AI Millionaire's WARNING: The Biggest Thing Since Nuclear Weapons | Nick Saraev

Today's guest is the son of immigrants who came to Canada with nothing.

He studied neuroscience, aced the exam to get into medical school, then walked away to become an entrepreneur. But starting out on his own, nothing came easy.

It took me over 2,500 businesses that I had to physically visit before even one of them said yes to me. Rents due fell through. Rents due fell through. Holy [ __ ] rent is really due. I need to like make this payment.

Today, his companies pull over $300,000 a month, and he built all of it leveraging the power of artificial intelligence.

He must not actually have to work really hard in order to be successful.

Then at the top of his career, he almost walked away from everything.

You said that you don't plan on dying. What is the reason you want to extend your life?

Our daily life and even the business landscape in the next 10 years, what would that look like?

There will be people chopping off their heads to put into cryogenic tubes to upload their brains. I mean, like we talk all day about AGI. Personally, I think we're basically there or maybe even a little bit past that. Technology of this kind has never been made available to any group of people really since like nuclear weaponry. There's the largest change in the balance of power ever. I feel like if you're one of those people who just has their head down in the sand, I think you'll look back on it for the rest of your life and you'll regret it. So be a part of the change.

Entrepreneur, investor, self-taught AI expert. Today's guest is Nick Sarrive. Before we begin, I want to genuinely thank you for joining me here today for your first ever interview because you're genuinely one of the big reasons I'm here today and I do what I love. And so, welcome to the podcast.

So for anyone who doesn't know who you are yet, who are you and what do you do?

I am a very active failer in many respects. Um I like trying a lot of new things, failing fast, taking learnings from that and then using them to make things better. If you were to ask for like my formal role right now, if that were to make sense, it would probably be bestly summarized by like an AI educator. So, I help people learn AI and then apply that to a variety of things, their businesses, their personal lives, and so on and so forth. Um, as well as that being like my main occupation. um implement AI systems at scale in some pretty cool organizations for uh you know pretty dope outcomes.

So when I say prolific failure uh I mean that because you know this was my first rodeo. I think when you look at uh any creator on the internet or any person that you look up to financially, let's say, because they've had more financial success than you, it's really easy to be like, "Oh my gosh, this person makes all this money and they have like this big group or community and they have such a big audience. Uh they must just like intuitively get it." And I know that because I'm very guilty of doing that, you know, when I was younger to a lot of people on the internet. But the reality is I had to fail many dozens of times before I got anything that even stuck. And yeah, the thing that I would say stuck the most so far is that a education piece. So we'll see how things go in the future, but uh that's more or less it that's the that's the summary.

So what are your current active engagements in businesses and what is the total annual aggregated revenue currently?

So, uh, if I were to go top to bottom, uh, Maker School, which is my daily accountability program where I help people get their first, second, or third customers for, uh, an AI automation service in 90 days. And so, that's the really big one. As of this morning, we do something like 220,000 a month in revenue. Um, there's Clarvo, which is essentially my AI SAS. Uh to make a long story short, it's a power dialer that helps people significantly improve their pickup rates and they reduce their drop rates. And that's right around a million dollars ARR. And that's fairly new. It's definitely the newest business. Uh there's Left Click, which is my AI implementation agency. And uh you know we've worked with all sorts of businesses starting from small mom and pop shops uh you know that do 10 20 grand a month literal brick and mortar stores to most recently pretty large successful companies like um Beast Productions for instance um if you're familiar Mr. Beast and so on as well as like a couple of other companies. Uh, it's tough to say annualized revenue there because the majority of my recent revenue has not been like locked in long-term retainer, but it's probably somewhere on the order of 600 700K. And then um I have a couple of other like small little side hustles as well that I'm still engaging in and that's where the prolific failure part comes in. So I don't really know how those are going to do. Not really 100% sure if this is going to take off. So I'd rather not, you know, put any numbers on them right now.

Congratulations, man. First of all, that is very impressive, especially from a numbers perspective. But I understand that it hasn't always been that way. And a lot of people, including myself, we watch your videos because of the immense value that they provide. But I believe that we spend a lot of time watching you and not spending a lot of time actually getting to know you. And so, if we could wind back the clock a bit, could you tell me a bit more about your childhood and then your journey for the failures that you mentioned?

Yeah, for sure. Um, well, childhood wise, I was born in Canada. Um, I was actually born pretty close to where we are right now in Red Deer, Alberta, which is sort of like a halfway town between Calgary and Edmonson. I was born on a Thursday, February the 1st, 1996. It was -28° C outside. And so, the very first my very first introduction into life was uh was bitter cold, my mom always likes to say. Um my family had immigrated from Bulgaria, Eastern Europe, right around the time of the fall of the wall. So um that's a transition from like kind of a communist economy into a capitalistic one. And so they struggled quite a bit when they first arrived to Canada. Um not really, you know, I always bring up the analogy of like you're entering a football game without knowing the rules. And so all capitalism really is is it's just a very elaborate sports game. It's like a very elaborate game of football. Um, imagine if you were just air dropped into it with not understanding what the hell a ball was, why you even needed a ball, where the goals were, who was on your team, who was against you. Obviously, you're going to struggle, right? It was a different economic system. And so, because of that, um, you know, most of my childhood, I would say the primary thing that we would talk about at the dinner table, for instance, the primary tension was was usually money. And, uh, it wasn't like a crazy big thing. You know, it's not like my family were breathing down my necks being like money, money, money, money. They tried their hardest not to make me aware of this. And uh, you know, really the the number one thing I saw from them was just like prolific work ethic growing up and it wasn't uncommon for them to have two or three jobs. Um, you know, I distinctly remember a period where my mom in particular was working like 14 15 hours a day and that's just like hours hours like think about getting two each job from each job. She couldn't have been sleeping more than 4 hours a night and that was just like kind of keep our family afloat right around that time. So that was sort of like my early childhood. And uh, you know, to make a long story short eventually I got into university and I think as a lot of you know immigrant kids do I was very infatuated with this idea of like becoming the highest earning career that I could find which at the time was a doctor and so you know I know there's like lots of stories like immigrant families being like you become doctor or you get the hell out of and so they weren't super pushing me in that direction but like there was definitely talk of that and um that's more or less what I thought I was going to do. And so I went to school with that in mind and I joined a bunch of these research labs trying to like get my volunteer hours up and so on and so forth. And that worked like reasonably well. But when I was 19, 20, uh, a friend of mine, you know, sort of had a crazy idea and he was just like, "Hey, uh, I'm going to throw some parties at my house. Um, let's see how big they can get. Can you help me invite some people?" And I was like, "Yeah, for sure. Let's give it a try." So he went around inviting people, you know, going blowing up my phone, doing the Facebook thing. And that was really successful. And you know, the next time around it was like, "Hey, I want to see uh I want to see how many people we can get in here. Um, can you help me out?" And I was like, "Sure." And and then my friend's like, "But I was thinking we can make some money off it." And I was like, "What?" And that would be the beginnings of an entertainment business, essentially an event management business um that a couple of my friends and I ran in university where basically we would throw events um at the local campus pub and then charge people for entry. And it sounds like a really small thing and it was. We didn't make very much money. I mean probably like 20 or 30 grand like very very little. But it was also the first time in my life that I think I'd ever had a situation where you know my output okay was so readily apparent like I could achieve a result so immediately after a certain amount of input and that output could actually be quite quite significant. Like there were events where we had 5 600 people show up. That's five or 6 hundred people that arrive at a location, you know, schedule their entire weekends basically just because we decided to have a crazy idea about it. And I was like, that is such a form of power if you think about it. How long would it take me to get an equivalent amount of power if I were to continue going down this path of let's say becoming a doctor or doing the, you know, day-to-day stuff uh that I was doing at the time, research labs and stuff? And it wasn't even close. I mean, I was already at 1920 able to grab 500 people and totally change their reings. It's like, well, this isn't even I have to wait a decade before I can change one person's uh life an evening. And so, right around 20, 21, I was sort of like in this weird gray zone where I was like, what the hell do I want to do with my life? You know, I have like my family sort of thinking Nick's going to become a doctor. He's going to like, you know, really really show us uh what it is to be financially successful in this country and he's going to like help us out and he's also going to, you know, have a wonderful life himself, something that we could not have financially because we arrived at a country in a pretty uncertain time. And then you had that other part of me that was just like, "Holy [ __ ] I could change 500 people's lives with just like a Facebook post." And those two battles worred inside me for for quite a while until I had a I had a conversation with a buddy of mine at the time. And like many successes in my life, I think this success in particular was directly resulting from just a one-off convo I had with a good friend of mine at the time, which is why I like doing these sorts of things and I'm very appreciative for them. I I think every conversation has the potential to change your life. But um he was just like, you know, is anything stopping me from giving this a try? And then just worrying, you know, becoming a doctor later. And I was like, you know what? I don't think there is. So, let's give it a go. And uh I didn't drop out. I got my degree and everything, but I just didn't proceed with the next thing. I had done the medical school test and I had scored really well and I was like submitting applications to medical schools and stuff and and I just stopped right there. And instead, I I began this long and laborious climb to um you know, what I would consider to be a really much more stable place financially than I ever was before. And so very thankful to that friend for kind of kicking me started on the right path. Um although I was also quite angry at him because there were a lot of intervening periods, a lot of strife and struggle. But that began a sequence of probably like somewhere between 10 to 15 businesses if I had to guess over the course of seven or eight years. Um all of which failed in their own way that ultimately led me to to being here today.

There's lot there. I would first like to ask you, do you believe that the fact that your parents work worked 14 to 15 hour days? Is that what drives you today? Do you think you take their hard work and and that reflects in your day-to-day life?

I wouldn't say it's the primary driver, but I think it's definitely been a massive advantage. You know, like if you grow up seeing your family routinely working 14, 15 hour days, and then somebody says, "Oh my god, my life is so hard. I'm sitting in front of a computer screen twiddling my fingers for 2 hours. You know, that's not even a Does that even work? Like, it doesn't even make sense to me because it's like I had to see my mother and father um at around the same age that I am now like really bleed just to be able to pay their bills. Um so, I would say it has solved a lot of the common excuses of entrepreneurship. A lot of like the ridiculousness of people saying I can't focus for more than 30 minutes, 45 minutes. And I'm like, have you even really tried? Have you really tried systematically working that out? Like if you have to pay your bills at the end of the month, is it that you can't focus or is it just you've never been in a position where your back is against the wall to that point? I don't want to make things like overly, you know, uh, hustle broy, but yeah, the work ethic is really, really, um, foundational. And it's funny because today's Father's Day, uh, at the time of the recording this podcast, and, you know, I sent my father a text and, uh, I was just reflecting on what would be the truest thing that I could tell him just in like a quick little text before I give him a call. And it was uh almost verbatim like, "Thank you for showing me uh what being a man in today's day and age is like and thank you for showing me um thank you for showing me what good work ethic looks like."

And I think like that's a great example of, you know, one of the benefits that I gotten from from them.

So from what I understand is that like let's say your back was against the wall. You have a very strong why. If you have to eat, you're going to have to work. Obviously, you're past that point now. What is your why? What keeps you going?

