Andrew Warner: Hey there, Freedom Fighters. You know me. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses for an audience of entrepreneurs.
And I have to tell you that for a long time, I didn’t think today’s guest would have been a good fit because he’s a YouTuber. He’s a creator. Now I love him. No offense to you, dude. When I got my iPad, I was full on iPad. Your videos let me geek out on how to be full iPad. And then, I saw you as a medical student, teaching people how to do well in medical school, teaching people how to study.
And I think, okay, interesting hobby. You become a doctor, I become proud. Not like your mom, but almost like your mom. And then, you kind of broke my heart a little bit when you said, I’m going all in on being a YouTuber. And I go, oh my god, he’s like bitten this thing, this feigned bug, and now it’s inside him.
We lost him. And then I realized later on, maybe I was wrong because this is a real business with real staying power. So here’s my goal for this interview with Ali Abdaal. I want to understand why he made this transition and why it works for all of us who want to be better content creators. And then also, is this a durable thing to do, or are you just.
Enjoying the adulation and making some quick money. And we can do it all thanks to my, sponsor. It’s called Gusto. If you’re paying people, Ali, you got to know this, you should find out about gusto. com slash Mixergy, but I’ll talk about those later, dude. Hit us with the numbers. Audience numbers today.
And what’s the revenue numbers?
Ali Abdaal: Yeah. so firstly, thank you for having me. This is going to be fun. and I love that we can talk to an audience of entrepreneurs because they’re my favorite people to talk to. so this year we will, we’ve just hit nearly 5 million subscribers on YouTube, like 4. 9 something, about a million followers across the other social platforms, if you add them up, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, that sort of thing.
this year we’ll do about. Five and a half million dollars in top line revenue with 60 percent six zero, net, operating profit. so whatever that translates, I think 2. 7 million or 3 million, something to that effect. annoyingly the company is based in the UK, so we’re then hit with like large amounts of corporation tax and stuff.
And the team is 13 full timers with a bunch of contractors on top of that. so we should actually be using Gusto for our payroll and our hiring solutions.
Andrew Warner: what have you bought? That’s fun. Before we get into the mechanics of the business, I see you as someone who does know how to enjoy life. What have you bought? That’s fun for yourself. Or has it all been investments?
Ali Abdaal: What have I bought? That’s fun. So I’ve recently embarked on a year of digital nomading around the world. And so I’ve been researching the living daylights out of all of the best travel gear, like the most optimized plug, the most optimized sling bag, the most optimized backpack. And the great thing about travel gear is that there’s only so much you can spend on it, like the Lamborghini of suitcases.
It’s also only a few hundred dollars. Like you can’t actually spend more money than that, unless it’s like diamond plated or something. So it’s been really fun to geek out of that. peak design products. I like my, I have a real obsession with bags and backpacks. So anytime peak design or nomadic or any of these funky tech bag companies release a new bag.
I’ll end up buying it, try it out for a bit, see if it’s nice, end up just giving it away to someone. But I have a real kind of tech bag obsession, which is super fun.
Andrew Warner: Wait, you’re telling me that you’re making millions of dollars and the thing you’re spending it on. That’s fun is bags. There’s no real estate, even not an interesting car.
Ali Abdaal: I mean, there’s a couple of rental properties in Manchester and north, north of England.
Andrew Warner: tell me what type
Ali Abdaal: Yeah.
Andrew Warner: apartments,
Ali Abdaal: what type? yeah, it’s four, four apartments. two are currently in the process of being built, two are cash flowing. They’re not cash flowing very much. There are, I don’t know, like the rental is about a thousand pounds a month and the mortgage is about 700 with all of the fees and all that.
So I’m making 300 pounds of 400 a month from each one. And that’s like how much money we make in like an hour of AdSense on YouTube. So it’s just like so much money being tied up in these properties. And it’s just such a small amount of money compared to the alternative of just make another online course.
Just make another YouTube video.
Andrew Warner: So why do it?
Ali Abdaal: Diversification, building an asset that’s de correlated from my fame on the internet and my popularity in case I get cancelled, at least the houses are still there, reasons like that.
Andrew Warner: Okay. Fair enough. Was this all intentional? I know that you’re very intentional person. I went back and I saw your early videos and it’s a guy who’s singing on, I forget what it was that he was singing, but that’s the first video that I saw posted and truthfully, even over the years, I think I’ve seen you play the guitar randomly.
How much of this business was intentional and how much was it just, I’m having fun. It turns out I’m going to make money out of it.
Ali Abdaal: it was very intentional. Intentional in the sense of, I always wanted this. YouTube thing. okay, so the first handful of videos on my channel, I was like, I’m gonna be a music YouTuber, I’m gonna be the next Kurt Schneider, I’m gonna play all these instruments, my friends are gonna sing songs, I’ll be able to sing and produce music.
I made like five or six of those videos, completely tanked, no one cared. In fact, the only one of those videos where I was singing, rather than my friend, got more dislikes than likes. It got three dislikes, and one like, and 14 views, and I was like, whoa, okay, this music career is not for me. It was when…
I thought I started using YouTube as organic content marketing for my business, that things really started to work. So I actually had a business in medical school helping people get into med school. I would go up and down the country and, even internationally, and I would teach real life seminars on how to do well in medical school entrance exams, where I write all the material, I print out the booklets.
And after a few years of running this business, we peaked at like 150K annual revenue and we started to dip. And I thought, you know what? What if I made YouTube videos teaching this thing that I’m very familiar with and hopefully some proportion of people watching my YouTube videos will think I’m legit and will buy my course.
And I didn’t know it at the time, but this is what they call organic content marketing. But it was when I started leaning into my expertise and actually just being, making educational content on YouTube and just being a nerd in public. that was when things started to work and the channel started to grow and then eventually grew beyond that business.
And then that business got sold and it’s actually just been sold again today to a private equity firm. I made some money out of it. It wasn’t a huge amount, but like the YouTube channel has just completely overtaken that.
Andrew Warner: Do you mind saying how much you made from it?
Ali Abdaal: From the business, the original sale, I think was about 150, 000 pounds, 180, 000. And I actually don’t even know what the number is to the PE firm, but I only own like 1 percent of it now. So it’s like, I think maybe
Andrew Warner: Fair enough. It was that early thing that I’m, that I was especially curious about. Okay. And then that does make sense. I could see how it helped your business. I could see how it helped you also become a better student because the more you teach, the more you learn yourself. What happened with
The iPad content, How did that fit in with this mission?
