access to this? And a lot of people are using it already for like journalists and like lawyers and stuff for like recording depositions and things like that. A bunch of people are using it for journaling as well. So one thing that I'm really bullish on is like, you know, to your point about wouldn't it be cool to get to $10 million revenue? I think the way we get there is I don't try and get there through content, but we try and get there through building cool software products on the side that I use personally that I would like, oh, I would fucking love a journaling app that does this. I'd love a to-do list app that's different to Things and Todoist, but doing this.

I think that's so smart.

And then we plug it to our audience.

Or like another one is Scriv. Scriptner, is that what it's called? I know you love that app, that writing app, which I think it's just like a guy in like Montana or something like, you know, a little bit random like that who owns that writing tool. Um, but you should acquire stakes in these businesses or launch some of their own. And I think you'd be very successful at that.

Yeah. Yeah. One thing I've been thinking a lot is that with a lot of these productivity apps, they tend, they tend not to be differentiated on the product itself. Like fundamentally all to-do list apps do the same thing. And when you watch reviews of them, it's like, oh, well, Things 3 has slightly nicer animations and Todoist has like teams and this one is available on iPad, so you should get that. It's like the, the, the product features that just, that differentiate these are so small. So if we could, in theory, just clone one of these, we're in our own way, in our own design language, whatever. And we've got feature parity on the product side. We would have a distribution advantage. And the market for these productivity apps is so huge that like, you know, a few users would be, would be pretty good.

How many users to, let's say if you owned Scrivener or Opal, how many users could a handful of your videos drive, do you think?

Um, probably thousands to tens of thousands based on what the users are that we drive to like Skillshare and Brilliant and these other like sponsory type things. If there's a good fit with the audience, then yeah.

There was a time where Sean brought up some company that does accounting or his taxes on the pod. And then afterwards he asked, he, I don't think Sean, you didn't have any, he didn't, he had no stake. He was just like, I just met this guy and it was cool. And I ended up using the product and it was interesting. Here's what it was. And then he like hollered at them 2 weeks later and was like, did you see a bump? And the guy was like raving, you know, I don't know what numbers I'm allowed to say or not. But Sean, you could decide if you wanna say it or not, but it was like a substantial sum.

He was like, your Calendly was booked out like 4 months or something like that. I don't know if they didn't have a lot of slots or what happened, but like that was, uh, that was great for them. Um, when, when that happened. Yeah.

But then we both had a light bulb moment and we're like, yeah. Oh, there's something there. You know what I mean? Um, now of course you have to pick and choose which ones you do and you can't do too many at one time. You probably should only do one at a time for a certain amount of time. But yeah, like we had that same moment as well.

So one thing that we did, we, so we recently launched, uh, well, recently, a few months ago, um, a studio called Hey Friends, which is like a dumb, with Hunter and Sahil. Yeah. With Hunter and Sahil. Oh yeah. Because it's like, you guys are working with them as well. Um, and one tweet from me and yeah, just like one tweet drove 2 million MRR worth of leads that they're still like going through the sales calls and like trying to shore up capacity because there's so many people wanting this 14,000.

MRR, worth of leads.

Yeah.

Wow. Okay. That's a shitload. Yeah.

Who's even Twitter famous, right? Like I can, I can go on YouTube and Instagram and I know like, oh, I don't know who Charli D'Amelio is, but I know that that's a person that's TikTok famous. Like started on that platform, got huge on that platform, has a huge fan base on that platform. You could say Dan Bilzerian and others were doing that on Instagram when Instagram first came out. And on YouTube, you had, you know, whoever, tons of people, MrBeast and others. I don't even know who that would be on Twitter. Who the hell is Twitter famous?

Like Sahil, maybe?

Sahil's our friend. Sahil, the most Twitter famous guy on earth. That's the biggest, like, no offense to Sahil. Sahil's great. But like, Shouldn't it be a famous person? Like, shouldn't there be like the whoever, you know, like, like MrBeast is like massive. PewDiePie was massive. These were like massive, massive creators. Who is that on Twitter? I don't even know. Like, is there, and I'm on Twitter all the time.

I guess you or our friends. I don't, I don't know.

It can't be.

I think, I think it also really, why does it not have that?

That's insane.

I think it also really depends on what audience you're going up like. Normal people have never heard of Sahil Bloom. The only people who have are the people who are in our sort of like business.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

So like, who's the mass market?

