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SPEAKER_03
All right, we're live. Sean, how many people did your tweet reach? How many people did my tweet reach? Yeah, so go to Twitter and then click Insights and then look at Reach. I'm going to guess 5 million.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, let's give it a shot. So it has 13,000 likes and yeah, almost 5 million, 4.8 million impressions.
SPEAKER_03
Wow. And who are some of the more interesting people who reached out to you? Well, first, what did you, what happened here for the listeners?
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so what happened? I went on Twitter and I wrote a thread. I wrote a thread about Clubhouse and the thread starts basically saying, you know, everybody seems to think that Clubhouse is the next big thing and I think it's going to fail and here's how I think it's going to go down. And then I wrote it in this way that's a little bit like goofy.
I kind of went over the top. I was like, all right, you're the CEO. First of all, congrats, champ, you did it, you know? And I walked through like the high that they're on right now because everything's going great and everybody thinks it's the hot shit.
And then like where things might start to go wrong and what might go wrong based on, you know, the way that the product is set up, the nature of that product and all that good stuff. And so that was a thread. I put it out there and I thought it was going to kind of flop because right away nothing happened.
And usually you could tell, like, you know this, you could tell pretty quickly within a couple of minutes, you know, if the thread, if your tweets going to get any action or not, it didn't look like it was going to get any action. And the first reply was this guy being like, dude, this is way too f-ing long. Like, what are you doing? And like the way he said, like, I assume some people say, this is super long because it's like, I don't know, 50 tweets or something crazy.
But when he was like, what are you doing? I felt super embarrassed and I was like, shit, there's just delete this, this is stupid. And then I just like let it ride for a few more minutes. And then it took off and now some crazy shits happening and like I'm going on CNBC tomorrow to talk about it.
SPEAKER_03
So all kinds of crazy stuff has happened. You're going on CNBC tomorrow? Yeah. I wonder if it's the same person who invited Trunk on.
So you're the second person associated with the company who's been on in the past two weeks.
SPEAKER_01
I'm hot on Trunks Heal that saw him on last week talking about Kathy Wood and ARC and stuff like that. And he was great. So if I can do half as good as he did, I'll be in good shape.
SPEAKER_03
And who else reached out to you? Can you say you told me a couple?
SPEAKER_01
OK, so I can't say all the names. I'll say, well, OK, so first I started getting mentioned by a bunch of cool people. So like the guy who started YouTube was like, dude, this is fucking hilarious.
Like I love this. And then so a bunch of people who have started big companies kind of were saying something. And I started getting DMs from people.
And I kind of went to sleep first. I was refreshing for like four hours because I couldn't stop. I was mid-workout.
And then between sets, I would go check my Twitter. It was kind of annoying. And Sony was like, what the hell are you doing? What is this? And I was like, I don't know.
I'm obsessed. I really just want to see. It was like I would pull the refresh thing and then a different famous person who I look up to was usually saying, this is awesome or something like that.
So that was kind of addictive. I went to sleep. I woke up the next day.
And so in my inbox is an offer for a book deal. Like a famous movie director who directed a bunch of movies that we've heard of. Wrote like, dude, amazing storytelling.
This is all like found my email address and emailed me that. He's the, I think I can say it. He's the director of Space Jam 2 and like a whole bunch of famous movies.
And then I don't know if I can say this one, but my favorite podcaster content person out there, DM me and was like, this is a fucking great thread. I was like blown away that this guy wrote this. And then CNBC was like, hey, would you like to do this? Some German news station was like, well, you come on and talk about it.
And I was like, wow, this is unbelievable. What could happen with just a random ass tweet? Kind of a written right. Not even a good one really.
It took me an hour. I sat down and so the way this played out actually was, I had already believed this, but I thought, okay, that's not cool. Like nobody thinks it's cool to just say, oh, a startup is going to fail.
Well, most startups fail. So like there's nothing that original there. But because I had built a product very similar to Club Boss, I kind of knew what the challenges are going to be and where they might get tripped up and what's going to be really hard for them.
And so I thought, well, I kind of feel like I know the product strategy here, but like, if I just write about the product decision, like some of the product challenges and the product strategy, it's a pretty boring tweet storm. Nobody's going to really care. So when I ended up writing it, I wrote it like an episode of Silicon Valley, like the HBO show.
Like I basically wrote it in that style. Like, okay, you know, Emily Chang invites you onto, you know, whatever CNBC and to do an interview, you wear your visionary gray V-neck shirt, you go on and you say this, this and this. And so I was just kind of writing like a goofy style.
I wasn't just writing information. I was trying to entertain a little bit. And then Emily Chang replies to the thing being like, you know, I can't confirm or deny this, but this is on point.
So all kinds of crazy stuff was happening. But yeah, it took me about an hour and then I just hit publish.
SPEAKER_03
And you got like 30,000 followers from it. Congrats to late or 20,000 maybe.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, dude, that's the way that Twitter works though, is like, you think it goes against like all the conventional good advice, which is just like, you know, be consistent, put out content all the time and like hit a bunch of singles. And like what I found, and I think, I don't know, you tell me if you found this too, which is like five tweets that grew me from 20K to 120K.
SPEAKER_03
Five tweets. Yeah, it's everything.
SPEAKER_01
Everything else was a cost of doing business.
SPEAKER_03
It's the hits business. Yeah, it is. And I am.
And I think it's business. And summarizes actually, I brought you asked me to ask you to summarize this. The, your bare case for Clubhouse, because we're actually gonna use this probably for one of our Twitter videos.
SPEAKER_01
So everybody's saying that Clubhouse is the next big thing. You're hearing about it all the time. They went, you know, from a test, I think they were in test flight and they raised at a billion dollar valuation, which is kind of crazy.
The Apple's not automated.
SPEAKER_03
No, they were in test flight and they raised at a hundred million. But it's.
SPEAKER_01
Right, but now they're at a billion dollar valuation. It hasn't been long. There's still iOS only, still pretty exclusive.
You can't even join the app unless you have an invite. But I see the other side of it. I think that they're gonna fail.
I hope they don't fail. I think the world is more fun if they win. It would be awesome if they win, but I don't think me wanting them to win doesn't mean that's what's gonna happen.
I sort of, I said in the Twitter thread, I said, if me wanting something to happen would happen then every bag of chips would come with block. But that's just not the way life is. And so, okay, so here's how it works.
I pretend you're the CEO of Clubhouse, Sam. First of all, you fucking did it. You made it.
People actually like the thing you made. And they don't even like it. They love it.
And, you know, you check your DMs and Chris Sokka's in your DMs. He says, dude, congrats. This thing is kick ass.
