Writing Twitter Threads, 101 with George Mack

What's going to happen here? So you're kind of teasing the beginning of the story and the end of the story. You're creating this thing we call the curiosity gap.

And then welcome to the digital writing podcast where we talk about using writing to capture, keep and monetize attention. If you're looking to build an audience, start a business and scale yourself online, you're in the right spot. Thanks everyone for joining. This is now our Gosh, Cole, Is this our fourth? Fifth.

Fourth, I think, yeah.

Fourth kind of shit ship 30 Countdown audience building webinar today is going to be just an absolute crash course in writing Twitter threads and we have with us an absolute legend in writing those threads, George Mack. George, thanks for joining us today. If you want to give anyone who might not be familiar, I don't know how they wouldn't be if they're. They're dialing in here. But just a little on your background and maybe how you think of writing Twitter threads in your kind of creative arsenal.

Yeah. So yeah, as Dickie mentioned, my name's George. I've been sort of tinkering around on Twitter for a few years now, largely accidental and just kind of snowballed a little bit. My background is primarily like growth marketing. So come out always explored how different platforms work, how different algorithms work and then that kind of skewed in with my writing accidentally. But yeah, primarily split between growing out high growth businesses and then Twitter is kind of the outlet to de stress from really.

What got you started writing in the first place was it just I'm interested in these things and I want to curate it for myself or.

It'S a good question what got me started. I've always been like writing so just using particularly notes on my phone, notes on my iPad of just getting down ideas. I just find it quite a. It's a way of capturing a current thought process. It's usually linked to mood or state I'm in. Ie if I'm on caffeine or anything, immediately capture down a certain thought I've had and then review it later. So that's how I primarily got into writing. It wasn't really about necessarily a love for writing. It was more that's a good four. I want to capture it.

What I, what I love about the idea of like you said, you know, I have a growth marketing background is you can't go to school for growth marketing. Not really. It's kind of a self taught. You just you enter it, you figure it out. I assume that's what you found too.

100%. Yeah. So I was at a company called Social Train, which is again based in Manchester. Went from kids in their bedroom and they kind of built it up to public company and everybody there was sort of under 25 and a lot of them were university dropouts. So it's very much, yes, something that's insanely self taught. And the one thing they had there was like this concept of like the ever changing landscape, because the Internet is an ever changing landscape. So even if there would be, even if you could put the best like university degree together for growth marketing, by the time you've managed to get it out, it's, it's, it's, it's done.

It's outdated. Yeah, yeah, this will, this will be really interesting. You know, as Dickie said, we, we do these office hours in ship 30 and one of our sessions is all around Twitter, Twitter thread writing. But we pulled a bunch of your examples so we could walk through, you know, why some of your threads worked or maybe your perspective on what you would do differently this time. But I think it'd be great to just walk through and actually get your perspective on a lot of the things that we've put together and other things you've learned, what you've seen. Work. Not work, Dick. You want to just dive in?

Yeah, let's go for it.

So.

Yeah, I think the premise of this is writing Twitter threads is a little bit of an art. Right. It's not like writing a blog post. It's not like writing individual tweets. It's kind of its own thing and it's got such a unique set of constraints. With 280 characters per tweet, you really can't go over like 10 to 12 if you want anyone to read it. And you're competing in a sea of very easy things that if you don't grab attention in your very first tweet, it's going to go nowhere. So it's kind of this interesting creative medium that brings a lot of different aspects from copywriting, storytelling all into one thing. And so coming up with frameworks for doing it effectively, I think just brings together so many of these different principles of writing and that's why we enjoy it so much.

Yeah, yeah. I assume, George, when you sit down to write a Twitter thread, it's not, it's a completely different thing than sitting down to write a blog post or email newsletter or something. How do you think about it?

It's a good question. I'd say the way I usually approach it is it's usually a topic I've been kind of obsessed about. Like that's the way I've always done it, ironically, not purely from a growth market. Even I can see the growth market elements. With me it's always been more art. So it's just a matter of a topic I've been thinking about and then how that's gonna go together in a story that flows seamlessly like a funnel from the first thing all the way to the end. And you just, you've essentially the way I'd approach it is you essentially break it down, you go, okay, again I always look at it from the art, but I can then take a growth marketing perspective and put that hat on. So if I take a growth marketing perspective, you just essentially look at it from okay, the way social media platforms essentially work is every piece, let's say for example, you have a hundred followers and you post out a piece of content there that will then get. They will almost split test it to a sub percentage of your audience, let's say 5%, 3%. Somebody's actually published this for the YouTube algorithm. I can find it and I'm sure we could attach it on the show notes. The exact way the YouTube algorithm works is quite similar. They'll split test it on that subsets of your audience and if they like it, it gets a higher quality score. And based off what quality score it gets is the higher the distribution it gets. And then obviously that factors in when you get other people's audiences collaborating on that. But you essentially assume that the more likes, comments, engagement it gets, then the greater reach is going to get. And. But then that's the growth marketers hat, right? But then you have to take the artist out of. There's the. I heard somebody say the other day that if you, if you ab test a website relentlessly, you end up with a porn site, right? So you can't just go down purely growth. And I think that's sometimes an issue you see on Twitter now where people are just doing it for the sake of doing it rather than doing it for some kind of genuine art or trying to put content out there that's uniquely different. And you can do the growth market perspective and if it's purely to grow a business, then yeah, that's different. But it is purely for the writing sake then I'd say don't lose the art of it because then the art is actually part of the growth marketing ironically as well. So it's a bit more complex and a bit more nuanced.

I've never thought about it this way. Now I'm just kind of riffing on what you just said, but I'm curious what you think. And also, Dickie, what you think of this too is there's this big obsession of find your niche. What's my niche? What's my thing? And really through that lens of the platform's going to split test your content to the first 3% of your audience. Really the idea of niching down is just how do I get clearer and clearer about what type of person I'm attracting so that that first 3%, the likelihood of them engaging goes higher and higher because I know exactly what they're going to want. So, like, do you think about that in terms of you sit down to write something and you go, hey, I really have this great idea, I'm curious about this thing, but it doesn't really gel with what I typically write about. How do you make that decision?

