MFM #162: Why Clubhouse Will Fail

My favorite kind of podcaster content person out there DM'd me and was like, this is a fucking great thread. And I was like blown away that this guy wrote this. And then CNBC was like, hey, would you like to do this? Some German news station was like, will you come on and talk about it? And I was like, wow, this is unbelievable what could happen with just a random-ass tweet. Yeah.

I feel like I could rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel. Never looking back. How many, uh, people did your tweet reach?

How many people did my tweet reach?

Yeah, so go to Twitter and then click Insights and then look at Reach. I'm gonna guess 5 million.

Okay, let's give it a shot. Uh, so it has 13,000 likes and yeah, almost 5 million, 4.8 million impressions.

Wow. And who all, who are some of the more interesting people who reached out to you? Well, first, what, what did you— what happened here for the listeners?

Okay, so what happened, um, I went on Twitter and I wrote a thread. I wrote a thread about Clubhouse, and the thread starts basically saying, you know, everybody seems to think that Clubhouse is the next big thing, and, um, I think it's gonna fail, and here's how I think it's gonna go down. And then I wrote it in this way that's a little bit like goofy. I kind of went over the top. I just, I was like, all right, you're the CEO, like, first of all, congrats champ, you did it, you know. And I walked through like the high that they're on right now because everything's going great and everybody thinks it's the hot shit. And then like where things might start to go wrong and what, what might go wrong based on, you know, the way that the product is set up, the nature of that product and all that good stuff. And so that, uh, that was a thread. I put it out there. I thought it was going to flop because right away nothing happened. Usually you could tell, you know this, you could tell pretty quickly within a couple of minutes if your tweet's going to get any action or not. It didn't look like it was going to get any action. Then the first reply was this guy being like, "Dude, this is way too effing long. What are you doing?" The way he said it, I assumed some people would say this is super long because it's like, I don't know, 50 tweets or something crazy. Um, but when he was like, what are you doing? I felt super embarrassed and I was like, shit, let's just delete this, this is stupid. And then I just like let it ride for a few more minutes and then, uh, it took off. And now some crazy shit's happening and like I'm going on CNBC tomorrow to talk about it. So all kinds of crazy stuff has happened.

You're going on CNBC tomorrow?

Yeah.

I wonder if it's the same person who invited Trung on. So you're the second person associated with the company who's been on in the past 2 weeks?

I'm hot on Trung's heels. I saw him on last week talking about, uh, Cathie Wood and ARK and stuff like that, and he was great. So if I can do half as good as he did, I'll be in good shape.

And who else reached out to you? Can you say? You told me a couple.

Uh, yeah, I mean, okay, so I can't say all the names. I'll say— well, okay, so first I started getting mentioned, uh, by a bunch of cool people. So like the guy who started YouTube was like, dude, this is fucking hilarious, like I love this. And then So a bunch of people who have started big companies kind of were saying something. And I started getting DMs from people. And I kind of went to sleep. At first, I was refreshing for like 4 hours because I couldn't stop. I was mid-workout and then between sets, I would go check my Twitter. It was kind of annoying. And Sony was like, what the hell are you doing? What is this? And I was like, I don't know. I'm obsessed. I really just want to see. I would pull the refresh thing and then a different kind of Famous person who I look up to was usually saying, "This is awesome," or something like that. So that was kind of addictive. I went to sleep and I woke up the next day and so in my inbox is an offer for a book deal. A famous movie director who directed a bunch of movies that we've heard of wrote, "Dude, amazing storytelling." Found my email address and emailed me that. I think I could say it. He's the director of Space Jam 2 and a whole bunch of famous movies. And then I don't know if I could say this one, but my favorite kind of podcaster content person out there DM'd me and was like, "This is a fucking great thread." And I was like blown away that this guy wrote this. And then CNBC was like, "Hey, would you like to do this?" Some German news station was like, "Will you come on and talk about it?" And I was like, "Wow, this is unbelievable what could happen with just a random-ass tweet." How long did it take you to write? Not even a good one, really. It took me an hour. I sat down and I started. So the way this played out actually was I had already believed this, but I thought, okay, that's not cool. Like nobody thinks it's cool to just say, oh, a startup is gonna fail. Well, duh, most startups fail. So like there's nothing that original there. But because I had built a product very similar to Clubhouse, I kind of knew what the challenges are gonna be and where they might get tripped up or what's gonna be really hard for them. And so I thought, well, I kind of feel like I know the product strategy here, but like, that's kind of a, if I just write about the product decision, like some of the product challenges and the product strategy, that's a pretty boring tweet storm. Nobody's gonna really care. So when I ended up writing it, I wrote it like an episode of Silicon Valley. Affect Erlich's ability to jerk different dicks simultaneously?

Shit.

Yeah, I think it would. Like the HBO show, like I basically wrote it in that style. Like I wrote like, you know, okay, you know, Emily Chang invites you on to, you know, whatever, CNBC, and to do an interview, you know, you wear your visionary gray V-neck shirt, you go on and you say this, this, and this. And so I was just kind of writing like a goofy style. I wasn't just writing information. I was trying to entertain a little bit. And then Emily Chang replies to the thing being like, you know, I can't confirm or deny this, but this is on point. And, um, so all kinds of crazy stuff was happening. But yeah, it took me about an hour and then I just hit publish.

And you got like 30,000 followers from it. Congratulations. Or 20,000 maybe.

Yeah, dude, that's the way that Twitter works though, is like, you think it goes against like all the conventional good advice, which is just like, you know, be consistent, put out content all the time, and like, you know, try to like hit a bunch of singles. And like what I found, and I think— I don't know, you tell me if you found this too— which is like It's just like 5 tweets that grew me from 20K to 120K.

5 tweets.

Everything else was the cost of doing business.

It's the hits business. Yeah, it is.

It's totally the hits business.

And so summarize this actually. I believe you asked me to ask you to summarize this. Your bear case for Clubhouse, 'cause we're actually gonna use this probably for one of our Twitter videos.

Okay, all right. So, all right, so let me, okay, we gotta get the video guys. Video guys, this is the part you're gonna edit. All right, here we go. Um, so everybody's saying that Clubhouse is the next big thing. You're hearing about it all the time. They went, you know, from a test— I think they were in test flight and they raised at a billion dollar valuation, which is kind of crazy. The Apple—

no, they were in test flight and they raised at $100 million.

