Big Idea

The argument in one line.

A viral long-form piece isn't one good hook, it's a structure: a problem-first introduction, a body built from your own past best-performing ideas, and a conclusion that turns advice into an implementable system, and that same structure can be reverse-engineered from any viral post with AI.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…

You write newsletters, X/Twitter threads, YouTube scripts, or long-form content and want a repeatable structure instead of staring at a blank page.
You want to use AI to reverse-engineer why a specific post or article went viral, not just get generic writing tips.
You're building, or want to build, a reusable AI assistant that remembers your past ideas and gets sharper with every piece you write.

SKIP IF…

You're looking for line-by-line sentence-level writing help. The video is explicit that no one can teach you to write sentences, only how to research and structure.
You only write short-form captions or one-off social posts with no research or outlining phase.

TL;DR

The full version, fast.

In January 2026 the author's X article hit 226 million views, becoming the most-viewed article in Twitter history. He argues virality isn't accidental: it comes from four ingredients, a novel or extreme promise, a contrarian angle timed against the season, a system instead of a tip, and self-diagnosis over advice, layered onto a three-part structure of problem-first introduction, a body built from your own best-performing past ideas, and a conclusion that turns advice into an implementable system. He demonstrates feeding the article itself into Eden to generate a reverse-engineered breakdown document, then converting that into a persistent Custom AI that interviews you about your weekly topic and builds a viral-worthy outline from a growing library of past breakdowns.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 02:28

01 · The article that broke Twitter

226 million views, a two-week social-media break, a Chinese-Twitter takeover of his feed, and a Melania Trump follow: the fallout from an article that went further than he expected.

02:28 – 04:22

02 · Why copycats miss the real reason it worked

Other creators' breakdowns get the surface details right but miss the pre-planned thought process behind them. The same underlying skill, long-form writing, applies to X, Substack, YouTube scripts, and podcasts alike.

04:22 – 07:02

03 · Feeding the article back into Eden

Cross-platform numbers on the piece, his writing pipeline (newsletter first, then X, then a YouTube script), and the exact reverse-engineering prompt he uses to have AI teach him how to replicate his own article.

07:02 – 09:20

04 · The four-job viral engine

AI's breakdown of the article surfaces four recurring ingredients: a novel or extreme promise, a contrarian angle against the season, a system instead of a tip, and self-diagnosis over advice.

09:20 – 14:17

05 · Turning the breakdown into a Custom AI

The one-off breakdown document becomes a persistent "Viral Anatomy Writer" Custom AI, with its own knowledge base, memory across chats, and a shareable affiliate link.

14:17 – 16:34

06 · Starting from the problem, not the topic

His three-question method for beating a blank page, and the first half of his introduction structure: state the problem bluntly, then meet the reader where they are.

16:34 – 21:08

07 · Promise, expectations, and the body as your greatest hits

The second half of the introduction (the desired outcome and setting expectations for a long read) and the principle that every section in the body should already be a proven idea on its own.

21:08 – 25:43

08 · Where the ideas actually come from

Capturing ideas continuously into Eden's library, then using deep synthesis and the Discover feed's outliers to research what belongs in a given piece.

25:43 – 28:01

09 · Turning advice into a system

Why a list of journaling questions wasn't enough, and how it became a morning, afternoon, and nightly protocol with calendar reminders so readers couldn't forget the piece.

28:01 – 30:29

10 · Practice is the only shortcut

The apprentice-and-guitar analogy for developing your own writing style, and the closing pitch for the Creator Bootcamp.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

A viral long-form article is built from four ingredients: a novel or extreme promise, a contrarian angle timed against the season, a system instead of a tip, and self-diagnosis over advice.
Every idea inside a long-form piece should already be a proven performer on its own, not just the title, so the article reads like an album of your greatest hits.
Start every piece by answering one of three questions: what's the problem in society, what problem have I faced before, or what problem do other people face.
A viral piece's introduction has two jobs: name the problem the reader is avoiding, then set expectations for exactly what they'll get if they read the whole thing.
Telling readers up front that a piece is long and worth bookmarking stops them from quitting halfway through, waiting for a payoff that never seems to arrive.
Structuring long-form content in three chunks works: the introduction states the problem, the body explains why it matters, and the conclusion delivers the system to fix it.
Advice that actually changes someone's behavior gets attributed to the person who gave it, so a vague list of tips is weaker than a step-by-step system.
Eighty percent of writing is research and outlining. Once the ideas are already on the page, the actual writing goes fast.
Reading books instead of scrolling social media is how you find non-obvious concepts that make an audience feel like they learned something they couldn't find anywhere else.
Capturing ideas the moment you have them, on a walk or mid-audiobook, builds the raw material a future article gets assembled from.
An outlier post is one that performs many times higher than that creator's typical output, and studying those specifically beats studying their average content.
Asking an AI to search your own idea library for what's relevant to this week's topic beats starting every new piece from a blank chat.
A reusable AI writing assistant is only as good as what you feed it: past breakdowns, your own top-performing posts, and other creators whose structure you admire.
You learn to write the way an apprentice learns a craft, by imitating someone else's structure and style until your own eventually develops.

