Full Transcript for 11 Marketing Rules every Creator needs to know: Kate Tolo

Today's guest is Kate Tolo. You probably don't know her name, but you definitely know her work because of this guy, Brian Johnson. He's the guy who wants to live forever, and you've probably seen some pretty wild posts from him online. Some quick context on Brian. In 2013, he sold his payments company to PayPal for $800 million. Then he had a lot of time on his hands.

So he decided that the most interesting problem left for him to solve... was death. So he started spending over $2 million a year to turn himself into a science experiment, trying to prove that he could stop aging, or at least reverse it. But he was doing this privately until five years ago, Kate pitched him a crazy idea. What if the science experiment was done in public? Kate is one of the sharpest content minds we've ever had on the show.

And she walks us through the 11 rules that they use to go from 2,000 followers to over 10 million with the actual emails, tweets, and thumbnails printed out to teach us the strategy. This episode of The Colin Smear Show is sponsored by our friends at Shopify, which is the platform that we've been using since we started our careers online.

And it's the platform that all of our creator friends use to run their businesses online. This episode is a lot about how Kate and Brian built their supplement brand blueprint off the back of the content they're creating. And this is a really common business model today on the internet. Make content that reaches a specific audience, build a product or an e-commerce brand that creates products for that audience.

And this pipeline is so built out that there's actually a natural integration on YouTube to put your products underneath your videos. But something that I noticed recently is that for our brand, Press Publish, YouTube is our number one traffic source. We actually have a really low conversion rate from people who click in from YouTube. And the way that I know that is because of Shopify Sidekick.

So when you log into your Shopify, you can just chat with your Shopify store to actually get more information. And so I asked the question, how could we convert more customers? And it brought to light that there's an opportunity for us to convert more people from YouTube. One of the suggestions that it made was actually to create collections specific to videos.

So if somebody is watching a video on our channel and they see products in that video, they can click through and buy those products. We've been working with the Shopify team since we started the Colin and Samir show. And one thing that I really love is their mission to create more entrepreneurs. And they do that through providing the tools, access, and education for somebody like me who doesn't know that much about e-commerce to actually log in to Shopify and learn quickly the moves I can make to support our brand.

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So if you're somebody who creates content and has been thinking about launching a business online or just curious about launching an online business, go to shopify.com slash Colin and Samir. Now for our episode with Kate Tolo. All right, Kate, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, you guys. And who are you? I am the person behind Brian Johnson's brand that a lot of people don't realize.

I'm his co-founder. I'm also his girlfriend. And we started this project together five years ago. So a lot of people know of Brian Johnson. All of that viral content work, he and I have been working on together for the last five years. So everything from what we see on YouTube to what we see on Twitter to even like you guys made a Netflix documentary all about his pursuit of

Immortality. Immortality. Yeah. Of not dying. Yeah. Yeah. So like five years ago, we started with 2000 Instagram followers. Now, after just five years, we've got the Netflix documentary, 6 million followers. We just raised $60 million from a star-studded lineup from... to Kim K, Paris Hilton, like pick your Jay Shetty. We reach about 300 million people monthly through press alone.

So the thing that makes us, I think, unique in the world is not only have we been able to master the content game in one area, we've been able to do it across many, not only on social, but also in press and also newsletters. And so what I'm gonna show to you today, when we first started this, I didn't even know what the word marketing meant.

Like everything I've learned has been on the job. And so I'm going to try and like simplify this into one big package of everything we've learned across the last five years. Your baseline is... I have a really interesting story to tell. Like if you told this story at a party, people are immediately interested. There's a guy who's trying to live forever and he's, you know, taking a hundred pills a day.

He's testing his son's blood. He's like, there's, there's so much in there that you're like immediately without even making a video, you're like, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more. That's right. Yeah. So I'm curious about like, what you've learned about even YouTube content creation or

internet content creation when not everybody has a story like this. Yes. In developing all of this, I even tested it on my own channels. I had like 2000 followers on Instagram as well, something like that. I published my first video and I got like over a million views and that was on air pollution in India using the same framework. And so that's like, you know, I do genuinely believe, and we post a lot on Twitter, for example, about very benign topics like sleep, and we can still get a lot of traction behind it.

So yes, there's an element of the raw core interesting. I think that that's how we got started. But this framework has, in my experience, mass appeal, even for benign topics. Got it. Should we get into it? Yeah, let's do it. So the first thing I wanted to share...

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is how to create viral content. I think a lot of people don't know the space that they're operating in. They have a really complicated relationship with the algorithm. And so the way I like to think about it is I imagine that I'm at a nightclub, and let's just take Instagram, for example. Imagine you're at the Instagram nightclub. It's the most exclusive club in town.

Inside, it's far few slots than what's happening on the outside, far few people on the inside than what's happening on the outside. And everyone's having the best time of their lives. They're dancing. It's vibing. It's like the place to be. Inside the club, you can also have, you know, your posters up on the wall and that's kind of like paid advertising.

But to really get inside the club, you need to be one of the people and you need to be contributing in vibe to the club. The thing between you and being inside the club is the bouncer. And the bouncer is the algorithm. And you're currently in line trying to get into the club. And so there's a couple of things to note about this. Your only job in creating content is to understand what the bouncer needs.