Ali Abdaal: Yeah, so part of the whole intentionality thing with YouTube, and I think anyone, any creator should be thinking about this is. What does the long term game plan look like? And I knew from basically from day one that I couldn’t make videos for students forever because that is a non durable market that I can be at.
eventually I’ll become too old to feasibly give students advice and I would lose interest in it. And I thought like. Tech YouTubers are an interesting bunch because the ones who are big today are the ones who were big 10 years ago. And that is so unusual in any other space in beauty and lifestyle and in all these things, it’s rare for someone to actually be durable on YouTube for 10 plus years.
But like Linus Tech Tips, Marcus Brownlee, iJustine, all these, OG tech YouTubers are still big today. And I think it’s because tech has staying power. There’s new stuff coming out every year. And the older you get in the tech field, the more expertise you get rather than the more irrelevant you become.
and I thought I need to sort of pivot a little bit into tech because I think that is where I can sustain this. So I randomly made a video about my iPad, which ended up going viral. since then I’ve straddled this sort of tech productivity type.
Sphere as a way of kind of staying relevant on YouTube for longer.
Andrew Warner: Because this was a period where people saw the iPad as a consumption device and you suddenly, and a few others had tapped into the potential of it. And no, we can’t replace the computer. I can’t do this interview with you to my knowledge as well with an iPad, but. Man, it’s so effective when you stay focused on certain tasks on it.
Right.
Ali Abdaal: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, my iPad is my main driver these days. Cause that’s where I do all my writing. And now that I have a team, most of my job is to come up with ideas and then delegate. And all of that can be done really well from an iPad. I only ever use my Mac book when I’m doing podcasts like this.
Andrew Warner: I know. I feel like most people don’t appreciate the power of it. If they watch your videos, I think they would. How are you doing with the sun in your face? That’s one of the problems with being a digital nomad. You have different environments and you have to keep readjusting.
Ali Abdaal: this is the thing. I think I might draw the curtain a little bit.
Andrew Warner: Go for it. Where are you today?
Ali Abdaal: I’m in Tulum in Mexico. So this is one of the spots on the digital nomad travel circuit,
Andrew Warner: Right on. I heard you’re coming here to Austin at some point too.
Ali Abdaal: Absolutely. Yeah. I was there a few months ago. I’m going to be back sometime next year as well.
Andrew Warner: Right on. Okay. So I see how it’s working for you. What’s the next step? At what point do you say, I think I’ve, I think I’ve exhausted this tech space. Productivity is my next world. And how did you calculate that would make sense? I
Ali Abdaal: Yeah, so that was a very accidental. That was just purely people started saying, how are you so productive? Because they would see that I was working full time as a doctor at the time, and I was making these videos on the side and, being fairly transparent about how I grew my business.
people started asking, how are you so productive? And so I just made a couple of videos, productivity tips and things, which seemed to do really well. And, In hindsight, it makes sense. Like I’d been browsing, I’ve been reading the Lifehacker blog since 2010. I was a huge Tim Ferriss 4i Workweek fan. I browsed a lot of productivity apps for fun.
And so I was like, huh, when I make videos talking about productivity, people seem to like them. And that is where this idea of me being, a productivity expert came from. And now, just about to publish a book about productivity. The tagline on that book is Ali Abdaal is the world’s most followed productivity expert, which feels a bit weird.
I guess it depends on how you define it, but like the publisher said it was legit. So we went with that and I accidentally stumbled into this productivity niche, which seems to be working.
Andrew Warner: do think you are the most followed. largely because people who are and teaching productivity end up disappearing. Like look at Tim Ferriss. He got so productive that he didn’t even have to show up much online. And you’re a guy who shows up all the time. The book is called, I should have said it in the intro.
It’s called Feel Good Productivity. What was the business angle on that? Like if I, look at tech, I think. There’s a model here. The model is you create YouTube videos and other content around tech. This geeky audience has money. You look at Leo Laporte, he started getting car commercials, right? For, I think the Ford Mustang.
So the audience has money and they spend it beyond technology. And then you look at Linus, he’s got a screwdriver. You can imagine other products coming out of it for productivity. It doesn’t feel like the revenue side is as clear. What did you see there?
Ali Abdaal: I wasn’t thinking about that when I stumbled into productivity. I was just thinking, Hey, I need, I want to continue growing on YouTube because it’s making money and it’s fun. And it seems to be helping people in that order, crucially. I was getting sponsorship deals at the time.
And so every time I can make a new video, it’s like. 2k, 5k, 10k, now up to 20k in sponsorship revenue every time we do a video. So I didn’t think too hard about what does the longer term monetization of this topic look like? One thing I did think about is that, if I won the lottery, if I didn’t care about money at all, I would still make YouTube videos because I really love teaching.
And I thought, okay, cool. who, who are the people in the space that I admire? People like Tim Ferriss, Ryan Holiday, Sam Harris, people who’ve written books. and so I, I kind of knew that I always wanted to be this sort of. Thought leader. Sounds a bit cringe, but like thought leader, book writer type person.
And so my plan was less about, hey, there’s all these revenue opportunities off the back of productivity and more like productivity is part of personal development. I like the idea of writing self help books and I can imagine myself doing that when I’m 50. Whereas I can’t really imagine myself making YouTube videos when I’m 50.
Andrew Warner: You do seem to really obsess about it. Sometimes to the point where I wonder, does he get anything else done? Because he’s thinking so much about the process of getting things done. but then I see you do have a life. You’re traveling, you’re building this business. One of the things that I think we all got to watch as you were doing was building a team.
What was the first person that you brought on in the team?
Ali Abdaal: Uh, so first hire was an editor. that completely changed the game. Cause I was spending like 10 to 20 hours a week editing videos while I was working full time. And it took a business mentor, friend of mine to be like, Hey man, why don’t you just outsource this?
And initially I tried, I went on Fiverr and tried to outsource it to someone for 5 an hour, and it didn’t work out. And I thought my conclusion from that was, oh, I guess I’m the only one who can edit my own videos. And then my mentor said, no, screw that. pay real money for this. You’re making real money.
Pay 25 an hour or something rather than five an hour. And so I found some guy, a guy called Christian, who was really good. And that suddenly freed up all this time that I was then able to arbitrage into just making more content. Which
Andrew Warner: Who’s the mentor?
