Learn Copywriting in 73 Minutes | Dan Ferrari Interview

There we go.

I'm doing well. How about you?

Pretty good, bro.

Is your last name really Ferrari or.

Is is People think it's a ghost writing name or like.

Yeah, I used to have a ghostwriting name called Ferrari Williams that I would opt in the funnels with. So I was always curious.

That's hilarious.

Yeah, that's funny. Well good, good branding then on that.

Yeah, I think it made life a little easier, to be honest.

Where are you located at?

I live in Hawaii.

Oh, sick. Also good choice. You're just making a bunch of good choices in life.

Yeah, it's pretty nice out here. Say that again.

I said I'm in Arizona in the summertime, so one of the worst choices you can make.

Yeah, what's it, 110 Sundays, right?

Yeah, it is. It's just now starting to slip below 100 degrees per day, which is, you know. But yeah, anything above 105 is not great.

You know, I was in Texas a few weeks ago and it was about a hundred and wasn't all that bad because there's no humidity. My.

Yep.

Whole life I spent on the East Coast. So like, oh, where'd you grow up? In Virginia. Okay, so I'll, I'll take no humidity over full humidity in 90, 95 degrees any day of the week.

That's probably similar to me. I think Virginia is about the same as where I grew up laterally, Central Illinois. So like it's. Yeah, it's, it's worse for sure. And I feel blessed to live in cool places. But yeah, there's a certain point where it's just like straight sauna here. But it's only not any worse than maybe a cold Virginia day.

How did you wind up there?

Work my like my career. I from central Illinois then moved to Colorado because I didn't like accounting. And then I got into this like quote unquote industry by meeting a guy named Cody Sperber and a mastermind and he lived in Arizona. He was called the Clever investor and he convinced me, or I convinced myself to come down there and work for him. So that was the first time when I was in az and that's where I met my business partner. Josiah was our star student there. So I told them when I left, Clever took a few years but I'm like, if you ever want to teach, let me know because I know you're doing more deals than like our guru basically. So the rest is history.

I've exchanged a few emails with Cody, so it truly is. Everyone's like one degree away from each other. Dude.

Yeah. It's crazy. Like, I think I credit Cody for, like, half. At least half of the success in my career because he. I was young, he pushed me very hard, and I didn't want to fail in front of him. I had a lot to prove, so he just made me. Made me good.

That's sweet.

Mm.

Yep.

So that's my story. I'm curious yours, though, What's. How'd you get from Virginia to Hawaii?

Oh, man. You know, it really connects into the whole copywriting thing. So let's see. Try to think about years here. I graduated college 2007, and I had a good job. I worked for Booze, which is one of the major consulting companies. No. And it was a pretty decent gig. I was living in Washington, D.C. but kind of just like. I don't know if this is really what I want to do. My father surfed when he was young and living in Virginia. We didn't have a whole lot of opportunity to surf, but every. Every summer, he would take us on vacation a couple times Here. There.

Yeah.

So we kind of got.

The beach is not the best.

Yeah, it's. Well, the problem is that it gets good basically, this time of year through the winter. And so you have to be pretty gung ho if you want to surf all winter long. Plus, we were. Where I grew up is two and a half hours from Virginia Beach.

Oh, are you into the. On the Appalachia?

No, we weren't country folk. We were actually just outside of D.C. oh, okay. Cool. Yeah. But anyway, so I had the bug my whole life, and my brother was in the Marine Corps at the time, and he lived in San Diego, and that just sort of furthered the desire to surf. And I was basically about to move to San Diego, or seriously considering it, I should say. And then, incidentally, my uncle lives over here on Maui, and he had just built this pretty nice house. This was now 2009ish. And I'd never been to Hawaii, so I came out here, stopped in Honolulu, which is where I live now, and within, you know, 30 minutes of getting off the plane, I was like, I want to live here.

Yeah.

And so in a very roundabout way, basically. So where I am right now, there's a Booz Allen office about three blocks that way. So I thought I was just going to be able to transfer to that office. But they kind of pulled my strings for, really about a year or two, and it never ended up happening. So finally I was just like, I'm gonna do this on my own.

Dude, Fortune 50 or Fortune 500s are the worst of that. Yeah, that's.

Yeah. I mean, it was. It was pretty disappointing. But anyway, it all worked out for the better because at the time, SEO was big. And so I started being like, oh, maybe I'll learn how to do this thing, and I can just make my own career. But somehow. So I went to University of Virginia, and somehow there was an alumni from University of Virginia who was kind of big in all these digital nomad circles, and he had become a surf photographer in Bali and was selling his pictures online. And I just randomly sent him an email and was like, how did you make that work out? And he's the one who first told me about copywriting. He said, if you really want to do something kind of on your own, keep in mind, this is 2011, so it's still like, you know, there's no Facebook groups, there's no YouTube channels. There's nothing on any of this other than these blogs about digital nomadism, basically. Right.

Nomad was the first one I ever saw.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those. Those guys. So this guy, he just said, look, if you really want to do this, there's a great thing called copywriting, where you could build your own schedule, you could surf when you want to. There's already a good, remote market for it at that time.

Sounds like a copywriter. He sold you the.

Yeah. And, I mean, he didn't really have to sell me that hard because I had studied marketing in school, and I was like, okay, this sounds pretty good. I like writing 10. Within six months I was out here. I had quit the other job and was just kind of like, scrapping to make it all work out. The story I always tell people that makes their eyes kind of pop out of their head was that the first job I took was off of. I guess it's. Is it Odesk now or. It was Odesk. I don't even remember remember. But it was off of that. And it was $15 to do, like, this long SEO brochure. So my hourly rate on that was probably like three bucks.

But, oh, man, I.

That's where I. That's where I started. And that's.

Yeah. Or like that. They're just, like, not knowing what they're worth of. But, I mean, at the time, you had to prove yourself something, and I'm sure it.

Excited. I had no experience, and so I would. I would wake up, do whatever I had to do in terms of fulfilling those projects, and I would go surf the rest of the day. I really Was kind of like living the dream other than not making any money. And then I would come to Starbucks after dinner and just study. That's how I got into Copy Hour with Derek Johansson, which was a huge thing for me. I started reading all these Dan Kennedy books and I just became sort of obsessed with the craft and got pretty good at it pretty quick, I guess.

What, what was the how, if you don't mind me asking.

Yeah.

Is there a base skill or a personality tendency that you felt like that made you pick it up faster than everyone else?