You need to befriend the bouncer. The bouncer wants people inside to have a great time. So the bouncer never wants the people to leave. It's dystopian, but it's true. If they do leave, they want to bring their friends, come back tomorrow and just like constantly be in the club. So the bouncer is looking for highly emotional, engaging content.

Doesn't really care what kind of emotion, whether it's hopeful, sad, shocking, scary, insightful, educational, some sort of... He wants the people on the inside to feel deeply. And the good thing about the bouncer is that that's the exchange. You don't need to worry about how many followers you have, whether or not to post every Tuesday or not, whether or not to post 100 times at one time.

It's just create good content that people on the inside have a good time with. And the other thing that I think a lot of people don't realize about the bouncer is that you can try a hundred times. And if you don't succeed, that's actually good because the people on the inside don't ever see. So if you get a hundred views, there's literally no risk for that.

There's no downside. So the best thing to do is to intuitively feel the relationship with the bouncer. Post, post, post. If one of your videos gets 200 views versus your average of 100 views, there's some sort of signal there that you can start to follow. And there's no risk in continuing to post. So I always say like try and try and try and get inside the algorithm.

So that's how I think about content. So the way I heard that is like you want to be the person who walks in with a tray of shots, right? Yes. Right. Totally. Equivalently to what are you providing to the party that makes the party better? A hundred percent. Is the mental model of how you think about it. Yes. Yeah. It's like you're walking up to the bouncer with like new things in your hand.

I also like the visual of if you fail and the bouncer says you can't get in, no one inside knows you couldn't get in anyway. Yeah. Yeah, there's literally no risk. And in fact, you're highly, and the cool thing is the bouncer is on your side. Like the bouncer is like, if you come with something good, great, love you, come on in. Like, so it's not this, people have this like mysterious relationship.

It's like, no, they just want the people on the inside to have a good time. Like that's your only job. You know, it feels like in today's world, it does feel extremely high stakes to not get in. Yes. It feels like you will be laughed at in some shape or form, right? Or like that. Yeah. But it's interesting though to say no one will know. It's literally the opposite truth.

Samir and I often talk about this party analogy in terms of brands. Like if you're going to partner with a brand, it's like inviting a friend to the party, right? So you want to make sure that you bring a brand who can hang out at the party and elevates the experience for everyone so that they're not like, oh, I don't want that person coming back anymore.

100%. But I never really thought about the fact that I too should be thinking about- What you're bringing to the party. Yeah. I think it's a really good, that's a really helpful model, honestly. Like what are we bringing to this party to make it a better party? So Instagram is one club, but you've got like a whole lineup of clubs. You've got, you know, YouTube, all these social places, but you also got the New York Times.

I think a lot of people don't realize that literally any company that puts out content these days is a nightclub. So the New York Times homepage is a highly curated, optimized homepage, just like the YouTube homepage, of the various title thumbnails of their stories. And that you best believe they're A-B testing that to figure out what does their audience, the people inside their club, best enjoy with.

And maybe that's more of like a slightly upscale, like slightly more New York bougie vibe for their club. And so you're trying to create, like as a journalist, that's now their job, they're content creators. And same thing for even take something like an

iPhone application home screen. That is a club too. And if Uber Eats is thinking about they're competing for 10 slots on your homepage, they need to make theirs the best vibe they possibly can to compete with the various other things that are trying to get your attention. So we live in this attention economy nowadays where everyone is operating with the same nightclub model.

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So should we get into this? Let's get it. Because it feels like previewing. This is it. What you guys see on the table here are my 11 rules for virality. And so this is number one, never assume, always test. Because even someone who's been in this world for a long time and has a pretty strong bias to what's going to work, always test. So that's example number one.

So now we're inside the email, and this is above the fold. So the subplot line's the same. The only thing we're testing here is the copy above the product. So just two copywriting examples.

By the way, just to clarify, this... This is what got me and I'm a subscriber to this. No way. So you know the answer? I can tell you what got me, but I have purchased this on a subscription and I've been a subscriber for the past 18 months. Amazing. Take it every morning. Hey, it's awesome. Yeah, there's two, what would you call these? Promotions? Like how do you just pitches? Calls to action? Yeah.

Calls to action. One says, this is for Blueprint's Longevity Mix. It says, nutritionally comparable to 1,808 calories of food, 13 health actives to support energy, metabolism, recovery, and vitality. Start Longevity Mix. The other one says, eat kilos of food or have one scoop. Drink these 13 key nutrients daily. I'm going to definitively say B.

Um, yeah, I would say B just out of simplicity. But now I'm second guessing because of the word nutritionally, but let's just both go B. That would be correct. Yeah. And so my argument would also be the same. That's the cool thing about content is you can never really know what actually worked or didn't work, right? It's just a guess. But my guess would also be the simplicity here, the easy to understand.

Also, it feels visually like kilos of food. You can kind of imagine what that looks like. The word calories is something that people care about. Whereas the nutritionally, it almost starts to get dense in people's minds. The word nutritionally is, yeah, it's very dense. And I think What we've learned in copywriting is the mix of emotional and rational sentences, right? Or even pitches.

