[Whiz Pill Podcast 56] Keith Hayden's Wisdom On Entrepreneurship & Being An Author As A Military Veteran

Transcript

00:00

Yeah, there you go. So everything that you do from here on out will be published on the platforms I use, which is currently on corporate, it's TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and all that stuff. And yeah, so I'll figure it out. I specifically want to dive into who you are really, you know, I mean, besides the character you mentioned before, because just keep the soldier military guy, the story.

00:28

don't give a fuck attitude that onto other spaces. And then there's you, you know, the guy behind this interesting tool that you've developed that's supposed to be helps you write a book into ours. You know? Yeah. So my story, I love hearing creator backstories because it, it always adds just a little bit of

00:53

a little bit of character and nuance. And I'm always like, Oh wow, what an interesting backstory. Mine is no less interesting. I'm a military veteran, US Air Force. I grew up in San Antonio, Texas in the US. And if you've never been to San Antonio, it's a military town. My parents were in the Air Force. My mom worked at Fort Sam Houston, which is the army base down there. She worked there a long time, my entire childhood.

01:22

So I grew up around military people. A lot of my uncles served in Vietnam. They were army, air force across all the services. So, but I didn't have the, it wasn't like destiny that I was gonna be in the military, but I was just kind of that kid. I was always neat. I always had like, I always made my own schedules and things like that. So I was like military before I even got in the military, I already had the mindset. And when I was in high school, I was in my high school.

01:51

Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. And this is like military light, right? You play kind of soldier. And I learned a lot in that program. I did that my entire four years of high school. So from there, I had the opportunity to apply to one of the service academies in the U.S. And these are pretty elite schools. Each of the respective military branches in the U.S. has a service academy. There's a...

02:20

Army Academy, West Point, there's a US Naval Academy, and then there's a US Air Force Academy. So in high school, I did a US Army JROTC. And I remember going to my senior officer, Major Varikin, that was his name. And I was like, Oh yeah, I heard about applying to West Point. And he was like, you're too smart for the army. You need to apply for the Air Force Academy. So I applied and

02:49

Um, I got in barely. I got into what's called the air force academy preparatory school, which is for, um, we, we joke, it's kind of like for last chance kids, you know, for kids who you didn't quite make the cut to get directly into the academy, but you had most of the right stuff, you were just missing a couple of things for me. It was my SATs. My SATs were pretty horrible. Um, I just remember like, I wasn't really thinking about them and I was like, Oh shit, I got to.

03:19

go take the SATs and I went and go take them. I did no prep. I just kind of took it blind and yeah, my score showed. And so that kind of helped me back, but I was still able to get into the academy and it was an amazing experience. If you're not familiar with one of the service academies, it's basically you are in the military in this school. It is a military school and it's regimented. You wear uniforms every day.

03:48

It's a training, we call it a training environment, your entire four, in my case, five years while you're there. But it's a special place because you're getting elite instruction, but you're also being trained to become an officer in the United States military, in my case, the United States Air Force. So upon graduation, you receive your diploma, a bachelor's degree or whatever, bachelor's of science, whatever, and you also receive a commission.

04:18

into United States Air Force as an officer. And I'm going into details because I know most people are probably not familiar with this because there's not a lot of us grads. I think total from the Air Force Academy, maybe there's like 50,000 total of graduates from this school. It's a relatively small school, but when people, when they

04:47

know the name, if they're familiar with it, they know that it's not easy to get in. It's damn sure easy not to graduate. It's more than just going to classes. You have all of the regular college environment stuff, but then you also have a heavy, heavy load of military training on top of that. So a typical day is like go to class. You might have to march to lunch.

05:17

After class, you might have some squadron training. It's broken up into like units. So think of like Harry Potter houses, but you have squadrons like in, or we call them squadrons and other academies call them some different, but these are basically organized units of cadets that do military like, you function like you would in a, in an active duty military unit. So there's roles, officers have different roles and.

05:44

depending on your level, whatever your grade year is, then you have that role. So obviously if you're a freshman, you're at the low end of the totem pole, you're getting trained, you're getting blasted. I wasn't gonna say you're getting beat. We used to use that word all the time. Maybe it's not good to use that word anymore, but beat as in like you do pushups, physical training, if you get punished or something like that. But then as you rise in the ranks, then you get more and more responsibility to where you're in charge of other cadets.

06:13

and that's preparing you for your life as an officer. I'm gonna take a break here just in case you have any questions. Cause I know, I don't know, I didn't want to, I didn't plan to go this far deep, but it is a big part of where I came from. And I know a lot of people aren't familiar with the Academy experience. So. One thing you'll learn about me, man, the more we talk, the more you'll realize that I very much welcome that sort of...

06:40

long-winded answers because to me, first of all, it's not long-winded. And second of all, it gives me more context, you know, sort of like mirror the current discourse around AI, you know, it's just giving me more. The more data, the better, right? I'm, I'm, I'm worrying about you all the time. Um, and hopefully the people that listen to my stuff to do as well, cause I noticed a spike as of late, I don't know where that spike came from, but my hunch tells me, my hunch tells me it's coming from one of the things.

07:10

guest I've had on and I reached like 80,000 people that are listening to my stuff man and I'm like, oh, okay, so something is going on here. I don't know how serious I should take it but nonetheless given that I'm already going, not because I have to but because I want to and introducing that structure that that military rigor into what this is, you know.

07:39

became really big for me moving forward. That's why I make it a point to take stuff out of other spaces specifically. That's why I make it a point to schedule everything. It's so funny to like see how other people respond to that. It's like, why are you sending me all these links? It's like, it's so funny man. But for you specifically though, from what I remember, I've seen your post orbiting around

08:09

later groups that I tend to hang out with. So Reden comes to mind. It's like, yeah, that general cluster of people from Twitter, they know and follow their stuff, so you showed up. But the other cluster that made me more aware of what you were doing is that the cluster, specifically the machine learning, you know, tech space. So I started to investigate some of what you were doing and eventually...

08:37

got to chat with you on spaces and realized that, oh, okay, you actually are doing something here. So as far as you can tell, man, how hard of a pivot was it really to go from traditional military lifestyle to then essentially becoming an entrepreneur from what I can tell and so low at that?

09:03

I had the DNA of an entrepreneur. So my dad was a radio DJ in San Antonio. Growing up, he was on, I mean, traditional old school DJ playing music, announcements, weather, all that stuff. And in that role, I never really got to talk to him about this type of stuff. But in that role, there's a lot of autonomy there.

09:32

You're working for the station, but of course, in your show and your program, you have your own personality, you have your own style. And it was funny, just a few weeks ago, my uncle, he was like, my uncle, I always joke, my uncle is my biggest fan, because it's interesting because I don't know this uncle very well. So I grew up in San Antonio, but my dad's size from New York. He grew up in the Bronx. That's where he's originally from.

10:00

So that side of my family, I don't really know them that well, just because I never visited New York as a kid. I went for the first time in college just briefly, but I just didn't know him. Bottom line is I don't know this uncle very well, but he's been seeing a lot of my stuff as you have been recently. And he's like, yeah, you got that creative spirit. You got that spark, just like your dad.

10:27

And that is interesting because I didn't know that side of my dad. But back to your question as far as how hard was it? Extremely hard because, you know, as you can imagine, the military, it's not the type of place for creativity. They don't really match and you'd be right. It's not really encouraged. Even if you don't know anything about the military, you would just think like you follow orders, you do stuff, you go to war, you fight.

10:57

And that's what you think when you think military. And that's absolutely true. My active duty years were from 2008 to 2016. And for the US, our main focus was the Iraq and Afghanistan war. And whatever side of it that you were on, for me, that was my reality. All throughout college, it was...

11:20

briefings about the war. It was, you know, getting ready. We're being trained as officers, as military officers. This is our business. This is our job. And we needed to do it well, because we, I had known classmates who were killed over there. I had, I had friends that didn't make it back. The service that I got involved in. I had two kind of phases to my career.

11:48

My first job was as a force support officer. This is a personnel officer. It's more of an administrative officer. And then I switched gears two years in to become a special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. And if you're not aware of this organization, you probably are aware of our counterpoint, counterpart organization in the Navy, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service known as NCIS.

12:18

decades long run show. We never got a show. Well, we, we've been in a couple of movies and stuff, but you've probably never heard of the organization that I worked with, but same training, same job scope, exact same duties, is what I was involved in. So I was a cop. I was a federal agent.

12:39

And so that made my role even more. Um, I remember back in 2015, shortly before I was getting out, there were, we lost four, uh, five agents to, um, I think it was, uh, I can't remember if it was an IED blast blast. It was some bomb blast, but they were, they were killed. And one of the agents, this is a very small organization, by the way, there's no more than 3000.

13:06

of the entire organization, the Air Force, AFOSI is what we called it, is what it's called. And yeah, I had met one of the guys just a year or two prior. I had gone to his unit, I'd done some training and two years later, he wasn't there anymore. So I'm not trying to bring down this podcast, but I'm trying to give you the scope of this was my job. This was my reality for...

13:35

a long time. And so becoming an entrepreneur, I already had the, like I said, I had the DNA, but what I didn't have is the mindset because coming from, as you can imagine, coming from this very, basically for us, wartime operations, fast paced, all that stuff, it was hard. I equated to stopping a train.

14:04

you know, stop a train that's just barreling down the tracks. And you've got to find a way to stop it and not only stop it, but you've got to find a way to turn it into completely different direction. And that was me back in 2016, 2017, when I started this. In 2016, that was during Donald Trump's presidency, correct? Yeah. So yeah, I remember that transition was a big part that was happening as I was getting out for sure.

14:35

Did it affect you in any way at all? Just curious. It's interesting because I was just talking about this with my wife the other day. It affected me actually in a good way because as a veteran, we have if you're, I don't know, and it's interesting doing these podcasts because, you know, I don't know, are you from the U S originally, by the way?

15:00

And I know I kind of give off that like OG vibe, but I'm truly a South American. Okay. I thought so. I detected an accent, but I didn't know. You just don't know nowadays, but that proves my point, right? That this is every podcast you do, and I have the same thing as a podcaster. It's an international audience. So it's like, okay, that's why I'm giving so much context around everything. Because I know not everybody's from the US. People are from different places. But

15:29

As a veteran, when you get out, we have something in the US called the Veterans Affairs Office. And so they're known for, once you get out all of your military records and stuff, they will transfer to this organization, mainly your medical records. And then you can still get medical care through the VA, we call them the Veterans Affairs. And so when I got out in 2016, the VA was kind of raggedy. Slow wait.

15:58

enormous wait times, just took a long time to do shit. And by the time, I think by 2019, by the time I left California, it was noticeably better. It was shorter wait times. It was quicker to get medications, get seen. It was just better. And that was, that was a direct result of more money, more attention being thrown at it. And I remember that was one of the

16:26

the Trump era reforms was to turn this notoriously. And we all knew it when we were in, when I was in, you know, that the VA just kind of, it was lacking in a lot of ways, but I feel like it got better actually during the Trump era. Yeah. I still have my own thoughts about this whole American presidency thing.

16:55

I couldn't fucking care less, was empowered because I'm still fucked over. Um, but I had the country to be clear, you know, not the people in it. I have beef country in its history with my own country and how they, they invaded the place and ransacked everything. But that's the topic for. Um, I, I do, I do want to ask you about your transition, you know, from an active DD.

17:25

member in an active duty entrepreneur at this point. It gives me, you give me some context in terms of like how hard it really is, but now I want to know what's the actual day to day life for what you're helping to do, especially on a platform like Twitter. Yeah. I love how I love the term active duty entrepreneur. I might have to adopt that as a thing. Some people say they want to chase that life, but they actually are on the bench, man. There's.

17:54

Absolutely. That's what you actually be in the field. And then there's one thing to just speculate about what you would do once you get in there. Amen. We are speaking the same language. I was just thinking this morning that there's, and this was, and I can't knock other people that I've met on Twitter and on X recently in the last few months, because I was in that space too for a long time. You know, there's people on

18:24

to have a business, but they don't know how to move the needle. So they end up on spaces all day. And yeah, they're racking up followers and they're racking up views, but they don't, they themselves don't know what it's building to. They don't have a plan. They're just there. And they're like, you know, the whole, the whole cliche of if I just show up every day, then somehow,

18:51

a business, a profitable business or something that allows me freedom in my life, whatever, freedom of movement, whatever. That's just going to happen overnight. And it just doesn't. And you know this, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but- The context of the people listening for sure definitely get into it. Yeah. No, okay. Yeah, for sure. No, it's just I've spent probably the last two years,

19:20

Really was 2022 when I really started to try and figure this whole social media thing out. Because prior to that, I was, I was posting stuff, but I was, I was just kind of posting whatever. Like a lot of people start, you don't know what to post. You have all these ideas. You know, you want to make money doing something, but you don't know what that something is. You damn sure don't know how to talk about it. You don't know who to talk to. That was a big disadvantage I had going in because my entire network

19:49

is mostly in the US military. They're not on X, they're not on Twitter. They still use Facebook regularly. And so that gives you an idea of these are not active social media users like you and I are. And so I already knew that going in a lot of people, they will start up. And that's what's funny to me. You'll see these people that, oh, I just started my account 90 days ago and look how

20:18

A lot of these people, they have people, they are in an industry, they're in tech, they're in so-called money X or money Twitter where they already knew other people in the ecosystem. I started from fucking zero. There was nobody else. I'm trying to think, I've run into maybe a handful of military veterans and maybe I've run into one other Academy grad.

20:48

And it's rare to run into a military entrepreneur veteran who's actively being an entrepreneur, not just, you know, they've published a one-off book or they've done one thing and that's it. No, somebody that's like doing it like I am that I can kind of walk with and learn from or whatever. I didn't find that. So I kind of had to build that. I had to start from scratch. I had to learn a bunch of new skills. I had to learn.

21:17

Um, as far as the day to day, it's interesting because in the beginning, my day to day was mostly learning based. I wanted to just cultivate a bunch of new skills that I knew I didn't have. And a lot of that was through writing. That was, it turned out writing is just kind of my bread and butter. I've been doing it for decades. Um, and that's one of the things that kept me.

21:44

that saved me writing kind of saved me through the military because I kept the journal. I didn't mention this part of the story, but my dad, I mentioned my dad, but my dad passed away when I was 16. He had a stroke on a random and was a Tuesday. And yeah, that was it. He was, it was, he was gone. And

22:14

that obviously changed my life. And it made it a lot harder because I have two brothers, I have an older brother and my older brother was already in school, out of state. He was in college at the time. And yeah, it's like all of a sudden, how are you gonna go to college kid? You know, what are you gonna do? And my mom was working, but I mean, like I said, my older brother is already in college and she's already...