And, you know, Naval is liking your tweets and Keith Reboi is basically saying like, this isn't shit. You know, this is not garbage. And so you take that as a huge compliment as it is.
And it feels like every day you open up the app and like a new star is coming on the platform. Like first kind of like just tech dork stars, like, you know, the Mark Vendrysons and Ben Horowitz, people that we like but they're kind of niche in our circles. And then it'll expand.
And all of a sudden you'll get NBA players coming on, you know, famous musicians. Logan Paul will come on. And then this was the most liked tweet in the thing was.
I said, Gary V realizes that you created a new place to yell. And he starts telling everybody, hey, if you really want to make money, go move back in with your parents and sell their furniture on Craigslist. So every life is good, right? You get a term sheet, you're valued at a billion dollars and you know, you're doing interviews.
And you got to kind of ham it up, right? Because you can't just say, oh, I made this app where you can go and chat rooms and talk to people. That doesn't sound very fancy. So you try to play it simple, but you talk really fancy.
You say things like, you know, this is a serendipity network. This is not just chat rooms. This is audio escapism.
Then you start saying like historical shit. Like you're like, you know, humans have been talking to each other since the dawn of time around the campfire. And you know, audio is so powerful because you can see your tone and texture.
And so you're going on the media tour and then like you get back to your computer one day and you look at the charts and you know, the graph doesn't look as, you know, as up to the righty as it's supposed to be. And so you're like, what's wrong with this thing? You refresh and the growth is kind of flat, maybe even declining. And you start to look a little deeper.
And what you'll find if you're the CEO of clubhouses, after about a year into the product, you see that retention is not so good. It's not as good as it used to be in the early days. And why is that the case? And what will happen is that you'll realize that clubhouses use for two totally different things.
There's two ways that clubhouse can be used. If you talk to users or you watch them, you'll see these two things. Number one, it's a place to create content.
And number two, it's a place to just chill, just to go hang out with other people and have conversations. And so content is what we see all the time on there. It's panels, it's fireside chats, Q&As, AMAs.
And it's like, oh, this is content. It's like the next YouTube. It's where you go.
It's where you create content and people consume it. The problem is that a lot of the content liked on YouTube is just like, meh, right? 98% of the content is junk. And that's okay.
That's the same for every platform. You just need to find that gold. And there is gold on clubhouse, right? If you watch The Good Time Show or the NYU Girls who go on there and they have that show called Shoot Your Shot, that is gold.
And so you want to triple down on that. You're like, guys, this is what we need to juggle down on. How do we get more gold content? And you tell the whole team, we're going to go get more gold content.
The engineers, they go start building features for content creators. They build like a scheduling feature and Q&A tools and like a monetization features where you can make money from your fans. And the creators are happy, but the retention stays bad.
And what you realize when you talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about here is that there's this problem called the interestingness problem, which is that when you open up an app, there's one metric that matters called TTF. And TTF is time to fun. How long does it take me to have some fun inside this app? Get some dopamine.
And all the great apps within seven seconds. If you open TikTok, YouTube, Instagram in seven seconds, you're going to get something juicy. You're going to get fun.
And the way those apps do it is they have billions of pieces of content to choose from. And the algorithm knows, okay, this is the most like content the last 24 hours. So it shoves it in your feed.
And when you open the app, it's going to show you something great, right? TikTok calls us the for you page because it's here's the best stuff for you. And that's why TikTok is so addictive. Every time you open it, you get something great.
But for Clubhouse, you tell your engineers, hey, that's what we need. Make an algorithm that will do that. And the engineers, you know, they sit you down in a chair and they'll say, okay, we're going to do our best.
But just so you know, it's one thing to just find what's interesting, but we have to find what's interesting and is being created live right now. And when you multiply those two things together, it doesn't become twice as hard. It becomes 200 times as hard to find interesting content when you open the app.
What happens is most people will download this app. They heard about Clubhouse. They heard it's cool.
Open an app and whatever's on right then, they'll walk into the first room and it'll be kind of boring. It'll be kind of mad. And then they'll walk into a second room and then within 30 seconds, they'll be like, why the hell am I here? This app is stupid.
They'll close the app and they'll probably never come back. And so they'll get a bunch of downloads, a bunch of signups, but they'll all just be leaking out the bottom of the bucket. And so, you know, you're the CEO.
And so you're like, oh, okay, yeah, live is harder. I get it, but Twitch did it. Twitch is live and look at that.
They got hundreds of millions of users. So clearly it can work. You guys, the engineers, you guys just need to make it happen.
The product manager or the engineers will come back to you and they'll say, well, Twitch is a little different, right? Because on Twitch, the great content creators are creating about 40 hours a week of content. They stream every day, six, eight hours a day. They're playing a game so they can do that.
They can play a game for six hours straight and just talk while they're doing it. It's hard, but it's not anywhere near as hard as just opening Clubhouse and being entertaining for six hours straight while talking. Maybe some radio hosts can do that, but the average person cannot.
And then the second thing they'll say is like, almost all the content on Twitch is about gaming. So as a viewer, if I come on there, maybe one creator's not live, but another Fortnite creator is live or another Fortnite creator is live, it's like density around one passion. Whereas Clubhouse is every category.
Some people come there for music talk, some for sports, some for tech. And so if I'm a sports person and I see a tech room, that's of zero value to me. So Twitch is vertical, Clubhouse is horizontal.
This is gonna be really hard to get great content in every category. And so, I kind of fast forward and, okay, this is tough. Your meeting ends, the next meeting, engineers leave.
Next meeting is the biz dev guys. The biz dev guys come in, and the biz dev guys, what do you want us to do, boss? And you say, you need to go get great content. Go get all the stars.
We got all this money in the bank. Go pick cut some checks. Let's get some star creators on the platform.
And you'll go to people who have a big audience. You go to podcasters, right? You go to people like us. And then we're gonna say, okay, so if I could spend an hour on Clubhouse and get, I don't know, 2000, 3000 people in the room, that's good, right? But like, if I just record a podcast, I'm gonna reach 300,000 people with that.
So why would I ever make this trade? Why would I go live here? Right, when I could just record my podcast? So you're the CEO, you say, all right, that's a tricky problem. But maybe you could do both, right? Why do you have to choose? Do your show live on Clubhouse, and we'll add a recording feature so that you could just make a podcast out of it later. You can have your cake and eat it too.
And so you do that and some creators start to use it, but you realize there's a big problem with that, which is as soon as you start to like let people record, and the core thing becomes, I'm recording my podcast here. I'm just doing a live version that will turn into my podcast. Turn into a YouTube video.
