From Student to Content Creator, with Noah Ryan

Noah Ryan joins the Entrepreneurship@DU podcast to discuss his journey from college student at the University of Denver to successful content creator and entrepreneur. He shares insights on building an authentic online presence, the challenges and opportunities in the digital content space, and strategies for monetizing a social media following. Noah offers advice on career development, emphasizing the importance of acquiring diverse skills and adapting to new opportunities rather than solely pursuing passion. 

Whether you’re a student, professional, aspiring content creator, or an entrepreneur, this episode offers a fresh perspective on the importance of creating genuine value for an audience while maintaining personal authenticity in the digital age.

 Transcript:

Joshua Ross:

My name is Joshua Ross and welcome to the Entrepreneurship at DU podcast. Today I’m joined by Noah Ryan, a DU alum, entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and influential voice in health and fitness.

Noah Ryan:

When it came to creating my own content, the only thing was I want to be able to enjoy creating every single day for as long as physically possible. So my only objective is to create content that I want to create. You have the right to have opinion, but you don’t have the right to have your opinion be listened to, especially not by a bunch of people. So you have to have something that’s rare and valuable.

Joshua Ross:

In a world where people often debate about the value and negative impact of social media, Noah shares a simple and positive view on why it matters.

Noah Ryan:

The real purpose of social media is to bring people together and create real world connections.

Joshua Ross:

Noah’s straightforward approach to life, harnessing digital tools to foster meaningful connections and engagement has led to a remarkable success. Just a few years after graduating from the University of Denver, he’s built a thriving business that exemplifies the power of authentic online interaction.

Noah Ryan:

How can I start building career capital that I enjoy what I do so much and that when my passion does arise, I have all the skills necessary to have the leverage to go and take it.

Joshua Ross:

Here’s my conversation with Noah Ryan. Welcome to the entrepreneurship at DU Podcast.

Noah Ryan:

Professor Ross, thank you so much for having me back technically.

Joshua Ross:

So where does this podcast find you in the world?

Noah Ryan:

I’m currently in Florida, which is actually very close to where I was born, and I didn’t know that until I moved here and my parents were like, you’re actually born 15 minutes away from where you live.

Joshua Ross:

So listener. Last time I had a conversation with Noah, we are on Zoom and his background was the water, and I believe that’s where he lives now. I think he’s inside right now.

Noah Ryan:

A little bit too windy today.

Joshua Ross:

Okay. A little bit too windy. Alright, well, so to get started, walk us through Noah Orion as the influencer and the content creator.

Noah Ryan:

Yeah, I mean I think there’s two ways of looking at content creation. It’s like you either play a character and you have to stick with that role and you method act or you just share your thoughts online. And I think for me, the biggest objective was not getting bored. I see a lot of people burn out when they try to stick to this character and they have some level of cognitive distance. So it really is, to me, it’s just about sharing ideas at a place with more leverage than talking to your friends. And that’s really what it comes down to.

Joshua Ross:

But so break apart then the influencer and the content creator for our audience. Is there a distinction between the two? Can you be one but not the other?

Noah Ryan:

I don’t know. I mean, I think the term influencer, it’s very, it’s not played out, but it has a negative connotation to it and rightfully so. I think that this ability to rapidly acquire leverage and audiences has brought a lot of people that probably shouldn’t have a lot of exposure to the forefront, and it’s kind of the only thing that they can rest their laurels on so they find an influencer thing. I definitely don’t use that word ever, but yeah, I think the difference between a content creator and influencer is that one of them creates content and then the other one actually changes people’s, I guess, perspectives and has leverage when it comes to, I dunno, making change in people’s ideas.

Joshua Ross:

So you don’t use that word. So what’s the most effective word that I can use

Noah Ryan:

In terms of just referring to someone that creates content online? Probably just a content creator, and it also depends on the medium. For me, creating content online, it’s a lot of writing. I typically avoided short form content because of my experience running a short form content agency and kind of realizing what gets rewarded in the short form content realm as opposed to the mid form and the written word realm.

Joshua Ross:

So you chose health and fitness and this is a very crowded area of influence and content creation. What sparked your interest in this area of health and fitness?