22:43

paying for that. So I'm second coming up and the academy, what's interesting about the academy, I mentioned it, but you actually get, since you're on a military status, you're in a special status as a cadet. So you get paid while you're at the school. Like they basically it's a full ride, technically it's a full ride scholarship to the school, but they actually pay you a stipend while you're there. And there's no, your, your pay back is the time.

23:12

that you serve after you graduate, if you graduate. And that's a whole complication itself, but that is what you owe for going to the academy. And so you owe five years on active duty minimum. And of course you can go longer, you can extend, but that's the deal.

23:40

broadly speaking, don't quite understand the power that reading actually holds. Because I think social media has made writing such an easy medium to consume that, um, and immediately obvious how it's affecting you. And, and, and I can, I can vouch firsthand for like, well, Twitter, for example, it's like these motherfuckers on there be reading the headlines and never really diving any deeper beyond that. And I'm like,

24:10

That's the power of writing right there, you know, like, um, rich, rich, great content, not rich, great content. I do think that people that beverage writing in that way, uh, speak volume to, you know, the ultimate power that writing holds. And I feel like writing, uh, as a tool is very foundational, which probably, which probably explains why those language models took off that crazy over the last year.

24:39

It's only been a year and fucking Chad GPT has like what? 100 something million plus users and counting. And that was like within the first month from what I understand, they actually reached that number too. So it's like, so a month or a day more that big. So who fucking knows how big, much bigger they are now. So it seems to me that people really care about writing. So from your perspective,

25:06

Why the fuck are people so hyped up about this fucking thing? About Chad GPT or about writing? Uh, Chad GPT first and then writing second. Cause they're using writing for the first time anyway. Yeah. Hmm. Right. Um, what's exciting to me about Chad GPT is that it's, it's more than just a writing tool, it's more than just a programming tool. It's literally whatever you want to be. And I think this is the misconception.

25:36

the average person, I will say, not even the average person, because you and I are in a, we're in a bubble of a minority of people that are interested in tech that know how to leverage Chad GBT to do a dozen things. And we see the potential and the power in it. Because a lot of people don't, you know, you still have, when I talk, I was just talking to somebody yesterday

26:06

tool that I built. And they're like, you know, they bring up the ethical piece. I kind of laugh when I think about this because I just go back to like since the night in my response, when somebody said it just yesterday was people have been copying, pasting shit since the dawn of the internet. Is that ethical? You use a smartphone full of

26:36

apps and software that you have no idea how to make, but you use it to take pictures. You use it to post to social media to keep in contact with your friends and family. Is that ethical? You didn't make that software.

26:51

And I think it speaks to what people don't understand is that chat GPT is, it's the ultimate repurposing tool. It's not making anything new per se. And you and I know this. I know you know all of what I'm saying, but I'm basically saying for you, if somebody doesn't know, it's not making anything new. It's just predicting what it thinks is going to come. And that is a prediction of what it

27:19

has read what it has seen and it's seen a lot, but it's not really making anything new. It's very much like copy and paste, right? Like if I copy and paste something that you wrote and, and learn from it, borrow it, repurpose it or whatever, it's the exact same thing as what chat GPT is doing, except I'm just doing it manually. And I think what scares people is that it is so autonomous. You don't see

27:48

the how or the why on the back end. And I can get that. It is, it is scary. We've never seen a technology that can do something like this without, you know, having programmed it to say, do exactly this. That's classic programming. Chad GPT can say, do something like this. And it can reach back and say, oh, this something looks like that something, which looks like that something. And it does it really, really, really fast.

28:17

on a word by character basis. And so that's, that is scary. I do admit that because it's so new. We've never seen that before, but it's not. Imagine a hundred students. And one of my professional backgrounds after I got out of the military is teaching. I'm, I'm a, I am still for now, a certified math teacher in the U S. And so imagine a room full of students and I'm at the board.

28:47

And I tell them to copy down an equation and they copy it down, but then they have to solve the equation. Now, in that case, it's 30 students and they're just copying what I'm telling them to copy. And then from that, they produce their individual solutions. Some of those solutions will be right. Some will be wrong. Some will be, they won't do it or whatever. Imagine that room. That is chat GPT. Now scale it up by

29:17

billion times. Now you've got 300 million, 3 billion students doing this, except there's an aggregator on the backend. So you can kind of take the average of, okay, 30 students over here got it right, 300 over there got it wrong. And then you can kind of say, okay, well, 30% of them, it's right. 30% it's wrong. 30% they didn't do shit.

29:46

And that's what chat GPT does. That's what it is. It's, it's, and I've never made this analog before, so I don't, maybe this, this analogy, somebody could, can destroy it or whatever. You probably could, but that's the way I think about it. That's all it's doing is it's doing it on its own and it's invisible. And so this, people are scared. And I get that, but long answer to your question.

30:15

That's why people are excited about it. People that understand, well, forget about the ethical stuff, like, because it's a tool like anything else, no different than our computers. We're both on computers or you're on your smartphone or whatever. Are you going to go out and make your own computer so you can feel ethical about not using people's software that you didn't design or pay for? Fuck no, you're not going to do that.

30:39

You're just going to go buy a computer or buy a smartphone and you're going to load up whatever you load up on it and you're going to start using it. That's, that's the way I think with the ethical thing, but Chad GPT, that's why it's so exciting is that it literally is this, I don't want to say this ultimate tool because it's as you and I both know it's, it's, it's still new. That's the thing. It's still like in its baby crawling phase. And yeah, it's going to be so much more powerful.

31:09

and so much better than it is now. And I think going back to writing, as you said, writing is the foundational skill because that is the first thing that you, that that's the way that we communicated with it. That's the way it communicates with us. And so as a teacher, I immediately saw the use cases of chat GPT because I was like, this can make teaching

31:39

easier and so much more interesting and so much more fun, I don't have to sit there and come up with just my lesson plan. I can come up with 30 lesson plans tailored to all of my students. I just give them, here's the strengths and weaknesses of this kid. Here's the strengths and weaknesses of that kid. And next thing you know, I've got customized lesson plans. That's just one way this thing could just totally blow up education. And it has in some cases, but writing is the vehicle.

32:07

And using chat GBT instantly, if you use it enough, it instantly makes you a better writer. It makes you a clearer thinker because you have to find a way to, you're talking to another entity that can understand a lot. But I like what the way a guy follow puts it. He puts it like a digit. It's like a digital intern. It knows a lot of stuff.

32:35

But it's a little bit overeager sometimes. It's a little bit long-winded. It's a little bit unfocused. And your job as a user of ChatDBT is to use writing to do all of those things, to focus it in, to say, no, I don't want you to do this. I want you to do that. And the clearer, clearer you get, it gets better and better. It's a very outcome-focused kind of process. And I gotta say, it's not too dissimilar to what...

33:02

really do with the whole podcasting format? Because again, I thought a lot I started doing it was out of frustration because there's so much knowledge being shared, but none of it is being archived, created in the wire. So I'm like, what's the next best thing to do this? And podcasting, we can answer to that. And what I noticed is that after time, people don't know what to expect with me in terms of what to talk about.

33:33

It's just so funny to watch, man. It's something that you only notice if you've done it long enough, which in my case I've done it for what? 20, 40,000 hours at this point. So I've been doing quote unquote podcasting traditionally. I just never really published anything. The way I talk about things and the way I talk to you right now, that's basically how I talk to everyone. And it's so funny how every so often I get someone saying

34:01

Oh, like, do you have a radio show? I would like to listen to that. And I'm like, I'm just someone who rants a lot. So I think it's a quite you. But focusing people in terms of like the kind of topics or the kind of themes you want them to touch on, that's actually a skill. You know, it takes a lot of mental awareness to be able to...

34:29

nudge someone along so that things don't feel abrupt or don't feel like it's extractive. That's another thing that I personally care about. I hate the term, pick your b***h. Every so often I'll throw up in a space and I'll do what I usually do, what you know me for, and I get reached out to a n***a. I'm saying, oh wow, like you are, you're very well spoken for a black man. You don't say a black...

34:57

But we know what they're saying, you know what I'm saying? So then they will try to clean, they'll be like, I'd love to beat your brain. I mean, I'm not sure. That'll be 250 and all. So, because these people only care about what you have to share, they can extract it. For me, it's very much the opposite. Like, I'm here to extract something, sure, but they devalue fears to extract

35:26

insights that's in service of the listener first of all and also the speaker themselves. I'm not really here trying to pick your brain specifically to like you know all the ins and outs of like what trumps are you using, how we find that, you know all that other. Um so that's really that piece in terms of like focusing in the conversation you know that it's not it's really not that different and I think for people that don't

35:56

know too much about chat TPC another way to describe it is talking to a baby Especially to be that's too smart. Wait, so I'm good You will every so often they'll say some shit that's kind of outrageous, you know Or it's a shit that kind of takes you by surprise and you're like, you know what? I didn't expect you for me to say that but you either We can't really get into that right now or Getting to it later kind of thing. You're not

36:25

a lot of ways to get them to acknowledge that what they're touching on is worthwhile, but as I'm in place for everything. So Chadgy teaching for me very much shows that focus, especially when it comes to taking the transcripts from these podcasts and synthesizing data out of bounds so that I don't have to just sit here and think, hmm, what did that person say at like 10 minutes and then, you know, stick stuff.

36:54

the intern figure that out. So it's been really helpful for me in that sense. And I gotta say, I'm effectively playing the editor here where I step in and I choose, you know, what's worth actually dissecting. Cause like you said, it really does like to ramble on. So every, what I'll do actually, I will first of all ask it, Hey, I want you to specifically focus on that part of the combo and only that part.

37:24

And I give it a follow up as I go along so that it doesn't just blurt out all at once. So that the actual information I'm trying to get across actually is preserved in there. Cause my big take for fellow writers out here, but writing, when all is said and done, it's information, man. I don't care how you present it. You know what I'm saying? I don't care if you use four scores in 40 years ago, or if you say, oh, it was 6,000 days ago, you know, it's like, it's the exact same.

37:53

assessment. It's all about like coloring your writing to appeal to the sensibilities of the masses. And that's why I personally am not that interested in nonfiction. History is never really my thing. And to be honest, oh sorry, fiction, not nonfiction, I got too confused. But yeah, like writing that essentially focuses more on the qualitative merit and artistic merit of it, you

38:22

and stuff like that. I know that matters, but for me, I generally could not care less. When I need to write in that way, I'll do poetry and keep it pushing, but otherwise I don't exactly see that going around. But what you do though is very much more on that side of fiction, but creative nonfiction kind of, because it feels like what I'm getting

38:51

You've essentially put together a biography that mirrors your own life, except you insert your own characters into it. Would that be a correct assessment? Of Sirius and Limnic? Yeah, like what the stuff you're working on in terms of these, I guess, like narrative stories that you've put out. Yeah. So I haven't really gone full personal biography and it's interesting because I've done so much writing.

39:17

that I haven't done that. I did a couple of years ago, because most of my journals that I mentioned, I mentioned that I journaled for 13 years and I still have those journals, but they're all in notebook spirals. I wasn't typing them. They're all old school, handwritten. And so a couple of years ago, well, actually when I got out of the military, I started just, I mean, I just didn't really even know what to do with myself. So...

39:42

I just was like, well, I'm just going to digitize these journals. So, and it was a good exercise for me at the time because it just allowed me to look back on my career and look back on some of the stuff I had accomplished and just give me that, okay, well, if I did it back then, I can, I can do something different now. But besides that, going to my fiction, I, most of it isn't really about me.

40:09

And I think this is another reason why I like chat GPT for fiction. A lot of fiction writers, they want to write about themselves in story form. I've noticed a lot of writers do this. They put themselves as a character or someone they know, and then they plop them into a scenario that they themselves live through or some exaggeration or hyperbole or whatever, some representation of it. And that's the book. That's not why I write fiction.

40:40

Fiction for me is an exploration. It's an exploration of the way, I'm fascinated how different we are and how that shows up. And especially now with the internet, I'm talking to you, you're from a yet undisclosed country in South America. I don't know what it is yet, but you're from there and I'm from the US.

41:09

And just between us, there's a lot of differences there. There's a difference in culture. There's a difference in possibly language, at least native language. There's a difference in history or outlooks in the world, but there's also a lot of similarities. You're interested in tech. You like writing. We're both podcasters. We like getting interested in different things. And by the way, I will say,

41:40

You know a lot about a lot of things. And it's pretty impressive to me. I've heard you in a couple of spaces and listened to a couple of your shows. It's just, you're like me in that you have a very wide range of interests and things that you like to get into. So we have that in common as well. So that's one of my drivers for writing fiction is to, yeah, I want to show the differences. I don't want to gloss over them.

42:09

And that was a big part of Sirius and Lemnick was getting these different perspectives, not just in ethnicity or gender or whatever, but in social status, in age, in geography, in culture. I'm really fascinated by that. And I wanted to bring them all together in an interesting way. And I also wanted to talk about the future.

42:39

I wanted to talk about how our society, how I saw it at the time or how I thought about it. I wanted to talk about things that were wrong with it and possible solutions to those problems. Because I feel like, you and I know, there's a lot of people that just bitch and moan online. They complain, they shitpost, but that's all they do. They stop there. I was always trained to, if you have a problem, then you find a solution. You better make a solution.

43:10

And unfortunately, these are big problems, right? These aren't tactical issues to where it's just, okay, just go and get that tool or just go over there and talk to that person. No, these are like human society, history, altering problems that I wanted to think about, that I wanted to, because I'm a big proponent of history. I love reading about it. Not just reading about it for the highlights, but really...

43:40

getting the perspective of not only people from different cultures, but people in different times, people in different eras of history, because we have a vantage point of history and it's typically, I don't know, the modern average person's view of history is that history is, you know, it's full of a lot of backwards things, a lot of bad things happened, but you know.

44:09

things are generally good now. This is my summary of the average person's thought of history. Things are generally good. We're generally better than we were, but things still suck. And there's all this da-da-da-da-da stuff that's wrong. I personally...

44:27

frustrating that that is a thing. Because if you just look back even just a couple of decades, you'll see that a lot's changed as far as how things look. But as far as how we operate within our given circumstances, a lot of it's the same. And I mentioned, I like on your form, how before you had people sign up, you were like, what's a recent podcast that you listen to?

