#162 - Why Clubhouse Will Fail

My favorite uh kind of podcaster content person out there. DM me and was like, This is this is this is a fucking great thread. And uh I was like blown away that this guy wrote this. And then CMBC was like, Hey, would you like to do this? Some German news station was like, Will you come on and talk about it? And I was like wow, this is unbelievable what can happen with just a random ass tweet. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to

How many uh 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 gonna guess five million. Okay, let's give it a shot. Uh so it has Thirteen thousand likes. And yeah, almost five million. Four point eight million

Impressions. Wow. And how all who are some of the more interesting people who reached out to Well first what what what did you what happened here?

For the listeners who don't know. Okay, so what happened? Um 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 um I think it's gonna fail. And here's how I think it's gonna go down. And then I wrote it in this way that's a little bit like

Goofy. I kinda went over the top. I just I was like, All right, you're the CEO. Like first of all Congrats, champ. You did it. You know? And I I walk 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 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 uh that was a thread. I put it out there. And uh I thought it was gonna kinda 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 tweet's gonna get any action or not. It didn't look like it was gonna get any action and the first reply was this guy being like

Yeah. Dude, this is way too effing wrong. Like what are you doing? And like the way he said, like what I thought I I assume some people would say this is super long because it's like I don't know, fifty tweets or something crazy. Um But when he was like, What are you doing? I felt super embarrassed and I was like shit, maybe I should just delete this. This is stupid.

And then I just like let it ride for a few more minutes and then uh it took off. And now some crazy shit's happening and like I'm going on C N B C tomorrow to talk about it and shit. So all kinds of crazy stuff has happened. You're going on C N B C tomorrow? Yeah. I wonder if it's the same person who invited Trung on. So you're the second person associated with the company who's been on in the past two weeks. I'm hot on Trunk's heels. I saw him on last week talking about uh Kathy Wood and Ark and stuff like that. And uh he was great. So

If I can do half as good as he did, I I'll be in good shape. And who else reached out to, can you say? You told me a couple. Uh yeah, I mean okay, so I can't say all the names I'll say what okay, so first I started getting mentioned. Uh by a bunch of cool people. So like

Guy who started YouTube was like, dude, this is fucking hilarious. Like, I love this. And then Ah, so the a bunch of people who sh have started big companies kind of were saying something. And I started getting DMs from people. And and I kinda went to sleep. Uh I at first I was refreshing for like four hours'cause I couldn't stop. Uh like I was mid workout and then like between sets I would go check my Twitter. It was kind of annoying and Sony was like, What the hell are you doing? Like

What is this? And I was like, I don't know, I'm obsessed. I I really just want to see it was like a I would pull the refresh thing and then a different kind of famous person who I look up to was usually saying like 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 a Offer for a book deal. Like a famous movie director who directed like a bunch of movies that we've heard of, uh wrote like, dude, amazing storytelling. This is all like found my email address and emailed me that. He's the Uh I think I could say it. He's the director of uh like Space Jam two and like a whole bunch of famous movies. And then

Um Yeah. Uh I don't know if I could say this one, but My favorite uh kind of podcaster content person out there. DM me and was like, this is this is this is a fucking great thread.

And uh 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, Will you come on and talk about it? And I was like, wow, this is unbelievable what could happen with just a random ass tweet like read or write. Not even a good one, really. Um, it took me an hour. I sat down and I s 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 gonna fail. Well, duh, 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 gonna be and where they might get tripped up, or what's gonna be really hard for them.

And um And so I thought, Well, I kinda feel like I know the product strategy here, but like That's kind of a if I just write about the product decision, like some of the product challenges and the product strategy, there's a pretty boring tweet storm. Nobody's gonna really care. So when I ended up writing it, I wrote it like an episode of Silicon Valley. Shit.

Yeah, I think it would. The HBO show, like I basically wrote it in that style, like I wrote like you know. Okay, you know, Emily Chang invites you on to, you know, whatever CMBC. And uh to do an interview, you know, you wear your your visionary uh 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 uh and then Emily Chang replies to the thing, being like, you know, I can't confirm or deny this, but this is on point. And um

So all kinds of crazy stuff was happening. But it yeah, it took me about an hour and then I just hit publish. And you got like thirty thousand follows from it, congratulations or twenty thousand, maybe. Yeah, that 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 You know, try to hit 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 It's just like five tweets that grew me from twenty K to a hundred twenty K. Five trees. Everything else was a cost of doing business. It's a it's the hits business. Yeah, it is. And I'm the hits business.