But it's right, but now they're at a billion dollar valuation. It hasn't been long. They're still iOS only, still pretty exclusive. You can't even— you can't even join the app unless you have an invite. And so, um, but I see the other side of it. I think that they're gonna fail. I hope they don't fail. I think the world is more fun if they win. It would be awesome if they win. But I don't think me wanting them to win doesn't mean that that's what's going to happen. I said in the Twitter thread, if me wanting something to happen would happen, then every bag of chips would come with guac. But that's just not the way life is. And so, okay, so here's how it works. Pretend you're the CEO of Clubhouse, Sam. First of all, you fucking did it. You made it. People actually like the thing you made. They don't even like it. They love it. And, uh, you know, you check your DMs and Chris Sacca is in your DMs. He says, dude, congrats, this thing is, this thing is kick-ass. And, uh, you know, Naval is liking your tweets and Keith Rabois is basically saying like, this isn't shit. Uh, you know, this is not garbage. And so you take that as a huge compliment as it is. And it feels like every day you open up the app and like a new star is coming on the platform. Like first kind of like just tech dork stars, like, you know, the Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, people that we like, but they're kind of niche in our, in our circles. And then it'll expand, and all of a sudden you'll get, you know, NBA players coming on, you know, famous musicians. Logan Paul will come on. And then this was the most liked tweet in the thing, was I said, you know, Gary Vee realizes that you've created a new place to yell, and he starts telling everybody, hey, if you really want to make money, go move back in with your parents and sell their furniture on Craigslist. And, uh, so every life is good, right? You get a term sheet, you're valued at a billion dollars, and you're doing interviews about, and you gotta kind of ham it up, right? Because you can't just say, oh, I made this app where you can go in chat rooms and talk to people. That doesn't sound very, very fancy. So you try to play it simple, but you talk really fancy. You say things like, this is a serendipity network. This is not just chat rooms. This is audio escapism. This is, you know, then you start saying like historical shit. Like you're like, humans have been talking to each other since the dawn of time, around the, you know, around the campfire and audio is so powerful because you could see your tone and texture. And so you're going on the media tour and then like you get back to your computer one day and you look at the charts and the graph doesn't look as, you know, as uppy and to the righty as it's supposed to be. And so you're like, what's wrong with this thing? You refresh and still the growth is kind of flat, maybe even declining. And you start to look a little deeper and what you'll find if you're the CEO of Clubhouse is, After about, you know, a year into the product, you see that retention is not so good. It's not as good as it used to be in the early days. And, you know, why is that the case? And what will happen is that you'll realize that Clubhouse is used for two totally different things. There's two ways that Clubhouse can be used. If you talk to users or you watch them, you'll see these two things. Number one, it's a place to create content. And number two, it's a place to just chill, just to go hang out with other people and have conversations. And so content is what we see all the time on there. It's panels, it's fireside chats, Q&As, AMAs. And it's like, oh, this is content. This is like the next YouTube. It's where you go, you make content, people consume it. You know, and the problem is that a lot of the content, like on YouTube, is just like, meh, you're right, 98% of the content is junk. And that's okay. That's the same for every platform. You just need to find that gold. And there is gold on Clubhouse, right? If you watch the Good Time show or the NYU girls who go on there and they have that show called Shoot Your Shot, that is gold. But you, and so you wanna triple down on that. You're like, guys, this is what we need to double down on. How do we make this, how do we get more gold content? And you tell the whole team, we're gonna go get more gold content. And so the engineers, they go start building features for content creators. They build like a scheduling feature and Q&A tools and like a monetization features where you can make money from your fans. And the creators are happy, but the retention stays bad. And what you realize when you talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about here is that there's this like problem called the interestingness problem, which is that when you open up an app, there's one metric that matters called TTF. And TTF is time to fun. How long does it take me to have some fun inside this app? Get some dopamine. And all the great apps, within 7 seconds. If you open TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, in 7 seconds, you're gonna get something juicy, you're gonna get fun. And, um, and you know, the way those apps do it is they have billions of pieces of content to choose from, and the algorithm knows, okay, this is the most liked content the last 24 hours, so it shoves it in your feed. And when you open the app, it's going to show you something great, right? TikTok calls this the For You page because it's, here's the best stuff for you. And that's why TikTok is so addictive. Every time you open it, you get something great. But for Clubhouse, you know, you tell your engineers, hey, that's what we need, make an algorithm that will do that. And the engineers, you know, they sit you down in a chair and they'll say, "Okay, we're gonna do our best, but just so you know, it doesn't, like, it's one thing to just find what's interesting, but we have to find what's interesting and is being created live right now." And when you multiply those two things together, it doesn't become twice as hard, it becomes 200 times as hard to find interesting content when you open the app. And so what happens is most people will download this app, they heard about Clubhouse, they heard it's cool, They'll open an app and whatever's on right then, they'll walk into the first room and it'll be kind of boring. It'll be kind of meh. And then they'll walk into a second room and then within 30 seconds, like, why the hell am I here? This app is stupid. They'll close the app and they'll probably never come back. And so they'll get a bunch of downloads, a bunch of signups, and then, but they'll all just be leaking out the bottom of the bucket. And so, you know, you're the CEO and so you're like, oh, okay, yeah, live is harder. I get it. But Twitch did it. Twitch is live and look at that, they got, you know, hundreds of millions of users. So clearly it can work. You guys, the engineers, you guys just need to make it happen. And then, you know, the product manager or the engineers will come back to you and they'll say, well, Twitch is a little different, right? Because on Twitch, the great content creators are creating about 40 hours a week of content. They stream every day, 6 to 8 hours a day, and they're playing a game so they can do that. They can play a game for 6 hours straight and just talk while they're doing it. It's hard, but it's not anywhere near as hard as just opening Clubhouse and being entertaining for 6 hours straight while talking. Maybe some radio hosts can do that, but the average person cannot. And then the second thing they'll say is like, also, you know, almost all the content on Twitch is about gaming. So as a viewer, if I come on there, maybe one creator's not live, but another Fortnite creator is live or another Fortnite creator is live. It's like density around one passion, whereas Clubhouse is every category. Some people come there for music talk, some for sports, some for tech. And so if I'm a sports person and I see a tech room, that's of zero value to me. So Twitch is vertical, Clubhouse is horizontal. This is going to be really hard to get great content in every category. And so, you know, I kind of fast forward and, you know, okay, this is tough. And, um, you know, your meeting ends, the next meeting engineers leave, next meeting is the biz dev guys. Biz dev guys come in and the biz dev guys are like, you know, what do you want us to do, boss? And you say, you need to go get great content, go get all the stars, we got all this money in the bank, go, go pick, cut some checks, Let's get some star creators on the platform. And you'll go to people who have, who have a big audience. You go to podcasters, right? You go to people like us. And then we're going to say, okay, so if I could spend an hour on Clubhouse and get, I don't know, 2,000, 3,000 people in the room, that's good, right? But like, if I just record a podcast, I'm going to reach 300,000 people with that. So why am I, why would I ever make this trade? Why would I go live here when I go live there, right? When I could just record my podcast. So you're the CEO, you say, all right, that's a tricky problem, but maybe you could do both, right? Why do you have to choose? Do your show live on Clubhouse and we'll add a recording feature so that you could just make a podcast out of it later. You can have your cake and eat it too. And so you do that and some creators start to use it, but you realize there's a big problem with that, which is as soon as you start to like let people record and the core thing becomes, I'm recording my podcast here, I'm just doing a live version that will turn into my podcast or turn into a YouTube video. Well, then this live thing becomes a second-class citizen, and I stop letting guests hop on my Clubhouse room and chat with me because I don't know what the hell they're going to say. It's unpredictable. And you know what makes for a great live session is that spontaneity, but that makes for a shitty recording. And so, um, you know, that's, that's another trap there. So, okay, you finally, you have an emergency team meeting. You say this whole content thing sucks, um, you know, we, we only have a few pieces of great content, only a few hours a week for every vertical. This is going to be impossible to do in every category. That's like recreating all of TV and that's just really hard to do, you know? And I'm tired of all these people on there doing shows and Q&As and these success coaches trying to manifest millionaires and all this bullshit. You know, what is this, Discord for douchebags? Like, screw shows. We need a new plan and we got— we're going to Plan B. Plan B is chillin', right? This is a social network. It's not a performance network. You come here to socialize, you come here to just talk to other people. That's the most human thing in the world. 7 billion people on Earth talk to their friends. This is what, you know, this is what we'll do here. Um, and you know, you, you, you ask people who had a great experience so far on Clubhouse, the people who think it's amazing, like our, you know, our friend Narendra, or, you know, different people who have really enjoyed their experience, and you ask them why, and they'll say, well, I came on and I was, I was in this room where this really cool thing happened, and Marc Andreessen was there, and then this guy was there, and then, you know, I went into a side room and I met a bunch of other cool people in the tech world, and We got along great. I made a bunch of new friends. And you say, all right, that's what we're going to do. And, and sure enough, that actually solves your retention problem because people will come here. It will solve loneliness. People will come here, they'll hang out and they'll make friends. But all of a sudden your growth will stall, right? Because if I'm coming here to make friends and I'm not bringing friends to the platform, that's kind of the rub there, right? So any platform where the value prop is to make friends, I'm not going to bring friends. So now you have sticky retention, but now you have no growth. And in the other world, you had fast growth but no retention. And so you're stuck in this catch-22. And, um, you know, so then, you know, just to kind of round it out, you eventually get disillusioned. You realize this shit's not going to work. You try to pivot. You eventually sell the company to Facebook. You spend a year as the manager of Facebook Voice, and then you quit. You go, you travel in Southeast Asia for a year, you do some ayahuasca, and you vow to yourself, I'm only going to ever work in enterprise SaaS again. You know, screw this social thing. And, uh, so that's my story, uh, over the top. I hope I'm wrong, but I think that's how it's going to play out.

