#17: Charlie Light - Being John W. Rich, making $39,000 per month, the meme economy

So with John Rich, it's kind of like a lot of the things you can just boil down to the same joke, but they have different contexts. So, you know, one joke is basically I lost all my clients' money, or that my wife left me, or that I made some like either miraculously stupid business decision or some really good one that turned out well, but I did it on accident and didn't actually know what I was doing.

Alright, today we've got John W. Rich on. Well, sort of. We got Charlie Light, the man behind viral Twitter accounts like John W. Rich and more. He's making $39,000 per month ghostwriting tweets and is showing no sign of stopping. Charlie gave me some incredible tips about writing on Twitter, like sticking to 2 or 3 themes and using a content dashboard. I hope you enjoy. I've been following you for a while and seeing you around the Twitterverse with Jack Raines and some of those guys. Um, what you're doing is really cool. So how did you get started? Uh, ghostwriting, content writing, meme accounts, the whole, the whole nine yards.

Yeah. So kind of started by accident. Um, so in April 2020, kind of when all the lockdowns, uh, were happening, I had a lot more free time, uh, just cause my previous job kind of slowed down and I obviously every single restaurant and everything to do was, was closed. So yeah, at the beginning of April, I just decided it might be fun to start like a parody account. I had, I had been reading Twitter for the last probably 3 or 4 years and I followed a lot of the finance and business accounts, but I had never really replied or tweeted anything myself. So I thought, oh, you know, it'd be fun to try it out. I might be good at it, might not. I figured that I maybe do it for a couple, weeks or every once in a while just for fun. So I picked out my, my guy, John Rich, and just found like an old, old businessman's picture to use. And surprisingly, it just took off. I think I had like 5,000 followers in the first month or so. I mean, it was mostly just a fun hobby to do for the first 6 months or so. It didn't really make any money, but it was just really fun to do. And really, the Basically it got really addicting to like tweet something out, immediately see how many people liked it or retweeted it or replied. And it was, I mean, Twitter's basically just a video game for the most part. You try something out, see how it works, and then you get immediate feedback on, you know, it's, it was such a great feeling. Like the first couple of times I tweet something out that I knew would do well, and then immediately it's getting like tens or hundreds of retweets within the first few minutes. Yeah, so kind of just got addicted to it. Near the end of 2020, I kind of started to look into how this could actually be a business, but for the most part, it was just fun for the first 6 months or so. And I'd probably still just be doing it completely for fun, at least a little bit, if it didn't turn into a business. But yeah, I basically just spent, you know, 1,000 hours or so on Twitter that first year just to see what worked and what didn't.

Got you, got you. Very cool. And so how did you start turning it into a business?

