#28: Nathan Baugh - The Art of Storytelling

Even if it's like just riffing on company, building a company, like your first ideas are probably gonna be not great.

Sup nerds, welcome to another episode of Cyber Patterns. Today we've got Nathan Bau on. He's got over 130,000 followers on Twitter and you probably have seen him all around for his newsletter World Builders. He teaches you about the art of storytelling. Today we have a great conversation about storytelling, about what makes brands good, and he even gives me a masterclass on the perfect Twitter bio. Really helpful conversation, and I learned a lot, so I think you guys will enjoy. All right, cool. So I just read your article this weekend. I think that John Mayer video that you included was really good, and I'm wondering why you included it and how it kind of relates to storytelling and writing. I—

so something I think about a lot is like, how do people get good at something? And it's very easy to just I mean, we spent a lot of time on Twitter. It's super easy just to like read stuff on Twitter and be like, oh yeah, I'm getting better at whatever it might be. When in reality, there's only so much that you can learn from just like reading without doing. And so for anybody listening, the John Mayer video is literally 2 and a half minutes long. And he just, he hears like a beat, starts playing his guitar. And then he just starts riffing on lyrics right there. And he does one pass through, then he repeats that with slightly different lyrics and essentially goes through that process 3 different times. And then at the end of those 2 and a half minutes, he has the foundations of, you know, a John Mayer song. And it took him less than 5 minutes. I think there's something pretty powerful to just being able to say, okay, we're gonna jump in. It's the whole idea of a shitty first draft. Like whether it's a song or like an essay, even if it's like just riffing on company, building a company, like your first ideas are probably going to be not great, but you have to get them out there and that kind of will clear your mind up. I think like you'll start to pattern match a little bit, like what is good, what is bad, and then you'll naturally start flowing in more of those what are good ideas. So I think that John Mayer video did a great job of showing that.

Yeah, for real. That's definitely how I write. I just throw sentences together and sometimes just bullet points and try to make it happen. Like somebody asked me like, how does your writing sound natural? I'm just like, it's not. It's so much editing.

That's— I think that's one of the funny things about writing. Good writing looks simple, looks easy. But whenever you read somebody's writing, like, and you're not thinking about the writing because you're just thinking about like the ideas behind it, like that means it's so well written. Probably took a lot of time and a lot of edits to get it to that point.

100%. And then for the John Mayer video, I also think about like rappers freestyling and how you'll see somebody just kind of like pick up on the beat and mumble a bit for the first 30 seconds or 10 seconds. And then they have lyrics in their head that they're slowly building together. So it's cool to see John Mayer doing that. Also, he plays with the Grateful Dead now, so they kind of make shit up on the spot.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, yeah, he tours with the Grateful Dead.

But that's awesome.

Yeah. Speaking of fantastic storytellers, you're pinned thread right now, Steve Jobs, right? Steve Jobs was an excellent storyteller, both in his presentations and just— I'm sure you've heard about, what is it, the reality distortion field that he was able to kind of create change.

Absolutely.

Ideas. So what made Steve Jobs such an excellent storyteller that we'll remember him for a long time?

So I, I've done quite a bit of research on Jobs, like beyond the biography too. Like when he, when we talk about Steve Jobs storytelling, it's almost all exclusively his second stint at Apple. I forget the exact year he went back to Manila, '98. But when he got back, he essentially simplified everything down and said, "We have way too many products. Things are way too spread thin." So he cut that all back, focused on a few core things. And I think that is pretty underrated when it comes to his storytelling because he needed to nail 3 to 5 stories instead of 20. So I guess the marketing, that wasn't there, but their products were still there. They had the Macintosh. It was one of the first personal computers on the market and they had that, but they still didn't do super well because the brand, the marketing, the storytelling just wasn't there. So when he left, he went and acquired Pixar, and became the majority shareholder of Pixar, CEO of Pixar, but he was actually pretty hands-off, which is surprising just knowing how he was at Apple, which is kind of the opposite of hands-off. But he's talked a lot about how he just absorbed the storytelling at Pixar, like how did they turn a toy way into a $500 million, you know, one of the biggest movies ever, Finding Nemo. And he took those principles from Pixar that he spent so much time learning and applied them to Apple his second time through. And I think another underrated thing he did was hiring John Ivey, which is one of the best designers of all time, because he came to understand how packaging was so important in what, you know, I think Apple's probably the one company that I buy something from and I like feel bad throwing away their packaging almost. And if you think about like the story that that tells is basically this is a high-quality product, and it's going to cost you more, it's going to be all those things, but they nailed it from the packaging to the pricing, to the marketing, to everything. Like his second stint at Apple, like absolutely masterclass when it comes to storytelling, just across product, pricing, marketing, brand, everything.