That's a really good question. The honest answer is I don't have the answer. So I thought a lot about this. I think the way the future of social networks is going to be or the way I design it is you'd almost want to fork personalities. Right. So I've got this issue. If you've been having this issue where there's certain accounts out there, especially as a Brit, I follow so many American accounts that I love and they start talking about American sports and like, this is nonsense. This is literally you. I'll see like the Raiders or whatever. Know what that means, right? Same way if I was talking about Manchester City, it goes over people's heads.

Yeah.

I think long term, what I'd actually like to do is I go in Dickie's profile and I can see like 10 forks of content. And I go, okay, I like the mental model stuff, I like the writing stuff, I like the business stuff. But the Raiders, no, that's not for me. And I think that's the way it should go. Because the issue you face right now is people then face this weird kind of content loop that they end up in where they feel that they may have to get in that niche. I've chatted to a few people about this. It's an interesting one of how you break out of it. I think the platforms are kind of broken because you've got a few ways. So you have a YouTuber in the UK, a guy called KSI, and he wants to chat about crypto. So he's just created a completely new account which is KSI crypto, so that you could literally fork off with a separate account and then you've got 10 different accounts going. I know Jack Butcher from Visualize Value, he did that and then Twitter started suspending his accounts. So platforms aren't currently built. It's actually built for a niche, which is quite frustrating because it limits people's personality. I think that's more of a wider question for social media.

That's a fascinating thought because I feel it sometimes of like I know I'm not going to write about this because I don't think it'll get a very good response given that followers I have, I don't think would engage with it. So it becomes almost self limiting that if you can't fork, you know, but that, that I could see how you could go to someone's profile and click, yeah, show me this, this, this, this, not these three. And then you know that that's a.

Cool idea that is. And the language too. I mean I assume you use that language because of your familiarity with blockchain and that's kind of how it works too. But that, that is a fascinating way of thinking about it. I never thought about that.

Yeah, I think that's the way the future is going to go. And I think there's, I mean obviously we're supposed to chat about Twitter. There's a slight fork in the conversation, ironically of, I call it like width versus depth. And what's interesting is certain Twitter threads I can get a huge amount of reach with, but the depth I get is different. So you've got like the John Dewar thing of like what gets measured, gets managed. And the kind of inverse of that is what you can't measure, you can't ever manage. And the issue with Twitter for us to some extent is it's very easy to kind of get feedback on impressions, likes and reach, but less kind of easy to get input on. Did people like save? I guess you've got that save read wise thing, but people just write that anyway. Do they actually save it and revisit it? Did they actually use the information? And I think that like DMs is quite a useful proxy. It's like a depth measurement. People DM you and say, hey, that was one of the best things I've ever read. That's probably a bet. Like you want to pair that with the likes and the comments the same way you want to pair. If for example, you like some. Like I had somebody message me saying that if they could buy it as an nft, they would. I was like, you want the same way. Going back to the growth market versus artists, you want the debt versus width, because trust me, you can go down the width rabbit hole. But like I said, you'll just end up with a. With a porn site. So you kind of always don't want to neglect that, which when you're starting out, it's like, oh, I just want to get as much reach and impressions. But once you get there, you realize that the depth of the audience is much more important than the width. Don't get me wrong, the width's important too, but you need the depth. I've seen firsthand going back to the growth marketing background of Facebook pages and Instagram pages back in the day that used to get 2 billion, 3 billion views, but couldn't sell $100 worth of product. And you don't ever want that scenario.

Yeah, we call this density, the density of an audience response to something. Right. You could write something that's like life advice that everyone reads and says, oh, that was great. Or you can write something almost very specific, that one, one thousandth of that many people are going to read it. But for every person that reads it, it resonates so heavily that the total amount of, like, emotional response, I think, is. Is really what you can't measure. But you can tell.

There's one example slightly off topic that I found, which is good. It's called. I think it's IYC. Yeah. IYC.com luxury yachts. Yachting worldwide. They sell yachts online. And it gets about 70,000 visits per month. And I was thinking, like, the visits to revenue, that is the perfect example of debt versus width.

Yeah, yeah. And it's a really interesting thing. We'll, I promise we'll get into the tactical stuff here, here for a second, but we're riffing is. You know, I've been writing online for probably a decade at this point, and George, I'm sure you know, you're speaking to it so clearly. You've experienced that. Dickie, you've been at Twitter for a year now, so now you're starting to experience it. I've had hundreds of millions of views on my stuff. And like, the first few times it happens, it's that dopamine hit and you're like, this is super cool. And, wow, I just got 2 million views on this thing. And then like, you do it five or six or 10 or 20 or 50 more, and then you kind of are like, what's really the point of this? Like. Like, that's great. Like, that's amazing. And It's a, it's a great skillset, I think, to learn how to write things that have that reach. But it's really. I've just noticed this for myself and George. I'm curious if this has been your experience too. Like when you first start the game, you kind of think reaches the goal and then as you keep playing it, you're like, it's not. I don't really care If I get 10 million views or a million views or 10,000 views. It's the density that I actually really want. I want our people finding this super valuable. Are they willing to retweet it? Are they willing to attach it to themselves and their identity? What questions do they have? Can I build a relationship with them? Do you? Have you found the same 100%?