Yeah, so kind of around the end of 2020, I started looking into how it could become a business. Um, the first thing I tried was starting a website that was basically a blog or news site. So it was, uh, um, just johnwrich.com. Actually, johnwbirich.com. That's before I changed my name on there. Yeah, I just was experimenting with having basically a site where I would do longer, longer form versions of my Twitter jokes, where I just write about funny things that happen on Twitter or something like that. So I was kind of experimenting with display ads. Pretty quickly realized that that's not really a great way to make money. You really need probably millions of views to actually make good money doing that. So like the first, first couple articles I put up, one of them did really well and that meant like 70,000 views. Um, and I think it's fairly hard to get someone to go to a website, especially when they don't know what it is. So I, it was pretty good that it got shared enough that 70,000 people decided to visit. But then when I actually looked at the revenue later from, I think Google AdSense probably, It was like, you know, $15 or something like that. So it's like, okay, I mean, $70,000, that was kind of— that was like the first month or two doing this, and that was like the best one. It was a big hit. So obviously, I, you know, you could keep growing it, but it just seemed like a pretty long road to making any real money on there. I could see that, you know, maybe in a few months I'd be up to making a few hundred bucks a month off of it, but it just didn't seem really worth the effort to be constantly posting articles on there. Um, the next thing I tried, which worked a lot better, um, was creating content for other companies. So actually, the first company that I, I, um, that I got in contact with, or that got in contact with me, was Hard Money, which is a finance satire. Um, so they basically said, you know, hey, we'll, we'll pay you to help come up with content for us, help run our Twitter account. And so I still work with them to this day, about a year and a half later. So that was kind of the intro to actually making money on Twitter, is instead of trying to make my own media brand out of John Rich, it's been a lot, a lot more profitable to basically put good content out on John Rich in order to meet other people that want help with their content. And that's been my main business since then, is helping other people on Twitter, personal brands or companies that want to put out good content. I help them do that. The one other thing I realized that you could do to make money on Twitter was, was selling advertisements. I tried that a little bit. I think it's hard to do a lot of that. First off, with a parody account, I tried selling some ads or tried you know, making money from sponsors. And I really couldn't make anything until I was like at 50 or 60,000 followers. 'Cause I think especially with a parody account, it's kind of lower value. Companies don't really wanna advertise with a parody account, especially one that's not really that big. So if I was getting offers kind of early on, it was someone offering like $50 to tweet something. So it didn't seem super worthwhile until I got to, yeah, 60 or 70,000 followers. And then I could actually charge for some sponsorships. I don't do as much of that as I could just because I don't necessarily wanna bog down the brand with, you know, always tweeting about, oh, check out these sunglasses, check this out. Yeah. And which I do something every once in a while, but for the most part, if an advertiser approaches me, I usually say, hey, you know, let me just write the ad and make it exactly in John Rich's voice. For two reasons. Number one, so my audience doesn't think, oh, he's selling out. He's just spamming us now. And also things that I write as a joke are usually going to do better just because people expect the joke from my account. So if it's something serious, most people will just be like, wait, what? I don't get it. And then they stop reading and then it gets pretty limited engagement.

Yeah, totally got you. I was, so I was freelance writing some content writing. While I was working as like a data support engineer at Amex. So I was doing some freelance writing for Greg Eisenberg at Late Checkout. That was like the first time I started making money on Twitter and then started doing for some Web3 companies, NFT collections and shit, and ended up getting hired full-time by the Defiant. So now I had to stop freelancing due to conflict of interest, especially in Web3, can't be, freelancing and ghostwriting for companies that I might write about. But man, I miss it. It's just so much fun. And the ceiling is just so high. I've talked to Jack, had him on the podcast about what he's doing and both you guys. It's very cool to see. I think at a point in my life when I'd love to get back on that grind because it's so much fun. Journalism is also fun. Like the Defiant Life is great. I'm learning a lot, but yeah, there's something about ghostwriting that's really cool. You just get to explore and be a goofball.

Right, exactly. Because I feel like when I first started out trying different entrepreneurial things, I would basically change my mind on, you know, every week, like, oh, I want to do this, or I want to be this type of whatever. What's cool about it is I can actually jump between those things, but I don't have to be like It's not like I'm actually trying to shift my own brand. I'm just, you know, one day I get to write for this type of person and kind of immerse myself in their world. And then the next day I can do something totally different, but I'm actually making progress this time instead of changing my own focus. So yeah, I like that too. And I think it's funny with Jack, actually, I've known him for almost as long as I've been on Twitter. I don't remember exactly when we started talking. Um, but probably in the first few months I had my account back in 2020, and I think we talked every so often. And it's funny too, seeing, um, so actually I met up with him in person sometime last summer. I don't remember exactly when, um, I'll have to dig that up, um, but it was sometime like June or July of last year we met up in Denver, um, and it's been cool seeing how far Cause I feel like we were back then, he was kind of like, oh, can I make this a full-time, can I make writing a full-time thing? And then basically 3 or 4 months after that, he was completely killing it. So it's kind of cool to see like how quickly things can happen with Twitter and with social media.