44:56

I put Dan Carlin's hardcore history. And I'm listening to that right now because I'm working on a prequel to Sirius and Limnic that takes place here in Japan. And a big part of... I've learned a lot about Japanese culture over the years, but of course, the World War II, Japan is an interesting... It's an interesting period in history, obviously, because of World

45:25

When I think of Japan today, and you mentioned that you enjoy Japanese culture and things like that, this bellicose wartime Japan is something that seems so foreign. And I can tell you from living here several years that it seems very foreign. It's like, what the hell are you talking about? How could these people have wanted, have been one of the enemies of the world? That was only...

45:54

75 plus 80 years ago. It's not that long ago. And to some people, and this is how you can already get a sense of how I think about things, it's not that long in the span of human history. Yeah, it's a couple of generations, but how do we go from that to the Japan that I'm currently living in right now, which is, it's unrecognizable. It's not.

46:21

the same. And I've traveled all over to Japan. I've traveled all over the world. And that's one of the things I look for. And I think for me personally, it's putting myself in the timeline. I want to see and I want to know where I'm at in the span of human history because it helps me. One, it helps me cope with the small things.

46:49

politics, the gossip, the drama that is ginned up daily on, especially on places like X and social media. I recently took a break from X and I came back after the holidays and I just realized how much fucking drama is on there. How much the platform, and it's not just X, it's the social media in general, but how much it's like, ooh, did you hear what?

47:16

what open AI did. Did you hear what Microsoft said? Did you hear what she said? Did you hear about this latest TV episode that they did this and that? And there's so much of that on there that it's... I like to say my native element is water. And I know for myself that if I spend too much time in that environment, I will absorb. I'm really good at absorbing information and absorbing...

47:46

That's one of the ways I learned so fast. I'm just good at absorbing things, information, feelings, emotions, that type of stuff. And so if I spend too long in that environment, then it starts to muddy the waters for me. It just kind of takes me out of time and surely takes me my eye off the ball of what I'm really trying to do. And so I've tried to get away from that. But anyway, yeah, this drama of human history, it...

48:15

me understanding history helps me put that in perspective. And that's a personal thing for me. So another thing that stood out to me too is when you talked about how unfocused Twitter can be as but also social media really, we can definitely. Yeah. Should we service your name? Serving your current goal as an entrepreneur? That's so effective. Yeah.

48:45

Yeah, man. I think that my wife looks at my routine and I think some people would just, I know they would hate my routine, but the way I do things. But essentially, I generally time everything that I do, like everything. I shouldn't say everything, but I mean, it's a lot of things, especially when it comes to being on here. Because as I mentioned before, there's a lot of things that just don't move the needle. For instance, being on a space,

49:14

for two hours waiting to raise my hand. You know, like.

49:19

When I, I did it so much last year. And so this is me talking to the me of like four or five months ago. And I'm just like, that is such a fucking waste of time. It just, for me in general, it is, even if it's people that I know on the space, it's just, it's not productive. Like I'm not, unless I'm getting anything out, and you know how it is on spaces. You start talking about one thing and then it goes off on this tangent. And then next thing you know, somebody's got

49:48

know, some type of personal story they're sharing. And then that takes another five or 10 minutes. And then it just boom, boom, boom. Like I think my longest space last year was probably like four hours. And I look back on that and I'm just like, look, I ain't got time for that. That's, most of these people aren't even interested in what I'm doing. They don't know what I'm doing. They don't care what I'm doing. This is not helpful.

50:16

It feels good in the moment, because especially when it's people, you know, you're hanging out, whatever, but it's just, it's not good. So what I do is when I'm, I, I tend to time my stuff. So I'm a big fan of the Pomodoro method, 25 minute sprint, five minute break. I don't do the exact, you know, you do it four times and then you take a long break. I don't do that shit. I just do as much as I can in that.

50:45

And pretty much every day I hit the same things for my goals. So right now my goals are get as good as Japanese as I can while I'm still here in Japan. And then also write my book while finding a way to grow my business. Now there's a lot of moving parts that go along with that stuff. There's a lot of other micro tasks that I'm doing. Like this morning, I spent most of the time before

51:14

call because I wanted to be able to link it and give it to you, was creating a landing page, a sales page for the, I'm calling it Dream Book Writer. This is the book writer for nonfiction books to help people write nonfiction books that I use chat TBT. And I've just finished this week. Like I was making a sales page for that. But the 25 minute thing, what it does for me is it, you know, you can sprint for 25 minutes. You can...

51:42

go for 25 minutes and then it forces me to take a break, drink some water, whatever, and then come back and hit it again. And in that time, there's no distractions. I don't, I close all the tabs except the one thing that I'm trying to do. I don't check social media if my phone goes off. I also turn off notifications on my phone too. So I don't see that. That's not pulling me away because all those little micro switches, you know,

52:11

just, they add up, you know, it's an invisible cost. Every time you switch tabs, every time you, you look at your phone and take your eye off the ball, there's a cost there. And it only adds up after you get to the end of the day and you're like, wow, I didn't really do anything. And I think a lot of people have this going on and this is, this is going to sound maybe terrible to say, but there's a lot of people that claim, you know, they have ADHD and things like this, but it's like

52:41

you're just distracted. We all get distracted these days a lot more easily because there's a lot more shit to get distracted by than in the past. And so I don't think it's the case that, some people do actually have ADHD, but I'd argue, because I was a teacher, right? So I get this often, this kid, oh, they've got ADHD. No, he's got a stayed up all night playing fucking video games problem. That's why he's scatterbrained because he realized he fucked up.

53:09

And now he's paying the price because he didn't do us on work. He didn't reach it. And now he's sitting here in class and now, okay, that's the problem. But I get this a lot. I got this a lot as a teacher, especially as a K through 12 teacher in the US. There's a lot of, we have that culture of it's not, it's never the kid's fault. It's not your fault. And so this goes down the chain. It's not the kid's fault. It's not the parent's fault. It's not

53:39

It's not my fault as a teacher. It's not the administrator's fault. It's like, who the fuck's fault is it then? Like something didn't happen. This kid failed the class or whatever. So it's just a, this is a common issue among teachers in the U.S. that they deal with. But I bring it up because we live in a distraction-filled world. And if you don't have active measures to...

54:04

to mitigate those distractions, then you're gonna get distracted. You're not gonna get shit done, and you're gonna feel like shit at the end of the day. And I know I do. And that's why I have all these things in place. Yeah, it's a game in service of what you're saying. You're very outcome-based, and having a framework that nudges along to really get to that results that you're seeking, it's no surprise, at least to me, that you went

54:33

that deep into child GPC, because I mean, as you said before, I know a lot about a lot of things, but I'm not necessarily diving that deep. And it has its shortcomings, but to me, I don't dive deep, but I'm selective of what I'm learning about in terms of making that it's foundational. Meaning that if I learn about say, the chemical engineering for the first time, I'm not just gonna go talk to a fucking

55:03

someone who does nuclear science. That would have zero impact to my overall health and understanding the field. And long term anyway, because it's not foundation. It's related to chemical engineering, but it's not a whole different discipline. Instead, what I'll do is actually have a buddy who's currently studying to have his master's in chemical engineering. What I would actually would either A, get them on the podcast, or B,

55:32

talk to him and say, yo, what's like the top 10 things I should know about in terms of chemistry? I was like an up front beginner. Obviously, I could just chat GPT for the exact same thing, but I feel personally I learned the best when I mirror my thoughts to people. And actually, speaking of like being a sponge, you spoke on that a little bit earlier.

56:00

You know what's funny about MemeIn that I don't typically talk about? That's low-key scary ability. So for whatever reason, I don't know what it is, but I, I sponge up things. Sure. But I sponged up things extremely quickly and then in a community environment. I mean, anything that has like more than two people involved, I'll just, I'm just going to sit by and just like download like a fucking leech man. It's that's kind of.

56:29

It's kind of scary how my brain does it. But the reason why I'm saying this is because that's why I'm mindful of like how I interact with people in terms of the whole concept of, you know, brain picking. I'm happy to pick people's brains, but I also have respect for that knowledge pool that took time to curate, you know? I'm not just gonna treat you like a fucking encyclopedia where I just don't.

56:57

only for when I need that thing. You know, you're not a fucking website. You're not a fucking media page. You're a fucking person. So for me, man, what I realized is that my brain, by nature, actually does that. For whatever reason, I'm really able to just like, passively or actively just like, hone in on things very quickly and just like, it's essentially a compounding effect. The more I learn about the thing or yourself,

57:27

the more quicker I will absorb what you're doing. So maybe it's a superpower, but this relates to the whole concept of leadership that you just spoke on and the discipline that's required to lead yourself in terms of, yeah, sure, I can absorb a lot of knowledge, I can recite to you every Harry Potter character, but what does that really help me in the long term? So,

57:57

For me, the discipline element came in at understanding that, okay, this is how my brain is wired, or I'm gonna make sure that whatever I'm fucking consuming online from now on, it's nothing but shit I actually need in the long term. So I've been aggressive about this to the point where, to the point where people look at me crazy when I tell them, no, I don't know about the Taylor Swift drama. No, I don't know about that new movie that came out. No, I don't know about Donald Trump running for president.

58:28

From there, it feels as if I don't care, but it's not true. I do care, but focused, it's a very different context. Absolutely, man. And there is yet another thing we have in common. And for me, it's a little bit more recent, and it seems like you've always been this way. For me, it's a little bit more recent, because I grew up, I remember my, it was either my dad or my mom, or maybe it was both of them. We'd be playing video games or something, and you know, like...

58:56

back in the day, it was only one or two TVs in the house. So then they come in and boot you off the TV. Cause they're like, hey, I gotta, I gotta see what's going on today in the news. And for my dad, you know, it makes sense. You know, he, he was a DJ. So that was part of his job. My mom, it was just kind of a, I found out later on. It's just kind of a routine thing. My mom just liked to have the TV on or whatever. She would watch it, but you know, out of the corner of her eye, one of those things. But.

59:23

So I grew up with this mentality of, I just got to know what's going on. And unfortunately, well, back then, it was a lot easier to keep up with. You just had the morning news, maybe you had a little news at noon, and then at night you had news. That world is gone. You and I both know it's 24 seven, breaking news. I was just talking to my brother about this last week. Everything's breaking.

59:52

We saw, my wife and I were watching YouTube last night and we saw a news report. I guess it's super cold over in the US right now. And up in Chicago, they were talking about this thing called frost quakes. They're like, and that was the title of the video. Like, oh, something about frost quakes. And you're like, what the fuck is a frost quake? And you get in this video and it's literally just like some scientific phenomenon of like water expands and that makes the ground crack. And so it makes noise sometimes.

01:00:21

And because it's so cold and it got warmer, I guess, really fast, it happens more. It was so stupid, but they made it sound like, oh, frost quake. You know, they made this thing. So bottom line is, yeah, man, I had been doing this my entire life, trying to keep up with stuff. And then it was really COVID. It was really 2020 where I was like, you know, just like a lot of people, I got caught up in the initial cycle and the initial drama of it, which, you know, I don't want to downplay it for some people. It was very devastating.

01:00:52

Um, but the, that cycle of just constant updates of the play by play, like literally hourly, almost down to the minute of, especially in the beginning, I think a lot of people have already forgotten this, but in the very beginning, it was scary shit. I mean, people just did not know what was going on early 2020. And so it was around like two months in like summer 2020. I was, I was like, you know what? Fuck this.

01:01:22

I'm done being scared. I'm done sitting here glued to my phone, glued to the TV. I'm done with this. So I started teaching myself Chinese.

01:01:35

And through that summer, I learned like a couple of thousand characters. I did, because my wife is Singaporean American. She grew up mostly in Singapore, but she was born in the U S and so she speaks a little Mandarin. And so that was a early motivation, but it was more of like just, I need to get my mind off of something. And that's also by the way, when I started my very first podcast, which was just me reading my first book. And so I

01:02:05

I bring this up because just like you, I don't have time for the bullshit, man. I don't want to absorb anything other than what I choose to let in. And that's hard on social media. I'm not 100% good at this, just like everybody else. I'm being served up ads. They got my number. I've spent so much time on there. They know the stuff that's probably going to get me to click. They just know.

01:02:33

And so you get distracted at times, but I'm pretty good at, you know what? I'm in and I'm out. I post, I do my thing. One of the things that I'm doing now with social media to even lessen my time on there is I post and I only respond to people that respond to my posts. I don't scroll. I don't click for you and then start scrolling. I don't press the.

01:03:03

post similar posts or whatever I just post. And the people that are being attracted to my stuff, those are the only people that I want to fuck with anyway. These other people, like I think what helps a mental model that I have for social media now is it's like the street. There's X street, Twitter street, there's Facebook street, there's Instagram street, whatever. And when I'm on that street, when you're on the street, maybe some people notice you, most of the time they don't, right?

01:03:32

They're going somewhere, they're doing something. I need to get people off of the street and I need to get them into my building. I got to get them on my page, in my cart so I can talk to them. And then I want to get them out of the open and I want to get them in to where I'm actually doing shit. My email list, one of my pages, my website, things like that, things that I own.

01:04:02

That's my job on social media. It's not to get caught up in the drama, to spend hours on spaces. It's not to spend micro, dozens of micro moments scrolling on there to shit that somewhat does apply to me. But, and I think a lot of people in these, you know, in the, you mentioned kind of the cohort that I'm, that you think of, you know, that I'm associated with the AI and like the

01:04:32

Sometimes they're growing to grow. Sometimes they actually have a business. A lot of people are just growing to grow. In this cohort, I...

01:04:43

I just don't, and it's hard to say too, cause I have friends, you know, like I had, I know people, I'm cool with people in this area, but I can't respond to everybody. And I feel like you get into this cohort kind of mentality. And I don't know if you've done, you're probably familiar with these types of courses to where they, you know, they have different names, cohorts, content accelerators, whatever. And you kind of get involved with all these people.

01:05:11

And so I hype your stuff up a little bit. You hype my stuff up a little bit. We don't really have interest in each other's respective stuff, but we're just helping people as other people who are trying to grow, which is cool. I get that. But what happens is once you deviate a little bit from that cohort or enough time passes, and I've been involved in enough of these, like I've paid for them and I've just done them informally, you kind of splinter off.

01:05:41

you lose the support. And as soon as that happens, the engagement immediately stops the those extra pushes. And then you're left coasting on what you have. And if you have a lot, then you're good. But if you don't have anything, then you're just kind of out in the cold. And that's happened to me several times throughout my time on social media. And that's a hundred percent my fault because I wasn't building up.

