Should we be trying to build an online audience?

Ali

My name is Ali I'm a doctor and youtuber

Taimur

I'm say Taimur. I'm a data scientist and writer

Ali

And you're listening to Not Overthinking.

Taimur

The weekly podcast where we think about happiness, creativity and the human condition.

Ali

Hello, everyone and welcome back to Not Overthinking. Taimur, how are you doing today?

Taimur

Doing great, man. I'm doing great. This has been a it's been an intense week on many fronts. Intense week on the, on the Causal front had lots and lots of calls, demos and things. So yeah, most Yeah, most days, I had, like, a probably an average of like, six calls or something. And I find them very, I find that it's usually me who is like, sort of leading the call, you know, demoing the product to someone or whatever, I have to be like, really switched on. And so I find the calls quite draining. Like they're fun. But then afterwards, I need to, I need to recover. And it takes like, you know, if it's a half an hour call, it'll take me like 15 to 20 minutes to mentally recover afterwards. You know? So yeah, a lot of that this week. But, you know, it's good fun. How about you?

Ali

Yeah, I feel like I've had a pretty intense week as well, mostly, because once I discovered Calendly links, I would just give my link out willy nilly to random people. And so I've ended up having, again, tons and tons of phone calls each day, which have all been useful, but it's just when I look at my calendar, and I see it blocked out with so much stuff that I barely have time to do my own work. Like something feels a bit wrong. There.

Taimur

what do you mean useful? Like, what are the these catches with friends? Are these like, random fans who want to talk to you or something?

Ali

No, mostly related to business stuff in some way or another. So this week, we hired for we hired four new people to the team. So the team sizes effectively doubled. So lots of calls associated with that. Various calls associated with, you know, the book that I'm writing and getting people's opinions on that having a few issues with like the book contract and the nuances associated with that about whether you go with a literary agent or not. So I had a few calls associated with that, just like random things here and there that have just meant that my Calendly was basically fully blocked up with random calls. But all of them have been useful in some way or another.

Taimur

Who are the 4 new people? What are they doing?

Ali

So we've got two new writers who are full time, on a one month trial. For now, we have a new assistant editor who's in the Philippines, who is also full time. And we have a third person who is coming on as a part time research assistant. And he's going to be doing three days a week, as like being head researcher, for the book.

Taimur

researcher, what does that mean?

Ali

So when you're writing a book, offer, often it's useful to have people to help research the content. So for example, you know, for the first section, which is about meaning, I have all these different questions like, you know, what's the relationship between meaning and productivity? And, you know, is there evidence based way of setting a five year vision? Is that even useful? these sorts of questions that have come up as I'm doing my own research and, and writing the book. And so instead of me trawling through obscure PDFs, and finding studies. It's a lot easier and more efficient to say to a researcher that hey, look, these are the questions I've got right now. Can you do the research and summarize the relevant papers? And if you find any interesting stories or case studies along the way, then that that would be great for me to know. I don't know, in a way their job is to give me as much raw material as they can find for then may have for me to then craft into shape, rather than me doing kind of the yeah, the legwork of the research.

Taimur

Yeah, sure. Oh, nice. That sounds like a good system. Yeah.

Ali

I mean, it's all very much making it all up as I go along. But I think in terms of writing this book, I'm trying to think of it in terms of, you know, how would How would like a CEO approach writing a book, and thinking in terms of systems rather than in terms of, I have to do everything myself, the more I can outsource, the more that I can delegate the bits that can be delegated. I think the easier it will be to just make a really good book.

Taimur

Now that makes little sense. So that was the work front. What else is going on these days? You went on a Zoom date last weekend, didn't you?

Ali

I did. It was quite fun.

Taimur

What's the zoom date like?

Ali

I've been humming and hawing about this Zoom date situation for a while. Initially, I was thinking, What's the point of doing Zoom dates, because obviously, it's better to hang out with people in real life. But then I think I had a chat with our mutual friend, Cliff Weitzman, and you know, partly Neel Nanda also was keen on this just being like, at the very least, especially in lockdown. A Zoom date is a good way of screening out people that you just automatically wouldn't get on with. And it's like, yeah, sort of time efficient thing. And so I kind of went into it with basically zero expectations, but actually quite enjoyed it. And yeah, we're having another chat later today.

Taimur

Oh, nice. Doesn't this go against your like, three date minimum, you know, try and have some low optionality mindset. When it comes to these things?

Ali

it does. To an extent, I think when I think the three day minimum, I may have to revise. Okay, because, like I think if, if I can't. Okay, so I, I'd have quite a low bar for what would make a successful Zoom date. Basically, my model for that is is, am I at least partially attracted to this person? And more importantly, is talking to her easy? Does the conversation feel like it's flowing? And if the conversation feels like it's flowing over a Zoom call, then chances are, it's also going to flow in real life. And if it's difficult over a Zoom call, then it doesn't really bode well for meeting up in real life to an extent. And obviously, there's some level of sensitivity and specificity here, and that there are probably some false positives and false negatives. I think right now, especially given lockdown, it makes sense to do these.

Taimur

Yeah, I think it's like, you know, if it's the only option, like what can you do, right? There's a up you could have a sort of, what can I do mindset? Or what needs to be done mindset? or What can I do mindset, you might be like, Well, you know, it's lockdown, what am I supposed to do? I can't be anywhere else. But like, yeah, I guess if you care about moving forward in this part of your life, then it needs to be done.

Ali

Exactly, mate. So this year, when I decided that one of my resolutions, one of my goals for 2021 was to make meaningful progress towards finding a wife, I was thinking, one way of doing that would be to commit to also set the goal of going on at least one date each week.

Taimur

with different people or possibly the same person?

Ali

Yeah, possibly the same person. Yeah, I don't really have too much of an interest in sort of courting multiple people at once. I feel like that's just it's just a lot of effort.

Taimur

We don't need any virtue signaling here, please.

Ali

I think I, I feel the virtue signaling would have been saying it's, it's a, it's morally wrong. Literally, what I'm saying is that it's just too much effort for me, I just can't be bothered.

Taimur

Yeah, I guess it also takes, you know, in order to do that, there have to be multiple people who are interested in [...]

Ali

I was hoping you would mention that. My [...] is looking a little bit a bit dry these days.

Taimur

I hope to have the [...] as well.