There's a very, very good talk key for a boy how to operate. I think the principles come from high Output Management book. But essentially one of the points he has in it has always stuck with me. Where you want pairing metrics, right? So if, for example, you have a customer support team and you set them the goal of reducing the fraud rate, they then start treating every customer like a potential fraudster, which you don't want, right? So what you do want alongside that metric is like high quality customer feedback. So then you're not just kind of ending up with a SKU one way. So even though the width is important, if you only optimize for that, you end up in the kind of the trap that you mentioned there. So 100%. The issue is how do you create those depth metrics? And it's tough. I think 10 years from now we'll look back at the current model of social media and we'll have them. Because I think the way it is right now is a bit broken. So you have to create them yourself. I'd say like DMs is a great metric to go off. Quality of people that follow you is a great message. To go off replies is a great one. Relationships that you can build is a great one. And kind of keep a rough track of that in your notes because otherwise, if you don't get me wrong, you may want to go off the which metrics as well. But this, yeah, as you, as you mentioned then, Nicholas, is. Is so much more important once you get past that initial rat. Taking the hit of the cocaine.

Yeah, yeah, Dicky, Dicky. You know, I mean you had that, that early thread, right? You got like all the, all the cocaine for like three days.

Exactly. And then it's like, okay, It's I might as well never write again, right? I wrote one, they got 45,000 and I was on the little hamster wheel like for three or four days and they just had me. I'm like, I gotta break out.

Yeah.

And then, and then you start to. They get you on the drip and then you keep coming back. So no, that's just so important of the pairing. Metric is, you know, unfollowers or negative replies to saying something like this is not useful, right. You, you need some kind of, some kind of like negative indicator of people saying, yeah, this isn't that valuable. You're clearly trying for reach at this point or something like that. Like, it's not easy to measure, but there's a lot there of who are you optimizing for? At some point you want only to put things out with like a, a filter of. Is a smart person going to follow me because of this? Or something like that could be a good way of doing it.

Yeah, I think we're kind of just looping the same point. I don't want to apply it to music as well. Where you don't want to be. Or maybe you do, right? If you do want to be the number one pop artist in the world, that's what you want to be and you take pride in that form of music. But I don't ever like sadder story then, you know, the sort of pop artist that kind of resents their own music doesn't want to play sold out. So you've got to. But you've got to build those metrics for yourself because those metrics don't exist. So you have to have a high sense of quality and taste rather than just pumping shit out for the sake of it.

There's, there's a fascinating TED Talk, Daniel. Maybe if you do a quick Google search, you can throw it in the chat for people. It's by Elizabeth Gilbert and she wrote Eat, Pray Love and the TED Talk was all about like creative inspiration. And basically in her talk, she says, I have had to come to the conclusion and realization that I've already written my most popular work in my lifetime. Eat Pray Love was just like a monumental bestseller. Sold a gazillion copies on Oprah's book list. Like every achievement, right? And she's basically like, I'm never going to outdo that in my whole lifetime. So now what's, what's my inspiration to write? And I think that's a really interesting question because so many people want to start writing online and they chase the once I get a million views, my whole life changes, right? Once I get 5 million views, my whole life changes. And the question I love posing to people is, okay, tomorrow you will write your most read article, blog post, Twitter thread, whatever, ever. It's going to get 100 million views, whatever, and you're never going to write something ever again that exceeds that highest pinnacle. Now what? And I think it's an interesting way of kind of reflecting on, like, well, then why are you writing, like, what's the real purpose? Because if you take away the carrot, then what do you have?

It's a great point. That's really good.

You know, so, Daniel, through the. The link in the chat, if anyone wants to watch it, it's a great. It's a great TED Talk, but. All right, let's get into some tactical stuff. I found this funny. I almost deleted the slide, but, Dickie, you're on here. And George, you're on here. I'm sure these numbers are outdated. Both are crushing it. These were some of the things that we talked about. Dickie, this was your insanely viral thread doing 5 million. This was in your first, like, six months of writing on Twitter, too.

This just blows my mind. The scale of Twitter, when I pulled up this metric for the slide, I mean, to have something seen by 5 million people that when at the time I had 9,000 followers, just. It's absurd how these social networks work. And so, you know, you pull these things up and the ability for things to go viral that provide value organically, just absurd. So I saw this, and I was like, wow.

Yeah, this is. This is why we. We preach over and over again. You know, if you want to start writing online, don't start with a blog. A blog does not have the distribution flywheel that a social platform does. You know, no one knows your blog exists. This. This was another one. You know, 600,000 views. It's another 600,000. You've outdone these since then. We need to update the slides.

You've had bigger ones. Exactly, exactly.

So here's a couple. And, George, we pulled some of your examples, too. These are kind of the different pieces that we've thought about with threads. Would love to get your take also on how you assemble them, how you organize the information. But one of the big things is that we like to share is that, you know, there's essentially three different types of threads that we found that work really well. Ironically, the three examples, Dickie, that you pulled of George's, these were the three that you used.

Oh, I tried. I tried to find them.

Yeah. Okay, cool. So, yeah, the three are, you're either telling a story, you're giving a framework, or it's very actionable takeaways, very tactical, you know, do this, achieve this result. Um, there are threads that do all three combined, and there are threads that do each one separately. So we're going to walk through examples of each one, kind of break it down. But the big thing that we point out is it's this lead in tweet. The lead in tweet is essentially the make or break. It's what tells everyone this is what it's about, this is who it's for, and this is what you're going to.

Get out of it.

And if you aren't able to answer those three questions, then the reader is going to sit there and go, I don't know what this is. I don't know who, if it's for me, and I don't know what I'm going to get out of it. So, George, I'm curious, when you sit down to write your lead in tweets, are you thinking, how am I going to frame this for the reader? How am I going to hook it for them? What's your process there?