01:06:10

my stuff. I wasn't building a business. I hate building a brand, but I wasn't putting stuff out there that was coherent, that was clear, that people could actually access. I feel like if people are honest with themselves, that's a lot of the case because that's what I see from afar. No, because I've made this mistake too, many times. It's taken years for me to get to where I can have a conversation with you and be saying, yeah, I fucked up. I wasted a lot of time.

01:06:39

Even though I got a lot of stuff done, I could have done more stuff that was way more valuable than what I was doing last year and the year before that. It feels conditional almost. It ties right back into the problem. People are happy to give access to what they're doing.

01:07:08

I'm not here to be the judge on how people go about treating their relationships, that's for them to decide. But for me, the idea of people orbiting around me personally, it makes me uncomfortable to begin with. Like, I don't want to be an influencer. I don't want to do like, yo, look at me, or welcome to the fucking Westpale show, and I'm going to be able to entertain you for a few hours. I mean,

01:07:35

hope if it helps to some of these people that are listening that is entertaining. But for me, a lot of what I focused on very early on as a mission statement is like, hey, I see some hidden stuff that people are not really pointing out or see a value in. So I'm going to do my due diligence for my own benefit, first of all. To put that out there and then second of all, if it helps someone else, then you'll get married away. And.

01:08:04

All the discipline element for me comes in and discipline as a game for me really came from this fellow podcaster that I'm probably sure you know. His name is Jocko Willink. You know that, right? Jocko Willink.

01:08:21

That's a shock because he's one of the biggest voices in military right now in the podcast. He's, oh yeah, without a doubt. I actually found out about him initially on Casey Neistat's channel. He's a YouTuber and a lot of what he does is like documentaries and vlog type shit. But he talks a lot about ideas of leadership, ideas on, you know, management, whether it's management of yourself or management of other people. And also...

01:08:50

Russian military leadership, surprisingly enough. Just typically the stereotype is that military people are just, you know, meatheads that just go fucking all around. Like, but bro, like he, even the, when you look at a picture of this guy, you'll think, yep, he's definitely in the military without a doubt. Like something about like the way he's built for screams military, but he's a very, he's a very insightful guy though. And

01:09:19

That's what I think is cool about the concept of podcasting as a medium because it really allows you to deep into the, be moved to covers and appreciate the values of what people have to offer. Because for me, a lot of what this comes down to is hopefully bringing to the surface some of that unappreciated aspect, whether it's other people or the world that I'm seeing or my own world.

01:09:48

And one of the things you touched upon too was this idea of focused content in terms of the consumption from your vintage. But now from the vintage point of creation, I'm very curious to hear some of your thoughts about like, how intentional are you really in terms of, since you don't want to waste your own time, how do you not waste to people that look at your stuff, their time, you know?

01:10:15

Yeah, man. This is a recent development that if you look at my stuff, you just go back to just a few months, I was all over the place. Probably if you go back to just summer of 2023, I was just... And once again, I was still in that phase, right? I didn't really know what I wanted to go in all in on like you and like a lot of people I feel like these days, a lot of people

01:10:46

a lot of interests. And it's interesting, the word polymath and I've heard multi-passionate, these types of words, they've become more common. And I think it's because it's so easy to start things today. It's easy to go down a rabbit hole, watch something like you mentioned, chemical engineering. It's easy to start.

01:11:12

Oh shit, chemical engineering. That sounds so cool. The next thing you know, your dozen videos in. And I feel like this is a lot of people. And then the next day it's something completely different. And after a while you have all of this, this knowledge, but you're not doing anything with it. So one first thing that happens is the knowledge leaves you. Second thing that happens is nothing happens. You don't start a business. You damn sure don't make any money.

01:11:40

And you don't go deep enough to really speak with anybody that's in that field that really understands their shit when it comes to, for example, chemical engineering. Right? You have to come at it as a beginner, but you think that you've gotten all this knowledge because you've watched all these YouTube videos, you've read all these blogs, but really, you know, your knowledge is flimsy.

01:12:08

It's not, you're not going to be able to go in and have a conversation, at least not anything with any depth. So I'm bringing all this up because that was me. And like I said, I was still in that skill building phase. I didn't know it. And at the time I, I wanted, I was learning from all these other influencers online, all these people I'd bought these courses. I've been watching all these people who had grown and built all these big businesses. So I was trying to do that stuff, but then I was still learning stuff.

01:12:37

But then I was still doing my own projects. I was all over the place. I did not have that focus. Like I would focus in on these different arenas, like doing Sirius Unlimnic, doing the whole audio drama podcast. I look back on that and one, I'm like, what the fuck? That was crazy that I did all that stuff, composed all the music, did all the voice acting, did all the sound engineering, experimenting with AI. It was insane that I was able to put that.

01:13:05

together. And that's not something that I can easily articulate to people like how much that this should not exist. It's just a cobbled together result of a bunch of stuff that I was building it as I was going along. And so I didn't have the focus as far as my main goal.

01:13:34

this year that one of my goals is to actually make money from all of these skills that I've put together. And I feel like that's everybody, right? Everybody is like, man, I know all this stuff. Somebody should pay me for something. But what I was missing was if you want to make money from your stuff, then you've got to focus on the stuff that will actually get people to pay you for that stuff.

01:14:04

experience doing the building of it. You need to get experience articulating it. You need to get experience representing it in a certain way, making it digestible. And so that brings me to the answer to your question. Now I'm very much more focused on my content. First of all, I've made a very clear distinction in my mind between

01:14:31

content, which is stuff that I exclusively make for social media, and the stuff that I really want to make, like my writing, stuff like this tool, working with people to help them write their books. In my mind, those are completely two different worlds. And before, I had a hard time shutting those things off. I knew I didn't want to make content. I knew I didn't want to just follow templates and things like that, because that would poison my art. That would cramp my style. That's not what I'm trying to do.

01:15:01

But I also knew that content is the means to get people to the stuff that I really want them to see, the stuff that I really want them to read and watch and absorb and learn from. That's how I can really teach. And so what I did just a few weeks ago was I trained a GPT to basically it's a content machine and I've done it stylized. And this goes back to our writing conversation, right?

01:15:32

I've done it stylized to where it just pulls from, and I've taken all these courses. I basically pulled stuff from all the AI posts that I've read, all the newsletters that I've read, all the courses that I've bought, all the guru shit, just seeing thousands of tweets and posts and social media shit over the last two years. And I've made this tool to where it just does it basically for me. I say that, but I still have to do a lot of work to.

01:16:00

to make it not be like chat GPT-ish. And that's the thing about, this goes back to the ethical thing, I'm bringing it up again, because it always just, it's funny, but then it's sad because people just don't, they don't understand. Of course there's a lack of education around this stuff. But the work that it takes to basically take the output of this tool and make it something that is...

01:16:27

is mine, that is true work. Like you can't just, and you know this, you've done this too, to where you get an output from it. And it just sounds horrible. It doesn't read right. It sounds weird. It sounds like a fucking robot wrote it. And it's like, no, I don't want to sound like that. I'm not going to post this directly on social media. But what it does is it gives you a template of structures that are known to work on social media. And I've seen it work because in the last

01:16:57

since the beginning of this year, since the beginning of 2024, basically in the last two weeks I've been using this system and my social media has steadily grown every day by using the output from this, making it mine, and then posting it. It just shows me that it's like...

01:17:21

These people have figured it out a long time ago. Now it's just very hard to do this by the way. I'm making it sound simple, but it's not simple to write content in a way that, because what I like to say is it looks easy on the surface, but when you peek under the hood of what powers a lot of these viral posts and what are these, a lot of these social media gurus are posting, it's some complex shit, man. It's marketing, it's...

01:17:50

social psychology, it's copywriting. And then of course, it's just a little bit of each respective creator style. But what I've noticed of taking a lot of courses and doing these different things is that they all have templates. They all have like, this shit just works and they repurpose it. They use the same thing and they will literally post the same thing over and over and over again. Of course, over a period of weeks or months, there's a formula to it. They have it downloaded.

01:18:20

Using ChatGBT is the exact same fucking thing as using a swipe file. And there's literally websites that you can go and get marketing swipe files. And if you're trying to talk about this, then do it this way. If you're trying to talk about that, do it that way. This has been the case. ChatGBT is just a distillation of that. I don't have to go to a bunch of different websites. I just do it and it's customized to what I want. So I bring all this up.

01:18:49

This has helped me focus because one, it gets me off of social media faster and gets me back to doing real work of actually building a business, of actually having conversations like this with you and with other people who are interested in my work. That's where I want to be. I do not want to be spending hours on social media. Social media, I think, and my advice to anybody who's listening to this would be you have to find where you want.

01:19:18

social media to be in your, if you're really trying to build a business, if you really want to make money off of whatever it is you do, then you have to find the place. Where is social media in that? Are you trying to hang out and just trying to make friends, but you're acting like you're trying to build a business? Social media should be at the top of your funnel. It's the street. You don't go and have a conversation in the middle of the street, like intimate conversation with traffic blaring and...

01:19:46

sirens and lights and the sun shining in your face, you're not doing that. You don't do that in real life. So why are you trying to do it on social media? But if you're just trying to make friends and trying to get more information and sniff things out, hey, the street's a very fun place. It's a party every day. But if you want to get real work done, then social media is, if you're thinking funnels, it's the top of the funnel. That's where you meet new people. That's

01:20:16

But once eventually you have to move away from it and actually talk to those people and actually solve their problems and figure out what their problems are. And that's what I've done. Well, even for me, one of the things that I kind of consider low key or cheat code is that most people won't really give it a time out of the day. So podcasting is a little way I bypass that. And it's so funny that you've gone that up.

01:20:46

What I realized early on is that actually this is not my first account the account that you know me as this was I had another one that I reached like basically 10k on and I was very unsatisfied with the quality of like First of all, it was a bunch of game motherfuckers and again no offense to the blockchain people, but y'all on the cool-aged shit man

01:21:22

It's so funny, man, because again, what was beneficial for me when it comes to blockchain was really the network effect. You know, many industries came pulling in that I saw it for what it is, an opportunity to capture some of these people in the market and keep tabs after that beyond blockchain. You know, I never really came down that. One of the people that touched base with that show was a photographer who is the first person that featured on this very podcast.

01:21:52

The idea of the podcast itself never really settled in my mind in terms of, oh, people are actually taking actual time of their day to come on, share about their stuff, share about their process. So what would that look like if I did not have the podcast and I tried it? And let me tell you, it does not work. People typically don't want to be talking to you like that if you don't have the excuse. And it kind of bothers me personally. I'm actually fairly open-minded.

01:22:22

In terms of, hey, if someone actually wants to talk to me legit about something, I'll do it. I'll find the time. But I would get that most other people don't function like that because we are on the hamster's wheel now. We have place to be and stuff like that. So I get that. From a leadership perspective, what I recognize is that, cool, how about I facilitate the process of dumb.

01:22:51

getting toward it and make it work in a non-zero sum game fashion. And what I realized is that when it comes to rabbit holes, another one that's really useful for me too is being able to essentially take some of these insights from across these conversations and compile them in a way that cohesively makes sense so that, yeah, you're going down a rabbit hole, but you're going down a rabbit hole that has a context to it, you know?

01:23:19

Ooh, blockchain here and then machine learning there. It's like, no, there's like, for lack of a better term, a narrative thread to what we're doing. And I'm saying to that, I don't like just send people off into like, hey, have you heard about this new AI tool? Here are top 10 applications you can use for that. And then one is for marketing, one is for banking. It's like, what the fuck? What? How do I do that? No, man.

01:23:47

So for me, man, that's why I think like this charge CPT stuff really comes in handy because what I've realized is that it's lowkey a savage in terms of roasting your body. I will add something verbatim and ask it for feedback and it will tell, hmm, something about that doesn't feel quite right. Or like what you're saying is just off. I don't understand it. Oh my god, damn bro, didn't have to do it anyway. But you know what, though, it's actually helpful for me because

01:24:18

I feel like that kind of feedback, if it came from a person, it would be harder to digest. I'm still open-minded, but something about the emotional weight of having someone critique your work definitely impacts you. I don't care who you are. But when it comes to Chad GPT though, it's not the whole different vibe for me specifically. I do feel like it's both the intern and the helpful coach that is actually trying to get me on point.

01:24:47

I think a lot of it comes down to the way it's even trained because it's trained on the structure of language, right? So language as a culture, the intent is to deliver a message. So how do you get from A to Z? So I think Chagy Peets really facilitates that process. And I feel like when you referenced me knowing a lot about a lot of things, last thing I mentioned, the way I make it work practically,

01:25:16

is always in service of my own interests. It's good to have interests, it's good to have hobbies. I have plenty of hobbies. But what I do though, is that I make sure that core, that hobby that I currently have, practically does it conflict with my lifestyle design. And what I mean by that is, you know, on a day-to-day basis, if I have to dedicate, you know, two hours to something,

01:25:43

What is that two hours going towards build something that ultimately makes me a better adjusted person? Then if that's, you know, go for it. You know, I feel like I'm not here to pass judgment to what other people think. I think I think you use your time however you want. I literally spoke to Henry who literally he goes to crack housewifes and hangouts with like fucking prostitutes. And that's how he gets his funds. You know what? Good. Good on you.

01:26:13

good on him for doing, but like, like even I, what I realized is that I do not, I do not wanna be one of those people who simply wants to do things in a way when I'm trying to float on them. And hopefully something comes my way. I'm very proactive with that. That's why I went into your, my personal side a little bit whole.

01:26:42

was for me to dive into some of what you were doing as it came my way. First it was places, then it was the newsletter. I immediately had to subscribe to that to see what would come my way. And then I got the email saying, hey, I'm about to go live with you. And here's my process. Here's some behind the scenes kind of stuff. So effectively what I'm describing here is mental mapping. That's not a concept that's fair to me, but

01:27:11

I feel like I've been doing it intuitively this whole time anyway. It's the idea of just me figuring out, cool, here are the places that I've explored thus far that's worth putting a pin in it, you know, it's like, cool, I've got stuff here, I'm going to get back to it at a later time when it's suitable. So for you, I feel like what was easier for me to do was that, oh, okay, you're going to be doing a video, actually for me it works out because now I can save that video in a few weeks or later and I can come back.