Ali

Thanks, man. Okay, a few things I want to talk to you about. Firstly, we are going to talk about "The Righteous Mind" and go over some of the main ideas in that because that was I think I've mentioned it a few times on the pot in the past, but it was like one of the groundbreaking books in May in 2020. When I read it, just sort of changing my mental models around stuff like morality and liberal versus conservative and and that that sort of stuff. Before we go there, I want to I'm having a bit of a, an issue on the book front. So at the moment, we are still in the process of finalizing, you know, in inverted commas, the book proposal to send out to US publishers, and I've just been, I've been keeping an eye on a lot about the introduction. So the working title at the moment is "The Productivity Equation" which may or may not change over time, Which reminds me, I need to register all of the relevant domains for that before the episode comes out. So that no one should ask me on that front. all right, note to self. the working title "The Productivity Equation" and the working productivity equation is productivity equals meaning multiplied by output divided by time. Now, the problem is that in the introduction, I have to sell this as to why it why this is the case. And there, there are a few different ways to sell it. But the one I was I was grappling with this morning was, I'll read out to you what I've got what I've got so far for. So initially, it kind of starts off with a personal story about why I'm interested in productivity and how I'm not really sure what to do with my life. And this is like a real crisis of meaning and purpose, and then kind of inciting incident that I get approached to write a book, like, oh, okay, cool. And then that leads me into thinking, yeah, I know all this stuff about productivity, because I've read lots of books about it over the years. But I can't shake the feeling of what's the point of being productive? Like, what is it all in service of and what do we actually working towards? And if productivity is a vector, then, you know, I'm pretty good at the quantity, but I'm not very good at the direction. And so it becomes like, hey, this is the stuff that I've discovered around how to figure out what to do with you how I'm trying to figure out what to do with my life. And then we'll talk about how to actually be more efficient at doing it, or that sort of that's one of the the the opening story. And then we have a subtitle, or rather a sub heading, "What is productivity?" And I'll read this out to you and you can you can tell me if this makes sense, or if you have thoughts on this,

Taimur

So the title is the productivity equation? There's no like tagline? You're reading a section of the intro or..

Ali

I mean, the tagline. The tagline or the subtitle it's like "The New Science of Getting Things Done" I mean, it's all very subject to change. Essentially what I'm reading you is, right. So we've got like 10 chapters of the book. The first bit is introduction. And the introduction starts off with like this personal story, which I'm not going to read you in its entirety. And the introduction ends with what follows is my exploration of productivity through the lens of meaning and purpose. At its heart is a simple question. How can we work out what really matters to us? And then how can we apply the principles of productivity to work towards it? I don't have the answers, but I hope this book will offer you some useful ways of thinking about the question. So that's like the end of my personal spiel, and then we have a heading within the introduction. So like an h1, what is productivity? normal text? What even is productivity? a mathematician, a psychologist, a sociologist would all give us different answers. Intuitively, we might first think of productivity as getting more things done. A farmer brackets, Alex, who harvests 100 kilograms of grain, would seem to be more productive than his neighbor, Ben, who only harvests 90 kilograms. But if Alex works in the fields for 10 hours to harvest 100 kilograms, but Ben only works for five hours to harvest 90 kilograms. is Alex really the more productive farmer? He works twice as long as Ben does, but only harvest 10% more grain. Which farmer would you rather be? Which farmer would you say is more productive? And economists would put their money on Ben, in Economics 101. Productivity isn't just about producing more, it's about producing efficiently. Because we're all fond of equations, the economists productivity equation might look like this. Productivity equals output divided by time, farmer Alex's productivity is 100 kilograms divided by 10 hours, which is 10 kilograms per hour. Farmer Ben's productivity is 90 kilograms divided by five hours, which is 18 kilograms per hour. All else being equal, it's fair to say that Ben is more productive than Alex. This makes sense. We're more productive if we get more done. But we're also more productive if we can reduce the time it takes for us to do our work. In other words, it's not just about getting things done. It's about getting things done efficiently. But let's put a spanner in the works. Right now. We're thinking of farmer Ben as being more productive than farmer Alex because he's more efficient at producing grain. But what if farmer Ben's job isn't to harvest grain at all? What if his business model relies on him harvesting apples instead? What if Ben harvest grain as a way of procrastinating from his true job of harvesting apples, with that context in mind is Ben really more productive than Alex, probably not? Sure he's making more grain and he's doing it efficiently. But he's doing the wrong thing. He shouldn't be harvesting grain at all. And so our original equation doesn't yet capture the essence of true productivity. Farmer Ben's problem is that harvesting grain isn't meaningful, it doesn't help him work towards his business goals, it doesn't get him any closer to where he wants to be as a farmer. And unless he's particularly fond of grain harvesting as a meditative hobby, it probably doesn't contribute towards a greater life mission, either, whatever that might be. It's all too easy to confuse busyness and productivity. We've all had days in which we get through our to do list, only to realize that none of the tasks in it have got us nearer to where we want to be, or where we've attended lots of meetings and seminars, and send lots of emails only to ask ourselves at the end of the day, what was the point of all that work. And so to my mind, focusing only on output isn't enough, we should instead focus on meaningful output. In other words, we need to work out what kind of work gives each of us a sense of purpose, and put this front and center in our productivity plan. To this end of the human productivity equation is as follows. Productivity equals meaning multiplied by output divided by time. And then I'll talk about the, you know, this, how this issue of meaning is already opening up a bit kind of worms. And meaning kind of means different things, depending on your time horizon, on a very zoomed in time horizon. Farmer Ben, his work is not meaningful, because his business relies on him harvesting apples rather than grain. If we zoom out a bit, we want to think then we think in terms of, you know, meaningful goals, like what does farmer Ben want from his life? And what are his goals? And then if we zoom out even further, it becomes a case of meaningful life, like, what's his wider mission? What does he want to accomplish? What does he want read out in his eulogy at his funeral? And the argument I'm going to make is that by thinking and meaning of meaning, in these three different time horizons, we can actually ensure that the work that we're doing or our productivity is moving us forward, preferably in all three realms.

Taimur

That's sick, man, I love it. I think that's so good. I think the farmer analogy is really good. Yeah, I think that's just a really good way of framing it. I think maybe, I mean, yeah, I don't know what level of feedback you want here. I think like, I think you could probably shorten certain paragraphs, and things like that. But I think that general stuff is like, yeah, I think it's sick

Ali

Okay, cool. Yeah. Cuz it was it was the farmer analogy that I basically came up with this morning, in my one hour writing session before this is, like, initially, what we had was we had this sort of, you know, Oxford's the world and data of productivity graph and talking about, like Adam Smith's the treaties of nations, and it all felt a bit dry and academic. And I was thinking, Okay, yeah.

