Status Games, Fame, and the Truth about FIRE

0:00a cool concept Dickie and I've been talking about a lot is like this idea of how much revenue can you produce per unit of attention if you look at some creators that have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers and then you do the the math of like what's their revenue relative to the units of attention that they're producing their ratio is really unimpressive you're like oh you're doing half a billion views a month but you're only doing 70 grand a month right like not a great ratio I would rather my attention be lower but my profitability per unit of attention be significantly higher dude what are

0:38you what are you drinking this is my my morning protein shake both you and Dicky Bush have very I feel like schedules like morning schedules tight schedules actually not even just morning like morning afternoon is that right yeah Dickie I think is a a bit more dialed than than I am I've tried I've tried to let go a little bit over the past couple years but I mean I guess even still I am my I am in my ways I I still have a pretty strict routine what's it what's a typical day in the life of coal say I'm gonna get up at 6 or 6 30 but actually

1:16get up at like seven or seven thirty there we go that's the honesty I'd like to hear yeah uh I try but I'm I'm not a morning person try and like maybe stretch a little bit in the morning if I can just get the body moving uh lately I've been I used to eat a big breakfast I realized that was kind of like weighing me down might be age as I get older so now I just do a protein shake with like peanut butter coconut water you know I chug one of these mountain valleys first thing in the morning hydration very important and then it just depends on the day like some some

1:49days especially because ship 30 and everything is just growing so some mornings are all team meetings you know getting people aligned for the day and then I do deep work in the afternoon other days more like middle of the week if people know what they're working on then my mornings are you know I leave them pretty empty so I can just like go straight into writing or work or something and then check in with the team around like one or two p.m and then lately this is like the first year I've been back in a good uh gym routine usually around like three three or four

2:21I'll go hit the gym two days a week I do gym and physical therapy back to back just kind of work on mobility and stuff and then after that like day's usually done come back maybe close out some slacks answer a couple emails do what I got to do and then spend the rest of the night with uh with Alyssa my fiance which is pretty dope that you're basically stopping to work at three or four every single day yeah it took a lot I mean you know though like it took a long time to get there like I you don't have that luxury in your 20s you don't have that

2:54luxury when you're like first starting my first business I didn't have that even when we first started ship 30 like I was I that was hard I mean we were putting in work you know like I was up working seven eight a.m I might stop around four or five for dinner then I'd go work another three hours you know seven to ten finish some stuff like there was definitely a year year and a half there where Dicky and I were pushing it really hard and it feels like Dickie is also pushing it really hard like I remember last time we hung out I was like come to dinner

3:25it's gonna be with a bunch of great people and and you're like I don't know Dickey's gonna be working uh and then you send me the text like ah we're working you know we are working late night or Dicky's working late now so do you find you you both work the same or is one of you working harder than the other because I think the last thing you want in a partnership is any sort of resentment where one person is working harder than the other I think we both work about the same there there are periods where just because we have different like different not even like

4:01responsibilities in the business but there's just things that I'm better at than him and things that he's way better at than me and so there's certain things that we're building where sometimes I'm in a you know like when you uh the dinner example like that was right when we were launching our ghost writing program and at that time I had a little bit more bandwidth because I had already like the month or two before was my grind month you know and so that month or two before like I didn't do anything but just work go to the gym sleep and I and I basically built the whole ghost

4:35riding curriculum in 30 days you know which is the equivalent of like writing a whole book and recording videos in 30 days it was a lot and so I had already done that work and during that time Dicky didn't have like as much to work on because I was the bottleneck you know I needed to create this curriculum but then a month later you know when you were like hey come out to dinner like then that he was in that period you know so he was like okay well now the curriculum's done now I got to go build all the infrastructure and everything for this so I think we work the same

5:04sometimes it overlaps sometimes it's I'm more one month he's more another month but like yeah I think we just both have that personality we both enjoy working you know I I enjoy being dialed in like that and so does he it sounds like you adopt the hunter mentality like the Hunter and rest mentality which is there's times where you're gonna hunt and you're gonna you're gonna kill that saber-tooth tiger and and and feast and when you're feasting like you're resting and you're gearing up for the next big hunt and you and Dicky might do it at different different times and by the way I want to like set the stage here with

5:43like who you and Dicky are and what you built ship 30 for 30 seven figures a year uh business um both of you have grown to like together I don't know five six hundred thousand followers on platforms at least in the last few years um and someone asked me recently who's one of the most underrated Twitter Roddy is actually how he does Twitter Roddy yeah

6:11and I said Cole from ship 30 for 30. under even though you're getting pretty rated because like you're you're you're PR you know a lot of people know you I still feel like you're underrated uh in the sense of like you're dialed in when it comes to building content writing for the internet Community you know building SAS products with typeshare like you you're building a an Empire through writing and and it's it's cool to see well I appreciate that I uh whether it's true or not I mean I don't know I think other people will have to be the judge but I certainly feel that way and I

