Speaker 1Nicholas Cole's made over $30 million writing on the internet. So when he talks about content, I listen. And this episode honestly felt less like an interview and more like just a free masterclass. He breaks down why most people's content gets ignored in the AI era, why AI is making generic writing worthless, and how to build what he calls a digital brain. A library of your stories and your opinions and your lessons and ideas that gets you customers 24-7, that builds you trust, and gives AI something real to work with. If you write online, you sell online, or you want ideas to compound, this is honestly worth thousands of dollars, but it's free for you. The people that stick around to the end of this are not going to be writing AI slop. And I think the people that use AI to actually create interesting content, I mean, of course, those are the people that have the highest probability of success. Enjoy the episode. I learned a lot. I think you will, too. Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. My company's been on Brex for a year and a half, and I started because I kept hearing companies like Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic were using Brex, and I figured if they're using it, why shouldn't I? It's been a game changer. The thing that got me is how smooth it is. It's got high-limit cards. It's got banking. It's got AI that handles the back-office busywork like expense reports, which I don't want to do, on its own. It's really just built for this agentic world. If you're building something new, it's time to get Brex. Check it out at brex.com slash solutions slash startups. Link in the description. Nicholas Cole, thank God you're here, man. By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn?
Speaker 2By the end of this episode, you will better understand the short, medium, and long-term value of everything you create and write and market on the internet before you create it. That is the goal. Before you invest the time, you will understand why you're doing what you're doing in the first place.
Speaker 1Yeah, and I think that matters a lot because all of us are vibe-coding software. We know there's a lot of opportunity to build apps, ship SaaS, things like that, but it's hard to get customers. What I love about you is through writing, you understand how to get seen, how to create stuff that goes viral, and there's sort of a bit of an art to it. And what I hope to learn, selfishly, by the end of this episode, is to get some of that art from you, to learn about that, so that the products that I create, I can accompany it with content writing that tells stories that hopefully goes viral or that just resonates with people. And Cole, can you commit? Can you commit that to me? Will I learn that?
Speaker 2Yeah, that's what we're going to talk about. Something I see people talk about a lot these days is that in the AI era, SaaS no longer has a moat. And I actually think that that's not true. I think that SaaS has a moat when you have a point of view. And I didn't, that was a nice little rhyme there. But what I mean by that is, if you're just building commodity SaaS, meaning like you're just providing features that accomplish tasks to people, that's fundamentally a commodity. SaaS with a point of view means that you're building some sort of product or platform that enables users to do things in a certain way. Like they're executing a certain method. So for example, like we have a SaaS platform called TypeShare. And the goal of TypeShare is, well, there's a gazillion scheduling apps and there's a gazillion writing apps. And our writing app does writing and scheduling too, right? Like that is a commodity. The goal of TypeShare is to quote unquote automate or make tasks easier for people who want to execute a different methodology for writing on the internet. So there's a point of view that drives the product. And if someone says, well, why would that create a moat? For example, if we say inside TypeShare, well, your goal is we're going to help you build your personal language model. And our point of view is that there are certain types of content, commodity content, personality content, original content. Each of these different types of content creates different leverage inside of your personal language model. Even as I'm articulating that, imagine you're trying to build a SaaS platform that does everything our SaaS platform does. Every time you build a feature, it's like you have to turn back and look at me and go, oh, so, but, wait, like, what does that actually mean? What's the point of a personal language model? What's the, what does commodity content mean? So you will forever be one step, two steps, three steps, five steps, 10 steps behind because you constantly have to look at the person who's creating the point of view or creating the methodology to go, whoa, wait, they're the one doing the thinking. I'm just going to copy them, which means you're always behind. And so I think it's funny when people say there's no moat in SaaS because it's like, well, yeah, there's no moat in anything if you don't have a point of view. But there's a ton of moat in SaaS and product and writing and marketing if you do have a point of view. And so that's kind of what inspired this convo is like, so how do you create a point of view in the first place?
Speaker 1So where do we start?
Speaker 2So an idea I've been thinking about a lot is the fact that the English language or any alphabet, any language is really just an open source language for communication. Meaning no one owns the individual letters of the alphabet. No one owns words, like the vast majority of words, right? Like you don't own the word tomato. I don't own the word catastrophe. We also don't own even our names. There are a lot of people in the world named Greg. There are a lot of people in the world named Cole. And if someone says, my name is Cole or my name is Greg, and you write, my name is Greg, right? You're not plagiarizing them and they're not plagiarizing you. And as you start to like tease that idea out, you realize that the vast majority of words and groupings of words and thoughts and ideas and sentences are shared. They are not actually attributable to any one individual. And I think this is what people are wrestling with when they read writing that they think was written by AI. Is when, when the, when you identify quote unquote AI slop, what you're really identifying is commodity content. Meaning you're reading something, but it feels the way that it does because it's not attributable to any one individual. It's like reading health and wellness content. Someone writes, uh, the key to losing weight is eating healthy. That's a commodity sentence. There's a gazillion people who have said that exact grouping of words. And we don't look at the millions and millions of people who have repeated, did that same grouping of words and go, Oh, everyone's plagiarizing each other. We just go, that's a commodity sentence. And so as you like start to tease this out, it raises a really interesting question in the age of AI. And the age of AI is the creation of infinite text-based content. Anyone can write anything on any topic at any time with any amount of volume and speed they want, which raises the question. So what is worth writing in the first place? And I think it's, it's, it's interesting even like your, your content is a really good example of this where the simplest delineation is when you're writing and you say the difference between, I think I did this, I perspective versus you should, you should do this because when you're talking to the reader through the lens of you inherently, the content is going to lean more commodity because you're kind of just like repeating all the things that everybody knows everyone should do. But when you're writing from a place of, I like, I just did this or I think this, or you, you share all the time. It's like, I think this would be a great startup idea. When someone consumes that content, that is personality content. That, that is, I am consuming what Greg thinks about the world, not what everyone in this topic area typically says about this topic in the
Speaker 1world. You know what I, I mean? Yeah. I mean, that's why all content isn't created equal because sometimes I'll see people go insanely viral on X, let's say, and I look at the content and I'm like, I've read this before. It's a Wikipedia article essentially summarized or it's just a take that's been said before and they plopped it into chat GVT and asked to create an essay on it. And it could still get 5,000 likes or 10,000 likes. But at the end of the day, it's like, what game are you trying to play when I'm creating content? I, I think about two things. I think about how do I, how do I drive as much value for the person consuming the content? So I'm just constantly, as I'm writing, I'm like thinking about the person in the other seat and thinking about how can I help them? And that frame of mind is super helpful because that means actually you're not going to write things like you should do X, Y, Z, you should do X, Y, Z. because that's kind of coming from a place of like, I'm better than you and I know everything, therefore you should do this. And I don't think that's what I want to avoid. And then the second thing is creating affinity. So if I add value to people's lives, it's sort of an effect of number one, it generates some affinity to, hey, this guy helped me out a little bit. I got an idea from him. I never thought of this topic in that way. For example, what you were talking about with the English language is open sourced. I use English every day of my life. I never thought about that concept before. And for the rest of time, I'm going to be associating that with you, Cole. And I think people undervalue how valuable it is to have a new idea and to have a new idea and ship that value to someone and it actually affects their day-to-day, especially within the context of a business context because that means that they're going to be making more money, they're going to be being more productive and that's going to put food on their plates, feed their family, get them a job promotion. There's so much good to that and that's what I want to unpack today is that piece for people.