Taimur

screw that mate.

Ali

Let me just like, boil it down to Farmer Ben and farmer Alex.

Taimur

Yeah, that's the best way. That's the best way. I love it. Yeah, I think that's really really good. I think the title and stuff is really stupid that like. I mean, the USP is like the meaning stuff. So I think the title and or tagline should definitely be around like, you know, meaningful, meaningful productivity or something.

Ali

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, we kind of the productivity, so when when you're working with a publisher, every book needs like a working title that they can generally, as we just sort of landed on the productivity equation, because that was what one of my Skillshare classes was based on. And initially, it was the whole pilot plane and engineer analogy.

Taimur

Yeah. [...] For that now?

Ali

Well, I don't know. So for the first, for the very first draft of the proposal, we did have pilot plane engineer. And I like that because, you know, when you're thinking about the elevator pitch of a book, and someone asks you, you know, what's your book about? Or if you're on I don't know, Good Morning America or something for 30 seconds, and you get 30 seconds talk about the book, saying, Oh, yeah, you know, productivity is about being a pilot, a plane and an engineer, you know, it's kind of intriguing. It's kind of interesting, it kind of Yeah, as Malcolm Gladwell will say, it's, it's the candy that people might talk about. But then we were like, well, productivity equation, and if we're saying productivity equals meaning times output divided by time, and pilot is meaning and outputs plain and time as engineer, were adding lots of..

Taimur

Yeah, you're presenting like to two separate metaphors and frameworks.

Ali

so we scrapped the potted plant engineer thing and then sort of made it section part one meaning part two, output part three time, but now it just like, it's a bit. You know, there's, I think, Stephen Hawking's editor said that, basically, the more every equation, you add to your book, half your readership [...] in Hawking's brief history of time, there's only one equation.

Taimur

here's the thing. If you're Stephen Hawking writes about time, I imagined the equations are gonna be, you know, Yeah. Yeah, I think you need to take a step back. Like, your equation, I think is very different to the kind of equation Stephen Hawking might feel compelled to throw into his book a history of time. And I think like, I think, I think the equation framing I mean, I'm usually pretty skeptical of these kinds of equation type framings of things. But I think like, it appeals to people, like it feeds into the wider kind of scientism, or like, you know, of like, Oh, it's legit, because it has an equation. It sounds sciency.

Ali

I was speaking to another author friend who said the exact opposite. He was like, the fact that it's got equation in it is going to put off more people than it appeals to because. And I guess this is another quote struggle with writing this is like, Who am I writing the book for? I had a cheeky chat with James Clear, this week, #flex. And I asked him about this because like everyone, everyone says, when you're writing a book, or when you're creating anything, you should have an ideal target avatar in mind. And so I've done this exercise with my writing coach and stuff, and, you know, yes, having an audio avatar is good. And I would ideally like to write this book for someone like myself. And James Clear said that he was a he wrote "Atomic Habits" because it was like, you know, I didn't really think about Avatar, I just thought, you know, what's the book on habits that I want to read. But then the issue becomes is that, for example, if I'm writing it for, like, if I think of my YouTube audience, and then I think of, I think of like, the median kind of person, and they're interested in tips about productivity, that median member of the audience is probably more interested in productivity hacks, than they are in the actual in like, actually making meaningful progress towards that productivity.

Taimur

Wow, [...] shit all over your audience, why don't you?

Ali

It's not about shitting over the audience. This is about recognizing that people want hacks rather than or the perception that people want hacks rather than a sort of, for example, if I were to pick up a book about productivity five years ago, I would have wanted how I managed my to do list and that kind of stuff, I wouldn't have wanted it to start with like a philosophical discussion about meaning and purpose and vision and values that would I don't think I was in the right place five years ago to actually think meaningfully about about meaning. And you know, if I if I think about for example, David Allen's "Getting Things Done." There's not really much about in that about finding your purpose it's and and like the insights in that book for me were like, Oh my god, I should do a weekly review Oh my God, I should have a project list and sort of those like tactical type things. And so what another author friend of mine was wondering is that by focusing on meaning, are you turning off the large majority of your audience who might prefer on the surface to be given hacks? in my head my I'm thinking I don't want to talk down the audience. I want to...

Taimur

mate, like I'm very wary of generally like thinking too much about the audience man. Like there's plenty of stuff out there on hacks, the world does not need another book about productivity hacks. The world does not need another framework or system for like making notes. Like, you know, a lot of progress has been made on that front, if there is one, you know, gap in the productivity discourse, it is around the meaning stuff. So like, just write the book that's like, that you think is meaningful. I'm sure you like, if you were purely optimizing for sales, I'm sure. You could sell out and do lots of things. But like, I don't see why that's interesting. Like screw the audience. Like, if you think the meaning stuff is important and interesting, and like, half a YouTube audience doesn't think that, who cares? Like, why do you want to just keep feeding the same stuff to the same audience? I would have thought the interesting thing about a new medium is that you can kind of reach a different set of people, you know, the kind of people that would be watching your YouTube channel. And would you know, would like be doing doing like productivity stuff? Like, do you really want to keep shitting the same stuff to the same people? Sure, you what you want to sort of access a new kind of audience.

Ali

Okay. Yeah, that's a good point. Thatwas kind of my my feeling about it as well. I guess I just wanted to get your permission that, that was okay to do.

Taimur

Yeah, man, my permission is always my, yeah, my leaning is always towards the art and the craft. And everything else, you know, follows from that, like I yeah, I think this like maximizing audience thing. I think it's, I think it's kind of lame. To be honest, I don't know why you're worried about that. Like, you've already got a massive audience, like the book is gonna sell fine. Just make something that you actually think is meaningful and valuable, and that you're proud of, rather than just like, optimizing for sales or something. And optimizing on sales based on theories. You know, it might be right that you could optimize by doing it life hacks that might be completely wrong. I don't know how much conviction you have on that. But

Ali

Cool. So you like the farmer analogy? Yeah, the thing I was gonna I was gonna work on for the rest of the day is figuring out and I wonder if we can brainstorm this figuring out using farmer analogy, how to incorporate the meaning bit into it. Because I think, I think the most zoomed in level farmer Ben is not being productive, because like, his business relies on producing apples, and he's producing grain, therefore, producing grain is not meaningful. But I think I need to think of like some something pithy for his kind of meaningful goals, the medium term time horizon and to meaningful life, his long term time horizon as well, that just, you know, in a simple farmer way, not saying farmers are simple, but like, a simple comma (laughs) gets the reader to appreciate Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's an interesting way of thinking about productivity.