100%. So how did you get into storytelling and what's kind of your story around that?

That's a great question. So my background is actually in engineering. I went in, I did engineering in school, always like math, science focused, but at the same time love to read and write, which is sometimes that's a bit of an odd combination. So figuring out how to like combine that is something that I've always wanted to do. So when I got out of school, went into consulting for a couple years, learned a ton. I had a really, really good experience, but it's, uh, it's one of those things where you kind of tap out what you can learn 2 to 3 years in, and you look ahead and you're like, you know, you would learn more as a partner, but that's not for another 8 to 12 years if you're you're really good. And you kind of look ahead and you're like, ah, is that the life that I want? Maybe not. And then it becomes, okay, what are my unique skill sets now? Like I've built out this like tech and business background from engineering and consulting, like learned a ton. Like it's basically like drinking from a fire hose when it comes to like doing business. And then at the same time, I had written like a full-length fantasy fiction novel and dove into CS Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, like all the best authors and from like a fantasy fiction perspective of the last 100 years, essentially, and just studied what they did. I love how Neil Gaiman writes. So that's who I try to model that style of writing after. And Combining those two worlds, I think it's, um, you know, storytelling, business, put them together, and it's a pretty unique niche.

Yeah, fair enough. What's going on with the, the novel? Are you gonna try to get that published?

Yeah, so it's actually the impetus for me starting to build more of an online audience is for first-time authors Publishing houses don't really throw a lot of marketing budget at you. So I was like, all right, I can write a book. I can write on Twitter or LinkedIn or wherever it might be. And figuring out how to capture people's attention, provide value, all that good stuff helps out my fiction writing quite a bit. But that was the impetus to start building an audience. And now I can go to a publisher and say, I'm trying to paint a random house. I'm like, look, I have this book. I know it's very good. You know, it's very good, but also you have a lot of people who want to be authors who come to you with solid writing. Like, it is what it is. Like, there's a lot of good writers out there who never get a book deal. So how can you differentiate yourself? And to me, I can say, look, I have 130,000 followers on Twitter. I have 20,000 people on a newsletter. You barely have to spend any marketing dollars on me and I can sell books without you. So we should partner and we should do this thing because by the time this book is actually published, it's like a 2-year process from the time you actually start talking to somebody, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. That makes zero sense. There's a lot of inefficiencies there. I say, look, that'll be 300,000+ on Twitter, I figured out LinkedIn by that point, the newsletter would probably be like 75 to 100K. Like those are really powerful marketing channels. One of them that I own being the newsletter and the others being, you know, more like mass appeal. Like I can get however many impressions at any time to launch that. So I think that's pretty powerful.

Yeah, 100%. It's the audience provides leverage when having conversations with publishers. And it's one of the reasons as well, I wrote you know, screenplays and novels and— Yeah, that kind of stuff. I studied English in college, so when I had a lot more free time, wasn't trying to pay the bills, I had a lot more free time to be able to just write long form. And that's really the end goal is just, you know, make money via short form and then be able to spend more time, buy time to be able to spend time on the projects that I really want to put out there. So, um, yeah.

What type of like novellas and all that would you write? I'm curious. Yeah.

So the novella was kind of dark, uh, comedy, uh, kind of like Vonnegut style. Vonnegut's always been a big one for me. Jack Kerouac. So that kind of dark humor exploration, coming of age stories. Um, so I wrote a novella about an obituary writer that kills people to fuel his career.

So yeah. That's a good one. That's a great concept.