01:27:41

I feel like it. So in terms of mountain consumption, from my perspective as a consumer, this is a, YouTube is a very, would be a very helpful place to have repositories of you actually doing the thing. Not necessarily real time, because I think yours ran for like, at least like more than half an hour from when I call. Yeah, it was a lot longer than that. But the point I'm getting at is though, from like a marketing standpoint,

01:28:10

What's useful about that format is that A, you actually get to do what you're actually doing in real time. And then B, showcase that to people and saying, hey, if you like what you see and you want to do some more of that yourself, pin the link in my description or whatever and get to building. So you're being on YouTube positions you at say way ahead of like 99% of people because a lot of

01:28:39

and Twitter, a lot of them, but really social media in general. And social media does not really convert well. I kind of hate to break it to people, but, but unless, unless you have like, unless you want to those degenerates who's like either it's very attractive and he's leveraging that for your benefit or show like the whole idea of funneling that like people have no choice but to click on your shit, have to just, you know, move on. So getting them.

01:29:07

getting them to come along will really come down to, okay, what exactly is it that for me right now as a consumer that I have to get it now? That I know for a fact, I see this now, I can't pass on that opportunity. So I feel that what I offer for riders specifically is a solution that, for lack of a better term, is a rail for trains, you know? It's like a...

01:29:34

The way trains, at least in my mind, the way trains operate is that they get from A to Z and they have pit stop stops along the way. And I feel like fighting can be difficult for a lot of people for that regards in terms of, hey, I kind of have a general idea of what I want to write about, but unfortunately, I get this team, I get going and then I run out of rails, you know, without no, you can't go nowhere. So I feel like what ChadGPC does and the way you use it,

01:30:00

both does the real analogy, but also a mental analogy of giving you the time to think for yourself and insert that narrative right in that. Will that be interesting? Exactly. It's so true. Yeah. And it's more about the ideas and the thinking than the mechanics of the language. And you know, there's this mentality of, and I think that's where a lot of the ethical piece comes back to is that.

01:30:30

these people didn't pay their dues. They didn't sweat enough. They didn't spend enough time. They didn't break their back enough to get to this output that took me this much time to get. It's the same. You see this in the AI art community all the time. There's this huge anti-AI because of that very reason. These people did not pay their dues. And I've grown up with this mentality. I'm a military veteran and that you did not pay your dues. It extended from

01:31:00

When I was in high school all the way through now, I've seen it where there's people who just learned the game and have shortcuts and they figure it out. And the older generation looks back and is like, all these young kids didn't pay their dues. They got social media. They didn't know what it was like to have dial-up internet, that type of shit, and have to wait forever to get mail or whatever. So this is a common mentality. And I go back to the history analogy again. This is another reason why.

01:31:30

Um, it didn't take me long to adjust my thinking to the fact that something like chat GPT exists because I'm like, the rules have just been rewritten. This is an opportunity to, to use this technology to do a specific purpose. And I, my purpose is just happens to be writing books because that was, that was literally the problem that I, from day one of using chat GPT that I have tried to solve and I've solved it.

01:31:59

in a way that not only is good for myself, but it's good for anybody who wants to work with me. And I like that you mentioned the YouTube because, and I appreciate that because I've video was another one of those mysteries for me for a long time. Like I started vlogging back in 2018 and it was, you know, just like any new blogger, you know, any person trying something new, it wasn't that great.

01:32:26

Video was just always a lot more work. I just couldn't get it done. So last year I did a huge push to produce as many videos as possible just to get the reps in. And the video spans, sometimes it's me talking, other times it's my stuff about my podcast. I use a mix sometimes of AI video, but I wanted to, it didn't matter what the content of the video was. It was just more of produce a video and put it up to where people can find it.

01:32:56

doing that practice got me more comfortable with video because you're right. Social media alone is a poor converter. You kind of need a tour de force of a good social media presence, like rock solid profile, an immediate, hey, value prop, like here's what I've got for you and it's either for you or not and you decide. And I didn't have that for a long time.

01:33:23

I thought I did, but it still wasn't very clear. And I think that's the hard part coming from the non-business side, which was where I started and the non-technical side. We haven't really talked much about that, but I wasn't a very technical person when I was younger. When I was a kid, I used computers to play video games and look up codes. I had a friend, my best friend had the internet when we were kids. He had it before I did. And so I would call him up.

01:33:51

be like, hey, what's the code for this? Or can you look on this strategy guide for something or look on this, this walkthrough for me? I would call him up. I wouldn't even get online. And even after we got internet access a few years later, I still wouldn't go online. I would still call his friend to help me out. And this was another characteristic of the academy that makes it kind of a miracle that I'm sitting here talking to you on a tech focus.

01:34:20

podcast is when I was at the Academy, we had two, our majors were shredded out. You either a techie major or you were a fuzzy major. And I was a hundred percent fuzzy major. And you can imagine fuzzy major is the humanities, political science, those types of things. And the techie majors were of course the engineers and the, the astronautical and aeronautical engineer, you know, the hard shit. That wasn't me all the way through college.

01:34:47

And even after college, I was still very, like I said, all of my old journals are handwritten. I was not using a computer to type on my journals. And of course, this is an ancient history. This was only like 10 years ago. I could have very well used my phone or use a computer to do it. So I was very, I wasn't a super Luddite, but I wasn't like tech guy at all. And I'm sure maybe that's surprising people because...

01:35:15

as much as I've been into AI and I've learned the fundamentals of software engineering, really by being on X and being on Twitter and for all of its foibles and faults, it's given me that education. The turning point was 2021 when I decided to do 100 days of code. And I just went through, I was doing the Odin project and I did some free code camp and this was still pre-AI.

01:35:44

into my Web3 phase, my blockchain days of, I wanted to be more savvy. I wanted to understand the technology. And I was like, well, you know, where do you start to get into Web3? You got to go through Web2. You got to go through Web1. I mean, Web1 is pretty quick, but Web2, you know, that's what powers the modern internet. And so I taught myself those things and I completed it. I completed 100 days of code.

01:36:13

It took me about six months. Like most people, I fell off for a little bit and I came back on. And that just, you know, I didn't get like super far. I got into like JavaScript, but I learned some CSS. I built a couple of web pages from scratch, like just coding. I remember I did a sales page for a Japanese website I was trying to put up and I did it all on my own. Like I didn't even follow their script that they...

01:36:41

gave in the curriculum, because I wanted to learn the tech. And so that forced me, through the 100 Days of Code, per the tradition, I was posting on Twitter every day. Hey, I did this every day, I did this. And of course, I met other people who were doing 100 Days of Code, and I saw their progress, and you get a kind of little community going on. And I learned that shifted my...

01:37:07

I was no longer that, you know, the classic left brain, right brain, you're either one or the other, you're techie, you're fuzzy. You grew up with all, I grew up with all these, you're either or. You're either creative or you're technical. You're either intuitive or you're very qualitative and numbers focused. You can be both. And I'm sitting here living proof of this. And really that shift.

01:37:35

completely shifted tracks. Like you talk about trains, my new tracks were laid in 2021, 2022 with that. I was like, I can understand tech stuff. I'm not just a writer. I can be technical. And that's the only reason I was able to build something like book, book, dream, right? Dream book writer, excuse me. Dream book writer is because it's a combination of the technical side. It's the, it's the

01:38:01

organization of how do you think about software, how you think about organizing these different ideas to make, how do you communicate with the computer basically? And then it's the other side of I'm a writer. I understand how to put in details, how to talk to not only talk to the computer, but talk to people as well. And so bringing those things together is just kind of

01:38:28

It's a magic combination with Chachi Bti because that is exactly what it requires. And then you throw in my military experience of discipline and order and just being able to organize things. I've always been good at that. That kind of triple threat has made it to where I can put this together. And it's made it to where I've created something that I'm like, I told my wife just yesterday, I was like, I actually, I feel like I invented something.

01:38:57

I don't want to guess you out bro, but it's kind of what you did. I'm not going to lie. Sure, someone may come to a similar conclusion as you, but you know, at the end of the day, it doesn't negate the fact that you went onto something, you acted on it. Me giving you feedback in real time, he's been telling you, yo, whatever the fuck you figured out, I could not have figured that one out myself. So you did invest something.

01:39:24

So it's going to be interesting to see what that looks like. But to touch upon the software side versus creative side versus, you know, the technical side thing, it personally, what frustrates me about being currently involved in the tech space right now is I never saw myself as like a tech guy. I'm not one of those. Like, I'm an engineer. I'm a coder kind of person. I'm just someone I grew up in tech for as long as I can remember.

01:39:53

And I also remember the influence that Tank has had on me in terms of like blowing my mind with shit. For example, the Game Boy, when that first came around, I was like, how are they able to pack that much into such a small little thing? I had no idea and I was curious to know how the fuck he did that. So I went with the mod Game Boys. Another thing was when computers became part of the household I lived in,

01:40:22

I would like tinker with the software in the back end and figure out, okay, if I do this, what happens? You know, that Loki got me into trouble quite a few times. I basically read that verse in my school at the time when I was doing this bullshit. I do not recommend. But it did give me the foundational, once again, to relate that to something we said way earlier. It's like, yeah, like, I have a very foundational understanding in relationship with this technology.

01:40:51

That was probably my entire childhood. I'm older than most from my age bracket, but I'm not so old back in my day. You know, I'm not one of those small... I've been old enough to see a fucking Nokia brick phone. I've been old enough to know what the world was like without wifi. Like, I've been around and seen a lot of shit and technology for me at this point was like, cool. It's a tool that can be used. It has applications and implications.

01:41:21

So, how do we go from there? And I think people lost the plot when they allowed social media to take the way they should take, you know? That really fucked up here, because the technology on its own has done nothing wrong, as far as I'm concerned. And actually, a limited cast guest actually touched on this, and she said that, for the longest, we've been making shit, you know, technology-wise, or whatever, otherwise, you know?

01:41:50

We've made weapons, you know, like weapons, their own wasn't the issue, it's us putting the weapon at somebody else. We had born a thousand hours in shit. So, you know, the philosophical argument, I'm done with it, but I'm also interested in how faithful that person is to, you know, the argument in place here. Are you trying to have a discourse or are you trying to just prove to me that your perspective?

01:42:20

Because I feel like right now I'm gonna take it so toxic because if you say you do anything tech related, oh, you want to doze, guys. It's like, no.

01:42:30

We do a lot of things. Every day is foundational to my entire online business model. If I didn't have a laptop to get a podcast, I would not be able to do anything. So it's a lot of multidisciplinary knowledge to be able to do what I do and run it effectively. So I'm on that. And the, um, one of the people that played the critical role in Chad's UPT

01:42:58

He goes by the name Andrage Arpat. He's like fairly big on Twitter. He's got like 800,000 followers. And he's a bit like the folks with Stanford and all that stuff. And he works at OpenAI, I don't know if currently. And he said that the hottest new programming language is English. And that was posted January of last year, actually. Oh, it's kind of funny, huh?

01:43:28

firsthand with this stuff, they know what we're talking about. They came to the exact same conclusion, when they have not elaborated on what they mean. But we see this when we read this, we know, oh, yeah, we know what you mean. We know what the fuck you mean. And another tweet of this actually says, the ideal training data for a lot of language model is not what you wrote, it's the full sequence of your internal thoughts and all the individual edits while you run it.

01:43:58

but you may deal with what there is. So I feel like what you came up with feels very similar in the sense of, you're not fixing the writing per se, you're not adjusting it in the sense of like, how to polish it up or shining it up. You can get even a place to shine and you put it in as is, and you then go on and refine it over time. I would argue what you're effectively doing in a lot of ways is the,

01:44:27

author and editor relationship process where the author writes, then consults the editor and says, cool, the editor is going to then say, hey, how about you edit that one out? How about you rephrase that one? How about this over here? That's what chat CPT in the way you're currently using it does based on what I'm told currently. So, can I give you enough kudos for pulling that off? Another thing that I'm realizing too,

01:44:56

Since we touched upon the narrative aspect of what you're trying to build on that last base I met you in. I told you that effectively bro, you've built a Hollywood printing machine in terms of making IPs. I mean when I thought about it, it sounds stupid and dumbing down, but correct me if I'm wrong, right? All I gotta do is just say, hey, what if Garfield was an astronaut?

01:45:24

and superpowers. That's an interesting premise. That looks like long form, right? Or what if Jesus came back to earth, but instead of being the Messiah, he was actually an alien, right? And chaos ensues, you know? These are very simple, very fun premises that when you like expand on them, that's where they're like

01:45:52

power of IP reveals itself. And I feel like what you got going on here has practical applications for people who create visual art or create soundscape or really, artistry in general, that can turn to storytelling, but don't necessarily know how to do it. So, I'll be a combo with one of my past guests, and we touched on this. There is someone who does 3D.

01:46:20

So as in the whole nine yards, Blender, Cinema 4D.

01:46:25

And they said that, yo, I wish I could just like create my characters, just have them have their own social media accounts and have them have their own stories in real time. And I'm like, only you say that because I know just the guy. They're really sick. What they told you need. So I don't know if they reached out to you yet, but in case they haven't, I'm gonna make sure they do because I feel like YouTube have to talk about.

01:46:55

But basically what I realized is that not only these tools are from the foundation of logic, which models that is, but there's they're interconnected in the way they play into other industries. And you, you, you, you're one of the early people that really figured it out. And you're like, cool, I'm going to focus on that and play into my own strength and keep it pushing and generative literature feel like has a place in the grand scheme of things as far as I'm concerned.

01:47:23

The debate of, oh, like, is this made by a human? Is this not? Yeah. Getting old. It is. And when I think about the whole generative classification of things, I feel like it does apply, because you're definitely generating this. But if you would just walk it back just a few steps, it quickly falls apart.

01:47:52

especially when you get to the level that I'm using it at because, and I was, and I wanted to put this on my landing page. I wanted to do a comparison of just me doing a prompt of write me a book with this, the, the topic that I did in the demonstration video the other day. I wanted to take that, put it in chat, GBT 3.5, which is the free version. And I wanted to say, write me a book. And I actually did that right before we got on. And it was predictably

01:48:21

actually wasn't vanilla because it's using my custom instructions, but it basically took my custom instructions, wrote like a very short, bulleted book of something, but you could hardly call it a book. You could barely call it an outline because it tried to flesh certain things out, but it didn't get very far. And then I wanted to show a side-by-side of use my prompt now, go through, and I shouldn't say prompt because it's all one, but it's

01:48:50

multiple prompts nested in other prompts, basically. It's a program. It's a natural language program. And use my program and go through my process. And what you get is what you saw in the video. You get a coherent, you get a focused output that you can then take and change. And so this is my problem with the whole generative classification is that yes, I'm generating, but it's...