Taimur

Yeah, I mean, we might be getting too into the weeds here. But I think, yeah, the paragraph you read out, I think you didn't make an obvious distinction between why the apples are more meaningful than the grain for farmer Alex or whatever. Like, you might have said something like, you know, but it turns out that no one in Alex's village wants to buy grain, you know, they only buy apples, like that just made, it really makes a lot more obvious. And then you can like, layer on a couple of more. It's, and it turns out that Alex's wife and kids just wanted to be home and, you know, all these guys pulled out of the field.

Ali

Yeah, okay. That's good. Yeah, I guess I'm looking for that kind of stuff. Where, the reader sees themselves in their view of like, Oh, yeah. With like, a kind of a kind of stupid example that everyone would intuitively understand. But that wouldn't apply.

Taimur

Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. But I think it's good stuff, man. I really like the farmer stuff. Yeah, I think it's great. Wait, before we get on to the episode, there's one thing we should chat very briefly about. I know a bunch of people, I think, in our members community on Slack, I think a few people posted about this, and had some, like DMs and things saying like, you know, can we talk about the whole? The whole GameStop thing? So, yeah, I mean, I don't think either of us are particularly qualified. But basically, if you have had your head in the sand for the past week, or if you don't go on Twitter, they're equivalent to be honest. (laughs) Yeah, essentially, it's been like a really crazy week. And the financial markets.

Ali

Almost like 2008.

Taimur

Like, honestly, it's been nuts. So essentially, a lot of Hedge Funds this week, lost billions and billions of dollars. A few of them were even put out of business. Hedge Fund is a company that sort of invest money in stocks. Broad broadly, that's like a really simple definition. Nice, good stuff. And so a bunch of Hedge Funds were put up put out of business this week, and a bunch of very wealthy people lost an awful lot of money. And the reason was that a bunch of nerds on Reddit decided that they wanted to make this happen. And so the way they made this happen was that it was publicly known that a lot of hedge funds are, you know, don't think certain companies are going to be successful companies. You know, for whatever reason, for example, once Coronavirus hits, a lot of people might conclude that oh, I think airlines are not going to be successful companies, at least for a while. You know, once Netflix hits, you might think, Okay, I think Blockbuster Video is on the way out kind of thing. And so one of the companies that a lot of hedge funds had kind of felt strongly that this company is screwed, is a company called GameStop. And its company in the US, it's sort of like a secondhand game store, like you can go in there, you can sell them your consoles, your games, you can buy secondhand game and consoles and things, right? And I don't know how well the company was actually doing. But a lot of hedge funds, placed big bets on GameStop, not doing well as a business over the next whatever period of time. And so what a bunch of people on Reddit did, there's a subreddit called Wall Street Bets, where I think you just like talked about stocks and things like that, they essentially banded together to say, look, all of these, all of these rich Wall Street suits, think you know, how have placed big bets that the game stock, the GameStop stock price is going to go down. If we as like a bunch of nerds on Reddit can make the stock price go ups sufficiently, then these people will lose a lot of their money, because they'll lose their bets that the price is going to go down. And so essentially, on the subreddit, I think it had like, I think it had under a million people probably like two weeks ago, when and that now it has like a few million. Everyone basically came together and said, Okay, we're gonna buy GameStop stock in order to push the price up. And I think the price went up, like, I don't know, 600% over the past two weeks or something like that, you know, pretty, that would be a lot even for Crypto. But this is this is like a normal traditional kind of stock. As the price went up, absolutely loads. All of these hedge funds lost their bets that the price was going to go down. And they had like such, they pay such big bets on this, that the entire fund actually went out of business because of this. And so it was really crazy week because I think this was a kind of watershed moment, where I mean, in this moment, just like a, you know, a step change, you know, like a before and after a moment that kind of splits history into, you know, the watershed is like the the time or the television where you can't, yeah, after the watershed, you can show like, you can, like swear on TV and show naked people and stuff.

Ali

And the word was originally a geographical term describing the area from which water sources drained into a single river or ridge like that formed by chain of mountains, which sends water to two different rivers on either side, from that watershed came to me in a turning point or dividing line in life. Oh, cool.

Taimur

[...] geography.

Ali

I was focused on cave art stack stop. [...]

Taimur

I was more of a oxbow lake man myself.

Ali

[...] I was so proud of my.

Taimur

Yeah, essentially, I think, like, why this is interesting is that it's kind of the watershed moment where I think I think there's a general trend that we're seeing where traditional institutions are losing their power and systems are becoming more decentralized and democratized. You know, like, instead of going to university, you can now like, you know, do stuff online and have a Twitter account and write a blog and things like that, and learn all this kind of stuff. This this is like, a big moment, a similar kind of big moment, I think, in the finance world, where it shows that if a bunch of you know, if a bunch of little people bands together, they can take down the big guy. And you know, the faith in the big guy is now being eroded. And I think I think there were like, there were lots of memes about this, but I think like the most probably the one that was the best description of the phenomena. Have you seen Planet of the Apes?

Ali

No.

Taimur

Okay, basically, it's about it's film where I think like, scientists, I mean, apes exist to hear the world right? I think some scientists like did something to one ape, and that it became like really intelligent. And then he started he'd like broke free. He started like rounding up all the other apes he could communicate with them. And the sort of catchphrase that he had to bring them all together. It was "Apes together a strong" like, when all the apes together, they were strong, so I think that meme was aptly used to describe this phenomenon where the people or Wall Street bets, like used it to describe themselves as like "apes together strong" like so that was pretty great. And there was another phrase there's a phrase in I can't remember who said this, maybe Keynes or something that is a "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Right? Which basically means that you know, even you know, even if you think, Oh, this business sucks, I'm gonna, like place a bet against it, or I think this business is really good. I'm gonna like place a bet in favor of it. You know, the market can do weird things for no reason longer than you can like, hold your money there. And they adapted this quite, this is somewhat problematic, but the adaptation was we could stay retarded longer than you could stay solvent. And that's, yeah, I mean, it basically worked. Then there was a whole like, you know, act to where like the trading platform stopped letting people trade GameStop and a few other of these stocks that people trading. I'd recommend reading into it. I think it is like, history being made. It's like absolutely insane. And yes, it's really fun to watch it unfold on Twitter. I bought some GameStop. Myself, I think a little bit too late. I think I'm now I'm roughly breakeven on it. You ended up putting a bit in as well.