Noah Ryan:

It was something that I was always interested in, and to be fair, when I started creating content, it was for acquiring clients for my marketing agency, and that was the objective. But it got to a point where it’s like, all right, I’ve acquired a few clients for this, but I’m just going to start sharing my ideas. It just so happened that the thing that I was most interested in and the thing that I had the most expertise in was health. It was something that I was always interested in. I believe that in order for you to have the highest chance of becoming top percentile at something, it’s best to do something that you’ve been obsessed with since you were a teenager. By the time most people start, you’ve already acquired close to 10,000 hours. I’ve always been fascinated in health. I’ve had a lot of health issues in my past that I’ve had to take my own initiative on solving. So I had a lot of value to add there, and I think the ability to combine that with my marketing background and my copywriting capabilities to make health cool was just a really good intersect. And it was this cool blue ocean where I kind of just thrived and it was fun for me. And when it’s fun, you do more of it. When you do more of it, you get better at it.

Joshua Ross:

So walk us through your journey. You are a University of Denver alum, you graduated a few years ago. How did you build this personal brand, your community and online following, but also tie into that comment you just made a few minutes ago about the 10,000 hours?

Noah Ryan:

Yeah, so I mean, I went to University of Denver. I had a great time, really, I think I took advantage of everything that DU had to offer. That’s why I’m grateful for going there as well, because there were so things to take advantage of and I was able to get my reps in terms of starting businesses very early on with great support, both financial and from faculty. And I was able to make a lot of the mistakes that most people don’t make until they already have a job. They quit that job and then they start their business. So I did that and my junior year at du, I joined a cybersecurity startup and as a contractor and then came on as a co-founder for that. Stuck with that for a while. I was getting a lot of advice, stay in the industries that are billowing, and when you’re in university, you kind of get stuck in this linear view of the world because all of your influences coming from the same walled garden, for lack of a better term.

So I thought that was the best opportunity that aligned with my skills and my objectives and my desires. So anyway, I did that. We graduated during covid, I graduated in 2020. I was planning on moving back to Thailand to go and build that cybersecurity startup that it was a threat intelligence software out there. Purposely built an international team for that, but ended up back in Minnesota in a basement and did that for a year. And there was a point where I saw a photo of myself and I’m like, man, this is not who you were supposed to become. This is not who 16-year-old Noah wanted, let alone 18-year-old Noah. This wasn’t the path. And a lot of people get golden handcuffs. I was like, alright, well if this isn’t it, then there’s no sunk cost here. So I left that company that I helped, and honestly, that’s when I went back to almost getting a job.

I tried the food truck realm, I tried a bunch of different things and failed a bunch. And then I ended up just moving to Mexico. I started a marketing agency. I leveraged what skills I acquired from the tech world and from the operations realm, and I applied it to helping agencies that gave me an inside look at the backend of agencies that then enabled me to start my own agency. But the entire time I went in with the objective and the foresight of understanding the thing that I’m doing now is not going to be the thing that I’m doing forever. And I think a lot of people mess up because they think that their next objective, their next initiative has to be the thing they’re going to do forever. They take a job in accounting or sales, and I’m going to be an accountant or a salesman forever, but that’s really not the case. Learn to just leverage vehicles and then know when to get off them. A lot of people just don’t know when to get off.

Joshua Ross:

And so where does the 10,000 hours come in with this kind of nonlinear way of thinking

Noah Ryan:

In terms of for me being health and fitness?

Joshua Ross:

Yes.

Noah Ryan:

Yeah. I think in order, this is a tangential discussion, but it’s related to building, I guess, influence online in order to deserve people’s attention, in order to acquire people’s attention. It’s not given, people think that their opinion deserves to be listened to. You have the right to have opinion, but you don’t have the right to have your opinion be listened to, especially not by a bunch of people. So you have to have something that’s rare and valuable. So now I just talk about whatever I’m interested in because I built up that brand equity, that career is something that I discussed, but in the beginning it’s like what are things that are rare and valuable that not a lot of people know about that isn’t discussed a lot and isn’t discussed in a way? So it’s valuable, but also not a lot of people are doing it.

And for me, I had some pretty serious health issues, so I got really into biohacking and pharmacology and new tropics and supplementation and these really cool niche health things that are really complex. And given my background in spending probably thousands of hours trying to figure out how to make complex cybersecurity terms comprehensible to the average Joe, and just being obsessed with health for the last X number of years and having a marketing background and spending four years really obsessed with marketing, I just had a lot of rare and valuable information that I could give. You come in every day, you post it and you just progressively get better. People start, you give them value, and there’s this reciprocal desire for them to reciprocate back, whether by just giving you their attention or as you start to actually build things to be a supporter, be an advocate, and be a customer.