Then this live thing becomes a second-class citizen. And I stop letting guests hop on my Clubhouse room and chat with me because I don't know what the hell they're gonna say, it's unpredictable. And what makes for a great live session is that spontaneity, but that makes for a shitty recording.
And so that's another trap there. So okay, you finally, you have an emergency team meeting, you say this whole content thing sucks. We only have a few pieces of great content, only a few hours a week for every vertical.
This is gonna be impossible to do in every category. That's like recreating all of TV. And that's just really hard to do.
And I'm tired of all these people on there doing shows and Q and A's and these success coaches trying to manifest millionaires and all this bullshit. What is this, discord for douchebags? Like screw shows, we need a new plan. And we're going to plan B.
Plan B is chilling, right? This is a social network. It's not a performance network. You come here to socialize.
You come here to just talk to other people. That's the most human thing in the world. Seven billion people on earth talk to their friends.
This is what we'll do here. You ask people who had a great experience so far on Clubhouse, the people who think it's amazing, you know, our friend Narendra or different people who've really enjoyed their experience. And you ask them why and they'll say, well, I came on, I was in this room where this really cool thing happened and Mark Andreessen was there and then this guy was there.
And then, you know, I went into a side room and I met a bunch of other cool people in the tech world and we got along great. I made a bunch of new friends. And you say, all right, that's what we're gonna do.
And sure enough, that actually solves your retention problem because people will come here, we'll solve loneliness. People will come here, they'll hang out and they'll make friends. But all of a sudden your growth will stall, right? Because if I'm coming here to make friends and I'm not bringing friends to the platform, that's kind of the rub there, right? So any platform where the value prop is to make friends, I'm not gonna bring friends.
So now you have sticky retention, but now you have no growth. And in the other world, you had fast growth, but no retention. And so you're stuck in this catch 22.
You eventually get disillusioned, you realize this shit's not gonna work, you try to pivot, you eventually sell the company to Facebook, you spend a year as the manager of Facebook Voice, and then you quit, you go, you travel in Southeast Asia for a year, you do some ayahuasca, and you vow to yourself, I'm only gonna ever work in enterprise SaaS again, screw this social thing. So that's my story over the top. I hope I'm wrong, but I think that's how it's gonna play out.
SPEAKER_03
And I think a lot of people who are hating on you didn't realize that this is the life that you led.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, some people are like, wow, that's really detailed. Where is this coming from? And some people are like, dude, that's way over the top. And I'm like, dude, I've built this before.
We built it up so similar to this. It grew to four million users, and Tony Robbins was using it, and ESPN was using it, and the Jonas Brothers, and then Oracle was using it, and then some of the tech guys, and the 37 signals guys were using it, and it was also product that was using it. We get to four million members, and we just started to see these same issues, and we tried everything to fix it.
And I hope these guys find the solution that we missed, or maybe the world has changed, or there's some differences. This was 70% my experience, 30% fantasy that I wrote this thing with.
SPEAKER_03
I guess we're gonna have to check in on this podcast in maybe one year. I think we'll see how things shake out in about 12 months. All right, everyone, today's episode is brought to you by Imperfect Action, hosted by Steph Taylor.
It's a podcast on HubSpot's podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals. Imperfect Action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for business owners. So join Steph Taylor as she answers all your business marketing questions and deep dives into the nitty-gritty of online marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and marketing for strategy for business owners.
A few recent episodes include some of the biggest mistakes you can make with your launch. Another one is why growing your audience feels so hard in 2022, and another one is five ways to make content creation less consuming. So check it out.
It's called Imperfect Action. You can look it up wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_01
I guess the more interesting part that I wanted to talk to you about was, okay, so first of all, creating something that goes viral is such a crazy feeling, and you've done it a ton. I mean, you built the hustle with a bunch of really viral blog posts. Like this is kind of nothing in comparison to the blog posts you guys wrote.
And also you're a writer, so you kind of have a process where you sniff out stuff that you think is gonna go viral, whereas for me, I'm not really a writer. This is kind of me just trying my hand at it.
SPEAKER_03
No, I mean, you have the it factor. I think you can study and how to do it. I think that you can just be born with the skill set.
I think you and I are quite similar in that it's both born, or we have that natural gift, and also we learn and master the craft.
SPEAKER_01
Right, you've tried it a lot more, and therefore your hit rate, I think, is higher. I personally, I just think that. But the question I was gonna ask you-
SPEAKER_03
No, I mean, dude, you got to 120,000 followers on Twitter in like basically six months.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that's true. So I wanted to share, so the way this came about, because I think this is ultimately more interesting. The rant is kind of interesting, but the how this happened, I think for people who are listening, they'll probably find it, I think they'll find it interesting.
The way this started was a pretty high profile VC person called me one day. I had never met them before. They had said, oh, you seem interesting on Twitter.
I'd love to meet. So we did a phone call, and then we were talking just about each other's background. This was cool.
And then they were like, well, what do you think of Club Pass, by the way? I got to ask. And I think they asked this because they had looked at investing, they ultimately didn't invest, and they were trying to figure out like, is this gonna haunt me for the next five years that I missed this deal, or is this gonna be a good one? And a good pass. I just went on this rant on the phone about this.
It just kind of came out of my mouth, like just the way I kind of explained it here. And without the whole like kind of dramatized TV show script, but just the reasons why I think it's gonna struggle. And they were like, wow, that was great.
Like, that was amazing. And I was like, shit, I should have wrote that down. That was like, I feel like that would have been like a good like piece of content.
And so I kind of like quickly was like, I got to go. And I hung up the phone and I went to my computer and I just typed the whole thing out. And it turned it in.
And then I was like, okay, whatever. I kind of edited it. I took it out.
I did your tip, which is I took a break for an hour, went and did something else, came back, and I edited it for about 30 minutes.
SPEAKER_03
Editing is the magic to everything. It doesn't matter if you're talking about viral tweet, a good email, editing is the magic. They say, write drunk, edit sober.
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that's a great one. I've never heard that. I love that.
I used to just edit in the moment. Like I'd write it and I'd make it. And that was a mistake.
The tip you gave me a while back was go do other shit, let it simmer in your head while you do other things. Don't even actively think about it. By the time you come back, you can make it twice as good in 20 minutes.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. And there's actually some science behind it. I can't tell you the exact science off the top of my head, but basically, you know how there's a shower of thought.
So there's science behind doing something really hard and then not doing it and then things hit you. There's science behind why that works and that's kind of what you're doing.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, basically the brain relaxes in some way and then when it relaxes, it's able to be creative in a new way. Okay, so then I post it and then whatever, shit goes wild. The other part that I forgot, which I think is my new, it's something I've been doing.