Big facts, big facts. It's insane. And now Jack is doing some really cool things, getting sponsorships in his newsletter and everything. I also, so I have a newsletter and it does well, but I decided to avoid the sponsorship route because I wanted to say whatever the fuck I wanted. Like I genuinely just didn't want to worry, like, can a sponsorship cancel me and I can't pay rent this month? Like, so I just did the subscriber route and like all my like posts that are somewhat heretical or somewhat like off-brand or like off-color, I guess, are paid posts. So the only people that see them are like true supporters anyways. So it's very safe. It's definitely going to be a slower route to money, which I'm fine with. I got the full-time job, but I'm personally happy I chose that route.

Right. Yeah. I think there's, it's an interesting trade-off between like the short-term, you know, I think with advertising, it's usually a little more like, okay, I can grab, you know, a couple thousand bucks from this advertiser, but it might not be the best long-term thing. I think, I mean, I think Jack's a good example, like his personal newsletter. He's really building like a long-term valuable newsletter that people are going to follow him for a long time because they really like his thoughts. It's unique. It's not necessarily, I think there's a lot of newsletters that kind of try to play on whatever trend is going on. So especially last year, you saw so many people pop up and say, oh, you know, we're doing an NFT newsletter or we're doing this crypto newsletter or whatever, and it didn't really have a brand besides the fact that they were just pumping NFTs or building off the hype. And I think a lot of those are probably just dying right now because there was no real connection with the audience besides, hey, we can, you know, here's a coin that's going up, which is probably fine for a bit. But I think a lot of those, um, now that potentially people are losing focus or losing interest in crypto and NFTs, a lot of those types of newsletters probably just see their open rate plummet Thanks.

Yeah. To switch— sorry to interrupt— to switch things, something I'm really curious about, coming up with new content. I have a few methods, but I'm definitely curious to hear your content flywheel, coming up with jokes too. I do some funny tweets here and there and do it for— I still, you know, But there's always, there's always more to be made, you know? Yeah.

It's yeah. So I've experimented with a lot of different methods, honestly. I think I don't really have like that strategic of a method. I think a lot of people will usually ask me, assuming that I have some like 20-page process that I outlined for coming up with stuff. I honestly, most of it just kind of exists in my head. So I think it's funny. I think the, it's always been the hardest either starting with a client or starting with my own stuff. Like I remember in the early days with John Rich, I'd run out of ideas a lot more often. But then after a while, I think you kind of figure out that there's somewhere between like 5 and 10 topics that I mostly talk about. And then you can just do endless variations on those, those topics. Those different topics. So with John Rich, it's kind of like a lot of the things you can just boil down to the same joke, but they have different contexts. So, you know, one joke is basically I lost all my clients' money or that my wife left me or that I made some like either miraculously stupid business decision or some really good one that turned out well, but I did it on accident and didn't actually know what I was doing. So there's kind of just a, if you boil most of the jokes down, it's kind of like the same 10 or so ideas just applied to different situations. So I think that's important is probably being a little more repetitive than you think you need to be. And this is a mistake I made too, is when I started getting popular with John Rich, as I would try to change it up too much. And actually I realized the tweets that did best were kind of, were just basically the similar takes I'd already done, but applied to whatever the current trending topic was. Um, cause I think especially for me, like I'm on Twitter way more than the average person, cuz it's actually my job.

Same.

We have to remember that most people don't really check Twitter that much. Like they're on it. Um, you know, they check it for 15 minutes and then for 3 or 4 hours they do their job or whatever else they do during the day. And then they check again. So maybe they're not on it as much as we are. So a joke that to me would seem obvious and overplayed. Most of my readers probably wouldn't think so, cuz they're only checking Twitter a few minutes a day, or they're only— and probably most of my followers don't see all my, anywhere close to all of my tweets. I mean, if you, you can obviously tell that by looking at impressions, but like most of my tweets will be somewhere in the tens of thousands of impressions. And obviously, you know, like most of 'em are below 170,000, that would be my follower count. But obviously some people are seeing it several times, other people who aren't followers. So you gotta assume that most of your tweets, like most people are just not gonna see it. So I think it's okay to be a little bit more repetitive than you think. Also with Twitter, I think people wanna know who exactly, who your account is. So I think some people try to start when they start an account or when they're building it up, they try to be too general. Like they try to give their take on everything. And people don't necessarily need you for that, especially if they don't really know who you are. So I think a lot of accounts get popular because they kind of get known for one thing. They get known for whatever it is that they either, if it's a serious account, they become known for whatever they accomplished or whatever their business is. Then later they can branch out a bit when people actually know who they are and care about their takes on other things. You'll kind of see that a lot of. The most popular accounts just follow the same. They have like 2 or 3 core principles, basically that every single thing they talk about just goes through those lenses. And then they, you know, give their current opinion on whatever the current trend is, but you can kind of tell it's similar to what they've tweeted about before.