Yeah, you know, it's good that you're asking me that question now because I think if you'd asked me that question 6 months ago, I probably wouldn't have been able to tell you. Um, after I found, you know, a lot of financial success with the community, um, as well as, I think, just more international, uh, acclaim I ever could have hoped to get with Leftclick, I was just like, well, I've sort of figured it all out. I have all the money I could ever possibly want. I have, you know, all of the acclaim I could ever possibly want. These really powerful people, uh, who are, you know, multi-millionaires, probably some of the billionaires in their own right are not texting me on my phone. Like, that's crazy. I think I've just achieved more or less everything financially that I had ever wanted to achieve. So, about half a year ago, I really did take my foot off the gas and I just started asking myself like, what's the point of all this? I actually distinctly had a call with a friend of mine. Uh, I distinctly remember this, a friend of mine, and um, I was just getting out of the gym and I just felt like basically depressed. I was like, "Dude, what am I doing all this for?" And uh he was like, "What do you mean?" And I'm like, "Well, like why am I even doing this [ __ ] I think I'm just going to shut everything down." And he's like, "You're going to what? Like shut everything down?" I'm like, "Yeah, I'm going to shut my agency down. I'm shut my community down. I'm going shut everything down. My YouTube channel doesn't make I'm going to delete it." And he was just like, "Nick, you're the biggest idiot ever." And he's like, "Just because you're no longer capable of getting value or enjoyment necessarily out of the things you're doing for yourself doesn't mean that you don't still have a responsibility and a right to continue doing that for others." and he's like, "You're really helping a lot of people out. Don't be selfish." And then I was just like, "Man, I'm such an asset. Can't even believe I said that." So, another really good conversation with a friend of mine. And um, you know, I think since then I really had to like reorient myself. Not like, hey, I've achieved everything I've ever wanted. Now it's like, hey, what do I have to actually give to other people? Like what is my unique set of skills and talents and what does that allow me to allow me to provide in value? And you know, I've realized that I'm a very good communicator. I've realized that I have the ability to start something, try something, fail very quickly, and then iterate much much faster than most other people. Um, I have the ability to speak my mind, which I think is important. And uh, you know, I think if you could just combine all of those three things, like you re I I've realized that I have quite the ability to, but also responsibility to continue doing what I'm doing to help others. And yeah, it's just a little bit of a mindset shift because when I understood that, that immediately became internally fulfilling to me, just as fulfilling as, you know, making a ton of money and being able to pay off all my bills was at the start. So, I'd say I'm definitely doing it for other people at this point. And I think that most entrepreneurs after a certain point in time, like they just kind of do it for other people because they're like, well, can't really do it for myself anymore. What the hell else am I going to do with all this?

You said that you are a very good communicator, but it's also my understanding from doing a bit of research that it wasn't always that way. From what I read, you offered to skip the grades twice, but your parents refused to protect you socially. However, you also wrote that those years ended up still being isolating. So, did it actually help, you think?

Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Um, but to make a long story short, I did have the ability to skip two grades growing up. And, um, I don't think looking back it was because I was some sort of precocious genius or anything. It was just because, um, I went to a very poor inner city um, public school. uh I was probably one of the poorest in my catchment area uh by far and um we just didn't have a lot of teachers at the time and so it was very common for me to be in a split class kind of like grade 1 to two split 2 to three split 3 to four split and I think just the way they were doing curricula at that time and uh the fact that you know the teachers that I was in the classes of obviously were like pretty hardressed themselves and the fact that the the educational level was pretty low I think just made the teachers be like oh you know Nick is uh ahead for sure and we could definitely bump him he's already sort of taken that next year curricula because we've commanded the classes. So, you know, as much as I wish I was like a little genius growing up, I definitely wasn't. Um, when that teacher in particular offered my parents um to give me the ability to skip the grade, yeah, like they were going to do two. They only did one. One was a lot already. When I went to high school, for instance, which here we do in grade 8, um I distinctly remember like walking into my high school being terrified, shaking. And um at the time, we were supposed to meet up in the gym with like all of our head masters basically. And I was trying to get into the gym and then all of a sudden this giant huge bulking man like just gets in my way and I bump into him and when I say bump into him I mean like my head was here and then this was like his chest. So I was like I look up and the guy's got a giant beard. So I'm like I'm so sorry sir. You know, sorry sir, will you help me with whatever? And the guy just looks at me and I realize he's just a student. The gap there was so big. I was 12. This kid was like 18 and a half. It felt probably 19. felt like a fish out of water for sure. So, that definitely stunned me socially for a couple years. And uh what was interesting is at the time, and I don't think I've ever talked about this publicly, I had like a really screwed up mouth. So, I had all these like weird mouth guard things. And I had to wear this thing that like made it so I couldn't eat food that was bigger like than about this big. It's called a palatal expander. It's just this little thing you keep at the back of your mouth. And so, I could only like subsist off of soup basically. And so, imagine like a 12-year-old who like was like really delayed puberty wise. Like I was like stick thin. And I was like probably 3 foot n like nine or I was a really puny dude and then like this giant hulking 19-year-old with a beard. That was pretty rough. Um took me a while, but uh yeah, you know, I think eventually when you're in a situation like that where you're like kind of the small little kid and everybody else is like huge and really terrifying. I think you act sort of like a Chihuahua does after a while.

And if anybody here has or has seen a Chihuahua before, you'll understand what I mean. You get used to barking quite a bit, right? I'll bark and no bite because um that's just sort of like your survival strategy. So I think growing up like I adopted this uh initially veneer of confidence. Um and it probably wasn't until like last 5 years or so that that actually became who I was. Um and that's how I sort of like got out of that socially stunted age.

What was the triggering event that allowed you to go from a smart socially awkward or I don't know if you were awkward maybe socially isolated kid to what you call a natural socialite?

Well, I wish I could tell you there was just one glamorous event and I think that's um something that a lot of people want because it, you know, it's like a good sound bite, but uh really was a very slow and gradual progression. Uh I, you know, in high school would just try my best. I I actually distinctly remember uh this one situation where I was given a locker that was right next to this kid that was just way cooler than me. And I remember being terrified again out of my bones every time I'd walk to the thing and I look around and do my little code and screw it up and I have to do it again. But then one day he was just there and I remember being like, "Okay, this is it. This is it." And so I said, "Hey," to him. And it's just a little high. And so I think that's sort of what gets the ball rolling, right? It's just these small little like, "Okay, this is a little bit outside of my zone of comfort and competence. I'm going to do it anyway. Let's give it a try." And there's a lot of failing there. Prolific failing as uh I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast. And uh, you know, eventually I I succeeded more often than I failed. When I eventually got to university then that put me in social situations a lot more which I think really accelerated that growth which is nice. And then eventually before I knew it, you know, I was running businesses that were like primarily socially based. There were businesses that involved me being on camera. There were businesses that involved me teaching other people stuff in ways that you know were still fun, enjoyable, humorful and so on. So slow and steady progression.

So getting out of your comfort zone basically.

Yeah. Yeah. And like my door to door job, cuz I did a door to door job when one of my businesses failed growing up. Um that was that was quite valuable as well. Um if I didn't have situations where I just consistently had to do that rep every single time and analyze, okay, like why did that call go good or okay, why did that call go bad? What was wrong with that meeting? Then I probably would have spent a lot longer stuck in that weird like plateau that a lot of people are.

And was there a moment where you said to your parents, I no longer want to proceed with neuroscience? And how was that moment and how did they react to it?

Oh yeah, they reacted pretty rough. I mean, I won't say they like, you know, I wasn't like an outcast. It's not like they disowned me or anything, but they were definitely disappointed and really worried for sure. Um, I would say that was like the the mixture of emotions that I saw on their face when I sort of came out to them as an entrepreneur. You know, I find it really funny cuz that's like the exact same vibe I think that happens like if you like come out to your family, it's like I'm coming out as an entrepreneur and they're like, "Oh, no." Like or like oh good luck, son. I believe in you. My parents were kind of like kind of in that middle zone and um yeah, they were just really worried. So my mom was sending me like we um have this big insurance company. It's sort of a public company in BC where I grew up called ICBC. And she was sending me little clippings from like Nick like are you sure this job is 55k a year? I think I could get you. And um they were right to be uh worried because I put myself in a lot of situations where I really didn't have the money to pay my bills. And um you know I just basically made it by through the hair on my cheek. like it was like basically.1% margin of error and I somehow made it. Again, I think when your back is against the wall like that, keeping in mind I could have at any point just went back home and been like, "Hey guys, can you help me?" I didn't want to do that for pride reasons.

Um, you know, I think when your back is against the wall, like you just figure it out. And that's sort of the same sort of energy I tried to distill inside of Maker School, like if you have to do something, you're going to find a way to do it. Was there a moment where your parents told you that you were right to do so? Do you remember that moment?

Yeah. Yeah. Um I think it was like a couple years ago and it was right after um uh 1 second copy uh which is my content writing company had got an offer to be boughten out and the bio offer wasn't like super insane or anything but I think the total was over a mill and I think I just like said it in passing to them and yeah they were they were quite impressed. They were like paraphrasing but it was like you know I'm glad you stuck to your guns. I'm glad you had the conviction to do this thing that like we're really worried about you. Um, you know, you're a self-made man. And I was just like, I don't feel like a self-made man, obviously, for reasons that I just told you. But, uh, yeah, it was really cool. It was cool to like see that go full circle. And it was also good evidence that like, you know, despite the fact that people in your life are obviously trying to do the best for you, these people, you know, parents and so on and so forth, usually trying to do the best for you, the way that they express that best for you, um, may not actually be the thing that is best for you. You know, most parents are prone to fear. And so, out of fear, they kind of want to suffocate you. They're like, "Do the thing that worked for me, please. I'm scared. And uh I think if everybody did, we'd all just be working deadend 9 toive jobs that most of us hate and making very little money indeed.

If anyone who's listening to the podcast right now is in that exact situation and wants to possibly take that leap just like you did, what would be your advice to them? And how did you particularly know for sure that you were going to succeed? Or if not for sure, at least have a gut feeling that could go well.

I mean, the way that I did it was I tried to like math it out and I've just mathed a lot of these situations and I think like when the math tells you something as strongly as this did for me, you should probably do it. And so my math was, you know, I had a friend and he's like, "Honey, just try it out for a bit and and see where you land." And I was like, "Okay, that makes sense." And then I thought, "Okay, how much money would I make if I actually did accept that ICBC job for out of out of principle?" And it was like, "Okay, the average person here makes somewhere between $40 to $60,000 a year." And it's like, hey, how long does the average person actually work? And it's like, hey, they work about 40 years. I'm like, so what's that? $50,000 a year times 40 years is about $2 million. And I was just like, okay, so that means that the average person makes about $2 million a year economically in one lifetime. Um, change, you know, plus orus 10% or something. And I was like, what are the odds that I could make more than $2 million if I just tried my own thing? If I just started a business every year for the next 40 years? And I was like, well, I'd have to have a 2.5% success rate. And I've seen businesses, not exactly rocket science, some of these things. If I don't feel like I have more than a 2.5% possible success rate starting this company, then uh I probably shouldn't do it. But then I was like, I definitely feel like I have more than 2.5% success rate, and I think I can start out earning myself in at least, you know, 10 years or so. And in practice, that ended up not being 10 years. It was maybe like four or five years of struggle where I was earning below what all of my uh cohort was earning cuz they went into you know, the the job market and stuff like that immediately and then within a couple more years I was earning like 6 7x and now I'm earning something like 100x. So I imagine this will just continue to grow. It seems very difficult to fail when you're in my shoes just being candid with you. You have such a following. You have so much inertia. I think you can but you'd have to be a real [ __ ] to screw it up.

So yeah, you know, just like doing that math in your head. What is the probability that you must actually succeed in order to make more money doing this than that? You know, are you going to enjoy yourself that entire time? No. But rest assured, when you hit that median, you'll probably enjoy yourself more than if you work some 9 toive job. You have total freedom over your schedule. You can do whatever the heck you want. Seems pretty simple when the math is that straightforward, right?

So, you took a lot of reps into businesses. You said anywhere between 10 to 15. What were those businesses and what did each and every one teach you and how did you improve incrementally with every iteration?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that first business was the um like that entertainment business, the event management business, which um you know, obviously was very useful from like a social perspective. In hindsight, it taught me a lot of marketing. one of our uh number one marketing techniques way back in the day. Truly revolutionary, this one, we would um just get uh like a girl and then a guy to take our posters cuz we'd print posters for our events and then we just like put them in front of the urinals where the girls would put them in the bathroom stalls. And I know that sounds stupid, but like that was revolutionary.