And I think a lot of people who are hating on you didn't realize that this is the life that you led.

Yeah, yeah. Some people are like, wow, that's really detailed, where this— where's this coming from? And some people are like, dude, that's way over the top. And I'm like, dude, I built this before. Like, we built an app so similar to this, it grew to 4 million users, and Tony Robbins was using it, and ESPN was using it, and the Jonas Brothers and then Oracle was using it. And then some of the tech guys and the 37signals guys were using it and it was awesome. Product Hunt was using it. And then we get to 4 million members and we just started to see these same issues and we tried everything to fix it. And I hope these guys find the solution that we missed or maybe the world has changed or there's some differences. But the reason I, this was 70% my experience, 30% fantasy that I wrote this thing with.

I guess we're gonna have to check in on this podcast in like maybe 1 year. I bet, I think we'll see how things shake out in about 12 months.

Yeah, and I guess like the more interesting part that I wanted to talk to you about was, okay, so first of all, creating something that goes viral is such a crazy feeling and you've done it a ton. I mean, you built The Hustle with a bunch of really viral blog posts. Like this is kind of nothing in comparison to the blog posts you guys wrote. And also you're a writer, so you kind of have a process where you sniff out stuff that you think is going to go viral. Whereas for me, I'm not really a writer. This is kind of me just trying.

I mean, you, you, you have the it factor. I think that, um, I think you can study and how to do it. I think that you can just be born with the skill set. Um, I think you and I are quite similar in that it's both born, or we, we have that natural gift and also we learn and master the craft, right?

I think you've tried it a lot more and therefore your hit rate, I think, is higher. Personally, I just think that. But the question I was gonna ask you is—

I mean, dude, you got to 120,000 followers on Twitter in like basically 6 months.

Yeah, that's true. So I wanted to share. So when I— so the way this came about, because I think this is ultimately more interesting, right? The rant is kind of interesting, but the how this happened, I think for people who are listening, they'll probably find it I think they'll find it interesting. The way this started was a pretty high-profile VC person called me one day. I had never met them before. They had said, "Oh, you seem interesting on Twitter. I'd love to meet." So we did a phone call and then we were talking just about each other's backgrounds. It was cool. And then they were like, "Well, what do you think of Clubhouse, by the way? I got to ask." And I think they asked this because they had looked at investing. They ultimately didn't invest and they were trying to figure out, is this going to haunt me? For the next 5 years that I missed this deal, or is this going to be a good one and a good pass? And I basically just went on this rant on the phone about this. It just kind of came out of my mouth just the way I kind of explained it here and without the whole kind of dramatized TV show script, but just the reasons why I think it's going to struggle. And they were like, wow, that was great. That was amazing. And I was like, shit, I should have wrote that down. That was like That would have, um, I feel like that would have been like a good like piece of content. And so I went in, I kind of like quickly was like, I gotta go, and I hung up the phone and I went to my computer and I just typed the whole thing out. And, um, and it turned into— and then I was like, okay, whatever. I kind of edited, I took it out, I did your, your tip, which is I took a break for an hour. Yeah, just went and did something else, came back, and I edited it for about 30 minutes.

Editing is the magic to everything. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a viral tweet, a good email, editing is the magic. They say write drunk, edit sober.

Oh, that's a great one. I've never heard that. I love that. I think Ernest Hemingway said it. I used to just edit in the moment, like I'd write it and I'd be like— No, no, no, no, no. And that was a mistake. The tip you gave me a while back was go do other shit. Let it simmer in your head while you do other things. Don't even actively think about it. By the time you come back, you can make it twice as good in 20 minutes. Yeah.

And there's actually some science behind it. I can't tell you the exact science off the top of my head, but basically, you know how there's like a shower thought? Yeah, of like not doing it. So there's like science behind like doing something really hard and then not doing it, and then things hit you. Uh, there's science behind why that works, and that's kind of what you're doing.