6:45think kind of no matter um I think no matter how much we build I imagine I will always feel that way like I just perpetually it might just be a personality trait but I I have always enjoyed being the the unsuspecting threat in the room you know like one of one of my like Dark Twisted fantasies is always thinking like if I go to a industry event and there's a panel and everyone's real really excited to hear all these other big name people talk and then I'm on the panel and by the end of that you will know you will know that I am not just some guy you know and I

7:24that's definitely the ego part of me but it but it also I really enjoy being more unsuspecting you know and I really enjoy being in rooms with smart people and not not even like I have something to prove to them it's like I I constantly have something to prove to myself like I always want to know how much further can I go and growing up my dad used to have this t-shirt my dad was really busy and you know cared a lot about his career and so I have sporadic memories you know spending time with him but he used to wear this t-shirt when he would wake up and work

7:58out every single morning it was like a Nike t-shirt it might even have been an and one t-shirt way back in the day and on the back is this like kind of big long monologue and it's like somewhere someone is practicing harder than you they're spending more time in the gym than you they're sweating more than you they're pushing themselves harder than you and when you meet them you will lose and I want and he wore I mean my dad was like successful but like kind of cheap and so he never bought a new workout t-shirt he wore the same workout t-shirt like every single morning all my entire

8:28life all growing up and so every morning I would wake up and I would like see him downstairs and I would read the back of that T-shirt and that it was such a small thing but it had such a huge impact on me and I've thought about that seriously like my whole life as I'm just like I am that somewhere someone is working harder than you and when you meet them you will lose and I've just like fully internalized that I was actually thinking about something similar this morning so I woke up it's kind of like a cloudy rainy day here and I was talking to my fiance and

9:02I was like usually I go for a walk in the morning and I was like you know what I don't want to go for a walk it's like probably gonna rain really hard and I just like I'm not feeling it and she's like no you should go you should go so I was like okay so I go for my walk and I was thinking about why did I actually make the mental like cross the mental hurdle of like I'm not gonna go do this thing that I know is good for me and I was thinking about it and I was like I remember growing up my

9:28grandfather who lived well into his 90s and was in great shape would go for daily walks and I grew up where all my aunts and uncles live within like a one mile radius basically of each other and my grandfather would basically walk to all of us and he would kind of just like ring the doorbell would ring it's like who's that like is it you know who is there and oh it's my grandfather just like walked there it just got me thinking about like growing up nature versus nurture and how these like seemingly minor insignificant insignificant things that our parents grandparents Aunts Uncles cousins do in their lives

10:14some of them stick with you I mean not to you know we don't have to like go down the political rabbit hole right but uh recently the whole affirmative action thing getting turned over and I think that's that's like one of the Nuance points that is very difficult for people to hold in their head is where you grew up and this and the sort of things like even even the fact that I had a dad so already an advantage you know had a dad that even though you know we didn't have a lot of talks growing up and like it's not like he sat me down and like

10:48explained work ethic to me and stuff but even just the fact that in my home I could observe a male figure showing up and doing the repetitive thing every single morning huge huge nurture Advantage you know and I don't think you really realize it until you get later in life and same with you it's like just just observing how people close to you the choices they made the the ways that They Carried themselves um the choice of doing the hard thing versus the easy thing like I don't think we really realize how much we soak those things up and then you see other people who don't

11:29have those things you know and then it's like Society turns to them and it's like well why don't why why aren't you different why don't you have that it's like well you didn't have any of the nurturing you didn't have the model you didn't have the any you know so yeah I've been thinking about that a lot lately too it's a bit of like a ripple effect right like it's not about the fact that your dad wore that t-shirt so much so the fact that like what it meant what that t-shirt meant was he showed up to work every day he compared himself to the greats not like people worse than

12:03him and he did it publicly basically like he did within your family to to let your family know working out is really important health is really important and being better than other people is really important so that so when I hear stories about like you almost were like a professional hockey player you were one of the best World of Warcraft people you start a Twitter account to zero to two hundred thousand in two years you start a company and you're making like seven figures of cash flow and teaching a whole generation of people to go make a million dollars as a writer and then someone asked me oh like how did Cole

12:46and Dicky get there they must be lucky I'm like dude no no no like my aunts no like no yeah just just know that's why I love the somewhere someone is working harder than you yeah like I tell myself that every single day and any any time I don't want to do something that little phrase like pops back into my head and I all and that's all it takes like do you ever watch the Michael Jordan um documentary The Last Dance right and like how he would like make up little narratives for himself like I didn't really realize how many years that I've done that where the moment that I'm