That's a great question. Something that. Well, I've always liked writing and I've always liked reading and probably pretty intellectually curious around a lot of things, which I think is helpful be a copywriter, particularly one who at that time I wasn't specialized or anything. And I've never actually really been specialized. I've kind of bounced all over the place. But I think the other thing, if I could like call whatever talent I have as being God given, it's actually not writing talent. It's the ability to just recognize patterns and really unpack them. My mentor, Aaron Winter, who was or is probably one of the best financial copywriters ever, and he was who hired me into the Motley fool, which is a whole nother story.

Yeah, But I want to impact so much here because. Yeah.

He said if I look out and.

Say, like financial copywriter. Right. I would make sure it's a stereotypical guess as to what. Right. Yeah.

Well, that's the whole secret of that industry is you go into those offices and no one looks like Wall street or whatever. But.

Right.

But anyway, what I was about to say is he said that the thing that he's always found that made me different is that I have a very high return on information, which is his way of saying, like, for everything that sort of comes in, I'm able to get more out of it. O and so I've always been really good at looking at comps in a market and saying, here's the 10 reasons why it works, but here's the five things that they missed. I've always been able to like, draw. Draw similarities between reading. Like I said, I read a lot. And I think, unlike a lot of people in the market, I read a lot of fiction. And I find that that helps my writing quite a bit. I watch a lot of serialized tv not for the same reason. I actually love it and I think it's an incredible art form, but I'm able to be disconnected at 9pm at night. Watching some sort of TV show and go, oh man. You see like that technique that the screenwriter just used, that's something that can go into copy.

Interesting. I wonder if. Are you. Do you know Myers Brigg at all?

I do, but man, I can't. I've taken it a couple times. I want to say I was an ENTJ the first time I took it, which at this point would have been 20, almost 20 years ago. And who knows what I was the last time I took it.

Yeah. I wonder if it falls similar to me because not everything like similar but I also the way I'm creative is indexing and then pattern recognition. It's just like the more I read, the more more. The more inputs in different fields, the more I can see patterns, the better I get. I'm really bad when I don't know anything because that's just core fear. Yeah. So I'm not like the. Some people are just like breathing brute force. They're like, what me? Let me overpower you from like a pure conviction frame type thing and moral good or like whatever it is. And that's never me to write from a moral good frame. I have to basically get there myself and research it myself so it hits. That's very, very point on for me.

Yeah.

Yep, yep. Well, dude, since you're a copywriter too, could you want to see the brief that I had my team draw before we got on here and I was looking at this because there's a lot of good names and there. I don't know if this was self claim. Max, I'm gonna actually have to ask you after this too. But I. Knowing all the copywriters on there, like that's a heck of a list. And that's a heck of a compliment too. So yeah, like knowing all those guys, like Sean was a mentor to me and camp. I love Chris. I met like 10 years ago and he was like on top of the world 15 years ago in a like leopard print, Speedo and an affiliate. The craziest advice for career I ever got in my life. So like all those guys are legends. I'm curious, as you progressed in your career, what was. What was maybe were there any like again accelerating points like you already kind of got it. You had a mentor, you said that was brilliant at financial copy. Anything else that stands out?

Well, that really was their turning point. I mean I went to The Motley Fool 10 years ago. Actually, 10 years ago last week. And Aaron's the one who hired me into that. And I could tell that Whole story. But just for example, of how foundational that relationship is. I talked to him like three days ago for two hours, and he was helping me through some stuff that's going on in some of the work, what I'm doing right now. So a relationship like that, to me, I mean, it transcends work, but it also, if you could plot my career growth before and after, it's like, you.

Know, and I would love to do that. That sounds like an activity I would enjoy.

Well, it was. It was complete chance, to be honest. So I was living here and the girl that I was dating at the time was a patent attorney. And so basically what the Patent Office told her was, we want you to come work at the US Patent Office headquarters for 18 months and then you guys can go back to Hawaii. And this was also maybe 30 minutes from where I grew up. So I was like, all right, that's cool. Like, I'll go spend some time being closer to my roots and my parents and my childhood friends. And this was when I was really scrapping still in that first kind of two years of just taking jobs for way less money than anyone should probably ever have to work for. And what happened was my dad sent me, and so I mentioned I had a marketing degree, but that degree is actually marketing and finance. So maybe some of this is, in some ways, my dad sent me a job posting that Street Authority, which was one of the other big financial publishers at the time, was looking for copywriters. And that didn't end up going anywhere but on the side of LinkedIn or wherever that posting was. There was another posting that the Motley fool was looking for a copywriter. And so as I got to look into, turned out that physically the Motley Fool's headquarters was the building right next to the Patent Office's headquarters. So that also was kind of like a little bit of a twist of fate, I guess you could say that I was randomly dating a patent attorney and she got called into the home office. And that home office randomly was next to the Motley Fool. So that kind of made my eyes perk up. And I applied for that job. And Aaron was the copy chief who was doing hiring. And he put us through the ringer. I mean, he had thousands or hundreds of candidates and made us do all sorts of stuff, including write one of their front end VSLs. And through that gauntlet, I kind of won the Last Man Standing award and got hired in and then just worked under Aaron, who, like I said, is absolutely brilliant, smartest human being I've ever met. That's not hyperbole at all. And he just took me under his wing and basically taught me everything he knew. And then after we left the Motley fool, we did a bunch of agency work together. Aaron basically started up an agency that went to go work for a lot of the competitors. Agora Financial. Profits from other big financials.

A dead giveaway that someone I feel like has been close to the Agora ecosystem.

Actually come from, like, the actual traditional marketing, maybe.

Yeah. Like, I have no idea the origin. I'm not as much of a historian of, like, tracing it all the way back as some people, but who knows?

I mean, this all just goes in at some point. It never, never escapes. So, yeah, that's just like he has been, whether we have a transactional relationship going or not, which we haven't for the last several years, but he's always just been there in my corner, like, ready to basically do anything that I ask to help. And he's become an incredible friend. And I just hope, you know, it's like, I hope everyone can stumble into that sort of relationship because it's life changing and I know it's hard and not everyone gets that fortunate.

So I consider myself stumble in is the terminology. And I. You probably caught me doing something similar. I said some similar word choice to like, I, like, got. You know, that's how I view it always. But when I'm. When I hear other people say it, I'm like, I bet it wasn't stumbled in. I bet he did something to put himself in position. Like, lucky, you know, you're good.

It's kind of like. So like I said, I went to University of Virginia, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson. And so I have all his quotes, like, locked in my head. And one of his quotes is something to the effect of. And this is a slight paraphrase, but I find that the harder I work, the luckier I get.

Yeah.

So it's kind of like, yeah, these things are all chance in some way. I mean, our life is just this accumulation of little tiny things that happened. Right. But how you react to them and what you do and your responses and everything else that sort of has led you into that moment and what you're going to do. Yeah. That's all on you. That's your responsibility. Yeah, I believe that pretty firmly. Yeah.