Yeah, basically like the brain relaxes in some way, and then when it relaxes, it's able to be creative in a new way. And so, um, okay, so then I post it and then whatever, you know, shit goes wild. So then, uh, so that was, that was the— oh, sorry, the other part that I forgot, which I think is my new It's something I've been doing, and I'm curious if you do something like this. Before I write anything now, at the top of every page, I have a template. And at the top, there's like 7 lines that says, what reaction is this meant to get? And I have 7 emotions. It's like, LOL. Like, this is meant to be really funny. Is it WTF, where it's like, dude, what the fuck? And that's when you're talking about something that's really unjust or people are pissed off and you want to you wanna explain, hey, there's this really messed up thing that's happening and people will be like, oh my God. Then there's other ones like, you know, like AWW, something really cute. AWE, aw, like that something is awesome. Like, wow, that is like kind of amazing. Wow.

Wait, did I tell you that I do this?

No, I actually learned this from these other guys who make viral videos, Rubber Republic. They had a search engine where you would just search by one of these emotions and it would pull up viral videos that had that, that were based on that emotion. Why this as well?

So the way to go viral is you always want to start— you start with the emotion that you're trying to get out of someone. And we already know that certain emotions get more shares. So for example, creating depression or sadness, that doesn't get shares. Creating outrage gets far more. And with small tweaks, you can make something sad outrageous, and that's far better.

Right. You know, so it's either amazing, it's super funny, it's really, really outraging. It's really touching and heartwarming. That's another one. Hard to do. And then the one I had for this, which is kind of like a new emotion, which was I wrote, finally someone said it. And I actually think that's its own genre that I didn't even have in my template because I was like, I think this is going to go viral, but it doesn't match any of these. I was like, I think for some people it's going to be WTF. Like, dude, this guy's a jerk. Why is he predicting failure? What an asshole. But I thought, no, it's going to go viral because If you say something that a lot of people have been thinking, but they've been afraid to say, or they couldn't put words around it exactly, but they had this hunch, they will share it because they agree with your opinion and you state their opinion for them.

It's the idea of recognizing something that you feel that you weren't sure if other people feel, but you see it on paper. So that same example is with location. So when you see like, how you know you're a San Francisco bro, or how do I know, do you know Sean Perry? Like if I said, if I saw an ad that said, do you know Sean? I'd be like, Oh wait, that's directed just towards me. Right. And so what the emotion that you just evoked was like, finally, I didn't think I was the only one who thought, like, it's a recognizing, it's a recognizing something type of vibe.

And they're really sharing because they're like, I knew it, I'm right. So they're not saying, wow, he's so right. They're actually saying, I'm right. Read this. This proves I'm right. Which is like a real subtle thing, but I'm so interested in studying the like psychology around why people do what they do, why do they share what they share? Because I want to grow an audience and this is the best way to grow it. And I feel like this— I'm— this process that I'm doing, I'm so glad you said you do it too, because I thought I was a little crazy. I was like, oh my God, that's what we used to do.

I mean, that's what I do when I— I'm like, I, I start with the emotion, then I start with the package, like how am I packaging this? And then I start with the headline, then the preview image, and then I work backwards from there. Right. And I always trying to find, like, I'll find something that catches my attention, just one fact or one line. So for example, I was just doing research on one yesterday. Do you know what reCAPTCHA is? You know, like, you know, signing up for something, you're signing up for something that says spot. Nowadays they say like, spot, click the thing or type in the, the, whatever picture is assigned, click it.

Yeah, it'll be like, you know, where are the traffic lights? Click all squares with traffic lights. And by the way, this is a good example. I saw this meme that was that reCAPTCHA with the traffic lights. And in one of the squares, just the tiniest corner of the traffic light is in it. And it shows the guy like, like sweating like crazy, like, oh fuck, should I include that or should I not include that? And that's one of those where it's like, me too, dude. I always feel that way. I'm always confused by this thing that's just supposed to separate the humans from the robots.

So we could turn that into an I always feel that way meme. Now here, I can take it another way. Do you want to know when I looked that up on Wikipedia? You want to hear a fun fact? Do you know why they do it this way? Is because people like Google, um, I might be butchering this just a little bit, but the idea is the same. People like Google are paying reCAPTCHA to translate stuff. So for example, somehow picking out that sign or saying where the headlights are, that actually helps Google, and Google's paying you money. It's paying—

okay, so I have a little— so the original CAPTCHA was done by this guy, he was a professor at Duke and Carnegie Mellon, and CAPTCHA originally was letters, remember? It was always these kind of hard to read letters, but you could read it. And that was basically taking— they had scanned a bunch of book pages, but who's going to convert— the computer was not good enough at getting all the book pages to translate over to text in the computer because some of the book pages are a little bit rounded or wrinkled or kind of fuzzy. And so the computer couldn't do it, but a human eye could easily do it. So they basically outsourced the work and solved two problems with one stone. On the website side, they just want to make sure you're not a bot who's signing up for their service, like a scammer who's going to spam everybody. But then they did good in the world also because that project ended up transcribing millions and millions of books. I think all the books that they had scanned eventually. And then CAPTCHA 2 is about— or reCAPTCHA, I believe, is about image classification. So for self-driving cars, we need to know, is this a bus or what is this? And so I think that's where the original idea was, uh, classifying images, let humans do it while they sign up.

And the inventor of reCAPTCHA, the second one, his name is Luis von Ahn. I think that's how you pronounce it.

He did both. And that guy started Duolingo.

And he, when he started Duolingo, he started it for two reasons. One, he, I guess he just cared about helping you learn language, but two, when you are learning the language, you're actually translating stuff that a third-party service is paying for you to translate.

So this guy's crazy. So what a genius.

The exact emotion that you just had of this guy's crazy, that is the emotion—

wow, this guy's a genius—

I am trying to evoke by sharing that. So I can tell that story in probably 5 tweets, and I bet it will— like, virality is pretty impossible to predict, but I can bet that there's like a 3 out of 10 chance that it's gonna have— that it has legs. And I could say this has all the, uh, this checks all the box to get popular. I can't— I can't— anyone who says that they're going to be able to predict it, they're wrong. Like Sean's thing just reached 5 million people. He was like, this is not going to work. Right.

It's impossible. The other part, the other part you had there that was good is that you took a thing that we've all seen. It's a relatable— oh yeah, I filled one of those in. And you— so you took a very familiar thing, but I told you the uncommon truth around it, which I think is like really cool. Like there's one yesterday I saw, you know, Tom Cruise's name is not Tom Cruise, his real name.

No, what is it?

It's Tom, uh, Tom Cruise something. It's like his middle name is Cruise and his last name is like some, uh, like, look it up, it's some like, I don't know, random ass like name. And he changed it to Tom Cruise, which sounds like a total movie star name, makes total sense that he did it. And, um, so yeah, his real name is Thomas Cruise Mapother IV or something. I don't even know.

Yeah, I can't even pronounce that.