And uh So so summar summarize this actually. You asked me to ask you to summarize this. The your bare case for Clubhouse, because we're actually going to use this probably for a uh one of our Twitter videos. Okay, all right. So all right, so let me okay, we gotta we gotta we gotta we gotta get the the video guys video guys, this is the part you're gonna edit. All right, here we go. Um So everybody's saying that Clubhouse is the next big thing. You're hearing about it all the time. They went

Yeah, from A test f I think they were in test flight and they raised at a billion dollar valuation, which is kind of crazy. That wasn't a lot of things. No, they were in test flight and they raised at a hundred million. But it's right but now they're at a billion dollar valuation. It hasn't been long. They're still all iOS only, still pretty exclusive. You can't even you can't even join the app unless you have an invite. And so um 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 that's what's gonna happen. I I sort of I said in the Twitter thread I said You know, if uh if me wanting something to happen would happen, then every bag of chips would come with walk, but that's just not the way life is. And um and so okay, so here's how it works. Pretend you're the CEO of Clubhouse, Sam.

You know, first of all You fucking did it. You made it. People actually like the thing you made. I they don't even like it. They love it. And uh, you know, you check your DMs and Chris Saka's in your DMs and he says dude, congrats, this thing is this thing is kick ass. And uh you know, Naval is liking your tweets. And Kiefer Boy is basically saying like this isn't shit.

Uh, you know, you 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 stars coming on the platform. Like first kind of like just Tech. Dork m stars like you know the Mark Andreessens and Ben Horowitz, people that we like, but they're kind of niche in our in our circles.

And then it'll expand and all of a sudden you'll get You know, NBA players coming on, you know, s famous musicians, Logan Paul will come on and then Uh this was the most liked tweet in the thing was I said You know, Gary Vee realizes that you've 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. And uh

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 about you know you and you gotta kinda ham it up, right? Because you can't just say Oh, I made this app where you can go in chat rooms and talk to people. That doesn't sound very Very fancy. So y you try to play it simple, but you talk fa really fancy. You say things like, you know This is like a this is a serendipity network.

This is this is not not just chat rooms, this is Audio escapism. This is, you know. 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, you know, around the can you know. Around the campfire, and you know, audio is so powerful because you could see your

Your tone and texture. And um 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 upbeat into the righty as it's supposed to be. And so you're like What's wrong with this thing? You refresh and

still the gr you know the growth is kind of flat, maybe even declining. And you You start to look a little deeper, and what you'll find if you're the CEO of of Clubhouse is After about you know 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 You know, why is that the case? And and what will happen is that you'll realize that clubhouse is used 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, QAs, AMAs. And it's like, Oh, this is content is like the next YouTube. It's where you go, you make You make content, people consume it. Um, you know, and the problem is that A lot of the content like on YouTube is just like meh, you're right, ninety eight percent of the content is junk.

And um 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 the NYU girls who go on there and they they have that show called Shoot Your Shot. That is gold, but um You and so you want to triple down on that. You're like, guys, this is what this is what we need to double down on. How do we make this how do we get more gold content? And you tell the whole team, we're gonna go get more gold content. And so the the engineers, they go start building features for content creators. They build like a scheduling feature and

Q and 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 realise when you talk to somebody who knows what they're they're they're talking about here is that There's this like

problem called the interestingness problem. Which is that when you open up an app Um, 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 gonna get something juicy, you're gonna get. Fun. And um And you know, 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 liked content, the last 24 hours.

So it shoves it in your feed, and when you open the app, it's gonna show you something great great, right? TikTok calls this 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 know, you tell your engineers, hey, that's what we need, make an algorithm that will do that. And the engineers, you know, they they sit you down on a chair and they'll say Okay, we're gonna do our best, but just so you know.

It doesn't like 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 two hundred times as hard. to find interesting content when you open the app.

And so the what happens is most people will download this app. They heard about Clubhouse, they heard it's cool. The open app. And whatever's on right then, the walk into the first room. And it'll be kind of boring. It'll be kinda meh.

And then they'll walk into a second room and then within 30 seconds, 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, and then But they'll all just be leaking out the bottom of the bucket. And so, um, 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 you know hundreds of millions of users, so

Clearly it can work. You guys the engineers, you guys just need to make it happen. And then you know 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 forty hours a week of content they stream every day, six to eight hours a day.

And um they're playing a game, so they can do that. They can s 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 um And then the second thing they'll say is like also, you know, 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 you know, I kinda fast forward and you know okay, this is tough.

And um You know, your your meeting ends, the next meeting engineers leave, next meeting is the Biz dev guys. Biz dev guys come in. And the biz dev guys are like you know, they're 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 go pick cut some checks. Let's get some star creators on the platform. And you'll go to people um who have who have a big audience, you go to podcasters, right? You'll 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 Two thousand, three thousand 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 am I why would I ever make this trade? Why would I go live here? When I go live there, right when I could just record my podcast. So you're the CEO, you say, all right, that's a tricky problem, uh, 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 um 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 or turn into a YouTube video.

Well Then this live thing becomes a second class citizen, and I stopped 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 you know what makes for a great live session is that spontaneity. But that makes for a shitty recording. And so um, you know, that's a that's another trap there.