Yeah, it's a good question. Sometimes I think about it, sometimes I don't. Depends again, I'll have this. This duality of the art versus the growth. I'd say there's very, very easy ways of just being able to hook it. I think the shorter the writing, the better. I think the. I guess just the more it just made, like more makes somebody want to click through, the better. So it's just. There's not that much complexity. It's just you've always got to assume. And if you guys ever been on the. This is true of all social content, and it just also applies to Twitter threads. But when you're on in London, you've got the tube and you go up these escalators like that, and savvy marketers have figured out, okay, you just put ads here, right? And that's kind of what the social media news feeds like. If you ever watch people just scroll through, stop, scroll through, stop, scroll through, stop. So you're catching people usually at their worst when they're kind of tired after lunch, looking for a quick escape. And it's really interesting, just even from a growth perspective, you see people, when they design an advert, they're really happy with it. But then when I watch the adverts, they watch, it's completely Different. So you kind of, I think the first thing to do is just be mindful of your consumption. So when you're going through Twitter or any platform, just noticing what stops you. So even now, TikTok now, for example, as a platform, and I'll just notice the trends that stop me and then I go, okay, if it stops me, it probably works on other people. But instead people work from some kind of false ideal. Whereas if you just observe yourself, it's quite easy. And then if you just look at what Dickie mentioned earlier in one of his tweets, like the advanced search feature, if you just go for advanced search and then filter by somebody's most engaged tweets, you can kind of just see the data for itself. Like the science is there really. But again, I think you have to balance the science of the art because if you just become a regurgitation machine, it might work. But as you mentioned earlier, Nicholas, what's the point? So it is balancing those two things.

Yeah, we call, we call that, you know, being a, you're either a passive reader or an active reader. You know, you're either just passively scrolling or you're actively. It's, it's such an interesting thing because every person, you know, when we do these, these zooms and we talk to other people whose worker we respect and we're like, hey, you're crushing it. Let's, let's break down what works universally across the board. Everyone shares the same thing in common in terms of you're an active reader. We're all scrolling through like dissecting and learning and going, why did this work? Why did this work? And nobody that is kind of winning the game of writing online is a passive reader. They're all active readers. So I find that interesting.

And I think just one last point on the lead in is what's interesting about Twitter is you're competing with just other like bite sized content. Whereas, so that you have to focus on if, if what you've written is high quality. And the worst thing you could do is have a tremendous thread with no, just no effort at all into the lead in. And so no one's even going to read it. They're just going to scroll past and I mean you're competing with just the ability to keep going and have this depth of information all below that never gets seen. Kind of ups the ante for you to at least have some kind of incentive to write something compelling.

Yeah, yeah. George, you, the way that you structure your lead in tweets, I'm Excited to look at these because it's a little bit different. And stylistically it's different than I typically structure mine or Dickie, how you structure yours. But just to point out, you know, again, every reader has these same three questions. You know, what is this? What's it about? Who is it for? And what am I going to get in return? And so, just to point this out here, Dickie and yours, right? What is this about? It's about David Ogilvy's rules on writing. That's okay, cool. If I'm interested in that, I'm going to stop. If I'm not, I'm on to the next one. You want to force that binary decision. The second is, okay, well, who is this for? Right? Like, all right, if I'm interested in writing. And here, this is really interesting. It's framed in this story format. In 1982, David wrote an internal memo to the employees of his advertising agency titled how to Write. Right? So in not so many words, it's basically saying, hey, if you are interested in learning how to write, we're going to tell you from this credible person. And then the promise, right? What do you get in return as the reader? And in just 10 bullets, he put together a masterclass in effective writing. Here's a breakdown of each one. So what do you get? You get to learn the masterclass that David ogilvy gave in 1982. And that is going to teach you how to write. And so it's these three components. You know, George, I was looking through your threads. If you can get there in one sentence, great. If it takes you three or four different sentences, great. But it doesn't. It's not length or word count or anything like that that matters. It's just you have to answer those questions for the reader. Otherwise they go, I don't know why I should stop and give you my attention. So let's look at a couple examples here. These are just two of the different frameworks. I mean, this is super in the weeds that we talk about, but, you know, this ADA framework, how are you grabbing someone's attention? Hooking their interest, you know, peaking their desire. And then there's some sort of action. Here's what you're going to get in return. We're going to distribute these slides, if you want to go back and reference them, everyone. And then we've got this other framework as well, right? Problem, agitation, solution. This is very copywriting 101. You know, here's the problem. Twist the knife a little bit. Hey, this is this is what happens when you don't solve the problem, and then here's the solution. So that's. That can be another really great framework to look at as well. So, George, looking at this one, this thread I found fascinating. This is if you take the framework, right? So you see Sahil Bloom write about frameworks all the time. This is like a curation of all the frameworks. So you're like, hey, I'm not just going to break down one framework for you. I'm going to introduce you to a ton of different frameworks. So what, what sparked this thread? How did you get here? How did you think about it?

I wrote this one on a beach when I was bored. The honest answer. And I just, was thinking, I was just going through different raises of like, if this, then that. I was just kind of combining them all in my notes. And then the way it usually works is I have a couple ideas of just jotting shit in my notes all the time. And then I'll just. There'll be a loose, like, sentence there and I'll go, okay, can I turn this loose sentence into like seven or eight bullets? And then go, yeah. Okay. So you almost like imagine if you watch it, the way I describe it is I've never thought about that, this before, but imagine if you're watching the sort of Big Bang begin. So you kind of start. Or like the first ever organism. You start with one organism here, like a loose idea, and that kind of splits off into two. Or like, let's say you believed in the Christian model of Adam and Eve. So you've got Adam and Eve here. It just starts and then it kind of these two create two, which create more, and it just kind of then begins to interlink and then some just die out of evolution. But after a series of events, you've got a whole little world that exists. So this one is very much. I'll have like 10 different ideas of things I want to write about in there. And I go, right, there's this one here. Can I get like five or six bullets on that? And then those five or six bullets have five or six bullets. Some get killed, some keep developing. Sometimes I look at the whole thing and go, listen, this is an absolute mess. Let's put it in the bin and do something else. But. And then, and then that's how it kind of begins. So it's very, very rough to begin with. And then I kind of layer it on in terms of complexity. I find if I go and try and get something perfect to begin with, it's just. It just.