Takeaway

Virality follows a structure, not a lucky hook

WHAT TO LEARN

A viral long-form piece is built from a problem-first introduction, a body made of your own best-performing ideas, and a conclusion that turns advice into an implementable system, and that structure can be reverse-engineered from any post.

02Why copycats miss the real reason it worked

Long-form writing is one skill applied everywhere: the same research-and-outline process works for X articles, Substack newsletters, YouTube scripts, and podcasts.
No one can teach you to write elegant sentences directly. That only comes from reading widely and practicing in a style you admire until your own develops.

03Feeding the article back into Eden

The useful reverse-engineering prompt isn't "break down this article," it's asking the AI to teach you how to replicate it yourself, including the psychological reasoning behind each choice.
Publishing the same core idea across a newsletter, X, and YouTube isn't laziness. Readers pick one platform, and repetition helps them retain what they read.

04The four-job viral engine

A novel or extreme promise, like promising to fix your life in one day, contradicts a belief the audience already holds, which is what makes people stop and click.
Writing against the mood of the moment, like challenging New Year's resolutions in January, gives a piece built-in tension the calendar hands you for free.
A detailed system readers can implement immediately outperforms a list of generic tips because it gives them something to do today, not just think about.
Including a genuinely unfamiliar concept, something readers haven't seen in a typical feed, is what makes them feel like they learned something and want more from you.

05Turning the breakdown into a Custom AI

A persistent AI assistant loaded with your past breakdowns and top-performing posts saves you from re-explaining your voice and structure in every new chat.
The habit that compounds is doing this breakdown three or four times. Each new reference article you add makes the assistant's future outlines sharper.

06Starting from the problem, not the topic

Before writing anything, answer one of three questions: what's the problem in society, what problem have I faced, or what problem do other people face, then pick the strongest answer.
State the problem bluntly first, then step into the reader's shoes so the piece reads as leveling with them instead of talking down to them.

07Promise, expectations, and the body as your greatest hits

An introduction has two jobs: name what's wrong in one blunt paragraph, then set expectations for exactly what the reader will get and how long it will take.
Telling readers up front that a piece is long and worth bookmarking keeps them reading instead of quitting halfway through, waiting for a payoff that never comes.
Treat each section of a long piece as its own idea that has already proven itself, so the whole piece reads like a collection of your best material rather than one idea stretched thin.

08Where the ideas actually come from

Capture ideas the moment you have them, on a walk, mid-audiobook, whenever, so you're pulling from an existing library instead of inventing ideas cold when it's time to write.
Study a creator's outliers, posts that performed many times above their normal average, rather than their typical content, because outliers reveal what actually breaks through.

09Turning advice into a system

A vague list of actionable steps is forgettable. A structured system built around specific reminders through the day is what actually changes reader behavior.
When advice actually changes someone's behavior, readers attribute that change to you, which is why a real system outperforms a checklist.

10Practice is the only shortcut

You develop your own style the way an apprentice learns a craft: by imitating someone else's structure and tone until it becomes naturally yours.
None of this structure replaces reps. Expect the first few pieces to feel difficult before the process starts to feel automatic.

Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Custom AI: A persistent AI assistant, similar to a custom GPT or Claude Project, that holds specific knowledge, instructions, and conversation history so every new chat starts with relevant context instead of from scratch.
Deep synthesis: An Eden feature that searches a user's entire idea library for concepts and notes connected to the topic they're currently writing about.
Deep social: An Eden research feature that searches a corpus of viral social posts for ideas related to a given topic, for pulling directly into an outline.
Outlier: A social media post that performs many times higher than that creator's typical output, used as a signal of ideas or structures worth studying.
Nine stages of ego development: A psychological framework describing how a person's mind or sense of self matures over time, cited in the article as a self-diagnosis concept most readers hadn't encountered before.
Spiral dynamics: A model of psychological and cultural development, cited alongside ego-development frameworks as an example of non-obvious source material pulled from books rather than social media.