13:26tired or the moment I don't want to do something or whatever like that little phrase comes in somewhere someone is working harder than you and it doesn't even have to be a specific per I just imagine this like it doesn't have a name it's not a real person I just imagine someone me waking up one day and going wow they did the thing that I always wanted to do and I just get filled with you know every emotion from frustration to drive to like anticipated Joy like what will that feel like when I get you know and it's just like this endless source of motivation for me how much do

13:57you think about competition of ship 30 for 30 and and your whole empire with other writing programs ghost writing programs do you think about it a lot not not really I mean so one of a cool business concept that I that I got that I've learned and been introduced to over the past couple years and I learned this from uh Christopher and Eddie who I started uh category pirates with which was a separate paid newsletter it was all about category design and one of the cool uh category design not even principles but just um like mathematical takeaways is that when you're the leader in a category the

14:38best thing that you can do is grow the category the more that the category grows the more that you benefit you know so the more that the smartphone category grows the more Apple benefits the more the electric car category grows the more Tesla benefits so I look at other writing programs and and other writers and other people talking about the same things as a net positive because they are growing the pie and the bigger the pie gets the more that we grow as well you know and so through that lens like that's why it's a bit of a contradiction because on the one hand I am a highly competitive

15:15person but it's really not competition with someone specific it's just Within Myself and then on the other hand I'm very aware of these category Dynamics where business is a little bit of a winner take all in the sense that the category King captures the majority of the category and the upside but the reality is it's also not winner take all because as the category grows lots of other people can be successful and be part of that upside as well so it's like I don't even think about it as having competition like they're they're all Partners they're all helping grow this category that we're at the Forefront of

15:49so thank you you know that's a that's a very American way of looking at it in a good way I think uh Americans Americans come at it with a lot and I love I love this about America which is you know if I'm eating I want everyone to eat type thing like let's Feast together and like it's it's all about growing the pie and not from a scarcity mindset it's really from an abundance mindset it's the best way to describe it which which is I love I love that about it I think people from like Europe and Canada often are more in a protective mindset it's like hey I built this thing

16:32and I'm just trying to like build walls around it so I could protect as much as possible I think the reality is if you're building a venture-backed business it really is winner take most like you you have to you have to act like it is yeah you have to act like it is and and to be honest like you have to Google captures 90 of search uh Facebook captures 90 of social right it is a winner take most um but I think in our world in the non-venture-backed world where you know we're building cash flowing businesses seven eight figures businesses which by the way might have an Enterprise Value

17:12in a few years of nine figures or high even high nine figures but when you're building cash flowing businesses you really can come at it like there's really no reason why you should come at it with a scarcity mindset in my opinion yeah I agree I think sort of saying it differently too it it just depends on what type of business you know because inherently if you're so if you're venture-backed you're most likely not building like an education business like you wouldn't really raise money to build a ship 30. no what do you need the money for right should I talk about that for one second sure Venture back company

17:51called me yesterday I'm an investor it's they're doing 25 million in AR okay they're doing really well they launch a quasi service based business uh attached to their SAS product okay they do it just to grease their flywheel to get people to use their SAS product more I'm looking at the numbers and I'm like this could be like they could be cash flowing 50 million dollars a year just from this service business I speak to the founder I'm like so what are you gonna do here he's like you know I'm actually thinking of shutting down shutting down the service part because it doesn't scale why oh it doesn't scale

18:32I was like well do you see the opportunity I see like I see look at these metrics he goes I know it kind of hurts me but what am I gonna do make 50 million dollars literally that's what he said because the expectations and the incentives are upside down you know when you go raise all that money like that I've I've written a bunch about this and it was a painful lesson in my first business which is every time you raise money your chances of success don't go up they go down you just kicked the goal post way further right so if you raise a million dollars and then you get

19:08acquired for 5 million that's not a that's a that's a failure you know if you raise 10 million and you don't make it to at least 100 million that's a failure you know whereas if you don't raise money or if you do like a very small friends and family or maybe strategic and you're like I just need half a million to get off the ground but I'm never going to raise money again then you build a cash flow business bootstrap or with a small round you get to a couple million you get 5 million 10 million 15 million like life-changing outcome life-changing outcome I sort of

19:40I keep asking myself like in hindsight it was like was I just never introduced to that perspective or was I just naive and didn't want to hear it because when I was a lot younger it was like you're either building Uber or you're working a full-time job like I looked at it in such a binary sort of term it's like billionaire or bust and you start to realize as you build things you do not you do not need to do that and the funny part is most Founders if you were cash flowing two million dollars a year you would your desire to go build a billion dollar