I'm curious if you do something like this. Before I write anything now, at the top of every page I have a template. And at the top, there's like seven lines that says, what reaction is this meant to get? And I have seven emotions.
It's like, LOL, like this is meant to be really funny. Is it WTF where it's like, dude, what the fuck? And that's when you're talking about something that's really unjust or people are pissed off. You wanna explain, hey, there's this really messed up thing that's happening and people will be like, oh my God.
Then there's other ones like, AWW, something really cute. AWE, aw, like that's something that's awesome. Like, wow, that is like kind of amazing.
Like did I tell you that I do this? No, I actually learned this from these other guys who make viral videos, Rubber Republic. They had a search engine where you would just search by one of these emotions and it would pull up viral videos that had that were based on that emotion.
SPEAKER_03
So the way to go viral is you always wanna start, you start with the emotion that you're trying to get out of someone. We already know that certain emotions get more shares. For example, creating depression or sadness, that doesn't get shares.
Creating outrage gets far more. And with small tweaks, you can make something sad, outrageous, and that's far better.
SPEAKER_01
Right, so it's either amazing, it's super funny, it's really out raging, it's really touching and heartwarming, that's another one. Hard to do. And then the one I had for this, which is kind of like a new emotion, which was I wrote, finally someone said it.
And I actually think that's its own genre that I didn't even have in my template. Cause I was like, I think this is gonna go viral, but it doesn't match any of these. I was like, I think for some people it's gonna be WTF, like do this guy's a jerk.
Why is he predicting failure, what an asshole? But I thought, no, it's gonna go viral because if you say something that a lot of people have been thinking, but they've been afraid to say, or they couldn't put words around it exactly, but they had this hunch, they will share it. Because they agree with your opinion
SPEAKER_03
and you stick their opinion for them. It's the idea of recognizing something that you feel that you weren't sure if other people feel, but you see it on paper. So that same example is with location.
So when you see like, how you know you're a San Francisco bro, or how do I know, do you know Sean? Like if I said, I saw an ad that said, do you know Sean? I'd be like, oh wait, that's directed just towards me. And so with the emotion that you just evoked was like, finally, I didn't think I was the only one who thought like it's a recognizing something type of vibe.
SPEAKER_01
And they're really sharing because they're like, I knew it, I'm right. So they're not saying, wow, he's so right. They're actually saying, I'm right, read this, this proves I'm right.
Which is like a real subtle thing, but I'm so interested in studying the like psychology around why people do what they do. Why do they share what they share? Because I want to grow an audience and this is the best way to grow it. And I feel like this process that I'm doing, I'm so glad you said you do it too, because I thought it was a little crazy.
I was like, am I trying to like-
SPEAKER_03
No, that's what we used to do. I mean, that's what I do. When I start with the emotion, then I start with the package, like how am I packaging this? Then I start with the headline, then the preview image, and then I work backwards from there.
And I always trying to find, like I'll find something that catches my attention, just one factor, one line. So for example, I was just doing research on one yesterday. Do you know what recapture is? We're trying to get it for something.
We're trying to get it for something that says spot. Nowadays they say like, click the thing, or type in the, whatever picture is assigned, click it.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it'll be like, you know, where are the traffic lights? Click all squares with traffic lights. By the way, this is a good example. I saw this meme that was that recapture with the traffic lights, and in one of the squares, just the tiniest corner of the traffic light is in it.
And this shows the guy like sweating like crazy, like, oh fuck, should I include that or should I not include that? And that's one of those where it's like, me too, dude, I have, I always feel that way. I'm always confused by this thing
SPEAKER_03
that's supposed to separate the two of them. I always feel that way meme. Now here, I can take it another way.
When I look that up on Wikipedia, you want to hear a fun fact. Do you know why they do it this way? Is because people like Google, I might be butchering this just a little bit, but the idea is the same. People like Google are paying recapture to translate stuff.
So for example, somehow picking out that sign or saying where the headlights are, that actually helps Google, and Google's paying you money. It's paying recapture.
SPEAKER_01
So I have a little, so the original capture was done by this guy. He was a professor at Duke and Carnegie Mellon. And capture originally was letters, remember? It was always, it was kind of hard to read letters, but you could read it.
And that was basically taking, they had scanned a bunch of book pages. The computer was not good enough at getting all the book pages to translate over to text in the computer because some of the book pages were a little rounded or wrinkled or kind of fuzzy. And so the computer couldn't do it, but a human eye could easily do it.
So they basically outsourced the work and solved two problems with one stone. On the website side, they just want to make sure you're not a bot who's signing up for their service, like a scammer who's going to spam everybody. They did good in the world also because that project ended up transcribing like millions and millions of books.
I think all the books that they had scanned eventually. And then capture two is about, or recapture, I believe is about image classification. So for self-driving cars, we need to know, is this a bus or what is this? And so I think that's where the original idea was, classifying images, let humans do it while they sign up.
SPEAKER_03
And then the inventor of recapture, the second one, his name is Louis Von Hahn. I think that's how you pronounce it.
SPEAKER_01
He did both and that guy started Duolingo.
SPEAKER_03
And when he started Duolingo, he started it for two reasons. One, I guess he just cared about helping you learn language. But two, when you are learning the language, you're actually translating stuff that a third party service is paying for you to translate.
So, this guy's crazy. So, what a genius. The exact emotion that you just had of this guy's crazy.
That is the motion. Wow, this guy's a genius. I am trying to evoke by sharing that.
So, I can tell that story in probably five tweets and I bet it will, like, virality is pretty impossible to predict. But I can bet that there's like a three out of 10 chance that it has legs. I could say this has all the.
.. This checks all the box to get popular. Anyone who says that they're gonna be able to predict it, they're wrong.
Like Sean's thing just reached 5 million people. He was like, this is not gonna work.
SPEAKER_01
The other part you had there that was good is that you took a thing that we've all seen, it's a relatable, oh, yeah, I filled one of those in. And so, you took a very familiar thing, but I told you the uncommon truth around it, which I think is really cool. Like, yesterday I saw, you know, Tom Cruise's name is not Tom Cruise, his real name?
SPEAKER_03
No, what is it?
SPEAKER_01
It's Tom Cruise something. It's like, his middle name is Cruise and his last name is like some, like, look at it up, it's some like, I don't know, random ass name. And he says it's Tom Cruise, which sounds like a total movie star name, makes total sense that he did it.
His real name is Thomas Cruise Mapother the fourth. I don't even know how you pronounce that. I'm beginning to pronounce that.
Mapother, yeah. Tom Mapother versus Tom Cruise. And so you take something really familiar.