So okay, you finally you have an emergency team meeting, you say this whole content thing sucks. Uh, you know, we 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 uh that's just really hard to do. Um You know, and and I'm tired of all these people on there doing shows and QA's and these success coaches trying to

Manifest millionaires and all this bullshit. You know, what is this? Discord for douchebags? Like screw shows. We need a new plan. And we go, 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 you know, this is what we'll do here.

Um, and you know, you you you you ask people who had a great experience so far on Clubhouse, the people who think it's amazing, like our you know, our friend Narendra or you know, different people who have really enjoyed their experience and You ask them why and they'll say, Well I came on. And I was 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 um and sure enough, that actually solves your retention problem because People will come here it will solve loneliness. People will come here, they'll hang out and they'll make friends. But all of a sudden your growth will sl stall.

Right, because if I'm coming here to make friends, then I'm not bringing friends to the platform. That's kind of the the 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 twenty two. And um

You know, so then you know, just to r kinda round it out, you 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 uh then you quit, you go, you travel in South East Asia for a year, you do some ayahuasca. And you vow to yourself, I'm only gonna ever work in enterprise SaaS again. You know, screw this social thing. And uh

So that's my story. Uh Over the top. I hope I'm wrong, but I think that's how it's gonna play out. And I think a lot of people who are hating on you didn't realize that this is the life that you led. Yeah, yeah. Well, some people are like wow, that's

Really detailed where this where's this coming from? And some people are like, dude, that's way over the top. And I'm like, dude, I built this before. Like we built a app 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 you know some of the tech guys and the thirty-seven signals guys were using it and it was awesome, Product Hunt was using it. And then we hit the you know 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. But the reason I know this was seventi percent my experience. Thirty percent. You know, fantasy that I wrote this thing with. Well I guess uh we're gonna have to check in on this

podcasts in like maybe one year. I bet I think we'll see how things shake out in about twelve months. Yeah, and I I guess like 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

Kinda nothing in comparison to the blog post you guys wrote. And also, you're a writer, so you kinda 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 to do it.

You have the it factor. I think that um I think you can study in how to do it. I think that you can just be Born with the skill set. Um, I think you and I are quite similar in that it's both born or we we have that natural gift and also we learn and master the craft. Right. I think you've you've tried it a lot more and therefore your hit rate I think is is higher. I I personally I just think that. But um the question I was gonna ask you is I mean, dude, you've got to a hundred and twenty thousand followers on

Twitter in like basically six months. Yeah, that's true. Um so I wanted to share. So when I uh so the way this this came about, because I think this is ultimately more interesting, right? The 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. Um

The way this started was a a pretty high profile VC person called me one day. Uh 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 backgrounds. It was cool. And then

They were like, Well, what do you think of Clubhouse, by the way? I gotta ask. And um and I think they asked us because they had looked at investing, they ultimately didn't invest, and they were trying to figure out like Am I gonna kick is this gonna be is this gonna haunt me? You know, for the next five years that I missed this deal, or is this gonna be a good one? And um, you know, a good pass.

And I basically I I just went on this rant on the phone about this. It just kinda came out of my mouth. I like just the way I kind of explained it here. And um Without the whole like kind of dramatized like M T V show script. But just the reasons why I think it's gonna sh struggle.

And um And they were like, Wow, that was great. Like that was amazing and I I was like shit, I should have wrote that down. That was like That would have um I feel like that would have been like a good like piece of content. And so I went in I I kinda like quickly was like I gotta go and I hung up the phone.

And I went to my computer and I just typed the whole thing out. And um and it turned into like and then I was like, Okay, whatever. I I kinda edited I took an hour I did I did your your tip, which is I took a break for an hour. Yeah. Came back and I edited it for about thirty minutes. Editing is the magic to everything. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a viral tweet, a good email, editing is the magic. They say write drunk, edit sober.

Oh, that's a great one. I've never heard that. I love that. Um I'm just I used to just edit In the moment like I'd right in 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 twenty minutes. And that's it Yeah, and there's actually some science behind it. I I I d I can't tell you the exact science off the top of my head, but basically, you know how there's like a shower thought?

Yeah. Of like not doing it. So there's like science behind like doing something really hard and then not doing it and then things hit you. Uh there there's science behind why that works, and that's kinda what you're doing. Yeah, basically like the brain relaxes in some way. And then when it relaxes, it's able to be creative in a in a new way. And so um Okay, so then I post it and then whatever, you know, shit goes wild. So then

Uh so that was the that was oh sorry, the other part that I that I forgot, which I think is my new It's something I've been doing, and I'm curious if you do something like this. Before uh 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 W tweet TF, 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 and you want to. You want to explain, hey, there's this really messed up thing that's happening, and people will be like Oh my God.