Joshua Ross:

Yeah, this idea of value is so important. My wife and I were talking about podcasts last night and just a number of podcasts that are available, the number of celebrities that have podcasts, but it’s not just bringing somebody in because of who you are. You have to constantly be creating value and a reason for them to stay there and for a reason for you to capture their attention. Walk us through this content creation process for you. How do you decide the type of content to create and how often to post?

Noah Ryan:

Yeah, so for context, I started a social media marketing agency. This was right when TikTok was getting big. I had a pretty significantly sized TikTok marketing agency. So we’d take an account and we would start from zero and we’d grow ’em to millions of impressions a month, millions of views a month. We’d take that account and we’d grow tangential ones. I’d have multiple people working for one brand, and we created this entire system of how to systematize creativity and systematize growth and content and really dissect it. And while I was doing that, I realized that that process, the process required when you’re running a business, the process required when you need results ruins the creative essence that is so integral to true content and the authenticity that’s integral to true content. So the methodologies that I use to do that at scale are completely different than the methodologies I use when creating my own content.

When it came to creating my own content, the only thing was I want to be able to enjoy creating every single day for as long as physically possible. So my only objective is to create content that I want to create. The second that people pigeonhole themselves and think like, oh, this is what people want to see, I need to post more than this. It ruins that connection that you have with, I dunno, being authentic. So my only heuristic when it comes to creating content is tweet like you would dm, which is something that I always say and it’s advice that I always give. It’s like, be authentic, just talk to the ether, which is just the online space, the same way you talk to an individual and then just talk about stuff that you’re interested in. And I think that requires being an interesting person. So really that should be your objective. It’s like don’t try to create more interesting content, just try to become a more interesting person.

Joshua Ross:

Alright, so you have a community of over 73,000 Twitter followers and you have your own newsletter with an impressive subscriber base. How do you build that trust and credibility with your audience, especially in the health and fitness space where I think there’s a lot of misinformation, there’s a lot of hacking that goes on. How do you as Noah or Ryan connect with your audience and they trust you?

Noah Ryan:

Yeah, that’s a great question. You have to earn their trust. A lot of people, they start creating content, they get a few thousand followers and they immediately try to monetize. They try to cash out because they weren’t doing it for their own sake. They were doing it as a way to escape the rat race or to quit their job or whatever. I made a very deliberate intention to always have my primary income source be completely separate of social media and then social media happens to just expedite that process. But that was honestly one of the secret sauces is not having to worry about monetization that enables you to be consistently authentic, to not have to take brand deals if you don’t want to take them, to not have to shield products or shield a service if you don’t feel like it’s the right time. And I think that was the primary difference.

I had no desire or interest to monetize too quickly and definitely not to monetize in a way that would hinder the brand authority. So that’s factor number one. Factor number two is being very honest and that comes from not caring too much. So saying what you believe, being willing to change your opinions. And also what a lot of people do is they will become popular because of something that they do, whether it’s a specific health claim that they make. A lot of people will be drinking raw milk or something about lectins like Steven Gundry, and then they’ll stick to that because they know that being controversial in riding that wave is their fastest way to the top, but it becomes to a point where it’s relatively inauthentic. They may not believe that anymore, but they stick with it. I think having the ability to change your mind and to be okay with that and kind of just sitting in between ideas is really important. And I think people catch on to that. And yeah, honestly, I think it’s about being just a real person as opposed to being a character.

Joshua Ross:

What do you want the outcome for your audience to be when they listen to you? They read you, they interact and engage with you?

Noah Ryan:

Right now? I think it comes down to lifestyle design. I think a lot of people have very limiting beliefs on what their lives could be. I do believe that most people have one or two things that are contributing to 90% of their problems that if they could just get over, they’d be fine. But I think it’s just showing what is possible relatively easily in terms of creating a really cool lifestyle that aligns with all of your values and having the self-awareness to know what your values are and what your ideal lifestyle is. Now, I talk a lot about health stuff and health is where I started because that’s the core foundation. That is the basis level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Now once you accomplish that, then it’s time for those higher things. But yeah, it really does come down to how to live a better life, less pain, more pleasure, avoiding the things that you think you have to do when in reality you could just completely excommunicate those from your life and be fine. And I call it the alternative life, like the alternative lifestyle, kind of like the lifestyle that I’ve been living in a small beach town in Latin America, not really working much surfing, enjoying time in nature and stuff like that. And then being fine.