20:12business would not go up it would go down you would be like why would I expend all that effort I don't real chance I don't actually need all that two million dollars a year basically lets me live and do whatever I want and so I think that's what's weird is like when you're especially in your 20s but you're like in your 20s you have like 10 grand to your name you know and you think I have to go make a hundred million dollars to be happy and it's like you don't even know the feeling of making half a million dollars a year and if you did

20:41you would realize that like you don't need as much as you think you need you can basically do everything you want to do on two or three million dollars a year which is now that I've like built a couple businesses you start to realize like that is not as hard to build as oh I gotta go build the next Google it's way easier to do that we were texting about this the other day we're just talking about how much how much money do you really need should we talk about it publicly here yeah I mean I think there it's a there's a Nuance in there which is how much money

21:16do you really need versus how much do you want versus how much do you think you need versus how much do you think you want because I think all those are four different answers you know and so for you let's let's talk about it so mentally I remember I had a couple mentors that have each told me like 20 million is the goal you know if if you get to 20 million basically you're you can cover all your yearly expenses and and that is like actually the definition of like you don't really have to work again the reality is I mean you can get to the

21:55you don't have to work again off of 2 million if you wanted to it's just it's the it's the level of Lifestyle you know like if you're living in the middle of nowhere in Idaho you don't need as much to cover your living expenses versus if you're like I want to never have to work again but I want to live in Miami or I want to live in LA or I want to live in New York I want to talk about this concept of never having to work again a lot of us follow these subreddits like fire financial Independence retire early fat fire lean fire all the chubby fire it's getting

22:29really really popular I've taken some time off in between things and it gets boring realistically any of us or if you're listening to this podcast realistically you would be one of those people that would be bored doing nothing nothing you can't and if you're gonna do something there's going to be some economic value associated with it if you decide to do a passion project where you open up a coffee shop maybe your coffee Shop's not going to make a lot of money but you might make something you know you're buying coffee for 50 cents you sell for two dollars so I think that a lot of people are

23:02actually chasing this net worth dollar amount so that they can quote unquote you know retire but I think that like I feel retired right now straight up what does retirement mean retirement means that you can do whatever you want to do when you you know wake up every day isn't it yeah I mean I think I agree generally so the the Nuance for me is one of the things that I've really learned especially in the domain of writing is that there's two very different ways of approaching writing and one is I like to think of it as art and business and the business side of thinking about writing

23:38is starting with the end in mind and working in Reverse so it's like you know why have we chosen to spend so much time on ship 30 well we see a need we see problems we see how to solve it we solve it with writing we work in Reverse you know why did we launch our premium ghost Writing Academy we see a problem we see a need we know how to solve it we know if we solve it that's valuable we work in reverse and so a lot of what I talk about in a lot of where I've gotten to in my career as a writer is like if I want to make

24:09money as a writer or if I'm talking to someone else if you want to make money as a writer it's significantly easier to start with the end in mind start with a problem and then use writing as a vehicle to solve it when I think about quote unquote Financial Freedom or retirement or like what's that net worth number I think a lot more about the other side which is the art of writing and there's a lot of things that I want to write like I I believe that I have the capacity to write the next Game of Thrones I believe I have the capacity to write some of the best-selling Memoirs

24:42of all time I have some really cool like category shifting ideas in terms of Art and writing and new structures but if I'm really honest with myself could those make money yeah like if you really are able to create the next Game of Thrones or Star Wars or something like that massive home run right but it is significantly more unknown and more risky than starting with the end in mind and going I see a problem I'm going to just build the solution and I'm gonna go solve that and so when I think about net worth number and this idea of like never having to work again what that means to

25:18me is shifting from I see the problem and I'm just going to use writing as the vehicle to solve it to I'm going to take much bigger swings longer term bets but I'm not making decisions from a place of this is going to make me money now it's more on the I would classify as the art side as opposed to the business side I like that way of framing it you know because I think you're kind of lying to yourself if you're like where a lot of writers go wrong I think is they much earlier in their careers you don't have the money part figured out you know you haven't

25:50really gotten your footing and you're like I'm gonna go pursue the art which is great but then at the same time they want the immediate external result and that's where things get hairy because you're picking one thing but your expectations are aligned with the other and so that's why like my kind of whole thesis especially in the world of writing is I actually think it's better to focus on the business side first learn how to monetize writing learn how to use it as a vehicle to solve people's problems answer people's questions learn business models learn audience building learn all the things you need build your foundation you know and then whatever

26:25that net worth number is for one person it might be 100K for another person might be a million for another person might be 10 million whatever like get your footing but then once you've gotten your footing and you're like I now have the skills to be able to take care of myself forever like I I have a insane amount of career defensibility because I know I can always wake up tomorrow and monetize my skills in a different way you know but the ultimate goal at least for me is kind of Shifting that pendulum from I'm writing with the primary goal of making money to I'm writing with the