Um then there's other ones like Yeah, like A W A W something really cute. A W E Aw, like Like that something is awesome. Like wow, that is like kind of amazing. Wait, 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 that were based on that emotion. I thought it was so smart. So the way to go viral is you always want to start You start with the emotion that you're trying to get out of someone. Um, and you and we already know that certain emotions get more shares. Um so, for example, creating depression or sadness, that doesn't get shares.

Um creating outrage gets far more. And with small tweaks you can make something sad, outrageous, and that's far better. Right. You know, so it's either amazing, it's super funny, it's really out really outraging. It's um It's really touching and heartwarming. That's another one. Um, 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 a don't 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, dude, this guy's a jerk. Why is he predicting failure? What a 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 and you state 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 the same example is with location. So when you see like uh how you know you're a San Francisco bro. Or how do I know uh do you know Sean Pur Like if I said if 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 it's a it's a rec recognizing something type of vibe. And they're they're really sharing because they're like I knew it. I 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? Um, because I want to grow an audience and this is the best way to grow it. And um I feel like this I'm I'm 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 oh my god that's what we used to do. I mean that's what I do when I I'm like I I I start with the emotion

Then I start with The package like how am I packaging this? And then I start with the headline, then the preview image, and then I work backwards from there. Um and I always trying to find like I'll find something that catches my attention, just one fact or one line. So for example Um

I was just doing research on one yesterday. Do you know um what recapture is? You know like um When you're signing up for something like that. R nowadays they say like spot click the thing or type in the uh the s the what uh whatever picture is assigned, click it. Yeah, it'll be like, you know, where are the traffic lights? Click all squares with traffic lights. And uh 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 then it shows the guy like suit 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 I always feel that way. I'm always confused by this thing that's just supposed to be. So we can take that to uh I always feel that way meme. Now here, I can take it another way. Do you want to know uh when I look that up on Wikipedia, you wanna hear a fun fact. Do you know why they do it this way? is because people like Google Um, 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 painting. I have a little so the so the original CAPTCHA was done by this guy. He was a professor at Duke and Carnegie Millon. And CAPTCHA originally was letters, remember? It was always these kind of script like kind of hard to read letters, but you could read it. And that was basically taking They have scanned a bunch of book pages. But who's gonna convert the the c the computer was not good enough at try at getting all the book pages.

to translate over to text in the computer because some of the book pages are a little rounded or wrinkled or kind of fuzzy. And so the 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 gonna spam everybody. But then

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 CAPTCHA two is about. or recapture, I believe, is about image classification. So For self driving cars, we need to know. Is it a is this a bus, or what is this?

And so I think that's where the original idea was uh Classifying images, let humans do it. And the inventor of recapture, the second one, his name is Louis Von Ahn. I think that's how you pronounce it. He did both. And that guy started Duolingo. And he when he started Duolingo, he started it for two reasons. One, he 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 a genius. The exact emotion that you just had of this guy's crazy. That is the emo emotion that 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's pretty impossible to predict.

But I can bet that there's like a three out of ten chance that it's gonna have that it has legs. I could say that I could say this has all the uh this taxes all the box to get popular. I can't I can't anyone who says that they're gonna be able to predict it, they're wrong. Like Sean's thing just reached five million people, he was like, This is not gonna work. Um 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've I've filled one of those in and you So you took A very familiar thing, but I told you the uncommon truth around it, um, which I think is like really cool. Like I there's one the yesterday I saw.

Uh, you know Tom Cruise's name is not Tom Cruise, his real name. No, what is it? It's Tom uh Tom Cruise something. It's like his middle name is Cruz and his last name is like some Uh like Bray look it up. It's some like I don't know, random ass like name.

And he changed it to Tom Cruise, which sounds like a total movie star name. Makes total sense that he did it. And um so yeah, his real name is Thomas Cruz. Mapother the fourth, or some I don't even know how you're pronounced. Mapether, yeah. Tom Lapither?

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. But you know, the the closer you can get to that The surprise gap.

Between what I thought I knew and what's real. uh the more shared. 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. Um, contagious made to stick is how to 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. Uh 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. Um, 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 spAC. And when they tried to do a spAC, the company that they were spAcking with just like kinda like went down like dropped like significantly. So they there was already a publicly traded company that was gonna buy a uh a few Agora brands. The stock went down big time. But that's not that important. What's important is the numbers behind this paid newsletter business. So there's this company called um

Actually, I don't know what they call this little it's a subsidiary of Gordon of Agora. I think they call it Beacon Hill. It owns six sorry, twelve different newsletter brands. Collectively, those newsletter brands Do Where did I put the number? Five hundred and fifty million dollars in revenue and two hundred million dollars in profit. And by the way, growing seven that grew seventy seven percent la over last year.