Joshua Ross:

So I follow you on Twitter and I read your post and I read the comments, and it’s really interesting when I walk through who you are on Twitter, and one of the things that I wonder about is there are sometimes negative comments and you have a very gentle and nice way to address those. How do you deal with some of those challenges as a content creator and putting yourself out there and making yourself vulnerable?

Noah Ryan:

Yeah, I think you have to understand when it comes back, I think I had a lot of experience with TikTok and seeing the type of comments that people would leave on TikTok. There’s a lot of people online that are just lurkers and it’s their entire objective. It’s their entire prerogative to just spew projections at other people. Oftentimes someone will, I get a lot of hate comments because I put myself out there. I’m on Twitter where majority of people are anonymous. I’m posting my face, I’m posting my lifestyle entirely. I’m going on video and I’m talking. You have people that are sitting in their parents’ basement, probably fat, pre-diabetic look like shit. I mean just people that you would never take advice from and they’re out there spewing, you go to their page and that’s all they do. So that is their entire persona is just being someone who comments on other people’s stuff and being a critic.

So when you realize that and you kind of just personify who that person is, you’re like, oh, this is nothing. If anything, it’s just engagement. I do think a lot of people struggle with it, but that is the price you pay. I think that you put yourself out there, you hit a certain threshold, there’s going to be a percentage of people that are going to be negative, and then you realize, would they say that to you in person? Definitely not. And I think everybody has to have that same thing. It’s like don’t say stuff online that you wouldn’t say in person and really use that as a litmus test before you say stuff, because that’s going to completely change the way that you interact on the internet.

Joshua Ross:

So is competition a challenge in this whole kind of creator influencer space? And how do you differentiate yourself to stand out in this very, very crowded field podcast and posts and videos and all these different things? How does Noah Orion attract brands and different people to follow him?

Noah Ryan:

Yeah. Well, it’s only competitive if you try to stay in one niche. If you try to dominate a category, then you’re going to be competing with other people. But if you create your own category, who’s going to compete with you? If you combine five different categories, there’s going to be no one else that’s doing that, and you are n of one. So I don’t really see any competition. I see friendly competition where it’s like, oh, here’s someone that’s performing really well. I would like to compete with them, but I’m not directly competing with anybody because I’m just doing what I do anyway and sharing it online. And I think that immediately differentiates you. That sets you out from the rest of, there’s copy, a lot of copycats, there’s a lot of clones, a lot of cookie cutter creators. But if you can combine multiple categories, blue ocean strategy, style, combine them, it’s there’s no competition, and then you never get bored either. So I have no issue with competition because I don’t think there’s really anybody that’s doing the same thing as what I’m doing just because I just do what I want to do. And that’s a myriad of different things.

Joshua Ross:

So I want to pull on that monetization thread a little bit. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote an article quote, social media influencers are not getting rich, they’re barely getting by, and they have this stat in there. Last year, 48% of creator earners made $15,000 or less according to neo research and influencer marketing agency, and only 13% made more than a hundred thousand dollars. And for someone like me, I was very shocked at this because everything you read is put up an Instagram account, start Van Life, start posting these different things about who you are, what your life is, and if you’re interesting and people are following you and you get a large following, you have an opportunity to really monetize that. So can you speak to this article?

Noah Ryan:

Yeah. Well, that is a common fallacy. I have a friend, he always says, likes aren’t cash. So a lot of people equate attention to revenue, but that’s just not the way it is. I think having an audience is huge, but if you have a really generic audience, say someone follows you because you do pranks, you see a lot of these people that are just doing anything they can to get views, anything they can to get impressions, but it’s just low value stuff that’s attracting a low value audience like pranks or something like that. How are you going to monetize that now opposed to someone who is writing about the real estate market in Philadelphia, they may have 5,000 followers, but the buying potential and the disposable income and the intent, the buyer intent of that audience is so much higher. So that’s why you have to really think about your audience and say, am I attracting an audience that’s wanting to spend money?

Is it a valuable audience? And that’s why I think chasing engagement and chasing attention isn’t a good idea. You should chase quality over quantity. I think that you can monetize better when you have just a few thousand. Perfect example. One of my friends, Anthony, he had a million subscribers on one of his YouTube accounts, but it was for this game, clash of Clans or Clash Royale, a million subscribers. He started a new one when he got into dropshipping, which is a form of e-commerce and outpaces earnings on that million subscriber account after hitting 3000 subscribers on the new one because that audience was primed and engaged to buy. So that’s a really important factor there. I think the secondary factor is a lot of influencers come in or a lot of content creators come in and they’re only skills content creation. Now, I think content creation is an amplifier, right?