Yes. And that you should over-index on the emotional, right? Like somebody saying, jeans at $60 or under, it's like you're mostly telling me the rational part of my brain, which doesn't really drive as much decision-making as the emotional part. Totally. But if you said like,

I mean, even you look at Levi's, like it rarely pitches you the rational thing. It just shows you a cool lifestyle. Or like Wrangler, it's showing you a cool lifestyle. So here it's like eat kilos of food or have one scoop. That's more emotional where it's like, oh, cool. I could either do the hard thing or the easy thing. Yes. Yes. Which I guess is also irrational.

So number two. You can try and try again and actually failure is invisible. That's so interesting because I feel like failure is wildly visible. It's one of my anxieties. We may be a slightly different case, though, because we make videos about often making videos. And so our audience is very plugged in in the moment that one of our videos doesn't do well.

They're there immediately to even try and workshop it with us. It's not always a hate comment. Yeah. Oh, I know this doesn't do too well. Yeah. This isn't doing great. So I think we're a bit of a different case. I functionally agree with you here. Yeah. But... It also depends on where you get to with your brand because failure is invisible in the beginning.

If that's the case, if 30,000 people watch 20 videos and typically you want to hit like 200,000 or something like that, even in that case, like I don't want to diminish the 30,000, but like that's practically invisible for the scale that you're trying to get at. And so those 30,000 people, maybe you can relate to them Because that's true for Instagram too.

Even if I post... If I've got 2,000 followers and I post a video and it gets 100 views, it's going to feel the same as what you're talking about. Those 100 people that watched are probably going to be closest people to me that the algorithm served the content to. And so they're the ones that are going to see this failure. But in the grand scheme of things, it's not...

So like in someday when you guys have 20 million followers, subscribers, that 30,000 number is going to feel insignificant. You know what I'm saying? And so can you relate to it in that same way now? Yeah, hard for me to think about that because I think as I'm getting older, I'm getting more astonished by smaller numbers. So like 30,000 people watching something, if they watched for a long period of time, it actually feels almost more substantial to me now than, you know, probably four years ago when it was like, it needs to be 700,000 or a million people.

Harder for me to conceptualize that amount of people. But I understand what you're saying. The basis of this, I think, is correct that If 100 people watch an Instagram reel, that would give me a lot of anxiety, but it's like 100 people watched it and the other people didn't even see it. I think sometimes it depends how you value the platform too.

For TikTok, for me, I couldn't care less personally if something got 100 views or 10 million. It's just like I don't really feel it in the same way. Whereas YouTube, it's just so core to who we are. Yeah. Yeah, and also the relationship is so rich on YouTube where like it feels like you really do know these people because you sit with them for so long.

So yeah, I get that. Okay, should we look at number three? So this is start in text first. And so this is a philosophy that I try to tell the team on how to write content. And I always tell them start in text first, because if you can perfect the text storytelling, everything becomes... 1000% agree. Like as a visual person who hates copywriting, I still start in text.

Does it read like an essay? If it does, then it's a good story. Or like you can find the gaps in the story if you write the essay. Yes, exactly. So here is an example of this. So I'm gonna give you each this and just flick through them.

So what you have in your hands is a text format and you start with that. And then how do you visualize that in imagery comes next. Got it. That's cool. Yeah. So this says five years ago, I decided to become a scientific experiment. I peed in cups, plucked my hair, ejaculated into containers, spit in tubes, ultrasounds, MRIs, sequence my genome, a bunch of list of things that was done.

And then it says, if it can be measured, we measured it. And so then we're seeing images of basically the reality of this stuff happening, the visuals against this. That's right. The B-roll, basically. let's say I'm trying to do a product photo shoot, you know, like without that anchoring storytelling, I might decide to put my product against a white wall, take a photo of it.

But if you look at it from the lens of, well, this is a scientific experiment and I have this clear story, then all of a sudden you have a Petri dish as the container for your product. Oh, I see. So like these capsules being photographed, this is product photography. Yes. That's on our website. That is how we sell our essential capsules. I see.

Okay. That's really good. And this tells the story. Yes. That this is the

summation of science. Yes. That's right. That's right. That's really good. That's good. That's really good. I'm glad. Yeah. I think what we're saying here feels so fundamental. Both of us grew up playing sports. And I think about this all the time of like the coaches would always preach fundamentals. Mm-hmm. And I remember I would like, you would hear it.

And as Stephen Bartlett says, it would turn into wallpaper. Like everyone said it so often that you'd be like, whatever, let me, I don't even know what you're talking about anymore. And you say the fundamentals. And I think about that in the context of content creation now of what are the fundamentals that you overlook so easily. And it's even down to recently, like we were doing photo shoots without reference photos.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. That is such a simple thing to do of like, what is the photo we're trying to take? Yeah. Let's have a reference photo. Yeah. Articulate it first. Just let's just see it so everyone knows what we're trying to do rather than we'll take some photos. It has been, I mean, like substantially different. Game changer. Yeah. And what you're showing us here, I think is like beyond even reference photos, what's the story we want someone to gather from the photo? Correct.

Exactly. That's yeah, that's really good. I firmly agree with start and text first. Amazing. I love that. How to write text though, first. That's quite a difficult challenge, but it's actually quite simple. And so the way I think about it is three steps on writing my, if I go down into a Google document, I'm like, okay, I want to tell a story about sleep.

