84: How can Elon fix Twitter? And a Linkedin deep dive with Jack Raines

Welcome to another episode of Not Investment Advice. We've got the NIA boys here today. Trung Phan, Jack Butcher, Bilal Zaidi. And we've got a special guest, the best LinkedIn shitposter in the world right now. I think you're winning that one.

I think him and Colin. Would you say you and Colin are one? Well, actually, and Chris Back. That's like the— that's the Hall of Fame right now. Raines, what do you think? Jack Raines, would you agree or disagree with that?

I would say that I'm— I would say that I'm the up-and-coming guy. Like, those two are definitely the best, kind of like the Brady and Rodgers over the last decade or two. And then I'm like a Josh Allen. Lamar Jackson type, like on the rise, not there yet, but, uh, you haven't won anything yet, but like people are scared.

Like when you're on the schedule, they're like, they can't sleep the night before.

You don't want to catch me in the first round of the playoffs for sure.

All right, so should we kick off with Twitter? Twitter's been crazy popping off in the last week. Obviously, as we're going to be talking a lot about shitposting today, but I guess we're going to have to start with Elon and his like real life shitposting essentially. So Tron, do you want to give the rundown of what happened and then we can, uh, Open up the floor.

Well, what's funny is we're so online, all of us. So we saw what happened on Friday, uh, when, uh, so Elon officially took over on Friday and two people, uh, one was named Rahul Ligma and the other one was named Daniel Johnson. Well, these were, well, look, air quotes for the listeners. These are not real names because they were method actors. People call them pranksters. I'm calling them method actors because of how good of a job they did. Um, so actually one of the guys, Rahul, we follow each other at Zero Interest Rates. Uh, you can find him. He's a legend. But, uh, so Basically, they're holding boxes outside. You guys remember when, uh, the financial crisis happened? And yeah, of course, it was like that, right? So ostensibly, these two individuals rolled up to Twitter holding boxes. And this is— but this is just like influence 101. They knew the media was going to be there, and they're looking— the media is looking for people rolling out on Twitter holding boxes wearing Patagonia gear. And this is exactly what these guys did. Uh, but the joke is, yeah, it was bait. Uh, they interviewed these guys and basically started writing articles with the names Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson. So the obviously massive joke is that as soon as that hits the internet, everybody that's internet native will know that Ligma— and to be fair, not everybody is— Ligma is shorthand for lick my nuts. So, and then if you combine the two words, Ligma Johnson, it's Johnson, another word for the male member.

So, but the male member, Jesus Christ, show up in the mainstream media.

And then Elon obviously takes it to like level 100. By tweeting out a Daily Mail article that writes the name Daniel Johnson and Ruho Ligma. A part of me thinks that he plotted this because it just makes the media look completely illegitimate because he knows the hit pieces are coming. Like, on the day—

his caption for that, his caption for that as well was, Ligma Johnson had it coming.

Yeah, exactly. Like a wink, right? Like a wink.

Well, he put the aubergine and the splash emoji on the end of it, so it's not even a wink. It was like full-on, you know.

Yeah, it's, uh, so Yeah. Oh, let me find— finish the last few thoughts. Sorry, Raines, get used to me talking for too long. The last few thoughts is the CNBC anchor that got completely roasted, you probably saw online, was Diadra Bosa. Uh, actually, I was classmate— DJ— we're friends, we went to each other's weddings. Um, she actually came out yesterday and did a, a, uh, a video where she apologized. And I, I reread through the comments Very rare this has ever happened. So I think we got to give kudos for Deidre, uh, for actually owning it. She says, listen, I got sucked into the vortex essentially, and like, I admit it, I, I didn't fact-check this and I just reported it, and I was the reason that this story went off. And then actually, if you read the comments, obviously people are gonna like give her shit, but like 90% of the comments are like, yo, this is so rare that a journalist ever owns it. So congrats to her, man. So now you guys, let's, uh, why don't we give it to Raines, his thoughts on Ligma Johnson. First question, did Elon plot it? And then tell me, what are your thoughts about it?

Jack Raines: I don't think Elon plotted it because just looking at how he runs Twitter, it seems like he basically just copy and pastes something from other people. He takes other people's memes, this "Let this sink in" thing that he did, that's been a recurring thing for years. I don't think he actually could have come up with this, but he is very good at taking a thing that happens and just running with it and capturing the moment. He definitely saw this blowing up, He knows that he's getting a lot of shit just for like all the Twitter stuff. So just double down on the joke that's already there. I just think it was two dudes that are just hysterical, saw an opportunity, and then he took their opportunity and tried to make it his thing.

I love it.

What were you guys— can we actually just add one thing, key detail we missed? One of the dudes had the Michelle Obama Becoming book. That was really key.

Okay, okay. Did you hear what he said about it? He said if Elon Musk had Twitter 10 years ago, Michelle Obama never would have happened. Like acting like Michelle Obama is just a conspiracy theory and nobody said anything about it. It's crazy.

The other guy said—

Yeah, you had a favorite.

Well, that was, that was Daniel Johnson, right? He said, guys, I'm just really shook up right now. I have to go and go home and catch up with my husband and wife, which is, which is, you know, again, another deeply internet native joke. But it would be, I think, to be properly executed, he would have said my wife and my wife's boyfriend.

Wait, is this alluding to the, the polyamory that goes on in the Valley? Is that what you're alluding to?

No, I think it's— well, yeah, maybe, maybe that was that reference, but I thought it was more of a, uh, you know, cuckold. Yeah, that was my interpretation of it, but who knows.

All the people with kids in the car listening right now had to turn it off. Yeah, it's good.

Your thoughts?

It's an interesting one because I think what Raines— Jack Raines, by the way, for people listening, we're gonna have to call Jack Raines Raines and Butcher Jack Butcher, or Jack Butcher Butcher, because I can't be saying your full name every time. Um, but what Raines just said there, that sounds hilarious. Um, basically saying that Elon wouldn't have orchestrated it, he just ran with it. I think that's probably accurate. I, I would— the only thing I would say is the ability to do it, I, I think he might have the ability in terms of like he probably has people doing the stuff for him sort of thing.

Yeah, I disagree with Raines saying that he never would have come up with this. Like, bro, come on!

Trungo, a fan of the channel.

Well, you know what, one of my favorite conspiracies in the replies to these tweets is Elon's already got the Neuralink fitted. So that's true. Yeah, like, that's already plotting memes and executing and outsourcing the memification of everything he does. He's running 100 times ahead because he's Neuralinked.

Well, let me give you a clear example of, uh, we knew the hit pieces were coming, right? That on the Thursday, a New York Times does a piece called, uh, Elon is a global chaos agent according to a number of sources familiar with the matter.. And then the next day, the Washington Post, sure enough, right in the morning drops, the use of the N-word goes up 500%. First of all, not good. Uh, but what ended up happening, uh, when they did the, uh, uh, the trust and safety head of Twitter did a whole thread and says, listen, no content moderation has actually changed. These were bots. It was coordinated. It was clearly coordinated because they're always catching in the moment, right? Oh, it's Elon switch over. Let's see what we can do. It looked like it was about 1,500 bot accounts. Just started pumping the N-word and other curse, like really derogatory words. They shut it all down. So I mean, the research was correct, but it was not correct for the reasons they said. It did happen, but it wasn't because the content moderation stuff had actually changed. But we knew the hit pieces were coming, right?

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. But while we are talking, there's a— do you see that? What is trending? A message to Elon is trending. Do you see that?

No.

I mean, I, I don't want to open and share on the screen, but just, it's just basically all the things you're saying, but like streams of tweets, people just like shitting on him and, uh, stuff like that. So yeah, it's kind of timely that as we're talking about it, this is popping off at the same time. Uh, but anyway, gone back to what you're saying there, Trung.

No, I don't want to ask Raines because Raines, uh, I will say this about Jack Raines, like on the scale of 0 not being a corporate shill to like 100 being a corporate shill, I'm probably closer to the 100 than Jack Raines is. So he's got a nice cynical look on the world. So Jack, give us your, like, unfiltered take about Elon's takeover of Twitter, what you think the good, bad, and ugly is.

So I really think that he just likes using the platform a lot. Like, he's probably got one of the strongest Twitter addictions out of anybody on the planet, which is hysterical because he's also the, you know, arguably richest person on the planet.

Um, he is.

Yeah, I, I know he is, he is, he is. I honestly, I just think, I think he wanted to acquire it the whole time and he just timed the purchase horribly, like right before tech went into this bear market, and then tried to use this whole bot thing to reduce the price, still wanted to take it over. But I really think he just didn't— I think he didn't want his use of Twitter to ever be impeded by somebody else running it. Kind of like Trump getting kicked off the platform. It's like if he just owns Twitter, then nobody can ever kick him off because it's his thing. So that's like my entire take is he just wanted to own his favorite toy. And he was willing to pay $40 billion to do that.

What Balaji said was he wanted root access to his 110 million followers. Just exactly what you said. He's like, he did not want anybody to be able to boot him off of that. And he said, actually, Balaji's like, it's kind of worth the $44 billion.

Oh yeah. Honestly. Yeah. Like, dude, how much money do you need? Right? Like he has like $200 billion, like 40. Okay. You spent $40 billion on Twitter. You still have like another $100 billion plus.