If you have existing acumen in some way or the other, then you can amplify that with content. If you go in and your only skill is content, a lot of people end up just trying to sell content creation courses, which is completely arbitrary. So I think that’s the big factor there. It’s like creating content is not going to make you wealthy. It’s an amplifier to be able to have a really strong network, have a really strong audience, and then if you can find a way to leverage that and bake that into your existing monetization ecosystem, then it is the best sheet code by itself. I don’t know how good it’s depending on the needs.

Joshua Ross:

That’s a really interesting example, A million users as opposed to 3000 with a dropship e-commerce strategy, and which one’s more successful? How would you measure success then in terms of what types of metrics would you use to see that you as a content creator, this is a profession that you’ve chosen, this is what you’re doing, how do you measure that you’re actually being successful?

Noah Ryan:

Yeah, well, I’d like to clarify that I’m not a content creator or influencer. That’s not my job. I have an agency and I have a supplement brand, and I work with all of these brands, and I have a very strong business that exists entirely separately of my content creation. So that’s the big factor there. So to be honest, I don’t look at it that way. I don’t look at metrics. My only objective is I want to enjoy engaging with my audience tomorrow. I want to enjoy posting tomorrow. That is the only thing I look at. I’m not a goal-oriented guy either, so I’m not looking at, I want to hit X number of followers. That’s not how I work. I’m only looking at wanting to enjoy creating content tomorrow because it is rewarding. Writing a long form content piece is self rewarding to me because it helps distill my thoughts. It’s a creative effort and it’s a creative endeavor, and if I stick to that, that’s going to give me the highest chance of wanting to post and wanting to continue creating content. A DHD. My brain doesn’t work on a prioritization or a gold setting standpoint. My brain works on an interest in a dopaminergic stimuli standpoint, so I just need to keep it stimulating. That’s the only thing that I look at, and that’s really what I attribute to being able to be consistent with this as someone who’s very inconsistent.

Joshua Ross:

I want to get your opinion though, on platforms and the platform’s level of transparency regarding how creators get paid. The metrics used to determine payouts, and there’s a lot of information right now out on the internet in terms of these platforms are bringing in billions and billions of dollars. The Facebooks, the Twitters, the tiktoks, and the reason they’re bringing in this money is because of all the people on the platform and the people creating content for the platform. So with that being said, should these creators be paid a larger percentage based on the platform ad revenue?

Noah Ryan:

I

Don’t think so. And yeah, Twitter started paying out once Elon Musk came on, but it’s arbitrary compared to the leverage that you have with the audience. If you can’t monetize an audience, you’re doing something wrong. And if you have to depend on creator funds, you’re playing the wrong game, in my opinion. So I don’t really care about audience monetization. I have a friend that creates tiktoks and he’s pretty decent sized, but nothing crazy. And he was showing me some of his analytics, and he’s getting paid $3,000 a month just to post, and he just does it for fun. So I don’t think so. I think that’s one of those things too, where it’s like people start creating content and they feel entitled and they realize that they’re like, oh, I was going to start creating content. I left my job to create content, but now I’m not making any money, so let me demand money from TikTok. I don’t know. I think it’s kind of like a, it’s not serving, it’s not, I feel like it’s kind of like a victim complaining mindset, but that may just be me. That’s kind just how I look at things, just it doesn’t really serve me. I’m not interested in getting paid for impressions. The impressions are enough value.

Joshua Ross:

So different ways to get paid. Being a content creator, first of all, let’s take a Jimmy Chin, right? Jimmy Chin, a famous photographer. He gets brought in and someone says, Hey, post this on your social media feed, let’s say Instagram. And he has probably a price list, and it’s like $50,000 and he posts it and goes out to millions of people. So that’s one way, and that’s a very, very, very small percentage of the community. Another one is someone that creates a lot of content, and in between that content, they show different types of advertisements and they’ll get maybe pennies on those advertisements. So that’s another opportunity. The third way is, and when you’re talking about monetization, is to your friend, he created a large following, but also a way in which to sell product, which he was in control of selling that product. Those are the three different ways. Did I miss any other ways in which you can monetize as a content creator?