No, the common pattern, I guess I'm now just seeing it, is that you reached out to that Nomad. Right. He didn't reach out to you. And you asked him. You were intellectually Curious about it.

Yeah.

Reached out to Cody after I didn't hear back about getting the job and.

I thought like, oh, wow, that's big.

And the, the, the. I was gonna say kid, but the guy, 20 year old who put together what I just showed you that, like that summary, essentially he, 35 days ago reached out to me and said, I'll work harder than anyone ever has for you. And that's the only reason that it worked out. I, but I test, I like tested a few, but I'm like, that's crazy.

Normal behavior.

Like, that's like, I wish people did that more. So I was gonna, like, normally you get on something like this. I'm like, Daniel, do you need copywriters? You're like, like, yeah, begging for like people. And I'm like, lord, they're growing so fast. Like guys click. And I could be. You'd be stupid not to work with Daniel, which I believe, by the way. So you should do it through traditional channels. But on traditional channels often work better for people like me at least.

Um, so yeah, I mean, I've been asked this question quite a lot because I've mentored a few copywriters, which is like, how do you build the brand or build the network or whatever you want to call it? Right? And I always tell people there's a very high energy way to do it. Someone who's high energy is going to be posting on LinkedIn and posting on Twitter and creating a lot of content that I just never really had the patience for all of that. The weird thing is I'm kind of a creature of routine, but in a weird way, because surfing almost forces me to have no routine, which I suppose forces the rest of my life to have a lot of routine, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, surfing's about flow, right for you?

Well, it's about flow and it's. So yesterday, for example, I surfed from about 10am to noon. Today there's no surf. So my whole day is a completely different schedule. Thursday, there's plenty of surf, but on the North Shore, which is like an hour from here. So my whole day will be, my whole morning will be surfing. So like every day is different, every week is different. But I think that leads me to want to have basically structure within the bounds of the unstructured day to day. And I always found that being heavily involved in content and social media and all of that didn't really work in that regard.

So is this working so far or.

Is it more the pace of the.

Content and the idea I think what.

It was is like, well, one, it's allowing myself to participate in things like this, which is actually what I was just about to say, which I think I've done a very good job of allowing myself to be, I don't know, connected to connectors, if that makes any sense. I have a pretty good network, you know, you just showed some of those names, like Justin Goff's a good friend of mine. I know Hadad very well. Peter. Incredible copyright.

You guys don't know.

Yeah, so I've just kind of cultivated a lot of relationships and never really expected much out of them, to be frank, but always more or less knew that behind closed doors, the conversations were always kind of what you just said, like, who's got the good copywriters? We need good copywriters. As much as, you know, I could go on a whole rant about AI, but even today I think that copywriters are still in pretty high demand. But it's always that it has to be backed against this. We're basically, you know, only as good as our last win in this industry. And that's one thing I've always loved about it, is it's pure meritocracy. Yeah, you have to be a good person. People like, working with good people. People don't want you to be an asshole. And you have to deliver. But above all, it's like if you can create conversions and sales, your name gets tossed about. And so I guess I was always just like, let me put 80% of my effort into getting really good at this and maximizing my. My results. And then the remaining 20% can be meeting the people who I just find interesting in the industry and then letting the rest take care of itself, which, as I say, it sounds kind of laissez faire, but I think I've said enough that it's actually not like just completely throwing it out into the wind. It's like when that ball comes back around to me, like, I know what to do with it.

I'm starting to think I understand. I find you personally very intriguing as a character because you said that you're not patient despite your presence being very common Zen, which is a difference too. And then you also said too, like a good copywriter would open the loop on, I could rant about AI, but then you didn't, which indicates discipline and self control. So, like, I'm curious with that being said, besides curiosity, is that how you went? Is it curiosity plus some sort of self control?

You know, it's interesting. The one that pops out of me right there is gratitude like I'm always trying to be.

Maybe that's what I'm sensing. Yeah.

Grateful for everything. And so maybe it's that great gratitude kind of forces a little bit of the calmness or the patience that you're noting.

Not a lot of copywriters have gratitude. I. I feel like that's. You're right that like you're right because you identified with it. So you are perceptions, reality. But now I'm seeing it too. It's just so it's interesting to. To me because mine. But yeah, like best and. And like high energy and social media is not how I win either.

Yeah. Yeah. Optimism and gratitude of that list is probably. Or curiosity. Excuse me? Curiosity and gratitude. Like optimism is probably a close third. I'm always pretty confident that things will work out, but that's a little. That I don't want to sound selfish doubts and all that too. Yeah, I mean you have to be. You have to be a highly optimistic copywriter to write for them. Which then you go to Agora and you're a pessimist but you know, you got to wear a different hat depending on what the right.

So if you were writing for Agora versus Motley fool and my dad bought from Motley fool, so it probably tells you a little bit about my childhood. And then, dude, I'm really curious if you had to associate a certain stock or a few stocks with good copy that you wrote. Do you feel like that you were able to actually to. To write good enough copy? Where specific stocks come into mind is like, oh, I wonder if they held that because they saw that in my Motley fool newsletter.

Oh man, she's going to challenge my memory a little bit.

It's like that made my dad go bankrupt and lose his job.

Then we'll have a. Yeah, I did write one on NXP semiconductors, which I.

Will text him right now.

Ended up being one of the chip manufacturers for Apple. And I honestly don't know what happened to them. They're still around. I know that because I drove by one of their offices when I was in Texas recently.

I just.

That's the only. That's the only one that really comes to mind that. I mean the. This is not related to copy at all, but sort of one of the things that I always laugh at is when I was at the Motley fool and that was 2014. I said 10 years ago. It's 11 years ago. 2014, 2015. They were already like 10 years into banging the Nvidia drum.

Yeah, my dad had Nvidia because of that, I think.

Yeah, yeah. And I didn't listen to any of that.

No. I never take my own advice when I'm ghost riding. Yeah, yeah. It's just a distraction I found. Because if you have shiny object syndrome in general or entrepreneurial qualities, the worst thing I found is as a copywriter is to start like trying to do all the stuff that you're telling people to do. It's like, yeah, yeah.

Because I mean, you can convince yourself that it's the best for you. It may be the best move for somebody else, but your best move is probably just focus on the work.

Draw that line. I. But early in my career, I did that a few times. I remember, like, oh, that's actually a really good idea. I should maybe look into that. I'm like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Don't do that. Yeah. So fascinating. Well, dude, what is. What's besides AI, what's on your mind in like the immediate present moment of like, what do you need right now? What is. What is even energizing? And be is maybe a better question versus what, what do you need?