Ali

Yeah, I so. So my editor, Christian has been following this for a while. And like, towards the end of last week, where it hadn't quite gotten fully mainstream. He posted on our team Slack being like, Hey, I think you should get into GameStop. And it was on a Friday that he posted. He said, like, you know, by GameStop on Monday, what the hell's going on, like, well, what are you talking about, and then Monday came, and I was like, I just started looking into I was like, Okay, and then on Tuesday, I bought in, and I put I put about, or it was either Monday afternoon, or Tuesday or Tuesday, and I think I put I put two grand in on Tuesday, another two grand on Wednesday. And I think I'm plus 35% plus 40%.

Taimur

Nice, that's solid.

Ali

So I'm just waiting for the sell signal from Christian as well. So he's based in Romania, and I think he's using like Trading 212, and they halted trading. So he was saying, look, screw my next salary, you know, just use free trade and, you know, post, and buy me, I think Christian got another like, 10 grand in like, two days ago. He was like, you know, what, screw this. It's gonna happen.

Taimur

I think it's gonna, I think it's gonna go back up. I think like, there's gonna be another surge. And I'm kind of hoping that GameStop becomes like, you know, in the same way that that Bitcoin is kind of, you know, a way of tracking Crypto as a whole, like, you know, as crypto develops, and goes more mainstream, the price of Bitcoin is going to go up, right? And I feel like that might now be this trend of like, meme stocks. And like, you know, like, yeah, this sort of decentralized investing kind of trend. And since GameStop, was the one that sort of kicked it all off. I'm hoping that it might be a similar case where like, you know, people, people just like, buy and hold GameStop. Almost, but like, yeah, just for fun, just on principle as like, you know, like, whatever, whatever you call it. So yeah, I think we'll get back up. We'll see what happens.

Ali

That was partly why I bought it. I was like, You know what, I don't actually I feel like I want to be part of history right now.

Taimur

Yeah, I want to be part of history. Yeah. I don't really care if I make money on this or lose money on this. I just want to be part of it.

Ali

But what's the deal? So is there another fun like AME or something like that?

Taimur

AMC, Yeah, it's a sort of cinemas, you know, another like, obviously, meme stock into like, invested in physical cinemas, when there's lockdowns and things like that. Yeah, that's another favorite of Wall Street Bets which has also gone up quite a lot.

Ali

I guess there's one of those things where now that wall street beds has so much attention, it's probably a lot less potent for an individual to be chilling on Wall Street Bets.

Taimur

I don't know. But I mean, it's very, it's very easy to call, like the top of a trend, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you would have probably thought, Man, this YouTube thing. Yeah. Been there. done that. You know, YouTube is on its way out. Like I don't watch YouTube videos. Like podcasting. Yeah, five years ago, someone might have thought podcasting. Oh, man, that's such a fad. Like, everyone has a podcast.

Ali

Okay, yeah. Good point.

Taimur

Yeah. Like, it's just so easy to say that.

Ali

Like, you know, it's surged to 20K, and then it fell. Bitcoin has had its day.

Taimur

Yeah. And I think like, I think there is there is a broader trend towards decentralization of everything. And, yeah, I think this is just the first thing and so I think it's, I think it's gonna continue. Anyway, you know, let's not make this too much of a tech bro podcast. But I think it's just really interesting in cultured moment.

Ali

So we've been recording for 37 minutes already. I feel like "The Righteous Mind" is like a very a lot.

Taimur

Yeah, let's not do that. Wait, let me get us [...]. All right. Here's one thing. We'll don't do "The Righteous Mind" We don't really have enough time. But one thing I've been thinking about which I've been meaning to flesh my thoughts out on is the social media grift.

Ali

The what?

Taimur

Are you familiar with the term grifting?

Ali

Like sort of being a hustler? Who sort of..

Taimur

Yeah. Yes. sort of Yeah, I think a grifter is someone who likes swindles, people for money lives and scams people out of money, basically. And it's a term that's, that's, that's been that's being thrown around to describe, you know, like someone who sells online courses would be described, you know, certain kinds of like online courses, like I will make you rich kind, of course, you know, would be described as a grifter. You know, people like Tai Lopez, for example, you know, Tai Lopez?

Ali

I know vaguely of Tai lopez the whole Hey, I'm in my garage, and I got a Lamborghini behind me.

Taimur

Yeah.

Ali

Here I've got my bookshelf.

Taimur

Yeah. So I think a lot of people would describe Tai Lopez as a grifter. And there's this trend. Okay, I think I think I think being a creator on the internet is now a very legible thing. Everyone understands what it entails. More importantly, everyone understands that there's a lot of money to be made. If you are a successful creator on the internet, you know, 5 to 10 years, like 10 years ago, for example, you can pretty much guarantee that the people who were creators on the internet, were not primarily in it for the money, they would have gotten into it just because, you know, Logan Paul making stupid videos with his brother, just because it was funny, you know, NigaHiga, making stupid videos with his mates because it was funny. Like, if you look at the original kind of, or the earlier batches of who do you consider to be creators. And if you look at people who've had like blogs and podcasts for 20 years, you can pretty much guarantee none of them went into this thinking, "I'm doing this for money" you get that they went into into it for like, for fun, the arts, the craft, whatever you want to call it, attention, even. But it wouldn't have been money. But now, now that this sort of the whole thing is a lot more mature, it is a very legible path towards making money essentially. And it's just much more of a legible thing in society, like people now identify as, like, I'm a YouTuber, and people will know what you mean. You know, stuff like that. And because it's now legible, you sort of have this sort of second or third wave, you know, depending on how you find the waves here. You now have a wave of people who are getting into it for the money. There's always multiple motivations, but like, the money is definitely part of it. And so, you see a lot of people, you know, just tryingto gain a following. As like the starting point, I want to gain a following. You know, I want to get followers, I want to like, I want an audience, you know, I want to build an audience. Like that's kind of the starting point. And I think we're also seeing a bit of a backlash against this, particularly, I think, particularly on Twitter, because I think Twitter is something that different people use in very different ways.

Ali

I'm often surprised with the Twitter thing, just as an aside, like, I feel like for most normal people, Twitter is not where you get fortune cookie tweets from the vault.. It is actually where you get news and, you know, celeb gossip, and oh my god, I log into Twitter, and then I feel awful every time I do it. Like that is much more of a meme. Then I log into Twitter, and I get fortune cookie tweets from the vault.