Resources

Things they pointed at.

00:00toolEden ↗

28:01productEden Creator Bootcamp ↗

Quotables

Lines you could clip.

00:30

“For a brief period of time, my entire feed was Chinese because Chinese Twitter took over and was just talking about the article.”

vivid, specific, surprising detail about scale→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

07:50

“I think 80% of writing is just researching and outlining. If you have that down and you spend most of your time on that, then the article writes itself.”

a punchy, quotable ratio claim that stands alone→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote

15:00

“You aren't where you want to be because you aren't the person who would be there.”

the exact tweet he reused as a section headline, tight and self-contained→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote

25:50

“If you can change someone's behavior, they're going to attribute that change to you.”

sharp, standalone insight on why systems beat generic tips→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote

The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

metaphoranalogystory

Back in January of this year, I posted an article to Twitter and I was not expecting it to get 226 million views and go on to be the most viewed article in Twitter history. That is a lot of views on something so long form. And with my newsletters, with my articles, I guess you could say I'm kind of notorious for writing really long ones.

This article specifically was somewhere around five to six thousand words, which is just absurd for a newsletter. But that's kind of what makes my content stand out. And that's what I like writing.

I find it difficult to write a short newsletter. But many of you have seen. That article, it went absolutely bonkers.

It went extremely viral. I had to log off of social media for two weeks just because when I would log on Twitter, all I would see is my name, my article. I would see the hate.

I would see the love. For a brief period of time, my entire feed was Chinese because Chinese Twitter took over and was just talking about the article. I had a ton of celebrities follow me.

Melania Trump followed me. And a lot of YouTubers and other people that I watch followed me, which was really cool. But as social media goes, what happens when you go viral is people start breaking it down.

They want to understand how you went viral so that they can replicate it and do the same thing. And most of the time, they just copy you to some extent, which isn't necessarily a bad thing because they aren't completely copying you, but they would take my image style. that i put on the article to try to capture people's attention and take advantage of them liking the image on my article and i've read some of the breakdowns on why my post did really well and a lot of them are accurate you can't really be that wrong when you're looking at the article and saying what is in the article but what they're missing is the thought process behind it they didn't know that i knew that this article was going to go viral i knew that this article was going to be one of my best pieces on all platforms not just twitter and so in this video i want to show you how to reverse engineer the article yourself and if you're a beginner have ai guide you through outlining your own unique topic using the structure and principles of the article that i wrote because that's a great way to start writing on a better foot

than most people who just stare at a blank screen. And this writing X articles is just writing long form content. It applies to substack newsletters.

It applies to YouTube scripts. It even applies to podcasts. If you learn how to do this, then you will grow much faster on any platform you apply this to.

Of course, X being one of them. And then after we do that, we're going to go through my actual thought process that went in to writing the article itself, not line by line. I can't teach you.

Nobody can teach you how to write. sentences in an eloquent way. You do that by taking a bunch of sentences and reading a lot of books of authors whose style and tone you like, and then you practice writing in that style or tone until your own develops.

So the only way to teach yourself that part, actually writing, is to write. But the thought process that goes behind structuring, outlining, brainstorming, all of those things helps you write that much better. I think 80 % of writing is just researching and outlining.

If you have that down and you spend most of your time on researching and outlining, then the article writes itself. What I mean by that is if you're stuck and you don't know what to write and you're just staring at a blank screen, it's because you haven't learned.

you haven't researched you haven't brainstormed the ideas that would go there the ideas should already be on paper in your outline before you even start writing really quick the next creator boot camp starts on september 9th so if you want to learn what topics to write about how to build an irreplaceable brand how to write heavy hitting short form and long form content and growth strategies so you don't have to rely on the algorithm for growth consider joining with the link in the description and if you want your purchase can actually go towards an eden pro plan.

What you pay for gets credited so you don't have to pay anything extra. All right, so as you can see, this got 339 ,000 likes on Twitter. On YouTube, it got 501 ,000 views.