Like, you know, on Instagram, it was like beautiful people went, they were the mass market famous people, right? And then on YouTube, it's like the funny vlogger types. On Twitch, it was like Ninja is the best Fortnite player in the world. All right, Fortnite's super popular. Makes sense that Ninja's super popular and DrDisrespect and these guys, Shroud, whoever. I don't even know who those people are on Twitter. Who is like, like, is it Elon? Is he the only guy who is like famous on Twitter? Oh yeah, Trump, like, they're famous. They were famous off Twitter, which is why they're big on Twitter. Like, is there anybody who's just natively so good at tweeting that they just got huge? Because if not, something is broken about this platform.

It's not broken. My point is it's small. It's small. So how many people, how many users does Twitter have? I don't know, 300 or 400 million.

Yeah.

Yeah. A fraction compared to what the other platforms have. So it's just small. Um, and also it's text-based, so it's a little bit less exciting. So like, uh, and you don't exactly see like the view count like you do on YouTube. So I see Ali's video that has 6 million views and I'm like, oh, many other people know this person. I'll see a tweet just randomly through my, my feed and I don't necessarily, it's more one-to-one versus one-to-many. So I don't know that other people are, people are consuming it, but that's okay. It's no, it's, there is no famous people, but that's okay. You, I think you could still build a big business because there's people like Ali or you or I on there who will spend more money.

Twitter's like 20 years old. It's, if it's not big now, it's never getting big. Like it's a 20-year-old product. There's 300 million people. Like who's more than 10 million followers? Is there like, who is not already famous? Like Trump and Elon, take them out. That has more than 10 million followers organically.

I don't know. Like I know people that have blogs that got popular, right?

Like, you know, that's insane to me. Maybe it's like a couple. Yeah. There's maybe some of these like crazy., you know, like F Jerry, like, is there even like an F Jerry type of account on Twitter?

I don't know.

I don't think so. I'm sure there is. Somebody who knows is just yelling at the podcast player right now. Like, why aren't they saying blah, blah, blah, the obvious.

So we're all friends with the most famous guy on Twitter, Sahil Bloom.

Yeah.

Congrats.

Yeah. What is it that you say? A dwarf amongst midgets.

Yeah. That's basically what's going on here. Like, uh, well, and the only reason he's famous is because he's Indian. So he has a billion potential fans and he's ripped. So he's already, he's going to attract all the dudes, by the way, it's never women that are attracted to the ripped dudes. It's always other men like me who see a ripped guy. Uh, and he like talks about productivity. So he's got this whole other angle. So he's like this, he's a, he's a triple assassin.

So he's Indian, so he gets Indian followers. He's not Indian. He's also half Indian. So he's super hot also, right? Like, yeah. Amazing combination of things. Dude, if he had Ali's accent, it'd be over. Yeah.

If he had a British or a London accent and sounded all proper, he's got it all. He's, uh, he'd be, uh, he'd had everything. Um, Ali, thanks for doing this, man. The name of the book, what is it? Feel Good Productivity. It's coming out on January or December 26th, right?

Yeah. December 26th. Feel Good Productivity. It's about how to do more of what matters to you in a way that's enjoyable, meaningful, sustainable. Yeah.

Yeah. Did you not know that most gifts are bought literally 3 days before that?

Exactly.

Oh, shit. Good point. Procrastination date.

For the production.

There was this whole, like, astrology that the publishers did where they were like, well, if we go before Christmas, we're competing with cookbooks and, like, celebrity memoirs, and those are often gifted over Christmas rather than, like, self-help books. But if we go just after Christmas, people are on a New Year, New Me kind of thing, so maybe that's when it'll hit. I'm not sure how much of this was astrology versus, like, actual data, but I mean, they seem pretty switched on, so maybe there was some data behind it as well.

And your cover looks like an Airtable spreadsheet.

The COVID we, okay, here's the thing with these sorts of books. The reason Atomic Habits was so successful is because it was picked up by the demographic of women in their 30s in the Midwest, apparently, which is like by far the biggest demographic of people who buy books and especially people who buy self-help books. And it really hit that crowd like sometime in the pandemic.

So Kinsey's of the world, like when a bunch of, a bunch of ladies named Kinsey.

Yeah, that kind of thing. You know, they've got two kids, that kind of stuff. And so the publisher was like, look, productivity is too bro-y. We need to have a cover that will be a bit more gender neutral, feel a bit more like kind of fresh and inviting. And yeah, that's why productivity is like—

Alison Abdal.

Yeah, good point. Yeah, sounds about right. But that's why the COVID is all like bright and colorful and stuff. It's also my vibe. I like bright and colorful.

Well, the landing page is beautiful. It looks good, man. You're going to kill it. Congratulations on all this.

Thanks, man. Thanks.

Thanks for giving us shoutouts. And we'll, we'll have to repay you in some way when your book comes out and we'll share it. But we appreciate you coming on and we'll wrap up here.

That's the pod. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off.

On the road, let's travel, never looking back.