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. Uh This is even wilder. They have 550,000 people paying them 600 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 a hundred thousand people.

paying them more than five grand for a product for a paid newsletter. And what is in this paid newsletter? What's the what's the bundle that's over five. It's way here's where things get way crazier. They have some paid newsletter that cost thirty five thousand dollars. Now, the reason why what gets crazy the what gets crazy with this is that They have a hundred and sixty products. of cross twelve brands. So what's that math? So each each brand has uh twelve th twelve or thirteen uh Products.

And The products I don't even understand, but basically I understand the business model. The business model is they get you to buy a fifty or forty nine dollar thing. Then they get you to buy a two thousand dollar thing. And they're 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. Right. I don't understand. how they get it to work and a large percentage of those forty nine dollar people buy the

two thousand dollar thing. Okay. So but I'm I feel like Okay, so m these must be B to B newsletters, right? No. They're not. Uh uh yeah, that that's an important part that I left out. Nearly all of this.

is around and we'll link to their deck. So they have a whole deck when they w they they it's kinda scammy. So they it's a financial and a wellness company, which is kind of weird. They're talking about health and they're talking about wellness. And if you click Agora up there, Sean, under my name, you'll see the deck. They say that their their target demographic is self directed investors. What's that mean? Well, I'm gonna tell you if I look at the website, it's just a bunch of old kinda wealthy white people who are probably Republican and because the reason I think this is they have Ads that say like Nancy Pelosi's coming for your guns, you better invest in these eight stocks. Like they say like crazy shit like that. It's basically the like Motley Fool on uh you know.

Steroids, right? Yes. Uh but I think Molly Fool's ethical. These guys aren't. They s also sold a book on how to cure diabetes. I was gonna ask you why do you think they're unethical and then you answered my question. And so it's all financial news f financial newsletter uh financial news related stock picks. And it's just a just a crazy story. I brought this up tons of time. We don't have to 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.

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 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'll you know, like I've had a paid newsletter as an individual, right? I made You know, 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 qu my honest reaction is Dude, why couldn't you have done this with the hustle? Why what what did they do or what was the why was the hill too hard to climb where you could scale like this, because this is huge. 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 seventies.

Right. 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. Helps. So how would you how would you do this? You let's say you want to

B these guys or beat these guys. What does you know, you're Sam, you're probably one of the most well equipped people in the world to do this. How would you have gone about it? Well, what you have to do is you've got to create multiple brands under 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 Um get a payday. Like and I wanted to I mean, like I was I was pretty clear about that before. Like I wanted I like it was cool. It was it's awesome. I'm gonna stay here, but

Like it was nice to like hit get a lot of ticket. Um But if I wanted to be patient. And do it for fifty years. Which

I kinda do to be honest. Um I would have created trends, but for subset subcategories, and you make the first newsletter, the one that people pay for, only like forty nine or fifty bucks, and we send you uh just a couple 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 uh dissected media companies I work in the media industry and you told me it was four thousand dollars and I also got access to a community, I ain't gonna complain about it. Right. I'm I mean I'm gonna do it. If there's something for digital streaming and that you know that the five analysts are smart, Twitch is gonna buy that.

It's not that like Challenging. Um, and so that's what I would do from multiple industries. And the thing that a lot of newsletter writers do, which which I've talked about this plenty of times, and I don't have to talk about too much, is they do two one of two things. One, they charge too little, and two, if they charge too little, they don't have a higher end back back product. You need a back 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 charge makes a lot of money. So so you guys at Trends is like I don't know, three hundred something a year.

Uh you could have been Forty nine dollars and then five thousand dollars would have been a better mix of value if you want if you were optimizing for how do we get this thing as profitable as we can, lucrative as we can. Yeah, and had we not gotten bought, I would have done that. I would've I was actually we were about to change it. We were about to make that change.

And by the way, what happens to Trends Now? People still pay for it or it's free now? Um, they pay for it. We're gonna we might lower the price. Before we were 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 ninety nine dollar thing and then a two thousand dollar thing. Yeah. Dude, when I see companies like this, it just makes me want to do it so badly. Uh, because it's like It just seems so doable. Now I know that in practice, when I and by the way.

We get we get heat for this sometimes'cause we're like, dude, it's so easy. It's so simple. We're talking like relatively. Like building a successful business is hard, okay? Like it's not just gonna instantly happen. We're not saying things are easy. Sometimes we actually do for say that word easy. Really what we mean is simple. So like being able to bench five hundred pounds that is

Um Um s simple. Like it's straightforward. 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 uh for five years, but that's that was 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 to do. I think weight loss is actually a better example because five hundred pounds is a is a hard thing to mention. Weight loss is is literally simple, where it's like

Hey, you need to eat these you know, avoid carbs, void sugars. You need to eat a little bit less, less calories than you're 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. Uh, 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 are out there that get all sensitive when we call something easy, it's not

Not trying to mislead you, like yeah, it's gonna take work, most likely it won't work, it'll take some time. But we're On a scale of one to space X. This is more like a one than it is a space X. And like that's the that's a scale for for people to think about. I completely agree. And um

I think like now let's talk about what makes us hard. The first And 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 think 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 be you have to say, I'm an expert at X. Pay me money to g for you me to tell you my thoughts. Second Um Well, I no, this is not that.