Noah Ryan:

Essentially what content creation does is it gives you a negative customer acquisition cost. It is free for you to acquire customers to whatever you want to sell, as long as you’re creating content around that. So for example, say you have a newsletter, you have a newsletter, it’s a free or a paid newsletter. You have acquired all of these emails, you’ve acquired all of these customers, you have a paid newsletter. People are literally paying you to be a customer. And then whatever you sell in that newsletter, that’s negative customer acquisition. So that’s a factor there. I mean, there is literally so many different ways that you can monetize, and all it takes is just some creative thinking and being in the space. A lot of people sell courses that’s like a go-to info products because it’s all margin, right? It’s all margin. And there’s a pretty negative connotation to info products justifiably.

So a lot of it’s garbage, but I mean so many, right? A lot of service models. I think a lot of people that go the fitness route, they do coaching, that’s good, but you have to ask yourself, is this what I want to do? And I think a lot of people just grasp at the first opportunity possible. But I really think, and I like the building a brand off of your audience foundation. So I have a friend, Kevin. Kevin runs Epic gardening, and they have probably like 3 million subscribers. They did a huge venture capital round, but they went a very nontraditional route. They built a very large audience, right? 3.7 million or something like that, and they started launching their own products, and that’s their model. So a lot of people look at content, and Kevin said this on his podcast with my first million, A lot of people look at content as the bottom of the funnel, but content’s the top of the funnel to bring people in and then to sell them stuff there. And I think that’s how you really want to look at it. And you have to ask yourself, do you really want to play the game that you’re playing right now forever, or do you want to start a new game? I’ll see content creators whose entire, well, it looks like their entire monetization is based off of affiliate posts, and that looks miserable. And that’s a way to burn through your reputation and your brand equity very quickly if you’re just shilling affiliates, shilling, every single affiliate that comes your way.

Joshua Ross:

So what I’m hearing you say, and it kind of goes back to the beginning of our conversation so much around this, is building your brand, but also building trust with your audience. So when you are actually talking about things that are important to you, whether product, services, lifestyle, that there’s a trust from the audience,

Noah Ryan:

You want people that feel indebted to you because you’ve given them so much value. And I think that’s what’s really important. And to be honest, this is something that you can really only get when you separate the full monetization from the actual content creation. But that’s really the best part, is having people make significant changes in their life and actually have gratitude. And that is the coolest thing ever. I think it’s a way to make the very not wholesome world of social media very wholesome and use it for the right ways and build connections too. All of my business partners are people that I’ve met from social media. I’m living with people that I’ve met from social media. A majority of my friends are people from social media. People think that’s so weird because they’re stuck in this idea that social media is exclusively on the internet.

The real purpose of social media is to bring people together and create real world connections. Most of your friends, most of the people that you’re surrounded with and that you spend your time with are friends of circumstance. You have 80 people in your high school. You’re going to spend time with the people that are the five closest, not really close. You’re going to make concessions, and that’s fine. I think that shared experiences are a way to build a strong relationship, and I’m still friends with people from college and high school, but you open that up to the 3.7 billion people that have access to the internet and you and go, and you put your ideas out there in a shared space in a congregation, you are going to find people that align much more heavily to your beliefs and your goals and your objectives.

Joshua Ross:

Alright, so we can’t have a conversation without bringing in artificial intelligence. So here’s the artificial intelligence question for the episode. So what are your thoughts on using artificial intelligence and content creation? How is it shaping the future of content creation? Have you used it?

Noah Ryan:

The barrier to entry to creating surface level content is low as it’s ever been. Anyone can create a cookie cutter script that has good copywriting, good grammar, has good information, and I’ve seen it because I started creating before chatt bt, and then now I see the health space. Now everyone’s just regurgitating chatt BT knowledge. It’s no longer rare. It’s a little bit valuable, but it’s no longer rare. So I use ai. I’ve used AI pretty heavily in a lot of my stuff, but I use it in a different way. A lot of people use AI to come up with the ideas and to write the content for them. I use AI as a research tool because a lot of the stuff that I write about is relatively advanced to health research, and it helps me shave that down. I created a bot, geek bot is what I call him, and I shared him with the newsletter.