Mapother. Yeah, Tom Mapother. Versus Tom Cruise. And so you take something really familiar, we all know Tom Cruise, right? Boom, here's the uncommon, did you know? And then it's like, oh sweet, like wow, you know? And that one doesn't have as much shock factor, so it won't go super viral, but it'll get a lot of likes. But you know, the closer you can get to that, the surprise gap between what I thought I knew and what's real, uh, the more shares people will get.

Yeah, I think if anyone cares about this stuff, I like the book Made to Stick, and I like the book Contagious by Jonah Berger. Contagious. Made to Stick is how to say something so people remember, and Contagious is a great book by this Wharton professor on how to make things get popular, how to make them spread like a virus, hence contagious.

I like it.

I haven't done that. You want to talk about paid newsletters really quick? A topic that we've discussed a lot.

Yeah, let's do it.

But this one is particularly interesting. The reason why is we've talked about this company a lot, Agora Financial. I've brought it up to you a ton. They spun off a couple of their brands and they tried to do a SPAC. And when they tried to do a SPAC, the company that they were SPACing with just like kind of like went down, like dropped like significantly. So they— there was already a publicly traded company that was going to buy a few Agora brands. The stock went down big time, but that's not that important. What's important is the numbers behind this paid newsletter business. So there's this company called— actually, I don't know what they call this little— it's a subsidiary of Gordon— of Agora. I think they call it Beacon Hill. It owns 6— sorry, 12 different newsletter brands collectively. Those newsletter brands do— where did I put the number? $550 million in revenue and $200 million in profit.

And by the way, growing— that grew 77% over last year.

Is that crazy? Now I'm going to tell you all some more numbers. They have 10 million free subscribers. So kind of like The Hustle, that's like they've got 10 million of that. Uh, this is even wilder. They have 550,000 people paying them $600, between $1 and $600 for subscribers. Then they have a quarter of a million people paying them $600 to $5,000. And finally, they have 100,000 people paying them more than $5,000 for a product, for a paid newsletter.

And what is in this paid newsletter? What's the So here's where things get way—

here's where things get way crazier. They have some paid newsletters that cost $35,000. Now, the reason why— what gets crazy with this is that they have 160 products across 12 brands. So what's that math? So each brand has 12 or 13 products. And the products I don't even understand. But basically I understand the business model. The business model is they get you to buy a $50 or $49 thing Then they get you to buy a $2,000 thing. And so they get you to buy that $49 thing, and that $49 thing is like a monthly paid newsletter. Like, it's not significant. I don't understand how they get it to work, and a large percentage of those $49 people buy the $2,000 thing.

Okay, so, but I feel like, okay, so these must be B2B newsletters, right?

No, they're not. Yeah, that's an important part that I left out. Nearly all of this is around, and we'll link to their deck. So they have a whole deck when they, they, it's kind of scammy. So they, it's a financial and a wellness company, which is kind of weird. They're talking about health and they're talking about wellness. And if you click Agora up there, Sean, under my name, you'll see the deck. They say that their, their target demographic is self-directed investors. What's that mean? Well, I'm going to tell you after looking at the website. It's just a bunch of old kind of wealthy white people who are probably Republican. And because the reason I think this is they have ads that say like, Nancy Pelosi's coming for your guns, you better invest in these 8 stocks. Like they say like crazy shit like that, right?

It's basically the like Motley Fool on, uh, you know, steroids, right?

Yes. Uh, but I think Motley Fool's ethical. These guys aren't. They also sold a book on how to cure diabetes.

Okay, I was gonna ask you why do you think they're unethical, and then you answered my question.

And so it's all financial news, financial newsletter, financial news related stock picks, and it's just, uh, just a crazy story. I've brought this up tons of time. We don't spend too much time on it, but it's pretty wild to actually see these numbers. I actually guessed that this is how big they were. Now we have proof.

Yeah, you've been talking about Agora as like, you know, doing hundreds of millions of dollars and You know, some people know about them, but I would say most people don't know about this empire. And most people, I mean, this blows away most people's expectations of, you know, paid newsletter, right? Like, oh, you know, like I just had a paid newsletter as an individual, right? I made, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars total and I thought I was crushing it. And these guys are making hundreds of millions of dollars. So when you look at this, my honest reaction is, dude, why couldn't you have done this with The Hustle? Why, what did they do? Or what was the, why was the hill too hard to climb where you could scale like this? Because this is huge.

I don't think it was too hard to scale. I think I could have done it. I would say that this business has been around since the '70s.

Right.

So it's kicking ass now. It didn't always kick ass. If you're willing to be patient, you can do it. Second of all, if you're willing to put your ethics aside a little bit, it actually is quite easy to do.

Helps. So how would you, how would you do this? You, let's say you want to be these guys or beat these guys? What does— you know, you're Sam, you're probably one of the most well-equipped people in the world to do this. How would you have gone about it?

Well, what you have to do is you've got to create multiple brands under one. It's really hard to have one brand and only a couple of products make all this money. So you'd have to have— for us, we would have done and we were going to do this, but then we got bought. And the reason I got bought was a whole different reasons, which is basically I wanted to get a payday like, and I wanted to— I mean, like, I was, I was pretty clear about that before. Like, I wanted— I like, it was cool. It's awesome. I'm going to stay here, but like it was nice to like get a lotto ticket. But if I wanted to be patient and do it for 50 years, which I kind of do, to be honest, I would have created trends but for subset subcategories. And you make the first newsletter, the one that people pay for, only like $49 or $50. And we send you just a couple of things a month. And then the second thing is you go to subcategories and you charge thousands of dollars. For example, If there was a newsletter that dissected media companies, I work in the media industry and you told me it was $4,000 and I also got access to a community, I ain't gonna complain about it.

Right, I'm in.

I'm gonna do it. If there's something for digital streaming and that you know that the 5 analysts are smart, Twitch is gonna buy that. It's not that like challenging.

It's not that hard, right?

And so that's what I would do from multiple industries. And the thing that a lot of newsletter writers do, which I've talked about this plenty of times and I don't have to talk about too much, is they do one of two things. One, they charge too little. And two, if they charge too little, they don't have a higher-end back product. You need a front end and a back end. So you need your cheap thing that gets a lot of people, and then you need your paid thing that gets only a few people, but it makes a lot of money.

So you guys at Trends is like, I don't know, $300-something a year. You could have been $49 and then $5,000 would have been a better mix of value if you were optimizing for how do we get this thing profitable as we can, lucrative as we can.

Yeah. And had we not gotten bought, I would have done that. I would have— I was actually— we were about to change it. We were about to make that change.

And by the way, what happens to Trends now? People still pay for it or it's free now?

Um, they pay for it. We might lower the price. Before, we were either going to make that the backend or we're going to make that the frontend, but we were going to copy this model of a $99 thing and then a $2,000 thing.