01:49:19

based so specifically off of what I've commanded it to do in many different ways that how can you even call it generative anymore? There's no way it would get there on its own. And so I think that's what's hard for people to think about because they just see the end result. They see ChatGBT writing stuff and they're like, oh, you're not doing anything. You're just having it. The original thinking is mine.

01:49:49

And that's what a lot of people don't understand. Like it can't get to these conclusions. It doesn't do anything new. It's just copying based on what it's learned. It's just predicting stuff based on what you tell it. So unless you tell it something very specific, you're not going to get specific answers. You're damn sure not going to get any answers to any questions. You're not going to make anything new. You have to take everything it takes and remix it anyway, which, and then it becomes human created.

01:50:19

So to me, the whole thing is like you walk it back enough, it's all human created. It's trained off of human created stuff. The only way to filter it down to where it can do something useful is to do it yourself, at least at this point, right? And like we said, this is still baby steps. Eventually it may get to where it can completely do something on its own autonomously, and it can come up with something new. It can synthesize ideas. I think we're going there, but it's

01:50:49

it's not even close to that, to what people think it is. It's not there yet. You have to do a lot of work to get specific outputs. And so, yeah, man, I really appreciate what you've said. I really feel like this is something special. And yeah, I look forward to helping people bring, especially I'm very curious about the person you said that...

01:51:16

that is exactly what I've been experimenting with. I have two accounts that I set up at the beginning of this year. One is a completely different vertical. It's for helping people learn Japanese. And then I started another account for military science fiction, which is my former sub-genre I was writing in. And so in these verticals, I basically created characters through

01:51:45

Not through chat GPT, but just on my own, I created these characters. And so these characters run, and I'm using air quotes, they run these accounts. And so when I post, I post in the voice of this character. That is essentially me. They're all me, right? But at the end of the day, outward facing, they're this character. And so when you mention this guy who wants to get characters and do it in real time, like, man, I got, I could do that now. I basically do that. I'm doing that right now.

01:52:14

I mean, I literally saw you spit out like a book's worth of material in two hours. So, Jesus Christ, man. So, okay. You touched upon, and these are some of the few last bullet points I kind of want to honk at you. Cause I feel like I've given you plenty time to talk about who you are and what you do, but I also want people to know about what you're actually offering as well.

01:52:43

important. So Nested programs, as you described, it's effectively similar to what a smart contract is in a blockchain kind of setting. A lot of what a smart contract does is an actionable function that calls to something and says, hey, when this happened, this has to happen. So I feel like for people that are more blockchain natives, they're also, they tend to benefit from what you're doing

01:53:13

There's this recent blockchain project I covered on my article on Substack. So long story short, whoever the bastard is that did this is either insane or very clever. There's no in between because for whatever reason, first of all, all the content that is on the blockchain, which is a theory on that, it's all AI. I'm talking like from the image to the text to the traits, all of it.

01:53:41

So that's number one. And number two, what they've done effectively here is sculpt an entire, I would say artistic project because bro, it takes a lot of like insight to problem solve and insight as far as I'm concerned. And problem solving is not too dissimilar to coding, you know, you don't just go code that shit and whoop dee doo is gonna work. It's like, but it might be junky as

01:54:10

So whoever this person is, because I have no idea who they are, they're not doxed, it's literally some random account that on the surface is unassuming, but what they did was they deployed the project where when you look at it, it shows you in real time a fortune that it tells you. And then when you meant that NFT, it calls to its own internal small contract where it then generates a text based on that.

01:54:38

fortune and then makes an image of Said text it's it's only how it works like that But it's so seamless that it handles everything in the back end for you And what I was is that okay if you want to do this but like with something a bit more traditional It's like the way this stuff works currently. It's more generative AI full-blown in the sense of hey Little trippy as shit. It's like fucking DMT kind of thing

01:55:08

But what if you did that with like a natural IP? Where it's like every time you make something, it generates a character for you in a different setting. Or a character, it's kind of like comic books. It's like each time you make something, it gives you a slide or a panel of said comic book. That's how I thought it in principle. So I saw that and I was like, yo, I think you would get a kick out of this. Even from like the perspective of someone who

01:55:36

might use some cool ideas here and there and stuff like that. And I just sent it to you so you can take a look at it later. I think you'll find it. But otherwise, small contracts and message programs aside, now to the idea of like figuring out the programming of making it easier for you to market this thing that you've worked on, like I'm very curious to know like have you ever heard of the concept of semi-dispend?

01:56:07

Tell me this pen.

01:56:11

Yep. This is from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, which features Jordan Belfort, right? Also, someone seems to have left fire in your butt, but hopefully not. Basically, in that movie, Jordan Belfort, you know, Wall Street guy, banker, you know, shark, you know, his goal is to get you the sale, get you that sale no matter what. That's not quite what his mentality is about.

01:56:40

And I'm not that lucky that movie is a master class of like sales, but it didn't really feel until recently when I was talking to another machine learning engineer who their bread and butter is data science. And a lot, a lot of what they're doing. Oh, it's like you hear the beating, right? Yeah. That's someone next door that seems to have an issue. Oof. Um.

01:57:09

Hopefully it doesn't get picked up like in the background when I edit this later. That's gonna be annoying I know right, but So what I'm getting at the fucking The scene in the movie the guy essentially does a thing where he talks to his His a top actor or whatever and he goes all right Tell me this pen and he hands him over a pen and he tells him yeah, go ahead. Sell me this pen

01:57:37

So I want you to do that same analogy here and sell me this tool right now that should work with everything we've discussed so far. I kind of want to hear. Yeah. So this is a tool. This is Dream Book Writer. And this tool is a nonfiction book writing in this current form. It's a writing service. And the reason why it's a service is because...

01:58:06

just too complicated on the back end for people. And I'm just telling you, this isn't part of my pitch, but it's a service that essentially makes the process of writing a book a lot more approachable and a lot simpler than it is without the tool. So when you think about writing a book, it's a collection of ideas. And the hardest part, people think the hardest part about writing a book is actually the writing. It's not.

01:58:34

It's the thinking behind the book to even get you started. Because a lot of people have ideas for books every day. You probably have them yourself. The problem is they're scattered. They come at different points. Maybe you jot some of them down. Maybe you don't. Some of them are from movies and you mentioned the Wolf of Wall Street. Some of them are from conversations. Some of them are from something you heard on a YouTube video or something like that. So you have all of these disparate ideas.

01:59:05

scattered, they're not ordered, they're not fleshed out. And you just know that you see in the distance, I would love to write a book about leadership. I'll use that as an example, because I actually had that goal and I still kind of had that goal. But what about leadership? Leadership is a huge topic. What am I going to say? Okay, well, I can talk about my military time. I can talk about my time as a teacher. And this is me going through the process. But how do I put it together?

01:59:35

Well, how do I structure it? And so this is where this tool comes in because I can take cool. My goal, my big idea, and this is where I start in the process is what's your big idea? What do you want to talk about? In my case, it's writing a book about leadership. Okay. I want to write a book about leadership, and I also want to mix in my military experience, my experience as a teacher and as an entrepreneur. How can I put all of those together? You basically put all those together in a blender, put it into this dream book writer.

02:00:03

And what it's going to do is it's going to give you a focus. It's going to give you who it thinks your target audience would be, or it's going to ask you who are you actually writing this book for? Yeah. Leadership. Leadership for who? For entrepreneurs, for military personnel, for corporate executives. Who are you trying to talk to? Then it's going to ask you for different parameters as well. How fast of an outcome are you trying to...

02:00:32

give them? Like what exactly do you want them to be able to do after they read your book? And after you go through this, it's going to give you an outline. And what I'll tell people is that once you have an outline of a book, you're probably 60% done. I don't think you're 80% done. There's still a lot of work to be done to flesh it out into a full book, but you've essentially established the guideposts of your book. And with Dreambook Writer,

02:01:01

Instead of getting there in a year or in a few months, to get to an outline, to give you an example, my first book, Tower of Babbling, it's a language learning resource. To get me to an outline, it took maybe a month to get a solid outline. And of course I knew what I was talking about. I mean, I had taught myself Spanish. I had been learning languages since high school. I knew how to learn languages, but I didn't know how to write a book. Those are two different skills.

02:01:33

And so it took me about a month to get my outline. And then it took another 11 months to get the book done to where I could actually publish it. And then it took another year to publish it just because I was still learning the publishing process and doing that. But the point is to get to that outline point. You don't have to take a month. You don't have to sweat over, oh, I forgot this, you lose motivation because that's the thing. A book...

02:02:00

a long-term commitment. It's a long-term process. And some days you're down to work on it, other days you're not. Life gets in the way and you just don't get to it that day. And so what this does, in one focused session, in an hour, I can take your idea and at least get to the outline point. I can accelerate six months and get it to where I can hand you that outline and you can either start writing it yourself.

02:02:28

I can immediately start fleshing it out for you and get you to a draft within a week, a complete manuscript. And that's just the base draft. Then I can layer in your personal story. You give me a transcript, you type them up yourself, you scan them in, whatever you got, and I can layer that in. And then I can mash them together with what the output from ChadGBT was and what I've sculpted. And then you have

02:02:57

an even more personalized book that's fleshed out, that's in your voice, that is basically publishing ready. All it needs is a little bit of editing, a little bit of polishing, and you're good to go. You could go from idea to book in less than a month with this process, guaranteed. And I think this is where really I want to hone in on, that you can get an idea shipped in less than a month.

02:03:26

Ideas are powerful. You and I both know that. My favorite quote from one of my all-time favorite movies, which is Inception, you know, a movie by Christopher Nolan said, what can I say? In that movie, they talk about this idea that ideas are like a virus, you know? It's like it sticks in there, you can't get rid of it no matter what you try. And I feel that in a way.

02:03:54

What matters is not so much the quality of the book or the length of it even. I will log that day in and day out. You know, I don't care if you're fucking, what's his face? The guy that wrote the fucking Game of Thrones books. He writes long ass books, bro. But like something tells me that the reason why he has such fame and appeal is not because his books are so long. There's no fucking way. I think what you said is that, um, is the idea that

02:04:24

Being able to shift the idea and getting people to resonate with said idea, that's really what people care about in the grand scheme of things. That's why they stuck with the actual show based on the books for so long. I think, after my knowledge, it's like one of the longest running TV shows of all time and they had like a whole thing with like, I don't know how much you know about the film industry and like what writers do to get show.

02:04:50

Let me tell you, it's a very involved process and something tells me that Game of Thrones specifically had to have their shit revised countless times on the fly. The principle stays the same though, in terms of, hey, we have the general idea, the general outline, and how do we service that idea so that, oh, you want to look at a show that's set in medieval times but has dragons and hot women?

02:05:20

things and political thrillers, congratulations. Show just for you, that kind of thing. So when I hear you talk, effectively, as far as I can tell, the way I would personally sell you this pen is say, I built a tool that structures your thoughts and helps you write your dream book in less than two hours. How's that sound?

02:05:46

It sounds, it sounds nice. It sounds really good. It's not, you won't get a book into, you could get a book in two hours. Would it be a book that's, that you'd be proud of, that is really representative of you? At this point, I'll be honest, no, probably not in two hours, but I still say it's better than the alternate, which is

02:06:16

You have this idea for a book, it never gets off the ground because you realize writing a book is fucking hard and it takes a long time. And I can tell you that from experience. And you know that you don't have time to do it, but you have this idea that it's just, it's got, you want to, what could it be? And this is what I love about using Chat GPT for this is I have a graveyard of fiction book ideas, of book ideas that

02:06:46

they're just there. Like I've just tried to see, okay, what could this be? Especially on the fiction side, I would just go in and see, hey, what could this become? What could this idea become? And sometimes it's really interesting, immediately interesting. It's instantly interesting. Do I flesh them all out? No, I don't. But the fact remains that bottom line is you can take even the silliest idea and say, what would this look like in book form? And you can immediately see

02:07:15

And you're like, oh, that's actually interesting. Maybe I'll keep going with this or I won't. It's very similar actually to, and sorry to button, but like whatever you're describing effectively, it's a sketching tool, a very efficient one at that, you know, because in the art industry, as in visual arts specifically, sketching is a very important part of the process. Very rarely do you know people who can just get on a black page and start like riffing, you know.

02:07:45

And actually, unfortunately, one of my long time consider really like giants in the arts and industry that I'm a fan of, King Jong-Gi, this is a Korean artist, he died recently, Art Attack at 4, older some shit. That was a sad loss because he's one of those motherfuckers, he does what you describe with this chat GPT based tool, but for me, he can draw anything from memory.

02:08:14

and just do it without sketching whatsoever. And I'm looking at this guy and I'm like, what the fuck? Like if I had that kind of power at my disposal, you know how much of a terror I would be on the planet? Like the imagery I would conjure into people's feeds would be second to none. But this is what is him and this is why I'm me, you know? We have different roles. My super-

02:08:43

My superpower is I can absorb shit really quickly and I'm usually good at rate memory recall. You know, that's like my... But to be honest, the point I'm getting at though is that this is someone who, in the context of storytelling, could benefit a whole lot from a tool like that. Because effectively, if I'm someone who I know how to draw really well, but I don't know how to do stories as much, what I can do... Hey!

02:09:11

I'm gonna draw this character. He's a badass. He's got a big ass sword. You know, the classic Japanese shonen stereotype, right? But he's the kicker. He's actually a fucking pussy, right? Like he's low-key... He's low-key someone who doesn't like confrontation unless you really, really, really push him. And then you kind of go from that and you iterate. You say, cool. And one of the quotes I remember...

02:09:39

that really changed my perspective in storytelling is from the guys that wrote South Park, if you know that show. So basically, the way they synthesize storytelling, good storytelling that is, it's that it boils down to are you using end-then statements? And what that is, in your story, if your story goes something like, this character happens, and then this happened,

02:10:09

And then this happens and then they go there and then they go here. This is not a story. It's just life, you know, life. It's and then it's happening to you over and over and over again. That's not what it is interesting. What makes narratives interesting is the play, the twists and the plots and all that shit. So instead of and then it's this happens, but this happens.

02:10:39

And then this character comes in. Therefore, this happens. But this accident happens. Therefore, this other character comes in. And then this happens. So this thread essentially outlines the idea that you kind of surprise the reader or the viewer. But you also don't want them to get lost in the threads. And that's when it doesn't define.