Ali Abdaal: a lot. the mentor was a guy called Rohan, who I sold my first business to, actually.
And he became a friend. He was, he’s also a former doctor turned entrepreneur. and I was talking to him about my business as I was selling my first company to him. And he was like, why are you spending 10 hours a week editing your own videos? that seems like the sort of thing that you could easily delegate.
I was like, Oh, I’ll give it a go.
Andrew Warner: And that feels like the thing that a lot of YouTubers don’t want to delegate. if you talk about people like Casey Neistat and others, they want to hold on to the editing because editing is where they create and for you, it’s not. It’s in the script. It seems
Ali Abdaal: I’m not really a video guy. I don’t really care about the craft of making videos. Like to me, videos are just a platform where I happen to be able to teach. I care about teaching. And so the thing that I like is reading something, learning about it, applying to my life, synthesizing the ideas into a cool framework, and then finding a way to express that.
Whether it’s through a Twitter thread or writing or a real life public speech or a YouTube video or a podcast. I’m fairly platform agnostic and format agnostic. I just love the idea of teaching. So
Andrew Warner: and it just happened.
Ali Abdaal: the craft of the video. Yeah.
Andrew Warner: It just happened then the video was the most viral, the place where you got your audience, right?
Ali Abdaal: Yeah. I was pretty good at teaching in real life because I’ve been doing it for such a long time. And so that trans translated naturally into video. I had a blog a year before I started the YouTube channel and, you know, I would enjoy writing blog posts. But it’s quite a lot of work to write a whole blog post and edit it and try to make sure it’s good.
Whereas speaking from the heart and just sharing, Hey, here are five tips for passing the BMAT section one exam. I’ve said this shit loads of times in real life, and so just repeating the same stuff on video, and that came quite naturally to me.
Andrew Warner: And then how did you build up your audience? I know that obviously YouTube’s really good about showing content that they think people will like, but I didn’t see you do much in the way of promotion.
Ali Abdaal: Yeah, I think one of the great things about YouTube and why I think it’s still the S tier social media platform is because the algorithm is so good. Like you don’t need to promote your content outside of YouTube. YouTube’s job is to promote your content within YouTube. And if the video is good, i. e.
people click on it and people watch it, then it’s almost inevitable that eventually the algorithm realizes, oh, this sort of person enjoys this sort of video, let’s show them more of that sort of content. And actually what we’ve seen is like people who try and try to promote the video outside the platform and bring their audience from YouTube, it tends not to work.
I think Dr. Mike is a huge medic YouTuber. He had 2 million on Instagram and only managed to get like 10, 000 people over to his YouTube channel. So like the conversion rate for cross platform promotion is actually really minimal.
Andrew Warner: The thing that I’d seen people do was have other popular people on their site. And I think you were doing live interviews for a period there. I remember Noah Kagan was on there and others. That wasn’t working.
Ali Abdaal: No, live interviews really didn’t work. during the pandemic, I thought, you know what? I kind of wanted to start a podcast. Why don’t I just do live streams with people interviewing them on my YouTube channel? So basically this, but a live stream. And every time we did that, we would lose subscribers.
Because people weren’t there for a two hour long live stream where I’m chatting to Noah Kagan and he’s giving me like advice on which books about sex to read, which was an interesting part of that conversation. people weren’t there for that. they were, they’d subscribe to my channel to get I don’t know, these bite sized videos that were 10, 20 minutes long.
And so I dabbled with the live streams for a bit. Decided to cancel those, then started a podcast, which is a whole separate thing on a separate YouTube channel. And then that’s been ongoing for the last two and a half years now. And that seems to be doing well.
Andrew Warner: is the one with you and your brother, I
Ali Abdaal: so there’s another one. So the one with me and my brother is like a bit of a hobby that we do on the side. the one that my actual podcast is called Deep Dive. And so that’s where I interview entrepreneurs and creators and stuff. And it’s mostly in, in person interviews.
Andrew Warner: And it still doesn’t translate for you. You’re still not seeing their audience come to your podcast on YouTube. And then from your podcast, come to the main channel.
Ali Abdaal: Uh, less so, like we did an interview with Mr. Who’s the Boss, who’s a tech YouTuber with 15 million subscribers. That episode performed really well. Did an interview with Alex Hormozy. That episode did pretty well, but people then coming onto my main channel that we haven’t really seen that as a real factor, I guess the main channel is way bigger than the podcast, so if anything, it’s more the other way, people who follow me on my main channel realize I have a podcast and then they follow the podcast.
Andrew Warner: I think you just mentioned that you’re doing 20, 000 for a sponsorship now on your channel. So when you talk about notion or. A product like that, they’re paying you 20, 000 today for that mention. Right?
Ali Abdaal: Yes, I mean I said 15 to 20 depending on how long term the deal is and whether we have a relationship with them and stuff
Andrew Warner: So then going back to the beginning, the first revenue was ad was actually you selling your program, your classes. The second revenue was AdSense. Am I right about that?
Ali Abdaal: yeah, exactly. And so about Two years into my channel the Adsense revenue started to match what I was making in my day job as a doctor So around like three four thousand dollars a month And then sponsorships on top of that started off at like five hundred dollars six hundred seven hundred eight hundred Up to two thousand up to five thousand up to ten thousand up to twenty thousand over the last five years
Andrew Warner: And then you did a course online too, right? Where you were teaching people how to be a YouTuber. I think was the first product. You
Ali Abdaal: Yeah, so I started making online courses on Skillshare in 2019 and people will be familiar with Skillshare because they advertise everywhere and Skillshare was making stupid amounts of money. Like the first course I made on that was about how to edit videos And it took me one day to make the course.
It took a freelancer two days to edit it. And that course continues to make somewhere between 3, 000 a month. Since September of 2019. So it’s been four years. I’ve done basically zero promo for it. And the course is still making thousands of dollars every month. Which was pretty mind blowing. and so I just made like 10, 12 classes on Skillshare.
And at one point, Skillshare was making us like 80, 000 a month. In pure passive income from the fact that people were watching my classes on Skillshare. Unfortunately, last year they changed the monetization algorithm, which I sort of knew would come and our revenue absolutely tanked. It’s now in this sort of 20, 000 range.
but then we decided to launch our own course because I knew that, Hey, it’s a bit, it’s a bit antifragile. It’s a bit fragile to have all of our revenue coming from this other platform that we don’t control. So let’s take matters into our own hands. And in 2020, we released a course called the part time YouTuber Academy, which is still going to this day.