What's energizing? Well, it's. It kind of has two. There's two answers to that. There's, at least in the industries where I've been working the most, financial publishing, supplements, things like that. There's kind of this ongoing question around the people in our world of are we about to start starving? Because all baby boomers are getting older. You know, there's a very big generational aspect to the mass markets.

And why would I. I actually didn't connect it like you did. I feel like that's your talent, your superpowers, your brain connected it for you. Like, it didn't inherently, I'm like, baby boomers getting older, people starving. To me, it's like dying more food.

Well, no, no, no. I mean starving as a figure of speech, like, is, are the copywriters gonna start going, oh God, going broke? So really, I think that a lot of these mass markets are driven by generational forces. But the question is, is it purely generational, meaning baby boomers versus Gen X versus Greatest Generation, or is it more of an actual age thing where this long form copy that is sort of based on impulse purchases, Is it that just somebody, once they're 55, 60 years old, is looking for that level of basically dopamine hit by consuming that marketing? Or is it that it's only baby boomers? I fall into the form of group to be honest, I think that it's actually just once people are a little bit older, they're just looking for a little bit more of an escape, to be honest, into some of these different storylines and worlds and things like that. A lot of my counterparts think it's that it's a baby boomer thing. And so there's almost. The baby boomers are dead.

They think no one's gonna.

Baby boomers are getting older. Yeah. And so that I don't. Somehow the whole. The whole industry disappears. Yeah. And I don't believe it either because I think you have quite a bit of data points that show, you know, if you look at sort of the golden age of copywriters, Gary, Ben Savanga, those guys, they were writing in the 80s and 90s and their target market was actually more like my grandparents who were greatest generation. And so I think it's just sort of the cyclical thing. What I do think is happening that people are mistaking is the storylines. There's basically a necessary format change. Meaning for the last 15 years, a long form video sales letter has been just this unbeatable format. And it's gotten to the point where it's evolved so much and the market's gotten so saturated on it that it's not cheap anymore. It used to be when I was at the Motley fool, even we could just put together whiteboard slides and it would crush. But even as I evolved in my time there, or as the business evolved, we started doing more of the high production VSLs. And fast forward to that. It's almost a requisite. Right. You almost cannot get response, at least in the super saturated markets without just throwing a whole bunch of stuff into these VSLs. The next thing you know, you used to be able to launch a product for a couple grand, now it's a hundred grand. Right. And so there's just a whole lot of expense involved. And I think the necessary evolution of that is we're just looking for cheaper, easier formats that aren't as saturated. And so you see a lot of people going to hide your pages where you have a shorter video, 10, 15 minutes on top of an econ page, or just purely more like not product pages, but ecom pages that have a little bit more selling power, bringing copywriters into stuff like that where maybe they weren't previously. And that's all fine to me. Like, it doesn't worry me. It's not this crisis moment because again, I look at sort of the history of whatever you want to call it, direct response Marketing, performance marketing, direct to consumer marketing. I think semantics doesn't matter. Those formats have always changed. Infomercials were the best format for a while. Direct mail was the best format for a while. Newspaper ads was the best format for a while. And now we're just sort of seeing perhaps VSLs are kind of on the tail end of that adoption curve and new formats are starting to win. And that's fine. It doesn't mean that baby boomers are the only thing that makes money in that industry or the world's ending. Like you're saying.

I agree with 95% of everything that you just said. There is to me, like you have a better fundamental understanding, seeing the patterns. Because to me I'm like, oh, like it. I think it was Ogilvy that said I'm just like, only, only, like only great writers. Like long copy superior to short copy. I forget what the quote is. Something like that though.

Something like that.

Yeah. Like are we. Is that really a generational gap? Because Ogilvy wasn't a boomer or even, maybe even greatest like he was. It superseded multiple generations. So the likelihood that it's generational, I think is low. And like you said, you're drawing comparisons to what's a long form sales letter. It's really just a means of, of format that are not a means of format. It's a format. And then the means of consumption of someone wanting the long form is really just time oriented or personality oriented. So like when people retire, they have more time. So long form makes more sense logically that they would consume instead of like TikTok reels. But yeah, the. I guess the only other argument I could see is algorithms are getting so addictive that people don't have a choice. And then it's going to fracture attention into a million pieces. And if that's the case, then cool, that might be where we're headed. But I bet it'll lead to a correction and a reset because normally when that happens and it's fired against us. Right. We're going to get to a point where we just go offline and then it'll just reset back to normal. So either way, Daniel, I think like copywriters are going to be fine. I agree with you. I can't see a world where persuasion goes out of style.

Yeah. I mean the way that I've always looked at that. Looked at it. If you want to really just strip it down to the purest elements. It's like most of the selling that happens or most of the purchasing that Happens in a direct to consumer world online. It requires a certain amount of selling, which requires persuasion, which requires a certain amount of messaging. Whether that messaging happens all at once or it's extended over weeks and weeks and weeks in some of these organic content things. My fiance works for one of the major influencers online with millions of followers and all of that. And so that's what. She's playing a whole different game, right? I'm playing a game where I'm trying to get somebody like that. She's playing a game where it's this tiny little thing, but at the end of the day, it is all. We're trying to more or less influence somebody's purchasing decision, which is very different than when I walk into the store and just buy whatever. So I think as long as that's the case, there's going to be a need for somebody to say, how do we create this influence? How do we create this persuasion? How do we get the sale? Or even how do we get whatever the steps are before the sale? That's the direct response piece of it. So, yep.

So me, if. Unless you're saying you're smarter than Daniel and David Ogilvy, which I also agree, this is the actual truth, this is one of the most common questions copywriters get asked. And to me, it's like as simple as that. There's not much more to it than that. It's just like context window.

Right?

So I don't. Or at least maybe, maybe there is more nuance. But if, if you're a good copywriter, you just divisively say that it's simple, dude. Like, I don't even know what my initial question on that was, but that was a great take. And I'll say there's something like, I.

Don'T know, where are you talking?

Energizes you? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. That's what it was. You know, we've kind of danced around the topic of AI a couple times, but I'll just, I'll.

Let's open loop again or you can close it.

It's like, look, I'm. I'm not an AI evangelist at any or in any way, but I'm also not a Luddite. So it's like you have to sort of acknowledge this thing that is there in all of our lives right now. What I believe to be the case is most companies kind of overcorrected. They said we can get rid of 90% of our copywriting overhead, 90% of our copywriting production time, and just have the bots do the whole thing. And now we're kind of a few iterations into that experiment, and for the most part, the results have been mixed at best. I'd say a lot of companies have had success, but for every success story I've heard, there's another one that's like, man, these things just suck, you know?

Yeah.