Speaker 2Yeah, so, okay, a ton of thoughts. First, value is always relative to where the audience is, meaning something that you could find really valuable because maybe you're a more advanced entrepreneur. A beginner would not find as valuable because they're not far enough along yet. And in reverse, something that's very basic to you that you've known and you've learned that lesson a thousand times is not valuable to you anymore because you already know it. But to a beginner, that's like the most helpful thing you could give them is step one. So value is always relative to where the other person is. What prompted this whole mode of thinking for me is especially in the past like two or three years and as I've seen AI start to accelerate, I've found myself living in a constant state of frustration where I know that these models can write a lot of things just as well as I can. My frustration is knowing that that, that solution exists and yet I still find myself spending time writing and rewriting things to tell beginners that I know would be helpful to them but are really boring for me to repeat. And so I've been writing nonfiction online for 15 years. I've been writing about how to write on the internet for over a decade. I have, I'm not exaggerating, like probably written, I don't know, north of 50 million words on the topic, like thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces. And especially in the past few years, this frustration for me is like, I know that there are still a tremendous amount of people in the world who need help taking the first step and going, how do I start writing on the internet? What's my niche? How do I name and claim what makes me different? Ideas that are very simple to me that are very novel to beginners. And yet, every time I write about them for the 999th time, I feel like I'm wasting my finite time on earth because I'm just re-swizzling the same groupings of words over and over and over again. And so what kind of, that's what originally prompted this way of thinking. And it made me realize that commodity content doesn't have zero value. Commodity content does have value. And for a lot of people, particularly beginners, in any industry, commodity content is actually the most helpful thing you could give them. The problem is that as you write more and more commodity content about a specific topic or in a niche, you will feel what I'm feeling. You probably already do, where you're like, I find myself just repeating the same ideas that I've already thought through. I'm not actually thinking through anything new. I'm just repeating things I already know. And that is very low leverage. And so, as you begin to build your content library, you have to sort of examine why am I writing the things that I'm writing? And each new thing that I write, what is the additive value of the thing that I just created to my, what I'll call, digital brain, my personal language model? And in an ideal world, like, so just a quick little backstory. I've been ghostwriting for a decade. I used to, I used to do this framework with clients where when I would be working with a client who was really, really busy, maybe they wrote a book, maybe they would have a podcast, more likely, maybe they would just record internal meetings. And I would pull from those assets, pull from their book or pull from blog posts or pull from things that they had created or said out loud. And I would take those words and phrases and I would assemble them into content. And that's essentially what a ghostwriter does. The misunderstanding is that the ghostwriter isn't really creating new ideas. The ghostwriter is not really like putting net new thinking in the client's mouth. The ghostwriter is essentially taking what I like to call approved language. The client said it. And so why can't I take a sentence from chapter one and a sentence from chapter two and two sentences from chapter three and two sentences from chapter four of their book and stitch them all together and create something new? The client said all of those words, in those groupings of words. And so I did the manual version of what AI can and should do here soon, which is the larger your library grows, the more ideas and approved language you have, the more net new combinations you can create. And I think that fundamental idea is something that the masses do not understand about the leverage you get in crystallizing your thinking and building a library of content. On the internet. Because the AI is not actually writing. AI is taking approved language from things that you've written and creating net new combinations. And if you play that out, the benefit of doing that is now I can continue to help beginners telling them the ideas I know they need to hear, but I don't need to take my finite time on earth rewriting the same thing over and over again. Which, what does that mean? That opens up more time for me to do what? To think about the next thing I haven't thought about. And I think this is the hope, or this is the utopian hope of AI, is that AI will automate the low leverage stuff, which opens up time for higher leverage things. And so in the case of writing, what that means is AI will help me repeat the same commodity ideas that I've already written 10,000 times, which opens up time for me to think about non-commodity ideas, personality ideas, or ideally original ideas, which is more additive to the long-term value of my digital brain. Which, imagine the societal implications of more people thinking about things they haven't thought about before rather than just churning out blog posts of things that they've already thought about and just need to repeat.