On Substack, it got 6 .5 ,000 likes. So it was an outlier for me on all platforms, but it just went super mega viral on Twitter. What I do, my writing process, as I've gone over many times, is I write the newsletter first.

The newsletter goes on Substack, and then I copy paste that to X, and then I turn that into X. a YouTube script. So I'm covering all platforms at once.

I personally don't see the need to create new content for all platforms because people have their platform of choice that they like to listen to or read the content from. And it doesn't hurt to read it a second time because that's how you retain the information. So what we're going to do to break this down is we're going to create a new chat.

We can zoom in on this a bit more to see what I wrote. I said, I want you to break down exactly why this article went viral section by section macro. and micro act as if you are teaching me how to replicate it myself, the psychological tactics, reasoning behind choosing those ideas and what made it shareable.

Now, a lot of people will just say, hey, break down this article, but they won't give it further instruction. And that's fine. You'll get a little bit out of that.

But the key line here when trying to break down a piece of content that you want to incorporate into your own style is this act as if you are teaching me how to replicate it myself, because what we're doing here is. We're creating a guide that we can then feed any AI chat in the future. We're creating a document that we can turn into a skill or turn into a custom AI or turn into a prompt, which I'll show you how to do in a second, but we're going to hit send so you see what I mean here.

All right, so Eve went a little bit crazy here and it researched the web for a bunch of other people's summaries and other things like that, which was surprising and cool, but it didn't really need to happen. it still created the document on how this actually went viral, the breakdown of it. So if we open this document, we can read why it actually went viral.

And so I'm just going to go over the gist of it. So the macro engine, four jobs apiece does well, a novel promise. Fix your entire life in one day contradicts the change takes years belief everyone already holds.

Obviously, how to fix your entire life in one day is like. Kind of shocking. What do you mean one day?

It opens that question. It makes people want to click. It's extreme.

I would call this an extreme promise or an extreme time bound promise rather than a novel promise. And that is a tool in your tool belt that you can use for the articles, YouTube scripts or YouTube titles, et cetera, when it actually fits the content, if you can actually promise that kind of thing. But it's also like a constraining factor that breeds a lot of creativity, right?

If I want to write an article titled how to fix. your entire life in one day, then I have to be creative enough to try to deliver on that promise. And that's what I did in the ending section.

Another thing that helped it go viral was that contrarian against the season. So it was New Year's, right? I put it out in January.

Everyone is setting New Year's resolutions. And I kind of attacked that in the introduction. I said, most people aren't going to achieve their New Year's resolution.

Here's why. The third thing is that I gave a system, not a tip, not a set of actionable steps. It was a very detailed protocol that people could implement right now, today, to see results and break out of their preconditioned patterns, which we'll go over in my own thought process.

The fourth thing here is self -diagnosis over advice. So I included the stages of ego development, the nine stages of ego development, which is a concept that maps how your mind or ego or psychology develops over time. And so the AI considered this self -diagnosis.

over advice when I would consider it. people learning something new. A lot of people haven't heard of the nine stages of ego development before.

And so when they read about that in some random article they found on the internet, that's what stands out, right? That's what makes them follow you is you taught them something they didn't know before and they feel like they can learn more from you. That's why in a lot of my articles and YouTube videos, I try to include a novel concept, something that my audience probably hasn't heard of before or isn't something that's super popular, but I find extremely useful.

So the nine stages of ego development is one of those things. Spiral dynamics, psychic entropy. And most of those come from reading books.

You aren't going to get those things out of a default AI chat. You aren't going to get those things by researching top content on social media. If you want to write good articles or YouTube scripts that actually stand out, you need to have the habit of reading and finding information that isn't popular.

You have to essentially hunt for ideas that you can share with your audience that most of them have not heard before. Now, it continues to go through and break down section by section. and why those sections specifically work.

And again, I think this does well, but I think it's being a bit too specific, right? It's not understanding the why. the why behind why these ideas were put in the place that they were put, because it doesn't have access to that reasoning that can only come from the individual.

But this is still extremely useful. And so there are a few things that you can do with this. I'm not going to go through this entire thing because it's very long.

It's essentially a course on why this article worked. So if you want to do that, then feel free to sign up for Eden, paste the link to the article in the chat and ask it to break it down or just go to the Discover feed. go to creators, look for Dan Co.