Dude, that's, that's fucking brilliant. And I've seen that before, but I never thought about it in the lens of, oh yeah, people don't. Aren't on as much as me, so they probably won't see it. Like, I'm on all the fucking time. Like, you know, it's, it's, it's a problem, but it's how I make my money and how I, you know, do research for articles for my day job and everything. So, um, but yeah, uh, I, I run a side account as well, um, which I— it's anonymous. Um, okay. And, uh, so I'm trying to grow that, and this actually gave me some good ideas, so definitely gonna screw around with that a bit. Um, but so you've now transitioned more, uh, as well, you're hiring writers and stuff like that, right? And, and you guys, you're up to like $40K monthly recurring revenue, is that right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the last few months I've really put a, um, a greater effort into doing this content agency because kind of what I realized is, um, I mean, my value is just For whatever reason, I can write things well on Twitter. So I realized that there's kind of a, you know, unlimited supply of people that were interested in paying for that. So I've taken on mostly like entrepreneurs, personal brands who want to get their name out there on Twitter and either, either they have some business they're trying to promote or some sort of consulting or, or course maybe. So yeah, those are, that's kind of been my sweet spot. And I think I have 14 clients or so. So for the most part, what my process has been is, you know, everyone's usually they're hiring because they want my help with things. So when we take on a new client, I'll usually just work with them for at least the first few weeks and figure out what the strategy is, what they're looking to accomplish, write the first several tweets. And then once I feel like we got a good hang of it, once like the process is a little more established and the account's doing well, I'll try to hire someone. What's nice about Twitter is I have a large network of people that also are interested in writing on Twitter. So I can usually find someone who, you know, if I know of their account, well, that's usually what, how I hire is I know of someone who has like 1,000 followers and they have pretty good content. And they would like to make some money off of Twitter. So I usually hire someone who has, I try to match people up. Like I try to match my writers up based on their past experience. So I think something that's really important is to produce good content. You really have to understand the subject matter you're talking about. So that's why all of my clients are either in like business, startup, finance space, like anyone who's outside that I just probably wouldn't do super well for if I don't really understand the space. Because I think especially if you want to be funny on Twitter, you really have to understand it. Like I could only do this about stocks and startups and tech. If I tried to be funny about something else, it probably just wouldn't really work out that well. Um, so yeah, and then I think I have about 5 or so writers. All of them are part-time and I'll just— so most of them have other jobs or they're in school or whatever, and I'll just give them, uh, 1 or 2 assignments to help me out with. So they kind of help offload some of the work and do some of the writing, but it'll all pass through me before we— so send it back to the client.

Nice, man. So are you using this newfound freedom? Uh, you traveling, doing anything, anything cool or, uh, enjoying working from home?

Yeah, mostly from home. Um, I mean, the one thing I am still really busy, so I'll have to figure out some way to, you know, not, um, I don't have a ton of days where I, you know, take the whole day off or whatever. Um, it has been nice that, you know, I've been able to work from home and just do whatever. But no, I haven't really been doing any, uh, like nomad lifestyle.

Yeah.

You know, working from Indonesia or wherever. Um, mostly just, it has been nice. If I do travel, it's probably a trip I was going to take anyway to see family, but it's nice. I can do it, you know, whenever I can go on Thursday or Wednesday or whatever and not have to worry about requesting time off.

No, of course. Of course.