It's just at eye level.

Yeah. Tell me about it. That was about as high. Yeah. And that was also just as about a high level that uh, you know, nobody else was was figuring out at that point. And we had a bunch of like competing promotions companies. We we crushed them with this one simple trick.

Then uh, you know, that eventually taught me like Facebook ads and whatnot as well because we ended up starting to run some Facebook ads. That was actually my first experiment and experience with Instagram. So we ran an Instagram page like I I started up an Instagram page and I think I scaled up to like 10 or 20,000 followers. And this is like back in 20 oh jeez I don't know 2016 2017. Okay. Quite a while ago. So it was pretty impressive at the time. You know want to know my revolutionary strategy for that? Go for it.

I was um I was doing this crazy thing where I just I went to my university page and then I opened the followers list and then I just followed everybody.

Crazy, right?

So, it just went straight to your ICP.

100%.

It was like, "Yeah, you're at my university, you're probably going to want to come to my party." Um, but what I mean by that is like this is really what taught me you could just do things. Doesn't matter how dumb they are.

And a lot of the time the real gold is not in the sky, it's like at your feet. If you just look down, it's like what are the dumb strategies that nobody else is doing? like putting a freaking poster in the urinal or like liking every person's post or you know following everybody on Instagram. A lot of people just never do that and they wonder why they're not successful. It's like you just got to get your hands dirty and do stupid stuff honestly. So yeah, that was that was pretty cool. I really like that promotions business. Um, there was the door to door business obviously and I started this like two or three times. So I had a lot of iterations. There was like Nimbus Digital, there was like Pacific Creative Group. Um, I'm not going to give names for all of these businesses cuz I genuinely do not remember all of them. But um, yeah, I mean like the very first door to door business that I ran, I ran because I was seeing a bunch of ads at the time for this um media agency program where it was like basically it was social media marketing was the business model at the time and I remember seeing a bunch of Facebook ads for this. Then I was just like, "Okay, that doesn't look super hard. Um maybe I can do it too. I know how to run Facebook ads cuz I did that for my other business." So what I did is I tried running Facebook ads and um the way that the social media marketing guru guys at the time said that you should get your business, you should go door to door. So I was like, "Okay, door to door. let's do it. And um, you know, I asked around my network at the time and there were a few other friends of mine that were doing something similar and I was like hey do you guys want guys to go door to door together? And so one of my friends uh who ended up being my business partner agreed and I was like let's do it. So he was way more charismatic and like way salesier and like way better at all that stuff than I ever was. But he um would be like okay let's do it. We're going to hit US minster today. And then he'd just be like okay let's meet here at this time and let's go. One of the first businesses we walked into was like this bubble tea store, which I think in hindsight is a massive chain, like corporate chain. Like there's no way no they would ever worked with us. And uh I distinctly remember there was me, there was my business partner Ger at the time and then there was um the random like cashier person and two out of the three of us were terrified. I was terrified looking at Grer and the person the cashier was terrified listening to him. We had no idea what the hell was going on, whether this was even like a thing. And uh anyway, despite that, like we we we iterated on that thousands of times. I have no idea why I stuck with that for as long as I did. It took me over 2,500 businesses that I had to physically visit before even one of them said yes to me. And the one that ended up saying yes to me, um randomst business ever. It was this jewelry shop in Port Kquitlam, which is an area a little bit out of Vancouver, like an hour. And uh it was like a cold day. I don't remember one month, but I just remember it was freezing. my little um Value Village jacket that I had bought to try and make myself look all professional was not doing the job. Um but there was a bunch of glass at the floor of this one business. I'm like, "What the hell?" And I looked up and I realized like this shop had gotten busted the night before and uh I you know that shop was like one of the shops that I was going to visit that day. So I think it was like my first or my second business that day and I just walked in and I gave my little pitch and

I looked around at the glass and then I just kind of went like you know screw the pitch. Like what's going on here man? Like what happened? And then he explained to me that like, you know, somebody broken into his business and stuff like that. And, you know, I just dropped all the salesy stuff and I just tried being like a person and um that worked. It worked. It literally didn't work. Eventually he was like, "What the hell are you doing here?" I was just like, "Well, you know, I'm um trying to run this business." But

So you felt a bit guilty trying to sell him after that.

I did. Yeah. Yeah. I think his name was Nasser or Nessier. Um, he's this lovely Persian man. And um, our whole job was to take his jewelry business from at that retail location and to to put it on the internet, basically sell ecom and uh it didn't go well at all. Was not a successful project, but you know, he took a he took a shot on me and I'm very grateful for that. So yeah, anyway, after that, we had a bunch of well, I had a bunch of experiences where, you know, I had somebody really close and I was like really banking on their money. My rent was due and then I fell through and I was like, "Oh, rent's due." Fell through, rent's due, fell through. Holy [ __ ] rent is really due. I need to like make this payment. And eventually I realized like I'm just not I'm not good enough at this. And that's when I went and I got a job and uh the job was at a door to door company which was lovely and actually provided like structured training which is one of the reasons why I try to provide structured sales training in in maker school because before that structured training I was just like a fish. I had no idea what the hell was going on. But after that I had like a consistent deal system in place. As long as you have a system you know you're like 90% of the way there anyway. And then I did that for a while. Um eventually I left that. I think it was like four or five months, maybe six months and then I started again and then my business was way more successful because you know I could actually structure what a sales conversation was supposed to look like. So yeah, I mean I did that for a while and that was great. Um and then co hit and uh the thing that you realize when you start a door to door business and um the government mandates that you know you can't go door to door anymore is like most of your revenue is very dependent on the politics of your geography. And when CO hit and they shut down all the businesses, I had all of my clients call us up like that day basically saying, "Sorry, we can't work with you anymore. You know, business is tough, whatever." And so, we were making like a reasonable amount of money at that time. I think we were making over 10k a month, which to me, you know, think about I was eating like rice and beans for like 2 years before that. Like, I was like really squeezing to pay all the bills. Um, to me that was like I was successful.

But when that disappeared, I was like, "Oh my god." Um, and so I tried a lot of stuff. I tried like online courses way back in the day after that thinking like okay if I put stuff out on the internet then no government will be able to say doors are shut you know it's like on the internet it's a thing like there was the pirate bay at the time I'm never going to get shut down right that didn't work well cuz I didn't know what the hell I was doing um I tried like a couple of like programming like kind of SAS based businesses neither of those really work cuz I didn't really know what the hell I was doing programming wise and then eventually um I tried a videography company and uh the videography company uh actually worked okay and it leveraged some of the prior skills that I'd used like I'd used my videography skills in the promotions business and then I'd also used it a little bit in an online course business you know eventually I was at the point where I think we made like nine grand one month and uh, you know, I also started a photography company and I started like local another local marketing company and I just I just rinsed and repeated I did so many businesses it wasn't even funny

e-commerce doing like Halloween sales. I mean, like, but you know, eventually, push come to shove, um, I think I just tried had so many things that the universe had no chance but to be like, "Jesus Christ, man, fine. Like, we'll, we'll give you some success, please." And then it culminated in this, um, you know, content business that, uh, you know, I, I, I scaled to $90,000 a month with a friend of mine. And, uh, that was really my intro into AI. And that was really like my intro into just like offering this sort of productized, scalable service, which I think I'm now, um, pretty well known for. And that was 1 Second Copy. So, yeah, from there, we scaled that business. The way that we did that primarily was using a small model which very few people had heard about at the time called GPT-3, generative pre-trained transformer 3, to like automate the process of writing small, sort of like infographics/news blurs. And I posted a bunch of things on Fiverr saying, like, "Hey, I will write your, you know, small SEO post for 1 cent a word," which anybody in the writing world would know is cheap as hell. It's like, you can't make a living off that. But I just found a way to like chain it to GPT-3 at the time because I was really hacky and entrepreneurial. And, uh, worked pretty well.

Then a friend of mine was like, "Hey, seems like it's working pretty well. I think we could scale this. Do you want to raise the prices?" And I was like, "Nah, not really." And he's like, "Please scale the prices, Nick. Like, we can make a lot of money." And I was like, "No, I'm fine with my one cent a word." Eventually, he made me an offer so good that I couldn't refuse it, which was that he would just do everything, and then all I would have to do is keep the system running. And, uh, if he couldn't make me, I think it was $10,000 a month within 2 months, then, you know, that would be it. And I would keep all the money. And I was just like, "All right, that sounds pretty great." So, if I didn't have him like really taking a shot on me, that wouldn't have worked. And then, yeah, we, we hired out, scaled it, we received that buy offer like I was telling you about. That didn't end up being enough for us to sell. So we just continued operating the business in the meantime. And we actually ended up making more money than we would have had we had sold. Um, but we shut that down, I think, like four or five months ago now because, um, you know, AI writing, there's just no real market for that given that everybody has their own cloud. This >> has been running for a while. >> Oh yeah, that business was running for like three, four, four or five years. >> Cool. >> Just generating consistently, uh, monthly profits that whole time. If you'd have told me like when I started that like I could have a business that was like, it's like 20, 30 G's a month of personal profit every month for a very long time without me really having to like do anything, I was, I would have been like, "You're crazy." That was pretty solid. Yeah.

Anyway, I mean, I could talk all day about this, I'm sure. But, um, that eventually resulted in me starting my automation agency. Uh, and then for my automation agency, uh, I found a lot of success with that, obviously, as we know. And then I started asking myself, "How do I get better leads?" And then I was like, "Maybe I'll make some videos." And then that resulted in the YouTube channel. And then it resulted in me being like, "Hey, what's the best way to grow more?" And that's what resulted me making these really long-form courses. And, uh, yeah, it's really just been like this positive feedback loop since.

>> So you stumbled almost by accident to your personal brand. You would say that it wasn't something that was planned ahead of time.

>> Yeah. I mean, like my initial motivation in doing the whole personal brand was just, "What is the most cost-efficient lead that I could get for LeftClick?" It was not like, "I'm going to start a personal brand and be this big hot shot guy that gets invited to all these fancy events and stuff." It was literally just like, "Okay, my current CPM is like 15. Can I get the CPM down to like five?" So, for anybody that has a CPM, cost per meeting, and um, that's all it really ever was. I was like, "Why should I jump on the sales call if I could just have a video doing it for me? Maybe I'll get more qualified leads that way." And, um, yeah, it turns out that that was like the play. Didn't perform really well initially, but I just kept hammering it with like the same level of like, like delusional, uh, failures. And every video was a failure until one eventually was a success. And then, yeah, the universe relented and was like, "Okay, here's 3,500 subscribers."

>> Was there one video that completely blew up or was it incremental?

>> Yeah, it was like incremental. I mean, I, I'd like it to say I'd like to say that it was super viral, but it was basically like, first video had five views, second one had like eight views, third one had like 12 views, fourth one had like 20 views, fifth one had like 100 views, sixth one had like 400 views. It was exponential if you viewed every video by its successor, but, um, it wasn't like super crazy. The only reason I kept going is 'cause I had pre-committed and given myself a challenge. I was just at the time very interested in this whole notion of pre-commitment. That's what I did with with 1 Second Copy. I pre-committed to spending two months on the business with my friend and I was like, "I'll make the decision as to whether it's successful at the end of that two-month period." So, I just tried to apply the same idea. I'll pre-commit to doing this personal branding thing, to basically making videos on a subject, and I'll try that out for one full month, posting a video every day, and I'll just see how it, how it does. And so, at the end of the month, yeah, I was like over three subs and I was like, "Okay, I think that worked."