26:56primary goal of creating new things that might make money I want to tell you about the moment meant that I felt really free to do whatever I wanted please because I think you'll appreciate this you know in June 2020 like pretty much I mean Peak covid covet had just started I bought a house in the woods one hour north of Montreal Canada and this it's actually in a small little town but it's it's it's basically in the woods and I walk into I walk into this open house and it's this beautiful house it's five bedrooms it's overlooking you know 80 acres of land and forests and rivers

27:39I walk outside and I like just smell that fresh air it's like combination of like meat trees and Pine and and just like it's on a lake so it's like that Lake air you're hearing like I was like I don't remember the last time I hear I've heard birds chirping you know like birds yeah I was like what what is this I saw like a little blue jay literal Blue Jay just like land on this tree and I was like I need to buy this house the graphics out here are amazing the crafting this is crazy Activision you've really outdone yourself yeah I was like waiting for the lag to happen

28:21and it just wasn't [Laughter] so I go back you know I I went to this open house for fun literally that's how it always goes yeah and I go to the real estate agent and I was like how much is the house and he goes it's 330 000 what Canadian oh my God so I go okay uh like here's put a bow on it I'll take it I'll tell you I'll take it I gotta call the next day he said sorry there's there's another offer on the table I'm like okay whatever I was like put in 375. so it's to me that felt like a fair

29:07offer uh-huh get a call back five minutes later the house is yours next day I go to the bank I get a suite 2.12 interest uh interest rate loan because boy remember the days the good old days and for basically a thousand dollars a month Canadian so just 750 a month I'm living in this crazy house and at that moment I said to myself I don't need any more money ever I could live in this house forever I could smell the beautiful smells I could get free education and free health care in this country could you imagine yeah wow I could walk to my my favorite coffee shop

30:01there's great you know great restaurants uh you know it takes me 50 minutes to get to the to an international airport they're skiing there's no there's all these things and it made me realize that all these years that I had spent in San Francisco and New York where I was spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on random stuff that it was really it was you know I moved to those places to get freedom and really I got enslaved by those places and the number one way to get more wealthy I think is to just lower what you want and once I started once I had that meant that mindset shift

30:40then all of a sudden I was being I was a better business person so I think I was just in the past okay when I look back at like all my Ventures that I've done Adventures where I actually like try to make a lot of money I actually don't make a lot of money and the ventures that I'm just following my curiosity and building tour towards my curiosity those tend to do better so for example in 2021 in the hip to crypto Mania we had an offer I don't think I publicly said this but we had an offer for we had a hundred someone willing to give

31:16us 100 million dollars to go build a studio incubator around web 3 startups oh my God even just hearing that I I just feel like there's a giant asterisk next to that 100 million dollar off uh number from a very very well-known group of people like top tier and I spoke to my co-founder about it and I was like should we do it should we not do it I was like I know what I want to do but I'm curious what you think and you know we started talking about it and I was like no no we can't we're not doing this we don't we don't need to do

31:58this we we have our path and we're going down our path and if I didn't if I wouldn't have bought this house I don't know if I would have made that decision something I have noticed I've been having a handful of these conversations with some entrepreneurial friends lately and something I wish people would share more isn't the things that they choose to do it's the things they choose to say no to because I think it's really hard to wrap your it was certainly hard for me to wrap my head around it like much earlier on I was just having a conversation with another buddy who was

32:31telling me he turned down a like one year strategic you know they wanted to hire him to be like CEO of this company just for a year to kind of like bring it attention help turn it around a little bit and they offered him like two million dollars to do it and he like thought about we were having lunch and he was he was like yeah you know I thought about it for a bit I talked to my wife about it and then I was like like I don't really need this in my life right now you know because you know when someone offers you two million dollars

32:56or someone offers you 100 million dollars like they're not just giving you that that there's a lot of strings that come with that and all of a sudden you have a boss and all of a sudden you have expectations right and and and the life that you've built for yourself sort of goes out the window I am really fascinated right now in these conversations and just talking to different successful people and hearing what they say no to and why like what was the real why did you turn down 100 million why didn't you take this seemingly cushy job because a lot of people look at that and they're like

33:26what how could you turn that down like that's my biggest dream but that's sort of it sort of circles back to what we're saying about venture-backed versus bootstrap you know versus the like what version of Entrepreneurship do you want to live and play what type of Life Do you want to build and yeah I've I've come to very much the same conclusion like I've had some wild offers in the past two years and I've said no to almost all of them because I'm like I really like the life I have right now you know give me an example give me an example I gave you an example of