We all know Tom Cruise, right? Boom, here's the uncommon, did you know? And then it's like, oh, sweet, like, wow. You know, and that one doesn't have as much shock factor, so it won't go super viral, but it'll get a lot of likes. The closer you can get to that, the surprise gap between what I thought I knew and what's real, the more shared people will get.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I think if anyone cares about this stuff, I like the book Made to Stick, and I like the book Contagious by Jonah Berger. Contagious, Made to Stick is how to say something so people remember, and Contagious is a great book by this Wharton professor on how to make things get popular, how to make them spread like a virus, hence Contagious. I like it.
I don't like that. You wanna talk about paid newsletters really quick, a topic that we've discussed a lot? Yeah, let's do it. But this one is particularly interesting.
The reason why is we've talked about this company a lot, Agora Financial, I've brought it up to you a ton. They spun off a couple of their brands and they tried to do a spack. The company that they were spacking with just kind of dropped significantly.
So there was already a publicly traded company that was gonna buy a few Agora brands. The stock went down big time. What's important is the numbers behind this paid newsletter business.
So there's this company called, actually I don't know what they call this little, it's a subsidiary of Agora, I think they call it Beacon Hill. It owns 12 different newsletter brands. Collectively, those newsletter brands do, where's that from? Where's that for the number? $550 million in revenue and $200 million in profit.
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, that grew 77% over last year.
SPEAKER_03
Is that crazy? Now I'm gonna tell you all some more numbers. They have 10 million free subscribers, so kind of like the hustle, that's like they've got 10 million of that. This is even wilder.
They have 550,000 people paying them 600 up between $1 and $600 for subscribers. Then they have a quarter of a million people paying them $600 to $5,000. And finally, they have 100,000 people paying them more than five grand for a product, for a paid newsletter.
SPEAKER_01
And what is in this paid newsletter?
SPEAKER_03
What is this funnel that's over five grand? Here's where things get way crazier. They have some paid newsletters that cost $35,000. Now the reason why, what gets crazy with this is that they have 160 products across 12 brands.
So what's that math? So each brand has 12 or 13 products. And I don't even understand, but basically I understand the business model. The business model is they get you to buy a 50 or $49 thing, then they get you to buy a $2,000 thing.
And so they get you to buy that $49 thing and that $49 thing is like a monthly paid newsletter. Like it's not significant. I don't understand how they get it to work.
And a large percentage of those $49 people buy the $2,000 thing.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so these must be B2B newsletters, right?
SPEAKER_03
So they're not. Yeah, that's an important part that I left out. Nearly all of this is around and will link to their deck.
So they have a whole deck. It's kind of scammy. So they, it's a financial and a wellness company, which is kind of weird.
So they're talking about health and they're talking about wellness. And if you click a gore up there, Sean, under my name, you'll see the deck. They say that their target demographic is self-directed investors.
What's that mean? Well, I'm gonna tell you if you look in the website, it's just a bunch of old, kind of wealthy white people who are probably Republican. And because the reason I think this is they have ads that say like Nancy Pelosi is coming for your guns, you better invest in these eight stocks. Like they say like crazy shit like that.
SPEAKER_01
Right, it's basically the like Motley Fool on steroids, right?
SPEAKER_03
Yes. But I think Motley Fool's ethical. These guys aren't.
They also sold a book on how to cure diabetes.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, I was gonna ask you why do you think they're unethical? And then you answered my question.
SPEAKER_03
And so it's all financial news related stock picks. And it's just a crazy story. I brought this up time to time.
We don't spend too much time on it, but it's pretty wild to actually see these numbers. I actually guessed that this is how big they were. Now we have proof.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you've been talking about Agora as like, you know, doing hundreds of millions of dollars. And you know, some people know about them, but I would say most people don't know about this empire. And most people, I mean, this blows away most people's expectations of, you know, paid newsletter, right? Like, oh, I just had a paid newsletter as an individual, right? I made a few hundred thousand dollars total.
And I thought I was crushing it. And these guys are making hundreds of millions of dollars. So when you look at this, my honest reaction is, dude, why couldn't you have done this with the hustle? What did they do? Or why was the hill too hard to climb where you could scale like this? Cause this was huge.
SPEAKER_03
I don't think it was too hard to scale. I think I could have done it. I would say that this business has been around since the 70s.
So it's kicking ass now. It didn't always kick ass. If you're willing to be patient, you can do it.
Second of all, if you're willing to put your ethics aside a little bit, it actually is quite easy to do. It helps.
SPEAKER_01
How would you do this? Let's say you want to beat these guys or beat these guys. You're probably one of the most well-equipped people in the world to do this. How would you have gone about it?
SPEAKER_03
Well, what you have to do is you've got to create multiple brands that are one. It's really hard to have one brand and only a couple of products make all this money. So you'd have to have, for us, we would have done, and we were going to do this, but then we got bought.
And the reason I got bought was a whole different reason, which is basically I wanted to get a payday. I mean, like I was pretty clear about that before. Like I wanted, I like, it was cool.
It's awesome. I'm going to stay here. But it was nice to like get a lot of tickets.
But if I wanted to be patient and do it for 50 years, which I kind of do to be honest, I would have created trends, but for subcategories. And you make the first newsletter, the one that people pay for only like 49 or 50 bucks. And we send you just a couple of things a month.
And then the second thing is you go to subcategories and you charge thousands of dollars. For example, if there was a newsletter that dissected media companies, I worked in the media industry and you told me it was $4,000 and I also got access to a community. I ain't going to complain about it.
Right. I'm in. I'm going to do it. If there's something for digital streaming and that you know that the five analysts are smart, Twitch is going to buy that.
It's not that challenging. Not that hard, right? And so that's what I would do for multiple industries. And the thing that a lot of newsletter writers do, which I've talked about those plenty of times and I don't have to talk about too much, is they do one of two things.
One, they charge too little. And two, if they charge too little, they don't have a higher end back product. You need a front end and a back end.
So you need your cheap thing that gets a lot of people and then you need your paid thing that gets only a few people, but it makes a lot of money.
SPEAKER_01
So you guys at trends is like, I don't know, 300 something a year. You could have been $49 and then $5,000 would have been a better mix of value. If you were optimizing for, how do we get this thing as profitable as we can, lucrative as we can?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. And had we not gotten, I would have done that. I was actually, we were about to change it.
We were about to make that change.
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, what happens to trends now? People still pay for it or it's free now?
SPEAKER_03
They pay for it. We might lower the price before we are either gonna make that the back end or we're gonna make that the front end. But we were gonna copy this model of a $99 thing and then a $2,000 thing.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Dude, when I see companies like this, it just makes me wanna do it so badly. It just seems so doable. Now I know that in practice, when I, and by the way, we hit heat for this sometimes because we were like, dude, it's so easy, so simple.