Thank you. And so I really, I don't know, I wanna just keep going with that and explore with crypto as well and stories about not really the metaverse stuff, but more just like the real world scammers, hackers, the wild shit that goes down in crypto and turn that into like a real story. And so, you know, I was talking to a friend the other day, like, if I don't sell a screenplay by the time I'm like 35, I'll be pissed off. Like, you know, like I want to do that kind of shit. So, um, yeah, that's awesome. The audience just makes it easier.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. One thing that I think about a lot with crypto is, um, like the long tail of the IP, the intellectual property, I feel like is often lost. Like, you think about Star Wars or Harry Potter, there's so much like fan fiction out there for those worlds that is pretty high quality stuff, but nobody's making money off that because it's copyright infringement. If they do try to make money off of it, it's not quite big enough for, you know, the big publishing houses to care about it and try to figure out how to make a deal with, you know, the people who actually created it. But then it's like, okay, We can figure out how to essentially get some of that on the blockchain, figure out royalties, all that good stuff going back to the original creator. I feel like there's a lot of value to be unlocked there. Yeah, when you think about reselling—

oh, 100%, man. I mean, yeah, I just wrote a story last week about Multicoin Capital raising a $430 million fund, and one of the big things that they're focusing on is A, creator monetization, and B, new models of intellectual property via NFTs and crypto and building businesses around that. You know, a couple of projects that I'm really a big fan of, Jenkins of LA. So it's a guy who owned a Bored Ape. Yeah, man, I could send you in the DMs, but Jenkins of LA is a guy who owned a Bored Ape and then built up a character around it and then hired Neil Strauss, the 10 times New York Times bestseller. And now he's writing a book and they're releasing a book, NFT collection. Uh, so that's cool. Yeah. That's what I love about like NFT collections is they're almost like organisms or like a forest where they build up a whole ecosystem of people building, creating and, and, uh, whatnot.

And it's also like, that is something that the creators of Bored Ape probably never would have expected, but because whoever that holder is, is creative in his or her own right to go do that, create the story around the character. And it's great too, just now their character's probably way more viable. For them.

I was reading one of your posts, just, I forget which one it was, but talking about the end in mind when you're telling stories, it was the same one that was talking about like cutting the BS in the beginning of an essay. I forget which one it was, but do you start with the end in mind always when you're, say, when you're writing threads, when you're writing articles, even the fantasy novel that you were writing, like, are you—

Yeah, for sure.

You always have the end in mind.

Yeah. So that's, that's actually something that I learned after writing a novel because it can become pretty winding. I think that the story itself can, can just kind of go all over the place if you don't have like that specific destination going. So I'm actually in process of rewriting it. Knowing what the end should be. And it's great because it focuses everything down to that main plot line and then, you know, a few subplots, but not, uh, you know, not all over the place. And I think that's something I've learned recently when actually I was studying, uh, J.K. Rowling for Harry Potter, like that fifth book, you can find her, uh, plot and outline of it online, um, which is pretty amazing to think about. It's like just a handwritten thing where she planned a book that sold, you know, 25 million copies or whatever. And there were only 4 subplots and 1 main plot, and this was like an 850-page book. So I was like, all right, my book should probably be 1 main plot, 2 subplots max. And just go deep on those. So I'm actually going back and rewriting it with, you know, knowing what the end is, knowing what the main plot is, the two subplots, and you can keep it super focused that way. And I found the same thing when writing shorter form, whether it's newsletter essays or Twitter threads or whatever. Like if you start with, this is what I want the audience to get out of it, boom, it can, it can be much more clear. And I find my writing to be better. Like the first draft is not quite as shitty, all that good stuff.

Yeah, 100%. I also found that when writing novels, if I don't have the end in mind, I have no idea how it's going to end. I just keep on writing and then it's so much easier for like essays when you have something in mind that you're trying to say and then you just say it and it works out.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So it goes. I Yeah. Speaking of growing newsletters, you found your biggest way to grow it has been Twitter threads, right?