33:57something that I've never shared probably to anyone public or private Beyond that's my co-founder so well I'm glad so now you're on the hook here's an easy one so in 2021 um kind of like right as Dickie and I Dickey was still working at BlackRock ship 30 was growing but I think we were still in a phase of uncertainty because you know I was still ghost riding on the side to pay my bills you know ship 30 was like making money but it was very lumpy and it was and it was very new and I think both Dickie and I were like is this gonna continue is this sustainable

34:31like should we bet on this and so Dicky was one foot in one foot out you know still at BlackRock I was one foot and one foot out still ghost riding on the side and I had three different um I was doing a bunch of like startup Consulting category design type strategy projects at the time and I had three different companies in 2021 I had a super early stage Tech startup found by not as mainstream known as like a Zucker and Elon but like that tier of person one of the most well-known Tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley um and was looking for help you know and

35:06not just like contractor was like we're looking for someone to like really come in and run with this second was like a mid mid-tier um like e-commerce company 100 million in sales you know same thing they're like we're big growth spurt like we're looking to hire somebody to like really run with this thing and the third was a publicly traded um company and so a it was cool to like get to see inside like three very different maturity maturities of business and in all three of them it sort of presented itself where I was like again one foot in one foot out was ship 30 and I was like there's a world

35:43where I could pursue one of these like and I was having conversations with the founders and and like it was sort of apparent that like the door was open like if I wanted something to happen I could walk through it I ended up not pursuing any of them and instead Dickie and I had a lot of conversations and were like you know what ship 30 is a little early but I went first I was like I'm gonna start ramping down my ghostwriting I'm gonna start focusing on ship 30 100 of the time I think in me doing that that gave Dicky the confidence to be like okay I'm gonna go

36:13all in too he ended up leaving BlackRock you know and a year later like ship 30 became more successful than anything we had either of us had experienced and it ended up being a lot more successful than I think what I would have made working for any of those companies but what was what's interesting though is and I and I bet you had a moment of this when the person comes and goes well we'll offer you 100 million dollars to to do this something I recognize is it's really not about the money it's actually more about the status it's more about the like you feeling chosen totally you

36:45know like you feel special that it was offered to you it's the status to yourself but it's also you know a lot of people I speak to so like I feel like in our world in in the cash flowing bootstrap world it's pretty low status oh dude when I when people ask what I do and I'm like yeah I run a writing program like you can see it in their eyes it's as if I just said I teach kindergarten like yeah I've even had people be like what and and how and how's that going are you are you having a good time like there's like condescending about it you know and I'm

37:20like okay like I like rich and Anonymous is okay with me you know like I I like that but you're totally like there is an almost there's very little status in the world that we're in whereas you if you're a founder of a VC backed company you could be paying yourself a salary of 80k a year be losing Millions a year and be on a trajectory to like work 80 hours a week for five years and your chances of success are five percent or less but when you talk to people people are they shower you with admiration it's especially low status being a Creator in our world like just calling at what it

37:57is like the amount of I see it sometimes because you know I recently been posting on Instagram I don't Instagram Instagram is a world unlike many others so you know recently I've I've been trying to grow my Instagram if you're listening to this just toss me a Pity follow Greg geisenberg also on YouTube please please like I'm trying to grow these subscribe buttons yeah like give me some amount of status folks so I'm posting I'm posting on Instagram and I'm like struggling to get any sort of traction and I've noticed that as people especially when I'm posting about myself there's a bunch of shares because I

38:45have a business account you can see who's sharing it and I know it's people sharing these like photos of myself or these stories that are just like gossiping and making fun of me whenever we get the metrics up totally so there's one way to look at that and be like that sucks right and it's probably the truth is it is probably a lot of people who I do respect for my like Silicon Valley days and stuff like that the other hand it's like I'm not trying to play that status game like Naval says it right Naval says what's his you know don't like playing status games is dumb basically yeah I've that

39:21had a big impact on me when I read that book which is one of my favorite business books actually what's it what's it called Almanac yeah the almanac um and uh there's a rapper I really like Russ who had a song recently that where he's like if you have to pick one go for the money don't go for the fame I think a lot of people as you start to build like one of two things happen either you start to build and you you know you start to get your footing and and things are going well and you either come to that realization and you're like oh

39:52status is way overrated like I would rather just make the things I want to make hopefully that they're lucrative and you know I have a life of financial abundance uh that's cool with me or other people really over rotate I notice and are like ooh status is addicting like Fame is addicting and then they go play a different game you know and they do the whole podcast circuit and they they it's like as much attention as possible and a cool concept Dickie and I've been talking about a lot is like and he'll be able to explain it better than me you should ask him but um this

40:24idea of how much revenue can you produce per unit of attention so the goal is not like like if you look at some creators that have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers and then you do the the math of like what's their revenue relative to the units of attention that they're producing their ratio is really unimpressive you're like oh you're doing you know half a billion views a month but you're only doing 70 grand a month right like not a great not a great ratio I would rather my my attention be lower but my profitability per unit of attention be significantly higher I had this same this conversation