Speaker 1To me, that creates two bottlenecks. And I'm curious your thoughts on this. The first is, how do you create a second brain that people use to use Obsidian or whatever second brain software you want to use so that you're properly capturing those ideas? Those ideas are in a safe place. And the second bottleneck is, okay, I've got these high-quality ideas. Actually, some of them might be high-quality, some might be low-quality. But I've got these ideas in this bank. How do I essentially plug it in to an LLM such that it's not just such that I don't get slopped? There's a bunch of people who are just able to mangle their LLMs such that they understand how to prompt it in a way or have agents run in a way such that it's eloquent. So I think, to me, those are the two bottlenecks. Am I missing something?
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, I think that there's certainly outlier use. And I'm not against the sort of person who is not a writer, is not a proficient writer, doesn't want to be a proficient writer, but knows a lot about an industry, wants to brain dump into an LLM, and then have the LLM take that information and just write it the way that the LLM would. That's really no different than how ghostwriters work with clients. And inherently, in hiring a ghostwriter, you get subjectivity, right? Ghostwriters are human beings. They all write in different ways. You're going to get a subjectivity because you're working with a specific ghostwriter. An LLM is no different. And I'm not against that way of working. I think that the fundamental mistake and the point of view that I'm really leaning into for the foreseeable future is that the highest leverage thing you can do is the writing. The robots should do everything else. And I think where people get lost and why slop happens is they might agree or understand understand that idea, but then they want to skip this. writing and go, well, my LLM knows enough and it can just do it for me. And you don't realize that in doing that, you're giving up a lot of leverage. I don't want the robots writing for me. What I want is the robots repeating me, which is different. So for example, um, you, you post on a bunch of different social platforms, right? And I know that I'm like, okay, I have this giant library of short form text giant. I've tweeted 10,000 times, whatever it is. Right. And I want to keep publishing two short form pieces a day. And I also want to put out short form on Instagram threads and YouTube community posts and some of these other platforms. It is extremely low leverage for me to go through my library and find the highest performing posts and repost them on multiple platforms. People got around this with a social media manager, cheaper solution. You get around that with a VA and even cheaper solution. Now AI and agents can essentially do that. But the step further and where, where I see long-term value in this idea of building a digital brain or a personal language model is that it is not difficult for AI to understand. Uh, Cole, you wrote this short form piece about, uh, five benefits of journaling and you wrote this other short form piece about five benefits of journaling. And you wrote this other short form post on, uh, seven benefits of journaling. And I can take some from the first list and some from the second list and create a new third list that is just repeating a different combination of those two posts. And this, this is where every time you sit down to write, I think one of the most helpful things to ask yourself is what is the short, medium and long-term value of the thing that I'm creating? And I'll give you an example of, of like what, so what is the value of, of the thing that I'm creating? And I'll give you an example of, of, of you writing commodity content. If commodity content is a commodity, what's, what's the point? The point is that there is borderline infinite commodity content inside every topic. The question is not, um, how do you write about every type of commodity content in your topic? The question is which types of commodity content do you agree with and which types do you disagree with? So I'll give you a simple example in the world of personal finance. Two pieces of commodity content are, um, if you want to build wealth, you should skip your morning coffee. Don't waste that $3 and you should just buy the S and P 500 and 30 years from now you'll be a millionaire.
Speaker 1Can I guess the second? Yeah. Yeah. Cause I'm just curious, uh, is the other one, if you only rented and didn't pay a mortgage, you would actually outperform like in general. Like I feel like I see that one. I see that one all the time.
Speaker 2Yeah. So the, these are examples of commodity ideas. These are not unique to any one individual, right? Like one person says, save your coffee by the S and P you'll get rich. Another person says saving your coffee money isn't going to make you rich. You're focused on the wrong thing. Both of those are commodity ideas. The question and why you should write about it is which one do you agree with? Because those are two different ways of looking at the world. And so where people run into, Oh, AI is creating, slop for me is they don't realize how many of those micro decisions they're expecting AI to just understand about them. So AI might like, let's say their topic is personal finance. AI might write something and use the example. Well, you should save your, uh, $3 of coffee money, uh, and just invest in the S and P 500. And the person reads that and goes, Oh, this is slop. But they don't realize that the reason AI wrote that is because they don't know AI doesn't know which perspective you agree with. So what is, what is the long-term value of your library? Well, on the commodity content side, the long-term value is you actually yourself having clarity over which points of view do you agree with? Which points of view do you disagree with? It's not the ideas themselves that are unique. It's which ones are tied to your identity. And the more of those that you crystallize, the more long-term leverage you get out of working with AI because AI knows, Oh, I'm never going to use that example because that's not how you see the world.
Speaker 1How do you actually like set, set this up? You know, if someone listening to this is like, I agree, I agree with Cole and what he's saying, you know, it makes a lot of sense. Um, how do I, how do I actually set this up? Well, shameless plug.
Speaker 2This is what, this is the point of view. This is what we're, we're building inside of type share. So if you want SAS that does that, there you go. But the reality is there's, there's a lot of different ways that you can accomplish this. And fundamentally it actually doesn't really matter where the library of content lives. What matters is that the library of content is where the library of content lives. And the library of AI has access to it. And more importantly, like you can't skip the step of understanding what you're doing in the first place. I, I fundamentally believe that the reason people are struggling with writing an AI slop and writing with AI is because deep down, everyone wants to skip the step of thinking and just have the robots do the thinking for them. And in doing so, it's like, you're going to have to learn how to do it in disguise. And so like an example, that's very visceral for me is when I was writing on Quora back in 2013, 2014, I wrote a handful of answers, uh, about me playing world of Warcraft professionally as a teenager. And I would always like in, in each answer, I sort of referenced it in different ways. I was like, Oh, when I was a teenager, I was a really competitive world of Warcraft player. And then another piece, I would say the same thing, just like a different combination of words. And one day I wrote a piece about me playing World of Warcraft professionally wrote a piece. And the first sentence was when I was 17 years old, I was one of the highest ranked world of Warcraft players in North America. And that Quora answer went viral. And so man, like me, myself manually looked at that. And when that first sentence and that way, that grouping of words, that way of talking about that experience, my hypothesis is clearly that resonated with people. So what did I do? I wrote, I wrote hundreds of other pieces over the next five, 10 years, repeating that exact sentence somewhere. Maybe it was the first sentence. Maybe it was a hook somewhere in it. Maybe it was before I told a story, but I used that grouping of words hundreds of times. That is the goal of what AI can and should help you leverage is that as you get clarity over these ideas and groupings of words and, and points of view and perspectives, once you say it really, really clearly, you're going to once or twice or two different variations. And you like both AI can then go, yeah, you've said that. I got it from here. You, you want AI doing repeating. You don't want AI doing net new writing thinking I'm assembling groupings of words and groupings of sentences that you've never done before. That's, that's why then it gives you something. And you're like, this isn't me because it's not you.