So guys like James Alticher, who we've had this podcast, he was ridiculed for doing this with Bitcoin. Everyone made fun of him. He made 60 million dollars 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. Well the way I think about it is Most people truly will not that they're afraid that they're gonna get the not gonna get the money and get mocked. And so they're like, Fuck it, I I I won't do it. If you really had a guarantee, I think people would Happily

Trade reputation points. For bank points. But yeah, and perhaps, but that's a moot point because the fact is is that most people don't even want to The because the first point you said of like they may not get the money at all, that is also true, and that's what they're they're 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 a job. So if you were a content creator, you I hire people to do it for me. You one hundred percent can do that, but you're you're gonna you can't You have to you actually have to do the work for a a little while in the anyway. So you're gonna have to work. And by the way, uh quick question hiring, because 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 Trump, they talk about Steph Smith, they talk about some of the people you guys. You do me. I mean right. I mean, I consider you You be part of our crew. You, me, Trung, Steph, this guy Colby. We've got yeah, we've got a bunch of people

Where the heck did you find these people? So can you give me the tw ten seconds on each? Where'd you find Chung? Where'd you find Steph? Where'd you find Colby? Where'd you find you know all these people? Colby was uh worked at a PR firm where he was doing some copyrighting work. Uh and Uh Trong, uh Amen. Did he just apply to you or you like recognize like oh this guy's good? Mutual connection, friend of a friend said you should talk to this person. Uh Trunk came from Amon Troy, a mutual friend and investor of the hustle. Steph, uh I found on Twitter because I read her blog.

Who else? I'd say I I just kinda wanna know and then when you found these people, are you what's your Did you cycle through thirty people who kinda sort of sweep before you found the gems? 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. Like this is actually quite normal in the editorial industry, but you hire a bunch of people and you Gotta f you you either fire or there's a mutual like all right, we tried it. It won't affect. Um And that happens a lot. Um yeah.

And you also set the tone, I would say that was also a key, right? Because you were writing it originally And so you saw the training the right people. You saw the trends community. Like I was the one actually doing all the work. Every day you were posting in that thing. Yeah, and that's that's the culture and it attracts like minded people. Um I also think that um once you find the winners, then you go all in on them. So Trung is what I call he's he's a made man. Steph, a made woman. Whatever Steph wants to do something

Cool. Sounds good. What do you need? Uh when other people negotiate, baby. Time to time to double it. Time to double that number. Whatever's number Sam gave you, time to double it. These guys are all doing great. Um whenever if a if an outside person or if a if a non made person comes with an idea, it's

You know, l why don't you just show me a little M V P and let just see what people think. If Trunk says something, it's All right, yes, sir. Right. Yeah, like you you you're a proven hitmaker. So and then the um 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 at storytelling. Right, right. Uh, okay, I like it. Um Can we do one idea real quick before we we jump? So

Um It's kinda kinda kinda kinda gonna feel like it's out of left field, but I would say there's something interesting here. So I light it on the page. Oh yeah, uh so I'm down here. Uh virtual team building. So 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're, you know, sometimes you gotta crack the whip and it feels like it's just task after task and deadline after deadline. And you wanna make sure that this team is really coming together and is uh bonded and You want people to have a good time here and you don't want them to leave and All the good 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 a shooting range, some people go to an escape room, some people do like, you know Um painting and wine tasting and what I've got to do. You know what I liked most? Just like a fancy dinner. Right, yeah.

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. Yeah, I just like go we we would do like fancy dinners. Right. And um and and this is ever every team. Literally I heard a NBA coach talking about this the other day. He goes, Man, we got all these new players so hard with Covid because in the old days You just go to the bar, you put your your card behind the tab, uh you know, and you you say

All the drinks are on me tonight. Go crazy, guys. He's like and 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. And um And so with the uh you know, we have this remote work trend, everybody's going remote. Um

So how are those teams gonna do it? How are they gonna 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 gonna do this? So I've seen some cool companies popping up. that are doing this and I think they're doing quite well. So

I wanna 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 team ro team rottery, is that right? Yeah, team rottery, 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 These seem like small bootstrapped ideas, but actually they have some big backing because I think people recognize the spaces.

Big co companies pay. Tens of thousands of dollars Um per division. A year to have team bonding. And so then you you know, in a big company you have

you know, easily High six figures, low seven figures worth of spend on uh on this type of thing. That's my guess. Uh I'm I'm not in the finance team, so maybe I'm off, but I think that's about right. I'm looking forward. First of all, Team Rottery looks interesting. Horrible name.