It used to be live cohorts during the pandemic, but live cohorts were a big thing. It’s now become evergreen. And actually we ran a Black Friday promotion yesterday, which has done 110, 000 in 24 hours. Which is nice. It’s cool.
Andrew Warner: being in a green room with Mark Maron, the guy who does the WTF podcast that used to be super popular. he was at this podcast conference and he looked down on the people who are on stage who both podcasted and had a class on how to podcast. And I remember thinking, why aren’t you like more supportive of the people who are here if they’re making money in any way doing this thing that they love, be supportive of it.
But at the same time that I was arguing with him in my head, I also thought. There is something kind of low rent about the fact that I did too. I had a podcast course on how to podcast this. I felt like there’s something low rent about it. Like you don’t see, I don’t know. I D does that ever come across to you?
Like I’m a guy doing a thing, teaching you how I’m a guy doing a thing. And then you have to pay me to learn how to do the thing. Do you know what I’m talking about? I’m trying to formulate a question here. That’s not coming out.
Ali Abdaal: Yeah. I, I think about this a lot and I, and this used to worry me, especially when I left medicine. Because I was thinking like, wait a minute, people follow me because I’m a doctor and also doing YouTube and business on the side. And so therefore my productivity advice seems to have merit. But if I don’t, if I’m not a doctor anymore, am I just a YouTuber that teaches people how to be productive?
And the way that I teach people how to be productive is through making YouTube videos and then teaching people how to be YouTubers. And this is sort of like. Circular industrial complex that’s forming of I’ll do a thing and then I’ll get, make more money teaching people how to do the thing than I actually will from doing the thing itself.
And that kind of got my mind in a bit of a tangle initially. what I realized like after a little while of doing this is that’s totally fine. I think if. I think if my channel was about how to grow on YouTube and my, the way I monetized it was about courses on how to grow on YouTube, I would feel a bit more weird about that.
But even then, I know people who do that, I have nothing against that. My channel is mostly about how to build a life you love and general personal development and productivity. And it just so happens that one of our products happens to be a course that teaches people how to build YouTube channels.
we’re about to launch another one. That’s a productivity course on, we’re also launching like a tech product line. We’re also launching a voice AI productivity app. So that’s where the software stuff comes in. so we’re just sort of launching things here and there and seeing what works, seeing what’s fun, seeing what makes money and.
The way I think of it is like, the thing that I want to do is I want to teach and I want to share content that I think, is valuable, which I do on YouTube and through writing books and selling courses or products and software on the side, all of that stuff is purely just to fund the engine of free content.
so at least that’s how I think about it.
Andrew Warner: you know what? I wonder how do you think about yourself now that you’re not a doctor? It was such a part of my connection with you. you’d introduce yourself as a medical student, and I watch you introduce yourself as a doctor. And that’s the way that you presented yourself. And there’s such a, I don’t know, there are people.
Admire doctors. If you say you’re a YouTuber, there’s a what? Tell me more. And maybe some younger people are in admiration, but you don’t get the same level of respect. How do you handle that personally? And be open with me.
Ali Abdaal: So this was like one of the main things that kept me attached to the doctor thing for a lot longer than I, than it should have done. It was this idea of status and prestige and like, Oh, I can call myself a doctor. And that has some level of kudos. And I realized after a lot of soul searching that, if I were able to design my life, however I wanted, would it include practicing clinical medicine in a hospital a few hours a week?
It actually wouldn’t, it would include. Teaching on YouTube, writing books, reading cool stuff, learning cool stuff, traveling, hanging out with my friends. And so is the only reason why I’m sticking to this doctor thing because of the external perception of it? Because I know that some people follow me because of the doctor thing.
If let’s say even half my audience were to unfollow me because now they’re like, you’re a fraud now because you’re not a doctor anymore. So fuck you. even if that were the case, I would still want to be the sort of person that would live a life true to what I want to do rather than a life based on the perception that it has to other people.
So it’s still something I think about to this day. I think interestingly, if anyone’s listening to this and in that position of like traditional job versus thing on the side. I’ve got a, I’ve got a friend who, they’re a married couple. One of them is a doctor and the other one’s a YouTuber.
And when they introduce themselves, the person who says, I’m a doctor, that usually the response is, Oh, cool. what specialty do you do? Oh, cool. Do you enjoy it? Cool. And that’s where the conversation ends. But if you say you’re a YouTuber, it’s a more intriguing thing. It’s like, Oh, I didn’t realize that can make money.
How does it work? And you have a business as well. What? There’s a team like, Oh my goodness. And the YouTuber thing weirdly leads to more interesting conversations than the doctor thing. I dunno, I think it’s less about what other people think about it, but this is genuinely something that like, I was I had in my heart as a heavy thing for such a long time before I chose to shed that identity.
Andrew Warner: I wonder how you even get through that. What’s your process for doing the soul searching that you mentioned? How do you get to a place where you recognize, I accept, That other people’s ad admiration of the fact that I’m a doctor is meaningful to me. I accept that I have sunk costs in here and I’m going to give them up.
I accept that I’m going to forget this stuff and I’m still, how do you get to that understanding of what you’re giving up? And then the ability to say, yes, what’s your process.
Ali Abdaal: for me, my process always comes down to what would this look like as a lecture or as a YouTube video? So it was when I was planning a YouTube video called something like my decision to leave medicine. I was like, okay, let’s really break this down and let’s zoom out.
Let’s abstract it out. Medicine is just a job, right? Like, why does anyone do any job? Okay, you do a job to make money, you do a job for a meaningful connection, you do a job for friends, you do a job because you feel that it brings purpose to the world. Okay, cool. And you do a job for the status.
Fine. Those are the five things. So which of these is true for me? And I would just run various hypotheticals in my mind. let’s say I had a hundred million in the bank. What would I do? Let’s say I had a billion in the bank. What would I do? Let’s say someone said to me that you can never be a doctor ever again.
How would I feel about that? Let’s say I could design my perfect day. What looks, what does that look like? And from approaching this question from a bunch of different angles and also trying out what working part time as a doctor was like and realizing, Oh, I feel like it’s actually not that fun. At least for me, I realized, Hmm.