02:11:06

And you're told very much in that regard. And to be honest, visual artists, particularly, I feel like, I take you, feel like will be one of the key target demographics for what it is you've worked out. Because believe it or not, contrary to popular beliefs, artists as in visual artists are not good storytellers. And what I mean by that again is that, yeah, they can have an idea of like what the character might be, the person, or it's a trait, right?

02:11:35

You know, is he a badass, is he a pussy, is he someone who is brave, is he someone who, you know, kind of more conservative, is he analytical, that type of shit. These are traits that are pretty easy to come up with, but in terms of making them work in context of a larger plot, that's what people are like, well, no, it's not for me. I'll just let someone else that's good handle it, which is why graphic novels as an industry exist, you know, it's people that are doing things.

02:12:03

coming together with people that are good at storytelling and then boom, we have fucking Washmen. I don't know if you heard about that one, but it's a really, yeah, it's a really, really good graphic novel. I highly recommend. Another one would be Gossam D'Shal. Yeah, I would count that as a graphic novel technically, even though it's a manga, simply because there's a really sustained narrative thread in there in terms of, hey,

02:12:31

What would happen in the hypothetical future where people's brains can be uploaded into the cloud and we can be put in change? And what does that, how does that affect you and at your core as a person? These are really deep-ass themes that supposedly a fucking naked cyber robot chick. So this is what I mean, once again, right? In terms of like, this is what you're sitting on in terms of potential.

02:13:00

that want to harness this tool and really take it to the next level. And I am again not to gas you up too much, but I generally think that if you do this right, if you put this out right to the right people, my hunch is you'll be responsible for the next wave of the biggest IPs that will ever hit the planet without it. Because I'm telling you these again,

02:13:24

Even though the same IPs that already exist, I stripped them down of their complexities, you can still, at the core of it, it's still something that people click with. There's a reason why they're so popular. So you're going to enable a future of storytellers that's going to take the entire industry of entertainment past on, and they don't know it yet. And that's why I recommend, by doing number one, getting you on, talking about your stuff,

02:13:54

talking about the process of making it, but more importantly, talking about how you would sell it. So when I said to you earlier that you built a tool that structures your thoughts and helps you write your dream book in less than two hours. Obviously I'm skipping, I'm skipping over a lot of, you know, details. It does get the idea across, doesn't it? It does. It was really good. Actually, I actually wrote it down too. Oh, this is why I do the podcasting thing.

02:14:23

This is exactly why. Cause yeah. I also wrote down book sketching tool. I love that concept because that I hadn't made that connection between art and because I'm not tradition. I'm not an artist in that, in the drawing context. Right. So I hadn't made that connection, but it made me think of another sketch tool that I use a lot or I use a lot last year. Hook theory, hook theory. I've done.

02:14:53

music production with Hook Theory and, or Hook Pad, I should say. Hook Pad is the name of the software and it's a digital audio workstation, but it's also a music theory teaching tool. And this tool allows you to sketch out a song very quickly and it actually has AI on the backend too, but it's very seamless because you can put in your chord progressions, you can make your notes, you can basically compose a song.

02:15:23

get closer to a full song faster, if you know how to use it, of course. And I thought about that for music, this is the same thing except for writing to where you can take just a collection of ideas and more on the fiction side. I like how you've kind of transitioned to the fiction side. And then you can just see, hey, what does this look like fleshed out? What does it look like using these types of narrative structures? I really like that.

02:15:53

I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to borrow that.

02:15:59

So as you were talking, I was searching up some stuff on the back end, because I want to riff some of that with you in terms of the role that narrative plays, not just on media, but in the context of engaging an audience, right? Something that clicked for me really early on is that the reason why people are so addicted to social media is because social media is full of characters.

02:16:29

People don't think of it that way typically because what they're real people, right? Like what do you mean? Like characters? Well, here's the thing. Who is Andrew Tate? If I apply the same of Selmy Dispense to who Andrew Tate is, and I would have you described in a few sentences who he is, how would you describe Andrew Tate? Oh man, I don't know. I don't know. I'm not familiar with him too well, but I just know he's like this hyper masculine guy.

02:16:58

Uh, he's like about male dominance and looking cool. I, um, I'm probably unqualified to talk about it, but yeah, that's, that's what I, the impression I get from the little I know about him. So the reason why I bring this up, right? Again, for the people listening along and for yourself specifically, Keith, I want, I want to reiterate, I do not like entertain whatsoever.

02:17:28

So no fucking body is gonna come at me telling me, this guy said this about Andrew Tate, he's a fan. Fuck off. If you're not getting the nuance, I can't really help you. What I'm focused on here is the character element and the way the character propagated on the internet. At some point in time, people don't think about that or don't discuss this enough in my opinion, but he broke a record.

02:17:57

At the peak of when this guy was trending, he was the most Google man on earth. So let me repeat that again. He was the most Google man on earth and across the board, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, when this guy was a thing, Jesus fucking Christ, man, he was, he was inescapable. I could not turn anywhere without having some somebody mention him.

02:18:27

And bro, this is speaking as someone who as we established earlier, I have a discipline about what I can share online, right? I don't just fucking dick around and then whoops, suddenly I'm watching an Andrew Tate video, no, no, no, no, no. What happened was the dude gave him the credit where it's due, bro. He applied strategic marketing principles. Get him to where he is today, where he has, what's his, I think he has like almost.

02:18:54

10 million people following him on Twitter now, which boggles my mind. I don't know how the fuck people are able to, my thoughts about the guy aside, what he's done effectively, he's not special is what I'm getting at, okay? He's actually, to be honest, in the green scheme of things, he's not that interesting, he's not that valuable, he's definitely not that valuable in terms of like his contributions to society, he's not a scientist, not chained,

02:19:24

Real legit scientists don't get that kind of following. And I'm talking, did fucking do rocket science and shit that are active online, okay? So how the fuck did he get that following? Well, here's my thesis and you follow along and see if I'm onto something. So the reason why he got so popular was because A, he understood really well the emotional core, the emotional resonance of what got talking about him and he got...

02:19:52

down on that to such a degree where now people would essentially repeat the cycle on their own without having him to step in on that much. Typically this happens when say Kanye does what Kanye does, right? Kanye will say, you know what, the Nazi is at the point. So people lose their shit and they go, what the fuck did he just say? You mean the Nazis are the point? Kanye lost it. Kanye is crazy.

02:20:22

Oh my... He's at it again. Blah blah blah blah blah. You see my point though, right?

02:20:28

So now, if you apply that same principle with Andrew Tate, what he figured out was that okay, instead of having me say the outrageous shit over and over again so that people go what the fuck did he just say about this and this and that, what he did instead was yo, I'm gonna have this circle of accounts that only do three post podcast clips that I've been on. I don't care where I've been on or what I've said, your job is to click me, post my stuff,

02:20:58

and have an affiliate link in your bio so that whatever traffic comes your way you get a cut right that's what he did there's a lip there's a there's a whole video about that on nature i would have to fetch it later but basically it breaks it down like that and you know what after that video i was like holy shit this dude hacked the entire world and we had this entire time from what i thought

02:21:28

No, no, no, no. What happened was this was really deliberate. This was strategic. And he did it in a way where you have no choice but to talk about him. Even people don't wanna talk about him, talk about him by saying, can we stop talking about Andrew Tate, please? It's a whole fucking paradox there. So for me, how that relates to marketing in terms of what marketing really is.

02:21:57

in the grand scheme of things. Marketing is not, ooh, I have this shiny product that does A and B and Z. The marketing is not the narrative either. The market is when you stage the entire thing and you let dominoes fall apart. Actually, I saw this quote specifically from a video on TikTok and it kind of breaks it down beautifully. And they were talking about this idea that the marketer is not the person that...

02:22:26

put up the flyer or not the person that does the discourse on social media or not the person that's the hype man or not the person even that does the design for the poster is the person that planned the whole thing to begin with. So the dominoes then get into motion and then suddenly whoop dee doo, something happens and someone is popular now. Personally, I have my own thoughts in terms of like in the great scheme of things what

02:22:56

how easily, for lack of a better term, manipulated people can be because marketing is manipulation, you know, in the nice people, people don't realize it, but they fall prey to stuff all the time, whether it's, you know, channel core, or if it's just all just using tactics that on the surface don't really seem like much, but over time it adds up and makes you like something. A good way to

02:23:25

that what TikTok does. Why do you think TikTok goes so viral? I'm someone who has a background in music and I'm an engineer. Music is not that great, but like, not really like fucking, it's not the modern day Shakespeare, but what it is though, it's TikTok doing what TikTok does where it plays the stuff over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over

02:23:53

And before you know it, you're like, you know what, I kind of like that song now. Again, I don't know what that says about society, but for me, the classical application though, this is what I really want to get at. And I feel like for you, you're in a very interesting position where you sort of can manufacture that same Andrew Tate effect, that same TikTok effect where you put together these two elements.

02:24:20

and you supercharge the visibility of what you're doing online. I have no doubt. I mean, to be honest, if I'm going to be frank with you, had I been in your shoes, you know what I would have done? I'd be like, hey, I built a tool that puts all the others out of business. All the so-called New York Times bestsellers, watch out. I have a tool that does what you do better and faster, just to piss them off. That's just me, though.

02:24:49

I'm a bit of a troll, you know, I was raised on the old school internet and I had a dollar for every time someone called me a nigger on the fucking Call of Duty lab. I'd have I'd be betrayed in Jeff Bezos by now. So I'm not easy, and it is the point I'm getting at. So for me, I will take on that battle, but maybe you're not. Maybe you're someone who's more conservative, more reserved, more chill.

02:25:16

It still can work for you though, because what you can do is say, you know what? I'm going to have this suite of videos that showcases, hey, I'm going to do a challenge where in 30 days I write 30 different books, but the kicker is the kicker is the entire time you don't reveal what you've been using, right? People are like, what the fuck?

02:25:42

How are you able to basically spit out 30 different books in 30 days? Like, is this AI? Is this not AI? Are you just that prolific? It gets the conversation going. You know what I'm saying? And now, one thing you will have to do at that point is have the capture where you have your social media set up, you have your YouTube channel, you have all your stuff with the same name across the board, same brandings and all that stuff. That's where the marketing nerds, you know, just their pants and say, yeah, like,

02:26:12

have the fucking same handle everywhere, they can buy us. For me, I'm more about the sociology and the psychology in terms of how people get to a result or an outcome. So from the way I think of things, how do people get to what you're doing and see the value in it? Is effectively by staging a feat where it's so impressive, they have no choice but to pay attention and say, yo,

02:26:39

Whatever you just did, how do I do that? Right. You see my point? Yeah, absolutely, man. And actually it's so funny that you mentioned that because I was just talking to a few friends and my wife yesterday that I was planning in February to do a book blitz, I wasn't going to be as ambitious, well, February only has 29 days, but I was going to be as ambitious to do one every day. I don't know if I could do that because I know we have plans and stuff for a couple of the days.

02:27:09

I was like, I could do 20 books in February. But I hadn't thought what you just said is genius. Don't reveal. And I haven't really talked about it yet. I mean, I did that live stream, but that was only for mainly the people on my email list knew about it. I didn't put anything on X or anything about it. But yeah, a lot of people do not know. And even if they know, even if they listen to this podcast before February, it doesn't really matter.

02:27:38

one of those things you can't really see until you actually see me take a raw idea and develop it into a book in real time. Like you, it's, it's so new. It's so mind blowing that you, you really can't believe it until you see it. And that's fair because it's never been possible before until now. And so I, I like that man. Yeah. And now that leads me into like the last five bullet points I have to touch with you. And then

02:28:07

I'll send you on your merry way. I'm not gonna talk much longer. So learning about the toolkits for writing, right? In terms of traditional writing and mirroring that with this new way you effectively invented, what parallels do you see, if any, and what contrast do you see, if any? There's definitely trade-offs, right? And I think purists that

02:28:37

know, obviously, if you want to write your whole book and you're obviously, you're already like a serial writer and you consider yourself a writer and author, then this tool isn't for you. This is more for those people who they have ideas, but they're not comfortable writing. They don't have the time or the discipline or the ability to write a full book themselves, and they know it. And I know people like this who just, you know,

02:29:04

They have ideas, but there's just no way they're ever going to get down. So this is what that tool is for. And as far as the parallels, it's the same process. It's just condensed. It's the exact same process of organizing your ideas. What is this about? You're just doing everything upfront. Instead of getting everything like the way I got ideas for my first novel, I used a novel because it's a little bit more clearer in my mind.

02:29:31

The way that novel came together over a period of five years, it was conversations, it was things that I watched, it was things that I heard, it was books that I read. And then after that period of five years of incubation, then I like, well, shit, I have enough to actually put this together into a novel. And then I went and I outlined it and then I started writing. And I tend to be in the writing community, we call it panthers and plotters, people that

02:30:00

plot everything and then people that pants, like they just write on the fly. Basically I tend to be a panter. I tend to be outline and I'm not even a, like a religious outliner. I bullet points. Basically that was what serious and limit started as. And then I will just start flushing out each, each chapter. I'll see what I want to get to the end. I see the end post down the street of that's the end of this chapter. That's what I want to happen. And then I will fill that in.

02:30:28

That's basically how I wrote my first novel. Just do that over and over and over again. This is the exact same process, except it is done lightning fast. And you get to, because I think the hard part about writing the book is seeing the forest from the trees, right? When you're writing your ideas down, your story, it doesn't feel complete. It feels weird. Even when you get to an outline, it still feels incomplete and weird because you can't write the book in one day.

02:30:57

like on your own, you have to take the time to do it. And here's something I want to add to what you're saying. And that's going to tackle another bullet point I wanted to bring back. So earlier, you were talking about how you consume social media, how you interact, how you really want to be maximizing your efficiency. And I definitely agree. But I think there's a push and pull between

02:31:22

being only focused on interacting with people that care about what you're doing versus actively putting yourself out there. And what shocks me is that you effectively have the tool that helps you do just that. Maybe it's been tight for you until now, but the way I'm thinking of it, you said that you don't have time to engage with meaningless discourse or denying discourse, then fuck, don't. What you can do is

02:31:48

take it to its logical extreme and be hyperbolic and construct this character around yourself where you use many narratives where you insert yourself into the public discourse so that people are reacting to you, whether it's negatively or positively, you know, I mean, being blocked like all the time. I don't give a fuck. Like what I care about though is this thread of like, hey, here's what's currently going on with me. Here's what I'm currently doing.