But it Awful name. Um they've got a pretty badass uh A pretty badass set of advisors, guys like Keith Raboy, who seems to hate everything, as you've said. Uh

advisor or their board. Pretty interesting. Yeah, exactly. So he's on this and it says trusted by three three hundred plus global teams and you see Pinterest and Slide. Summer Sanders. Who's that?

You don't remember Summer Sanders? She was from and uh she was like a a swimmer in the nineties and then was the host of all the Nickelonian TV shows. No way. That's that's hilarious. Suburb Sanders works at product development at Team Rottery. 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 um guacamole tasting, uh a painting class or whatever. It could be if you do kick off uh kick off uh team kick offs. Uh okay, we got our guacamola tasting again, but we also have The High Heeled Shu Project, а Lesson for Inclusion. Um, you know, so there's these like

Uh kind of team experiences, lessons in a box, or bonding in a box experiences. That's one. Then our friend from the pod, uh Greg Eisenberg. Created one called Nice Break Dot Fun. Um

Dude, this guy loves like Cute names. Yeah. Give me give me a name check. How do you feel about nice break dot fund? It's okay, it's good.

He loved like he he l Greg is like the coolest guy when it comes to he like public school or like school works or like school bus. Like his studio's called Late Checkout. Late Checkout like you know. I remember being like why'd 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 kind of like product design creative agency thing. And um and then every week he's like yeah, we w like I'll I'll put I'll post a cool product that I think is awesome. He's like, Oh yeah, we worked with them, 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, okay, that's pretty cool. And he's using that to fund his.

own in his own projects, if their their own internal projects which I don't know, that's 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 Um Yeah, a wardrobe makeover or stuff like that, right? So I think this is kind of cool. And there's other products like this that are like just a straight up Zoom escape room. It's like,

Eight people enter, one hour goes on the clock. And the whole thing in Zoom. So I think there's g this is gonna be I think a pretty big space that starts out looking like a toy, but ends up being a pretty Pretty solid business. What do you think?

Yeah, I first of all late checkout dot com or sorry. Uh with latecheckout.com is Greg it's uh Sh mostly Sean's buddy. Uh he's got a community community design firm. Go to that website and look at what he's doing. It's really good. That guy is really good. Um n night break fun.

Nice break dot fun. I think it's cool. They're charging a lot of money, which I think is badass. So they charge two thousand dollars a month. Plus Okay, so A grand a month gets you two nice breaks per month for and that's for companies that are twenty five to fifty. If you're okay, I understand how this works.

Uh Yeah, this could bite this could be a hit. I think this is great. I think this could totally be a hit. Can it be a huge V C thing? I don't know, but uh this could make tens of millions of dollars in subscription revenue. Exactly. And the other thing is um One way to think about problems like these or find opportunities like these is you go.

Uh in the C suite. So you say okay, there's a CEO There's a CMO, there's a CTO, CFO, CIO, whatever, right? You go through all of them. And we were laughing because you were like, What the hell is a C H R O? So this is what a C H R O thin about.

They're the chief people officer essentially of a of a company. Th I kinda use those inter interchangeably. Maybe there's some nuance difference. Sorry to you know, the the three C H ROs that listen to this podcast. Um I didn't mean to to Uh, yeah. Human resources, I think, uh officer. So

So w they think about this stuff, right? They're like, Okay, 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 gonna leave? Are they gonna is this a toxic work environment or not? And so then they have this The do you so one thing you could do is you go talk to these people And you just sort of say What sucks.

What's 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 mean? 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. That is

Like some people sometimes people ask like 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 they're 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 Do the m does the money map to the problem? And if the money maps to the problem, you start to see, oh, okay, and you ask them, hey. Which budget line item is growing a lot year over year. Which which line item was smaller last year and was bigger this year. Because that's the space where they're still looking for new solutions. 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 ten 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

They're qu you look at uh QuickBooks and you say, All right, what's going on here? Where's all the money going to? Right. It's an awesome way. That's actually kind of a cool business in itself, which is like How do I think? Uh how do I what? Like wallet share. Like how do I just see how it share these people are the moms in America, where is their wallet going, right? Like w what are they spending their their time and money on? I think You know, big brands like I don't know.

Practor and Gamble, they they think about this a lot. They interview a ton of moms, they say, Oh, okay You know, the mom controls this much of the household budget. you know seventy percent or whatever. And then within that Every month she's spending X percent on groceries, Y percent on household cleaners, this percent on this, this percent on this. And that's how they decide, okay, we need to invest our

Product development. according to where the budget is. Um because that's how that's how we make our money back. That's such an interesting way to do things. Like it I guess you could do it. How many public company there's two thousand public companies in America. You could easily more. I think there's like four thousand, something like that. Four thousand. Uh however many Michael actually said in last episode. Four thousand, let's say. You could easily do that with with the all their Categories. Right. G and A or

But you might be that's kind of an interesting study. Right. And uh and you can do this with just media companies. How our media comp what what is the expenses look like of a media company. Where are they allocating you know, where where are they s where do they spend all their money and where which which ones are changing uh over time? Where are things shifting?