Speaker 1Yeah. And, and people sniff it out. And it actually hurts you more than it helps you because then they associate you with some, in my opinion, then they associate you with someone who isn't adding value. And it's like, there's nothing worse. I don't think there's anything worse that you can do than steal someone's time. And I think that's why people are so, you know, hate slop so much. It's, it's cause they consume this piece of AI. I hated that.
Speaker 2Mm-hmm. I think this is a, a second really fascinating question in the age of AI, which is, so what is ownership? If, if language is open source, no one owns the alphabet. No one owns 99.9% of the words. And most people don't even own 99.9% of the groupings of words. If language is open source, what is ownership? And ownership, um, and, and obviously there's like a legal component. It's like you can trademark names and like there, there is a legal component, but generally speaking, ownership is really just a, a, a different word for association. You associate ideas with certain people. Now you can achieve association in lots of different ways. The easiest way to achieve association is to write about a topic a lot. Like people associate AI startup ideas with you. And we can just say at a fundamental level for no other reason than you create more about that topic than the vast majority of people.
Speaker 1Or I'll give you, I'll give you another example, two examples of your coffee, uh, drinking coffee and wasting money, which is when I hear, you know, that concept, I think of Ramit Sethi, I will teach you to be rich, who always says, keep drinking your coffee, even if it costs $6, like live your rich life. And that's against the common idea of, you know, save, put in the S and P. And the other side of that coin is Dave Ramsey, who's like save, invest, don't go in debt. And so you, you know, both ends of the spectrum, same core idea.
Speaker 2Exactly. And I mean, so to build on that, right, Dave Ramsey is known for that meme where he's like taking the live call. And he's like, so you spent all your money on what? And then it's a funny answer and he's like, He's like, and you owe how much money to who? And then it's a funny answer. Like what's actually happening is that that's a format. That's a structure that people associate with him. So ownership is really just association, generally speaking. And the easiest way to establish association is through volume. You write a lot about a topic. People associate that topic with you. Very basic. The next layer up of association is personality. It is, okay, so it's not just that you write about this topic, but the audience knows all of these specific things about you. They know, like, so play it out. It's like you have a personal finance expert and you know nothing about them. They just write a lot about personal finance. And then there's another personal finance expert who is maybe just as qualified or less qualified, but they share a lot about their personal life, their personality, how they see the world. She's a personal finance expert. She's a single mom. She got divorced three years ago. She has two kids. She's had to work multiple jobs, put them both, you know, through school. A really hard worker started a blog, blog took off, you know, all these things about that person and something that I think a lot of people forget is that. Quote, unquote, less credible, more personality content typically outperforms more credible commodity content. So like take, take the extreme, like there are, there are not as successful personal finance people or finance people with significant personality content that get more distribution and have bigger audiences than Ray Dalio. It was like. A multi-billionaire, right? So the credibility of the person is actually not like, it's important. You want to learn or hear from someone who has done something and, you know, knows about the thing. But I think people forget that credibility itself is not the, the, the winning card. The winning card is actually the personality of the person and how much they're willing to let you into their world and how many things about them you associate with that topic. And that, that idea should be really important. And I think that's what's really liberating for a lot of people. Like I'm sure a lot of your listeners, people that build products or our first time founders or second time founders, they want to build organic audiences. Like you actually don't need to be coming up with game changing, radically new original thinking. All you need to do is just go, yeah, there's a gazillion startup founders, but I am a startup founder and these are, this is what makes me unique. This is how I see the world. This is where I live. This is how many siblings I have. This is where I went to school. This is what I studied. This is what my hobbies are. And all of those little data points actually now in the age of infinite text-based commodity content, all of those little data points are differentiators. And more importantly, every time you write about one of those personality details, that personality detail should make its way into your digital brain, your personal language model. Just like with me, when I was 17 years old, I was one of the highest ranked World of Warcraft players in North America. There's a reason why I repeated that 500 times, you know? And so then association is really just, I associate these, uh, life, life details, life events, ways of seeing the world with you. Like, I'm sure you're familiar with, um, Gary V repeated. This has been repeating this for 15 years, which is I want to buy the New York jets over and over and over and over and over again. Like, what is that? That's a personality detail. And you associate that detail with him.
Speaker 1And I think he lives in New Jersey. So it's kind of funny, right? I know he works, maybe he has a, a, a place in Manhattan, but you know, I think he grew up and, and still lives in New Jersey. So it is interesting that you can have someone who lives in another place and his dream is to buy the, the New York jets and, you know, tens of millions of people associate Gary V who's not, you know, necessarily a sports person. I know he has a sports business now, but you know, made his wealth in, in wine and, and, and agencies, social. All of a sudden people connect him with, uh, with the New York jets. I think what's, what's something really interesting you said is, is basically like, Hey, you're going to have your competition basically is going to just plop ideas to create commoditized content. And there's just going to be more and more of that. Whereas if you could do a audit of, of. Interesting tidbits about you, your brand, how you think about things, point of views, as you call it, um, throw it in a markdown file or use a second brain software like obsidian or something. And it's going to just stand out by virtue of everyone else is, is, is using the same tool and the same methodology to crank out content. So it's like, it's, it's just, it's sort of like fish, fish where the fish are. And the fish, you're going to be able to fish with dynamite if you actually have these stories and stuff like that.