Taimur

I like, I don't know what what gives you that impression. I have no idea how, quote normal people like non tech people use Twitter. I don't really know, to be honest.

Ali

Basically, all of the non tech people I know. And I mentioned Twitter, though they they have a responsive Oh, isn't that where you just get like troll comments and like, you know, flame about politics and politics and stuff here.

Taimur

Okay. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's, I mean, that's definitely how a lot of people use Twitter. But I think now it is it, you know, it is also being used by people who want to, you know, build an audience and get a following and stuff like that. And there are some very, like, transparent tactics that people use to do this. I think I mentioned one of them before, where, you know, if you're a new Twitter account, and you don't have many followers, and you just want to get followers, you can like, you know, make a you know to tweet something about a list or my like, top five favorite YouTubers and my top five favorite books this year. And then you can like tag the people who wrote the books or tag the youtubers themselves. And, you know, out of like courtesy or something, they will like your tweets. And once they've liked your tweets, it'll appear other people's feeds, and so on. And you can sort of keep mining the sort of this of tags about like how in the olden days, you if you had like 100 hash tags on your Instagram picture, you just get a bunch of like random likes from people, right? It's kind of similar to that. Another sort of format that it's starting to take off is threads. Where you'll, you know, in the first tweet of the thread, you will present some like thing, and then you will sort of create some suspense you'll say, I just learned about this one weird trick to like, do x,y,z time for a threat and then you'll have the finger pointing emoji, this is like this is this is classic. And then you'll have like a thread about, you know, some random insights. Or it'll often be like the equivalent of about a BuzzFeed listicle. of, you know, here are the top 20 you know, productivity tricks I've learned over the past five years or something, time for a thread. And then you'll have like these things on the thread. And it's like engagement bait, basically. And a lot of people are starting to speak out against this, where it's, I think there's, there's a sense that it's inauthentic, and it's very transparently inauthentic. And it's like very obvious that this person is trying to build a following. And it's kind of cringe basically, it comes down to it essentially being cringe. Because you're watching someone try to try to build a following, okay? And here's the thing is, here's where it gets complicated. I find it cringe. But I think I'm not sure how I'm not sure like, whether it's valid for me to take my cringe response and turn it into something more permanent, and pretended some kind of like, you know, principled stance against it. Woah, what's going on here? What has happened?

Ali

And then we had an audience member join the podcast.

Taimur

Yeah. So it's cringe, but it's, I feel like it's cringy in the same way that when you're, you know, we on Episode One, Two of the podcast, we were talking about, you know, the early days of you starting on YouTube, and you'd like have, you know, been like vlogging in lectures and stuff like that. And to say this like you had five subscribers or something, people would find it cringe. It's like, Oh, what is what is Ali doing? That's so cringe, like, stop recording or whatever. But now that it's much more of a big thing. No one has the same reaction to it. Because it's like, yeah, it's sort of an actual thing now. And so I feel like maybe part of the backlash is just this cringe response that everyone has, when you watch someone try to like, try to leave their station, okay, in some way. You know? Do you get what I mean?

Ali

Trying to break free from the barrel of crabs?

Taimur

Yeah, yeah. Like when, when you're when your friend is on, like 10 subscribers, and they're making this little YouTube videos, you'll look at it, and you're like, what are they doing this embarrassing kind of thing, but that when your friend is on like, 100,000, or a million, or whatever, your attitude towards it is very different. And so I think maybe, yeah, maybe that's a big part of it. You want to say some stuff?

Ali

Yeah. So I've been noticing this pattern for a while. A, I think the the thought sort of Twitter threads are cringe is a very niche, elite person on Twitter, someone who is the founder of a company that is already successful, someone who's potentially has who's been in this game for a while and can appreciate like, the meta game that's going on. To someone like I don't know, [...] from gumroad is going to be taking the piss out of this thread thing. But he's kind of already made it if so I was looking at one of Julian Shapiro's threads the other day, Julian Shapiro's, like 90,000 followers on Twitter, that's a big deal on Twitter. And it was genuinely a good thread. And he's been open about the fact that the way you grow on Twitter through threads, and the thread is good. And because of Julian Shapiro, whereas if someone with three followers were to post the same thread, I would also feel a bit like ah, mate, what you're doing. If James Clear, with his 1 million Twitter followers post a thread about, hey, here are five things I've learned about habits this year. No one is gonna complain about that. No one's gonna think that's cringe, he can post whatever thread he wants. Whereas if I don't know, yeah, Twitter account with 10 followers were to do the same. That tiny, tiny, tiny segment of elite tech Twitter thinking that we're better than everyone else, will have a cringy response to that. I think it's deeply unfair.

Taimur

I think it's unfair, but I don't think I think the phenomenon is more widespread than elite tech pressure of like, founders who have already made it. I think, like, there are lots of people on tech Twitter, with, you know, sub 10K followers, you know, sub 20K followers, who use Twitter very actively, but they use it in a different way. I think part of the issue is that people also use it in a different way. Like some people, you know, see Twitter as like, mainly just like a business thing of like, you know, trying to, you know, whatever their whatever the hustle is they want to use Twitter as a channel to grow that. And I think that's perfectly valid. Like there's a guy there's a guy whose username I think it's SweatyStartup. And basically, his hustle is that it's the most nice thing ever, but it's actually pretty interesting, he's hustle is he buys his self storage facilities in the middle of nowhere in like random middle of nowhere kinds of towns and cities. And then like, makes them slightly more efficient, and kind of raises the prices and then like, sells them on for profits. He is like the self storage facility guy. And he has grown a lot on Twitter. He does lots of threads, just like explaining various like tactics and how he does that, that kind of stuff. And it is very interesting. I didn't know anything about that world until I started following him. And he basically almost exclusively just talks about like his work i.e., like real estate investing specifically in self storage, right? And through, you know, from doing that he's, you know, won his network is in he now, like, you know, has done lots of deals with random people on Twitter, where they're like, buy a self storage facility together and sell it and all this kind of stuff. So it's like, it's like a great vehicle for him to advance his business. And I can't really knock that. But I think the issue is, yeah, I think probably the issue is different people use it in different ways. So I have a Twitter friend, who's we've hang out in real life, who I think is really the eminent thinker about the eminent thinker about online search online slash offline social interaction. His name is Ryan. And again, this this is not some like, this is not some like elites, you know, already made it Founder. He is working on a fairly early stage company right now. But by no means has he already made it at all. But he's been like very active on Twitter for a while. To give you an idea, though, he has almost 8000 followers. Okay. But I think he is somewhat like, his thing on Twitter is really just about keeping it real. And connecting authentically with people. I think he's gotten tremendous business value out of Twitter, but not because he was trying to squeeze business value out of Twitter. He has gotten tremendous business, social, all sorts of value out of Twitter by just, you know, being authentic, keeping it real, connecting with people in like a real and normal way. And not try and not having any kind of grifting going on. You may there's an Apple Clubhouse, which is now sort of starting to head to the mainstream. He used to previously be like a tech Twitter sort of thing. Let me let me just find this post that Ryan did recently.