Yep. So, so for background for anybody listening, I started a newsletter in April. It's now mid-July and we've got almost 18,000 on there and should have 20,000 by early August, which is, which is great. That's grown. Between 1,000 and 2,000 a week, pretty much. So figuring out how to— I basically figured out how to do that on Twitter. And the answer is 1 to 2 really high-quality threads per week. And when I say high quality, like it needs to be original, it needs to be pretty thought-provoking, all that good stuff. It can't be like, oh, Google Docs has 2 billion users and these are these features, blah, blah, blah. Those can go super viral, but at the same time, they're not actually going to convert anybody or, you know, show how you think or anything like that. So they're just kind of going viral for the sake of the dopamine hit. Um, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. It's just harder to move people to like show people the value in your long-form written content, which is is. Um, so I go for the more kind of focused route, um, and do those really consistently 1 to 2 times per week. And then it's figuring out how can I do as many cross-promotions organically as possible. Those don't generate near as many subscribers, but they generate very high quality subscribers, meaning they're like opening the newsletter, they're clicking through to different links. All that good stuff. And those are the things that really matter is like keeping that open rate high. Like my goal is 50% opens on everything. And if you start to see it dipping below that, then it's digging in and figuring out like, all right, you know, the audience is clearly telling me that the content's not good enough for them to open it. How can we, you know, what can we change? What was different about the ones that got the 50+ open rate? So doing that and just focusing on what's important, which is open rate, click-through rate, all that good stuff, basically just engagement rather than just that like vanity top line subscriber number. It's super important.

100%. 100%. Yeah. Big facts. Twitter threads have grown, been the number one growth mechanism for my newsletter and definitely, yeah. I mean, it's been super helpful, but I am And just hoping to keep on growing it this year. It's been very fun to do.

I— one thing for anybody interested in like Twitter threads, the thing that's been most helpful for me outside of just like what we talked about earlier with John Mayer, just like start, you know, if you have an idea for one, just write it. It might be terrible, but you might be able to edit it into something super good. And the more you do them, the better they become, all that good stuff. But really tactically, like start— and you very well might do this already. Something that I love doing for anything that I'm trying to get good at is to keep a swipe file and say, this was like a great ad done by whoever. And you can go look at it, see exactly what they did. What was the hook like? How did the content flow? What was the call to action at the end? What was their unique angle? All that stuff. So I like doing that for threads. It's super helpful. Come up with ideas, structure, all that good stuff.

Oh yeah, 100%. You know, Alex Lowell, you've probably seen him around. He writes a— I think so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He writes a newsletter called The Steal Club, and it definitely helped me realize it was like, hey, it's all right, you know, not to steal fucking news or threads or whatever, because some people do that. But, you know, there's a few formats that work very well and you could make them your own. And as Steven Pressfield says, it's not stealing if you put a spin on it.

Exactly.

Yeah. So it's definitely been fun doing threads and watching those pop off. It's a crazy feeling. So you're full-time newsletter and you were helping out with Launch House as well, correct?

Yeah. Launch House. They're great. They're, they're probably— so I have a couple of different clients. They're probably the one that I spend the most time with. Toby Howell, who writes their newsletter Home Screen, probably one of the best, just like peer newsletter writers that like I've read his content. So it's, it's, it's great to get to work with Toby and figure out how to turn that into a really great asset for Launch House as a company, I think it's a pretty brilliant play really to invest in that for them, something that'll 2, 3 years down the line home screens a massive newsletter, really known for being big in the startup ecosystem, and that's an amazing top of funnel asset for Launch House. So yeah, Launch House is a great company and I enjoy working with those guys.

For sure. For sure. I have a favor to ask. If you— how would— so I have trouble telling my story kind of about what I do. You know, analyzing internet patterns is kind of vague. And so what I'm trying to like figure out a way to tell that where it's like I break down internet patterns, I study, you know, patterns over time and kind of make them my own with personal essays that are funny. So if you look at like my Twitter bio, what would you change? And then I'm also like a staff reporter at Defiant and need to like put that in there, which is like, you know, important. But it also confuses people because I write for two separate things.