Speaker 2Yeah. To, to sharpen the precision of the language, it's that everyone is using the same LLMs, meaning they are all creating from the same data set. Yeah. Your, your personality content, your library of content is the unmade data set. You can't, you can't expect. To write a paragraph inside of, uh, an essay or some, or a newsletter or something that you're writing about what you learned as a kid going through an experience that you've never articulated. AI doesn't know that that is an unmade data set. And so the way I think about personality content and that, that aspect of a personal language model is that you want to spend your time building the unmade data set. And the way that you do that is by writing about how you became you. Like, what are your formative experiences? What lessons did you learn? What mistakes did you make? The, all of these things seem very mundane to ourselves, but that's because we lived it. We experienced it. We take it for granted. But you articulating a visceral mistake, especially in a story, instantly differentiates that piece of writing from everybody else writing about the same fundamental commodity idea. Right? And so that's where you want your time to be spent is you, you want to, you want to be building these net new additive data points, the unmade data set about how you became you.
Speaker 1What do you say to people who are thinking to themselves? Well, I just, I lead an uninteresting life and I don't have anything interesting, you know, or specific or unique about me.
Speaker 2Yeah. I mean, A, that's incorrect. Um, and B, like, I don't know any other way to say it. It's just wrong. Um, and, and B, it's like, you have to, you have to get out. You have to get outside of yourself and realize that even the most mundane experiences are things that other people resonate with and see themselves in like a really simple example is I moved across the country twice in the past four years. That's not like the most unique and different and captivating data point ever, but it, it is an experience. And I bet if I was at a dinner party and I said, yeah, I moved coast to coast twice in the past four years, I might be talking with someone else. And they're like, oh, I moved across the country twice in the past four years. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I did the same thing six years ago. Wasn't it crazy? And then we're telling each other stories. And all of a sudden we're like friends at a dinner party. We, we fail to realize that we do all of these things in conversation every single day of our lives. And, uh, the, the build on idea. And I, I've been thinking about this for a decade cause I, I was trying to explain this to ghostwriting clients back in 2016, 2017, which is in real life. We walk around. Um, as a walking, talking personal language model already. And what happens is we go have a coffee meeting. Like think about the first time we met up for coffee in Miami and you, you go have a coffee meeting or meet up with someone. And what do you do? You start sharing things from your personal language model. You're like, here's where I'm from. Uh, here's how many siblings I have. I moved to this city two years ago. Here's what I'm into. Oh, you're into the same thing. We're just doing the unscalable version of that writing on the internet is the idea that instead of repeating the same life facts and stories and perspectives over and over again manually at one meeting and then another dinner party and then another grouping with friends and then a picnic one afternoon, instead of doing that manually, what you can do is you can write about it once and then publish it on the internet and have that same coffee meeting, sharing that same perspective or insight. Or life factor story with borderline infinite people. And then with AI, that piece now gets added into your library. And now you can go, I don't want to, I don't want to tell that story anymore. I've already told that story 10 times. I've written about it 10 times. We've got 10 different variations. I just want you to repeat it for me. And that's, that is the fundamental leverage of writing with AI in for, for the next decade
Speaker 1foreseeable future. So that works with personal brand. Like if you're trying to build a personal brand, you're going to have to build a personal brand. personal brand, you want to get out there, Gary Vee that works. How does this work with branded content?
Speaker 2First of all, I think that for a long time, I remember my, my first job out of college was working at an ad agency and I was repeating this as a 23 year old. I was like trying to tell my boss and my boss's boss, nobody wants to hear from the branded Twitter page. They want to hear from the CEO. They want to hear from a human being. And that only proves more and more true. So I think that regardless, the, the human being personal branding decision is continuing to accelerate and branded content just always underperforms. But also there's no reason why your branded content can't repeat all of your chosen commodity ideas. Like if we create, so let's, let's say TypeShare, our SaaS platform has an X account and a LinkedIn page. There's absolutely no reason why those social pages can't just repeat all of my commodity ideas. Now it wouldn't make sense for TypeShare to be like, when I was 17 years old, I was one of the highest ranked World of Warcraft players in North America. Like that doesn't make sense because that's a personality data point, but there's no reason why TypeShare can't tweet. Here are the five benefits of writing online. It's a commodity and it's the same thing I would have said. So I actually, I actually think that you get double leverage when you have the human being, the, the founder or an executive team or whoever building their own personal language model that then the branded content is like, great, we're just going to ignore the personality details. And we're just going to repeat the commodity ideas, which is what brands do anyways. You're just choosing which perspectives do we agree with?
Speaker 1Yeah. And I think you can still, you know, there's so many brands, there are a lot of brands like Taco Bell comes top of mind, which is like, it feels like it's personality driven. So like just because it's commoditized content doesn't mean it can't be human centric. Like you can have like, I think the future of branded content is like, you know, basically not just one human behind it, but like five, you know, and you can even like sign off. Oh, it's Tiffany who did this or Jeremy who did this, who wrote this and different stories around the brand. So for example, like. You know, Taco Bell, let's just use that like you can have instead of just Taco Bell writing commoditized content around or just content around, oh, hey, like we dropped like a new crunchy burrito today and here's what it looks like. It's more around, you know, Tiffany who works at the, you know, Tulsa, Oklahoma store has been coming to Taco Bell for the last since she's been 13. In fact, her parents met at a Taco Bell. And then you tell that story.