Yeah, dude, when I see companies like this, it just makes me want to do it so badly. Because it's like, it just seems so doable. Now I know that in practice, when I, and by the way, we get heat for this sometimes 'cause we're like, dude, it's so easy, it's so simple. We're talking like relatively, like building a successful business is hard, okay? Like it's not just gonna instantly happen.

We're not saying things are easy. Sometimes we actually do say that word easy. Really what we mean is simple. So like being able to bench 500 pounds, that is, Um, simple, like it's straightforward.

What do you do? You just—

here's how you get strong in the bench press. You lift a lot and then you eat a ton. Now that is quite hard to do for 5 years, but that's, that was, that's the steps you take. So it's like simple. And so what we're saying is that this is simple.

It is not easy. I think weight loss is actually a better example because 500 pounds is a hard thing to bench. Weight loss is literally simple where it's like, hey, you need to eat these, you know, avoid carbs, avoid sugars, You need to eat a little bit less, less calories than you're burning. And like, you should work out regularly. Do kind of whatever. Just try to get an hour a day of, you know, break a sweat. If you actually just did those two things and be like, hey, give it like 4 to 5 months, 6 months, boom, you're in great shape. Everybody knows that formula. It is actually simple. Executing it and doing it, having the discipline and having the rigor to like actually stick to it, hard. But it is way easier relatively than becoming a CrossFit champion, right? And so when we're talking about business, the scale is that it's like, it's hard to create the next Facebook. That's really freaking hard. Is it hard to create a paid community? Well, I don't think most people who try it will do it, but it's relatively way easier than creating the next Facebook. So for people that are out there that get all sensitive when we call something easy, it's not— we're not trying to mislead you. Like, yeah, it's going to take work. Most likely it won't work. It'll take some time, but we're on a scale of 1 to SpaceX, this is more like a 1 than it is a SpaceX. And like, that's, that's a scale for, for people to think about.

I completely agree. And, um, I think like, now let's talk about what makes this hard. The first is that you have to sell your soul a little bit. Now, many people will not be comfortable with this stuff. Sean is pretty comfortable with it. I think I'm comfortable with it, but I think I'm a little bit less comfortable with it. You have to be a face. Sometimes you have to be, you have to say, I'm an expert at X, pay me money to, for me to tell you my thoughts. Right. Second, um, well, no, this is off that. So guys like James Altucher, who we've had this podcast, he was ridiculed for doing this with Bitcoin. Everyone made fun of him. He made $60 million doing it, but he still got mocked constantly. And shockingly, most people would actually prefer not to make the money and not get made fun of than they would to make the money and get made fun of.

Uh, well, the way I think about it is most people truly will not— they are afraid that they're going to get them not going to get the money and get mocked, and so they're like, fuck it, I, I won't do it. If you really had a guarantee, I think people would happily trade reputation points for bank points.

But yeah, and perhaps, but that's a moot point because the fact is, is that most people don't even want to, because the first one that you said of like they may not get the money at all, that is also true, and that's what they're, they're not going to do that. So you have to do that. Second It's a treadmill. You can't stop. This is a lifetime job. So if you are a content creator, I hire people to do it for me. You 100% can do that, but you're gonna, you can't, you have to, you actually have to do the work for a little while anyway. So you're gonna have to work.

And by the way, quick question on hiring, 'cause people ask me this and I have no idea. I'm like, why don't you ask Sam? He's the one who did it. Why are you asking me? They'll be like, Dude, The Hustle has had amazing talent. Like, they talk about Trung, they talk about Steph Smith, they talk about some of the people you guys—

You, me, I mean, right? I mean, I consider you be part of our crew. You, me, Trung, Steph, this guy Colby. We've got, yeah, we've got a bunch of people.

So the question is, where the heck did you find these people? So can you give me the 10 seconds on each? Where'd you find Trung? Where'd you find Steph? Where'd you find Colby? Where'd you find, you know, all these people?

Colby was, uh, worked at a PR firm where he was doing some copywriting work, uh, and Uh, Trong, uh, Amon Troy.

Did he just apply to you, or you like recognize like, oh, this guy's good?

Mutual connection, friend of a friend said you should talk to this person. Uh, Trong came from Amon Troy, a mutual friend and investor of The Hustle. Steph, uh, I found on Twitter because I read her blog. Who else?

That's it. I just kind of want to know, and then when you found these people, are you— what's your— did you cycle through 30 people who kind of sort of sucked before you found the gems?

When we actually sold to HubSpot, they were like, "Wow, you guys have a lot of churn." I'm like, "Yeah, but here's what we do." Like, this is actually quite normal in the editorial industry, but you hire a bunch of people and you've got a— you either fire or there's a mutual like, "All right, we tried it. It wasn't a fit." And that happens a lot. Yeah.

And you also set the tone. I would say that was also a key, right? Because you were writing it originally. And so you—

Yeah. And you saw the trend changing.

You attracted the right people.

You saw the Trends community. Like, I was the one actually doing all the work.

Every day you were posting in that thing.

Yeah. And that sets the culture and attracts like-minded people. I also think that once you find the winners, then you go all in on them. So Trung is what I call— he's a made man. Steph, a made woman. Whenever Steph wants to do something, cool. Sounds good. What do you need? When other people come to me with an idea—

Time to negotiate, baby. Time to double it. Time to double that number. Whatever number Sam gave you, time to double it.

These guys are all doing great. Um, whenever, if a, if an outside person or if a, if a non-Maid person comes with an idea, it's, you know, let, why don't you just show me a little MVP and let's just see what people think. If Trung says something, it's all right. Yes, sir.

Right. Yeah.

Like you, you, you're a proven hit maker. So, and then the, um, the last thing is when we interview them, I always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume, which is like the college classes and all the things that they take. Cuz I want them to like entertain me during the interview. So in the same way that you are really good at storytelling, you have to have other people that They're good at storytelling.

Right, right. Okay, I like it. Can we do one idea real quick before we jump? So this is kind of gonna feel like it's out of left field, but I would say there's something interesting here.

Highlight it on the page.

Oh yeah, so I'm down here. Virtual team building. So for a long time, people have had this problem of we have a team, we're working on stuff together, you know, As the boss, sometimes you got to crack the whip and it feels like it's just task after task and deadline after deadline. And you want to make sure that this team is really coming together and is bonded and you want people to have a good time here and you don't want them to leave and all the good things. You care about your people and the experience they have working for you. And so in the old world, this was different team building solutions. And so we would do offsites. I don't know what you did with the Hustle Crew, but some people go to a shooting range, some people go to an escape room, some people do painting and wine tasting and whatever.

You know what I liked most? Just like a fancy dinner, right?