41:06with a friend of mine he has like 300 000 followers on Instagram maybe 500 000 on Tick Tock and he called me up and he was like I'm barely making any money I'm barely barely made I'm scraping by he's like what is your suggestion to get me out of this hole so my suggestion to him was to Niche down in a particular highly monetized sub niche of his you know what he talks about oh but you know I don't wanna I'm gonna alienate all the other people and I'm gonna who cares like it that's just like a mental game of him like he's attached to his 250 000

41:48followers on Instagram or whatever yeah why just why my worst case scenario would be being recognized on the street and making or like and still having to work a full-time job or like making not very much and still just living in my studio apartment in Chicago like how horrible would that be you know it's like you're losing your personal life now you got people that are like hey it's you from Instagram or Tick Tock like and and you're getting recognized in public and now you have this weird dynamic that you have to live with but you're not even getting the financial upside like that's to me that's that's

42:25horrible like I would never want that and I get I mean maybe other people want different things and that's fine but yeah I especially if you're not proud of the work the worst case of that is you get recognized you're scraping by and the thing that you got recognized for is pretty like you're not proud of you know I I was at a wedding recently and I I I ran into you watch the office David Wallace you know what I'm talking about oh my God amazing okay so I actually I see David Wallace from the corner of my eye and I I asked someone I said is that

43:01David Wallace from the office looks exactly like him yeah it is so I go over them hey you know my name is Greg Eisenberg I'm a huge office fan like I watch it like every night you know before I go to bed every night before bed yep he's like you like the office I was like yeah he was like genuinely like so so stoked uh-huh he goes into his pocket he hands me a business card I pull I look at the business card it says David Wallace CFO Dunder Mifflin oh my God I was like you're literally my hero right now like you did a thing at this point 15

43:40years ago but you're you're proud of the thing that you did yeah and all the respect to you I totally agree and that's a great way of putting it is it it depends on how you feel about it you know it's like it's like an artist who maybe doesn't make that much but they love their work and they love what they do and you know um but even still I still sort of circle back to if you're generating all that attention and you're not monetizing it something else is going on because it's not that you can't like the opportunity is there it's just either you have a

44:16skill deficiency like you haven't really learned or taken the time to understand how to monetize business models you know whatever or you have some sort of relation like weird unprocessed through relationship with money where you're like no I feel weird I don't want to monetize my craft if I monetize like that's selling out that's you know and whenever I talk to people like that it's very clear that like that's not true it's not like if if something makes money that doesn't mean that it's lower quality like that's not a factual statement but so many people have these faulty beliefs around money thinking I can't charge for that I don't want to

44:50charge for that if I do charge for that that means XYZ you know that means I'm taking advantage of people that means I'm selling out whatever and none of those things are true and so yeah I just look at it like why go through all this effort to generate all this attention hopefully it's because you're doing something you really enjoy and if you are doing that then invest a little bit of time in understanding how to monetize it in a way that you feel good about too so you get the other side of the barbell because otherwise like attention for attention's sake is really fleeting and

45:19you know doesn't really do anything for you a lot attention doesn't pay the bills you know there's a guy on Twitter JK Molina he says yeah likes like saying cash like saying cash he's right I'd take I'd take the cash over the likes any day well it sounds like you'll take the likes and the cash yeah you know but again I want the ratio yeah I want the cash per like to be as high as possible you know I it's not like it's all the the threads and the viral YouTube videos and ads it's all just like numbers for the sake of numbers and it's like what

45:51are what are you really doing here what are you really optimizing for you know there's an argument to be made that you need you need top of the funnel content that goes viral to get attention to then build a niche or audience what do you think of that when people say that no I mean ship 30 is a great example of how not true that is you know super Niche a lot of the things that we write around writing don't go crazy viral at all and I also think that a lot of creators have it backwards like it's not you build attention and then you build a business

46:27because if you build a ton of attention posting memes and then you try and go launch a business like it's it people aren't brain dead it's not like just because they followed you they're just gonna miraculously buy the thing that you sell you know and so it's not audience and then oh now I have something to sell it's like who's the person that you want to help build the thing that you know helps them and then go sell the mixtapes out of your car you know then go get attention for it yeah sometimes I see like these you know memes and and stuff like that online and

46:59that's cool if like you love sharing that stuff and you get enjoyment out of it but if you're trying to monetize it and it's like if you like this meme you'll also like my newsletter on you know and it's like that's literally the definition of being and switch by the way you know it's literally bait meme switch newsletter yeah like okay if you're actually like creating value add content to the conversation and then it's like if you like this check out my newsletter that's one thing yeah it's not it's not that complicated it's not that hard you don't have to people make it way harder than it needs to be