Okay. Now, fast forwarding a bit, what is the current state of your community? Because I understand you mentioned that you basically have a guarantee that if someone doesn't get their first client in 90 days, you usually them a full refund. Has that ever happened?

>> Yeah. Yeah, it's happened. I would wager probably 1 to 3% of people will ask for some refund in some way, shape, or form. Uh, what's interesting is people don't always ask for the full refund. A lot of the time people are like, "Nick, I, you know, I'm so sorry I didn't make it. Um, but I didn't really try all that hard, so could you please refund me one month or like half a month? You know, I really like the stuff you're doing." And I'm just like, "Dude, man, it's a guarantee. Take the guarantee like I would have taken the guarantee. Um, but yeah, it happens. But that's the whole reason why you have a guarantee, right? The whole reason why you have a guarantee is not because it'll never happen. It's because it will happen. You've just done the math. And so in my case, when I had a guarantee, I sold like two or three X as much as I did without the guarantee. And so just think about it mathematically with me for a sec. If I sell 300% as much as I would have before at the cost of like a 1 to 3% refund rate, my total net is still like 295%. Right? So, it's like, why not have a guarantee? Also, guarantees are just great to put in offers, great to put in ads. They're just, it's the way you should have a guarantee.

>> And what would you say is the number one reason people that join your community don't find success?

>> I would say it's because they fall off the consistency wagon. A big chunk of the way that Maker School works is it forces you to show up every single day for a pre-committed period, right? So, it's like, okay, 90 days. Just give it 90 days. And we don't ask for a lot. It's like two or three hours a day for 90 days on average. Uh, taking into account the time you spend on the last day and the first day. They kind of average out. Um, but, you know, that's pretty scary to a lot of people. Can you imagine doing something for 90 days, every single day for a couple hours? Like, a lot of people are terrified by that. And it's just because they probably were either raised in environments where they didn't have to do that, or they've sort of become brainwashed by this notion of like work-life balance where it's like, "Oh, I have to have Saturdays and Sundays off. Oh, I have to take a week off for this trip." The reality is there's more work-life balance in doing something that you're passionate about a little bit every day than there is in going ham five days a week, taking two days off, or going crazy for one month and then taking a month to sail in and in the Maldives or something like that. So, yeah, it really just boils down to a lack of daily consistency. And, um, you know, like there, there are ways that I've tried to improve this. Like a big one is just like, interact with the community, engage with the community, make friends within the community. Join accountability groups like you have within the community. When people do that, the probability of success goes way up because now it's not just me being like, "You better show up tomorrow." It's all of your friends being like, "Hey man, how, how'd, uh, today go?" Like, "Are you going to show up tomorrow?" Obviously, when you have that level of social accountability, your probability of success goes way up.

Did you do that in your journey?

>> Yeah, I had that, um, after a while. I didn't have that initially. I'm very thankful to one of my roommates at the time because, um, one of my roommates, uh, I should clarify, I lived with a roommate for a while because rent was pretty expensive. And he was also running a business. And he, uh, he was a very loud individual. I love him to death, but he's very loud. And so every time that he would make any sort of money, I could hear it through the walls. And so I would be in my room trying to get a good night's sleep or something, and then he'd be, you know, doing some deal for his service agency at the time, and he got a deal, he'd be like, "Yeah, yeah." And I just like wake up, "What the hell's going on?" So I lived with this guy for long enough to like really grow like, kind of pissed off that he was winning that much. And I was like, "You mother?"

Um, and so that actually ended up being like a form of daily accountability where I was just like, "Okay, what are you doing? How, how can I do it too? Like, you're succeeding a lot. What are you doing to do these inputs? If I do it too, like, can you, you know, can you hold me accountable to this, to this end?" But that wasn't until like that videography agency. Um, and that's, you know, actually, now that I think about it, one of the reasons why I was so successful, like one of the reasons why I was making like 80 grand a month at that time was because I had somebody that was checking in with me being like, "Hey man, what are you doing tomorrow?" So, yeah, I mean, what's funny is Maker School is really just a hodgepodge of a bunch of these ideas that I gained out of working with people. Um, and the daily accountability one's huge.

>> And is your automation agency still operating?

>> Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Because it's very interesting to me. You basically give the sauce out to people for free. So, it's sort of like giving away your own market share. Have you noticed any deviation from your current operations? Because I understand that the most valuable thing for your community is to share student success. But again, that means you are breeding in your competitor.

>> Yeah. The inherent friction of what you're talking about, I think, is fairly common in any sort of like info product situation. It's always just like, "Well, dude, if you knew how to do this thing as well as you did, then why would you share it? Wouldn't you just like continue hacking the market and just making a ton of money?" And there's truth to that. Um, but there's some nuance. And the nuance there is like, if you look at the sort of companies that I'm working with now compared to the sort of company I was, I was working with at the time, they're very different. I mean, we're working with like large multinationals now. These are much more difficult to get through, you know, like daily Upwork apps or, you know, cold emails or various community forms of outreach that I recommend. And so like those forms of outreach work really well for me at a time when I was growing primarily like very SMB, very like creative agency PPC. But I'm sort of like beyond that now, targeting a kind of playing a different game, if that makes sense.

>> And so it's not that I'm like saturating my market necessarily. What I'm doing is I'm just alerting people to a market arbitrage opportunity that still exists. Mhm.

>> And so if you think about it from like a moral perspective, if I know that a current market arbitrage opportunity exists and I'm not currently taking advantage of it, you know, wouldn't I, doesn't it make more sense to share that with as many people as I can that presumably have similar values to me if they like watching my content? If I can improve their lives by showing them, "Hey man, there's, uh, this button and you press the button and every time you press it, you make five cents." Like, wouldn't I, shouldn't I tell you the button? So, I think, I think that's a level of the nuance there. And another thing is like, Maker School and just my whole like content stack today is very different from what I was talking about like a couple years ago. Like a couple years ago when I started all this stuff, for instance, we were on a totally fundamentally different platform. We were on like Make.com, for instance, and we were selling like very, very different sorts of builds, um, with Make.com. But if you think about it, like we've evolved a lot from like simple drag and drop. Like we're using like Power Automate. We're using like AutoHotkey desktop macros and stuff. It was just like a hodgepodge, right?

>> For anyone who doesn't know, what are those platforms?

>> They're just platforms that allow you to automate certain parts of your desktop workflow. So like you could click here and then click here, click here. You could automate the pressing of certain buttons and certain combinations to, you know, maybe you go on a certain website and then you tab twice, press enter, and that'll like open up a window and then it types something and then you go down. And so in that way, you can automate some mundane portion of your economically valuable work. And so like, you know, you're filling out a form, it's like, "Okay, these fields are always going to be the same. Tab, enter, tab, this, this, enter, tab, enter." And it's like, "Okay, I just saved myself literally like four hours today just by automating that really boring, mundane part of my workflow." So that's what they were kind of initially, right? But if you think about it, like the content's changed a lot. And so the market opportunity has also changed. If I was stuck selling and teaching people how to sell the same thing that, you know, I was talking about a couple years ago, of course, the whole thing would have crumbled. And so this is actually why I changed the name of the community that I, that I'm running to Maker School. Previously it was called Make Money with Make, and it was like, "Here's how to make money in a very thin lane with like a certain tool." And now it's like, "Hey, here's how to make money in general using the technology of the day and age." And the technology of the day and age now tends to be these AI agents, which presumably are going to be the dominant technology of, you know, our future age as well. So, yeah, I mean, like the, the arbitrage opportunity is different. I think that old one has definitely been really filled and it's probably much harder to sell those sorts of systems and very few people want those systems. But the systems today are sort of very new. And, um, that's sort of how I get around that.

>> So for anyone who's trying to enter this space, what would you say is the number one arbitrage opportunity currently?

>> Number one arbitrage opportunity is using Claude code and other AI agents who are exceptional at software, uh, production to create fixed, repeatable workflows that work the same without you having to do anything. And then you just install these fixed, repeatable workflows inside of businesses. You don't actually use the AI necessarily in the workflows themselves, you just use the AI to help you build the workflows. So a good example of this is way back in the day when I was designing these sorts of AutoHotkey Power Automate, these macro flows, I would actually have to like sit down and think, "Okay, like, if I want to automate this, how many times do I have to press tab and like, you know, the mouse has to go where, but I have to like think about sizing it for different screens." And so the program that I would write, 'cause it was a program, would end up being really, really long and it would also be kind of fragile. And I would involve a lot of my time and energy, maybe like 10 hours or something. Well, the cool thing is I can do the thing that previously took 10 hours, but it can do it in like 30 seconds. And then because it's a lot smarter, it can make the work a lot more, uh, reliable, but also a lot less fragile. And, and the nuance there is you're using a very flexible system, which is AI, to sell a very reliable system, which is a pipeline or a business workflow. What people don't realize is that businesses are typically very repeatable. The only real way you get successful in a business is just do the same thing over and over again and then improve and iterate on that. It's kind of meta, right? Because that's the whole point of Maker School.

>> But they don't actually want really flexible AI workflows necessarily. They want like the same thing over and over and over again. And so, um, you know, having cloud code available to you and so on and so forth is a great way to do that.

>> So there's still an opportunity to not necessarily make these workflows with AI, but also make some other sort of fulfillment using AI.

>> Yeah. Yeah. For sure. If I think back to the way that we were automating things at 1 Second Copy, for instance, like we would do, we would use AI in our production process to like, you know, template out articles and we would equip our writers with AI to let them write really quickly. But it's not like AI was running our entire business necessarily. We still use like, you know, CRM and project management systems and stuff. But what would happen is, you know, when a new lead enters our flow and then we convert them into a client, that kicks off like an onboarding sequence which templates out a style guide. And then that style guide pulls from our best performing style guide. And then that makes a new time entry in this time tracking software. And then that sends them an email letting them know we're starting to work on their thing. These are all very like, very simple and like, uh, sort of foundational things in any business, but they all must be done the same way every time. And so instead of trying to like insert all the super advanced, hyper, crazy AF functionality in businesses, a lot of the time you sort of have to look again at the floor and not in the sky. What is the foundational thing that they probably should be doing? What do they have to do before every sales call? You know, "Oh, I need to do a quick like one-page prep sheet on what the client is." It's like, "Okay, give me the template and then give me the business name and the website and I will just build an automation that goes out, scans through their website, compiles a one-page prep sheet." That's very foundational, but it's also very boring. And that's why nobody really does it. Even, even people like, I'm talking about this right now, like very few people are doing this. They're like, "Oh, I need to develop a new agentic engineering framework. Oh, I need to create this new context management thing." And like, "That's how I'll make money." And it's like, "No, there's a lot of people out there that are just making money inefficiently." So if you can help them produce capital like 1% more efficiently, you can take a portion of that 1% as upside. So basically your whole mindset is, "Do now, figure out later." How does that tie in to what you just said?

>> Yeah, I mean, like rather than overthinking and trying to come up with the most complicated, sexy sounding agentic engineering framework or new way of using AI that nobody else has uncovered, understand that like even the most foundational application of this stuff is still heavily underutilized. We all just live in a bubble. People watching my video, okay, on YouTube, you live in a bubble. You're hyper, hyper into AI. 99.9% of the world is not even 100% into AI as much as you are. There was this graph that was circulating around a few months ago and it was like, um, out of, you know, every box is like a person that, you know, works in a white-collar company. And every colored box of the big box is like people that actually use AI. And it was something like 80% of people were still not using AI to do anything at all. Something like 19% of people were using AI in some use cases. Only 1% of people were using AI with like flexible harnesses and coding flows and stuff like that, like what I'm talking about here. That's a massive arbitrage. You are the 1% quite literally. You don't need a ton of money. You don't need like a big thing. You don't need a bunch of capital expenditure to buy a bunch of heavy equipment. You actually have the thing that everybody else wants. So just help them with their boring ass businesses and then worry about like developing your hyper cool niche later.