And I think what has occurred to me is that, unfortunately, there probably is a little bit of erosion of the copywriting opportunities. And that erosion probably happens in the middle, meaning at the very extreme ends of experience and results. It's never been better, to be frank. Like all of the companies that I know, they basically want some sort of master of copy, copy chief, whatever you want to call it, to more or less oversee the rest of that process. And then maybe younger, less experienced copywriters are doing a lot of the actual heavy lifting of getting things created.

Yeah, I agree.

So there's. There's probably less opportunity in the middle, right? Yeah. So I don't know if I have any. I don't really know if I need anything. To answer your question directly.

No, That's a very contrarian take again, too. And also, I agree, I'm observing it firsthand, is the people that I give the AI tools that are working for me to people that don't have the fundamental skill set a. They never progress, so they, like, permanently stay at the same skill level, which isn't good. That means giving a junior copywriter a fancy tool makes them 20% more productive. They stay there for forever. Even if it does, you get maybe, if they know how to use it, a great win. You train them up. So training, to me, isn't the answer. I tried that first. It's just like, why aren't you guys using it? I'll train you to do it. Then I'm like, oh, skill erosion. And it'll happen to me, but it'll happen to me last if I continue to do it too. So getting back on the horse, if you value competence and you value mastery, I think will never be the case. The tool will never, you know, if it gets good enough where it's so much better than us at everything, we'll probably go and do something else. But until then, yeah, I would say we're. We're probably the last. The ones who have the most experience preside over it. And what I've found then, too, on the iterative side, when I use it for rapid iterations and trying to just speed right through all my frameworks that have ever worked, is that there's a plateau eventually. So you, you just hit plateau faster on the iterative stuff or you run out of money. Because capital is still a main constraint when you're.

Yeah, and there's a very interesting corollary or side thing to what you just said, which I think a lot of the reason that there's been failure on the business side, I mean, we can go back to what young copywriters should do, but on the business side I think there's been a lot of failure because related to what you said about capital being a constraint, most of these businesses didn't need more output. Maybe in certain contexts, like at the ad level and if you're a high production publisher, you probably need a lot of leads. But most companies are actually constrained by volume and they are not accurate. They're not trying to solve the right problem in my opinion. They just thought like we'll try to push out more and more stuff and then they don't have the operations or the systems to push it all out or they don't have the volume to test it. All right, yeah, right.

And I don't, I've never had more backlog copy in my life, in my career than right now. Yeah, just. And that's when I stopped. I was like, well, this doesn't make much sense.

Yeah. And so some of the kind of research that I've been doing into the effectiveness of AI, not, not in marketing specific context, but just sort of across industries and businesses is that yes, there is a case for automation. And that's very obvious when you think about rote tasks and things like that. But the less you get off of that extreme, the less useful it is in automation. At the other extreme, what seems to be the story or the narrative at this moment, if you really read the McKinsey's of the world and the boozes of the world and what they're saying they find is that it's almost like using it more for collaboration ideation, as a next person to be talking to. And that's personally how I use it quite a bit, which is I am almost always using AI just as another smart person to talk about ideas with, to get ideas to go back and forth. There is of course the problem of it being just a complete brown noser and you have to kind of work around that.

How do you turn off the confirmation bias that most language models are programmed with, especially OpenAI?

Well, for me what I have found is that most of the stuff that I'm working on is not stuff that I wrote originally. It's actually coming from junior copywriters. And I think that my specific chatgpt knows that enough at this point where it's willing to be like, this idea you got from that copywriter is junk. Like, let's talk about a new one.

Yeah, you're not right wing conservative trying to justify some sort of action.

Yeah. And so for me, that's where I found the most use is just. It's almost like again, to sort of go back into the heritage of copywriting. Gary Bensivenga had this thing where he said, like, I just imagine that I have all the great copywriters of history sitting around a table whenever I have a new problem. Right.

Yeah.

And so that's almost how I use it is like, what if I just had an incredibly smart other person helping me? But I'm also cognizant enough of where it may not be useful. Like I said, I was talking to Aaron Winter quite a bit last week and it was in an area where I was like, I'm not even. I don't even want to talk to AI about this because I know I'm not going to be able to bypass a lot of those issues with it just telling me I'm right or the way to go because it doesn't have enough context. The amount of time it would take me to feed the context where Aaron is fully up to speed being just because he knows who I am and all of the things that I'm trying to accomplish, like it's way faster to just pick up the phone. And that's probably one of the downsides. Right. Is people sort of forget, like, you have all these smart humans around you that can help too. We're not just dependent on.

Well, I don't want to make a recommendation quite yet, but I just waded into these waters now where I found something other than custom gbts, because that I feel like all copywriters, or not all, maybe, but a lot of them have said that same thing. And I've said it too. I'm like, I just want like the greats kind of like in grayscale above me being like, yo, yo, Gary, can you rewrite that with your, like signature bullet style or whatever it is he Actually, I did think of last week and I misspelled his last name. I was like, balenciaga Bullets.

So that's hilarious.

Yeah.

So like, I was way off.

Like, you wouldn't have known to know what to tap. Like, I'm not going to tap David Ogilvy to write a TikTok Hook. Well you probably actually that would work too, but you know what I mean, he'd probably be good enough to do it. So yeah, I just want those people and I found Delphi recently for me. I built for Pace, who is our biggest brand in our portfolio of brands.

And they build like the custom model. Right.

But it's so easy for someone on your team to do. I could show you a backend after this, but it ingests multimodal so like I can throw it videos, VSLs, docs, PDFs, MP3s, links, social media. So it's, it's really good at indexing. If you value the. The comprehensiveness of being able to easily index without getting slowed down and integrate things, then it's a great solution because.

Mine'S interesting and yeah, it's trained. I've actually been looking at Delphi recently because like I said, most of the work that I do, I'm not writing really anything other than test copy from a blank page anymore. I'm always working off of junior copywriter stuff and I have at this point thousands and thousands of video calls recorded of me in my coaching group coaching copy. And so what I have been considering and now you're really making me feel like it's time to pull the trigger on that is using the Delphi models to train off all that. And then I can give the junior copywriters that bot to basically at least go through the first round of revisions without me.

Yes, dude, it's all right. I would, I'll. I can introduce you to their team if you end up checking it out and liking it. But this was like the initial skill because I had a lot of much like you, high standards and requirements for how it would be to. To build. So like we came up with this use case document for what they wanted and then I found it was actually pretty easy to self implement for the most part. Like the back end looks like this. And the thing that I find the most useful is I come in here, this is Paces. Then I'll show you mine. Legendary quality mine. In fact they said no one I think has indexed more than us. Paces is at 20 million words. It's training off of like every day. And from the users who use it over the last 30 days, I'm gleaning insights that this is useful for AI like this. I had to manually read one by one in order to get there, which there's utility in that. But I can still drill down from popular questions and click into them. It just rolls up the popular questions into like significance of count. So for me it's like, okay, you'll see when it renders here I can actually get a sense really quickly of maybe lead magnet themes or like major areas that our users are stuck on. Let's just do last seven so it doesn't take forever to load and like the usage metrics. We're just in beta and it's only for our mastermind units. But I can go deeper here and I'm like, sweet. I wish I could go even deeper again and get direct quote. That would be like perfect. But that's just from a dashboard view. And then you can see from the mind. Yeah. 22 million words. And it's updating because it's connected. Yeah.