And so I think that's kind of like an interesting signal. that you can use at the company level. One um division in a company. individual person, whatever, and I think you get a lot of insights from that.

I think that's a great idea. I think what we just said of like Did you make up that n name wallet chair, or is that a thing? Uh I think that's a term in general. Um Like it's a it's a general term, but but um I I've also seen this, by the way, in terms of s for for in the social networking space, in terms of time.

So WeChat, I think, or um One of the Chinese companies They had this presentation I saw. And you know, I'm sitting there trying to go through a Chinese presentation, so I you know maybe someone's lost some translation, but I got I got the general idea, which was

They want an app for every minute of your day. There'cause the China has all these like super apps, like we chat you can pay your house bills in it and it's like WhatsApp. Uh and you can also like subscribe to Netflix through it. you know, their version of Netflix, but it's also like You know, where you post photos and like that. So what they said was like they took a person's day. So they're like, Okay, 15 year old kid wakes up in the morning at this time.

First 10 minutes of the day, what what products are they using? What apps are they using? And they start to break it down minute by minute, basically like What Where are there gaps? So today we're taking up four hours of this person's time. If they're awake for twelve hours, how do we spend how do we get 12 hours of their or 16 hours, how do we get 16 hours of mind share from this person? Well, they watch movies at night. We need an app for movies.

Well, during the day they need uh they message the friends. We need that. They need news. They would get the news. All right, cool, we're gonna do news, and that's how they They think about 'Cause how do they expand? If you're an ad based business, you need attention. So how do I get more attention? Well, I need more hours of the day of yours. How do I get more hours of the day? Well, I gotta figure out how you spend it today and I gotta insert myself there. I have a few friends that have worked on those on that at Facebook where they're like, All right, we have found out that if you put stickers onto photos, people spend like five seconds more. And they have like fifty people just working on stickers and I'm just like kill yourself uh like these people hated their job.

Dude, I one of my best friends, his job at Facebook was literally He was in the, you know, it was called like security and pro safety and privacy of community or something like that department. And literally he's like, I just try to make sure a dick doesn't show up on your Facebook feed. He's like so uh 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.

He's like That's right. That's cool. You're like trying to protect people, whatever. That's cool. But on the other side, he's like, I'm writing like 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 n were writing programs to train the computer. to recognize this versus that. And he's like, it's a cat and mouse game. Always harder than you think. They're always one step ahead. Like stack of dimes or Sean Sean's D No, that's just about a dollar and pennies. Um

They uh but yeah, I I mean at least that job is all right, but Like 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. Um Yeah, it is sad when you think about it. Like the the best brands of our generation are Basically sitting inside the giant slot machine. And being like, Okay, how do we 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, right? Like that's the reality. And it's like, hey, I get paid

Five hundred thousand dollars 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. That's uh those are all true things that happen. Um, before we wrap up, did you see that you were you so you and I are one for one of being turned into meme. So you posted Something like I'm looking for a m a meme creator, five hundred dollars a month, no vacation. And uh you posted all this other funny stuff. And people like mocked you. Uh liquidity mo a bunch of people mocked you. It's pretty great. I think hopefully they realize that like we do this shit on purpose.

Yeah, or like uh it's not even like okay, I'd love to say Huh. I'm in on the joke. I knew this like, yeah, I knew it was silly, but like I didn't think we'd like to get it. We we know like we're self aware enough to know this is like Like mockable.

I wrote no vacation. It's not even a real job. Like of course it's like a fake job posting. Not fake. It's like I'm basically like just being like, hey, does someone want to hide hustle for me by making a bunch of memes? You can make five hundred 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 gonna get like a hundred likes. But if I say it the way I said it over the top.

Boom, I got thousands of likes and then the thing spread and a bunch of people got angry and it literally like Taylor Lorenz was like, Why does this person not get sick leave? Because it's not a job. And so um yeah, we're kinda doing this on purpose, but also I am just kind of a character and like s 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

I win if If you get mad, I win. I if you you know, like if you take it seriously and um you apply, I win. Like it's I win all I win no matter what. As long as I don't get completely canceled, I win. Which might happen one day soon, but we'll have we'll have fun until then.

Um And I will explain someday why I am hiring a a personal meme god to uh to to do some memes for me. I will explain. You have to explain that why I mean there's nothing. Well, um there's actually a cool story around it, but uh 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 uh when it's ready. So that'll that will come in I don't know, a couple of months. Um

And I guess you'll have to share some of the best ones you got. Yes, sir. Um all right. That's it.

Feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like a day song on the road Travel never looking back

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