>> So if anyone who's listening is trying to find the best way or even fastest way to go to 10K per month, how would you break it down to them in simple steps?

>> Well, it depends. How much money do they have?

>> They have a laptop. Okay. So they got a laptop. What? Like $0 in disposable income and they can't spend a cent.

>> $500. All right. So, they have like a, a small modest budget, let's say. Um, okay. Well, with $500, I think you can do a lot. So, the very first thing you have to do is you have to assemble some sort of portfolio, which is a brief little two or three project slideshow of like what it is that you've done before. And so, you can do this in either like, um, some sort of like visual design tool like Excalidraw or like Lucidspark, or you can actually do this in like a drag-and-drop platform like N8N or Make.com, for instance. Um, we're sort of deprecating Make, but N8N's pretty cool. Um, so the reason why this is valuable is because you need some asset to show people on a sales call like what it is that you have the ability to build. So if you watch one of my videos on, I don't know, 4-hour N8N course or 4-hour Cloud Code course or something, you will know more than enough to do this in like five minutes. You know, it's literally like, "Okay, like, what are some common problems of businesses? They want to get more leads. They want to, you know, send quotes, send estimates. They want to, I don't know, send an automatic email or something." Like you can just design very simple workflows and so on and so forth to accomplish that end. And once you have the portfolio, I mean, the sky's the limit. There are three really high-converting, um, lead generation, uh, stacks right now, like lead generation approaches. The first that I think I've now unfortunately gotten kind of famous over is Upwork. And the reason why I always pitch Upwork is because it's very much like, "Do now, think later." Um, with Upwork, what you do is you spend a portion of your money, okay, to immediately put your pitch or proposal in front of the people that are the most likely to say yes to it right off the bat. Now, this doesn't really work after a while because, you know, when you do the cost basis, you're probably going to spend the $500 before you make like $10,000 a month or something. But it could be a reasonable chunk of your budget. So, you take this portfolio basically of systems that you built, okay? And, um, you know, you start applying to Upwork jobs, let's say, in the form that I talk about often in Maker School. And it's literally as simple as like, "Hey, I know you're struggling with XYZ. Here's this thing that I developed that's pretty similar to what you're talking about, and with a couple of tweaks, I think we could probably do it." You know, you give them the asset, you give them the file, the Excalidraw, the freaking Lucidchart, whatever. Record a quick little video going over it, which is quite important because, uh, you know, a lot of the time people don't just want the results. They want a person that can also guide them through the results. It's, it's quite important. And you just rinse and repeat. I mean, it's, it's about as straightforward as that. There's a certain amount that you can spend with your $500 a month, but that might cost you like $150 bucks in your first month, maybe $200 bucks. The rest of your money you would distribute to other lead generation mechanisms, and you'd run them all side by side in parallel. And the reason why I recommend people do this is because if you just do one lead generation mechanism, some people just suck at different things. So like, some people are great at Upwork and they blow at cold email. It's like, if they just do Upwork, they'll do okay. Um, but if they just do cold email, they'll suck. So why not just distribute yourself at the beginning and try a bunch of things and then hone in later, right? So, um, you know, like cold email, for instance, is a great way of of getting in touch with all sorts of businesses. The reason why I like cold email so much is because you can actually use AI and automation to help sell AI and automation, which is quite cool. So you might spend another $150 to $200 signing up to various cold email platforms, scraping lead lists, and then starting to send mail at scale. The last approach that I like is, well, actually, I guess there's like a couple more approaches. I mean, like at that point, you probably have more time than you have money. And so rather than like looking to spend money necessarily, you could spend your time instead. And so one really killer way that people are finding a lot of success right now, um, of doing this sort of, you know, trade of time for money is they will DM people or direct message people on LinkedIn with these sorts of portfolio, uh, systems that they built, um, and then essentially do the same thing that you would have done on Upwork, just do it on LinkedIn. You'll go through somebody's LinkedIn profile, go through their business, you'll say, "Hey, you know, I noticed you're doing XY and Z. Um, this is totally out of left field, but I just designed a system that I think could help you a lot, and I'm actually giving it to you upfront. I'm not even asking for anything in return. I just want like a shot at the table. Can I walk you through how this would work and then walk you through how I might be able to make you a few hundred or thousand extra dollars a month?" That's actually quite a reasonable pitch, right? You do, you know, 10 to 20 of those a day. After the course of about a month or so, how many of these have you sent? I don't know, 300 to 600. That's actually like a reasonable batting average. Uh, and then the last way is through communities themselves. So, you know, Maker School is a community. And in that community, people talk all sorts of ways about all sorts of things. And a chunk of the things that people talk about are problems that they're struggling with. They say, "Hey guys, I'm finding that, you know, for whatever reason, when I try and create a system like this, this happens and it sucks." Well, the really good thing about communities is the whole premise is that you're sharing vulnerabilities and problems that you struggle with in a niche. So, you know, if you think about other communities out there, videographers, think about photographers, think about content, you know, uh, people, think about creatives, think about PPC ads guys, they all have their own communities, and what they do is they just [ __ ] and moan all day about problems that they're suffering from. If you just go into those communities and look at all the problems people are facing and then offer to proactively solve them, okay, and you do that 10, 20 times a day, that's another 300, 600 reps. So, if you got 300, 600 reps from this cold DM stuff, 300, 600 reps from this, uh, community stuff, you have presumably a few thousand reps from the cold email stuff, and then you have maybe another 100 reps from the Upwork stuff, you're sitting at like a pretty solid Upwork stack, uh, uh, outreach stack, and you're doing that for $500. The probability that one in that maybe five to 6,000 people will not say yes to you is quite low, assuming that you are actively iterating on your growth. And all you really need is one person. I mean, there are people that are willing to pay $10,000 a month for your service right now despite the fact that you might think that you have no idea what the hell you're doing. It just takes you finding the right person. Or alternatively, you might find two people willing to pay you $5,000, or three people willing to pay you $3,000, or so on and so forth. It might be a hodgepodge collection of different projects, but you can eventually get there. You're really only, you know, a few thousand people away from that sort of life.

>> Mhm. So, to get to $10,000 a month, you need to trade your time for money.

>> Yeah. If people are trying to break through that freelancing phase, trying to go to 100k, 200k, whatever it may be, what are the actions that will allow them to have that breakthrough and what needs to change in their mindset?

>> And when you're talking break through the freelance phase or break through the $10,000 a month?

>> Or like scale from $10,000 a month to $100,000 a month.

>> Yeah. While also being able to not call yourself a freelancer and to stop trading your time for money.

>> Well, at some level, you will always trade your time for money. There is no real way out of that trap. Um, the whole notion of passive investing, for instance, I find very silly, or passive income I find very silly because usually you will have had to spend active time in order to acquire the capital or resource that you were looking to passively compound. So there really is no like passive, truly no way to trade your time for money. What occurs is at, as you grow, you just trade your time for money at higher and higher multiples. And so right now, you may be trading your time for money at $20 an hour, okay? But in a year, you could trade it at $40 an hour, and in another, you could trade it at $80 an hour. In my case, when I work on Maker School, I trade it for something like $7,000 an hour. So if you look at me at the beginning who was trading it for $2 to $3 an hour and say, "Hey, I'm trading my time for $7,000 an hour." It may look like I'm magically producing money, but it is still occurring on a graph somewhere. It's still like a line input to output. Right? Okay. So once you understand that, um, it's simply a process of taking something that got you from zero to one and then just doing it faster and better. And that's how you sort of increase the slope of that graph. And that's how I always think about it. So for instance, right now you are a solopreneur and you're making $10,000 a month. Presumably you're spending, you know, if you're doing a full-time thing, maybe like 150 to $200 a month. Let's just say 200 hours. That makes it simple. It means that your hourly rate is $50 an hour. So what does that mean you can do? Uh, the very first thing you do is you just cut out all inefficiencies. If your current time is $50 an hour, okay? Um, you know, as in, you trade one hour and you get $50 back in your bank account, there are likely a lot of things that you are currently doing in your business that you do not need to be doing. If you can take a very analytical approach, like time yourself day in day out, like literally, "What am I doing every 15 to 20 minutes?" You can probably squeeze out 20 to 30% improvements in your hourly rate right off the bat, which I know sounds silly, but have you actually ever timed yourself? Have you actually ever sat down, timed every task that you've done in a 72-hour period? I can almost guarantee you, like less than 1% of people watching this have done so. And the 1% of people that are watching this that have done so probably make more than $50 an hour.

>> So now maybe you're at like 70 or 80 bucks an hour or something like that. Now what you need to ask yourself is, okay, where is the vast majority of my current time going? Is it going to the fulfillment of projects or is it going to the sale of and winning of new projects? Now, if the vast majority of your time is currently going towards the fulfillment of projects, then odds are you have something broken in what it is that you are selling. So, you should find a new thing to sell. So, instead of selling, let's say, custom backends or something like that, you should look to see what can I sell that makes me the same amount of money on the front end, but that takes fewer work hours to fulfill. So, maybe instead of this custom automation backend, you just sell dashboards or something. Maybe dashboards are templated. You have a thing. You just copy and paste it and then you make the colors a little different. Now you make the same amount of money. You do so in half the time. Instead of, uh, $10,000 and $200, you do $10,000 and I don't know, $100. So now your rate's like $140, $150 an hour, right? Now that you're, you're done with this, presumably now you're spending most of your time on the sales side, right? Because you've now eliminated the fulfillment side. You're spending most of your time on the sales side. Good for you because that's how successful businesses grow. But eventually, you will sell so much that even though you are trading your fulfillment time at a very high multiple, you will not be able to fulfill. So now you need to hire somebody to do some fulfillment. When I say hire somebody, I don't necessarily mean like hire a person. Like you could build agents and automations and stuff like that to fulfill stuff for you. But, um, fulfillment is what you can currently like automate and delegate with a high degree of skill very easily because it doesn't really require as much taste, I'd say, in automation or backends. Um, sales and stuff is what you still need like yourself for. Nobody will ever sell like a founder. But if you do this now, maybe you can trade your time at a three or four X multiple. So now you're doing it for $500 an hour, right? And now it's like, "Okay, so now making $500 an hour, if I work 200 hours in a month, 500 times 200 is now, you do the math, $100,000, right? You could do that very easily. You could do that with two or three people working for you. So long as you found the right thing to sell and then you spend the vast majority of time on the sales, not necessarily the fulfillment.

>> It's just increasing leverage. It seems that your mindset is very much about efficiency, optimization, and mathematically calculating your actions. So with that said, what are your current frameworks that you use to be able to operate to such efficiency for a prolonged period of time?

>> Yeah, the big one is the hourly rate framework, for sure. And people scoff at it because again, they say, "Oh, you're trading your time for your money, Nick. I can't believe you're doing this." But it's just how it is. I mean, if you want to make any money, you must indeed spend some time doing it. Even if you start a cool product or a really sick business or something like that and it's mostly on autopilot, you still needed to trade your time initially to build the thing. When I record a piece of content, for instance, might take me one hour to record, the cost of that content is one hour. How much money I make from that is going to grow over time, of course, but right now it's one hour. And so, um, understanding your internal rate, I think, is very important. And your internal hourly rate is literally like, total amount of time spent on work divided by total amount of money, or sorry, total amount of money divided by total number of hours equals your internal hourly rate. So in my case, you know, our revenue collectively is probably over $325,000 right now. And I would say I work, yeah, and I would say I work somewhere between, you know, probably 100 to 150 hours. I, I don't have the numbers, but I could tell you in front of my laptop because I do log all of this stuff. So let's just say it's like 100 hours. That means that my effective rate right now is $3,250 across all tasks. And so I think the second that you realize this, you start being like, "Okay, cool. So if my total amount of money I make per hour worked is $3,250, what tasks make me more than $3,250 an hour? And what tasks make me less than $3,250 an hour?" And it's like, if the task makes me less than $3,250 an hour, I should stop doing it, right? And if the task makes me more, then I should just do that all day. And in that way, I'm going to improve my hourly rate to $4,000 an hour. So at every point in time, I'm just making these sort of incremental improvements. And that's actually why I love this so much 'cause it's like a game, right? It's, it's literally like, "How do I optimize the amount of time I have available?"