It just never works. Yeah, yeah. This is again, just kind of breaking this down tweet by tweet, right? What is this about simplifying decisions? If you're interested in simplifying decisions, here you go. Right. Who is this for? Well, if you want to learn how the best of the best simplified decisions, this is what you're interested in, Right? And what does the reader get in return? Hey, by the end of this, you're going to have 15 mental models, 15 frameworks to make better simplified decisions. Right. All of that's being communicated in that first thread. Very simple. I'm curious, George, if you do this too. We. We talk about this. Dick, you're talking about this in the last zoom we did, where, if you scroll down. What's interesting is just kind of looking broadly at the. The metrics here. So these three all got kind of similar engagement, almost exactly, which I find interesting. And then here, all of a sudden, this got 2000 more likes on this one razor. Right. And if we keep going, we probably have more data that we can play with here. So 5.2. These got less, you know, 1.9. Oh, this one got a little more 4.4. So do you ever look at this, George, and kind of go, okay, broadly, this topic's working. And then subtopic, hey, you know, a lot of people are interested in the bragging razor. I'm going to break that out and do a thread just on.

I should be.

That's a very good point. That's a very good point.

Yeah.

Because it is like little MVPs that you've built, right? And you can see already the engagement that's built in there. That's a very, very good point. Yeah.

I mean, Sahil Bloom's written probably 10, 20 threads on razors. What's so cool about this one is you basically were like, I'm going to figure out which ones are. Because he's probably spent some time on ones that did far less, you know, far fewer impressions or whatever you want to measure. But this is. It's a cool way of saying, what is the market really interested in? I'm going to test 15 of these and you have a bunch of different answers there. And I'd never heard of that. Bragging. That could be it too, Right? Like a bragging razor. You've almost coined that term, in a sense.

And what's interesting as well, going back to the art versus growth now, I look back at this quite a lot later down the line when I actually look Back at the stuff that I'm most proud of, rather than just the pure debt width metrics is the stuff where I put my own spin on it. So like for example, if you scroll down to Hofstadter's Law, like, this is great, but I mean, to be fair, this bit here, I have like every project costs two times as much and takes three times as long as. But just copying the law for the sake of it. Don't get me wrong, you can get a lot of engagement with that, but I massively prefer it in hindsight, when I've created my own things, like Elon's Law didn't exist, I was like, what's the opposite of that? And you kind of build on that. And I'd say going back to the debt versus WIP thing when you can. Don't get me wrong, the generic stuff will get the most amount of reach. But in hindsight, I'm a lot more proud of like the Elon's Law or the Bragging Razor or the Luck Raiser, because they wasn't just purely copy and paste jobs as much, if that makes sense. So that's really interesting looking back at it now, that I think the issue with a lot of the Twitter threads now is it's just purely just done for engagement. And don't get me wrong, I've done it. There's nothing wrong with that. However, I think in hindsight, if you can put a bit more spin on it and a bit more of your own personality through it, I think you looking back at it now, I think they're a lot better and I enjoy them a lot more when I've done that. So definitely advise that as well as I find that people message me a lot more going back to depth metrics about new ideas I've created as well. So that's definitely one thing I'd recommend.

Yeah, by far. I mean, with telling, trying to take the frameworks I want to talk about and then finding a personal story for my life for how I started to learn about it. And what I found is when I tell them through this personal story lens, the indicator that I've been using is just replies. The number of replies of people saying, whoa, this was such a cool story. Shows the intimate relationship you've built. Like I told one of three marketing frameworks I learned from running for class president. And that one, it didn't have the same kind of nuclear viral reach, but it felt so much better to say I've created something from scratch that resonated with people than Just like my David Ogilvy thread. There's really nothing new there, so it is interesting to think about that dynamic.

Yeah. I mean, that's. That's the ultimate goal, right? I mean, after. At least. That's kind of the point I've gotten to. You write a lot of viral things, and eventually you're like, okay, viral for the sake of. Viral is what. Right. The real goal is learning how to write things that can go viral. But you're ultimately kind of wanting to introduce people to the thing you really care about, you know? So, like, George, this is a great intersection, right? Where you're like, okay, I understand how to get a lot of reach out of this, but I'm going to introduce you simultaneously to my own thinking, because where your density is is people that go. George is going to curate all this interesting stuff for me. But I'm also really interested in how George thinks about this as well.

100%.

Yeah. I'm gonna ask a super dumb question, by the way, just so everyone sees how we're always in the learning. What the hell does this mean? I see this all. What does HT mean?

Hat tip. So, like, you're taking off your hat and tipping it.

Oh, my God.

It's like, where you got it from, Dude, I.

Seriously, for three months, I've been like. Like, it's gotta be some sort of ask. Yeah, it's one of those things no.

One knows but doesn't ask.

How's the ht?

Like, like, like originally found. Like, I was trying to figure out what it stood for. Thank you. So you guys were always learning out.

Here, like, tipping your heart, I think.

Got it. Hat tip. All right, now I'm gonna hat tip all over the place. Got it. Okay, so that's. That's one. Frameworks are great. I always like sharing with people. I think doing frameworks correctly is hard. You know, I think it's. It's a lot easier to start with curating frameworks from other people have spent their lifetime creating frameworks, and then once you kind of learn how frameworks work, you can create your own. But I find this is the bucket that is hardest for people to kind of learn how to do just whilst.

We'Re here as well. One of the. What's the. What's the three topics?

So we got Framework, Framework, Story, and Actionable Advice.

Actionable advice. One of the ones that you could. I'll send it to you afterwards. I found this one ages ago. I still think about this one years later, which goes through. It's a Good depth metric, where somebody. I forgot the exact context, but it was something along the lines of somebody in tech and they said, DM me. What? Like, what you're afraid to tweet? And they just kind of combine that into a thread of, like, what VCs and founders were afraid to tweet. And obviously you get some fake stuff in there. But, like, that was, like, one of the most interesting things I've ever read because you knew everything was done via the realm of anonymity. So I buy different creative ways of doing it as well. Find that one later. It's a really good example.

