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In this episode I speak with Nicolas Cole about the real value of everything you write on the internet. Cole has 15 years of experience as a nonfiction writer and ghostwriter, and he runs the SaaS platform Typeshare. He gives me a simple model with three tiers of content: commodity, personality, and original. He also explains the digital brain, which he calls your personal language model, and he shows how AI repeats your approved language at scale. By the end, you know how to judge the short, medium, and long-term value of a piece before you write it.
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Timestamps
00:00:00 – Intro
00:03:36 – POV is the Moat
00:05:40 – Language As Open Source
00:11:24 – Value Is Relative To The Reader
00:14:26 – Approved Language
00:17:43 – The Value of AI in Writing
00:22:09 – Commodity Ideas
00:24:23 – How To Set Up The System
00:27:58 – Ownership IS Association
00:33:56 – Build your Personal Data Set
00:39:53 – Branded Content vs Founder-Led Content
00:45:17 – What is Original Content?
00:46:35 – Writing Versus Short-Form Video
00:48:58 – Three Types of Hooks
00:49:50 – Timely Content vs Timeless Content
00:53:27 – Voice is 3 dialed settings
00:56:32 – Finding your Voice
01:00:49 – The Company Brain As The Moat
01:07:30 – Closing Thoughts
Key Points
• A point of view creates the moat, because copycats must wait for your next idea.
• Content sits in three tiers: commodity, personality, and original. Each tier adds different leverage.
• Ownership equals association. Volume builds it, and personality details make it strong.
• Your life story is the unmade data set, so AI learns it only from your own writing.
• Every piece sits on a spectrum from timely to timeless, so match your expectations to the type.
• Humans do the thinking and the writing. Robots do the repeating and the remixing.
Numbered Section Summaries
1. The Point Of View Moat
Cole answers the popular claim that AI removes the moat from SaaS. He says a moat appears when a product carries a method, such as Typeshare and its personal language model idea. A competitor who copies features must still look back at the person who does the thinking.
2. Language Is Open Source
Cole describes the alphabet, words, and most groupings of words as shared property. He uses the example of a health sentence that millions of people repeat. This explains why readers label some writing as AI slop: they recognize a commodity sentence.
3. The Three Tiers Of Content
Cole separates commodity content, personality content, and original content. Commodity content helps beginners, and it stays useful as a first step. Personality content and original content raise the long-term value of your library.
4. Approved Language And The Digital Brain
Cole spent a decade as a ghostwriter, where he assembled client language from books, blogs, and recorded meetings. He calls this approved language, and he sees AI as the automated version of the same job. A larger library gives you more net new combinations.
5. Ownership As Association
Cole defines ownership as association. Volume creates the first layer, and personality details create the second layer. I add Ramit Sedi and Dave Ramsey as two people who own opposite sides of the same commodity idea about coffee and savings.
6. The Unmade Data Set
Cole explains that everybody uses the same models and the same public data. Your formative experiences, mistakes, and life facts stay outside that data until you write them down. He gives the example of his World of Warcraft sentence, which he repeated in hundreds of pieces after one Quora answer went viral.
7. Timely Versus Timeless
Cole puts every piece on a spectrum. A meme captures 24 hours of attention, and an essay serves you for ten years. He asks one question before you start: how much value do you extract, and over what time horizon?
8. Voice, Volume, And The Company Brain
Cole unbundles voice into word choice, sentence length, and sentence structure, so you can create it on purpose. He recalls a client edit of about one percent that made a piece sound like the client. I close with the company brain idea: a company pays one deep thinker for a library, and the robots pull from it across every channel.
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FIND ME ON SOCIAL
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FIND COLE ON SOCIAL
X: https://x.com/Nicolascole77
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nicolascole77
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