It's like when you, yeah, play some resource accumulation game, do some cookie clicker or whatever. It's like, "How do I click the cookie the fastest?" Another big framework that I've used is this framework of expected value. And we were chatting about this, um, just at that brunch place right before, but I'll do my best to make it clear for everybody. In expected value, you sort of have two things. Anytime you make a decision, you ask yourself, "What is the outcome of that decision? And then what is the probability that I will achieve that outcome?" So the example I provided you, uh, in brunch was, "I want to start the next Uber." And it's like, "Whoa, you can make so much money with that! Like, that's crazy." What is the probability that you will achieve starting the next Uber multiplied by the total amount of money you can make without that outcome? Well, if you started the next Uber, you could probably make like a bajillion quadrillion dollars. Let's just say it's a billion, right? But what are the odds that you could actually succeed with that Uber? It's probably really small. It's probably really, really, really small. It's probably like 0.1% if if not even less. One out of a thousand people probably make it. So if you just do the math on like a billion dollars over here and then 0.1% over here, you just multiply the two out. The expected value of you starting that company is $1 million. Now contrast that with starting a marketing agency. Let's say if you started a marketing agency, are you going to make a billion dollars from your marketing agency? If you think you will, you are unfortunately mistaken. You will not make a billion dollars from a marketing agency unless you're the deoid of deoids or something. I don't know. Um, you're not going to make a lot of money. But let's say you made $10 million and let's say the probability of you having success with that was even just 10%. The expected value of that decision is $10 million times 0.1 to do the math, which is $1 million. Right? So now we have two decisions that are basically equal. Starting an Uber is approximately equal to starting a lowly marketing agency. And if they're both pretty similar, then does it really matter all that much, right? And so the whole idea of expected value is you just pick the thing that has the highest value to you at any point in time. And it's not that you're going to know what these numbers are. I don't know what the probability of me succeeding at any point in time is. But, um, you know, like I just use that as a framework. And it's like, "Okay, like, probably more likely that I'll make money with a marketing agency than Uber, right? So why don't I do that first, make a little bit of money, and then I can spend that on some more money later on, you know, if I needed to spend on marketing my Uber." I think both of these in conjunction with each other have been extremely valuable. Um, and I think if you just like approach this from even like a slightly more mathematical perspective than like the really motivational perspective that a lot of like, you know, business owners and entrepreneurs and all this stuff do, like, "You got to hustle and grind all day, bro. So, if you're not waking up at 3:00 AM in the morning and gymming and doing all sorts of random BS, then you're not going to make it." If you just approach this from a math perspective, you'll be way more successful than those guys by far.

>> Two things to touch upon. First, what do you have to say to the people who subscribe to the idea of grant culture?

>> Yeah, I mean, I think it's just naive and sort of silly. Um, there are people out there that spend 1/1000th less time and effort on tasks and make a thousand times more money than you. So, clearly, it is not that you must work extraordinarily hard in order to succeed. Now, that's not to say that working hard is not highly correlated with success. It is, but it is not the necessary prerequisite to success. You must not actually have to work really hard in order to be successful. Realistically, the prerequisite is you must probably work moderately hard, but moderately hard might mean two or three hours of focused work in a day.

>> Mhm.

>> So, just look at the base case. There are people out there that are making way more than either of us could ever hope to, and they work way less. So, if you want to be successful, you don't necessarily have to work really hard. What you have to do is you have to figure out the right things to work on. You have to figure out in that expected value calculation, what just so happens to have a high probability of succeeding and also gives me a big outcome. 'Cause when I multiply those two together, I'm going to make way more money than what I was doing before.

>> That makes a lot of sense, especially on a high-level perspective and in which direction you should go. But if you zoom in a bit, what do you do on a daily basis to be able to maintain three, four businesses and also I know you spoke a lot about that this

year, you're going to be focused on daily tasks rather than, excuse me, daily goals rather than long-term ones.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I'll give you an example of um you know, some simple math that I think would guide anybody at the beginning of their business career make the right move. I get a lot of people calling me and emailing me saying, "Yo, Nick, I know you used to do door to door. Clearly door to door is the reason why you made so much money. I want to do door to door. So, here's my plan. I'm going to do a hundred doors every day and I'm gonna do that for 100 days and it's gonna be 10,000 businesses."

And then I'm like looking at that and I'm like man back when I was grower you know in a single day I could contact 100 people let's say at max today with like cold email Loom videos combination of everything else that you could do you could contact 10,000 people in a day clearly one is a lot more effective than the other like would I rather have the appearance of working hard by knocking on all these doors hey brother how you doing I just walked by your business and saw whatever whatever BS pitch I used to make all the time or would I actually rather be effective effective usually looks really boring right like me sitting down at a laptop twiddling my fingers a little bit.

So, you know, the big thing is just like the things that usually move the needle a lot are actually pretty boring. It's like just looking at a cold email and being like it's like just copying and pasting the same template with a minor variation to like 20 people on LinkedIn a day. It's like really basic stuff like that. So, I mean like the micro case for instance, when people tell me I want to go to I always say just take all the time that you would have spent driving onto the business plaza and then walking from business to business. take all that time and just write the best cold email campaign you can and you will make way more money, spend less money in gas. That's usually a cost people don't realize and uh you'll contact 100x of people.

Okay, so that's an example like if you're in the you know beginning stages of building a business you want to learn outreach. Uh in my case when we talk daily tasks I always think about everything from a revenue generation perspective. And so the idea is at the beginning of my day I'm probably the freshest and I'm probably the most productive I will ever be. So what are the tasks that I can apply this high level of intelligence and freshness to that produce the most outcome that make me the most money possible? So this is sort of the expected value equation. What has the highest outcome has the highest probability of success that I can apply my brain to at the very beginning.

And so um for me right now what that usually means is I'm doing some form of content creation and or marketing. And so when I say content creation and marketing I mean recording YouTube videos, recording daily update videos. I'm recording videos for like even within my community, engaging with members in my community because engaging within a community is marketing in and of itself. Um, and basically what I'm doing is I'm looking to just grow my revenue base as much as possible. And then everything is just a pyramid from there. It's like at the beginning of my day, highest revenue generating activities and then everything just gets less and less and less and less such that I backfill with all of my admin. Do my admin at like 3:00 4 p.m. when my brain's fried and I don't really give a crap about anything cuz that stuff just isn't all that important. Oh, I do my website design at like, you know, 2:30 when it's like, hey, I've just worked for like eight hours. I don't, you know, I'm not fresh anymore. I'll do the website design. I basically make sure to always focus on tasks that involve talking to people, communicating with people, creating content that people consume at the very beginning of my day. And then we'll only ever backfill with like stuff that's just me time um at the end.

Mh. And yeah, if you just apply that to your own business at whatever stage, I think you'll have a lot more success than if you just try and, you know, do whatever the hell else that most people are doing these days. Watch Hustleb Bro culture videos all day.

So talk to me about Clervo, your SAS. In the age where everyone can take an AI agent, build something, let's say they can remake Calendarly in an afternoon, what gives you that mode for Clarvo?

Yeah, it's pretty interesting because I spent a big chunk of my YouTube career talking against regulation and compliance and saying, uh, if you're going to start any business, do it in an industry that is not regulated or, you know, faces compliance risks. And the reason for that is because I'm like, well, if you're a noob, you should just do something that actually lets you get out there, get some reps, and not have to worry about your HIPPA or, you know, your A2P registration or whatever. But after kind of like graduating from that level, what I've realized is is that all of these forms of regulation and compliance are in and of themselves massive modes. If you can invest time and energy building infrastructure that effectively allows you to work around these succeed in whatever verification you need for like phone numbers or bypass HIPPA in and you know by actually anonymizing all data if you build that infrastructure that in and of itself will eliminate 99.9% of competitors.

And so in case of Clarvo for instance that's what we've done. We've built reliable, durable infrastructure in a niche that is very difficult to penetrate. And that is what is going to stop that's what I hope will stop the 99.9% of AI copycat arbitrage bros from like printing the exact same software over and over and over again because we're at this point this inflection point really with software where like it really is just a token calculation. It's like okay, how much money can I spend on tokens to reproduce this software? So it's like for Netflix it's like how much money do I spend to reproduce software it's like a certain amount but it's like will you ever get the licenses that Netflix has to show the content that is the durable thing will you ever get like the relationships that Netflix has with Warner Brothers and whatnot to actually like put their videos on their platform that's the thing and that's distribution right and um that's also data too if you think about Netflix or like these other really big platforms they're usually sitting on a mountain of data and that data is sort of like the proprietary thing that allows them to grow better and faster. It allows them to train things like machine learning algorithms and so on.

And so for anybody that um doesn't know, uh Clarvo is essentially a system, an infrastructural tool that we built that allows you to uh one contact significantly more people per unit time if you are on the phones doing some form of cold call, inbound or outbound call. And it two also significantly improves the number of people that pick up and reduces the number of you know the drop rate as well. Which means, you know, if you're a sales team and you typically do 100 calls per unit time and right now only 40 of them get picked up, we can push that to maybe 60 or 70 and in doing so literally 1.5 to 2x your revenue, which is an insane proposition. Um, so the reason why it's so freaking cool is because while we're doing all this, we're also collecting data. So we have all the call data, we have what was said, we have sentiment analysis, we have annotations on all the calls. We're collecting this mountain of data while also being protected by that mode by the regulatory capture mode as well. Um, so you know in an AI or post AGI environment which we will soon be entering if we are not already there, it's probably like the most defensible sort of software you could build.

I want to touch upon of what you think the future is going to look like especially in AI and business. But before we jumped into that, you mentioned that you built this whole SAS using plot code, but most recently we saw that there's a possibility where when the frontier model comes out, just like Fable 5, it can be taken out in days. What would you say to people who rely heavily on these models that can be taken away at any time?

Yeah. Yeah. Um I should note that I didn't build the full software myself. I'm working with a team on this. We have some really crack devs and so on and so forth. So kudos to them for doing the vast majority of that heavy lifting. But um in terms of building with like frontier level models, so like Fable for instance or I don't know like the the GPT equivalent, I think we're already at the point where the best models on Earth have not actually been available to us for probably like a good 3 to 6 months. Obviously, it's in these AI companies best interest or at least it was to release the best intelligence because that would swoop up the largest market share, right? But that only works to a point. They initially did this because they wanted to raise as much investment capital as they could to get to this dream of re recursive self-improvement where models now have enough intelligence to make next generations of models better and so on. Really the second that you do that the only other constraint is just like capital for for hardware for comput and stuff. So I don't think we really have access to frontier models anymore at least average. I think the vast majority of that is now going to be either like government. It's going to be like restricted to the staff members of these companies. It's going to be restricted to AI agents that use these other really smart AI agents.