So the first step is articulate in words as simply as possible. Don't worry about marketing what you're trying to say. So frequently when we're trying to storytell, we're not even clear on what we're trying to say. Then I take that and I rewrite it from the value of how can I create value for the person listening? So I take that exact wording and I say, okay, how can I create value? And I rewrite it.

Then the third step is I say, what is the most gossipy element of this text? And then I pull it up to the front. Is there something you guys would want to go viral?

I'm terrified of virality. I mean, let's think about what we're marketing right now, like Press Publish LA. I think our event is a great one to stick with. We're having an event on May 28th called Press Publish LA, yeah. Okay, cool. Tell me about it. It's very much this moment we're bringing 500 creators and people in the entertainment industry to discuss the future of media, both from like panels that happen on stage but also just to be in the same room it's at the fox studios lot in la and it's this acknowledgement of the merging of these two worlds of the independent digital creator and the institution that has been hollywood have kind of finally come to a head and

agreed they have to figure out how to work together we've seen that through the headlines of like Netflix making deals with creators. We've seen it through like YouTube is now carrying the Oscars. There's this like meshing and acknowledgement that the future of entertainment is happening both from these independent players as well as the legacy players.

So we want to be responsible for getting them in the same room. Okay. And now can we take all that and what value does it bring to the person who comes to that room? The attendee in the room. Yeah. I think there's

One element, which is community. Everyone who comes feels like they've met someone that they can work with, learn from. It's also application only. So there's a bit of an exclusivity feeling of like, oh, I got to be in that room in that moment. And of course, there's like tangible takeaways of what they learn on stage. So they feel like they're ahead.

Yeah, I think we have always felt this more internally, right? But like the value proposition of these events is like don't get left behind. Oh. Like we are pushing the narrative of what's happening in the future. Yeah. Right. We're informing you tangibly how do you engage with the future of this industry. Yeah. So there's a bit of like internally I have that thought in my head.

Yeah. So it's like it's always like as a creator, don't you feel like it's a constant treadmill? It's actually lonely. Oftentimes you're working on your own. You're on this treadmill where you have to keep up with all the new content coming down the pipeline. We exist so that we can help you get ahead of it. And we've got this amazing new thing.

Have you noticed that all these companies are starting to get bought up? All these YouTube channels are getting bought up by these big conglomerate media companies. We're actually getting ahead of it. You don't want to be left behind in this situation. Come to our event. We're actually having both parties here. You can benefit from it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Something like that. Value for the person. What's the most gossipy part of this experience? Like, by the way, the gossipy thing is like writer's room. Like the sworn agreement is that anything goes. You kind of need to let your brain go to the absolute edges of what's possible. Yes. Mm-hmm. That was actually one of the first things that when we went to North Carolina and spent time with Mr.

Beast six years ago, he said that exact thing. Yeah. He said, you got to let your brain go to the furthest extreme and then pull it back. Yes. Find what's on brand and what's off brand. But to give you the most gossipy thing, I mean, I think the fact that it's application only has a gossipy element to it because there's people who get in and don't get in.

I don't know how to define gossipy beyond this like high school feeling of it. What about if you're with a friend alone right now and describing the event and there's no cameras rolling, what would you say to them to get them most hyped about this event? It's the thing that you- Definitely who's in the room. Yeah, who's in the room? I would tell them about who's in the room.

Yeah. Yeah. Who's in the room? There's very cool executives from a lot of- At least for me growing up in LA, a lot of my like dream studios like A24 and Lionsgate and Sony and Fox. So there's like decision makers all these places. There's also like the core team of YouTube, Google, Adobe, like real decision makers. People have come to our events before and walked out with their biggest deal ever.

Mm-hmm. So I would say the pitch to creators is like the decision makers are in the room. It's also like, and this number has probably already changed, but more than 40 creators with over a million subscribers on YouTube. And the collective YouTube reach is right now 568 million. Collective YouTube reach, collective streaming reach or whatever, like you have collective...

financial value from these big companies. So it's like for the first time in history, these three things are coming together and it's everyone from like the biggest creators in the world, the most highest senior executives at the largest media companies. That's the gossipy part that comes. And ideally you can name drop a couple of people, but.

Yeah, that's cool. Whenever I'm writing a story, I literally do that three-step process because it's very hard to sit down and do all that at once in your brain. Whereas if you sit down and you say, what am I trying to say? You write that out. Okay, what's the value for them? You write that out. And you say, okay, what's the most gossipy thing about this? And you write that out.

Do you mean- So much easier. When you say gossipy, is it like the easiest to talk about or like the most, not salacious, but the most kind of like- It is. Evocative? It is. It's the most evocative. Yeah, it's the most evocative. And that can be as simple as a scientific study. It doesn't need to be off brand. I think a lot of people think gossipy and salacious and they think, oh, you know, I don't want to say that or whatever.

But sometimes, like, for example, I have an example in here that 90% of visible skin aging is from UV radiation. Like that's gossipy when you're trying to sell UV. Or when you're trying to say, hey, I don't want you to go in the sun. If you say 90% of your skin aging is from UV, that's the most gossipy part of that story. Yeah, there's an element of Seth Godin's like remarkable, being remarkable, being worth making a remark about.