Okay. So the only reason to continue to do medicine, then it’s not money. It’s not fun. It’s not status. Maybe helping people. Okay. Maybe status and helping people are the big ones. and fulfillment. I actually get a lot of fulfillment out of teaching. So status and helping people are the only two reasons left.
why I’m doing medicine. let’s analyze the helping people thing. As a doctor, you know, some guy called, I think his name is Greg Lewis. He’s done a analysis in terms of consequently, what is the impact of an individual doctor in the healthcare system in, in a developed country, and on average, a given doctor would save seven lives in their entire career.
And if I wasn’t a doctor, the next best person would be a doctor because actually there’s a surplus of doctors in the UK for training programs. And so my counterfactual impact as a doctor is not huge. Running all these calculations helped me realize that the helping people thing. It wasn’t really about helping people.
It was about the feeling of helping people. And that is something that I do miss that I don’t get these days. Like when you’re a doctor and you’re, if I was the one who arranged the scan for a lady who’s had early pregnancy bleeding and she’s, I’ve been able to reassure her that her baby’s okay, that feels really nice.
It feels great. Making a video that 500, 000 people see feels a lot less nice. which is why I’m dabbling with more teaching in real life and doing lectures and seminars and stuff to get that feeling of it, but it was really like breaking this down into what are actually the factors that cause someone to do a job and how many of them are actually legit for me to continue doing medicine?
That was how I came to the realization that the only thing left was status. And do I want to live a life where I’m governed by the opinion of other people? Ideally not. So that, that made it easier.
Andrew Warner: So what you’re saying is you separate yourself out and you analyze it the way you would, if you are an outsider and you’re about, and you’re just weighing each aspect of what you’re giving up, what you’re doing and trying to be open with yourself about how you’re feeling about it.
Ali Abdaal: Absolutely. Yeah. And there was a really good book, Your Money or Your Life by Vicky Robin. That really helped me as well. She basically argues that the only reason to have a job is because it pays you money. And all of the other reasons that people say for having a job are all bullshit because you can get all of those from volunteering, you can get all of those from raising a family, you can get meaning and connection and stuff from volunteering at your church.
The only thing that makes a job a job is the fact you’re getting paid for it. And so if you weren’t getting paid, would you still choose to do the thing? And for me in medicine, if I wasn’t getting paid, would I still choose to do it? No. But for YouTube and teaching stuff online, if I wasn’t getting paid to do it, would I still do it?
Yes. Because that to me is more inherently meaningful than being a doctor, which is not true of everyone and I’m weird But that’s where I ended up.
Andrew Warner: I’m going to tell you, honestly, if gusto wasn’t paying me to talk about them, I wouldn’t, I’m going to tell you why you’re a business person. You know, this. Every freaking year, I had to go through and figure out who to 1099, who to make sure that I got the paperwork for, how much should I pay them.
It was insanely painful for something that’s so freaking basic. So my accountants would say, do you want us to do it? I’d go, no, I think I can handle this, I can handle other stuff. And then I’d regret not asking them to do it. I signed up for competitors, including one that I did a sponsorship for.
And I, this just wasn’t working. And then I discovered Gusto and I’d started talking about them. People will text me out of the blue and say, do you still like Gusto? How is Gusto for you? And I tell them the same thing that I say now that obviously it’s a paid subscription. It’s easy. It’s so beautiful.
It’s like the best looking software that I use for business. The worst is QuickBooks. I get to see exactly how much I’m paying. I get to see clear reports and the people I work with get to see that too. And it’s the way to manage all the way. You’re checking them out right now, aren’t you?
Ali Abdaal: I’m I’ve literally used what I suspect is your link gusto. com slash mixer G
Andrew Warner: mixergy and you use that, they’re going to let you use their software for free. This is payroll and benefits in one. Even if you don’t have full time employees, if you just have 1099 people, if you have just employees, if you have them all over the world, check them out. Gusto. com slash mixergy. Look at this time and attendance, hiring and onboarding, talent management.
It’s just beautifully laid out. Don’t you see, if you’re looking at that, you are someone who has taste. Don’t you look at that page and you go, you know what? They didn’t allow everyone to just throw their junk on this page. They kept it clean and organized, right?
Ali Abdaal: it’s so nice. I love it. This is so good. I love the icons It’s very much my vibe a successful business starts with a successful team mate gusto. Gusto looks sick.
Andrew Warner: Super elegant, very effective. Go to gusto. com slash Mixergy to use it for free. Thank you.
Ali Abdaal: That’s a good ad read very natural. I like it.
Andrew Warner: appreciate it.
Ali Abdaal: It’s like you’ve done this before.
Andrew Warner: Oh yeah. Tell me, did you try any other medium? Obviously I see you on Instagram and others. I feel like Instagram is more you like sharing your life on a personal level, but have you gone into the newsletter business?
Has that helped you? Have you expanded beyond YouTube?
Ali Abdaal: Yeah. So we’re, trying to basically be across all the platforms, for better or for worse. So we’ve got about 400, 000 subscribers on my weekly email newsletter. I’ve been doing that since 2018. So five years now, we’ve got maybe like 600, 000 on Instagram, 200K on TikTok, 100K on LinkedIn. We’re dabbling with all of these platforms.
Everything is broadly downstream of a YouTube video. Cause that’s the thing that feels core to me. I’m like, I, I really like long form video and so we’ll make a video, but then my team will convert it into like a tweet thread or a LinkedIn post or an Instagram carousel. recently, I say like two years ago, we got into YouTube shorts and so we’ll make videos in vertical format.
And we’ve got a team of animators that animates them in a really nice way. And then we post them on TikTok shorts. we’re doing all of these things, but really trying to leverage the thing that fundamentally I care about, which is long form YouTube videos.
Andrew Warner: Because there’s more money and more connection in long form YouTube videos. The short stuff is more consumed, but it’s not more deeply consumed. Am I right?
Ali Abdaal: Yeah. Great. I think a short form is more like top of funnel awareness. And then, The hope is that some proportion of those people convert into a long form subscriber or a newsletter subscriber. And actually most of the money we make from our courses, we don’t really sell to our YouTube audience.