02:32:18

Give me some of your updates as far as how you feel about it or why should yourself be working on it. So I would just distill in a way where I would say for example, I have a week planned where I'm like, cool, on this week I'm gonna be like, unironically the entire AI guy. I'm just gonna go and ask about how much I hate AI, how much is killing society and all that other shit and post nothing but that for a week straight.

02:32:46

From a content-making perspective, your tool is huge. Cause all I really have to do is say, cool, I'm gonna outline that, sketch it out, and then insert my personal into it when necessary. And I have this stuff ready to go and I can just like scheduled all of them, fuck off and do something else. See my point? Right. Yeah, yeah. No, for sure. And yeah, it can definitely be used for that type of strategy, for sure.

02:33:15

I think I think about when I hear what you're saying and I've always been, even to get this far, to get to where I can come on this podcast with you and confidently talk about something that I made that I truly believe in. It's been a long road. I mean, I grew up, I was a serial people

02:33:44

since let that go to an extent, but I don't know if I could go out and be the Andrew Tate, like not be Andrew Tate, but you know what I'm saying? Like be the foil. Like hyperbolic so that people respond to you emotionally. I know. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. What I see, what I was thinking of doing was just writing many narratives.

02:34:12

or shorter ones or longer ones. And just seeing what resonates. But because I can write them so fast, it's easier to iterate. It's much faster to iterate than it was before and respond to what's working and what's not. Because I tried, I think last year, no, maybe it was in 22, I tried the whole, you know, I write a story and then people respond to it and stuff. But

02:34:36

It just takes a long time to get the feedback and then you have to make the narrative and continue it and all that stuff. Now it can be pretty much instantaneous to where you can respond and you can have this volume. And I think that's what I'm baking on at the end of the day. That's the strategy. At least before I started talking to you, I definitely have some more ideas now, but it's just, you can just get out volume. And volume at...

02:35:05

high pace and at a high quality too. And I think that's another reason why I turned this into, because the original idea, when I talked to you two weeks ago on the space, I was talking about novel kits. But as I mentioned before, there's just too much specialized knowledge that I can, first of all, I can look at a chat GPT output and know that chat GPT wrote it, if it's not adjusted in any way. And I can look at that and then I can...

02:35:32

of my experience as a writer, I can immediately rewrite it to where it's more coherent. It sounds like a regular person wrote it instead of just a Chad GPT output. An average person can't do that. They will look at the Chad GPT output and be like, oh, this sounds good. And then they'll use it in their book or on their social posts and stuff. And it's like, it just won't work for a long work. And that's why I saw another

02:36:03

book writer company that does this and they've turned it into a SaaS. They have a software around it and they do the exact same thing, but it's a hundred percent AI generated. And their claim is, oh, you know, you can write 150 page book, 35,000 words in, you know, it's one of these standard AI companies. And of course they're charging, they're charging what they charge for this type of product.

02:36:33

I don't want to read a 35,000 word book of AI material to edit it, let alone read it as a consumer. And so I'm like, I think they're not going to last very long because you have to edit the book. You have to go through and take that. And that's the beauty of starting out with what I have is that, yeah, you don't get the quick whiz bang, okay, 35,000 words.

02:37:03

novel or book immediately. No, you go chapter by chapter, line by line, basically. And because that's the way I do the output, line by line and say, is this good? Does this suck? Do I get rid of it? Do I change it? Do I make it more intense? Do I make it shorter? Whatever. I'm asking myself that. So essentially it is human generated, but it just is slower and it requires someone that has

02:37:30

least some writing experience and has experience with chat GBT. So they know the difference between okay, now I got to tweak this and now I don't. Yeah, it's deliberate and it also super sharp. What you already have, once again, I feel like that's what the role that the core of these tools will play in the long term, regardless of and I want to riff with you real quick on.

02:37:58

You know, speaking of like you being in that, you know, hot seat of entrepreneurship and being an active. You also a creators effectively. That's what I would describe you as. I'm very curious as to how you would feel based on this thread. I'm about to read out real quick from Kelsey Hightower. This is someone who has like a pretty influential.

02:38:24

by Google, you know, all those like places, those big so-called high towers, if you will, probably not totally intended there. So like he says in that thread, time to reflect on an important conversation I had at Cubicom today. It was not about tech per se, it was about diversity. I don't normally engage in diversity conversations, but this time I could not avoid it.

02:38:53

This time, I did not want to. A person came up to me that I've seen at other conferences and I braced myself for an engaging technical discussion. This person and I shared something in common. We were both black males at a tech conference. This rarely happens. I was not ready for this phrase question. I thought it would be about Kubernetes. I don't know what that is, to be honest. Those are easy, but the question was, person, can I ask you something about diversity? Then he gave me that.

02:39:22

I look to give someone after asking a tough question. A few moments pass by, then I was like, sure, fine, all right. Truth is, I was not ready. I was in public place. I was in a public place. And I knew my response would be heard by everyone. This is a tough subject. And the person would then go on to say, you know, the whole nine yard, essentially what they're getting at is that being a Black founder, or being a Black infant, gets you noticed regardless. But being Black in tech specifically,

02:39:51

has its own challenges. And I kind of hear some of your challenge, that's why I was like, how do you see yourself in the future as you try to put this tool out? How you try to appeal to people so that you're able to use it effectively for your benefit, obviously, but also so that people don't downplay you in the process, you know? Yeah, man. This is, oh man. It's definitely a thing, man.

02:40:21

And that's the weird thing from my standpoint, because once again, I'm not a tech native. I'm a tenant at best, I feel like. I don't consider myself to be in the tech community, but I guess I am. I know I am in the AI community, but it's definitely a thing, man. Being black and being out here doing this stuff, just being on X, like being active, you're just...

02:40:49

First of all, there's not a lot of us out there. And I'm not...

02:40:56

probably not a good person to have. I know you don't come from with this angle because I understand now. I haven't talked to you for this time, like that you're not, you don't think about this topic in this way. And I'm so glad you brought it up, but I'm not a good person to talk about with diversity among certain types of people because I don't believe in diversity for diversity sake. Like I'm the last person to say,

02:41:26

enough black folks in here, we just need to get black folks in. Why? I mean, are they going to do something? Are we going to actually make an effort? Because if we are, then fine. But I'm not about diversity for diversity sake. But I will say, I've dealt with it, man.

02:41:54

we all have to make those calls, right? For instance, like you're, you're not doxed. Like I don't know your real name. I don't know where you're from. I didn't even know where you were until we started talking. And so I thought about that early on, when I really started to make a going of social media back in 2022, I was like, do I want to be anonymous or do I want to be Keith, Keith Hayden, myself? And

02:42:21

I tried the anonymous thing when I first got on Discord, I adopted a name and the first time somebody called me by that name in Discord, I didn't like it. It didn't feel right. I was like, who is it? Oh, that's me. I forgot that I made up this name. And so I immediately changed my profile. I remember I changed it back to my regular name that day because for me it just didn't feel right. But what comes with that is yeah, being a blackface.

02:42:52

is

02:42:55

is a liability upfront. It just is. People, you know, and just like Hightower, and I am familiar with him. I don't know him personally, but I have seen a couple of his tweets and yeah, you have to almost prove yourself every time, even to other black people, you know, like this other black person obviously came up and asked him about this and- Especially to other black people.

02:43:24

It's a better to essentially prove yourself and see, yes, I'm not one of those niggas. You know what I'm saying? Yes, yes, yes. Are you one of them niggas? And that's what they want to know. And if you're not, then okay, then there's another few gates that you need to pass through before it's like, okay, I trust this guy, you know. And I'm glad you brought it up because that's exactly what it is. It's this kind of, are you down for the cause?

02:43:53

And what is your cause? Are you here as your cause tech or is your cause to cause trouble? And I hate to put it that way, but it's so true. And among black people, it's like that. And of course, non-black people, you have people that treat you like kid gloves because they don't know if you're one of those black people who's going to be quick to get offended and make them feel bad because they're not black. So they don't fuck with you. And then there's another group of people who don't trust your work.

02:44:21

They see black and they equate it with slavery, with lower class, with low status, with low quality work. And so they immediately see you and think, oh, it's a black guy. There's no way what he's making can be that good. And then that's when you get those comments that, you know, we started the conversation with that you said, it's like, oh, you're not, this isn't, it was something about how it just doesn't seem like it's you're a black guy, you know, like.

02:44:50

You're well spoken. That's what you said. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You get those comments that you're already coming up from behind. You were in the negatives with them and now you're at zero because you're well spoken. Now I can at least hear you. So, so the call switching is really big and I'm glad to

02:45:16

not just share about the tool, not just share about who built it, but also share their entire truth in terms of, hey, this is the kind of shit I truly lived and stuff up. So thanks for touching upon that. So the last bullet point I got for you touches on Japanese culture specifically, and I'm curious to know whether or what term or concept, if at all, stands out to you in terms of

02:45:47

For me, I can think of Ikigai. That's like the one thing that comes to mind. But maybe for you, it might be something else. I'm just curious. What term? Ooh, man, this is a good question. This is gonna be a term that people aren't familiar with. Ikigai is pretty, is more mainstream now. A lot of people know it and a lot of people have written about. I want to think of Ruseu. So yeah. Yeah, so this term is gonna be unfamiliar to most people. If anybody, I doubt anybody's gonna know, but...

02:46:16

It's very specific to down here in Okinawa and they have this, this term called Joto. Joto is like Okinawan hogen for, or dialect for like, it's all right. It's all chill. And then there's another Japanese saying that goes, shogunai. Shogunai is like, ah, it can't be helped. There's nothing you can do about it. And if you talk to

02:46:44

know, if you get to know any Japanese people and you hang around them long enough, then you'll probably hear them say this, this phrase. And that's what I equate with Okinawa. Of course, there's serious things that happen down here. There's real business, there's real people, there's all that stuff. But that's one of the reasons that I love this place is that Jotō shogunai mentality is just present throughout. It's throughout the culture, it's throughout their

02:47:14

the way they do stuff, the way they relate. And I just, I just really love it. It's definitely different from back home to where it feels like almost every topic there needs to be either an accord or a solution. And I've never said this before, but I feel like that's a good way to describe how stuff feels back home. It feels like if something is an issue,

02:47:44

Okay, well then how are we going to solve this? Are we going to solve this with in the courts? Are we going to solve this in the streets? Either way, this needs to get solved somehow. Somebody either needs to pay in hide or pay in money or pay in time, or they need to feel bad. This is a common thing we do nowadays with a lot of social justice movements and things

02:48:13

are definitely legit and things like this, but others are just, it's become just kind of noise and it's become like, we just need to be validated. We need to feel like we feel, we feel good about ourselves. So we want you to feel bad about what you, what you think. There's a lot of this. You see this on social media too. I feel like here in Japan, specifically I can't, specifically down in Okinawa and in Japanese culture too, it's okay.

02:48:43

to not have solutions for things, it's okay to be like, okay, let's just table this and walk away from this right now. Or it's just okay to say, look, this isn't really that important. And there's other more important things to do. I feel like you don't have that out back home. And that mentality, just not having that cloud hanging over you, I think that's the biggest thing that I love about Japanese culture. Of course, Japanese culture is not perfect. I'm not here saying that.

02:49:11

But I do appreciate that as an outsider to this culture, who's basically, I don't want to say adopted it as my own, but I've lived here enough, I've studied enough Japanese culture over the past 20 years that I deeply feel this and I've seen it in action. And it's something you can't appreciate unless you actually experience it. That makes sense. Yeah, what it reminds me of is my own background.

02:49:41

Or like, well, other black people have been racist to me. That's the funny part. It's like, essentially they would say, oh, you're not black because you don't talk like us. It's like, why are people talking? Because a lot of the beef came down to, I don't talk ghetto enough or whatever. When I first got in here, I was so confused, man. But it took me a long time to, for lack of a better term, assimilate.

02:50:10

But for me, I'm more about the substance of people. I don't care much about who you are, what you do, what you call them, near and dear to your heart, whatever. What I care about is someone who can actually have a level-headed interaction. And if you do get to its logical extreme or we do lose your call, can you actually recover and be reasonable? If not, I'm not the person for you, to be honest. Because I'm like...

02:50:39

I'm already blown about it. Like I've said this to people, cut the arms bro. Like I can say a lot of things and I can do a lot of things, but at the end of the day, I don't mean you any harm bro, unless you come for me. That's a whole other story. Especially, you know, to really give you a solid idea of like what my culture stands for, there's a notable quote from a revolutionary warrior from my country. Literally the quote goes something like,

02:51:09

to decapitate and incinerate. The kind of shit that these motherfuckers was on when they were finding out like colonizers from fucking Britain and like Spain. So to say that I narrowed that culture would be an understatement. I do not miss my word in that sense. But I appreciate coming on, and this was a very enlightening conversation. Learned a lot, he taught me a lot. And...

02:51:37

I look forward to chat some more at another time. So check on the Twitter DMs. I'll see you later on.

02:51:45

leisure and we can then touch base on more stuff later. Cause I feel like we definitely need to like do a bit of a part to offline. Once we know all of the stuff is published and whatnot, but before, before I had, before I had a new head out, I want you to give people one less primer in terms of like where to find you, how they should act with you. You know, where you want to funnel. Yeah. No, I just, before I do that, I just want to say thanks for having me on, man. This is.

02:52:12

This was only supposed to go for two hours. We've gone for three. I didn't know what type of podcast, you know, you never know until you get on the podcast. Some podcasters are very rigid and strict. I'm so happy to see that you're the, on the other end of the spectrum to where you're like, look, let's just follow the conversation and have a good conversation. That's the exact type of podcast I love. I'm Keith Hayden. You can find me on my website, KeithHayden.net. This tool is, I just put up the

02:52:41

the page for it there, Dream Book Writer. And I haven't put up the fiction side yet. And because of this conversation, I might be changing some things about that page. So look for that. One's nonfiction, the other's fiction. I'm on X. You can find me at KH underscore author. You can also find me on YouTube for my one currently one man studio, Hack Studios, Hayden Academy Collective Studios.

02:53:11

repository of videos and yeah, you can find me there. I'm also on TikTok at KH underscore author there as well. I do mostly like book stuff there and I'm on LinkedIn too, just Keith Hayden. Okay. And that's it. Oh man. So once again, great having you on, great fellow substacker. I personally look for. Yeah. That's right. I forgot about substack. I'm on substack too. I know we have like so much to touch upon for that.

02:53:40

specifically at it. It was great having you on. So yeah, I'm going to send you on your merry way and sayonara. All right, sayonara.