Ali

Yeah, I think what one thing I think about when it comes to this kind of cringe responses kind of thing, seeing what people are doing on on social media platforms, is I think it's, I think it's the same problem as in real life, when you see someone vying for social status, like social status, and prestige is such an important part of the way that society organizes itself. But as soon as someone is seemed to be actively working towards that, rather than actually working towards it, everyone has a bit of a cringe response to it. They talk about this a lot in the in The Elephant in the Brain, about how, you know, it's all it's all well and good being I don't know the alpha. But if people think that you're trying to be the alpha then it causes a problem. It's all well and good. Having a good job that gives you prestige. But if people think that the reason you want that good job is so that you can get the prestige and compete with the Joneses. Suddenly it like the what's the phrase, the curtain, the curtain falls and the

Taimur

The emperor has no clothes.

Ali

Emperor has no clothes. Yeah. That kind of stuff.

Taimur

Yeah, I think it's very much related to that. Yeah, I don't know how I actually feel about that. Like, it's definitely cringe if you're watching someone intentionally [...] for social status. I think there's just something ulterior about that there's game playing going on, you know, it's just it's inauthentic. There's there's there is an ulterior nature to in, you know, intentionally doing something directly for social status. And I think it's like understandable and defensible, that you don't want to, you know, you won't want, I'm trying not to be too strong in what I'm saying here. Not from a hedging point of view, but really from a accuracy point of view.Like, it's understandable. If you find it off putting if someone is intentionally trying to increase their social status, put it for its own sake. Okay, so actually, so in 2015, Ryan wrote this sort of like blog posts, about kind of Twitter stuff, actually, in 2011, Ryan wrote this blog post about twitter stuff. So this is like nine years ago. Now, this is like very, very early on. I'll read the post very short. Many friends, students and even young professionals that I encounter continually downplay the potential positive impact of maintaining a blog or using Twitter in a mature way, could have on their personal growth and or career aspirations, despite various examples on a daily basis, how they could be using the various tools. Twitter is still acquainted with the Facebook status. And blogging is what Perez Hilton does. So obviously, this was this was nine years ago, a lot has changed since then, I think the perception has kind of changed. And Ryan says, I still urge them to think about the question how many people outside you know how many people outside your university that aren't your family know who you are and what your passion is, for the individuals that are receptive to start using these mediums. The first thing I personally try to impart on them is the goal is that the goal is to be and reveal rather than brand or craft a perception of them. The goal is just like to be just vibing you know, the motive behind tweeting, blogging, or comment thing is not to artificially create a brand for yourself. Social media, media and the web doesn't exist so that you can use smoke and mirrors. It's not to think, think yourself, you know, what would my future employer friend want to see, and then set off trying to build a disingenuous perception of yourself. Rather social media and maintaining a strong web presence is about revealing who you truly are, what you're passionate about, and what you're doing. It's about bringing the real insert name here to the surface, the audience of your tweets and blog posts is often a mixture of peers, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and future employers. A personal balance must be struck between fun professionalism, candid thoughts and frequency, you should strive and continue working, becoming a talented, whatever, a thought leader, an expert, whatever you want. But the emphasis here is, is that who you are online is representative of who you are in reality, that way, when you do meet someone in the physical world for a coffee at an event or an interview, there's no need to bullshit or fake it. I think one. So he wrote this in like 2011, which was very early on pre like most people kind of getting into this stuff. Basically, urging people to just like, keep it real, just like be authentic. Don't try and like create a brand for its own sake, all this kind of stuff. And then now that now that it's a club, so Clubhouse is this, the social audio app where you can basically join a room, and they'll just be a bunch of people speaking and you can listen in and you can raise your hand and you can speak as well. It's I think it went viral over the past few weeks, or a month or two. It's kind of been around for a couple of years-ish. Yeah, I think it's like definitely going mainstream. And Ryan has kind of been on it since. Basically, since day one. He has really seen it evolve. And the app that he's working on himself is also like a social audio app. So he's really thought a lot about this. And now that Clubhouse is going viral. You see a lot of people on Twitter, you know, with their heartache about why like, why like clubhouse is the next big thing and why social audio is so meaningful. Basically jumping on the bandwagon with their now obvious thought leadership after the fact. Like after the thing has already gone viral. And right, yeah, Ryan did have a few tweets, saying I would have appreciated your Cubhouse takes six months ago. Thanks. Everyone just seems for known things. Time away from the timeline has been so healthy and refreshing. He says peeps pontificating here are fucking losers. Go put your brain on the line with an ounce of independent thoughts or just go build. He's obviously like, very, very, like, I think you can feel the anger through the thread. I wouldn't like read too much into that. He's actually a great guy. And like you, generally is not like this. He says, it's actually disgusting. I really think folks will look back on 2019 to 2021 tweets as a blemish on their career and personality. Cool. You captured attention with your like pointing down threads and you captured an audience, dot dot dot that continuously ridicules you off timeline, but can't say shit publicly because of incentive and the game. So he's saying that like, you know, all these people who have like audiences or whatever, you know, you can't, you can't like publicly speak out against people on Twitter. It's just like, a bit rude. It's dumb thing. But in real life, all of these people, you know, are sort of ridiculed more privately and it's not something that people can publicly say, but a lot of people find this stuff distasteful maybe true, maybe not. And then he says this isn't a thread I precomposed and sent by tweets bought at the optimal time hoping for your RT and follow and he says it's a similar dynamic as you know, it's so cringe to see an acquaintance on Instagram with no personality or edge trying to become an influencer with 4k followers. I don't care if you follow me like this subscribe to riff is up share it, etc. The inputs for a decade have been for others to feel understand who you are not craft a shallow, timely veneer to harvest the Zeitgeist. I hope the right peeps truly when so they can say what they want. Yeah, he's obviously very angry about this. And I feel the anger. But yeah, I mean, what do you think?