Speaker 2Think about, okay, so that's a fantastic example. Think about how with a little bit of creativity, if you take or Taco Bell takes that approach, what's really happening is you're, you're opening the door for personality content and personality content. That's, that's what I was saying where, where lots of like high personality content often outperforms more credible commodity content. And so I actually think in that example, Tiffany, the tacos are would outperform, right? The other, the other taco company brand, that's just only doing the commodity version. And this, this, this is why I think this lens is so helpful is because it, it forces you to raise the question, like, what are we actually creating here? What is the value? And if you're only creating commodity content with no personality component, you have to fundamentally realize it's like. You are creating the lowest leverage, lower, lowest value form of content in your topic. That's not to say it has zero value, but it has the lowest value. A little, a little creativity means you can open the second tranche, which is, well, now we give ourselves permission to create some personality content. And the ultimate goal, the ultimate goal is to spend enough time crystallizing your thinking through writing on a specific topic where you ultimately create original content. And I, one, one of the things that I've been writing about recently is just because you wrote it doesn't mean you own it. I think that a lot of times people think because my fingers touched the keys, my fingers typed that grouping of words, that means that grouping of words is mine. And that's not true. If you write the sentence, I woke up today and made coffee, that is not attributable to you. That is an open source grouping of words. No one owns. And, and there's, there's this, uh, faulty belief that people have where they think if they're the ones who wrote it, they're the ones who did the work. That means they own it. And that means they created something original. That is not original thinking. You didn't, you didn't think a single new thought. You didn't say anything that hasn't been said before. And so original thinking is not something that's like, oh, I started writing online and three days later I had a game changing insight. Original thinking comes as the result of crystallizing the way that you see the world in a specific topic or a small number of topics for a prolonged period of time. And one of the best examples of original thinking, like original does not mean I wrote a hundred thousand word book on it. Great example of original thinking was Pythagoras saying the earth is round, not flat. That's six words, like fundamentally six words that completely changed the course of humanity that we still live in. Still associate with that person. And you only arrive at those six words after years and years and years of crystallizing thinking in a topic. And so if you kind of loop all the way back to the beginning here, that's why there's, there's an irony when people say, I want to write about everything. It's like, you don't realize that in doing that, you deprive yourself of ever being able to go deep enough where you end up saying something original. All you're doing is you're just typing and rewriting stuff. And that's why there's an irony when people say, I want to write about everything. You're just repeating commodity ideas all day long, thinking they're yours and thinking that you have ownership or originality because you were the one who wrote the words. When in reality, those groupings of words have existed forever.
Speaker 1How do you see writing versus short form video?
Speaker 2In what sense?
Speaker 1So we talked a lot about content in general on, you know, capturing ideas, writing ideas. And when I hear that, I think of. Uh, tweets. I think of blog posts. I think of email newsletters. I think of copy on websites. But on the other hand, we have, uh, all the social feeds just hungry for short form video. So my question to you is, how do you think about writing as it relates to short form video?
Speaker 2First of all, I don't, one of the most common questions people ask is which is better, which is better writing or video, which is better? Podcast or long form YouTube. The reality is that the answer is yes. It's all of them. They all work. Me and Dickie, my business partner, create essentially zero short form video. The only, the only short form video we publish is we have a, uh, internal editor and we record a long form and he clips out some random short form and post them. Like it is like very low. I'll even say low value short form. Not like intentionally investing in that. And we run a multi seven figure business. It's all driven through writing. So like the, yes, there's always a trend or some other form of content that is working or maybe working a little bit better, but that doesn't mean that the other ones aren't working. You know, this, the second idea is, um, video is no different than writing. Everyone uses teleprompters now. Like when you do shorts, do you ever script them?
Speaker 1I, I'm, I actually do. I script them when I do shorts. Uh, it's like cutouts of long form content or it's, um, I do like animation explainers that are scripted.
Speaker 2I, I actually do. Timely content has very high short-term value and very low long-term value. Timeless content has very low short-term value and very high long-term value. And so, for example, I saw you tweet yesterday or two days ago like an AI image meme where you were like, I'm not waiting for the foldable phone. I'm waiting for the desktop that's foldable, right? So, that's a great example of hyper-timely content where you capitalize for 24 hours, but then the value of that content falls off a cliff. You can't repost that a month from now or three months from now or a year from now, right? So, this raises a very interesting question of, all right, so everything that you create, like how much value are you actually extracting and over what time horizon? You created a meme. You capitalized for 24 hours. Great. But like that's all the juice you're going to get. You're not going to get any long-term value out of that. In contrast, I wrote this essay about AI. It took me two weeks to write. I spent a lot of time on it. It got some short-term value, but I'm going to reference and use that essay for like the next 10 years. And so, when you're creating something, you want to ask, well, where on the spectrum am I sitting and are my expectations aligned with the thing that I'm creating? You can't go build something or write something or create something that. You know is intended to be very timeless content and expect it to get the same short-term distribution as a meme that capitalizes on an Apple announcement in 24 hours, right? There are different expectations. So, if we tweak the first sentence of that short-form video and we go, Substack just launched this new feature. I run a $400,000 a year paid newsletter. Here's how to start a Substack in 2026. That word. This just happened or in 2026 fundamentally changes the short, medium, and long-term value of that content because I can't repost that in 2030, right? Maybe I could use pieces of it or I got to rerecord it or I got to rewrite half of it. And so, when you put all these variables together, you start to realize like everything you create in some way is adding something to your digital brain, your knowledge. The question is, how much did it add? How additive was it? If you spend 20 minutes and you're just repeating the same commodity idea that you've repeated 100 times, maybe you added like one point of, I said it slightly differently. Okay, cool. We have another like grouping of words, approved language. Whereas, if you sit down and write a net new essay about a topic you've never written about before and you crystallize a whole point of view around it, the additive value of that to your digital brain is going to be like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. The additive value of that to your digital brain is exponentially higher than the first one. And so, that's my hope with AI is that the human is doing the writing. The human is doing the thinking. The human is doing the choosing of how do I see the world? What ideas do I agree with? Do I disagree with? What are my personality details, et cetera? But the robots are very effective at repeating and remixing and doing all the things that social media managers and even ghostwriters and VAs have done for. For a very long time.