We just sell it to our email list. So we use convert kit. We’ll have a once one click opt in, like for example, a black Friday deal that we just did, in my email that I sent to my entire list on Sunday, which is my weekly newsletter. I just started the email with something like, Hey guys, quick announcement.
we’re about to launch a really great discount for Black Friday for our YouTuber Academy. Click here if you’re interested. Boom. One click subscribe to the waiting list for Black Friday. So now this whole like seven day sequence of emails that we’ve teed up for the Black Friday offer is only sent to that some tiny segment of the audience that has already opted in.
And that means my newsletter can be relatively chill and like, Hey, I’m just sharing what I’m up to each week, but our sales and marketing machine works. On the segmented bits of our mailing list.
Andrew Warner: You know, I was on your website earlier today because I wanted to find out about the book, the feel good productivity. I was on it. I looked through it. I love how things slide and move. And I paid attention to it all. I totally missed the email newsletter on there. Because it’s not in your face. In fact, I’d like that now I see it on the bottom, right?
If I press the S key on my keyboard at any time, I can see the subscribe button with the subscribe pop up that comes up really elegant. I guess I just didn’t see this as such an important part of your business. And now that I look at it based on what you told me. I wonder, are you the one who’s writing the articles like, what would you do if money were no object?
Or is that someone else turning that into content based on what you’ve said in a YouTube video?
Ali Abdaal: so What would you do if money were no object is a newsletter that I wrote and when I write a newsletter We just copy and paste it onto the website as an article. So that’s one that I wrote myself But for example, we have a ultimate guide to growing on youtube Where we got a ghostwriter to write this 12, 000 word article based on my YouTube videos and based on my course, because we already had like 80 hours of video content and we just said to this ghostwriter, Hey, can you turn this into a amazing article?
And so that one wasn’t written by me.
Andrew Warner: The book, how is that to write?
Ali Abdaal: The book was interesting. A three year long journey. lots of ups and downs, lots of imposter syndrome along the way. I think more like, similar to what I hear, like running a startup is like, where it’s like some days are really good, some days are really bad, some days you feel like, why am I even doing this?
but now that it’s finished, I look back at the process with fondness. And I’m excited to write future books because now I’ve done it once. I know what the process is like. And so I know what are the tweaks I can make to make it more enjoyable and more, and more energizing. First time around, it was a little bit of a grind, but Hey, I’m really glad I did it.
Andrew Warner: I wrote a book too on pod, on how to do interviews, how to have conversations with depth. Frickin Nathan Barry. He talks about how you write, and then you discover ideas that you didn’t know you had before, and you go in depth and all that. And I go, all I’m discovering is that this is a tough process, and maybe it’s not meant for me.
And thank goodness I hired an editor to just get on calls with me every week to check in with me. And she had so much experience working with writers that she would say, Andrew, this is common. This happens. I’ve seen this before. Now here’s what you need to do. It was really challenging to get past that.
And I do look on it with fondness. I wonder how I would do it differently. I would definitely keep the editor weekly check ins. I would be really clear about what I wanted to teach, but also cared enough to explore because you do spend a lot of time trying to learn it. I would do focus mate so I could have one on one video sessions with someone to make sure I stay focused.
What would you do if you were writing the next book based on what you learned? How do you stay productive?
Ali Abdaal: So I think what I would do is, so firstly, I didn’t use a ghost writer. So this was a thing that I could have done that I had experience of, but there was something around writing a book that I wanted to be my own words. and so I decided that I was going to write most of it myself.
We had a research assistant, someone on our team who was amazing, and we did have an editor as well. And so when you work with a researcher at an editor, It often ends up being your words that were then transformed in various different ways. and I like that process. What I learned is, firstly, I would make sure I have the title and the thumbnail, i.
e. the title and the cover, and, the concept and the hook, like, really nailed before I started to write. Cause with this one, it’s like, I had an idea, I had a title, wrote a proposal, publisher accepted it. Then we gave it to feedback to this other guy who tore it to shreds. And then we had to rework the whole thing.
And then we did it a couple of times. And it was only like a year ago, like two years into the process that we finally got landed on the title of Feel Good Productivity. And that suddenly brought everything together. But it’s like making a YouTube video. If you try and make a video and then come up with the title later.
It will inevitably be less good than if you get the title first and then match the content to suit the title. I think also I would, yeah, I’d spend a lot of time in the outlining stage. Figuring out, okay, like for example, the next book I write, I like the idea of calling it feel good fitness because the first one is feel good productivity and the next one might be feel good fitness.
And so what I want to do for this one is like really know, okay, what’s the core message? What’s the hook? What’s the one line summary? What’s the five line summary? What’s the one page summary? What is the chapter summary? What are the outlines of each chapter and then each chapter I want to make into its own YouTube video and its own Twitter thread and its own LinkedIn post and its own Instagram story, so that I can battle test the ideas and get feedback on them in real time and then turn them into the stuff in the book once I’ve had all that feedback.
I didn’t do any of that with this one. So this one was a lot of just like labor of love, just sitting there reading research papers. But I didn’t really test any of the ideas on my audience, and I think that’s something I would like to do next time.
Andrew Warner: I think your team gave me, or meant to give me a preview copy of the book as we’re recording. This is still not public, but we’ll be publishing this when people can get it. So I don’t know the methodology. What are you teaching? what’s the process you’re teaching for me to be productive and feel good about it?
Ali Abdaal: basically the core thesis of the book is that the secret to productivity is to find a way to make your work feel good. Basically to find a way to make it fun. and it turns out that this is an idea that’s actually very well scientifically validated. They’ve done studies where they get people in a room, in a lab, and they split them up into a few different groups.
And one of the groups they give some candy to, and they get them to solve a creativity puzzle or whatever. And the other group, they give like, I don’t know, a book or something like that, and they get them to solve the same puzzle and they find that the group that got the candy perform better on this test of creativity.
they get people in a group, together and they. stress them out by telling them they’re going to be preparing for a public speech. And then some of the people they show like a really… It’s a really happy and, joyful movie clip. Some of the group gets seen something sad. Some of the group gets shown something neutral.
And weirdly, they find that the group that watched the feel good film, their stress levels reduce and they return to their physiological baseline even quicker. And so there’s all this, all sorts of weird things that positive emotions seem to do to us. one of the theories is that, back in caveman times.
If you were experiencing positive emotions, if you were happy and serene and joyful, it meant that you were safe. It meant that a tiger’s not coming at you. It meant that you’re chill. And that encouraged you to go out and explore and to broaden your repertoire of actions and to go explore what’s in that mind, what’s in that cave.