Well, just as an example, right? It's like, look at Trump. It wasn't like Trump got kicked off and like could spend $10 billion to get back his 100 million followers, right? Like, this is— frankly, there's a number between like 10 and 40 where it's totally worth it for Elon to secure root access to his followers.

Jack Butcher put this up, uh, I think in the last day or two. This basically illustrates it perfectly. Can you guys see that?

Oh yeah, beautiful screen.

Uh, for people listening, this, uh, the caption is distribution. And Jack Butcher, do you want to just explain what it is on, on the screen?

Yeah, so it's just a simple illustration. On the left-hand side, you have the first print and press, the Gutenberg, and then the right-hand side you have the retweet button. So the hypothesis I'm trying to posit here is that the, like, the frictionless nature of distribution with a platform like Twitter is different than anything else in the world. And in the same way the Gutenberg, like, replicates an original thought hundreds of thousands, millions of times, same thing with Twitter.. And I think, you know, someone who thinks about things the way Elon does can see the value in that way, way, way down the road versus what it's kicking off in cash every quarter. Right. It's just, it is unlike any other platform in— I actually forwarded a tweet to you guys yesterday, I think, about Twitter is like this very odd social dynamic too, where anybody can talk at anyone. It's like there is no—

default public, right?

Default public. And people sign up with their names for the most part, right? I think that could be true of something like a Reddit or something, but you're not going to get like Barack Obama signed up to Reddit.

Reddit is mostly pseudonymous.

And that is like a dynamic that doesn't exist in the real world. And there's something like ridiculous about that. That's why, you know, it's an amazing and a terrifying thing at the same time, right? We all have commented on how like weird your relationship is with, with a platform like that because it does. I mean, we would not be doing this podcast if it wasn't for Twitter, but I also probably would, you know, be doing some more interesting stuff with my time if it wasn't for Twitter.

What are you trying to say, Jack?

Jack just completely threw me and Bilal under the bus. No, he's not saying this.

I'm saying the time I waste on a daily basis scrolling through my feed.

Actually, wait, so let me bring up a point here because, uh, our boy Raines is going to go off on LinkedIn in a bit, but LinkedIn's product decision around retweets is actually very interesting. So when you repost something on LinkedIn, it's not an anot— it doesn't just go in a feed. It's your name on top of it. And if you don't write anything, it's the repost after. So that's actually like a mechanism to make you think for a second. It's not like you're just retweeting to boost the signal of it. Now you kind of have to own the fact that you did that. You know what I mean?

So I think— You start to reshare versus like—

Exactly. It's like a—

Like you're co-signing it.

That is true on Twitter though still, right? It's just more subtle.

No, but that's what I mean. It's subtle though. It's not the full ownership. And we'll talk about other product decisions on LinkedIn, but I think that's an interesting one. Something that people— and the other thing that people complain a lot about is a quote retweet function on Twitter. That's where all the dunking happens. And listen, I've been guilty of dunking on cats. I try to do a lot less now. Raines does way too much of it.

I think—

I love it, but dude, it's so toxic, man. And like, let me— okay, let me just— okay, this is the problem. The quote retweet, you can shut off replies to your tweet to like only people that follow you or the only people you follow. So like, if I put that, instead of 500,000 people being able to respond, or 300 million, 499.9 again. Yeah, round it up, round it up to a million. It's like, call it a million.

So your tweet, so just for people who aren't following, Truong finally it's 500K, which is incredible. And then it went down to 409.9.

Those percentages are getting, getting significant up there.

No, I think, I think people, uh, first of all, I think bots are leaving the platform. I don't know if it's intentional, it probably is. And I think people are actually leaving. I've heard a lot of people say they're losing a couple hundred followers, not a big deal.

Anyways, uh, it was like my portfolio like last year, like finally big numbers, and then now I'm a bit more than 0.1 gone off.

Summer 2021. But, uh, back to the quote retweet, the problem quote retweet is, so they implement a function where you can restrict to replies, but you can't restrict quote retweets. It's just so ridiculous. Right. It's like, not only are you allowing the thing that spreads more to be allowed, like you're going to shut off one of them, let the quote retweet thing that gets shut off. Right. And then a lot of people reply. It's just such a dumb product decision, but I'm pretty sure they're going to stop that happening where you can decide. Nobody can also quote retweet. They're gonna take the screenshot and it'll just slow the distribution of it. But okay, let's get right into it, guys. I sent you guys a message. Uh, let's just ask questions now. What are of the products that are being bandied about— a verification badge, Vine, all these creative tools— I think, can, can we just go around the horn here and say what excites you and what you think can happen? We'll start with—

because you said Vine, the charging 20.

Yeah, bring it back, Vine. Uh, the verification badge, they weren't— right now they're floating a number. I think it's just pure floating. They're saying $20 a month to keep your verified badge.

Uh, to keep—

but it's not like anyone who is this— if you're not verified, you can get verified.

It's not clear. No, this is all we know for sure from the reporting, and none of it is in stone. Is if you have a verified badge now, and if they flick this on on November 7th, according to reporting, Elon said if they don't do this feature by November 7th, everybody's fired. So they're moving fast. Uh, so if you have a badge already, you have 90 days to go up to Twitter Blue at $20 a month or you lose the badge. Now, to Bilal's question, does this mean that any Joe Schmo can pay $20 now and get the badge? That's unclear. And I think this is something we'll have to discuss. So the Vine, for sure, they want to reboot Vine. Uh, I'm not sure whether or not it'll be internal to the feed or again, like a separate app, which I think is not a great move. But so those two, and then more things to get bundled into Twitter Blue. So we'll start with Jack Raines. Uh, just pick one of them, Jack, and walk us through your thoughts on it.

So I'm, I'm a big fan of the Vine thing coming back. As someone who was in like, I guess, middle/high school when Vine was a thing, I remember Vine being like a very fun part of my adolescence. Like, people would try to replicate the Vines. There was— I don't know if you guys remember the iconic Vine of the, um, of the dude, like the woman's giving the weather report and the guy in the sunglasses and the hoodie jumps out, grabs the mic and yells, fuck her right in the pussy, and then jumps off the screen.

Um, I think I saw that one.

If you've never seen it, yeah, yeah, we wanted to edit that out, but actually I do think we should include that video in. It's— if you describe it, it's terrible. If you watch it, it's hysterical. I dressed up as that guy for Halloween like 3 times. It's a very niche costume, but it's funny. But I always loved Vine because it was like these just 7-second videos, and it, it just forced people to make really funny stuff as quickly as possible. And honestly, there's all this stuff about like TikTok being a security threat. What if the US bans TikTok? This and that. TikTok is toxic. So like, since Zuck is kind of all in on this metaverse stuff, having another video platform that's, I guess, like US-based, and it's kind of got that nostalgia effect of people who use Vine, like 8 years ago or whatever, 9 years ago, get to use that again. I think it's cool. I love Vine. I think it was the worst decision Twitter made getting rid of Vine. They could have literally won this short-form video thing. So I'm very bullish and excited for Vine to probably come back.

Nice. What about you guys? About Vine? Any thoughts on Vine?

Yeah, Vine is class, man. What a crazy constraint. What was it, 7 seconds?

Yeah.

Incredible. Should keep that. That's my opinion. If you bring it back, don't mess with the length. That's my only thought.

I, I think they— if they're gonna do it, I think they're just gonna have to— I'm not saying this is what they should do, it's what I think they will do if they bring it back. They'll keep, you know, the old school packaging of it all, but they probably— I think they might make a few changes, like the 7-second constraint. I think even though in a way that's, that's great, but that might have also been a reason it didn't completely hit the scale that it needed to, whereas TikTok By default, I guess, was 1 minute or so, 30, 60 seconds most of them last. And now, now they've extended it, it's like way longer as well.

10 minutes, I think.

Yeah, exactly. But, but what really popped was the short form, right? And the way that they, you know, surfaced it full screen, etc. So I don't know, I feel like they can reinvent little parts of it. And yeah, so I don't know, I think they're probably gonna do that. And then, yeah, maybe I'll save my thoughts on the, uh, okay, I just want to say one thing back to Blau.

Is like the one thing about keeping a constraint that's different than another platform, it stops people reusing everything and then you start to get your own like, oh, right, versus like Instagram Reels is just because you couldn't rip the 7 seconds from TikTok because they look ridiculous, right? Right. So maybe it's not 7 seconds, but I think that's one cool thing about something reaching critical mass is like it puts a frame in somebody's who's going to make something like they think about it in the context of what are the restraints of this platform? And if you just do vertical video up to 60 seconds, you're just going to— it's like war of attrition, right? It's like try and just get people and maybe that's a good strategy. If you have the— then it becomes like an algo game, right? Like TikTok versus Twitter algorithm. And the TikTok algorithm is like, it's insane.

Supercharged.

Yeah. I'll add 3 thoughts that I agree with Jack. MrBeast actually went in the replies when Elon put the poll up. So here's a crazy thing. Elon puts up that poll, 130,000 people replied. So 130,000 Twitter users— has there ever been an experiment?

Sorry, should we bring back Vine?

Okay, okay. Yeah, why or no? Uh, I can't remember what the answer was, but, uh, he also did a poll on how much people would charge for verification. But we'll talk about that later.