Especially when you consider that against some sort of custom GPT build. Correct.

Like, and it's, it's always now like this is how many it failed on. But once you set up the like social integrations in your drive and everything, if it hits one of those things, it pulls it in on a cadence and then you can turn on the last thing you might really love. Which I was like, thank you guys for thinking of. This is not this. Some models have this speaking styles, purpose instructions. There is. Oh, it's an advanced.

Yeah.

I was like, oh yeah, I want to know what advanced stuff you're doing. You can do freemium gating, like if you want to use it to do free consulting for three questions like an only fans model and then a gates of just like, hey, now it's time for a call with me, Daniel Friedrich.

Right.

You asked me your three wishes which we're about to try next. But this I am about to play with next, which is automations triggers. And yeah, you could see all the risk stuff that I've learned too. When a user mentions harming others 29 times. Come on. Community profanity. Yeah. So like you can do all this type of stuff, but the one I was looking for was just a slider that said turn on recency bias. And it was as simple as that of just like do you want it to work like the human mind or do you want it to be all knowing 22 million like words that it reaches and indiscriminately, you know, go slower most likely in order to find that.

That'S good because you mean the recency of the training, right? Yeah.

Which is important for me. The advice in marketing moves a little bit faster than advice in real estate. So if I'm like, sometimes people accuse me of coming now that like, have you ever Been called old yet in this industry. It used to be I was like, young.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a grizzled vet at this point. Yeah, there's nobody, like, there's very few people older than me at this point.

I interviewed a guy last week who I really loved, and he's just like, like, killing it right now. He was like, you OGs? I was like, oh, I got OG status now. Like, yeah, yeah. I was like, that's. That's cool.

That's hilarious. Right?

So, yeah, like, the ability to go back. Some people would. Might accuse me of coming up much like you or the SEO era. I came up in, like, the Facebook ads 2009-2011 era, where you can only target, like, name audience. Do a bunch of stuff that was like, uncompliant. So, like, at my worst, I'm just like, yeah, just like, write that. They're like, that won't get approved. I'm like, okay, change the income to like seven figures. And they're like, figures like is out. I'm like, fig. And they're like, okay, you can't do that either. I'm like, Then like, come up with.

Yeah. What's the best way to say yeah, right.

Whatever it is these days. But you can still.

Compliance dance. Yep.

Compliance. So that's. That's the only thing that I usually think of when it comes to copywriters watching this and ad buyers is. Yeah. The TOS you might want to upload, which I've never thought to do is upload in Facebook's current terms of service, is a link.

Yeah. That's interesting.

But, yeah, you might enjoy it. That's all I really wanted to say about AI.

Where.

Where.

Where.

I was just excited to tell you that, like, now. But the use case. The use case that I found it most useful for me, if I'm talking to myself, is rewrites in my own tonality. And I'll have do it tonality score, because that's what I use it for. Like, pace is like quick fact check of Find things, find quotes, find stories.

He's told.

Hey, do you have any story. What do you typically say? What are the hundred most common lines that you start off a YouTube video saying?

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the ways that I have viewed AI, and this is a little bit of a generalization, is I don't use it to make my work faster. I use it to make my work better.

Me too.

Yep. You know, like I said, that's a little bit of a generalization because just some of the things you just said, like consolidating massive amounts of data to find the hundred best hooks or I use it a lot to consolidate Amazon reviews on competing products and things like that. It's very useful for that sort of thing. So that's where it does make me faster. But for the most part I'm using it to basically get better work out of the same number of hours. So if a certain project's going to take me 40 hours, and it took me 40 hours three years ago, it's still going to take me 40 hours this year. But I'm just going to get 30% better results out of it.

I 100% agree. It's like at worst it's having another copy editor who can look for just a hyper specific thing right in your copy. So what is your stance on copy editing? Having worked at like, I wish. Do I wish so much I worked at like Motley fool or Agora Is. The day I went to Paradigm Press I was like, oh, this is where I was meant to be. Like, this is fun. Like you guys are like, like me. So yeah, I always kind of wish I was always kind of one or you know, solo copywriter when I worked for other people or with maybe one other good person. That's about it. So I'm curious, your experience with collaborating.

You know, it's a nice to have. I don't think it's a necessity. You're going to get better output, but do you need the better output? I suppose is the question. A lot of the work that I have done in my career has been in isolation and it's worked out just fine. But in an ideal world, I think everyone benefits from it. Like even I benefit from having other people read my stuff, take a look at it. There's just. And maybe that's another place where AI is useful, is just being that set of extra eyes.

Right? But the copy editor I never had.

There's also a short term and a long term answer to your question. The short term answer is what I just gave, which is in every individual project you are going to get more out of it. Does that make or break it? Probably not, but over longer horizons. I almost can't imagine not being in a state of constant learning as a copywriter. And there's no better way to be in that constant state of learning than having someone who's better at you just constantly tell you what is going on that you're not seeing and ways to improve it. And I don't think any of us are above that. I mean, maybe Gary Benson Vega, because he's just such a natural talent at this sort of thing.

Does he sit on top of your rankings if you had to do a top five copywriters of all time?

Well, I think he has a very different gift than a lot of other copywriters. My own writing style is probably much more akin to a John Carlton or Gary Halbert or, you know, these guys that are very. It's maybe it's more of like a mix of like a John Carlton and a David Deutsch. Like there's a certain amount of technical mastery in what I do, but then like, I tend to write off a very high tempo, which is sort of the John Carlton piece of it. But Gary Vincenzo, who I know personally and is a very just like endearing, empathetic man, and I think that's what makes him different than a lot of other copywriters. Not to say that any of those other names that I just mentioned or any other copywriters aren't empathetic to a certain degree, but he just seems to have this understanding of the human condition that shines through in his writing.

Interesting.