There I am. You can find it in my top liked right here and then hit this boost button, this lightning bolt button, and then hit reverse engineer and it will do the same thing. And you can do that on anyone's posts that you find that are going viral in the discover feed or in any creator that you search.

This is a very good tool for creators who understand the value in researching the market for what's trending. So now what you can do is just save this document so that you have it later if you ever want to reference it as you're writing a newsletter. One thing you could ask in a chat is, hey, I'm writing this newsletter.

I'm on this section. How could I make this better based on this document, which is a breakdown of a viral article? What principles or tactics can I include in my own newsletter to make this better?

But another thing that you can do is just turn this into a custom AI. what a custom ai is is like a custom gpt or a cloud project and so it has instructions it has context it has knowledge it has other things like that so i'll just show you what it is because that helps a lot more and you'll get the gist of what it does and why it can be so powerful if you do this three or four times to really create a powerful custom ai so i'm going to type something really quick all right so what i said is i want you to turn this into a custom ai that helps me write newsletters articles YouTube scripts with this breakdown as knowledge.

This will have other breakdowns and references inside of it too as I add them. The AI should ask me what topic I'm writing about that week, then ask me questions around article writing principles to pull the right ideas out of me. Then it will turn that into an outline I can run with and start writing.

So I'm going to hit enter so you can see what I'm talking about here. So now you can see the magic happening. What it is doing is creating an environment which we can go into without starting from scratch every single AI chat.

So the custom AI that it created is called the viral anatomy writer. And what it does is it interviews you about your weekly topic, then builds a viral worthy outline from your growing breakdown library. And you can read through the instructions here, but what it essentially does is just that.

So I'm going to create the custom AI, let's name it the viral anatomy writer. We'll make the icon a fire because of virality, and then we'll just create it from here. So now if I go to the custom AI page, it should be right here.

And so what a custom AI has is very similar to a custom GPT or a cloud project. It has knowledge. So this is what is called into every single chat.

This is what the chat can access, right? You aren't just starting from a blank chat. You're starting from one that has this viral breakdown that it can reference.

We can add creators here that we want to reference if we really like their writing and want to use their newsletters. structures or their YouTube script structures. We can paste links to different X articles or substack articles or YouTube scripts.

We can add more from our workspace. And so what I would want you to do here is break down a few other YouTube scripts or articles that have gone viral before and then add them. to this custom ai so that when you chat inside of it to develop your article outline for the week or your youtube script for the week it's able to reference those breakdowns and you can drop pdfs or markdown or other things like that inside of here but the next thing that a custom ai has is it groups all of the conversations together what that means again is that you're not just starting a new chat from scratch your custom ai has all of the memory it has all of the past conversations and chats that it can pull from if you want it to pull from those things the last thing it has is just a configure tab you can change the image you can change the name you can change the icon you can change the description and here are the instructions if you want to read through them and then there's other things inside of here too like connectors and your writing voice and routines so let's say you create a weekly strategy ai that researches what's trending and puts it inside of a table that you can choose ideas from then you can create a routine to do that every week

at a certain time so that you have fresh ideas to come to every single week and the rest of these things like the conversation starters are if you're sharing it with another person because if you share a custom AI by hitting this share button you can share it and it appends your affiliate link so if you're an affiliate for eden and you want to share a custom ai that you built with someone else and they end up signing up for eden then you get a commission in other words you just create custom ais and share them to your audience and then you get paid for it so this is something that you can build over time is just having a way to outline a viral article time and time again whenever it's time to write an article you just hit start a conversation this opens it up here you hit one of the starter prompts like i want to write about topic this week interview me and build the outline and then you can add more knowledge here you can add specific creators and i'll show you what that looks like if we add a creator i can add myself so my sub stack articles so it knows to pull from my

top performing articles. I could put Alex Ramosi in there. Let's just look at my other stuff.

I can put my YouTube, I can put my X, and then we'll add those here. And these can be pulled into context as well. And then if I wanted to, I could edit the instructions or I can just tell the AI chat to edit the instructions.

So if it doesn't do something that I like, then I can just correct it. And then the custom AI builds itself over time until you have the perfect system to show up to, to outline a newsletter. every single week based on what works.

That's why this is so much more powerful than just showing up to chat GPT and saying, hey, I want to write a newsletter because one, it can't even read the Twitter article unless you copy paste it in. It can't search what's trending across social media. It can't do most of those things.