That's awesome. Yeah. It's crazy to me how much, you know, so much of this game is like, what lens are we going to look through? You know? And that's a perfect example of some person goes, I'm going to tweet a bunch of startup advice, right? And someone else changes the lens and goes, this is all the startup advice that everyone's afraid to share. I'm going to go and curate it. And that little tweak is the difference between, like, oh, that's interesting to. Oh, this is. I'm going to think about this five years later.

Interesting.

All right, next, one story I love. Did you read the book American Kingpin George?

I flicked through it. I. But I listened to. I'm more of a listener these days. I listen to the Silk Road podcast by True Crime. It was the best thing I've ever listened to. It was this Ozzy. I think it's Ozzy, the guy that narrates it. And it was like nine hours long. And I consumed it all, like a day. It was that good. And this story, I just kept saying it to people as I've got to do something, because it didn't seem to be a big story. I couldn't get over how it wasn't a bigger story. And I just felt it was just. It encapsulated a lot of my thoughts on just using Google. And I just felt absolutely nothing out there that talked about using Google. I still think there's probably something that. I don't know how you do it, but there's something there of teaching people how to Google shit. And this, for me, was like the craziest story. For people who are not aware, Silk Road, the biggest online drugs marketplace, probably the main thing that kind of catapulted bitcoin into the mainstream, where people could buy. Good job, it's in front of me here. Could buy magic mushrooms, heroin, AK47s, et cetera, and the FBI couldn't catch him, the DAA couldn't catch him. And you're talking about two of the best drug enforcement agencies in the world with billions of dollars of resources, the best technology in the world, et cetera. But one kind of tax inspector on Google was just started going back through old forums, tried to find the oldest post, and then the oldest post had, that was on like a bitcoin forum, was talking about this Silk Road site. And it was actually the founder of the site doing kind of a pseudo post, trying to advertise it for the first time. And when they contacted the forum, they found the email that was associated with it and it was RossalBrittmail.com and for me, I was just still amazed that was possible. And that's why I had to write that one. It's the same. I had another one, which was the Francis and Garni one. When I think there's stories that it's not even for me at that point, it's more like this just story even. I don't care if all I'm doing right now is just collating somebody else's story and trying to get it out there. I was like, this is so good.

It just has to.

It just has to exist at scale. If it means I've got to make it a bit more clickbaity and give it more reach than I have to, because it was just that good.

Yeah, you said. I mean, one interesting thing that I just like pointing out, because we talk about data driven writing all the time, like we did in your last thread, right? You have data saying, people are most interested in this razor. You should break this out, turn into its own thread. You basically told this story to call it 10 people in your life. And all of the data points, or the majority of the data points were like, that's fascinating, right? So you're.

What was weird, though, was the dichotomy between that and then just it. Not really getting the pickup. Even like the YouTube video I found didn't get as many views and it was like, it just didn't. I was just more angry at the world that it wasn't a bigger story because I was like, this is the easiest story I've ever heard. It felt like you'd stumbled upon a secret. So sometimes you get data, but sometimes, like, it's the Peter Thiel thing, like where you feel like you've stumbled. I mean, you could argue this wasn't an exact secret in that case, but it felt like a secret relative to how many articles were written about it. I was like, you know what? There's no data on this, but the data right now is me. And again, going back to the science versus the art side of stuff, like, when do you go the date with the crowd, but versus when you go the data of, like, what you can see yourself. And sometimes the hedge is actually better when it's your. If you're. If you're so certain on it and the crowd isn't really talking about it that much, then it's kind of. There's actually quite a good arbitrage opportunity there. Don't get me wrong. It's probably less consistent than the data. Like, the data is always going to be sort of seven, eight, out of tens. But I found this one. There was very little data, but the. But I was like, as myself as a data point. It was so valuable. So it was. Again, there's different hats for going back to the hat tip metaphor to where depending on the context of what you're trying to produce.

Yeah, there's a. The hero's journey here. I just want to point this out because this is really important. You know, had you just said how one guy achieved more than the entire FBI, I think that that would have been too vague. You know, readers would have been like, achieved. What are we even talking about here? Right? So going Back to the 3. What is this about? Who is this for? What do they get in return? So it's this piece, right, where all of a sudden you're like, what could possibly be achieved with Google search? Like, and then immediately I imagine just someone sitting at home on their couch on their laptop, and it's like, wait, you have the power to do more than the entire FBI? What's going to happen here? So you're kind of teasing the beginning of the story and the end of the story. You're creating this thing we call the curiosity gap. And then you go, hey, this is super underrated. This is another key word is. This is an amazing story, but it's not getting enough attention. So I'm going to tell you.

So what's really interesting about this is I've never thought about it like that. You're so. You're so spot on. But I'd say with the writing, the first tweets as well. I don't know about you, Dickie, but I'll always write the whole thing. I'll have like a loose placeholder for the first one, and then I'll write the whole thing, and then I'll go back to the actual original Tweet and then just chip that one away. And then I get it and it's just like, can I remove any words here? Can I remove any words here? And as soon as I felt there's enough, like there's no more words to remove, then I've got it. But that's always. This is always the last thing I would do is the first tweet.

Same exact thing with me. I almost find it harder to, to write that first tweet. And the rest I'm like. Because it takes more thinking. Because you do have to be a little bit more tactful. Because I'm confident that any thread that I write, the, you know, 10 tweets that come after the lead in, I know what I'm going to say. And if someone's reading that, they're going to find it interesting, right? If someone gets into this story, they're going to read the whole story. So it takes less. It's just a completely different way of thinking. So I just, I would like brain dump some bullet points on the intro tweet and then write the whole thing and then come back in a workshop with Cole or something like that to try and figure it out because it's just more difficult. It's like a different, different writing skill entirely.

Yep. I love this.

I.