A pretty special way. Well, you look at like his ability to wear different hats as a copywriter, I think is unmatched. Meaning he can write these things that are lies, lies, lies. You know, one of his classic promos about basically the lies of the financial industry is really just fueled by the. The desire for retribution and something that's a little bit of a darker emotion. And he wore that hat incredibly well. But then you read his stuff in his olive oil business and it's just kind of like the finer things in life that make life good. So I think he sort of was always in touch with different humans who weren't even similar to himself or wearing similar emotions on their sleeves. But the other thing that I think makes him special was his peak. I always tell people in this sort of conversation that what I've always found different about him is I think he could have been a great novelist. I think if you read a lot of fiction, there's a lot of similarities in his writing, how he structures stories and the way he tells the story. And he's not always leaning on sort of high impact excitement storytelling, which, to be frank, is kind of how I do it. And that's sort of the John Carlton thing that I just mentioned. Is this real kind of thing, more traditional? Well, Carlton's writing is electric. Right. Where a more traditional novelist or some of Benson vanguard's Stuff. It just has more of this kind of. I don't. I don't. Nuance probably isn't the right word because I don't want to say that something like what I wrote or Carlton writes is not nuanced. But there's just a certain element of true mastery, I guess, of character development even in his smaller stories that I don't think many other copywriters have ever, ever done.

What comes to mind is something that I should read if I fancied myself a copywriter, that you would be concerned if I hadn't, which I probably haven't. So I'm going to feel embarrassed.

No, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is what I already mentioned, which is his olive oil letters. But he has some good stuff from the Magalog days. Get rich slowly. That one was great. That the one for the Charles Givens letter. Those are ones that stick out in my mind as being very demonstrative of some of the things that I just said where he just kind of has this talent for making the person that he's ghostwriting for come to life in a very real, tangible way, in a very human way.

Okay. That's. Which is something that I'm not naturally great at. And it's something I would like to brush up on. And just like, the different ways and approaches I'm just intrigued by anyway, so I usually try to find them by use case. The first time, like last year, I wasn't. I wasn't not a Tony Robbins fan. I just was like, yeah, he's like the goat, the Godfather. Like, the dudes like, in endured beyond. Like, so I had respect for him, but, like, he's not my cup of tea as far as, like a Tony super fan.

Right.

And personal development like he is for others. But I went and saw him in person. He did like a affiliate, like, small room, date with Destiny type approach, but just in a small room. And I was like, good Lord. This guy's level of mastery, it's something that I consider myself good at. Is just so far above mine. How did he learn how to do this? Like, I'm seeing. That's great psychological tricks that I don't even like normally. I can at least pinpoint a guess as to why he did that. I'm like, why did he even say that? He just, like, he skipped like, five questions and just went right. Right. Rooted to the source of it.

Yeah. There's certain people that are just very much wired to have that type of intangible skill. Yeah, that's that's kind of probably what you were noticing in that moment. And it can be kind of jarring. Right. You're sort of what's going on here, how I was intense person, this good at this thing, right?

Yeah. So needless to say, like, I was like, all right, now I'm gonna look into, like, who he learned from and what he's doing. Like, what branch of nlp, like sorcery is this? So I was like, I know the basics, but the cheese. And I was like, oh, yeah, like he learned from Jim Rohn. I know, but I was like, I don't know who Jim Rohn learned for, but it all usually traces back to some sort of great who was. Is then taught by someone great. So I like to think that's been happening since the beginning of time. And I'm always interested who those like, you know very well. Like, you're the people that have stay shaped in your style. So now I'm intrigued and I'm gonna go back and probably grab a few. So I don't know, like when people ask me my favorite, like Sean Vossler, also student, the game has like, he goes to the library and gets like, the actual, like, documents. Russell Brunson, I met him, has a whole library full of classics and like Napoleon Hill, like, super fan. And me, I just don't have.

Well, you know, it's what. It kind of goes back to the conversation we had at the very beginning, which is there's just this level of curiosity, I think, with a lot of great salespeople, persuasionists, copywriters, whatever the category of specific influences, where they just love to consume knowledge.

Yeah.

And make the connections between things that are either directly or indirectly related. And it's kind of what I was saying about being able to watch, say, TV or something and see, you know, just in intuit how character is developed and things like that.

What's.

Do you.

Can you think of a specific example where you're like, no one would know this, but that hook was really from Loss season four or like, whatever it is.

Oh, man, that's a good question. I can't think of that in specific, but I did a bunch of direct mail stuff a couple years ago, which was pretty interesting in that it allowed for a different style of storytelling than I might tell in a video and particularly very dialogue heavy. And one of my favorite genres or guilty pleasures in fiction is the American Assassin series, which is written by Vince Flynn. There's a movie called American Assassin, which is based on one of the early novels, and it's basically one of these. There's 30 books and they're all about the same guy and he has Saves the World in every different book. So it's not necessarily real in any sense. But they're page turners. They're the type of book that you pick up and it makes you feel like you're reading an HBO series or something like that. They're just so expertly done. And that guy has incredible dialogue in his books.

I got into that of mine. I don't even know how to do it, to be honest.

You may not need to. Right. Because particularly in a lot of the video stuff, it's actually. It falls apart kind of easily when you don't have the actual visual people.

In a BSL is my worst situational to come into with no prep.

Yeah. But anyway, I just found myself. It was actually quite nice because I'd be reading one night and notice all these little tricks of dialogue, and then I'd be the next day inside one of those direct mail letters writing dialogue and going, oh, I know exactly how to do this.

Cool. And that's a really good point too. I was going to actually ask you that next is how do you swipe and deploy? Because a lot of people swipe. And you kind of brought up that like swiping and having a big. The biggest swipe file is a source of pride for literally only copywriters. But it doesn't actually help you get anywhere I found. So I don't know.

How do you feel it's useful for inspiration? Is my answer. And that's another place where I think there was a lot of overcorrection or misuse of AI is people would say, hey, I take this lead and just make it from that offer to this offer.

Right.

You can have a certain amount of success with that, but it gets saturated pretty quickly or it's just not appropriate. And so it's like I said, there's some success stories, but there's a lot of people who failed. And so it's kind of like the same problem just with AI is that swiping something directly carries a certain amount of risk and you're probably better off thinking through it for a little while. So for me, swipe files are typically used to kind of stir the creative juices, so to speak. If I'm feeling really stuck, I'll just go read old copy or hand copy it even. Another thing that I picked up way back in the day. And I do believe that there's actually some science around how that neurologically kind of unlocks certain parts of your brain. So that's sort of the. In the moment. I feel like I always give two answers, but that's how it is.

I love how your brain's working, like, answering things too, because a lot of people have asked me that as well. It's like, should I still hand write this to me like that. That opinion? Maybe I'll try doing that. I was taught I could just type it though, like. But same idea of just like, taking your time understanding, like, well, to put.

It into your brain. Yeah. And so there's sort of that in the moment thing where if I have a very specific problem I'm trying to solve and I feel like I'm at a loss for words, literally, I will typically go read other swipes. I might go watch a VSL that I find to be particularly well done.