And then if you want to actually write the article, you can just create a new board or go to your library and then hit D to create the article. You can open it and then you can open your custom AI on the side where you did all of your research and you have your outline and then you can just write side by side. But now I want to go through my actual thought process and how I wrote this X article because the breakdown doesn't exactly cover it.

So the way that I like. to start almost every single article, newsletter, YouTube script is by asking, what's the problem? What's the problem that I observe in society?

What's the problem that I've faced before? What's a problem that other people face? If you ask yourself those three questions and choose the best answer to one of them, you're off to a great start and usually the writing flows pretty easily.

So the problem here is that most people don't actually change from a superficial New Year's resolution. That's the problem that comes to my mind when it's January and I'm writing this and I'm like, people are setting New Year's resolutions and that they're never going to hit. And so what I tend to do in my introductions is pretty much say, hey, this is stupid.

This is a problem. Here's what's going to happen if you keep allowing it to be in your life. And I'm pretty blunt here.

I just say it for what it is. But after that, what I do is I put myself in the reader's shoes and I just say, I'm not here to talk down on you. And I level with them.

And I say, I've quit 10 times more goals than I've achieved. So I say, I am in the same exact spot. I'm just showing you a better option.

So a better way to frame this or think of almost any introduction you want is what is the bad way of doing something? Or what is the enemy? What are we trying to avoid?

And then we hint at the good way of doing something. And that's what you're going to teach inside of the newsletter article or YouTube video.

In other words, what's the desired outcome or the promise? So in this sentence, my transition from, hey, here's what you should avoid. I then say, so whether you want to start the business, transform your body, or take the risk toward a more meaningful life without quitting after two weeks, I want to share seven ideas you probably haven't heard of before on behavior change, psychology, and productivity.

So you can do just that in 2026. This paragraph alone, I believe personally is the thing. that hooks them in.

You're essentially giving a one paragraph summary. of what's in the entire newsletter article youtube script and you're hinting at the desired outcome that they want what's the transformation that they want for my audience or for myself when i think of what i want in the future or what i wanted when i was younger i wanted to start the business i wanted to transform my body i wanted to be lean i wanted to be jacked as superficial as that sounds that's what people want and i wanted a meaningful life so in order to get those things we then transition into i want to share seven ideas you probably haven't heard before on behavior change, psychology, and productivity.

So you can do just that in 2026. So I'm framing it as if I'm going to share seven life -changing ideas for you, and it's going to potentially result in this if you actually adopt and take action on these ideas. And then what I say to kind of lock them in is this will be comprehensive.

This isn't one of those letters that you read through and forget about. This is something you'll want to bookmark, take notes on, and set aside time to think about.

This isn't something that people do enough, I feel like, because if you want the article to go viral, then they need to engage with it. They need to like it. They need to bookmark it.

All of that helps with the algorithm picking up the article. So first off, I tell them, hey, this is going to be long. You're going to spend 10 to 20 minutes reading this, so expect that.

And then I kind of hint, hey. bookmark this pull out a piece of paper or pull out notes on your phone and set aside time to think about it and not everyone's going to but those that do are going to get a lot more value out of it i feel like if i didn't say this people would get halfway through and be like holy crap this is way too long they wouldn't be waiting for the payoff in short what i'm doing here is i'm setting expectations for what they should expect in the newsletter so in the first part of the introduction i say here's the problem here Here's what's wrong.

Here's what we need to avoid. And then I set expectations. Here's what to expect and what you will get out of it if you actually stick through reading the entire thing.

And the last line here, the protocol at the end to dig deep into your psyche and uncover what you truly want in life. Again, hinting at the transformation will take about a full day to complete with effects that last far longer than that. So people finish this part of the intro and they're like, wow.

I am ready to read through this entire thing because it's going to be life changing. But what that means is that you as the writer have to actually deliver on that. Now, the way that I like to structure my long form content in general is just in key points.

And each one of those key points has to be a big idea. This is what the AI breakdowns miss. They don't understand that all of the seven key points inside of here were ideas that have previously outperformed.

for my content. What that means is that this article was essentially an album of my greatest hits because the idea in the title isn't the only thing that makes it go viral. Every single idea inside of the article is a reason for it to go viral as well.

I personally believe that writing long form is just stringing together the best ideas that you can come up with for that section or sentence or whatever it may be. So when I sat down to write this article, I'm like, dang, I need to make this really good.