So let me ask a couple of questions. When, when you say internet patterns, are there either specific category or Is there a way to break that down a little bit further into what is it like emerging internet patterns? Is it like new things that you see kind of on the forefront, or, you know, is it internet patterns specifically within like new tech, whether that's like crypto, Web3, or AI, or machine learning, or whatever buzzword you want to use? Like, what are the— is it— is there like a theme around the patterns are?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I've tried doing the 40 to 80 year internet patterns. And those are more like technical essays and they don't do nearly as well as the emerging ones, which makes sense. You know, people are more familiar with it. Like I've written essays, decentralized friendships, which is like a relatively new concept, 20 years, 30 years, friends around the internet and whatnot, and then meeting up with them. Essays like that. And then 10+ Years Losing on the Internet, just talking about trying to—

I liked that one. That was good. Yeah.

Appreciate it. So I think kind of personal emerging patterns are the ones that really hit and that I tend to focus on. So yeah. And then I did have like, in my newsletter description on Beehive, it's like, quote, witty, digestible. Two words that people have used frequently to describe it. I don't know if that'd be worth throwing in the bio. I always— I never know what the right— the right way to do it is. But yeah, any advice would be helpful.

So I'm looking at— I'm looking at the profile. I think the whole vibe they are going with— I don't know exactly what to call the profile picture, but just like the way it's distorted a little bit. And the colors on like the header photo are really good and play nicely into what you're doing. One thing that you could do, and this is, this is a small thing, but basically your header focuses my eyes to your profile photo, if that makes sense. Like the animated character's body is pointed that way, which drives my eyes that way. Instead, I would basically flip it so the character and the laptop are pointed at the follow button instead of your profile. It's like a super small thing, but if you look at— I think a bunch of creators will essentially funnel eyes to the follow button. It sounds stupid, but if you get— let's say you get, you know, 1,000 profile impressions a week, if you turn that conversion from 5% to 8%, like that's, you know, 30 people. But in reality, you probably have way more than that. If you're, you know, writing a lot on your newsletter, Twitter, doing Threads, like that starts to add, like add up and compound pretty quickly. So that's one thing I would consider doing is just flipping, keeping the exact same image, but just like flipping it a little bit. So it drives eyes to follow the photo. And then on the actual copy, let's see. So for anybody listening, this is what it says right now. Jason Levin analyzing internet patterns, cyberpatterns.xyz, little dot chatting with internet friends, patterns.chat. I assume that's what we're doing right now. Is that the website for the podcast? Nice.

Correct.

And then another little dot, crypto journalist at Defiant News. And then you got like, you're in New York, you got Cyber Patterns linked again, born, joined. I would get rid of the birthday. I think it just takes up space. I really like the newsletter Subscribe button right there, like the thumbnail image is really well done, similar to kind of the profile and the headers, the whole vibe fits and makes sense. Similar thing there, like it kind of points me away from the subscribe button though. So I would just maybe like twist that or flip it or something. So it's pointing the like eyes to the subscribe button. And then on the actual copy— If you're looking at cyber patterns, uh, like the subscribe button on the newsletter, I feel like it almost angles me away from the subscribe button. Um, that could just be me, I'm not sure, but something to look at. Basically just funnel eyes to where you want people to click. And then on the analyzing internet patterns, I would make that Analyzing maybe emerging patterns or something. I don't think it's super important that it's internet. Like so much is on the internet. Like a lot of pretty much any pattern in life is now going to be found on the internet. I don't think that's like super important to include. But I think the like it's emerging. So that tells whoever is looking at your profile, like this guy's on the forefront of, you know, whatever trends there are, like, that's what I expect him to be writing about is like the trends he's noticing, he'll write about them, I'll learn about them from him. And it's going to be, you know, something new, something, whatever. So I would consider how to, how to kind of get that across. I like the Chatting with internet friends, patterns.chat, that's good. And then crypto journalist Defiant News, I think that's good too. I think what your main theme that you want to— like the story that you want to tell somebody who's looking at this is this guy is, you know, specifically looking to identify emerging patterns that he's seen in the world and he's going to write about them and I'm going to learn about them from following him.

Yeah. So maybe writing about emerging patterns, cyberpatterns.xyz, boom, boom, boom. Yeah, dude, that's fascinating. The pointing the eyes, I did not even think about that, but it's, it's brilliant. I don't know if I'll be able to— I'll try to flip the, the little Git review photo, but need to find the PSD file on Photoshop and then already flipped around the header. So—

Oh, you did? Nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boom. Yeah, that's great. That was quick.