I've got it right now. 60— this is hilarious— 69.6% of people said yes. I'm not making it up. Yeah, yes, he's definitely bringing it back. 4.9 4.9 million votes.

Think about how crazy it is. 5 million Twitter users voted on whether or not she— I mean, it's an insane way to run a social network if that's actually what happened. But I think a lot of this is— I mean, a lot of it's just democracy strong, right? Yeah, direct democracy. Well, listen, okay, let me get back. So MrBeast answered to that, and he and MrBeast and Elon had an exchange. MrBeast said something to the effect of what Jack said: don't just do whatever TikTok does, You have to make it that is unique to Twitter. That's exactly what Jack said.

So I think what's interesting—

what could you actually do with Twitter that makes it unique? There's a lot, right? It's like something with the feed. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, that's smart. Uh, two other comments I saw, uh, Nikita Bier, the founder of, uh, Gas and, uh, legendary social network founder. Um, he said you should not make Vine a separate app because it'll be impossible to get the, uh, the inventory of content. Back up to compete at the level that you could with, uh, TikTok. That's his concern. And then the former head of engineering of Vine's like, do not bring back Vine. You got to build it from scratch because that code is 10, 6 to 10 years old. Fair enough, right? Uh, obviously they're gonna have to do some new stuff. And then you guys already know, I have said episodes, my hobby horse, just, they're gonna ban TikTok. They need to ban this shit. So if Elon's ready with Vine, then there we go.

Here's the thumbnail. We got the thumbnail ready now.

Yeah.

Real quick, I'd like to point out, like, MrBeast commented, no one is original anymore. Whatever you do will be on every other platform the next month unless it has a deep moat. YouTube has Shorts, Insta has Reels, Reddit, Snapchat, Facebook, etc., all copied TikTok. Whatever you do, make it hard to copy or it's a waste of time, IMO. The very first reply to that comment, somebody just copy-pasted MrBeast's comment. That's so good.

This is—

that's—

that is Twitter's moat, right? That can only happen on Twitter. Twitter's the only place where I can throw a poll up on Vine. MrBeast gives like a good product recommendation and then just a complete troll that fucks up everybody.

That is a good, that is a good, uh, point to unpack though, because the video thing does just become this algorithmic— like, it's not you watching exchanges between people, which arguably is where all the attention is, uh, like aggregated for Twitter. Like people switch between those two apps. So I don't know, it's a good— oh, you don't want to kill the DNA of it with bringing in features that are going to be maybe like technically can accrue more attention, but like you're kind of losing the DNA of the thing that made it, made it sticky in the first place. It's a hard, hard problem to solve for sure.

Well, Butcher, let's jump right in. What— what— you wrote something to one— I think Jason Calacanis asked what product ideas do you have? And you had some creator ideas. Could you share those?

I, um, his question was around advertising, right? How do you make advertising better for Twitter? And my response was about like, how do you improve the monetization tools for people who are contributing to the platform, right? Like, the advertisers only want to advertise on Twitter because people come to Twitter to read and watch the stuff that Twitter users make. In the same way that MrBeast built a massive business off of making amazing YouTube videos and completely frictionless— frictionlessly collected cash from that, right? So say, let's, let's say Trung or Jack write a tweet that has a million impressions. Why aren't you getting paid a couple hundred bucks for that tweet? Because all of the real estate that you generated that ads are getting placed on in is, and especially if you're like writing on finance, right? Like someone's putting a Robinhood ad in under a Trung tweet mentioning the story of a company or something.

You shouldn't put a Robinhood ad though. Don't, don't do that.

Whatever. Austin Reef put another great comment that said you could make basically a marketplace with like a deeper integration with Revuu where Jack's newsletter plugs Young Money doesn't have to go and like find and negotiate all these deals on a 1-to-1 basis. You could just say, oh, my newsletter gets read by this many people. This is the open rate. This is a subject matter. If you want to advertise in it, it's X per reader and you just turn it on and it just inserts it in the— So I think like just deeper integration with like an attention marketplace, understanding what—

Yo, that's a great idea, dude. That's a great idea on the newsletter plug.

Austin Reef. That's Austin Reef. Yeah. The newsletter.

Okay, well, Austin, great idea, dude. Yeah, I don't know how— I know you listen sometimes, but if you're listening to this one, you should, because Raines is here. Uh, that's a great idea, Austin. Okay, all right, so let's go around the horn. How do we feel about that? Oh, actually, that's less of a horny one. Did I just say horny? All right, Bilal, hit us. Uh, you gotta do— okay, just do the verification, verification.

Bad.

Well, no, I mean, the only thing I was, I was gonna share this one from, uh Stephen King, the writer. Let me just quickly share my screen here. Do you guys see that? So this is Stephen King, the famous writer, and he basically said, $20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I'm gone, I'm gone like Enron. And the funniest thing is, I mean, Elon Musk responded to this. He said, we need to pay the bill somehow, which is also a great way to describe this. Uh, Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8? I love this, like, negotiation happening.

Dude, it's actually— my dude, this is genius, right? He just anchored it high and now it's gonna be like— it's gonna be $6 a month. Be like, oh, that's not bad, that's way better than $20.

That's the pricing. Yeah, exactly.

So I mean, there was another— there was a Sailor— there was a Sailor contribution to that thread too, right?

Remember that? Oh yeah, I got it right here. I'll pull it up for you guys. Uh, uh, Jack Raines has got strong feelings about Sailor, so just bite your tongue right now.

I think he's hysterical.

Likewise. Yeah. Yeah. So for the listeners and viewers that don't know about Jack Raines, he spends a lot of time going after Bitcoiners. So me, the people like me, everybody on this call, he keeps posting charts. I just bite my— every time I could just like quote retweet him and be like, oh God, I'm so— okay. So Michael Saylor says Twitter would benefit by offering a variety of verification tools. Uh, you put blue for public or official, green for an individual, orange for anonymous, and purple for corporate. All accounts can be secured by monthly fee or upfront deposit. That would be forfeit for malicious or bot-like behavior. It's actually a genius move. I know he's talked about it a lot on the podcast, but he wants to make it a use case for Bitcoin, but it obviously could just be fiat. I think that's a smart idea. I think that's where they're going to have to end up because as we talked about at the top of this, Bilal asked the initial question, does that mean you can just pay $20 for verification? Because a lot of journalists, what's funny is, listen, there are a lot of legitimate and well-meaning journalists, They're also just like a bunch of Brooklyn trust fund kids making, living off their parents' money, making $40,000 a year. Right. And, uh, but they know that they got this nest egg and they're complaining about paying for blue checkmark, even though they don't realize that the blue checkmark, the amount of like, listen, the blue checkmark increases engagement. It just does. And if, uh, uh, Antonio Garcia Martinez, the former, the guy that wrote Chaos Monkey, the former Facebook exec, he said, if you can't monetize that blue checkmark or like use it to a benefit, for influence, uh, that's kind of on you. This isn't to say that like a lot of these fake scammy crypto accounts that somehow have the blue checkmark are legit, but I agree in the sense of like, on this platform, the blue checkmark is— it's a sign of status. It's just how it's happened. And for these people to say this is not worth nothing to me, I think it's completely idiotic.

And I mean, you can game it too. Like, I get emails all the time saying, do you want us to run press for you to submit through the process to get a blue check? It's like like, I wouldn't say that's every case. Like, I think a majority of— there's some criteria where it's like, if you write for a publication that is read by X number of people, it's an automatic thing. But if you want to get that and you have any degree of like output in the world, you could figure out a way to do it. It's not gonna be $20, it's going to be expensive, but you can get it.

Um, but I agree, similar suggestions, that'd be kind of a no-brainer. Listen, put up a dollar or prorate it for different nationalities or countries.

Right. I think, yeah, the other, the other way this is being discussed, I think this is Elon framing or somebody he replied and agreed to this where someone's like, it should be set up like a game. Basically, you choose how you want to play Twitter, right? Like the R-rated version is like all the anonymous accounts, quote retweets. It's just like carnage, basically the way it is now.

Only then there's like, choose your algorithm. That's what it is. Choose your algorithm. Choose your algorithm and choose like what gets surfaced.

And it feels like the thing that Saylor's suggesting about like verify you're a real person is a way to like participate in that version of Twitter, right? It doesn't— you don't have to be a celebrity to verify your identity, but you're less likely to have people like screaming insults in your face if you are participating on the real name version of Twitter. I would imagine that would calm down some of the crazy—

Let's give a very simple example here, right? If you paid a dollar a month to have this lower tier, just to prove that, you know, you put some skin in the game, anybody that gets that should have their replies come up to the top. Because right now, when somebody replies to your tweet, it doesn't matter who they are. You can get somebody with zero followers that opened their account yesterday being the top reply, right? But like, you go to Reddit, it's upvoted. You go to YouTube, the top YouTube comments are incredible. They have done an incredible voting system there. Twitter has nothing like that. That's a I don't know how easy it is, but conceptually it makes a lot of sense. Um, and it actually goes back. So let me just tie a bow on this. My point was just going to be Jason Calacanis has said that it sounds like the main thing everybody's talking about is trust and safety. So I mentioned the explosion in derogatory words at the beginning there. I don't want to downplay that. The thing I was trying to say is that that was the content moderation piece. It wasn't that it changed. Nothing changed. It would just got bought. But what it does demonstrate is this: people's number one concern on this platform, the reality is this, and the reason why a lot of big accounts leave and a lot of like really famous people have left and stopped using it, there's just so much harassment, right? And, uh, you have to implement one of these kind of gating functions to prevent that. So, um, I think if they can nail that, it's, it's, uh, listen, I'm going to be using Twitter no matter what.