Yeah. Or easy to repeat. That's something that we definitely try, but it's a good note. Yeah. And I really find you have to be okay with being in a writer's room where it's just like, let it all out and it's going to feel uncomfortable. And I've had, we've done this with our employees and the way we say it is like, Hey, if you have a thought, like, maybe I shouldn't say this.

It's probably, you're probably onto something. That's the kind of internal compass. Okay. Should we keep going? Yeah, let's go.

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So we already kind of covered this, but this is the know your ticket price. So here's a couple examples. I started with YouTube because I know you guys know that. Okay, I'm looking at four thumbnails right now. So the ticket price here is title thumbnail. It's pretty obvious probably for your audience. What's the next one? New York Times.

Journalists aren't educated on exactly how they should be thinking about writing their articles to get the most of their articles. And so if I'm a journalist, that's my ticket price. So really, this is a different content creators, different ticket prices. What's the next one? Email, email. So subject line. Yeah, subject line. And that's an actual screenshot of my inbox.

And I'm trying to say to the Blueprint team, look at us in comparison to whom you're competing with. You're in a sea of other emails. How are we going to stand out? The app notification screen. we went through already, but this idea of like you're competing in a sea of notifications, how the first three words in that need to be non-salesy, create enough intrigue that someone wants to open up the notification.

So this one is from Blueprint. It says, when you come home today, leave your shoes at the door. The first four steps into your house tracks 85% of the outside worlds. I'm guessing germs. Contaminants, yeah. Contaminants. So that's true. I should be taking my shoes off immediately. Yes, it's a very easy hack for longevity. Like it doesn't take any of your time.

Take your shoes off. Yeah, like lead. I think it's so interesting that basically the two things that you're suggesting here is one, something that we say of like we've written down these principles of what it means to be a creator in today's world. Number one is being contextually aware. And this is what you're saying. Yes. You got to know what's around you.

Yes. To stand out. Yes. If you're creating by yourself without context, you're not going to stand out. Yes. And number two is writing is everything. Yes. Like this is all an exercise of writing. Yes. Everything that you've shown us is like, it's really all copyright. It's all copywriting. And there's different rules of the road for each of these platforms.

Yeah. That's a good way of thinking about it. And I absolutely hate writing. And so it just goes to show how much like anybody can do this at home. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's see what's next. Number five.

So this is ruthlessly create value. This is one of the core principles. And so I'm going to give you two examples here, two separate examples.

Okay, so this one says what you said before, 90% of visible skin aging is caused by everyday sun. Whenever we're doing something like this, you need to create value. We just incited fear in someone potentially. Yeah, you created tension. Yeah, so how do you soothe them so that they are left with a sensation that you are on their team and that you're creating more value than you're taking from them? And so that juicy gossipy headline, you don't want that to take away from the audience's experience with you.

And so immediately after that, we're giving them a protocol on what they can do to mitigate that risk. The next thing that we see here is follow these rules to protect your skin. And there's three rules. Yeah, so that's an Instagram carousel. So again, this is another platform, right? It's not video. And by the way, all these examples are mostly text because I had to show them to you, but we take these same principles into our paid advertisements, reels, et cetera.

And then the second example is, I believe, a tweet. And I wanted to show what it's like when you're telling someone something as opposed to creating value for them. Okay, so the first one that we have here is a 2020 nationwide study in Korea following 161,286 subjects for a median of 10.5 years found that frequent toothbrushing three or more times a day significantly reduced the risk of, how do you say this, atrial? Atrial fibrillation.

Atrial fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation. And heart failure by an average of 10% and 12% respectively. So that is telling me something. And even the fact like stumbling over the words just goes to show like you just created a huge distance between you and your audience. Friction. I barely even understood that. Okay. Now this is a tweet from Brian Johnson.

Brush your teeth immediately when you wake up. Overnight, your mouth fills with acid-producing bacteria due to lower salivary flow. When you eat or drink carbs or sugars without brushing first, you feed this bacteria, which immediately produces acids. Acidity increases beyond the tolerance threshold and immediately starts damaging your enamel.

So that first sentence is like, you guys brush your teeth. Yeah, just basically say the thing. Yeah, say the thing. This reminds me a lot of working with technology companies on marketing, meaning like a phone company. And the difference between Apple and other phone companies, which often over-index on like the chip that's inside, right? The Snapdragon chip.

I'm all good on that. I don't need to know that. Like the Apple ads are typically like call your mom, right? Or like showing someone FaceTiming a friend and laughing. And it's like- I mean, even shot on iPhone. Yeah. It's so incredibly simple. Here's a photo. Couldn't even tell you if it's that much better than a photo shot on another phone.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Hey man, this shot on iPhone. Just simplicity and like we don't have, I think we all can sit in a room and get to like a nuanced creative message.

but that rarely wins. It's always like the most simple human. Just say it. Yeah. Say it in human words. Yeah. And I find that I've like developed like this intuitive sense of when I feel like it's becoming so complicated that I'm almost struggling to remember it in my head. That's a sign for me to like, we got to strip it back 10 degrees here and get to the core of what we're trying to say.

Okay, next. Yep. So this is a fun one. This is two tweets exactly one year apart.

Okay, it's a tweet from Brian Johnson. The first one says, Sleep is the most powerful drug available for performance, mental health, and well-being. That's 2025. It has 220,000 views.