He’s awesome. People can use him to learn health stuff, and I trained him with a lot of my data. But that essentially gets me information faster that I can then utilize, synthesize, and then write in my own words. So I’m using it to learn. I’m not using it to create. That’s factor number one. Factor number two for me. I think with creating, it’s all about the least amount of friction. It’s really hard for me to sit down and write. It’s really easy for me to sit down and talk. So I’ll record something like a 15 minute monologue of me just ranting about a topic. I’ll go and I’ll transcribe that with fireflies ai. And then I’ll go and I’ll upload that to Claude and I’ll be like, just break this down into bullet points for me. And then I go and I take that and then I just edit that. So it goes from the process of being like, oh God, I have to write an article to like, oh, I just have to edit an article and I just have to speak. So it is really effective, but you got to use it in the right way where you’re still rare and valuable. So that information is still rare, it’s still valuable. And then the way that you express it is rare and valuable because it’s you and you can’t sound like a bot. You really got to avoid sounding like a bot. You got to be yourself.

Joshua Ross:

So where do you see the future of health and fitness content going, right? What trends and platforms do you see that are going to be important in the coming years? So you look in your crystal ball and health and fitness will always be around, but it evolves in terms of the different types of diets, the different types of exercises, the different types of ways we approach life.

Noah Ryan:

So right now there’s a schism between the traditional primal health guys that go and live on the beach and they eat raw meat and they, I don’t know, sun their balls and stuff like that. And then you’ve got the biohacker longevity Brian Johnson type that are getting plasma and PRP injections in their scalp and they’re never getting sunlight and they’re doing crazy, right? So there’s a schism that’s going on from the traditional health to the advanced biohacking. Now a lot of people try to do one or the other. I think that the real benefit is doing both. So for me, it’s like I live on the beach. I never wear shoes when I’m in Mexico. I’m on an independent grid of my own, well, no toxins and whatsoever, but then I come back here and I’m sitting in front of a red light all day. I’m using peptides, I’m doing all these things.

You can get the best of both worlds. So I think the health movement moving forward, it’s going to be, honestly, it’s going to be a schism between those two, and it’s going to be a huge battle. That’s probably going to be a huge point of contention for a large period of time. The way that I see it folding out into the grand scheme of things, it’s like Instagram and TikTok is where all the flashy visual stuff is. Not a lot of information, not a lot of value, just a lot of wow factor. Twitter is where a lot of these actually more advanced front level guys go and they share that information, but they’re usually like researchers. So they’re not going to go on TikTok, they’re in some basement somewhere researching. So I see that slowly teasing over into that space. But the way that I see it is a lot of the mainstream health stuff right now is already out of date compared to what’s going on in these more hidden crevices of the health space.

Joshua Ross:

I guess I’m pretty simple. I look at it as eat well, be cognizant of what you eat, lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise five days a week, get a lot of sleep and try not to stress. And I think those things will help you. I read your newsletter, I look at your Twitter posts, I see the posts, people that you repost, and I find that all very fascinating. But for someone like me, I just try to keep it simple.

Noah Ryan:

Yeah, it’s fascinating. And you have to ask yourself, what is your objective? What is your objective? What are you doing this for? I believe that a lot of people get caught up on hyper fixating on the biological component of health because it’s cope. It’s this desire to have some feeling of control. They want to control all the variables when in reality the thing that’s messing them up is probably a mental block. So you can’t out, you can’t mental the physical and you can’t out physical. The mental, there’s a lot of guys that are really smart, they’re cerebral, they’re very cerebral, but really what they need is to go on more walks and to eat better. So you can’t outthink that. And then there’s guys that train four hours a day and they eat really well, but they have big mental hurdles. So you got to realize that those are one of the same.

There is no mind body disconnect. They are one singular unit. And then there comes a certain point where hyper obsessing over health no longer serves you. I’m relatively healthy, but I do a lot of unhealthy stuff because it provides utility in my life, and that’s okay. You just can’t be willfully ignorant about it. I think that’s the issue. People don’t take the initiative to be scientifically literate enough to know what their bad habits are actually doing to them. The guys that me in college after I turned 21 of course started drinking a bunch. And when I was doing that, I didn’t know how bad that was for me now. But now I know all the damage that can be accrued from alcohol while still seeing the utility of having a drink when I go out and have dinner with my family or when I go out with my friends. So I think that’s really the objective. It’s like health should help you get more out of life, not less if you’re of the sun, if you’re afraid of eating junk food, if you’re afraid of staying out late, that’s getting less out of life. But if you figure out how to mitigate the damage from those, that’s getting more,

Joshua Ross:

I love that advice. That is great advice. Just be literate on your health and understand even if you’re putting alcohol on your body or fried foods in your body, what the impact is. Not saying completely go away from it, but understand what the impact and everything in moderation. Alright, so you wrote an article in your newsletter and I loved it. Why pursuing your passion is bad advice. Please explain.