I was just gonna just add one layer to this. I think we're talking about two different things. One is the existing blue checkmark, which is verified, which right now is, is a— one, shows you're a real person, but two, normally a notable figure or something, right? You're a famous journalist like Trung, or you're a, you know, actor or someone of public record or whatever. And that obviously comes with clout, right? Undeniably. And the thing is, as soon as you— and the second part is like verifying real people, which I think I think could be a great benefit to a lot of social networks if people opted in, but you need to give people a reason to opt in. And if everyone's gonna now suddenly get a blue checkmark equivalent just by doing the same thing, the clout is no longer the same. You're no longer special.

Change the color. That's what—

do that. Yeah, so maybe that would be the thing, right? It would be just— it would be like a green one or whatever. Now, like, for me personally, there's no— I'm like basically giving something up. To get something that is kind of inferior. Like, just to me, to have a green check mark, I'm not getting the same clout, right? Just to speak completely bluntly here, if anything, I kind of look like a dweeb. Like, I'm paying money to give my information away.

Trust me, I'm allowed. Please.

Yeah, trust me, I'm real, you know what I mean? It's like, right, I don't have—

but here's a question though, there has to be something, right?

It's anti-clout.

So I, I, I had an idea. I saw, I saw a tweet about this that actually made a lot of sense for like just normal people like us that aren't journalists like Trung. Um, so like, like dating apps, for example, have where— I'm a single dude in New York, I use Hinge.

Oh yeah, you do, buddy.

That's next topic, next topic.

Jack Raines, ladies.

So you have to like— you can like, you submit pictures of yourself that verifies that you're you. You can submit like 3 pictures. So why not on Twitter just submit 3 pictures of your face if you don't have like an anonymous account, if you're you, and that verifies every person as a real person. And then you pay for like the blue check that signifies, all right, like I'm at this tier, that's the current blue check. And then just regular humans, everybody else that isn't a bot, like two pictures of your face that show that you're you and then you're good to go. I think that would be pretty— I feel like that wouldn't be that hard to implement because a lot of apps like do that. That's, that's the thing that already exists.

I think technically it'd be quite easy, but like I'm thinking of the mechanism of incentive for someone to do it. So on the dating app, I completely get it, right? Like, you want to make sure you're getting as many matches as possible. And I mean, all of us have either married or in relationship, so we've been out the game for a while. I'm curious, on Hinge, is there like a freemium thing?

Is there like— yeah, I don't know, man. I've never— I've actually never used—

yeah, same.

Yeah, because we were all in a relationship.

Oh yeah, Bilal has back in the day, but yeah, Hinge wasn't around back then, I don't think.

Yeah, so I mean, people can definitely like, like pay to get like boost and stuff like that. Like the basic, the basic thing is free, but I honestly, I can't remember. I can't remember if I had to like verify that I was real on Hinge or not. But like, I know that like we have a lot of Latin Americans in my, like in my business school that use Tinder all the time because that's just bigger in like Argentina and Colombia. And like on there you can verify that like you're actually whoever from Colombia versus just being a bot and vice versa.

Yeah.

So. Yeah, I mean, there's like people definitely like pay for stuff on there, but yeah, got you, got you.

So I guess the question is on the Twitter side, like, are there people, regular people, who want to pay to get verified by a beta version of the blue check, like a green one, where it's like, oh, I'm just showing I'm a real person, I've given up my personal identity?

It's people, lady.

Yeah, exactly. No, no, I'm, I mean, I'm just curious. I'm personally saying myself more market. Yeah, maybe I, maybe I would, but at the moment, if you gave me an option today, I'd be like, I don't really care, it doesn't make a difference to me. Um, but if I was gonna get, you know, like you said, if I'm trying to write and get more engagement on Twitter and that helps me get more engagement, then there's a direct incentive to do it. But to me, it's like right now the blue check is what you're getting, that's the clout one, right? Like, that's what's going to help you. People, oh, that's a notable person, I'm going to follow that person, etc. So I think as soon as you segment them into those two things, it's no longer as valuable in my opinion. But, um, that might just be me.

No, I think that's a very legitimate— I think it's a super— I mean, us doing that, oh, it's me, Bilal, like, that's legit, right?

It's that Android green text, man.

I gotta like— I gotta give a dollar. Well, that's why you gotta bundle in the features, right? Listen, you're gonna have to tier it. But I think another person just wrote also, Rune, you know, the really funny anonymous AI account. The guy's a legend. He just said, this is so ridiculous. He just wrote straight up, just make a better ad product, create a proper direct response ad product. Well, here, let me ask you, Twitter's mostly brand. Is that correct? Yeah.

I've used it for a limited amount of money, a limited amount of advertising.

No one's ever had a positive ROI.

Yeah. I can see Tenei J who's responded to Jason's thing is right. One of his replies was about improving the ad product. Better targeting, you know, content.

How would you— how would you— okay, so let's ask you, this is your area of expertise. What would a good direct response ad product look like on Twitter and why is it important?

I think from without knowing the ins and outs of Twitter targeting, it's just, it seems like the targeting just doesn't work as well. Okay. So like the way you can select certain things that sound like they're going to be great targeting, but when you run it, it just doesn't work anywhere near as well as, you know, Facebook.

And so if you like tell Mooncat69 that you, they should buy these compression socks, that's not the right time.

Exactly. No, but, and the thing is, to me, from the outside, it seems like it should have as good targeting as anything else because a lot of it's open interest. And you're seeing, yeah, the interest graph, you're seeing how people, um, you know, who they follow. It's just, I think the way they invested in it over the years was just kind of like they tried copying and pasting the Google stuff. They did, you know, they basically hired a bunch of Google people to run it early on before the IPO, and then and I, in my opinion, they just did a terrible job of like actually making that product.

You were, you're going to be one of those people.

Exactly, exactly. So I would have been there like selling it, telling a great story, but then they go to run the ads and it would have been like absolute bullshit.

Well, no, so, um, yeah, another thing I think they can do, and I think Facebook's tried to do this, I don't know with what, to what degree of success, is like integrate e-commerce in the platform too, because that's another thing that Facebook does pretty well is like all the different— Yeah, with IG, especially CTAs that you get, like send an email, introduce this, and like they're still like running like early 2000s banner ads basically, right? Here's a URL, click it and you're going to promote it on a different site. Yeah, well, here's a very tangible example. The frequency of them is pretty, pretty low, right? I can't tell you the last ad I saw on Twitter. I didn't remember it or don't like that. They don't pop up.

It could have been that they were a decent amount. You've just got banner blindness because they're not good ads as well. Banner blindness from Elon's tweet about it, I thought was actually a pretty good tweet. I mean, he was playing nice with advertisers, saying that they need to revamp the advertising solution, etc., that it's important. And I completely agree. Like, they— if they just got to parity with the way that the other platforms work, and even just like the, the interface to run it all, again, without using it too much, is, is not as good. And honestly, LinkedIn— we're going to get to LinkedIn in a minute— is also the worst, but they have like really good targeting on LinkedIn because people have their like firmographic data, it's called, like LinkedIn, where you work, titles and stuff like that.

Firmographic means like personal, professional?

Yeah, like firm, I think, is where it comes from, like a firm sort of thing.

Naughty consulting language, though.

Yeah, yeah, that is, that is naughty.

Hey, Truong, do you know the numbers of the advertising business in numbers?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can throw you guys some numbers here, uh, Uh, I think they did last year, Twitter did $5 billion. 90% was on, uh, was on advertising. I think the majority of the rest was on data deals. They have really big data deals with some, uh, I think they have a big data deal with Google just to take the kind of Twitter information hose. But then, I mean, you know, we should probably start transitioning LinkedIn. Just give you an idea of how underrated of a business LinkedIn is. LinkedIn's ad business, just their advertising business, uh, which I can't even tell you a LinkedIn ad I've seen. LinkedIn's ad business does $5 billion a year. It's as big as Twitter's ad business. And then that's not even their cash cow. The cash cow, as we will probably all know, is that dumbass LinkedIn premium stuff, the subscription service and like all the recruiting tools. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, which makes all the sense in the world, right? It's like recruiting is one of the most expensive, uh, uh, people, uh, uh, cost centers for business. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So yeah. Well, blah, what will you transition into LinkedIn? Uh, Uh, why don't you hit Raines with whatever we have lined up?

Well, Raines, I realize we're probably like 30, 40 minutes into this, and for anyone who doesn't actually know what you're doing, could you just give us like a 30, 60-second version of like how LinkedIn relates to what you're doing as well?

And pitch yourself to our 5 female listeners.

Yeah, yeah. So basically LinkedIn is like, as far as original content, is just a complete cesspool because, because everybody—

Hold on, Jack, who are you? Who is Jack Raines?