Let me go research my past content and see what my top performing ideas were. And so this, you aren't where you want to be because you aren't the person who would be there, was literally a tweet of mine. This was the exact tweet.

I copy pasted the tweet and put it as the headline for this section. So when I'm outlining a newsletter, what I tend to do is I have the topic that I want to write about, which is how to fix your life. And then for the key points, which are the sections inside of the article, I try to think.

What are the biggest ideas or concepts that can slot into here in a kind of storytelling structure, right? Because they're not just all going to be ideas. They're going to be supporting ideas followed by actionable ideas because the introduction is largely here's what the problem is.

Then the first key point or two is like, here's why it's wrong. And then the last section, which is a system, a protocol or actionable steps to overcome the problem and achieve the transformation is here's how. you implement it.

So the introduction is here's the problem, here's what's wrong. The body is here's big ideas on why it matters, what's going on, helping them understand, right? It's education.

And then the conclusion is just the implementation, the actionable steps, the protocol, the system. And if you can nail those three big chunks, then you have the structure of a great newsletter article or YouTube script. And the way that I personally like to write these is very similar to how I wrote the introduction.

I just start with the problem. I think of the problem relating to the idea and then expand on it from there. And so how can you actually apply this?

If you don't have ideas that have performed for you before that you can weave into one grand newsletter of all your best ideas, what do you do? Well, you have to find ideas to weave into the topic that you're writing about. You pick a big topic that you think is going to do well, and then you need to find the best ideas for each set.

So one way you can do this is just by becoming an idea generation machine and having somewhere to save them. Inside of Eden, this isn't like your typical note taking app or second brain. What you do in Eden is you just embrace the chaos.

You dump ideas and links and notes and everything else into your Eden library because what we do is we auto tag, we auto categorize and we auto connect everything that goes into here so that it can be found or surface later based on. both keyword and based on meaning so you can see that there's this little graph that is created and this really isn't useful you're not going to use this as at all obsidian has this too but it's good at showing you what happens when you actually put ideas or videos or documents or anything else inside of eden is it creates this little brain out of all of them that the ai can search through and find the best ideas that's the important point so when you're inside of the library you can insert a link you can create a document or you can create a and what I like to do is create cards for just quick ideas.

If I'm on a walk or I'm listening to an audiobook or a YouTube video, that is like my greatest habit is just jotting down ideas that i really like or i think are really useful or important and so i just jot these down hit command enter keep typing i can type as many as i want but i usually do this on the mobile app and you can see i can just capture an idea really quick here or hit the capture button this opens up i jot down the idea save it as a card and i can just capture as many as i need to and it's just a really easy way to jot down an idea now as i'm actually right or outlining my newsletter I can just open a chat and then hit this button down here hit deep synthesis and what this is going to do is search through my library for connected ideas or good ideas that will relate with the topic that I'm writing about and it will search efficiently across all of them now the second way to do this is by either going to discover because the discover tab shows trending ideas it shows outliers and an outlier is something that

forms this many times higher than the creator's typical post. So if you want really good ideas that will potentially go viral, then think of how an article or YouTube script works. The title or the main topic or idea is only one thing.

that contributes to it going viral or not. The other ideas inside of it, if those are also ideas with high viral potential, then it is that much more likely to go viral. And so this is great for scrolling and getting inspiration, playing around with the filters for each platform.

But the best way to do it, in my opinion, is to, again, use this hit deep social. and then tell it what topic you're writing about. And then it will go and research our entire corpus of millions of viral social posts and then give some to you that it thinks it can best incorporate into the newsletter outline.

And you can just do this inside of the custom AI that you built as well. You just type in what you want to research here and give it the instructions like, hey, you're trying to find ideas that are most related to this article or newsletter that you're writing about that you can incorporate. in the outline and that just sets you so much further ahead than other creators who aren't doing this so going back to these slides really quick because that covers the body right that covers what ideas you can actually include inside of the outline itself but for the conclusion for the implementation for the actionable part I understood that just like Normal actionable steps wasn't going to cut it.

And I know that if you can change someone's behavior, they're going to attribute that change to you. I think that's what the best content does. It changes behavior in a positive way.

So that was my goal. I couldn't just give a list of your typical actionable steps. I had to take it up a notch and give something that people could implement today right now.

What could they do? And for this article, I planned on just giving journaling questions, but I knew that that just wasn't enough. So I had to beef it up and turn it into a system that they could easily implement.