Yeah, let's go out to dinner, right? Let's go to a cool place. I, you know, it's on me, order what you want type of thing.

Yeah, I just like— we would do like fancy dinners, right?

And, um, and, and this is every team. Literally, I heard an NBA coach talking about this the other day. He goes, man, we got all these new players, it's so hard with COVID because in the old days you just go to the bar, you put your card behind the tab, you know, and you say all the drinks are on me tonight, you know, go crazy, guys. He's like, and he's like, you didn't have to like have conversations, like you just needed to give guys a night out together and good things will happen. And, um, and so with the, you know, we have this remote work trend, everybody's going remote, um, so how are those teams going to do it? How are they going to do team bonding? Because although you get to spend more time with your family and you get less time in traffic commuting, you do lose the water cooler, you lose the team bonding. So how are people going to do this? So I've seen some cool companies popping up that are doing this, and I think they're doing quite well. So I want to point out a couple and then get your take on if you think these are good ideas, bad ideas, or how you would do it.

So the first one is TeamRottery. Is that right?

Yeah, TeamRottery. Like camaraderie, but for a team. And so this is actually backed by some pretty legit players, like some pretty famous people in Silicon Valley, which I'm surprised at because it kind of just looks like a goofy— these seem like small bootstrapped ideas, but actually they have some big backing because I think people recognize the space is big. Companies pay tens of thousands of dollars per division a year to have team bonding. And so then, you know, in a big company, you have, you know, easily high 6 figures, low 7 figures worth of spend on this type of thing. That's my guess. I'm not in the finance team, so maybe I'm off, but I think that's about right. So Team Lottery is one.

First of all, Team Lottery, Looks interesting. Horrible name. What an awful name. Um, they've got a pretty badass, uh, a pretty badass set of advisors. Guys like Keith Raboi, who seems to hate everything as you've said, uh, is on their advisor or their board. Pretty interesting.

Yeah, exactly. So he's on this and it says trusted by 300+ global teams. You see Pinterest. You know who works there? Who?

Summer Sanders.

Who's that?

You don't remember Summer Sanders? She was from— and she was like a swimmer in the '90s and then was the host of all the Nickelodeon TV shows.

No way. That's hilarious.

Summer Sanders works at product development at Team Rotary.

So like, you know, you could do things. So if I click their experiences, right, I click the bond and engage category. So it's like a coffee and tea tasting, a wine tasting, a guacamole tasting, a painting class or whatever. It could be if you do kickoff, team kickoffs. Okay, we got our guacamole tasting again, but we also have the high-heeled shoe project, a lesson for inclusion. You know, so there's these like kind of team experiences, lessons in a box or bonding in a box experiences. So that's one. Then our friend from the pod, Greg Eisenberg, created one called nicebreak.fun. Fun.

Dude, this guy loves like cute names.

Yeah, give me, give me a name check. How do you feel about nicebreak.fun?

It's okay, it's good. He'd love like— he, he loved— Greg is like the coolest guy. He like public school or like school works or like school bus.

Like, well, his studio is called Late Checkout.

Late Checkout, like, you know, the grocery store.

I remember being like, why did you open this agency Late Checkout? It seems like a weird thing to do. Like, you're an entrepreneur, why are you doing this? Like kind of like product design creative agency thing. And then every week he's like, yeah, we were like, I'll post a cool product that I think is awesome. He's like, oh yeah, we worked with them. We designed the prototype. I'm like, he's doing it for all of them. I'm like, oh, actually this is fucking awesome. You're like on the ground floor of all these things. You can invest in them. You're meeting them. You're like seeing all these spaces and getting paid to do it. Like, okay, that's pretty cool. And he's using that to fund his own projects, their own internal projects, which I don't know, that's actually a pretty cool way of doing it. But they have things like a comedian will do like an improv class with you guys over Zoom, or a virtual escape room, or a, um, you know, a wardrobe makeover or stuff like that, right? So I think this is kind of cool. And there's other products like this that are like just a straight-up Zoom escape room. It's like 8 people enter, 1 hour goes on the clock, and the whole thing happens in Zoom. So I think there's— this is going to be, I think, a pretty big space that starts out looking like a toy but ends up being a pretty pretty solid business. What do you think?

Yeah, first of all, LateCheckout.com, or sorry, WithLateCheckout.com is Greg. It's mostly Sean's buddy. He's got a community design firm. Go to that website and look at what he's doing. It's really good. That guy is really good. NiceBreak.fun, NiceBreak.fun, I think it's cool. They're charging a lot of money, which I think is badass. So they charge $2,000 a month. Plus, okay, so a grand a month gets you 2 nice breaks per month for, and that's for companies that are 25 to 50. If you're, okay, I understand how this works. Yeah, this could be a hit. I think this is great. I think this could totally be a hit. Can it be a huge VC thing? I don't know, but this could make tens of millions of dollars in September.

Yeah, that doesn't have to be, exactly. And the other thing is one way to think about problems like these or find opportunities like these is you go in the C-suite. So you say, okay, there's a CEO, there's a CMO, there's a CTO, CFO, CIO, whatever. You go through all of them. And we were laughing because you were like, what the hell is a CHRO? So this is what a CHRO thinks about. They're the chief people officer essentially of a company. I kind of use this interchangeably. Maybe there's some nuanced difference. Sorry to, you know, the 3 CHROs that listen to this podcast. I didn't mean to—

What is a CHRO?

Chief Human Resources, I think, officer. So they think about this stuff, right? They're like, okay, the whole workforce has just gone remote. We really care about what's called employee engagement, which just means how happy are people to work here? Are they going to leave? Are they going to— is this a toxic work environment or not? And so then they have this. So one thing you could do is you go talk to these people. And you just sort of say, what sucks? What's keeping you up at night? What are you stressing about? And you start to ask these questions and at first they won't give you a whole bunch, but then you say, all right, can you show me your budget for the year? Oh wow, you spend a lot of money on people development. What does people development mean? And it's like, oh, that's corporate training and blah, blah, blah. Oh, interesting. Who do you guys use for that? You go look up those companies. That is like, sometimes people ask like, how do you guys think of these things? That's how we learn these things. It's like we just start to sniff in these types of ways and you start to learn about all these spaces that are outside of just your day-to-day worldview. So if you're out there as an entrepreneur trying to figure out where can I build a company where there's, I don't want to just guess on demand. This is one way you go talk to somebody who's in charge. You figure out what they're, what's stressing them out, what problems they need solved, what language they use when they describe it. That's your landing page. That's your ad. And then you look at their budget and you see, Do the— does the money map to the problem? And if the money maps to the problem, you start to see, okay. And you ask them, hey, which budget line item is growing a lot year over year? Which, which line item was smaller last year and is bigger this year? Because that's the space where they're still looking for new solutions.