I'm Jack Raines. I write a finance blog that I only talk about finance maybe 40% of the time and called Young Money. I edit Liquidity. He's this big finance meme page. I edit his newsletter, Exact Sum, every day. So yeah, I basically just like put a lot of stuff on the internet and see what—

And wait, hold on. You didn't even mention the juiciest part for future mate. Where are you going to school right now?

I go to Columbia. I go to Columbia Business School.

So my first ranking Is—

I don't know what our ranking is right now, actually.

Top 10. It's definitely top 10.

New York Business School.

Okay, cool.

Um, so yeah, top 10 business school in New York.

I think it's the number one in the world. It's a top 10 business.

I thought you were downplaying.

Also in New York.

How much do you guys give the Stern people a hard time? The MBA Stern people? Is it like beefing or not even on the same level?

We don't even— we really don't even associate with them, honestly. Okay, like two different fields.

Just unmatch everyone on Hinge. Anyone NYU?

Yeah. If you see Stern MBA, it's— yeah, you just— you ignore, you swipe left every time.

All right. So we got— I just want to— I just want to troll you on the Ivy stuff. Columbia's Ivy, right?

Thank you. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

I'm just trying to put Jack on the spot here.

Every— every— it's Ivy and then everybody goes either IB or consulting or blog.

Those are the— okay. Okay. Nice.

Nice.

Yeah. Okay. Now Good. Sorry for cutting you, but I had to do it, man. I love it, dude. Thank you for sharing that.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's my background.

But you're also, Jack, you're, you're right, uh, you're also at school right now, correct? I don't know how much you can share, but you've been getting a little bit of trouble recently because you've got these incredible shitposts on LinkedIn. Maybe we can give an example of this in a second, but I think the dean of your school got alerted, so maybe we hear that story as well.

Yeah, yeah. Do you want to go ahead and go into that now?

Yeah, yeah, let's just do it.

Okay, so, so for a little bit of background, LinkedIn is a platform where people are just like— it's a professional platform, right? So people tend to be a little more like— they aren't as outlandish on LinkedIn as they would be on Twitter. It's all job updates, congratulations, and whatever. So the only original content on there is hustle culture, like sales guys being like, you have to wake up at 5, jog 10 miles, do this, take a cold shower. This is how you're successful.. And if you do that on Twitter, like PandaBear69420 will just dunk on you and call you a loser and it's game over. And then you'll get ratioed. But nobody is gonna say that on LinkedIn because nobody wants somebody from their HR department seeing them calling somebody a loser on LinkedIn. And it reflects poorly on the company. So LinkedIn is the best platform I think for growing a blog or newsletter because there's like triple the user base of Twitter.

It's written for— 800 million versus 300 million.

Yeah. It's absurd. And like, it's written con— like written content repurposed as well there and stuff stays on the timeline longer. It just— the shelf life is longer.

And there's a huge dearth of content. Like what you said, people are scared to post because they don't want— I just want to add one thing that I cut off Raines, but like the other thing you didn't mention, you know it, but you, if you're an employee and you're posting a shit ton on LinkedIn, your boss is going to be like, dude, are you trying to get another job?

Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's great. So it hit me like I'm trying to grow my LinkedIn bigger, but I really don't want to do all the cringe, like this is how you be a better entrepreneur. So one day it hit me, if I go really over the top cringe, like just abs— like just dunking on hustle culture with satire, everybody on LinkedIn intuitively knows what it is and it's funny and they can like it and engage with it without themselves directly participating in that stuff. And if it's funny enough, it could essentially get the same engagement as the actual cringe stuff by making fun of the cringe stuff. And it works. So I started throwing, I would just think of like, what's something that would be a hustle culture LinkedIn post and how do I make it 10 times worse? So I put this post out last week about, I think I can pull it up on my screen right here.

But basically—

Yeah, you can share your screen.

Yeah, I'm pulling it up now. But essentially I like put on LinkedIn that I haven't paid for a single meal in New York City since I moved here because I've been going to, I've been going to like all the Marriotts around the city. And just eating the free, like, the free breakfast everywhere, and then going by for dinner and signing off on other people's rooms to, uh, get the food. So let me, let me share my screen on this.

Sure. What room are you? Yeah, 360. Yeah, I think it's— yeah, 360.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me get, let me get mine pulled up. Um, can you guys see it? Yeah. So I post this on LinkedIn, it does pretty well, it gets like 60,000 impressions. Then I post a screenshot of it on Twitter and the tweet gets 7 million impressions, 62,000 likes. My friend Austin Reef from Morning Brew posts a screenshot of it. It gets 70,000 likes and 10 million impressions because on Twitter, people love dunking on LinkedIn. So when you see something funny like this, everybody wants to engage with it. So anyway, it blows up. I have people commenting on the LinkedIn post saying, "I can't believe you're bragging about stealing from all these hotels and stuff. People are in the comments on Twitter calling me a thief. Um, like some of, some of those—

Jack, hold on, why don't you promote your tweet? I saw there's an option to promote it. Why didn't you do that?

I don't honestly— I have no idea how that even works. I've never, I've never done it. But like, you scroll down here and you have people like Nuclear Sense Clara saying this is with 67 followers.

No, and he still follows you. Nuclear Sense Clara. Oh my goodness. So this guy's bio is burn more fossil— and not wrong, by the way— until we can safely transition to nuclear. He's right. He's right. 67 followers. But he calls you a thief and still follows.

And then I just say, shut up, nerd, and get like 20,000 likes. So all this happens. And then I get this, I get this email. It wasn't the like overall dean of the business school, but it was like our dean of— it was like the head of student life or student development. She emailed me and said, hey Jack, we received this, uh, an email concerning a potential, like, like questionable ethical conduct based off of a LinkedIn post of yours. And she like attached a screenshot of it. She asked if I could meet. And I was looking at it like, wow, somebody actually got so pissed off by this. They like looked up my dean in the Columbia directory and emailed her. Right. So I sit back, sure. Like happy to meet about this. By the way, this is, this is like definitely satire. Here's another like 5 posts that I've done on this stuff, right? So I go about to meet last Thursday and I have no idea what I'm about to walk into. Like I, I tweet about, I tweet, well boys, we did it. I have to go meet with the dean of my business school because somebody emailed her and said I've been stealing bacon from all the Marriotts in New York state.

And then like, hold on. Did you expect 5% that they're going to expel you from the program? Was that in the back of your head?

I didn't think expulsion was on the table, but I thought either remove Columbia from your LinkedIn or you have to stop posting like this or something like that. And it became this whole saga. All my friends were seeing it.

You were stressed. You had a little bit of anxiety.

I was a little bit stressed, but also in my head, I'm like, if I get bodied for this, I could blow up such a just like PR shitstorm of like, oh, you would get 100,000 subs on Young Money.

Win-win situation.

The best thing for my career would have been if they had to get expelled. Yeah, but I go in and she was actually like, to her credit, Dean Chaps is awesome, incredibly supportive. She straight up told me she thought it was really cool that like I was doing something different from just consulting or investment banking. Like it was neat seeing somebody kind of building their own thing, like putting out content online. So she was great. She, she liked it. We just kind of talked about what I was doing.

She—

the real reason she called me in was, one, she just wanted to talk to me about what I was doing because it was just very random, and two, make sure I realized some people didn't get it because she didn't want it to adversely impact my career if somebody misinterpreted satire and then got mad at me. So like, I actually— I was like, it was great. I'm very appreciative of her for looking out But she told me, she said, I would have forwarded you the email that an alumni had emailed her about the concern. She said, I would have forwarded you the email, but I figured you would have posted a picture of it on Twitter and said, well, boys, look at what this dumb alumni sent my dean about me posting on LinkedIn. And I was like, honestly, you're probably right. Like, there's a 50-50 shot I would have done that.

Um, but yeah, so we gotta say, I will say, when you tweeted out Boys Who Did It gonna see the DNA. Oh, this guy's playing with fire.

Boys, we did it.

I'm like, bro, you're gonna— well, if it was 0%, they're gonna expel you. That was like up to like 3 or 4%.

Yeah, that definitely bumps it up.

Yeah, yeah. But oh, and then, man, for the likes, for the likes, right? For the retweets. You did it for the Twitter. I appreciate it.

You can't put a price tag on clout, right?

Like, if you can make people laugh on the internet, who cares? Well, Elon's trying to, but, uh, uh, let me Let me actually throw this here before we go deep on LinkedIn, because I have a lot of thoughts about the platform. I agree with you fully that it is— well, Butcher too has been using LinkedIn a lot. VV is perfect for LinkedIn, man. Oh yeah, for sure. Hustle, the hustle graphics. Not to throw Butcher on the bus with the hustle talk there, but okay, here, Jack Raines. I wrote you, why are you spending $200,000 on an MBA? It just does. You're on such a trajectory where I don't know how much additional clout would make a difference, and you're paying them for it. That's the other thing. $300,000 probably if you include opportunity cost by not going all in on your content. So tell us why you're spending $300,000 on a Columbia MBA.

Well, I'm skipping class right now. So I would say I'm going pretty all in on the content. I spend half the time in the back of class working on blogs.

And you're paying them for the right to do that.