Yeah, yeah, man. This is fascinating though. Do you like— I feel like this is really OCD-ish, but that's me, like checking the bio on like it looks different on my Twitter on my phone versus my girlfriend's. Like, I don't know if it's the font size or whatever, but I don't know. Do you think about that stuff or am I just overanalyzing it? Because that could probably be what it is.

Well, let me— so I'm looking at it on my computer. Let me see what it looks like on my phone. As it would— like, you can't control Everything, unfortunately. True. I think it's probably most important what it looks like on the phone. Yeah, it's, it's good. I like that you took out like so on the phone, like getting rid of the birthday saved like an entire line. So people get to like cyber patterns and like the actual subscribe button quicker on your profile. So I think that's good. Yeah, I think it's super solid. All right.

Well, I just got a free session with Nathan Brown.

Perfect.

No, I appreciate it, man. This stuff is— I feel like the pros know what they're doing.

So what? One thing that I— the psychology behind all of this is pretty fascinating. I think it's like when we were talking about like story, storytelling, like a lot of it is psychology, like what works and what doesn't and really be tied back to, you know, pretty far back in history with like what psychology works with humans and what doesn't.

Yeah. Yeah. What do you, is there any reading that you've done that really helps with that?

Well, like, um, I think the most, probably the best and most obvious example is the Hero's Journey, which is like Jason Levin Levin's study. His book, A Hero with a Thousand Faces, is fantastic. It goes back to pretty much looking at like Greek mythology through Rome, through basically through all of history up to like the 1900s or 1800s. And a lot of the most famous, most popular, longest-lasting stories follow a very, very similar narrative arc. Which isn't super surprising when you think about it. It's like, oh, like that story did well. So its structure applied in a different way will also likely do well. That kind of intuitively makes sense. But the way he broke it down in the Hero's Journey is awesome to see. And then once you read that book, you like, you know, you watch a Marvel movie and you're like, oh, that's what they're doing. Like, this is meeting the mentor or crossing the threshold or whatever it might be. So for some reason, that structure just like works to tell stories.

Yeah, facts. I read The Writer's Journey, you know, the—

yeah, yeah, yeah.

I guess the play on the hero's journey. I read that in college and it kind of breaks your brain for a sec. You know, you're like, damn, like All I had to do was just follow a structure this whole time. But yeah, it's, it's definitely helpful, the idea of like the mentor, the what is it, kind of the climax and all those ideas. And yeah, it's definitely helpful. I can't remember all 11 of them or whatever it was, but yeah.

Yeah, that and, and then there's some, I think, pretty forward-thinking brands or getting that into a lot of their materials, whether it's mark— like, you know, marketing is kind of that initial touch point usually, and then they move it into like an education tool, or how do they do pricing, or, you know, different follow-ups, like how you get deeper down the funnel. And they're starting to incorporate, you know, the hero's journey there, which I think is pretty brilliant. And some of them that are doing it, like Shopify does it so well. If you, if you poke through their website, you can really start to tell, you know, exactly what, what they're, what they're trying to do, and it works.

Yeah, facts, facts, dude. This has been a great call. Um, are you gonna be in New York anytime soon?

Potentially. So we're, uh So I'm in Spain right now, but we're coming back end of July, going to be in Austin, but would not be shocked if we end up in New York full-time, or at least traveling there a good bit. I'll have to let you know. Okay.

All right. That sounds great, man. And I know our mutual friend Jack Raines is coming to New York very soon as well, so it's going to be nice to have him here.

Yes, Jack. If, uh, anybody listening needs a good newsletter, check out jacksmoney.co.

Dude, one of the, one of the best out there, really.

Yeah, I think it's gonna blow up for him.

I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that this man's gonna be the Morgan Housel of memes.

So yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Yeah, for real, dude. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time. I'm gonna put this out ASAP, so within the next couple days, um, and, uh, we'll put it out there.

Sweet. Thanks a lot, Jason Levin Levin. Enjoyed this.

All right, peace, bro.