We're talking like relatively, like building a successful business is hard. Okay. Like it's not just gonna instantly happen.
SPEAKER_03
We're not saying things are easy. Sometimes we actually do say that word easy. Really what we mean is simple.
Being able to bench 500 pounds, that is simple. It's straightforward. What do you do? Here's how you get strong in the bench press.
You lift a lot and then you eat a ton. Now that is quite hard to do for five years, but that's the steps you take. So it's like simple.
And so what we're saying is that this is simple. It is not easy.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, actually, I think weight loss is actually a better example because 500 pounds is a hard thing to bench. Weight loss is literally simple. Where it's like these types, you know, avoid carbs, avoid sugars, you need to eat a little bit less, less calories than you're at the burning.
And like you should work out regularly, do kind of whatever, just try to get an hour a day of, you know, break a sweat. If you actually just did those two things and be like, hey, give it like four to five months, six months, boom, you're in great shape. Everybody knows that formula.
It is actually simple, executing it and doing it, having the discipline and having the rigor to like actually stick to it. Hard, but it is way easier relatively than becoming a CrossFit champion, right? And so when we're talking about business, the scale is that it's like, it's hard to create the next Facebook. That's really freaking hard.
Is it hard to create a paid community? Well, I don't think most people who try it will do it, but it's relatively way easier than creating the next Facebook. So for people that out there, they get all sensitive when we call something easy. It's not trying to mislead you.
Like yeah, it's gonna take work. Most likely it won't work. It'll take some time.
On a scale of one to SpaceX, this is more like a one than it is a SpaceX. And like that's a scale for people to think about.
SPEAKER_03
I completely agree. And I think now let's talk about what makes this hard. The first is that you have to sell your soul a little bit.
Now, many people will not be comfortable with this stuff. Sean is pretty comfortable with it. I'm comfortable with it, but I think I'm a little bit less comfortable with it.
You have to be a face sometimes. You have to say, I'm an expert at ex, pay me money for me to tell you my thoughts. Second, well, no, this is not that.
So guys like James Altucher, who we've had this podcast, he was ridiculed for doing this with Bitcoin. Everyone made fun of him. He made $60 million doing it, but he still got mocked constantly.
And shockingly, most people would actually prefer not to make the money and not get made fun of, than they would to make the money and get made fun of.
SPEAKER_01
The way I think about it is, most people truly will not, they're afraid that they're not gonna get the money and get mocked. And so they're like, fuck it, I won't do it. If you really had a guarantee, I think people would happily trade reputation points for bank points.
SPEAKER_03
Well, yeah, and perhaps, but that's some moot point because the fact is, is that most people don't even wanna, because the first point that you said of like, they may not get the money at all, that is also true and that's, they're not gonna do that. So you have to do that. Second, it's a treadmill.
You can't stop. This is a lifetime job. So if you're a content creator, I hire people to do it for me.
You 100% can do that, but you actually have to do the work for a little while. Anyway, so you're gonna have to work.
SPEAKER_01
Quick question hiring, cause people ask me this and I have no idea. I'm like, why don't you ask Sam? He's the one who did it, why are you asking me? They'll be like, dude, the hustle has had amazing talent. Like they talk about Trung, they talk about Steph Smith, they talk about some of the people you guys have done.
SPEAKER_03
You, me, I mean, I consider you be part of our crew. You, me, Trung, Steph, this guy Colby. Yeah, we've got a bunch of people.
SPEAKER_01
So the question is, where the heck did you find these people? So can you give me the 10 seconds on each? Where'd you find Trung? Where'd you find Steph? Where'd you find Colby? Where'd you find all these people?
SPEAKER_03
Colby was at work at a PR firm where he was doing some copywriting work and Trung, Aiman, told it.
SPEAKER_01
Did he just apply to you? Or are you like recognized? Like, oh, this guy's good.
SPEAKER_03
Mutual connection, friend of a friend said, you should talk to this person. Trung came from Aiman Troy, mutual friend and investor of the hustle. Steph, I found on Twitter, because I read her blog.
Who else?
SPEAKER_01
I just want to know, and then when you found these people, did you cycle through 30 people who kind of sort of sucked before you found the gems?
SPEAKER_03
When we actually sold to HubSpot, they were like, well, you guys have a lot of churn. I'm like, yeah, but here's what we do. This is actually quite normal in the editorial industry, but you hire a bunch of people and you either fire or there's a mutual like, all right, we try it, it wouldn't fit.
And that happens a lot.
SPEAKER_01
And you also suck at tone. I would say that was also a key, right? Because you were writing it originally.
SPEAKER_03
You saw the trends community. I was the one actually doing all the work.
SPEAKER_01
Every day you were posting in that thing.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, and that's the culture and it attracts like-minded people. I also think that once you find the winners, then you go all in on them. So Trung is what I call, he's a made man.
Steph, a made woman. Whatever Steph wants to do something, cool. Sounds good.
What do you need with an idea?
SPEAKER_01
Time to negotiate, baby. Time to double it. Time to double that number.
Whatever's number, same gave you time to double it.
SPEAKER_03
These guys are all doing great. Whenever, if an outside person, if a non-made person comes with an idea, it's, you know, why don't you just show me a little MVP and let's us see what people think. If Trung says something, it's, all right, yes sir.
Right. Yeah, like you're a proven hit maker. So the last thing is when we interview them, I always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume, which is like the college classes and all the things that they take.
Cause I want them to like entertain me during the interview. So in the same way that you are really good at storytelling, you have to have other people that are good storytelling.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, I like it. Can we do one idea real quick before we jump? So kind of gonna feel like it's out of left field, but I would say there's something interesting here. So I like it on the page.
Oh yeah. So I'm down here, virtual team building. So this is not the sexiest idea, but I think it is, remember our two by two matrix, what we say, is this a old problem or a new problem? Is this an old solution or a new solution? And so this is old problem.
I'm sorry, actually this is new problem and new solution in some ways. And so actually, no, we should cut that out. I think the right way of saying this is, this is old problem, new solution, which means for a long time people have had this problem of, we have a team, we're working on stuff together, you know, as the boss, you know, sometimes you got to crack the whip and it feels like it's just task after task and deadline after deadline.
And you want to make sure that this team is really coming together and is bonded and you want people to have a good time here and you don't want them to leave and all the good things. You care about your people, the experience they have working for you. And so in the old world, this was different team building solutions.
And so we would do off-sites. I don't know what you did with the hustle crew, but like, you know, some people go to a shooting range. Some people go to an escape room.
Some people do like, you know, painting and wine tasting and what else would you make in classes?