Here's what it was, and this probably doesn't really make any sense, but in my head it did. One, I have some scholarship money. I don't have to— like, my parents are helping with it. I had to take out some loans, but like, it wasn't that much. But two, I didn't really know anybody in New York. I wasn't going to just— even though like I knew objectively it made a lot of sense to move here just because of how many people in finance and media are here, I wasn't actually going to like pull the trigger on that unless I was stuck in a commitment where I had to come here. And I also knew that it would give me basically like a friend group of 600 or 700 people around my age doing a lot of interesting stuff. That like I would just be with for, you know, 2 years. Like, it's— to me, it's very— just in general, it's weird making adult friends. And yeah, like, I have a lot of like connections or like, like people that I like associate with through all the media writing stuff. Like, I don't have people that I'm just like going and playing basketball with every day.

So dude, give Bilal $100,000. He'll do this instead of $300,000. He'll hang out with you every single day, man.

Dude, honestly, I just like having like a group of just like normal people completely separate from this whole Twitter writing thing that I'm just like living like normal life stuff with. I know I'm going to make enough money that like any cost associated with this over the course of my life won't really matter. So it's, it's been a fun way to spend 2 years. So that's, that's why. Yeah.

I also think there's like a, there's this massive arbitrage comes from that name still, especially if you're doing something opposite. It, you know, like the connections you make in the old world that need what you're building in the new world, like whether that's finance writing, like the connections you'll get to people that can't reach the people that you can reach through, uh, like institution like that, it's going to pay itself off, right?

Like say, say that like Goldman Sachs or Jeffries or somebody is trying to build out like a newsletter or revamp their MBA marketing strategy on how they act because It's such an antiquated dinosaur way. The whole MBA recruiting process for investment banking, it's like they have to go to 10 coffee chats with a suit and tie, all this stuff. Somebody could disrupt that and literally just land every single recruit. I think there's a lot of ways for me to make a decent amount of money.

Oh, you could easily make 7 figures doing that, man. If you delivered a bank 10 of the top 10, you'd make millions.

Yeah.

I think that there's a lot of consulting-like gigs from that. Being in the MBA program, I've kind of got boots on the ground seeing on just how outdated a lot of this stuff is and like, here's how you could fix it. So I think it'll end up paying for itself big time over the next decade. But, and it's fun. I mean, the big thing is it's fun. Like I've been having a lot of fun the last couple of months and that's—

You gotta invite Bilal to these Columbia parties, man. Oh my goodness.

Are you, Bilal, are you, are you in New York too?

Yeah, I'm in New York.

Yeah.

I'm moved to Brooklyn now, but I'm in, I'm in New York. We'll definitely link up.

Well, yeah, we did for sure. We need to link up.

Yeah. Yeah. Since it's been recorded, I'm not joining you for any college parties, but I will come and hang out with you.

You can go and steal some breakfast together.

We can steal a lot of liquefied eggs from the Times Square Marriott.

Whites only.

Yeah.

Sorry. That's the eggs. No, no, not the hotel.

All right.

What else do we want to talk about on LinkedIn?

There's, uh, oh, let's talk about, yeah, let's talk about the platform itself. So we talked about the reposting. Blau, you mentioned you saw the difference, right? When you press repost, it looks a little bit different.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I think, uh, let's talk about some of the smart engineering decisions they had on their content stuff. So they're going hard, right? You can go creator mode now on LinkedIn instead of having to have a connection. You can follow people. It's all within the past year.

Have you guys all done— because I used to post when I first started Create Lab, 2015, '16, I posted a decent amount on it. It worked pretty well. I stopped posting for a while. Since you guys have transitioned to the creator profile, has it made much of a difference?

People can just follow you. That's a big thing. They don't have to do— you don't have to accept their connection for them to see your content.

Have you seen any difference in like reach or like how, how it gets out out to people? Because I'm just curious from that.

Yes, I have, I have, because of the amount of people that like hitting follow, their stuff goes in their feed. Got it. And, uh, so that, that was smart. They're doing a lot of tools for writing, a ton of writing tools.

Um, I should try it out for sure.

Yeah. Yeah.

What's your strategy on LinkedIn, Trump?

Uh, well, actually repurposing a lot of stuff. But here's the beauty, this is why I like LinkedIn as a platform. I actually, actually love Butcher's take on it is, uh because to get newsletter subscribers, and Raines knows this too, from like an informational Twitter thread, your call to action is like 14 tweets down, right? So like you write a 15-tweet thread, your call to action is a 15th thing. So even if it, if even if your tweet, your thread quote unquote explodes, you're not getting them to a CTA until all the way to the end. And it's pretty clunky to be honest. Whereas in the decision LinkedIn made, there's quite positive for for thirsty newsletter writers like me and Raines is you write something, you don't have to put your link in because links get throttled everywhere. We've talked about this. Obviously no platform wants you to leave their platform. So links always get throttled, but LinkedIn has a really good edit thing. Like it doesn't like Twitter's edit button is still very clunky. It like changes the version you're on and it is not everyone sees it from my experience. LinkedIn though has a very good editing interface. So you write your thing, it goes up to 3,000 words and it's just one post. So your CTA is in the first post and it could be 200 words, 300 words, 400 words. So I think it's massive for converting people onto newsletters. So I would ask Raines that. Raines, would you agree with that assessment?

Yeah, yeah, 100%. One quick question about what you do. Do you typically go back and edit and add the link in the post or do you—

Within 60 seconds. I do it within the post.

I was gonna say, so do you think that works better than pinning in the top comment? Because I'm about to do one, one of two right now.

Okay, I, I think doing the top— because look at the engagement on the top comment, it gets like 1% of like the, uh, the engagement, uh, with the original post.

So, Truong, for people who don't know what— why— to explain is there's a thing where you add the link.

It—

no, you can literally just edit it. Yeah, I'm saying, but the reason why on Twitter or anywhere else, when you put a link in, it just shows to less people. And you're saying you post it and then you add it within 60 seconds. Does that not then straight away edit like the number of impressions it's going to get?

From my experience, it has not. So this is not, this is not an engineering scientific move.

You want to cut this out of this episode, man. They're going to take— as soon as people start doing this, the alpha's gone. Yeah.

All right, maybe we should cut that out. Uh, Antonio, you may want to cut that out. Um, that's a great point though. Well, I'll actually tell you something with, uh, some decisions they made that's actually very smart. I'll give you one more thing. Uh, so on Twitter, if you want the benefit of a big account, it's typically the retweet. It's not a reply. It's not a like, but on LinkedIn, because there's such a dearth of content, it's like, if you even get a reply from a big account, it like boosts your post because that reply shows up in a bunch of other people's. Exactly. So, and asking for a reply is a much less big ask than for a retweet. You guys been on Twitter when MMS asked for a retweet, you're like, oh, I'm going to put this on my timeline. But if it's a reply, It's a very small thing. So I think that's quite good, but we might have to delete that first thing. I have to edit that up. No, I, well, here's the thing. They know, they know people can edit it. I don't know what the actual thing is, but let me ask Butcher. Butcher, you actually told me to hit up LinkedIn like a year ago. So what has your experience been on LinkedIn as a driver for your business?

I honestly don't spend anywhere near as much energy on it as I should, but noticed that that, like you say, the, the Visualize Value stuff, specifically the like how to explain what you do more concisely. People are on LinkedIn in a professional context anyway versus like, you know, reading jokes on Twitter and then your thing comes in like, do this serious thing or think about this thing. It doesn't— like you're kind of the— I think we've used this analogy before, like you're the guy in the party that's like, read my thread, you know, like, here's how you need to organize your life. And people are like, what the fuck are you talking about? So like the— in the same way, I think Jack is playing off of that. You can also play into that, right? There's a— there's like a— one thing that we've had a lot of success with on LinkedIn is the job board that we run. So obviously people are on LinkedIn trying to articulate their skill set and like like maybe look for another job. I mean, why else would you be on LinkedIn? I would imagine 90% of people are trying to climb the hierarchy of the place they work or the industry they're working in. So just using that insight to tailor content, I think maybe the spillover is actually happening now. I think a lot of people are figuring this out in a short amount of time. So, uh, we'll see how long the, uh, arbitrage opportunity exists. But Jack's arbitrage opportunity is definitely greater. Infinite. And I think that I was thinking about this the other day, like you're kind of tapping into something that people already feel with the stuff you're doing. Like people are frustrated with the, like, you know, the CEO crying image that, you know, like I just let go of 3 people and like posed this photo and it's like you're just like tapping into that truth by completely inverting it. And like you say, people don't have to figure out a way to articulate themselves or expose themselves to that thing they're feeling. They can just amplify your post or respond to your post. So, man, we'll see. It feels less sophisticated, like algorithmically, than any other platform. But the long tail of content is crazy on there. Like the 2 weeks later you see something can pop up or somebody mentions you in something and it just stays circulating for weeks sometimes or months versus like Twitter.

It's just a big bump and then the half-life on Twitter is crazy, right?

It's insane. In the first 5 minutes it's game over versus LinkedIn. Like these things will just pop up over time. So it does feel more like it's almost more akin to like an SEO type engagement strategy. It's like got a longer tail. Yeah, I don't know. I think the, the, uh, the going against the grain there is, is pretty fascinating in the same way that the initial, uh, bump I think for Visualize Value was posting visuals on a text-based platform, right? In the same way that Jack is like posting jokes on a supposedly serious platform. You find what everyone's doing and then you do the exact opposite, and then attention just flows.