And you could do that for an individual as well. I think what you can do is you can go sign up for Mint or whatever and just look at the categories of your money and just look at the trailing 12 months and be like, wait, what am I consistently spending money on? And do that with 5 or 10 friends. And that's actually a great way to find an idea. And doing it with businesses is far more profitable. So you just go and you look at their— you look at QuickBooks and you say, all right, what's going on here? Where's all the money going to?

Right.

It's an awesome way. That's actually kind of a cool business in itself, which is like, how do I— how do I—

what, like wallet share? Like, how do I just see how wallet share these people are? Moms in America, where is their wallet going? Right? Like, what are they spending their time and money on? I think You know, big brands like, I don't know, Procter Gamble, they, they think about this a lot. They interview a ton of moms. They say, oh, okay, you know, the mom controls this much of the household budget, you know, 70% or whatever. And then within that, every month she's spending X% on groceries, Y% on household cleaners, this percent on this, this percent on this. And that's how they decide, okay, we need to invest our product development according to where the budget is. Because that's how, that's how we make our money back.

That's such an interesting way to do things. Like it. I guess you could do it. How many public companies— there's 2,000 public companies in America. You could easily—

more, I think there's like 4,000, something like that.

4,000, uh, however many Michael actually said in the last episode. 4,000, let's say. You could easily do that with, with all their categories, right? You can't see the line items, but you could see like G&A or— but you might be— that's kind of an interesting study, right?

And, uh, and you can do this with just media companies. How are media— what, what is the expenses look like of a media company. Where are they allocating, you know, where, where are they, where do they spend all their money and where, which, which ones are changing, uh, over time, where are things shifting? And so I think that's kind of like an interesting signal that you can use at the company level, one, um, division in a company, individual person, whatever. And I think you get a lot of insights from that.

I think that's a great idea. I think what we just said of like, did you make up that name wallet share? Is that a thing?

I think that's a term in general. It's a general term. But I've also seen this, by the way, in terms of the social networking space, in terms of time. So WeChat, I think, or one of the Chinese companies, they had this presentation I saw. And I'm sitting there trying to go through a Chinese presentation, so maybe something's lost in translation, but I got the general idea, which was They want an app for every minute of your day. Because China has all these super apps like WeChat. You can pay your house bills in it and it's like WhatsApp. And you can also subscribe to Netflix through it, their version of Netflix. But it's also where you post photos and stuff like that. So what they said was they took a person's day. So they're like, okay, 15-year-old kid wakes up in the morning at this time. First 10 minutes of the day, what products are they using? What apps are they using? And they start to break it down minute by minute, basically like what, where are their gaps? So today we're taking up 4 hours of this person's time. If they're awake for 12 hours, how do we spend, how do we get 12 hours of their, or 16 hours, how do we get 16 hours of mindshare from this person? Well, they watch movies at night. We need an app for movies. Well, during the day they need, they message their friends. We need that. They need news. They get the news. All right, cool. We're going to do news. And that's how they, they think about 'Cause how do they expand? If you're an ad-based business, you need attention. So how do I get more attention? Well, I need more hours of the day of yours. How do I get more hours of the day? Well, I gotta figure out how you spend it today and I gotta insert myself there.

I have a few friends that have worked on that at Facebook where they were like, "All right, we have found out that if you put stickers onto photos, people spend like 5 seconds more." And they have like 50 people just working on stickers. And I'm just like, "Kill yourself." Like these people hated their job.

Dude, one of my best friends, his job at Facebook was literally, he was in the, you know, it was called like security and safety and privacy of community or something like that department. And literally he's like, I just try to make sure a dick doesn't show up on your Facebook feed. He's like, so, he's like, you wouldn't believe how many dicks are posted on Facebook every day. He's like, have you ever seen a dick? And I was like, no, never, not one. He's like, that's right.

At least there's, that's cool. You're like trying to protect people, whatever. That's cool.

But on the inside he's like, I'm writing, He's like, "I'm reviewing folders of images that are just being like dick, not a dick, dick, not a dick." And then also same thing on the algorithm side. We're writing programs to train the computer to recognize this versus that. And he's like, "It's cat and mouse game. Always harder than you think.

They're always one step ahead." Like Stack of Dimes or Sean's D? No, that's just about a dollar in pennies. They, uh, but yeah, I mean, at least that job is all right. But like, I can't imagine working at a Facebook or an Instagram and just all I'm trying to do is suck more of people's time.

Um, yeah, it is sad when you think about it. Like, the, the best brains of our generation are basically sitting inside the giant slot machine and being like, okay, how do we, how do we get the rat to come back again? You know, like, how do we get her to come back more and more and more and spend more time and more time? Right? Like That's the reality. And it's like, hey, I get paid $500,000 a year to do this, and I get free lunch, and they do my laundry, and I get foot massages on Fridays. And like, people think I'm joking. That's— those are all true things that happen.

Um, before we wrap up, did you see that you were—

you—

so you and I are one for one of being turned into meme. So you posted something like, I'm looking for a meme creator, $500 a month, no vacation. And, uh, you posted all this other funny stuff, and people like mocked you. Uh, Liquidity, a bunch of people mocked you. It's pretty great. I think hopefully they realize that like we do this shit on purpose.

Yeah, or like it's not even okay, like okay, I'd love to say, huh, I'm in on the joke, I knew this, like yeah, I knew it was silly, but like I didn't think it would turn into a meme.

We know, like we're self-aware enough to know this is like, like yeah, mockable.

I wrote no vacation, it's not even a real job, like of course it's like Of course this is a fake job posting. Not fake, it's like, I'm basically just being like, "Hey, does someone want a side hustle for me by making a bunch of memes? You can make $500 a month, just make me a few memes every week." That's really what I was trying to say. But if I say that, it's only gonna get like 100 likes. But if I say it the way I said it, over the top, boom, I got thousands of likes and the thing spread and a bunch of people got angry. And literally like Taylor Lorenz was like, "Why does this person not get sick leave?" And I was like, "Because it's not a job." Oh my God, what a dork. We're kind of doing this on purpose, but also I am just kind of a character and I'm just saying things as I think them and then I move on with my life. I win either way. I win if you get mad. I win if you take it seriously and you apply. I win no matter what. As long as I don't get completely canceled, I win.

Which might happen one day soon, but could happen. We'll have, we'll have fun until then.

Um, and I will explain someday why I am hiring a personal meme god to, uh, to, to do some memes for me. I will explain that.

You even have to explain that? Why? I mean, there's nothing—

well, there's something— there's actually a cool story. Um, there's actually a cool story around it, but, uh, it's not quite ready yet. The story will be cooler if I put the whole thing together and then explain it when it's, uh, when it's ready. So that will come in, I don't know, a couple months.

And I guess you'll have to share some of the best ones you got.

Yes, sir.

All right. That's it.