47:38you know ship 30 hit seven figures as a business with like four steps it was right on Twitter drive people to a free educational email course send them a Weekly Newsletter sharing here's more of what we know every couple newsletters join the next cohort of ship 30. like that is not that we're not talking about building a SAS platform here we're not talking about launching a cyber security firm you know like this is It's not that difficult and people make it to make it out to be so much more complicated than it needs to be it's like solve someone's problem give a lot of it away for free

48:12remind them of what you have to sell do it a lot that's it before we head out do you have a question for me when do you get back to Miami August 14th August 14th okay nice I'm going to grease for my bachelor party uh uh August 30th or something like right or maybe the week before so okay so I'll get to see you for like a week yeah so we'll hang out and then uh and then I'll dip out and then I'll come back what do you want to do I don't know I got you know I'm trying to do my rounds while I'm here in Miami I want to

48:48try as many awesome restaurants as I can so if you have any uh either that you've been wanting to try for a while or like a favorite I would love some wrecks and then let's go let's go try a new spot or something I'll take you for a night of fun oh no put on your seatbelt oh no actually you know what take off your seat belt yeah yeah we'll have a good time we're gonna live stream it on Instagram yeah follow along follow along follow along um Cole thank you so much for for like chat I could literally chat with you for for hours uh save so you're gonna have to you can

49:31come on whenever you'd like you you and dick you have a open invite uh for people who want to follow you and the ship 30 and PGA Journey where can they find you yeah Twitter you know all things Twitter but yeah I agree I I always love our our talks and I really appreciate that we've gotten to the begin the beginning of our friendship here in uh Miami but I really look forward to seeing you when you get back I mean I would love to find a way to work together I just don't know how it'll it'll reveal itself it always does yeah cool and I gotta ask you about should I

50:03write a book or not oh you know what's so funny you just said that literally yesterday I was thinking of texting you because someone else that I met at uh when Dicky and I went to that cab uh Cabo that Cabo Mastermind um I was just chatting with him and he's thinking about writing a book I was giving him some feedback stuff like that and then I thought of you because we had talked about the community book like six months or eight months ago or something and I was like I should Circle back and ask Greg if he's ever gonna do that because I think that would be a I mean

50:31totally man just keep dominating the category you know keep planting your flag and but why why okay why why should I have a tweet drafted actually about this it's not even a tweet it's a it's in a gem of an idea and it says I have no desire to write a book and it says write thousands of words a day and you get no easy way to get instantaneous feedback like what I like about Twitter and my sub stack is like I post something and I get instant feedback and what scares me about writing a book is I'm gonna go spend five months of my life like sahil Bloom

51:08I know is writing a book right now and he's spending so much of his energy like writing a book and it's like always thinking about and it's taking him like a year like is that gonna be me am I going to spend thousands of hours on this thing it just depends on what sort of book you want to write I I think you know he because I'm assuming he he got a uh like a publishing deal totally different it's like venture-backed versus bootstrap totally different set of expectations right his book needs to sell a million copies or it's failure right like VC you're either a billion dollar company

51:39or you're not and and I think I would encourage you not to do that I would encourage you to self-publish bootstrap and instead write a book that is basically think of think of a book as you're just doing it's it's well it's two things you're doing all of the work where you now have content to pull from for the next five years on this one topic and this idea of you wanting feedback you already got all all the feedback like you already know what you would say about Community I I know I know what I'd write about yeah so you don't I probably to be honest yeah you

52:16gave me really good advice once uh and I probably said the same thing like oh it's so much work I you're like dude it's literally 10 blog posts that's it yeah I know exactly what I would those 10 blog posts would be so this is the difference right is like you already and this is also the difference in like types of non-fiction I I'm about to publish my uh ghostwriting book it took me three months to write I didn't have to think about I already knew everything I was gonna say sahil or anyone that goes and gets a publishing deal or whatever like most of the time because the

52:50expectations are different there's a lot more research and they're figuring out what they want to say because they're trying to write something that you know they have a totally different goal you don't have that you already know everything you're going to say so you don't need like feedback on what like you already know what you would say and so now it's just a matter of taking the time to compress it and you have this asset and a book does a really good job of planting planting your flag in the ground and being like I own this category even if it's self published art and business of online writing

53:20self-published It's Made Me way more money than if I would have gotten a publishing deal for it and everyone in the online writing World references it I mean I would I think if I were to write a book I wouldn't even like my goal I really actually like Alex hermosi's approach which is charge as little as possible for the book and get it in yeah that's possible yeah it's not about the money it's about I wrote the book on this topic yeah I'm the guy all right I got a I got a Jad but could speak to you for forever so thank you again awesome later

53:53I'm excited when you get back yeah see ya see you bro