Cool.

But the other part of that answer is there's more of an accumulation piece of all that, which is, to use the AI analogy, you're just sort of building your own training model. Right. The more of the stuff that you just have buried in your head, it kind of pops up as being like, oh, I can go back to that thing to solve this problem, or it's just subconsciously informing your decisions. And I think it's. You said something earlier around how the problem that we will encounter with junior copywriters is that they're not taking the time to develop with AI in front of them. They feel like they don't have to. Right. And I do think that that's ultimately the problem that I'm talking about right now is whether it's reading swipes or going back and reading tested advertising methods or any of the other quote unquote sacred texts. Like, you really need to be building your own language model that can solve these problems basically on command. And every great copywriter that I know has been a student of the game. And I really just think that that's still the case, and it might even be more the case now where if you. So I. I said we could come back to the junior copywriters. And I guess I just sort of stumbled my way into it here. But if I were a junior copywriter right now, I'd take a look around and I'd say, okay, using AI as table stakes. Everyone's using AI. The people who will get better at it are the ones who are using it better or who get better results are the ones who are using it better. And that's obvious. But it's kind of like this Thing is, you could work smarter, you could work hard. The issue with that is that there's some people who are going to do both, right? If you are only trying to work smart, I guess by using AI to automate and cut down on your workload, you're going to rub up against somebody who's doing the exact same thing with AI, but then spending an hour doing the type of stuff that we're talking about, and that person's going to get better results, maybe not every time, but over long enough horizons. And that's really all that matters here is we're talking about careers and you have to be able to do this stuff for years and years on end, unless you walk into some way to make $100 million the first time. But for most people, that's not going to be the case.

I don't know if I've ever seen that, to be honest. Like, that's such an important point. Like, that's the thing, working hard and smart. If you're, if you want to be lazy and use a tool and you have first mover advantage, good luck. I think in 10 years you could, you should just go to clickbank.com and buy like some product because those will probably appeal to you, their type of offers, right? Those are the offers that ghostwriters will sell to people on, you know, a whim or a pipe dream. So to me, there's, there's the inevitability of knowing what you want. But for some people, maybe they just want, I guess, the like, have you experienced this calling a customer being with a user who has sold like a dream like that, and just like they were satisfied with what they got, they got the inspiration, maybe kind of what you were touching on, or they got the, they bought the possibility that it was possible and that was enough for them. For me, that's not enough. And I would be disappointed in myself. Not usually the person selling it to me, but just disappointed that I thought life could be.

Yeah. I mean, now you start to get into market dynamics, right? Which is if you're a developing copywriter where you sold a dream of, basically this is an automated, easy way to make money, or were you sold the reality, which is this is a career. And like any career, if you want to be on the right side of the bell curve, you need to be applying yourself. You know, I'm, I'm not so fully like immersed in our market and how new people are brought into it to fully know the answer to that. But I know what the reality is, which is if you want to do this successfully, you have to apply yourself. And I've seen a lot of examples of AI written copy come across my list where it's just like, did you even read this after it came out of the machine? And that's a bit of a epidemic probably. But it's like I said, I think it will self correct in a lot of ways because people are not going to just everything comes back to results. We've had a couple of running themes here. That's one of them. And so if you're not getting results, you're going to very quickly have to look at them in the mirror and say why? And sure, maybe you were sold a bit of false promises coming into this. And if that's the case, then you have to ask yourself, do I want to apply to this? Or maybe it's just not right for you. And that's fine too. But my contrarian view is that it's actually a great time to be a young copywriter for all the reasons that we've discussed because I think there's quite a bit of opportunity. You basically have the very, in a very like practical sense, you can make twice the money because you can do twice the work if you're willing to do it.

Well, dude, like I said, I agree with you too much. Nothing else really left to say other than I don't know how young copyrights are being brought into. But I know human psychology and things catch up. Like things have caught up to me. It just won't be the AI one as quick. I forget whatever baby boomers told me I had too easy. I'm sure I did and had to learn. Walking to school both ways or uphill? Both ways.

Yeah, yeah, uphill both ways, that sort of thing.

That's usually what I say at the end of something like this because I had Mark Lack on shout out to Mark Lack and had a conversation with him and he was, he did like an Agora style doom and gloom sales letter like world's ending on AI and whatnot. I was like, dang. Okay. So I always root back to the fact of just like no matter what happens, humans are adaptable. And like sometimes it's interpreted as there will be no jobs for anyone coming out of college. So do X, Y and Z. I think you guys just figured out no matter what happens is my personal opinion. Daniel, what's yours? I guess if you had to give words of wisdom.

Oh man. Yeah. I mean I've always just been a fan of betting on myself in a lot of ways. Most of the work that I do is formatted with the old terms where I'm really betting on my own abilities. And that's what I would just tell anyone. There's no better investment to make. There's no better person to bet on than yourself for the simple reason that you're. I'm not saying like every one of us is brilliant or whatever. You know, there's realities in terms of intelligence and all that. But the one reality, the one truth is that it's the only thing you have full control over. You don't have much control over anything else other than what goes on in this in between your ears and then how you act as a result of that sort of thing. And because of that, I think that that's. It's almost a necessary. I think that the only thing that you should really bet on is your own ability and then do whatever you can to make that bet pay off.

Pete Rose did, and it still worked out for him.

Despite him. It's a nice poll. I like it. Right?

Like, if that's the worst that happens, he's. I was like, who's the worst example of someone betting on themselves? It still worked out great for him. So to me, great advice to end it with. I am over. Are we over time? I think so. But I really enjoyed this conversation. Let me just check my calendar. Is there any last. Actually if you had to add a PS as some copywriters do who work in financial newsletters. Do you ever write a ps?

Yeah, of course. I mean, yeah.

I'll actually. I do have a buffer here until the top of the hour. So what would. What would your psb? Is there anything you need right now that anyone watching this can help you out with or think to do?

No. I mean, dang. I think eventually everyone needs great copywriters. So just for people to listen to the advice that we just gave and level up. Cool. So then.

Then I'll say do that. Like let. Let Daniel know in some way. I'll let you guys get creative. How do you like when people reach out to you? Comment, Just comments. You don't seem like you're trying to grow your personal brand to a million followers.

I have an email list@ferrari media.com but I believe the opt in page is down at the moment. I'm gonna have to get that fixed. It's on my list to do in the next like 10 days though, so.

Oh, no worries. I'll delete it.

How seriously, I take that.

Go to the cta. It should be live by now, right here. Dude, I kid, but thank you. I appreciate this conversation. It was a fun one.

Yeah, yeah. Thanks for making me think. You got some really good questions.

Yeah, man.