Jack, I have to ask you, Butcher, you've had so many copycats, uh, how do you actually feel about— do you just don't care, you just keep doing your own thing? Like, what are your actual thoughts about the numerous Visualize Valley knockoffs?

Yeah, I think it's just, uh, there's like a, a point where you reach a certain level of saturation where the market sees that something is working and just copy it. And I think there's a there's a good amount of, uh, man, like my, my Instagram feed. I don't really look at Instagram, but now I look on the Discover page on Instagram and it's just full of that stuff. And it's— I think it kind of takes the sharpness out of, um, I don't know, there's, there's— it's like you have to innovate. Basically, it forces you to innovate. Like, if somebody is getting anywhere near close to like being confused with what you're doing than not being original enough. So it's just a reminder to— I believe Michael Cera said— creative risks, like take more creative risks too.

I think as soon as you think you can do something else, you can. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But also this is a little different than that, I think, because if you stay doing the same thing or you're not like slowly or innovating or iterating on the output of it, then you just— I guess the, the potency of it decreases with time. You get what I'm saying? Because like it gets confused with this other stuff. So you have to find a way.

How have you adjusted? What have you, what have you done?

I mean, played with different, different— the video component, the motion component is something I've been playing with on Instagram. But a lot of it is just like figuring out new visual formats to play around with. And I'm working on some stuff at the moment that I'll share with you boys in a few weeks. But the— as soon as the playbook has been out there for 2 or 3 years, you bet your ass people are going to copy the playbook. So you got to be writing a new playbook all that time and then, you know, find—

so you're not even salty. Like, this is the game. You're just like, this is the game.

This is it. Yeah, this is it. Credit. Yeah, like the— yeah, not at all. I mean, it's been a success in that regard, right? Like, I've taught people how to do it.

I was about to say, that's true. Jack has a course called How to Visualize Value.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or build once— you got two that are relevant to this, what we're talking about.

And I think the, the, the longer this stuff is about, there is enough critical mass that recognizes that it was like the genesis of a lot of this stuff, where I get some of that credit as a function of—

yeah, people come and say This looks like Visualize Value or whatever. Yeah.

So yeah, I think it's a cool— like, it's definitely a signal of it working too, right? If it continues to spread into all these different areas. And that was the initial goal. It's just it does become— you do— attention is finite, right? There's a certain amount of people with a certain amount of time. So the more competition you create for attention, the harder you got to work to get it, get it yourself.

So Raines is gonna have to steal even more like meals. Like, can't just be breakfast, you got to do like the lunch buffet. And then once you do the lunch buffet, you got to start doing like the, the, the tea. Every hotel's got a nice tea hour.

Oh no, if you go to like a Chipotle, on the like little shelf where they have the to-go orders, you can just walk in and take food and leave. Um, so there's a lot of like— there's a lot of ways you can play this.

Go to the DoorDash section of every McDonald's. There's bags there with food in them and they're just being waited for people just to take them. Um, let me see, what else do we want to discuss here that we haven't— oh, Raines, what is your, what is your LinkedIn strategy? We never got to you because you wrote somewhere that you think LinkedIn will be responsible for half of your newsletter subs. You live and breathe this stuff, you and our friend Nathan Bao. How do you say Nathan's last name?

I think it's Bao. Honestly, I never asked how to pronounce his last name.

My respect on Nathan, man. His growth has been astronomical. He's done an incredible job.

Yeah. So yeah, just because like I was watching him and then, uh, Daniel Murray, one of, one of your coworkers over there at Workweek, like he's like, he, it's, I didn't realize how big his LinkedIn network was until I went on his podcast. And like he went to, he got 50,000 newsletter subscribers in a couple of months and it was just from LinkedIn basically that drove all of it. So at that point it just hit me that like it works. I don't know, like my, my strategy is like half shitpost, half thought boy. So it's like half of it's posting like, I just think what's the ridiculous like fake hustle culture thing that I can put? And usually it's somewhat influenced by either something that I saw recently or just like a thought that comes to my head. Like I put one out today about donating plasma, um, every single day to like make like an extra $15K a year because it's 100% profit margin activity. One of my—

one of my zero cost of goods sold.

So yeah, well, it's a, it's a renewable resource.

You can't put the number on the actual cost. It might be intangible costs.

Yeah.

Well, so one of my roommates in college used to like donate plasma. Actually, I was texting him. I sent him a screenshot of this today. He used to donate plasma in college like more frequently than he should, but it was kind of a double benefit because if you overdonate plasma, like you can get drunk faster. So when you're like a 20-year-old kid, it's actually like, it's phenomenal.

You cut your alcohol cost by like half, right?

Yeah, and you make more money. So like you can donate plasma twice in a week and just have one hell of a Friday night in like any college town in America.

Some of my friends do, uh, like the trials, you know, the like pharmaceutical trials at university.

That's wild.

Challenge trials.

They get paid. Yeah, obviously.

Yeah, you're experimenting. Of course.

Yeah. Um, but yeah, sound effects include the 6th finger on your right hand.

It's, it's worth it though. But yeah, it's, it's half, it's half posts like that because those, like those blow up, those do numbers, but then some number of people will end up like, sometimes I'll link my blog on those. Sometimes I won't, but people will see it on your account and then they'll message me and say, oh, like I saw this post and then read this piece and signed up. Like, I really like your stuff. So it just gives you a bigger and bigger and bigger online footprint where people will eventually find. The blog or the newsletter. And then obviously I share all of that, but it's like, yeah, like a shit post might get 500 likes, but one of my blog posts used to get 5 likes 3 months ago and they now get 50 likes on LinkedIn. So that residual value of it is 100% there. It's just an unorthodox growth strategy. But to me, I'm a sarcastic guy. Like it doesn't, it makes where I didn't have to sacrifice the authenticity of my voice to build an audience, which I think is super important. If you're a content creator.

Yo, Jack, just while we— slight diversion, but I'm looking at your, your bio, which I've always loved your, your pronouns in there, we them boys, which is, uh, what I was all about when I first saw that back in the day. It says that you were deported from Norway. Can we get that story real quick?

Yeah, so I was, I was in Europe from August to like close to Christmas time last year, and I was just doing the classic like backpacking around, hostel hopping, whatever. And I had a few friends that flew out to meet me out there. So I was in Switzerland in September and I kept having issues with my US— they were making me show my vax card and a lot of places weren't accepting the US one. And I found out I could go to a pharmacy and get a digital one made. So I did that, didn't think about it. One of my buddies met me in London and we were planning on going to Oslo, going up to Tromsø, Norway, and then going to Stockholm and finishing in Copenhagen. And so we're in London for 2 days, then we fly to Oslo. And thanks to Brexit, you have to go through customs now if you fly from London to another part of Europe. Yeah. Appreciate it, guys. So none of this would've happened if we'd flown from like Berlin to Oslo or something like that. But we landed in Oslo and my friend Devin, he just had his US vaccine card. No other country in Europe had any issues with the US vaccine card for getting in. Like you might have an issue at a bar or a restaurant, but for entry requirements, it was fine. Norway, you had to have a digital card, either like European Union or British or like one of those to get in. So like we have the same vaccine and we— I go through customs, get in, and then he's standing there and I see him like pull him off to the side. They're questioning him. And keep in mind, nobody in the airport's wearing a mask. Like they don't care. Like it was just one of those rules.

And the country is not an EU country though, right? It's a member.

Yeah, it's— sorry, Shin—

I think if you're flying from like a Shenzhen, it's a member of the Shenzhen region, but not a EU country.

But either way, if you fly in from like, like Sweden or whatever, we wouldn't have had to have gone through customs. So like, they just tell me can't come into Norway. And he was like, can I just take a COVID test like right here in the lobby to prove I don't have it? Because logically, if he is negative for that and they're not letting people in without the vax card, he would be fine. They're like, no, you have to leave. So he has this sheet of paper that calls him a national security threat to the health of Norway and all this stuff. So he has to then fly back to London. He has to get another COVID test at the airport to fly back to London because you have to have one for the entry requirement there, even though we were literally there that morning. But the customs agent tried to help us out. He was like, "You guys could just go to Stockholm." And we were saying, "We don't want to go to Stockholm right now. We're just going to go back to London." Sweden. But he was implying that if we just went to Stockholm and then turned around and came back to Norway, we would get in because we wouldn't get like checked. We didn't realize that until we were like halfway like above the sea back to London where I was like, Devin, he was trying to tell us we could have gotten to Stockholm and just come back. There was like a $50 flight, like we could have done that. But anyway, so long story short, we got deported from Norway because my 6'7" friend who looks Norwegian, um, had a paper vaccine card instead of a real So that's wild, man.

Related question, I thought, but I was going to ask this. Have you gotten pushback on we/them boys pronouns?

Actually, no, I really haven't. I've been hoping I would get some because I think it would be very funny if somebody hit me off to know it's just, just like remain in character and make them refer to me as boys. I think that would be phenomenal.

Please call me we/them or boys.

Yeah, it's like I'm actually boys. Like, don't refer to me as he or him. I'm boys. But no, it's people know it's lighthearted. Like, I've never once, like, I've never once, like, been, like, antagonistic or anything towards, like, how people—

totally, totally.

But it's, uh, people think it's funny because it's just like, like a lighthearted joke. Yeah, cool.