Let me build a friendship. But if you’re feeling negative emotions, you’re like, fear and anger and disgust and sadness. That’s a sign that your survival is threatened. And so you’re like, shit, I just need to get out of here. It really narrows your focus and you spend a lot of energy in this high stress state with like adrenaline and cortisol coursing through your system.
And after I came across the studies that talked about this idea of positive emotions. I realized that actually this is this has been the secret to my productivity for such a long time Whenever I was struggling with studies from medical school or like doing my youtube channel while working as a doctor It’s like I always found a way to make it fun because I found that if it was enjoyable and energizing I didn’t need to use discipline or willpower or grit or any of that crap
I would just do it. no one ever struggles with discipline when it comes to watching Netflix or playing video games, because those things are inherently joyful, they’re inherently fun. But we struggle with discipline when it comes to working, studying for our exams, or working on a boring aspect of our pitch deck for our investor meeting, or whatever the thing might be.
And so the whole idea of the book is, what are the scientifically validated methods that we can actually use? to make work a little bit more fun so that we become more productive, but also in a way productivity isn’t really the point like productivity gets people in. Then you realize that finding a way to make your work a bit more enjoyable and energizing is just good for your whole life and not just for your productivity.
Andrew Warner: All right, let’s see this in action, if you don’t mind, and two different things. I’ll come up with something basic. This interview will be done. I’m going to need to post it up on my site. There are things that I need to do. Come up with a good headline for this, come up with some good copy for it, and find the right photo for you.
I’ve got to do that. It’s only a short amount of time, but it’s such pain because what, if you don’t like the headline, what if other people don’t resonate with it and so on that I don’t want to do it. If I want to be more productive, what’s, how does this feel good approach help me? What do I do?
Ali Abdaal: so I would ask you a question.
What is something you can do to make the process? of doing these tasks 10 percent more enjoyable if we just throw some ideas out there.
Andrew Warner: I’ll give you two. One is disconnect and go do it in a more fun, interesting place. We’ve got this campground that I developed on our property here. I would go sit there with a fire that I created so that I can, I’ve got a chimney so I could start the fire quickly.
I go do that. That makes it more interesting. Now I get to treat myself, and this becomes the excuse. The other one is to be a little bit freer with the writing. To be more outrageous and not care about what you think. to let myself even say this is a stupid productivity book by another one.
Not that I would ever do that, but I mean to give myself enough room that I don’t worry about how you feel or the audience feels and I could just be as open even if it’s insulting because this is what I’m really feeling. So those two approaches.
Ali Abdaal: Amazing. So both of those touch on ideas that we talk about in the book.
so the thing around, changing up your environment, the way that I approach, tedious tasks is by, I, I literally, back when I had a computer monitor, because right now I don’t, because I’m a nomad y world, but I, I had a post it note on my computer monitor that said, what would this look like if it were fun?
Which is a sort of mirror of the Tim Ferriss question, what would this look like if it were easy? But I would ask myself, what would this look like if it were fun? And we can always come up with ways to make something tedious just a little bit more enjoyable, turning it into an adventure. You know, back when I was studying, I used that exact strategy.
I would go to different coffee shops. I would go and sit like on the grass outside one of the colleges instead of being cooped up in my library Because like it’s just a bit of a nicer environment. I feel like it’s more of an adventure. I can treat myself It’s a cool thing So there’s something about changing the environment that can always make things more fun And I think to your second point around like being freer Uh, this is so the first chapter of the book is about play and one of the core conditions that we need to feel Playful is for the stakes to be low So, for example, Roger Federer does not feel playful when he’s defending his Wimbledon title, because the stakes are too high.
It’s too serious. he might look like he’s having, but if you look at his face, he’s like full on in the midst of battle. It’s not that playful. Whereas the way to make things playful is to have high engagement, but low stakes. So what you’re talking about here is just, giving yourself more permission to be free, to have a little bit more fun with the language, to take it with a little bit less seriousness than you otherwise would.
And there’s a quote from the philosopher Alan Watts, which is don’t be serious, be sincere. it’s an idea from, I think, from Zen Buddhism where, the angels fly because they take themselves lightly. So how can you treat whatever you’re doing with a little bit more lightness?
That often, that mindset shift helps really transform anything to make it a little bit more enjoyable. And therefore makes you more productive, more creative, less stressed, all the good things as well.
Andrew Warner: All right, then let’s go to something harder. And then I want to end this interview with where do you think this whole game of content creation is going?
But harder productivity challenge, you need to reorganize your team. That means Read what everyone has written, give them feedback, check out all the documentation that the company has, organize that. That’s just a drudgery to go through documentation, especially if it’s out of date. Organize it, figure out who needs to be told that this is not working, and then tell them very clearly.
Just really go in there and adjust all the different levers of the business. That is an exhausting thing. That leads to low energy, low enthusiasm. What would you do to make sure that got productive?
Ali Abdaal: so three Ps. The first three chapters of the book are play, power, and people.
So play,I would probably do it away from the office where I can feel like, feel that sense of adventure. Maybe do it outdoors. So much evidence that doing things in nature helps feel more productive.
I’d probably have background music. So I really like going on YouTube and typing in Lord of the Ring’s ambience and you’ll get these concerning hobbits theme from the Shire from the Lord of the Rings and I’ll play that through my airpods while I’m doing this thing.
I’ll lower the stakes in my own mind. I’ll be thinking, okay, I’m just gonna have fun with it. It’s not that serious. Fundamentally, who gives a shit if the documentation is a bit out of date? Not the end of the world. And I would just tell myself those sorts of things to lower the amount of seriousness that I’m approaching the situation with.
Then we’ve got power. Power is about doing things in your own way. It’s about taking responsibility and ownership. And so I’d be thinking. What’s, an interesting way that I could maybe go about this? Could I maybe use ChatGPT or something? Could I use, like, I don’t know, Microsoft Office Copilot?
Because all of our things are Word documents. Can I get the AI to summarize some stuff? Like, hmm, interesting. Can I get the AI while I’m here to turn it into a poem that can just lift up the spirits of my team just a little bit while I’m doing this drudgery and tedious thing? And then people. Everything is more energizing if we do it with people who energize us.
So I’ll be saying to my friends, my family, my co workers, Hey, I’ve got to do a bunch of tedious admin tomorrow. Anyone fancy coming over and we’ll have a co working session in the local coffee shop. We’ll order some pizza. Let’s, make it a bit of fun. Everyone probably has some random admin shit that they have to deal with.