Um, yeah, nomad life is not for me anymore, but I think the, yeah, the one thing that'd be tough is the, uh, I mean, I don't think I'd ever do that for somewhere across the world. I briefly thought about it a while ago, like several years ago, but I think that working with clients, it, it just seems like it'd be way too stressful to either have to be up at weird hours to work in the US time zone, or just be consistently late or weird about getting back to people. Cause you're, you know, when they want to talk, it's 2:00 AM. In Bali or whatever. So I don't, I think I, yeah, I don't think it'd be ideal for this type of thing. Cause it is, I don't have a ton of phone calls with clients, but definitely a lot of like back and forth and it would probably degrade the service a bit if I only responded to someone, you know, once a day when I was awake and they were asleep.

No, I totally got you. Are you usually like using Stripe or what do you use?

Um, yeah, usually just, uh, QuickBooks. I send invoices from there and just have it. Um, um, yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe there's a better way to do it. I don't have like a super advanced system for billing. I usually just send an invoice and the customers pay it.

So fair enough, fair enough. Are there, um, what do you like to do outside of Twitter?

Yeah, that's a good question. It's funny. Cause for a while Twitter was my hobby, like, cause I would do it outside of my actual work before this. So yeah, now I would say basically sports, try to take a, try to walk around different neighborhoods every so often and check out different. So actually I recently moved to Minneapolis area. So I've been trying to check out like different places. I mean, yeah, that's almost about it. Basically traveling a bit and seeing friends and family, but nothing too crazy. I don't have any crazy hobbies that people wouldn't expect.

Fair enough. So what's kind of the plan with the agency? Just keep on growing it and keep on growing John Rich until you're bored Elon status, or?

Right. That'd be, I mean, definitely keep growing John Rich. And I think that's something at this point too, it's just really fun to do. It's honestly not work at all, just because It's almost kind of like my hobby where I would just get on there and joke with people. I think the agency, that's a good question because I guess there's, I really haven't decided exactly. There's kind of two different ways to go about it is, is keep growing it as much as possible. I think then the, what I'll have to figure out is, you know, hiring other writers that can take more of the, the can take on more of the work for me, which I think I'll definitely continue to experiment with. Um, and, you know, keep giving the, the writers I have now more work as long as they can handle it and bring on new people. And kind of, I think what's nice is I can kind of test what works in terms of hiring people. So I'll bring someone on, give them a task, and if it doesn't work out, it's no big deal because then I can just quickly do it myself. Um, So I can, you know, for a while I can probably just experiment, figure out what works with hiring and slowly grow the, the, uh, my writer base. Cuz I think right now, yeah, there's a lot more clients I could take on and I really haven't done any, um, like outbound, you know, I, I don't even have really a functioning website for this. So it's mostly just been people that reach out on Twitter. So I think there's a lot more clients out there, just the problem, the bottleneck more is, is delivering it. So I wanna make sure that, you know, I'm not overwhelmed with having to write for 20 different people on the same day. Cuz I think that's the other issue. It's, you know, it's definitely a creative thing where you can't necessarily just work for 12 hours straight cranking this stuff out. Mm-hmm. Um, I mean, sometimes I do honestly, but then there'll be times where I just literally can't think of anything for a client and I just have to come back to it later when I'm feeling more refreshed and then I'll think of all the ideas. Um, so yeah, it's a good question. I honestly don't know. I'm, I, I kind of, I asked a question on my Twitter the other day on my personal Twitter saying, you know, what would you rather have? Uh, let me pull that up real quick. It was, um, you know, which business would you rather have? And scenario A was, um, 5 clients at $5,000 a month. You do all the work yourself and minimal expenses, or would you rather have 100 clients at $2,000 a month? But you have 20 employees. So there's interesting debate on that. I think anyone interested in this model, read the comments on there because it's pretty much split in half. You know, half the people said, oh, you know, have 5 clients at $5K a month, keep trying, you know, do great work for them, and probably most of them will keep expanding their— the amount they pay. And I could see that part because especially clients that I've had for a long time Honestly, it ends up becoming less and less work because after 6 months, I know, I know all the ins and outs. So I don't really have to spend a ton of time on it and can produce better results for them than I did 6 months earlier. Mm-hmm. You know, but then the other, on the other hand, people were saying, oh, you know, the other one that's $200,000 in sales a month, that's something you could probably sell for a few million bucks or something like that. Uh, whereas the first one, you probably can't sell it. So I think that was the big difference with people debating is A sounds like a better business to run and your life will probably be better and you're making maybe about the same amount, but you can't sell that one. Whereas the second one, some other agency would probably be willing to buy that for who knows exactly how much. Um, yeah, I'm still kind of deciding. What's nice is I can still work with the clients I like and not necessarily have to worry about Oh, we gotta sell this to a bunch of, um, to a bunch of people. I think the other thing is maybe I'd spend more time building on my personal brand as well. If I wasn't working on client stuff so often.