And I'm right there with you, George. I read American Kingpin, which is the book on this. I literally read the whole thing in like 12 hours. Like just it. I just snorted that. It was so good. So good. So sometimes the best stories are the ones that you find yourself just devouring and then you're like, I gotta tell this to someone.

What? I find some of the best content I find now. So this kind of goes a bit high level, right? Like, not just how do you write it, but how do you get interesting shit to write? And I found when I try and just get. When I'm trying to make myself write interesting shit, it never works. But there's something to be said about. I find just searching for random topics. So even like YouTube, you got the YouTube, you get a Chrome extension where you can hide the home feed. Often the best content I've found is when I'm using a search engine, ironically in this case, versus just waiting for the algorithm to serve me shit. Because the issue with the algorithm is it just serves you the same, particularly YouTube. There was a point I think went before Rogan moved to Spotify. Still to some extent now my whole homepage feed. I love Joe Rogan. It was just all Joe Rogan I say, even if I'm eating kale every day, like, this is just. There's just no variance in my diet. So again, you have to going back to like with the depth metrics where you have to create this for yourself. I find with finding interesting content, don't wait for an algorithm to do it for you. Try and figure out ways that you can do it for yourself. So in my case, some of the biggest stuff now is I'll literally sit there. I don't do this enough, but I'll sit there sometimes and I'll blank out the YouTube home feed and I'll be like, what do I want to think about? And you actually get. When you just start putting in topics, you go, what about this? Or somebody mentioned this the other day, you put it in, you find content that never would have found you just from the algorithm and create the algorithm yourself. And again, I think 10 years from now, this will be a thing I found recently I searched ice baths and there was this lady who lives the craziest life in Nordic Sweden, who's escaped the city and she lives 100 miles from nowhere and she's got millions of YouTube subscribers. I'll try and again, I'll try and find the YouTube video in a second. But it is. And she literally goes underwater. Her morning routine takes ice baths. This video had about 20 million views.

But it was never.

And I think these algorithms are so like the same way we're talking about using them. They're so dangerous if you're not having agency over them.

Absolutely.

And I've been starting to say that great writing is a byproduct and not a result. And it's a byproduct of your information streams at this point. Right. If you are constantly feeding information that is going to get you to think. And it takes so much more effort than anyone really wants to put in to generate like a stream of information that's delivering you high quality. It takes hours to make Twitter lists or newsletter filters that send you the right information. But that's the reason it's like arbitrage. If you can master these platforms to deliver you the high quality stuff, you're going to accelerate versus if you just sit on the drip of it, you're going to kind of end up like everyone else spends too much time on it.

Out of interest, what's been the highest value thing for yourself, Dickie, in terms of like doing that? Like from a Pareto perspective, like the.

So for me it's having Twitter lists for each interest and Using tweetdeck and so having all of them like very intentionally scrolling one list. When I want to explore something, I've been using Mail Brew, which is this. You know, it's like a. You create your own newsletter and it lets you pull in RSS feeds from different blogs. You can pull in tweets from certain lists ranked by popularity. So I have like a crypto Mail Brew that pulls in all the Latest headlines from CoinDesk and CoinMarketCap and all this other stuff. Same with the Twitter list, same with the newsletters. And I think having one of those for all the information that you want to consume consistently. Um, and then it just takes effort to prune it. Take you. You have to update the list over time. It's just not easy. But I think we'll get there eventually. Where it's. I would love someone to do information as a service and not just curation newsletters but like because then it's. They still have a filter on it more just like I'm going to set up some stream that is objectively pretty good and you can have access to it and it pulls from these 15 sources and trusted people. Like I think curation newsletters are going to go away. But just curation where you can tap into someone's information sources is going to be even better.

100%. Yeah. Especially if you can then have them put their own like spin on it a little bit as well. Even one of the things that I.

Thought would be cool.

There's people doing this now, but where you've got like a private telegram group of some sort of. And just different. So let's say for example, Dickie, you could be posting in a write this article I've read. Here's the brief summary. Here's a conversation I've just had with Nicholas. Here's a key takeaway that I think would be very, very interesting. One of the best things I've ever had is different. I don't use tweetdecker Twitter list. I might experiment with it actually. But just creating folders in my Chrome browser of different topics and then I'll actually go to the individual's account and I'll scroll through. So I kind of get that individual blasted at once and then another individual blasted at once. I find that really, really useful.

You know, real and real quick. We'll go to the last one here. But in terms of stories, I mean think about how much potential there is to take. You do a little digging, but think of all the stories that haven't really been Digitized yet. Like, think of all the stories that are in books or in. Are in old recordings or are buried somewhere on the Internet that haven't been refreshed in today's. How we read today. Like, there's all this opportunity for writers to just go do a little bit of digging. Dickie, your Ogilvy thing is a perfect example. Right? That book was written or whatever. That. That memo was written 40 years ago, 50 years ago, right? So just going, Doing some digging, taking it, refreshing it, putting it into a Twitter thread. A lot of people go, hey, thanks so much. That book's out of print. I don't have it anymore. Right. You just change the format. So there's just so much opportunity out there. It's such a great time to be a writer. All right, last one. Actionable takeaways. These, I find, are the easiest, which means they're also the most overused as well. I see them all the time on Twitter. But if you can do it well, the actionable takeaways is super powerful. Dickie, you do this all the time. I do this all the time. George, this thread that you wrote was great. Talk about this. Is this. How does this compare to writing stories for you and doing frameworks? How do you think about this kind of bucket of things?