SPEAKER_03
You know what I liked most? Just like a fancy dinner. Right, yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Let's go out to dinner, right? Let's go to a cool place. I, you know, it's on me, order what you want type of thing.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I just like, we would do like fancy dinners.
SPEAKER_01
Right. And this is every team. I heard a NBA coach talking about this the other day.
He goes, man, we got all these new players. It's so hard with COVID because in the old days, you just go to the bar, your card behind the tab, you know, and you say, all the drinks are on me tonight. You know, go crazy guys.
He's like, you didn't have to like have conversations. Like you just needed to give guys a night out together and good things will happen. We have this remote work trend.
Everybody's going remote. So how are those teams going to do it? How are they going to do team bonding? Because although you get to spend more time with your family and you get not less time in traffic commuting, you do lose the water cooler. You lose the team bonding.
So how are people going to do this? So I've seen some cool companies popping up that are doing this. I think they're doing quite well. So I want to point out a couple and then get your take on if you think these are good ideas, bad ideas, or how you do it.
So the first one is team Rotary. Is that right? Yeah. Team Rotary, like camaraderie, but for a team.
And so this is actually backed by some pretty legit players, like some pretty, pretty famous people in Silicon Valley, which I'm surprised at because it kind of just looks like a goofy. Like they seem like small bootstrapped ideas, but actually they have some big backing because I think people recognize the spaces. Companies pay tens of thousands of dollars per division a year to have team bonding.
And so then, you know, in a big company, you have easily high six figures, low seven figures worth of spend on this type of thing. That's my guess. I'm not in the finance team, so maybe I'm off, but I think that's about right.
SPEAKER_03
So team Rotary is one. First of all, team Rotary looks interesting. Horrible name.
What a awful name. They've got a pretty bad set of advisors, guys like Keith Reboi who seems to hate everything, as you've said, is on the advisor or the board. Pretty interesting.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly. So he's on this and it says, Trusted by 300 plus global teams. You see Pinterest, Slab, Bane, Delph.
SPEAKER_03
Summer Sanders. Who's that? You don't remember Summer Sanders? She was a swimmer in the 90s and then was the host of all the Nickelodeon TV shows.
SPEAKER_01
No way. That's hilarious.
SPEAKER_03
Summer Sanders works at product development at Team Rotary.
SPEAKER_01
So like, you know, you could do things. So if I click their experiences, right, I click the bond and engage category. So it's like a coffee and tea tasting, a wine tasting, a guacamole tasting, a painting class or whatever.
It could be if you do team kickoffs. OK, we got our guacamole tasting again, but we also have the High Heel Chew Project, a lesson for inclusion. So there's these like team experiences, lessons in a box, or bonding in a box experiences.
So that's one. Then our friend from the pod, Greg Eisenberg, created one called Nice Break.fun.
SPEAKER_03
Dude, this guy loves like cute names.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Give me a name check. How do you feel about Nice Break.
fun?
SPEAKER_03
It's OK. It's good. Greg is like the coolest guy that you like public school or like schoolwork.
So like school bus.
SPEAKER_01
Well, his studio is called Late Checkout. Late Checkout. I remember being like, why did you open this agency Late Checkout? It seems like a weird thing to do.
Like, you're an entrepreneur. Why are you doing this like product design creative agency thing? And then every week he's like, I'll post a cool product. I think it's awesome.
He's like, oh, yeah, we worked with him. We designed the prototype. I'm like, he's doing it for all of them.
I'm like, oh, actually, this is fucking awesome. You're like on the ground floor of all these things. You can invest in them.
You're meeting them. You're like seeing all these spaces and getting paid to do it. Like, OK, that's pretty cool.
And he's using that to fund his own projects and their own internal projects, which I don't know. That's actually a pretty cool way of doing it. But they have things like a comedian will do like an improv class with you guys over Zoom or a virtual escape room or a wardrobe makeover or stuff like that.
So I think this is kind of cool. And there's other products like this that are just straight up Zoom escape room. It's like people enter one hour, goes on the clock, and the whole thing happens in Zoom.
This is going to be, I think, a pretty big space that starts out looking like a toy, but ends up being a pretty solid business. What do you think?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. First of all, with LateCheckout.com is Greg.
It's mostly Sean's buddy. He's got a community design firm. Go over to that website and look at what he's doing.
It's really good. That guy is really good. Nice break fun.
Nice break.fun. I think it's cool. They're charging a lot of money, which I think is badass.
So they charge $2,000 a month plus. OK, so a grant a month gets you two nice breaks per month. And that's for companies that are 25 to 50.
If you're, oh, OK, I understand how this works. Yeah, this could be a hit. I think this is great.
I think this could totally be a hit. Can it be a huge VC thing? I don't know. But this could make tens of millions of dollars.
And that doesn't need to be.
SPEAKER_01
Exactly. And the other thing is one way to think about problems like these or find opportunities like these is you go in the C suite. So you say, OK, there's a CEO.
There's a CMO. There's a CTO, CFO, CIO, whatever. You go through all of them.
And we were laughing because you were like, what the hell is a CHRO? So this is what a CHRO thinks about. They're the chief people officer essentially of a company. I kind of use those interchangeably.
Maybe there's some nuance difference. Sorry to the three CHROs that listen to this podcast. So they think about this stuff.
They're like, OK, the whole workforce has just gone remote. We really care about what's called employee engagement, which just means how happy are people to work here? Are they going to leave? Are they going to? Is this a toxic work environment or not? So one thing you could do is you go talk to these people and you just sort of say, what sucks? What's keeping you up at night? What are you stressing about? And you start to ask these questions. And at first, they won't give you a whole bunch.
But then you say, all right, can you show me your budget for the year? Oh, wow, you spent a lot of money on people development. What does people development means? And it's like, oh, that's corporate training and blah, blah, blah. Oh, interesting.
Who do you guys use for that? You go look up those companies. Sometimes people ask, how do you guys think of these things? That's how we learn these things. It's like, we just start to sniff in these types of ways.
And you start to learn about all these spaces that are outside of just your day-to-day worldview. So if you're out there as an entrepreneur trying to figure out, where can I build a company where there's, I don't want to just guess on demand. This is one way.
You go talk to somebody who's in charge. You figure out what's stressing them out, what problems they need solved, what language they use when they describe it. That's your landing page.
That's your ad. And then you look at their budget and you see, does the money map to the problem? And if the money maps to the problem, you start to see, oh, OK. And you ask them, hey, which budget line item is growing a lot year over year? Which line item was smaller last year and bigger this year? Because that's the space where they're still looking for new solutions.