Facts, facts. Threads take a while to write, man. Like I had one finally pop off, uh, like 3 weeks ago. And so to write it, I like read through a 40-page research paper twice and and went through that shit. It was all about NFTs and whatnot. And it was like, it took a while and just writing that, that was the first one that popped off for me. And now I'm like, what the hell do I write? I write an article every day for work and then I write my newsletter once a week, but I just, what's next? What's the next thread to get? Got a bunch of ideas, but I just gotta sit down and, and put in, put in the work on that one.

Right. I think that's interesting. Cause I've, I've seen that for sure with either myself or with clients is that it, it can be super hard to come up with new ideas. Honestly, what I think is better instead of trying to write tweets is write something longer, like write whatever you're thinking about, like write a longer blog post or newsletter or whatever. And then later you can pull, probably you can pull like 10 or 20 tweets from that. Yeah. At the same time, I think that is hard if you can't think of what the newsletter should be about. So I think it's also important to have a list of kind of topics to think of. Honestly, it's been a lot harder with my personal brand. I feel like I, with my personal Twitter, I get stuck a lot more often. That's even happening now where I don't really know what to write about. I mean, usually what I, and maybe I'm overthinking it cuz it's my own. So Probably what I tell clients is, you know, number one, just whatever's done well in the past, basically do more of that. So I've had a few threads that have done super well, and those are the ones that are about building my business. So people like seeing that. Besides that, I, you know, I have like a longer list of topics that I would talk about. So I think that's important. Like whenever you think of some sort of topic you might write about, even if you're not writing at the time, just keep that. In some sort of list where you can then look and see, okay, these are like 20 different things I have thoughts on. And if you're stuck, then you could write on one of those. I think the other thing is batching content works a lot better. So like, yeah, I would get so stuck if I'd be like every day I was like, okay, write a tweet now. And then 3 hours later, it's like, oh, I should tweet again. And with the John Rich, like, honestly, I don't, that's a funny thing. I don't really ever batch content with him just because I'm already It's been 2 years. Like I already know what works. Like I can think of something at any time, but with my personal stuff, I've found that it's way better just to write like a whole week's worth of tweets at once. Cuz once you, you know, maybe you sit there for 10 or 15 minutes, can't really think of anything, but I found that once I think of a few ideas, then I think of 50 more easily once I'm like actually in the flow of thinking about it.

Yeah. I've been like trading off right now. The trade-off between writing witty one-liner tweets, like I have a few scheduled, you know, whatnot. Do I spend time doing that or do I spend time just putting in work on Threads, which will get me the newsletter subscribers? You know, one for engagement, one for the followers, but the Threads, yeah, that's, I have, yeah, I have the whole Notion, everything, so many, So many ideas that I'm working on right now. Working on a cool essay currently, just the idea that losers and idiots exist. It's a fun one. I feel like I fuck PC culture. Like, not everyone's gonna win this shit, you know? So that's a fun one I'm working on. But yeah, having fun with that.