We get some people together. It becomes a party. And now those are like, that’s pulling out all the stops to like really make this thing feel a lot better, which is probably going to make you feel more productive, but also make going to make you happier because now it doesn’t feel like you’ve lost a whole day of your life to this boring ass crap
it feels like, oh, you’ve actually had a bit of fun along the way.
Andrew Warner: All right, I like that. I especially like doing with other people. I find a lot of the reasons why some work becomes drudgery is that I’m just spinning my wheels alone on it. All right. I remember when I interviewed Emma Cheer, he was creating a video, streaming platform for gamers.
And the whole thing seems so silly. But if you believed in the software startup world, you knew some of these ideas were going to kill, and it became Twitch. A lot of the people who created these little dinky pieces of software ended up creating really big software companies, and today I see them.
they’re incredibly wealthy, and their businesses outlive them. Immature hasn’t been a Twitch company still grown. I wonder where the creator space is going. where do you see the longevity here?
Ali Abdaal: Yeah, I think it’s hard because creator is such a broad term. Like I would say an author is also a creator. It’s just that their platform is books. A TikTok YouTuber is like a filmmaker is a creator in a way and their platform is movies. So it’s sort of depends on what the platform is. But I think really where it’s going, I think where a lot of Where people will get the most rich is in using the fact that when you are a creator and you’re building an audience, you can then, that, that becomes an amazing marketing channel.
The one thing that we’re doing, I was talking to Nathan Barry about this and speaking to a bunch of other entrepreneur friends is, you know, one of the issues that every startup has, especially early stage is distribution. So startups make money with their, with a really good product, but they have no distribution, which is why first time founders focus on product, but second time founders focus on distribution.
Creators have a lot of distribution, but they don’t have a product. And so what will it look like for a startup to partner with a creator, or a creator to co found something with a startup founder? this is something that I’ve, I’m doing with a productivity app, uh, like literally as we speak. It’s called a VoicePal.
It’s like the idea is that you can double your productivity using your voice. And this is a thing that I partnered with a friend of mine who’s a third time founder. He’s built and sold two companies and he’s hired a dev and a designer and he’s product managing this thing. And I’m like the audience co founder, as it were, where I have co founder status.
He and I hop on strategy calls once in a while, but my main goal is to get the product to a point where I use it every day. And then to mention the fact to my audience that I happen to use this product every day and organically share it on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube and things like that, and that will drive tons and tons of traffic fingers crossed to this product, which, it’s basically because my creator audience has been used as a marketing channel.
I also then easily have a sense of what people like me would want because. If I make the product for myself, my audience are people who are like me, who follow me because they vibe with me. You get all these synergies. And I think that’s really where the real wellness to be made in the creator economy, by =building businesses that tap into the creator’s audience.
Andrew Warner: I see. And so maybe it’s software, maybe it’s physical products, the way we talked about Linus from Linus Tech Tips does. Maybe it’s something else. Do you think it’s that and not just content creation with advertising? Do you think it needs to be? Do you think it will, that the longer term, stable, strong, big business will be from creating something beyond content or not necessarily?
Ali Abdaal: Yeah, I think. Probably. so Mr. Beast, is a good example. he has built his own physical product. Feastables, Beast Burger, which is now shutting down. but the thing that he says is that, his platform is so big, but even though it’s so big, there is no sponsor that would pay him a million dollars for a sponsorship, which is how much he would charge.
And so he might as well just make his own product and benefit from all the sponsorship dollars going into it. So I think yes, creators can make money through just content and advertising. It’s not a very durable business model. Every creator I know who makes the bulk of their money from sponsorships hates it.
Because now you are indebted to the company who’s giving you the sponsors. They tie you to deadlines. And you end up being an employee rather than a freedom fighting entrepreneur, as it were.
So I do think the goal is to be able to sell something. Now, that something might be an online course. That something might be a book, or two, or three, or four, or five, or six, or seven. That something might be a software product, or a hardware product, or food. but I’m very bullish on software because obviously, for all the reasons that software has tons of advantages, distribution, cost of distribution, scalability, the internet, the fact that tools are evolving every single day.
We tried doing physical products. We are continuing to try doing physical products. It’s really hard, because it’s just, you have to deal with like actually negotiating with the stores to get them on the shelf. it’s not like software where, you know, if, if it’s good and people land on the website, then they’ll sign up I just love the idea of doing this with software.
Andrew Warner: I know what you mean. I got these teeth whitening things from, one of my listeners. I bought it. It just turned out it was from them. They did everything right. It rained the day it was delivered. And in San Francisco, where I lived at the time, delivery sucked and they just left it out in the rain. And so, that’s one of the issues with physical products. Digital, you get a lot more control.
Alright, I hear your point. You’re saying, look… Create great content and you explore it as you did it, right? You just kept trying tech makes sense. I dig productivity. We’ll do that. I’ll dig something else. We’ll do that. Wherever the audience, whatever the audience loves, and I love providing and for you, it’s teaching around these different topics and then it’s, let’s try selling different things.
We’ll try courses. I’m not going to be ashamed. I’m just going to create a course and sell it because that’s where the audience is. That’s what, that’s, what’s helpful for them. I’ll try physical products. I’ll try software, I’ll try whatever it is, and along the way I’m going to just keep thinking about what would make it more fun.
And yeah, it stinks that there’s going to be sun in my face if I happen to be in Tulum, Mexico. But, that’s what makes it more fun for me to do this podcast and to keep recording. Alright, I think I got you, dude.
Alright, I’ve been a big fan. I’m enjoying watching you build and grow. I’m looking forward to the book. It’s called Feel Good Productivity. And the website for it looks freaking awesome. I usually would say to people, go over to Amazon, but I think one of the things that you downplayed in this interview is your taste. Like, I don’t care. I could write or I could do video. Your videos did well because they had good video quality.
Even early ones. This bokeh effect back six years ago when I know you had to have a good camera, not the iPhone. The site splits out to show me the book cover as I scroll through it. Anyway, the site is aliabdal. com and of course you’ll see him on YouTube. And I thank Gusto for helping me make this interview happen.
Gusto. Mixergy. Thanks, Ollie. Thank you, Andrew. And thank you, Gusto. Cool. Right.