Noah Ryan:

When I was in college, it was like you got to follow what works and you got to do what works and you got to ride the coattails of the opportunities presented to you. And I did that and then I got burnt out and I was like, man, this sucks. I just want to do what I want to do, which is kind of a selfish perspective, and it’s not self-serving. So I remember having a call with you, it’s like, man, I’m so sick of this. I’m so sick of tech. I just want to go hang out with animals and train martial arts in the jungle. And that was what I wanted to do and that was my passion. So I was like, maybe I could become a martial arts instructor, or I like cooking, so I’m just going to follow my passion and start cooking. But the reality is, first and foremost, a lot of people confuse passion, confuse interests for passions.

If I followed my passion as a 16-year-old or a 15-year-old, I’d be a professional Minecraft player. If I followed my passions as an 18-year-old, I probably try to be a professional skier, but that doesn’t get you anywhere and that’s not going to be your passion forever. So I see it a lot, especially with college athletes. Everyone sees the college athlete and there’s three paths that they go down. One, they actually continue their passion for sports and they become a professional athlete, but that’s rare. Two is they don’t make it and then they get this complete identity crisis like football is my passion, it’s all I love to do. And then they get a job doing something that they hate. They start drinking a bunch, they become miserable, and I’m seeing it in real time. But there’s that third person who looks at their experiences and they look at what they’ve accrued through football and they take a step back and they’re like, okay, cool.

Maybe I wasn’t passionate about football. Maybe I was passionate about goal setting and winning and taking initiative and leadership and teamwork and comradery. So how can I take that and then apply it to the next game? That makes sense. And then they go and they start their own business and they crush it, or they go and they get a really good job in finance and they crush it. So I think that following your passion is bad advice because it doesn’t serve you. I think the better thing to look at is how can I start building career capital? And this is from Newport and his book So Good, they can’t Ignore You. How can I start building career capital that I enjoy what I do so much and that when my passion does arise, I have all the skills necessary to have the leverage to go and take it.

And that’s exactly what happened for me because I do live a life where everything I do is I’m quite passionate about and I’ve earned the right to delineate things that I am passionate about and not passionate about and select the latter or select the former. But that was through building career capital and abstaining from Falling Passion and just saying, what skills can I acquire? What leverage can I acquire to do less of what I like or less of what I don’t like and more of what I love? And then you eventually just grow to love your work. And I think that’s what I said in the article. It’s like don’t try to create a life of passion. Create a life where you just love what you do.

Joshua Ross:

That’s great advice, and I’m going to lean on you for one more piece of advice to close out our conversation. So think about Noah Orion back 18 years old, entering the University of Denver. Not really sure about what path he’s going to go down in life. What advice do you give our young adults, our young students entering the university or in their first or second year?

Noah Ryan:

So a lot of people that are in my space, they’re in college and they’re in this crazy online space where they’re getting exposure to all these ideas. When I was in college, all of my idea exposure was just who I was with in college. So it was professors, it was my peers, it was companies on campus. That was it. So I had no idea what was out there until I went and studied abroad in Thailand and I started meeting some crazy characters. I’m like, wait a minute. This lifestyle is possible. So I think the most important thing is to actively pursue exposure to new ideas and new realms and new fields and live a double life. Really try to get yourself into some new environment where you’re completely new and everything’s foreign. And try to do that just as a thought pursuit on a weekly, monthly, daily basis. Get exposure to more ideas because you just have no idea what’s out there until you experience it.

Joshua Ross:

Well, Noah, thank you for being on the podcast and thank you for making me a little bit smarter.

Noah Ryan:

Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. I’m glad we got to chop it up.

Joshua Ross:

The entrepreneurship at DU podcast was recorded in Marjorie Reed Hall on the University of Denver campus. You can find us on Instagram at du Entrepreneur on Twitter, x at DU entrepreneur, and on Facebook at entrepreneurship at du. This episode was engineered, edited, and produced by Sophia Holt. Entrepreneurship at DU is part of the Daniels College of Business, which has its own podcast. Check out Voices of Experience wherever you get your podcasts.