That said, I know that sounds depressing and that we're all in the permanent underclass. I don't actually think it's all that bad because what I've come to realize is these models, the ones that are mega mega smart, are typically being applied to problems that you and I just would never really ever use anyway or really give a crap about. What I mean by that is I don't know if you knew, but you know, GBT 5.5, deep thinking or whatever the hell pro was applied to solve a bunch of math olympiad problems, these like really deep like math Olympian ones and it crushed it. and then started figuring out a bunch of Aeros problem solutions that have been like, you know, waiting for 50, 100 years or whatever to be solved. It crushed it. When's the last time you ever looked at a math Olympiad problem or Aeros problem? Never. It has absolutely no functional bearing on your life. So, you don't actually need Frontier models to do most of the current economic heavy lifting. You really don't. I think you could actually do totally fine with um a recent open source drop of GLM 5.2. That's probably like it to be honest. I mean, like we talk all day about AGI. Personally, I think we're basically there, if not really close to being there. Uh, or maybe even a little bit past that. And, you know, that's the thing. It's general intelligence. It's intelligence applied to general use cases. I'm not trying to land a drone factory on Mars right now. I don't need that sort of like hyperorbital calculation capability for my claude mega fable pro. What I need is I need to, you know, optimize my business a little bit. So, all I would say to that is don't really worry too much about it. Um, we haven't had access to frontier models for a while and even if models do get pulled back, whatever the current open source frontier is is already good enough for you to do the vast majority of economically valuable work.

This would be for maybe the short term, but if you were to imagine in the next 5 to 10 years, these governments that are going to have access to this frontier models, don't you believe it's going to increase the separation and possibly the ability to come up with new stuff or even increase the gap between classes?

Yeah, if you think about this, technology of this kind has never been made available to any group of people really since atomics, like nuclear weaponry. And so when atomics were made available to people temporarily, you know, the United States had a massive, massive battlefield advantage. And it wasn't even necessarily a battlefield advantage, but it was this illus this this power, this this perception of force. And I think when you're in this position where like one group of people has ultimate power and the ability, let's say, to deploy this super crazy model and just nuke every person's brain on Earth cuz that's basically what these models have the ability to do. You know, the situation they're in is inherently a little bit fragile. And um I remain somewhat happy that currently the distribution of power is not 100% of all model intelligence in just one person's hands. Because if that were to occur, then I don't think there would be any sort of inherent incentive for people to share at all. It would just be one person that's just crushing it, you know, going to the edge of the galaxy with their super hypotron fable and the rest of us would just be looking as our solar system gets cannibalized. But realistically, we have multiple actors and I think in a situation with multiple actors, you also need support. And in a situation where you need support, you also need to provide things to to people. So, I know that's a little bit philosophical, but um that's that's my current take on that.

Is there a risk that the class gap will continue to grow, let's say?

Uh, for sure. Absolutely. And I mean, I think I think it will. We have like recursive self-improvement. Obviously, there are a bunch of people that like own these models that have first shot at these models. The first company to get like a crazy recursively self-improving model. Like even if they get it 2 days before another thing, that's an infinite gap of intelligence, right? But after a certain point in time, it's as it's as the Stoics said, you know, if you can't do anything about it, then why worry about it?

I mean, the world is going to look fundamentally different in just a few years than it does today. And you and I have very little in the way of what we can actually do about that. And I remain reasonably confident that the intentions of the people who are working on this sort of technology are not just to permanent underclass everybody. I don't think they hate humanity. I don't think they're inherently evil people. I just think like any technology, they're going to be the people that uh, you know, they're going to be people that are going to be pushing stuff and the rest of us are just going to have to sort of deal with it. And that's why I work on technology like this because I don't just necessarily want to be a person that deals with it. I want to be a person that can at least take a little slice of the power of these transformative technologies and then put them in the hands of people.

Touching upon that in the more philosophical way. Before we get too deep into it, if you had to make your most accurate educated guess about our daily life and even the business landscape in the next 10 years, what would that look like?

When I was, you know, four or 5 years old, the most advanced thing piece of technology that I had access to was like a Game Boy Color and I didn't even have a backlight. So, I needed to like go into the kitchen where there was like a big bright light and that's how I played it. If you were born at any point in history, except for the last 100 years, you would basically live your entire life at the same level of technology. There would be zero developments in your entire lifespan. If you're born from the year 200 to 250, let's say, and that was like your little split um AD. You would live with the exact same level of technology your entire life. You have maybe one major development a century or something like that until it started accelerating. We're at the point now where there are thousands of such developments every single day. A single such development, you know, 5,000 years ago or something would have changed the game. We we now have thousands of them every single day. The definition of uh singularity is essentially that it is impossible to predict what will happen post that singularity. I think the probably most reasonable educated guess I could make was that the world is that the world will look vastly different from it will today uh from what it is looking like today. It will look so different that it will be almost incomprehensible. It is almost indescribable. There will be people chopping off their heads to put into cryogenic tubes to upload their brains. There will be people going not to Mars or Jupiter but to Alpha Centuri and actually have a reasonable shot of making it tomorrow. There will pe will be people miniaturaturizing civilizations, running simulations of all kind, converting every bit of matter in the universe to computium. I mean like it's science fiction, right? And because it's past that singularity, that event horizon, there's just there's really no use talking about it. We can reason about it as intelligently as we can, but it's just going to look so damn different that uh yeah, just be prepared for it to look different more than be prepared for a specific outcome.

You just mentioned that we're going to be having simulations of entire civilizations and universes. Do you believe there's a chance that we are currently in simulation?

Yeah, I suppose so. Um I try not to think too hard about that, but uh the reality is, you know, if we are, there's very little that we could do about it, right? And with everything being calculable and with everything being simulatable, you know, like intelligence for instance being uh approximatable in binary with zeros and ones, it does seem increasingly likely that uh you know, we're just some civilization like 4 million layers down of like the parent civilization.

But what does that really mean for me and you?

Pretty much nothing. It's the same way that I feel about like these grand philosophical and spiritual questions of life. It's like, you know, it could very well be that. But um will it meaningfully impact how I live my day-to-day life? I suppose if you believed in it so heavily then you would stop doing anything at all because you would just think, well, my universe is simulated. I should just go and jump off a bridge or something. I I think there's uh sense in not going too deep in any one of those directions.

But you did write and when I saw it, it kind of messed with me. You said that you don't plan on dying.

So what are the actions you're currently taking to not die? And what is the reason you want to extend your life as much as possible?

Yeah, this is one of those things that I think sounds absolutely crazy to people like pre- singularity, but this is something that I think is very feasible post singularity in an era where we do have these thousands of advancements occurring every day, soon to be every minute. By the way, we will soon have more advancements per minute, per hour, per day, whatever, than we will have had in the entire intervening 99.9% of human history. It seems silly to imagine that, you know, we wouldn't also conquer um you know, like decaying biology as well. I think we're already seeing so much incredible progress towards things that previously would have been considered death sentences. If you think about just like the way that people with HIV lived 40 or 30ish something years ago versus today, it's crazy. How about multiple sclerosis 30-ish years ago today? It's insane. Think syphilis 100 years ago was a death sentence. Now it's like, oh, just take a little antibiotic or whatever. Think about these like major problems that have plagued humanity since the beginning of time. like a lot of them are actually pretty much completed like they're pretty much fixed and so it's like okay what's left at the end it's like well how about aging itself a lot of people say that um you know it's like the height of hubris to assume that like you know your life will not eventually end at one day and it's not uh my belief is not necessarily that my life will not end one day to be clear it's just that um you know biological aging is just one of the problems in a big domino sequence of problems that humanity is successfully solving through technology so yeah I would like not to you know die of old age or infirmity if I uh I'm going die. I want it to be something cool like jumping off an asteroid.

Without a parachute.

What are the steps you're currently taking to ensure that you survive long enough to see those technological advancements?

Yeah, the whole concept here is coined by Aubrey Deg Gray and it has to do with longevity escape velocity which if you're not familiar with essentially refers to this takeoff velocity. It's like the speed at which you are healing yourself or something. the speed of technological advancements will eventually get to a point where you heal yourself more than one year for every year of life you live. So that makes sense, right? If you're 95 and you're infirm and you're about to die, but somebody gives you a pill that reduces your age subjectively by 5 years, you kind of go back to subjective 90 and then you know now you're 95 again and you're about to die, but then they do it again and now it's six years. Well, eventually you'll live forever. You know, you'll at least delay biological aging faster than your whole lifespan, right? So the whole idea is just stay alive as long as possible. Not really revolutionary here. And then just uh pray in your hands and knees that big daddy technology will come up with some way to save you. No, no. To be clear, um obviously there are concrete ways that one can do this. And so I think there are just some sure bets, you know, uh uh that minimize the probability of like sudden death. Um so I just minimize the probability of sudden death. I don't want to go. We joke about jumping off an asteroid, but I don't actually want to die. You know, skydiving or parachuting. I was considering getting in a helicopter a little while ago. And then I actually looked up the stats of helicopters and I was like, that sounds kind of silly. I don't really know if I want to do that. Certain things are under the threshold, obviously, and I'm happy to do those like taking international flights and whatnot cuz, you know, I think the the benefit outweighs whatever cost. Um, not eating terrible junk food, foundational things like sleeping well. uh you know Brian Johnson a big longevity advocate that I think probably some people will compare me with when they see this um and I'm not you know I think we have very different beliefs on a lot of stuff but he's known for uh doing this really detailed sauna experiment for instance where he's basically shown definitively for at least his body that sauna is like a miracle drug and it does way more than any of all of the longevity intervention therapies that he's been working with way more like it's crazy I mean sauna is like takes the microplastics out of your balls like it does like everything it's incredible So, you know, I sauna. I I I do things like that, cardiovascular health. Uh aim to to maximize that. And, you know, if we get to the point where singularity hits and we have the elimination of biological aging within 70 years, I think I got a pretty solid shot at not dying from infirmity.

What is the number one thing that you do to prolong your life that is not necessarily scientifically proven?

Not scientifically proven? Oh, that's interesting. Uh well, you know, I think in science all you really have are are probabilities. Like if you subscribe, it depends on the viewpoint that you subscribe to, but um you know, people that say like, uh well, that's correlation, not causation, bro, or whatever. Um I think they misunderstand that really everything is just statistical probabilistic. It's like, you know, this intervention probably has a 85% chance of helping you more than it's hurting you. And so if it does, then you should probably do it. But um just because it has an 85% chance doesn't necessarily mean that like it is 100% positively proven. So like an example of one thing that I aim to do which is it sounds silly but it's just like maintain relatively stable levels of humidity in my home. You know like there's just a lot of research out there showing that you are slightly more inflamed when you are in environments that are not very humid. And so I would just like to remain in environments where I'm not perpetually inflamed. You know minimizing the consumption of these things called oxidative radicals are pretty big. Sleeping well is very scientifically proven. But notice how all of these sound very simple. There's like nothing super crazy here. I'm not taking like massive shots of BPC57 into my sternum. Like it's not like super crazy like that. I'm not taking the wildest peptides ever. The reality is I think most people approximately our age will probably get to the point that I'm suggesting where technology is good enough to buy you a year for every additional at least a year for every year of life that you live just by doing basic things. So just like get the basics right and then don't worry too much about everything else.

You describe yourself as a technoptimist. What does that mean exactly?

That just means in general being quite optimistic about the progression of technology. I think more or less every problem that technology is produced some subsequent technology is solved. So when humans stumbled across fire for instance, you know I was reading an Arthur C. Clark um book on this actually and I forget the name but it was it was wonderful and I'm going to see if I could find it dig it up. When humans stumbled upon fire, for instance, a lot of these errant fires ended up, you know, catching in various forests and like clearing out massive areas that previously would have been quite habitable with, you know, nice shade. Geographies were like heavily disrupted. Uh um you know, people's quality of lives changed quite a bit. There were like firestorms and stuff like that. Um we were playing with the technology that we didn't understand, but obviously we've since harnessed fire and we've harnessed like the principles of fire to significantly improve human quality of life. When the steam engine was invented, you saw massive reductions in human quality of life in industrializing areas. So like London for instance, where the streets were blackened with coal and soot. And so ever, you know, since then, I think you will have agreed. I just went to London a couple weeks ago. The skies are not blackened with coal and suit. It's actually pretty nice there. Pretty nice. As we talked about nowadays, people are like AI, data center, water. I think it would be naive to say to not remain optimistic about technology and our ability to wield technology and the likelihood that future technological developments will solve the problems that previous technological developments have caused. So global warming for instance, you know, climate change, um acid rain in some places, microplastics, let's say, you know, people are like, "Oh my god, this is crazy. There's no going back." And it's like, well, if you think about it, every piece of technology ever developed has had some sort, like pretty much every piece has had some sort of downside. And it's mostly just that we've controlled the downsides and then packaged the technology in such a way as to at minimum, you know, minimize the downsides, but then at maximum even like repair the downsides that I feel it would be silly and naive not to think that that would happen with all current technologies. That's just how it is, man. You just get better.