Yeah, no, I think people on Twitter like that. Well, it either resonates with people or they'll like to debate it, but either one's probably good for you. Cause I think a lot of big accounts, they do that well on Twitter is they'll say something that half the people will agree with, but the other half will disagree with, but everyone has a strong opinion on it. So everyone's gonna wanna debate and put their two cents in the replies. Yeah, I think the— what you're saying about doing threads that I think anything that kind of matches like what your newsletter is about or what your overall persona is about is, is you know, probably the best bet. It's, it's funny. Like, I don't know if you ever look at someone who has a completely viral tweet. That's like some joke that gets 200,000 likes. I dunno if you've ever looked at those and then clicked on their profile and they have like 200 followers. Yeah. I'm like, how's that possible? Like this tweet probably has 5 million impressions and, you know, they didn't gain a shit ton of followers from it. But it's interesting. Cause I think sometimes I've had, I've had things go, not necessarily viral, but do really well that didn't really match like what my profile's like. So I think probably people see the tweet, they like the tweet, but then if they click my profile, things just don't really match up. So they're like, oh, whatever. You know, they get confused and they close it and don't follow me. But then there'll be threads that, like with my personal account, that one about, you know, how I built a content agency out of a meme account. That's basically what my account is completely about. My bio matches up with that. So when that one did well, I think it got like 1,700 likes, but I gained like 2,000 followers from it. So it's interesting to see like how, you know, if your content consistently matches up with what your persona is, you'll get more followers versus, you If you try this one random thing and then this other thing, you probably are just confusing the audience a bit too much by trying to do all sorts of different things.

Facts, facts. That's advice that I've gotten before and advice that I did not listen to, but no, that gives me a good idea though. 'Cause just thinking about like people think that my shit's serious 'cause I'm a reporter and then I see the jokes and then It's like Trung does it really well where it's like his bio just says dumb memes, smart threads. Like that is, that's just perfect.

Yeah.

So definitely gonna play around with that, but let's see. Oh yeah. I think anything about Pete Davidson, that's like, I'm working on an essay called the Pete Davidson Principle and that should be a good one.

But yeah, there it's funny. There's always. In every pocket of Twitter, there's like a few people that if you tweet something about, everyone would just love it. Like, you know, it'll do well. So I think lately with finance, it's like, if you mention Jim Cramer or Cathie Wood or Bill Ackman, maybe people just like, you know, it'll do well. Because there's a few people that people are always either like making fun of or everyone's just talking. I guess Elon Musk, that's an example too, where if you tweet almost anything that has to do with Elon Musk, it'll do twice as good as any other tweet you put out just because everyone's talking about him.

Yeah.

So yeah. And then there's other pockets of Twitter where, you know, Pete Davidson, that's like all anyone talks about, or a few other celebrities that are having their moment.

Yeah. I think Ryan Breslow is another one of those, the fast guy, or no, he wasn't fast. Jump or whatever. What's his company?

Bolt.

Bolt. All the one name companies.

Yeah. I know. I was getting those confused for the first couple of weeks, like the one that shut down versus But yeah, it's kind of funny, especially yesterday with that article, the New York Times. Anything with the name Stripe. Yeah. So I, anything that's like a trending topic, that's kind of the, I mean, I guess it's fairly obvious, but that's kind of the hack to getting good engagement is basically whatever your like persona is, you know, take that, apply it to whatever the thing that's trending that day is. Then the next day, apply it to whatever the other thing is. I think Trung does a really good job of that, where he kind of, it's funny, he kind of hits like those trending topics from every single angle. So he'll put out like the, a meme that, you know, is kind of, it's funny too, when, when a story breaks, there's like this cycle of, you know, everyone uses like kind of the obvious jokes first, but they do well if they're the first among the first ones to use them. So Trung does this really well where it's like, he hits it with You know, some meme format that's common. But then later he'll do like the whole cycle of, okay, well, here's like a deeper dive into it. And here's like another example of when this happened. So he kind of, he's usually all over any trending topic from like 20 different angles.

Yeah. Yeah. That dude, I feel like being inside his brain is like a bumblebee, like a bumblebee hive or whatever, a beehive. There we go.

Yeah.

It's like, or a squirrel, man, like on, on some fucking Adderall. That's, that's true.