The next one from 2026 says, Sleep is the most powerful drug available for performance, mental health, and well-being. It has 348,000 views from a year later. That's incredible. That's amazing. You can say the same thing. People have this misconception. I need to come up with something novel every single time. This is really good. I thought it was going to be slightly different.

I know. That's so good, Kate. Yeah. You know, Scott Galloway kind of told that to us as well. He said like when you write something good, like just hammer it, like just say it constantly. Like if you have a good thing. I can't tell you how many tweets we've written about sleep. Just like, you know, you think that our audience would get sick of hearing about sleep? I think we've written like, I don't know, 200 pieces.

Do you space it out or no? No. You're just like, if it's good, just do it again. Yeah. All good. Yeah. Yeah. I can't wait to hit Twitter. Yeah, I know. I also, I'm feeling very inspired to write right now. It's really helpful. Yeah. I think we come, you know, I went to film school. I got into this to be like a a filmmaker and creative, and I think I get to the point where I'm like, Colin and I, the amount of times where we're like, well, we already did that.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's actually one of our biggest faults. It's probably one of our biggest faults is that we want to reinvent the wheel constantly. I was looking, this is like, I was looking at your content and I was thinking about like my title thumbnail, if you guys do publish this on your YouTube. And it was the chicken shop date when it was like, she built this.

And so I thought like she built probably has an inherent tension behind it. And I was like, that's probably, you could just reuse it, you know? So yeah. It'd be fun to workshop copywriting. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. I like that.

This is actually similar, it's an iteration. It's what you expected. It is the very slight adjustments on writing when you hit something, just do it again. So I did two examples here, one from Twitter and one from Instagram Carousel.

So this is four pieces of content, two separate iterations. So the first one, it says you need to be longevity maxing. And it has like, this is on Twitter, I assume. It's actually on Instagram. This is Instagram. And this was published through Brian's account? Through Blueprint's account. Through Blueprint's account. Okay. So this has like all the different elements of what it means to engage in longevity.

It has Blueprint. It has a tweet from Brian. It has a goth girlfriend. That's funny. It has a standing desk. So the next one that you have here is a very similar image, but it says it's time to start sleep maxing. There was signal in that first one that this was a higher performer than other posts for the Blueprint account that's just starting out.

And so it's take that existing thing and then just do a slight tweak. You actually really don't want to tweak too much. You just want to take the same thing and then you can start to isolate, well, what is it about that's actually working? Is it the fact that it's about longevity or is it the actual format itself? And then once you find signal on the format itself works, then you can just crank out 20 of those at once.

And so... We're always so tempted as creatives to want to do really new things. But we have to restrain ourselves to just take what works, tweak it, publish, see if that works again. And so the next two are basically what it looks like, the early iterations of that exact same tweet that you showed us. Sleep is the world's best willpower drug.

Willpower enables you to do what you want to become. Next tweet. Sleep is the most powerful performance enhancing drug in existence. Get your dose tonight. Yeah. So the concept is sleep is a drug and then two different expressions of that. You've got it. Yeah.

I mean, this one should not be a surprise to you guys. One example, again, Brian's genius on Twitter.

And this is number eight, speak simply. Okay. The first one here is from something titled preventative medicine reports in December, 2023. It reads protective effects of dog ownership against the onset of disabling dementia in older community dwelling Japanese.

A longitudinal study. And then Brian Johnson's tweet reads, you a cat or dog person? Own a dog and exercise, 63% lower dementia risk. Own a dog and don't exercise, 0% benefit. Own a cat, 0% benefit.

I didn't even understand that these were saying similar things. The same thing. When Colin read them both, I was like, these are two completely separate thoughts, but they are not the same. That tweet is from that science, that scientific study. And so there's like so much of what we do is we take a study and then we make it understandable.

And not only do we make it understandable, we make it dead simple. Yeah. This again is back to that phone thing that I think you see this a lot in phone advertising where, again, like the Snapdragon chip I don't care about. Tell me what it does for me that's like radically human. You know, and this, you a cat person or a dog person is, that's the most radically human.

Yeah. I want a dog, less dementia. Right. Yeah. Okay. Next.

So this is really similar to the one we went through last time, which is you want to see it in context. So two different stories in here. The first one is me sitting down in a Google document and writing this. And writing it like that, you miss all the cues of how someone's going to receive this. So I'm drafting a text here. In order for me to write it, I actually need to see it in the format to understand what is the best way of viewing this.

And so same thing for Twitter. A lot of the times it's literally the spacing of the text wrapping that makes the biggest difference. Is this legible or is that one hanging word make it very hard to understand what's being said? And so that's just an example of copywriting. And then I also wanted to include this example from Blueprint of, you know, we're redesigning a packaging.

And someone sends me, hey, here's our new packaging. Do you like it or not? Is it approved or not? And then I'm like, no, I need to see it in context. How does it look on the website next to our other branding? How does it look on a meta advertisement in someone's hand on their phone? Is it legible? Can you see that this is an edible product? How is it on Amazon? How is it in store? How is it when it arrives in a package at home? And now with AI tools, it's so easy.

I drafted all those images and like, you know, a minute. And it's like, because so much of it is like, does the story come through if it's on a shelf? How does it sit amongst the sea of other products that it would be surrounded by? And when you saw it on a shelf and in these scenarios in context, what made you think, okay, yes, this looks right? So I'm thinking, I'm looking, so it really depends on what you're indexing for.