And I had to make it clear. And so with my articles, I write them physically, but I brainstorm and I research with AI by asking questions like this. So what I asked for this article is I gave it the context of what I was writing about.

And I said, I want to just do more than create journaling questions. to make this something unforgettable I want it to feel magical I want to make it so clear that they have to do it and so when I told the AI chat that a lot of people don't even know that they can just ask the AI chat that and then it gave me some ideas and then I worked with it and then we decided on a direction and we came up with a morning afternoon and nightly system which tells people what to do at every hour of the day.

I told people to set reminders on their calendar that will go off and tell them what to do. So I kind of just ingrained myself into their day so that they would never forget about this article. And so that's what I would recommend you to do is whenever you're writing a newsletter, don't settle for the default.

You can go and ask the AI chat like, hey, what are a few ideas to just like... Take this to the next level. How can we make it so impactful that they'll never forget?

And yeah, it may not give you the best idea. You don't have to accept the ideas that it gives you. You can question them.

You can work with it. And at a minimum, even if it doesn't give you anything, you've started that line of thought in your head so that you may come up with that idea as you're writing or as you're going about your day. And then you can actually take it once you come up with it and put it inside the newsletter.

So that is it. That is the breakdown. That is the thought process that went behind writing the actual newsletter.

But of course, none of this is a substitute for practice and experience and being able to come up with this process yourself. So at the end of the day, that's what I recommend is just put in the reps. When you first start writing an article or a script or a newsletter, it's going to be very difficult.

You're not going to know what to write at all. But that's how it is with any skill. If you start playing the guitar or the piano, you don't know how to play it at first.

You don't even know. where to put your fingers on the guitar. But then you learn.

You pick up subtle tactics. You try to play a song. And what I mean by that is you emulate someone else's work until you develop your own style.

That's how apprentices work in the past. The master had an apprentice that would essentially imitate the master until they developed their own style. When you learn to play the guitar, you pick a song that you want to play, like Smoke on the Water, and then you look up the chords and learn what the chords are, and then you play that, and now you learned those chords.

And the same goes for content creation. That's how you practice. So I will leave you with that.

And again, the Creator Bootcamp starts on September 9th. So you have a few days to join if you haven't already, where you will learn much more than just how to structure an article. You will learn how to build an irreplaceable brand.

You will learn how to write heavy -hitting short -form and long -form content. And you will learn the growth strategies that make it so that you don't have to rely on the algorithm to grow. And the cool thing is that if you join the bootcamp, your bootcamp purchase goes toward an Eden Pro subscription.

So what you pay gets credited if you want to upgrade and you don't have to pay anything more. And if you are on Eden Pro Annual, the bootcamp just comes with it. So thank you for watching.

I will see you in the next video.

The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

In January, the author posted an X article that hit 226 million views, the most-viewed article in Twitter history. He walks through the four ingredients that made it go viral, then shows how to feed the article itself into AI to reverse-engineer the structure and turn it into a reusable writing system.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

07:02list

The Four-Job Viral Engine

A novel or extreme promise
A contrarian angle against the season
A system, not a tip
Self-diagnosis over advice

The four ingredients Eden's AI identified when asked to reverse-engineer why the article went viral.

Steal forany long-form piece you want to push past its normal reach

14:17list

The Three-Question Problem Starter

What's the problem I observe in society?
What's a problem I've faced before?
What's a problem other people face?

The author's way of starting almost every article, newsletter, or script: answer these, pick the strongest answer, and the writing tends to flow from there.

Steal forbeating blank-page paralysis on any piece of content

16:34model

Three-Part Long-Form Structure

Introduction: here's the problem, here's what's wrong
Body: big ideas on why it matters (education)
Conclusion: the system, protocol, or actionable steps (implementation)

The macro structure the author uses for every newsletter, article, or YouTube script.

Steal foroutlining any long-form piece before writing a single sentence

CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

VERBAL ASK

28:01product

“The next creator bootcamp starts on September 9th... if you want, your purchase can actually go towards an Eden Pro plan.”

Mentioned twice: a soft mid-video aside right before the screen-share section starts, then the primary sign-off pitch, framed as low-risk since the bootcamp cost credits toward an Eden Pro subscription.

MENTIONED ON CAMERA

00:00toolEden ↗

28:01productEden Creator Bootcamp ↗

Storyboard