I think so. Yeah. Cause he kind of like encompasses so many different areas of Twitter too, where he has the tech people, the finance people, even sports and pop culture and film and all that. It's like, yeah, he has like these 4 or 5 pretty big areas of Twitter. He's like one of the main guys for them.

Yeah. Yeah. He's, he's brilliant in his own way. Yeah. It's crazy when I try to describe my friends or my dad what I do for a living, he doesn't understand Web3. And then I have to explain that I just write for a living. I just make media for a living. And his brain, the mental model is writers are poor. Writers, that's like his sister's a poet and she got a professorship in shit, but she still doesn't make money. But, you know, like, it's, it's so weird describing it to friends. Like, how do you, how do you describe, you're like, I tweet for a living, you know? That's a flex, bro. That's it.

Yeah, exactly. It's, it's funny because I've— it depends who asks, right? So I, I've struggled with that a bit, like saying, you know, because someone will say, oh, what do you do? And other people can say, oh, I'm an attorney. And then they'll say, what kind of attorney? So it's harder for me because I like I feel like I've described it in so many different ways to different people. So it kind of depends who's asking. I think the most basic explanation is I'll say, oh, I just run a bunch of Twitter accounts. And then usually people are pretty interested in that. So they'll say, oh, like what kind of accounts? And if they're interested in finance or whatever, usually they'll know the account I'm talking about, which is funny too, because there's been a lot of examples of like people I knew in real life who followed the account, but didn't know it was me until I told them or whatever. Um, so there was a few people like, um, actually a couple of my brother's friends followed me. And then one of them told my brother, hey, you should check out this account, John Rich. And my brother like didn't know if he was messing with him and said, well, you know that my brother runs that account, right? And he's like, oh, no way. Uh, and there's been a few other examples. Of people like that. So it really depends on what they know about Twitter or like the finance and startup space. So usually I'll just say, "Oh, I run a bunch of Twitter accounts." If they're curious, I'll show them some of the ones I run. I think it's funny too, because I explained it like to my grandma or whatever. Like I don't think she doesn't really know what Twitter is, or I don't think she knows what Bitcoin is even, right? So I would just kind of explain to someone like her, like, yeah, I just run Twitter accounts. Like basically that means I just write a bunch of short-form content for entrepreneurs and just help them build a personal brand. Yeah, it's always interesting. I guess the other frame I'll sometimes use is like, oh, you know, I'm like a marketing consultant if I needed to be a little more formal or whatever. But I mean, which is, that's true. I'm just, I'm a marketing consultant that focuses on Twitter and memes. Fair enough.

Fair enough. All right, man. I gotta, I gotta finish up this article about Azuki. I don't know if you heard about this stuff.

Honestly, a little bit. I, that's, I need to get a little more plugged into that world. Like I always hear about those things, but I never know, like, or usually don't know the full story.

Yeah, if you— there's, there's some— I mean, even with the bad market right now, but like, there's some serious money in Web3 writing, um, and like doing what you're doing for Web3 shit. It's, it's the same thing, you know? It's crazy.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'll look into that. I, I'm not really— a lot of people that are Web3 follow me. It's funny, like the last few months I've noticed way more of like the, the NFT picks following me, but usually I mean, my observations on crypto are usually pretty surface level, just commenting on Bitcoin going down or whatever, and I usually don't know a ton more beyond that. But yeah.

I feel like John W. Rich's grandson should be a crypto miner or something.

Actually, there's a little— I don't know if you've seen the John Rich Kid account.

No.

So you should check that one out. Actually, I don't follow it, but I chat with that guy sometimes. So yeah, it's kind of exactly what you're describing. Oh wow, he has 38,000 followers now.

Yeah, fake child has 38,000, right?

So he's way more into crypto and he actually does do a lot of like this crypto, like some of the jokes I don't even really get because they are pretty specific about a certain NFT or something like that. So yeah, if you want the version of that, go ahead and check him out. I don't run it, but That's a pretty good account.

All right, I will definitely check that out. Yo, it's been a— it's been a pleasure having you on, man. I gotta finish this fucking article, but it's been great talking.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

All right, peace.