Is it a one SKU product where AG1, for example, they have their big headline? Yep. Or is it something where you need to draw together one brand under one cohesive product? storytelling and in which case you want to have like a really strong design point of view and it's less important that people can understand what the product itself is.

Is it going into retail? So it's all about knowing your ticket price. Like what is it that you're trying to have people be the story they walk away with? It makes me think a lot about short form content right now and how the assumption is you make one short form asset and it can go across every platform as is. Right. Or even like the context of like a cut down of something.

Like it's actually, it's its own asset in its own context. We can't assume like this long form video, but vertical is just fine over here. Right. It's not. Right. Or like this short form video that was on TikTok will be fine over here on Instagram. It's in a completely different nightclub, as you said. Like there's a totally different price there.

Yeah. I think that to me is, as I look at this, and I'm reminded of, again, spending time with Mr. Beast. Yeah. walking up and down the aisles of Walmarts with him when he was launching Feastables and testing new packaging. He would bring it with him and just put it on the shelf and stare at it and walk by it and be like, is that noticeable or not? And I think it's such an important thing of contextual awareness.

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Yeah. Yeah. Okay. publish immediately. I don't know how you guys feel about this or if this is connected to press publish, but I always tell like people, I hate marketing calendars. I hate content calendars. I hate planning in advance. Like, because the whole point of all this is to publish, see how it performs, iterate. And so if you're holding content, you don't get the juice, which is the biggest value you get from publishing is you're did it perform, did it not perform? How can that inform my next piece of content? Over and over again, the more you skip and you've already got five pieces of content ready to go, those four pieces of content that you publish on the next

one miss the learnings of that piece of content. And so that, and also I feel like energetically, the more you're exposed to your own content, the energy wears off for you and you forget what the, if it's even novel or interesting to the person watching, So I agree with you. The thing we've been talking about a lot is like the distance between recording and publish is extremely important because you lose a lot of energy in that.

Yes. But that distance is filled by post-production in a lot of contexts. How are you guys thinking about the heaviness of post-production in a lot of this stuff? This also gets back to the... I don't have it in here as an example, but the benefit of scrappiness. Like the whole thing about the polished product imagery versus the UGC version makes me also just want to take a much scrappier post-production process and really like...

bring it back to our core of like, how can we just quickly get this out and not put too much effort into post-production? Of course, that comes with its own downside. So I wouldn't, like our YouTube team is amazing. They work really, really hard. And one of their absolute banger skill sets is humor. And I feel like humor does require a lot of thoughtfulness, a lot of post-production, a lot of, you know, comedic timing.

And so they're fantastic at that. Yeah, I think we've been having this conversation quite a bit of like, I mean, what you've done today is also respecting that, that like you're going to, you brought visuals, you know, but of course, like for our audience to follow along, we're going to now layer on B-roll. We're going to make this, this is now.

I literally was just thinking as you were starting to hand these to us, I was like, okay, we're going to need you to send us. I've got my list prepared. I've got my links. As I was pulling together, I was like. Amazing. I was like, I'm not gonna have you guys ask me for it. Sure, of course. I think we've been trying to do the exercise. We actually did this thought exercise.

What if there was no post-production? What does it look like? Totally. What if we were live right now? Right. And when this was done, we or other people could already clip some of these moments they liked and put them out. Because that's what we're going to try and work towards anyway. But the amount of time it's going to take to get there is going to be enormous.

By the time you get home, if this was already out. Totally. And out in the world and people had enjoyed it. That to me feels like where we're moving as a...

as a creator economy. Because I think, you know, there's this great tweet from Eric Tornberg. He said, content today either needs to be timely or timeless.

There's no in between. And I think it's a really good note of- That's true. the middle ground, which is kind of where most YouTube lives, is in that middle ground of like, this isn't immediately timely and it's also not timeless, but I'm going to spend two weeks making it. Oh man, that's so brutal. Right? It's this murky middle ground where I think we're recognizing like that era may be winding down.

Then you look at the people who make short form content straight from their phone, they're moving at a much quicker pace. So I agree with this one. I don't know how to get there yet, but I agree with it. But I also find that writing... you know, tweets, that's a great way to get there because you're like, I can, I can publish this immediately.

So this, I wish I had the skill set, but I don't. But you know who does? Mr. Brian Johnson. This is such a valuable skill and it is such an unlock for how to think about content. So this is to approach everything that comes your way as yes and no matter what it is. If you have the instinct to say no but, to correct someone, to do something different, Put it to the side for a second and say, well, what if I was to say yes and to this? So this is some examples.

Read the first tweet and then have the yes and experience.

My urine is now blue. Started methylene blue today. Which is a type of therapy. Okay. And then am I meant to read Neil Stone's? Okay. Then another tweet under it from Neil Stone. Methylene blue is a synthetic petroleum based dye. Why take that? Brian Johnson was really moved by the Smurfs movie.

So essentially like a hater responding. And instead of Brian being like, well, I'm going to take it because it has the benefits of all like trying. It was like, well, what if we agree with this person? Where does that leave us? That's interesting. Okay, the next one. We need an anti-Brian Johnson. Someone who sleeps four hours, lives on fast food, drinks heavily, smokes, never exercises, yet somehow achieves perfect biomarkers through a cocktail of drugs.