So this is like. It's really weird to describe this, but I'll give it a go. This one requires quite a lot of context. So when I first did this, this wasn't as big of a thing of, like, finding somebody and compiling them was the first thing. This is still like. And it doesn't sound that long ago, but it's like over a year and a bit ago. And since then, that's become a more and more prominent thing. I'm sure you can see a map of Twitter threads. This is very early on, and at the time, Toby Lutke was very less well known. Shopify was less well known. I think it might be pulling, but less well known as a company. So I wouldn't write this again now, but it worked perfectly at the time. But now I feel this is way overdone. Yeah, it's again, very hard to verbalize that. But just from experience, this works insanely well. At the time because of the two things. One, it was less well done, and two, not as many people knew who Toby was. I think it was like one of the first bits of public right about him at scale like this, because it even got retweeted by him at the time. Whereas I think if you did it again now, he wouldn't retweet it profile. So there's some bit of nuance there that could easily get missed here. But I'd essentially say I found somebody who was relatively obscure. I mean, still the CEO shopper, he's still a billionaire. Right. But at the time, relatively so. And it was quite a new format at the time. So even there's a similar one I did, which was about Josh Waitzkin, who's like, I'd probably say is a very similar one to this one, where he wasn't as well known. And then you kind of blow them up. But you can essentially. It's similar to the Google story. If you find a very obscure individual that you find insanely interesting and insightful, it's almost like you found something before anybody else. You can essentially assume if the data is saying yes for you, it's probably going to say yes for a lot of people. So this one, there wasn't really any data, apart from the fact that I loved it. So I've rambled on a little bit there. But there's a bit of nuance behind this one.

No, I think there's a couple points. I remember seeing this early on as like, the very first. Here's a thinker and here's everything I've learned from him. And what I also think is cool about this, and I bet you felt it as you were writing it, it was almost a forcing function for you to say, I really like this guy. I've learned a lot from him, but I haven't crystallized all the things that I've actually learned. So I'm going to use this as a forcing function where if no one even reads this, I'm going to be smarter as a result. But I get the free upside of putting it online versus just taking notes on the podcast I've listened to on Toby Lucan. Right?

100%.

Yeah. The key that I find with actionable takeaway threads or actionable takeaway articles, whatever it is, is you pick one central focus. So here it's thinking clearly, right? And then the credibility is, well, okay, so who are we learning this from? So it's thinking clearly from Toby. Toby Ludke. And then now we're going to break out thinking clearly into a bunch of different things. And that I find when people do these lists, just something, you know, for everyone to think about is if you're trying to curate lots of different ideas, it's confusing to the reader. You need to orient it to a North Star. And you're like, this is about clear thinking. Now, clear thinking principle one, clear thinking principle two, clear thinking principle three. That's what makes it easy for the reader to go, oh, you're giving me a ton of value because it's oriented to this North Star. If you don't orient it to a North Star and they're like, here's just a bunch of interesting things I learned from Toby, then the audience is more like, all right, I don't really know what the point of this is. If I'm interested in Toby, sure, I find this interesting. If I'm not, then I don't find it as interesting. So clarifying that what is this about is really the key.

But my advice, yeah, that fantastic. In terms of the direction and my advice as well would be try and pick somebody who's less well known. So again, this one, at the time, he wasn't as well known. He's way more well known now. So it kind of feels like I'm contradicting my advice. But you can easily do like, you see these all the time now. It's just like top 20 naval piece of advice. And he may go viral, but it's like nobody's going to really connect the dots with you there. They're just literally looking at naval. And you may get a few novel fans that just auto follow. But if you. Then let's say, for example, I can see that post, I may like it, I may follow you as a result, but it's very low content. Whereas if you told me about some individual I've never heard of. So like for example, this, this time at the time it was less well known. Or the Google search one. I think there's just so much value difference there. Even though they have the same morality potential is a lot more depth potential.

Yeah. And any. I totally agree. Looking for like unconventional, little known, you know, weird, unique. Like, oh, people haven't heard of this before. Those, those make for the best pieces. And if you do pick those things, like you said Shopify, Shopify and Toby were a little less well known. Maybe you could have even taken this and said, toby's the CEO of Shopify. You know, what many people are calling the next Amazon or something to add in that credibility. So someone goes, oh, I don't know what Shopify is, but you just described it for me.

If you go on quickly, if you go on the search function, search georgemac and then search wait Z, K, I, N. This is, this is a really example, this one, I think, I think if you click on the first one, then just scroll your way up in a white space. Functioning here, I'd say this is my favorite one. Yeah. Again, might be the most. Again, I probably should have done caps. In hindsight, it's a very aggressive. Might be the most interesting person alive. He doesn't have Twitter and he barely uses the Internet. I compiled my 5 minutes models of his below, Fred. This one is like, yes, like, somebody might be the most interesting person alive. You probably never heard of them. I find that is you can still get the hook, the viral hook, but you're providing so much more value to the reader. It's going to take harder work to find obscure people. But I think that I remember the quality of people that retweeted this one and reached out to me was so much higher. And I have to say that because you can only see the front end metrics, you've got to hear about the backend metrics as well. So the backend metrics of this was fantastic. So, yeah, really advise if you're going down the story of route, find a story that nobody's ever heard of rather than just a popular story.

I wonder if you could have pushed this even one step further and said, he doesn't have Twitter and he barely uses the Internet. And I'm going to butcher the specifics, but you say, and he barely uses the Internet, but he's one of the greatest chess champions in history. And right. Immediately after became. It was jiu jitsu or something, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Push hands. Tai chi. Push hands.

Yeah. But, yeah, it was. I could definitely could have done that in hindsight, but the issue with Josh is, like, if you try. Even on this one here, I tried to compile it into, like, a secondary, and you can't.

There's just too much.

Too many fucking things. So, yeah, yeah, it's an interesting one.

Well, I want to. I want to be respectful of your time, George. And selfishly, I got to be respectful to mine because I'm late for a call. But this is awesome. Like, I love jamming with you about this. Like, this is a lot of fun and I'm sure a lot of these threads are helpful to other people as well. So appreciate you making the time and coming to share your knowledge.

No worries at all. Thank you for having us, man. It's been fun.

Cool.

All right, everyone, we'll send a replay recap to all this. I got tons of new takeaways. So, George, thanks again for coming on and we'll distribute all this.