Speaker 1You still got to give the robots direction around writing in a style that isn't generic sounding AI.
Speaker 2So, now you have touched on the, I think, the final piece and it is the hardest one for people to understand, which is voice. So, what is voice? What is style? Voice is a bundled term. When we say someone has a voice, someone's content has voice. We think that it's this intangible quality that can't be replicated. The reality is voice is really a bundled term made up of a couple different data points. It's like word choice dictates voice, right? If I say something is really cool, that gives you one perspective of who I am. If I say something is exquisite, that gives you a different perspective of who I am. And if I say something is fucking dope, that gives you a different perspective of who I am. Like literally a single word in a sentence can change your perspective of what the voice of that sentence or person is. Another one is sentence length and sentence structure. If someone writes a paragraph with no periods and like seven different sentences broken up by semicolons, you have a very different perspective of that person rather than someone who writes in short, terse sentences with very simple third grade reading level vocabulary. And what's, what's important about this is your, your takeaway should be that voice is something that you intentionally create. It's not something that just naturally happens. And when you become proficient enough at writing, what's funny, I ran into the same thing, ghostwriting for, for clients. I will never forget. Um, I had a ghostwriting client who I sent him a piece and he sent it back and he was furious and he said, this doesn't sound like me. And I looked at it and I went back and listened to the call and I was like, all right, he didn't really tell me what it was. So I have to guess what he's thinking. Like, why doesn't this sound like him? And it occurred to me, oh, I was, I was using the wrong voice. I made this piece, uh, lean too much into opinion. And this guy actually spoke referencing like a lot of studies and a lot of facts. I didn't rewrite the piece. All I did was go back in and add in like two or three sentences that just said, according to the New York times or according to Harvard business review, I changed 1% of it and I sent it back to him and he was like elated and he was like, oh my gosh, this is so much better. It sounds just like me. And so the irony of writing with AI is oftentimes AI will give you an output and people will look at one single variable. They'll look at one individual word choice and go, the whole thing is shit. And the reality is it's like, no, if you were proficient, you understood the qualities that made your voice, your voice, which most people don't know. All you would have to do is just go, I want to trade that one adjective for a different adjective. And all of a sudden the sentence sounds like me.
Speaker 1What do you think of people who don't like their voice, but who know which creators voices they like? So they might say, you know, I don't really like my voice, but I really like how Greg Eisenberg writes his essays on X.
Speaker 2I, I truly believe that, uh, 99% of the time when someone says that. They can neither articulate what makes their voice, their voice, what it is they don't like. And they can't articulate what makes your voice, your voice. And usually when people say that, it's more of a mask of they're just afraid to write period. And so it's a lot easier to point to and make this like a voice issue. The reality, I have ghostwritten for north of 300 different founders, executives, investors, the vast majority of the time. I used the exact same voice in the writing. It was authoritative. It was concise. It, it maybe had like a couple little vocabulary choices in there specific to that person. But like 98% of the thing was just an authoritative thought leadership style voice. And almost every one of them said, this sounds like me. And so if you go, if you go, I'm not, I'm not joking. And so if, if you go back to like language is open source. Most groupings of words. Words are commodities. The reality is that the voice component in writing is a minority component. It's a very small piece. It's not like this entire piece of writing is an original voice. Very rarely is that the case. It happens, but very rarely. Instead, it like a piece is 80% commodity groupings of words with maybe some subjective swapping of adjectives and things. And I think this is one of those. It's like you can't possibly discover the quality. That you want or like about your voice without writing. How are you going to discover? Oh, I actually prefer these types of adjectives over these types of adjectives. You know, I prefer this, this rhythm in my writing opposed to this rhythm in my writing. And so if, if you're not willing to do that, how in the world should you expect AI to have any inkling of any of those data points or choices? That's the unmade data set.
Speaker 1Yeah. I mean, the truth is, you know, like deep down, you know, like it's the same, it's the same concept around, like, you know, what kind of food you like, you know, if you're a pizza or a pasta person. Yeah. So like, of course, you know, the types of words that you connect with, how you, how, how you know your voice. It's just, it might be a little deep down. You have to, you have to be a little self-reflective on it, but it's there.
Speaker 2And this is not, to be clear, this is not exclusive to the everyday person. I think oftentimes people think, you know, oh, I'm, I'm the everyday person. I haven't achieved this massive outcome. I bet this is so much easier for people who have achieved all these things, right? They, they make up all of these problems. The reality is I have, I have ghostwritten for some of the most, like you can't accomplish things any more accomplished than what they've accomplished in the world of business. And even they, the, the core problem was they, they get nervous. Nervous staring at a blank page and they're, they're nervous to put themselves out there. majority of my value as a ghostwriter was not actually the writing. It was helping the client and giving them permission to put themselves out there. And it was comical to me. Ghostwriting for so many people where I would have a client be like, I'm really afraid of putting my perspective out there. And their perspective is like, the key to marketing is knowing your customer. I'm like, there's nothing to be afraid of. You are literally repeating a commodity idea that most of the planet agrees with. And so a lot of these are self-inflicted issues. And the whole key is like getting out of your own way and hitting publish so that you can discover what these variables are. What makes your personality? What makes your writing style? What makes your voice? The other
Speaker 1piece of that is, generally speaking, people are underpublishing. The volume of content that they're putting out. The volume of content that they're putting out is lower than they can actually do. I was having this conversation with our agency, actually. And LCA literally works with the biggest companies on the planet, building their new products. So there's, as you can imagine, in the AI world, as you can imagine, that team has just an incredible data. An incredible knowledge base around what's working and what's not. And there's so much content that they could be putting out. And they put out some content here and there. But it's, you know, I think one of the things we're talking about is like, how do we ship a minimum of five pieces of content today? And what does that look like? What systems do we need in place? And, you know, we could use AI in that process. But what systems do we need in place for that to happen? Because if we're not posting five pieces of content, we're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, I think if we're not posting five pieces of content per day, I don't believe we're giving it a fair shot.