SPEAKER_03
And you could do that for an individual as well. I think what you can do is you can go sign up for Mint or whatever and just look at the categories of your money and just look at the trailing 12 months and be like, wait, what am I consistently spending money on? And do that with five or 10 friends. And that's actually a great way to find an idea.
And doing it with businesses is far more profitable. So you just go and you look at quick books and you say, all right, what's going on here? Where's all the money going to? It's an awesome way. That's actually kind of a cool business in itself, which is like, how do I see a budget share?
SPEAKER_01
How do I what? Like, wallet share. Like, how do I just see how? Wallet share. These people are moms in America.
Where is their wallet going? Right? Like, what are they spending their time and money on? I think big brands like Proctor & Gamble, they think about this a lot. They interview a ton of moms. They say, oh, OK.
The mom controls this much of the household budget. You know, 70% or whatever. And then within that, every month, she's spending X% on groceries, Y% on household cleaners, this percent on this, this percent on this.
And that's how they decide, OK, we need to invest our product development according to where the budget is. Because that's how we make our money back.
SPEAKER_03
That's such an interesting way to do things. There's 2,000 public companies in America. You could easily.
SPEAKER_01
More. I think there's like 4,000, something like that.
SPEAKER_03
However many Michael actually said in the last episode, 4,000, let's say. You could easily do that with all their categories. You can't see line items, but you can see like G&A, or that's kind of an interesting study.
SPEAKER_01
Right. And you could do this with just media companies. What does the expenses look like of a media company? Where do they spend all their money? And which ones are changing over time? Where is things shifting? And so I think that's kind of like an interesting signal that you can use at the company level.
One, division in a company, individual person, whatever. And I think you get a lot of insights from that.
SPEAKER_03
I think that's a great idea. I think what we just said of like, did you make up that name while it shares that thing?
SPEAKER_01
It's a general term. I've also seen this, by the way, in the social networking space in terms of time. So WeChat, I think, or one of the Chinese companies, they had this presentation I saw.
And I'm sitting there trying to go through a Chinese presentation. So maybe some has lost their translation. But I got the general idea, which was they want to app for every minute of your day.
China has all these super apps. Like WeChat, you can pay your house bills in it, and it's like, what's app? And you can also like subscribe to Netflix through it. They're a version of Netflix.
But it's also like where you post photos and stuff like that. So what they said was like, they took a person's day. So they're like, OK, 15-year-old kid wakes up in the morning at this time.
First 10 minutes of the day, what products are they using? What apps are they using? And they start to break it down minute by minute, basically. Like, where are their gaps? So today, we're taking up four hours of this person's time. If they're awake for 12 hours, how do we get 12 hours of their, or 16 hours? How do we get 16 hours of mind share from this person? They watch movies at night.
We need an app for movies. Well, during the day, they message the friends. We need that.
They need news. They get the news. All right, cool.
We're going to do news. And that's how they think about, because how do they expand? If you're an ad-based business, you need attention. So how do we get more attention? Well, I need more hours of the day of yours.
How do I get more hours of the day? Well, I got to figure out how you spend it today, and I got to insert myself there.
SPEAKER_03
I have a few friends that have worked on that Facebook where they were like, all right, we have found out that if you put stickers onto photos, people spend like five seconds more. And they have like 50 people just working on stickers. And I'm just like, kill yourself.
Like these people hated their job.
SPEAKER_01
One of my best friends, his job at Facebook, was literally, he was in the, you know, it was called like safety and privacy of community or something like that department. And literally he's like, I just try to make sure that Dick doesn't show up on your Facebook feed. He's like, you wouldn't believe how many dicks are posted on Facebook every day.
He's like, have you ever seen a dick? And I was like, no, never, not one. And he's like, that's right.
SPEAKER_03
At least that's cool. You're like trying to protect people, whatever. That's cool.
SPEAKER_01
But on the inside, he's like, I'm writing. He's like, I'm reviewing folders of images that are just being like, dick, not a dick, dick, not a dick, right? And then like also same thing on the algorithm side, like we worked writing programs to train the computer to recognize this versus that. And he's like, cat and mouse game, I was harder than you think.
They're always one step ahead.
SPEAKER_03
Like snack and dimes or Sean's D. No, that's just about a dollar in pennies. At least that job is all right.
But I can't imagine working at a Facebook or an Instagram. And just all I'm trying to do is suck more of people's time.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it is sad when you think about it. Like the best brains of our generation are basically sitting inside the giant slot machine and being like, OK, how do we get the rat to come back again? You know, like, how do we get her to come back more and more and more and spend more time and more time? Like that's the reality. And it's like, hey, I get paid $500,000 a year to do this.
And I get free lunch. And they do my laundry. And I get foot massages on Fridays.
And like people think I'm joking. Those are all true things that happen.
SPEAKER_03
Before we wrap up, so you and I are one for one of being turned into meme. So you posted something like I'm looking for a meme creator, $500 a month, no vacation. And you posted all those other funny stuff.
And people mocked you. A bunch of people mocked you. It's pretty great.
I think hopefully they realize that we do this shit on purpose.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it's not even like, OK, I'd love to say, huh, I'm in on the joke. I knew this. Like, yeah, I knew it was silly.
SPEAKER_03
But like we're self-aware enough to know this is like, yeah, mockable.
SPEAKER_01
I wrote no vacation. It's not even a real job. Like, of course, this is a fake job posting.
I'm not fake. It's like, I'm basically like just being like, hey, does someone want to find hustle for me by making a bunch of memes? You can make 500 bucks a month. Just make me a few memes every week.
That's really what I was trying to say. But if I say that, it's only going to get like 100 likes. But if I say it the way I said it over the top, boom, I got thousands of likes.
And if the things spread and a bunch of people got angry, I mean, literally like Taylor Lorenz was like, why does this person not get sickly? Because it's not a job. Oh my God, I want to go to work. And so, yeah, we're kind of doing this on purpose.
But also I am just kind of a character. And like, I don't, I'm just saying things, you know, as I think them. And then I move on with my life.
And like, I win either way. Like, if you get mad, I win. If you take it seriously and you apply, I win.
Like, I win no matter what. As long as I don't get completely canceled, I win.
SPEAKER_02
Which might happen one day soon, but we'll have fun until then.
SPEAKER_01
And I will explain someday why I am hiring a personal meme god to do some memes for me. I will explain that.
SPEAKER_03
You have to explain that. I mean, there's nothing going to explain.
SPEAKER_01
Well, there's actually a cool story around it, but it's not quite ready yet. The story will be cooler if I put the whole thing together and then explain it when it's ready. So that will come in, I don't know, a couple months.
SPEAKER_03
I guess you'll have to share some of the best ones you got. Yes, sir. All right.
That's it.
SPEAKER_00
Cool. All right.