Fair enough, man. Well, I hope the Norwegians are listening to this and there's an honest mistake, and, uh, you can thank—

never allowed to Norway again.

So I actually, I went back 2 weeks later when Devon flew back to the States, and it worked out even better because, like, by then it had started to snow because it was later November. So I was FaceTiming him like, oh look, the Northern Lights. I went dog sledding. Like, we couldn't have done any of this if we would have gone back to Norway.

Just cleaned up on Norwegian Tinder.

Oh dude, yeah, Norwegian Tinder is sick.

That brings us to our last section of the pod. So yeah, is there anything else trying, or Jack, on, uh, on LinkedIn before we move on from that?

Yeah, I was happy to do a quick LinkedIn on this LinkedIn Mafia thing. You guys aware of how many successful executives there are? Well, Blah, you worked— did you Do you guys ever hire former LinkedIn people? Was that ever a thing?

Yeah, a little bit. I feel like it's more like a lot of people eventually would leave and go there. Or actually, one of my clients now has some people on the board from there.

What's the reputation like when you're doing Google?

I would say like most of it now, because I left Google like 5 years ago, so it's kind of hard to discuss. But in the startup world, like a lot of the people that come from LinkedIn in, like, some of them, like, most of them are fairly smart people, but it's kind of known that LinkedIn is very chill. Like, the work-life balance is— I mean, all of them are, right? Like, we've seen the TikToks, people are on a rooftop having like, oh, I'm a, I'm a product manager of Meta or Google, whatever. Nowadays everyone's doing the same shit. But I think LinkedIn specifically, it was like they would give them off like 2 weeks in the middle of nowhere. Like, the whole company got it. And, and I, like, my, my business is like trying to talk to them about spending money and like doing stuff, and they're like, oh, we're off. And I'm like, it's July, are you in France? Like, what's going on? Um, so there was a bit of like an, like an idea of, or perception of, like, it's very chill. Um, but yeah, I think generally they're probably smart people. Like any of those big tech companies, they're like smart on paper, but not necessarily there because they're like trying to change the world. They're trying to like have a good work-life balance.

Let me disabuse you of that notion Uh, well, I mean, I don't, I can't speak for all of them, but here, former LinkedIn executives, C-suites in Silicon Valley, Coinbase COO, uh, Emily Choi, LinkedIn, Atlassian CPO, LinkedIn, Bill.com CMO, LinkedIn, Twitch COO, LinkedIn, Calm CPO, LinkedIn, the Figma founder, LinkedIn, but it was more of an intern.

Oh damn, I didn't know that.

Yeah. Glassdoor CEO, LinkedIn. Um, and then, uh, and then Jack Raines's friend, uh, Keith Rabois, also a former LinkedIn executive.

Good friend.

Yeah.

Uh, wait, but Trang, just to clarify, I know we're not being that serious here, but I'm assuming those people are early LinkedIn, right?

No, like, yeah, early days, like, but they all had like VP roles of VP Corp Dev. Yeah. Yeah.

I'd say anyone at that level in like early stage company at that level. Fair enough. But like, I'm, I was talking more about like nowadays, you know, which is—

well, I'll give you a couple of things. I was like, so Reid Hoffman, obviously PayPal Mafia, founder of LinkedIn, sold the company to Microsoft for $26 billion in 2016. But like his mindset was always, he built initially LinkedIn as like a consulting firm in a sense. So they didn't hire salesmen that had sales backgrounds. They hired like Yale graduates and Stanford graduates that were just generally smart. And those individuals typically go to management consulting roles, but they're like, listen, actually at LinkedIn, like Bilal, you work in ad sales, right? He's like, if you work in ad sales at LinkedIn, you're actually, you're chatting directly As we mentioned with the key people executives at these companies, right? Because HR is such an important piece of the pie.

Oh, on the HR side.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So you're getting the diversity of industries you're getting because obviously people operations is in every company in every industry. So you're exposed to all these industries, just like a management consultant would be. And Reid Hoffman built this thing they called, it's called a tour of duty mindset. I know it's a lot of, if you're talking about Jack's talking about managerial doublespeak, that's another thing, but they expected side, a lot of these employees to come there, be generalists, and then bounce. Uh, but it's, it's also beneficial because they all end up at these companies that we talked about. And guess what? Where are you going for an HR solution if you need, uh, if you're running one of these hot startups? Right. And, uh, yeah, I think that's interesting, but yeah, that was the last thing I had on that. And, uh, it was good chat on LinkedIn and Twitter. I think Butcher wanted one more piece, uh, but anything else?

No, that was good on LinkedIn. Jack Butcher, the NFTs.

Oh yeah, we got— we'll do a proper breakdown of it next week. But there was Paradigm. There was a Paradigm launch yesterday called Art Gobblers.

What's Paradigm? Can you tell the listeners what Paradigm is?

Paradigm is a— was it a $4 billion crypto-native venture fund?

And the founders were kind of prominent people.

Yeah.

Fred Ehrsham. Yeah. And, uh, somebody else came on. Who's on there?

Uh, Matt Huang from Sequoia, former Sequoia partner.

Yeah. So they've been, they've been working with the guy, the co-founder of Rick and Morty, on an NFT project. But this, man, I might have to get somebody on to explain it because it is like incredibly complicated. Looks like a Richard Feynman lecture, the, the blackboard of mathematics, uh, equations that go into this thing, but they're trying to build a different type of ecosystem where there's, you know, these, these NFTs that they launched with were free mint. And there's a lot of controversy about how they got allocated. They got, you know, whitelisted a bunch of people that already have big followings in an effort to, you know, increase awareness of the project. A lot of people got pissed off about that, and then they instantly started selling on secondary for $20,000 a pop or something. There's only 2,000 of them. And the premise of it more broadly is that it's going to be— so these NFTs represent like a gallery in themselves. So they're building this native tool for people to draw artwork one of one. Could be a Young Money exercise here, Jack. Like they're like MS Paint in the like native in the browser so people can contribute to the ecosystem by drawing art, and then these NFTs ingest the art. There's a currency that goes alongside it. It's all like completely out there. And we're going to have to get someone on to break it down because it's incredibly complicated. But it's an NFT project with a currency that's also a marketplace curation tool. It's far too much to get in before the end of the episode, but go and check it out on Twitter. There's a lot of people talking.

And you got— you got— you're one of 2,000 people AC did it with you.

Yes, Jack's back in the game.

There we go, back in the NFT game.

Reigns, we gotta— as the guest, let's give Reigns the, uh, the final word here. One of the biggest crypto skeptics I know. Reigns, go on. What do you think about what Jack just said?

Honestly, I, I don't think any of those words were in the Bible, first of all. But you know, I'm like, yeah, I'm a very outspoken crypto skeptic, but like I find, and on Twitter I'm probably a little bit more antagonistic, but I do find the whole space really fascinating and almost like a degenerate gambler. Like people are just doing a lot of crazy stuff type of sense. Like one of my best friends is like a pretty high up strategy guy at Polygon. So we just go like back and forth, like, like just dunking on each other all the time. But no, I like, I don't, I don't know. I think people are going to, some people are going to make a lot of money off of it. Some people are going to lose a lot of money off of it. Some people are going to make some really funny stuff with it. It. Then like once whatever it is drops like 90% in value, some people are going to make some funny memes about it, and then you're going to see the same thing happen again. But it's just to be like separate from it, but just watching all of it happen, it's like, it's just like watching chaos over and over again. But I find that type of stuff really entertaining. So I don't like when people lose money on stuff if they get misled, but it's also really funny seeing people just go all in on stuff like this just to see what happens. So So I find it, I don't know, like chaotic neutral, maybe sometimes chaotic evil, but it's just chaotic all the time.

It's good material for a finance newsletter.

Oh, for sure. For sure. It's great material. There's always, there's always something fresh going on.

All right. Beautiful, beautiful boys. Great to have Raines on. Raines, this will not be your first. Well, this will be your first time. It will not be your only time. This is literally your first time and it can only happen once. Fun fact, fan. That was my fun fact fan for the day. The first means you can only— it can only happen once.

That's kind of where should people go, uh, was it— what's the, the place to sign up for your newsletter? This is your plug moment.

Yeah, yeah, you can check out my stuff at youngmoney.co. Um, .com is already taken, so young money—

that's a good domain, even .co.

Lil Wayne.

So my, my goal in life is to get like sued by Lil Wayne for essentially stealing his name. It hasn't happened yet. If you Google Young Money, unfortunately, Lil Wayne's record label is still above my blog, but I'll get there.

Fair enough.

But yeah, youngmoney.co, you can check out my stuff. I did a whole write-up on this whole LinkedIn fiasco last week. It's pretty funny read. So yeah, youngmoney.co.

Nice. Read it. Read it. It's great. Hey, you're on page 2 though, mate. I'm just looking now. You're top of page 2 on Google for Young Money.

It's not bad at all.

You're coming.

Literally 5 other than Jack Butcher, 4 people have gone to page 2 of that search. How do you bury— how do you bury— how do you hide a body? Put it on the third page of Google.

All right, let's leave it at that. Good to have you on, mate. We'll definitely link up in New York as well. And, uh, yeah, if you enjoyed this, let us know on Twitter, and we'll see you next week. Cheers!