Speaker 2I would agree. And I would say that it's important for people to remember that that is, in many ways, that is the baseline expectation now. And that is just the infrastructure. The question on top of that is, what is the input? If you're posting five times a day, like, where are you pulling the ideas from? Goes back to, well, you need a digital brain, need a personal language model. Like, where is it all coming from? And the same way, I know you're aware of the trend. You know, you see, like, OpenAI acquired that podcast, TBPN. And there's a huge move to these, like, large companies realizing they need a media component. I think that it might be idealistic, but I think that some of the best marketing money that any Fortune 500 company could spend would be plucking really thoughtful journalists. And I think that's a big part of it. And nonfiction writers in relevant or tangentially relevant fields and being like, you have one job, we're going to pay you a fat salary. And your only job is to think deeply about our industry and write long form content about it. That's it. Because what's really happening is it's not that like that individual piece of writing is the silver bullet. And, you know, that's going to drive all the sales and they make it all super promotional. What's really happening is you have a very smart person who's paid to think deeply about a topic, hopefully over time creating net new original thinking and ideas that get associated with the company. And that library of content feeds the infrastructure. It feeds your whole supply chain. It's like, just to make it visceral, Greg, it's like, imagine you were like, cool, I'll pay you a million bucks a year. I want you to do nothing, but think deeply about the future of AI and technology and the implications it's going to have on product building. And I just want you to build like the, a world-class long form content library that all of our different departments can pull from the robots, do the repeating. We can pluck short form. We could turn it into automated videos, like all the infrastructure. I just want you to create the highest quality input. Now imagine if Salesforce did that with like a Pulitzer prize winning journalist or Slack did that. I think that the leverage you get out of that is so it's so hard for people to wrap their heads around. And they're so focused on the minutia of like, we got, I post five times a day and what time of day and how do we go viral? And can we pay for retweets? And like all, none of it matters. None of it matters. What matters is you have the infrastructure and you have a very valuable content library that you pull from and leverage for a long period of time.
Speaker 1Yeah. I mean, that's why people are starting to say the company brain is the moat. Yes. Right. Cause if you're, uh, if you're like, if I hired you to this company brand and it's getting more and more valuable and I can use robots to go and slice and dice it a million ways. Like I know it sounds crazy to pay someone a million dollars, but, uh, it's not that crazy. If the value from that million dollars is thousands of pieces of content, it's improving workflows. It's helping with the product. It's, it's pretty insane. Right. And that's why you're starting to see actually, you know, companies, you know, spend millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, something, and I think it'll be hundreds of millions of dollars on data licensing or buying data. I saw micro one buying data, uh, spirit airlines data for a million, I think millions of dollars. And you know why? Because they're going to use that data. They're going to mine that data, you know? And, um, I think that's where everything is going.
Speaker 2That's exactly, that's exactly it. It's just people understand this idea more in technology. They go, Oh, we acquired a, uh, company that just filed for bankruptcy and we bought all their data. And everyone's like, yep, I instantly understand the value. The reality is language and writing and libraries of content are data. And you are buying, you are buying groupings of words. You are buying ideas. You are buying crystallized thinking that you can leverage the same way you leverage data.
Speaker 1Yeah. It's funny. Cause like, I bet the spirit airlines people are probably like, ha ha ha. I can't believe they bought our data for millions. Dollars idiots. And the micro one people are like, ha ha ha. I can't believe they sold us the data for so cheap. Yeah.
Speaker 2Well, it's, it's always a question of, it's actually not really the value of those assets in and of themselves. It, the question is how do you leverage it? You know, like if you're, if you're a company and you buy some writers, entire catalog and library of content, and then you don't have the operational infrastructure to scale it and squeeze all the juice out of it, then that was a horrible decision because you, you're not able to do what you should do with it. But if you have a really smart person as your input for your entire content marketing machine, like literally one person doing that for Slack or Salesforce or Airbnb or whoever could put that one smart person could build the entire digital brain library of content. That their entire marketing machine uses and reswizzles and remixes and posts and chops and cuts and pace. Like that's, to me, that's the future.
Speaker 1I mean, we're out of time, but that's like a whole other startup idea that someone needs to do, which is just do company brains as a service. Come on. Yep. Yep. So it's a, it's,
Speaker 2it's a home run. If I, if I was excited at all about B2B, I would go do it, but I'm not.
Speaker 1Cole, you've been so generous with your ideas, the whole playbook. You, you open sourced it. I really appreciate it. Where could people get to know you better, find you and get more of your ideas?
Speaker 2Always, always pumped to chat, my man. You can find me on X. I still want to call it Twitter. You know, I'm a, I'm an old head. And if anyone wants to build their digital brain and library of content, you should come join us for the next ship 30 for 30 cohort. We're going to do that in October. Should be a lot of fun.
Speaker 1Cool. Yeah. I'll include links for all that in the show notes, in the description. Cole, you've been on the pod probably what? Three, four times? Three, three or four. Yeah. I love having you on. I hope this episode is well, well loved. Um, it's one of those things where this is like, you were talking about timeliness, timely versus timeless. And like, this is a timeless episode. Like people who ingest this, these ideas, 2026 now, like 2029, 2032, like these are, these are ideas that are always going to, to be so, so valuable. And it's, it's sort of in some ways like an eat your vegetables episode, um, you know, versus like drinking a smoothie. It, there's just so much nutrients in this. And I do believe that people who actually, you know, if you've made it here and people actually who, who've made it here, uh, like they are going to understand how to have strong points of view, how to use AI to create some of this content. How to think about how it all plays together. And, uh, they're lucky.
Speaker 2Well, thanks man. Yeah. That's my goal as timeless as possible.
Speaker 1I'll catch you later.
Speaker 2Cool. Thanks everyone.
PodcastTranscript AI