Would be way more interesting. Brian, I'm pivoting.

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Do you guys know Liver King? Yeah, of course. This is really funny. I forgot that Liver King was also named Brian Johnson. And they're the same age. That's crazy. Okay, so you have a fork in the road with Brian Johnson and then Brian Johnson Liver King on the other side. And there's a kid there and the meme says, which way, modern man? And Brian Johnson says, honestly, Brian Liver King has painted a more compelling vision or a compelling vision.

Yeah. Got it. So it's also like the playfulness. It's the playfulness of the internet where it's like... It's part of the humor of it too. Yeah. Being too self-serious. I think this goes in with the...

the polished stuff you showed us from the beginning where I think actually polished content looks very self-serious and the equivalent of like being not self-serious in responses is also showing the like messy table with the pills on it, meaning with the supplements on it. That's like a playful, not so self-serious thing. Yeah, that's cool.

That's interesting. The other thing, and this is kind of like, it's hard to kind of explain, but the other thing that it does is it captures energy, negative and positive, and it turns it into your energy. So when things go viral online, they just like an amount, enormous amount of energy can happen. That can be positive energy, it can be entirely negative, or it can be a combination of both.

Usually it's a combination of both, right? Viral content typically elicits both positive and negative. If you say yes and all of that energy, it all of a sudden becomes yours. Does that make sense? People enjoy the fact that Brian showed up with the yes and energy and it becomes like we're almost a bit one big family and we, yeah, we agree, we disagree, but like it's funny and we're just playing, we're having fun.

And so you really get to, it's a real skillset in converting people to your team. I like that. Four months ago, we saw a video, you know, you've been relatively behind the scenes, but you know, this video and tweet came out from Brian about having a girlfriend. There's a YouTube thumbnail. It says, guys, I have a girlfriend. Brian is smiling, hugging you.

Yeah. How much did you guys workshop this as a marketing moment versus like how did I think a lot of people would be curious about this, like the behind the scenes of rolling out the fact that you guys are dating has been a very public thing if you're on Twitter and it's been a very loud conversation. Yes. So I'm just curious about that. No, that was all Brian.

Like he, he's been wanting to say positive things about me online for a long time. And this, and he was wanting to announce the relationship. And so he spent like two months just writing in his head. He does this thing where he writes it in his head and then he just sits down and does it all in one go. So it doesn't become this iterative process on page, which is quite hard to write.

And so he was like iterating in his mind for two months and then wrote it all that big long post in one go. And that was just like an authentic spewing. I think the iterative process in his mind is he really does treat his audience as family and he wants them to have a good time. And so I think part of it is also like, what would the people enjoy reading and understanding? Like we...

A lot of folks think that Brian is selfish because he's spending all his money. But you don't go viral like that unless you really deeply care about people in the community having some value from what you're saying. And so yeah, that's just a completely organic process. The video...

One of our editors put together of his own accord without any input from Brian and myself. Got it. Just totally observed us in the moment and then put this really loving, thoughtful piece together just as a pure storytelling person. And what has that been like to be a more public part of this now? Oh, great. I mean, I'm very much a shy person by nature.

And so I'm learning how to take up more space and step into the spotlight and all that kind of stuff. And it's definitely a stretch for me and something I'm having to kind of overcome my internal desire to kind of shy away. But what I love about it is the playfulness and freedom that Brian gets to play online. So like, I don't know if you guys saw, he tweeted about us having sex.

I did see that. Yeah, like everyone saw that. Now I'm getting congratulated in public, like people like, Congrats on the sex. And a lot of folks are like, how do you feel about that? I'm like, I love it. Like, how fun. You know, we just get to say what we want. And it's true. We did just have sex and it was silly. And it was like, in the moment, he was kind of like, should I post this? And I was like, sure, great.

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Do it. It's fun. Yeah, it's very contrarian to how we've operated as human beings for a long time. And it definitely creates a visceral reaction, positive and negative, as you said. Yeah, it's interesting. And a lot of the content we do comes from, I think both Brian and I are pretty neurodivergent. And I know growing up, like I wanted to know a lot more and there was so many taboo topics.

Let's take erectile dysfunction, for example. ED predates a cardiac event by three to five years because the blood vessels in the penis are small, similar to the heart. And so it'll show up in the penis first before it affects your heart. Now, this is a really important thing for men to know if they're experiencing ED. And this is just something we don't talk about.

Same thing with sexual arousal. I didn't know that the cervix retreats prior to sex, which makes it a more pleasurable experience for a woman. And it's actually really important to know that so that you can look after your own needs and also communicate to your partner so they look after your needs. And so there's just all these things that people don't want to touch that for us, it's like, this is biology.

Why can't we talk about it? Yeah. Thank you so much, Kate. And hopefully we converted Colin to a Blueprint subscriber. I think I definitely think that's kind of all I can think of. I also feel like now I need a wide-brimmed hat to go outside. Yes. Three feet, right? Yes, that's like the one thing that, yes, please. I'm very overwhelmed. I got my hat, yeah.

Thanks for having me on, you guys. Yeah, thank you for coming.