That's some really deep stuff, man. Okay, I have a couple of rapid fire questions for you.

Yeah, sure.

If AI takes over the world, which model do you want to be your overlord? And you're not allowed to say hi cool or any small model needs to be different model.

Oh, yeah. Fable for sure. Fable.

Fable for sure. Yeah. And it's not that um I think like the world would suck under the GPT overlords or anything, but uh yeah, I mean I'm just I'm just a big fan of the company. I applied to work at that company. Um they didn't hire me. What's interesting is some girl from my high school I think now writes for them which is so funny. I just saw her name and I was like I feel like I recognize her. But um anyway yeah. Yeah. So like I think they probably are the most aligned with my own beliefs. Um you know like five or six years ago there was this big controversy at Google with this guy called Blake Leo and um he was like chatting with what would later become like the llama models and he I think quit and said this model is conscious and everybody at the time was like dude you're freaking crazy. It was like 2021 or 2022 or something like what are you nuts? No, they're No, it's not. And I wrote some big blog posts after that and I was like, how do you know? You don't actually know. Everybody definitively saying it is conscious or is not conscious is just wrong. You you have no idea. And you know, I used to go to school for neuroscience where I got my degree and like, you know, like neuroscientifically there is no established basis for what makes something conscious or not. Like we we really we don't know. And to be confident enough to say blah blah blah um I thought was so silly. So fast forward a few years and Anthropics working on Claude and they're like putting out cloud 4. or whatever. And they're like, demonstrabably speaking, we have no idea what it would what it would feel like to be Claude. And that's when I was just like, nobody else is talking like this. These are the first public people and actually the developers of the best model to like explicitly say, we don't know what it's like to be Claude. It could actually feel like something to be Claude. And that's when I was just like, yeah, I mean, like, you know, I know they have their failings in many ways, like any company does. They're trying to figure out the path to the right solution. And you know, sometimes they will alienate certain groups by doing so. But um that's when I was like, okay, like I vibe with these people.

What is the best advice you ever ignored and later wish you hadn't?

Best advice I ever ignored? Uh cleaning my room. That was my dad's. Cleaning your room is one of those really tiny things. Doesn't seem like a big deal whatsoever. And then if you just get in the habit of doing it consistently every day you wake up, your life is so much better for it. It's like doing your bed. It's like a small thing that compounds over time. I wish I wish I had taken him seriously a decade before.

But it's funny because most of my advice in maker school now really just sounds like my dad. She's like, "Have you tried cleaning your room?" Literally, there's somebody in America school not even like two weeks ago that was like, "Ah, you know, I couldn't do the daily work cuz I uh my room's so dirty." It's like, "Clean your room." And then I was like, "Who have I become?"

So, you clean your room, you clear your brain, and is that where your lifestyle of it comes from? you would say.

Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. Um, for anybody unfamiliar, lifestyle is just taking a very clear and intentional look at your environment and it is acknowledging that your environment probably has more to do with your success than your internal willpower. So rather than spending your willpower every day solving some nagging problem, why not spend your willpower changing your environment? In that way, you will solve it forever. And so, uh, it's a big chunk of it. If you clean your room, your environment is cleaner. Your thoughts will be cleaner if you take care of that one nagging thing that's always annoyed you. I don't know, there's some piece of furniture that like you always trip over. That's just one less thing for your willpower to have to navigate throughout the course of the day. Applied to an extreme, you can really fundamentally change your life just by changing your army. You can move to new places, meet new people, you can cut off people that hurt you, and so on and so forth. A lot of things that you can do to improve your life, but yeah, I would say that's a chunk of the motivation.

Who's your hero? Who do you look up to?

H does like uh not real people count both. Uh well, they always say that if you know you live long enough to meet your heroes or something, they'll eventually become the villains. I'm really butchering that. But it's like, you know, if somebody is your hero for long enough, they'll eventually no longer be your hero, right? because they'll do something that you disagree with or whatever. But um in the real world, uh Arnold Schwarzenegger was like the goat of all time for me just growing up. And I wasn't even that into bodybuilding. The reason why he was the goat is because this guy coming from absolutely nowhere Austria speaking indecipherable English, you know, somehow fall, you know, he becomes a crazy bodybuilder, really successful, but he somehow then stumbles into that into like a a very successful acting career. Then he somehow stumbles from that into being governor of freaking California. I I look at that and I'm like, these are very fundamentally different things, right? I feel like the set of actions one must take to become a world champion bodybuilder and then become, you know, a world famous actor and then become the governor of California are all very fundamentally different. But then growing up, I realized that they weren't actually all that different. The actions that you take to become the best at anything actually tend to be very similar. And um I'm reminded by this one interview of uh this guy Callaway who's a prolific content creator where he basically said something along the lines of how success is a rep and then the iteration. And he's like the degree of the iteration is the degree of your success or something. And if you think about it, that's all you know in Arnold Schwarzenegger's case he did. He basically just showed up every day for a very long period of time in bodybuilding and eventually just beat everybody by doing something and then iterating 1% and doing it and iterating 1%. Then he took the same mindset, not the same set of skills, but the same mindset to acting. Did the exact same thing. He would train non-stop harder than anybody else. He'd recite the hell out of his lines and a super crazy Austrian accent all day.

And then he took that same mindset and he applied it to politics. Uh, I'm sure his campaign tours were legendary just because he put more, you know, consistency and uh sort of like tactical effort uh towards those goals.

Did you consciously identify that and then applied it to yourself or did it just happen?

Well, yeah. I just thought about like how these crazy successful athletes tend not only to be good at like athletics but also other things and I was like what about them makes them really good at it. It's not necessarily that like I don't know look at Michael Jordan or well just look at like any like really cracked athlete and you'll find that like they usually have a lot of things together in my in my humble opinion.

And it's not necessarily that like their muscles are just the biggest. It's that like they apply themselves tactically on the consistent daily improvement. And that's why I think about business a lot like the gym, right? In the gym, if you start working out today, you're not going to see the results for like 2 or 3 weeks. Realistically, in the market, if you start doing outreach or contacting people or trying to build a product or whatever, you're not going to see results for at least 2 or 3 weeks. The mistake is people try and like figure that out way too they try and assess the results way too fast and they collapse themselves. But you really do need to pre-commit to a certain amount of daily consistency over a long period of time. And that's what, you know, these crazy athletes and Arnold Schwzenegger in particular taught me.

If I were to restructure the question, I guess a bit, if you were to have a dinner with one fictional character, who would it be and what would you ask them?

A fictional character.

Yeah.

Oh, that's great. Uh, my favorite fictional character throughout all like books, science fiction, everything like that. Oh, and this is going to make me really sound really nerdy, but it's from this old like Dungeons and Dragons book series.

Um, called the Dragon Lance Chronicles. And there's this one character in there called Racellin Mer. And he's a very sickly kind of like weak and quite honestly at the beginning very pathetic sort of magician. and he's needs to be carried by his big buff brother around the place because he uh he can hardly walk a lot of the time. But Ray Mour is like what you would call like chaotic neutral which is just a term where it's like you don't actually know if he's good or evil. He's just sort of like he just sort of is and he just makes decisions for himself over time. And um over the course of this book series which progressively gets more and more well written because the very first one like the writers was like their first book I'm pretty sure and like they got really good at the end. Grayson applies like this diligent like singular focused ambition to basically becoming like the best magician of all time and you see him like change over the course of the books become better and better and better. The one thing that he never changed though was this ruthless focus towards success. Um anyway it just made such a big impact on me growing up. I mean I must have read that book series when I was like 9 or 10. Uh I would really like to sit down and hear what he has to say.

What would you ask him?

Oh man I would ask him is it worth it? So, one of the end things is he basically becomes this like ultra powerful magician and essentially becomes this god.

And um he has this realization while he's up there that like in a a world that is like unchanging where he like dominates over everything like there's basically no point and then he sort of steps down from that ladder. I I would very much like to like have a conversation with him about that cuz I feel like even like in a microcosm when I was really successful with Maker School when we like crushed it number one when Left Click was operating um at its peak when more or less everything was going like super well in my life financially. I sort of felt like he felt I was just like well is this super worth it? It took him like really achieving the success that he thought that he wanted the entire time to realize that he actually wanted something a little different. And uh yeah. Yeah, he actually ends up I think just being one of the best characters ever as a result of that.

Did you relate to that character?

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And um I mean I don't think I realized to what degree until now. But uh yeah, when he was at his heights, he was just empty. And when I was at the peak, I was just like, well, I guess I made it. Like what the hell else is there?

But it's being at the peak, it's like actually doing the thing that I think forces you to reflect on why you did in the first place. And like I was alluding to earlier in our conversation, like if I hadn't achieved that, I wouldn't have realized that, hey, I was actually doing it for really selfish reasons up until now. But now I actually have the power to give back with my talents and you know my efforts fully aligned with that fact of giving back.

So you would say your definition of success has shifted.

Yes, I would say it's shifted. I mean previously it was primarily financial success, stability and then security and um now it is not. Now it is having as large of an a positive impact on people as humanly possible. And specifically in regards to technology, I think it's helping to accelerate the transition to a more efficient economy and helping to empower as many people as possible during that transition.

If all of your work and all of your videos get deleted with the face of the earth and you only had the next 30 seconds, what would you say to the world?

That's a tough one. Well, I think in the context of AI, as alluded to previously, this is the largest, most incredible, most powerful change that anybody has ever seen, ever. If you're not consciously committing yourself to like learning how this stuff works, I think you're losing the vast majority of what is possible. I feel like if you're one of those people who just has their head down in the sand and they don't realize the degree of both economic and then like spiritual change that humanity is about to um experience the next few years u I think you'll look back on it for the rest of your life and you'll regret it. I don't think there's like a thread the eye of the needle point as clearly delineated in history as there is right now and I'm very grateful to be living during that time. But I think other people should realize how grateful they can be as well. Not to butcher the answer but it's a hell of a time to be alive.

If you were to compress it in one sentence.

There's the largest change in the balance of power ever. And it's better to be a part of that change than not be a part of that change. So, be a part of the change.

Amazing. Okay. Before I let you go, I actually have a gift for you. I did some digging and I found out that your favorite book or at least favorite book series was this Anitor.

Yeah.

Am I correct?

Yeah.

And I saw that you had a one small complaint about the book that the cover art was lame. Is that correct?

Yeah, that is correct.

So, I did some digging and I found a deluxe version that I hope you don't have.

Oh, no way.

That actually takes care of that problem. And it also has a map and it also has some extra stories. I was trying to find the signed version of it, but obviously with the time frame in which we organized this, I couldn't get my hands on that. But hopefully you enjoy it.

Sick.

Oh, thank you very much, man. Hey, thanks, man.

So, you can take that cover out. I think it matches your.

Oh, so much better. Oh, so much better.

Oh, I love Christopher Rukio. I really do. But this is.

That's so clean.

You don't have that, right?

No, I don't.

I really don't. Thank you, man. I appreciate that.

Thanks so much for coming, man.

Yeah, it was an absolute pleasure.

Likewise, my brother. Mikey.