Ali

So I think he's got he's clearly got strong opinions about this stuff. Yeah, I think the problem is that, let's say, Okay, I'm thinking about him, let's say you're a real life kind of networking event or something like that. And someone was being too much of a salesman. And was kind of doing the thing of entering every group and being like, openly loud and charismatic and be like, Oh, hey, shaking hands with everyone in the group and like, you know, really playing a part of being like the networker. And at the end of it be like, you know, I sell these used cars, I'd love to get you a good deal, (laughs) Now, there are going to be some people in this networking event who will think, who will think anything of this be like, Oh, this guy's this guy, social, I've got a business card, I'm gonna buy his car, there are going to be a small number, there are going to be some people in this in this networking event. There's also people who've been around for a while, who've been to networking events for a long time, who can see through the facade and see that this guy has read a book about sales recently. And this guy is a blowhard, and this guy, what's he doing? Come on, man, read the room. This is not, you know, it's a networking event. But networking isn't actually about business networking, it's about being authentic, and creating friendships and all that kind of stuff. Those people would look down on this guy for his hustle and for his grifting. And for his [...] but you can't knock the guy for doing it. Because [...] he needs to sell cars, used cars, he needs to have his business card out to people. And weirdly, the fact that he's doing it at this networking event actually does work. And I think the problem with mixing. I don't think problem, but this is what you get when you mix business incentives with personal incentives, when people are at this networking event, to keep it real with the bros and to meet a new person that they can invite to their weekly quintos. For example, other people are at this networking event to give out business cards and to close deals. The problem is that it's the same networking event. And some people are going to see this as a party where you will you should be your authentic self and others are going to see as a party where you can be your business self. And this issue with Twitter. Ryan sees Twitter as a place where you can be your authentic self. Whereas insert Twitter blowhard here sees Twitter as a place where he can grow his audience and grow his business. You know, blowhard is going to grow his business and is going take followers by his hot takes about Clubhouse six months too late. But in fact, for most of the people on Twitter who didn't know that Clubhouse existed until last week, the you know, those tweets would seem prescient if that's the right word. And they would therefore follow him like, Oh, this person's working on a startup. Let me check out a startup and he gets sales as a result of this. So I think, yeah, I can see it from both angles. I'm always wary of knocking people too hard when there are business incentives. And, you know, people are doing what they can to support their families.

Taimur

I agree. I think I think I think the fundamental issue is that people use Twitter in different ways, like this, the sweaty startup guy and self storage, does the self storage stuff. I think his thoughts on Twitter has changed. I mean, he's kind of gone from like, basically zero to like 100, almost 100K followers over the past year or something. And I think his view on Twitter has kind of changed where I think he felt some of the negative effects in his personal life of like caring too much about that, and going too hard on that front. And so I think, like, I think he's dialing it back a little bit. But like, I think he's also pretty transparent about, look, the thing I enjoy talking about an occasion with people about is like my business stuff. And that's basically what I tweet about. Follow me if you're into that, let's make some deals happen. And like, I think that's perfectly fine. I think that's all good. I think, look, yeah, I think I'm in agreement there. You know, if I think there's a weird middle ground, though, I think there is a weird middle ground, where, you know, suppose your sweaty startup guy, like, you know, you've been doing the Self Storage stuff for a bit, this has been your, this has been your hustle for like the past bunch of years. And then you discover Twitter, and it's like, oh, cool, I can like connect with these people. And like I can, like, you know, share what I do on my hustle and connect with all the people who might be interested in it and you know, collaborate as business partners and stuff. I think that's very understandable. I think where it gets weird is when it's when it's kind of something in the middle, where, for example.

Ali

Where someone doesn't have an established business already, and their Twitter bio says, tweeting about productivity and self improvement. And they've just started a YouTube channel with five subscribers, where they where they make videos about productivity and self improvement,

Taimur

I think so, I think that is maybe weird a territory, because there is a sense of the of there being a performance there, you know, that there's a sense of like, you know, performing as if, you know, you are this, you know, what a cheesier example, like productivity guru or something, you know, with Sweatystartup, there's, there's, there's no sense of performance, that this is like the thing he does, and he's now started talking online about it. And I think, I think if, if you don't have like an, you know, for example, Sweatystartup guy is I think 40, mid 30s, something like that. Like he he has a thing that he does. And now he started talking online about it. I think there are lots of people who do not yet have a well defined thing that they do, they're still trying to figure it out, all of that kind of stuff. But when you look on Twitter, you see these people making, you know, these engagement bait threads, you know, you see people like presenting themselves in a certain way, like, Oh, I'm the productivity guy, or I'm the x guy, all this kind of stuff. When you look at that, I think it's easy to get caught up in it and really just kind of lose any kind of authenticity. I don't think Sweatystartup is being inauthentic. But if you're someone who's still trying to like, you know, figure out what you care about, you know, figure out what you're interested in what, you know, what you're passionate about all that kind of stuff. I think there's a trap of sort of influencer theater, where you feel like you have to do that rather than just keep it real, be authentic. And, you know, see what happens along the way.

Ali

Yes. But it comes, it comes down to that, you know, used car salesman at the networking event for the people who see through it and see that that is a performance is automatically cringe, for the people who don't, it's like, oh, I'm getting a business card. And this guy seemed cool. I think on Twitter, the amount of people who appreciate engagement bait is far, far higher than the amount of people who see through engagement bait as being performative, you know, influence theatre, for the sake of gaining followers. I think, yeah, the more you think about the meta game of socializing, the more you see that the emperor has no clothes. But in fact, the, I don't know, x thousand followers that influence the theater guy will acquire by posting threads, threads about productivity, most of those people, are people who appreciate the thread. And so as yeah, as someone who's who understands the metagame, it's just a different, like, obviously, your response to it, or one's response to any situation like that would be different than, you know, it's like, it's like when you're at university in your first year. And everyone's like, Okay, cool. Everyone's being allegedly, their authentic self, by the time you get to third, fourth, fifth and sixth year, and you see how the first year they are interacting, you can see, you understand the meta game, and you see that there is a large amount of performing going on. But when you were first here, you're just like, oh, that person seemed cool. I want to take the number because I really want to make friends. And I've heard that, you know, if you give out your number to people, then people will be more likely to be friends. And you should add everyone on Facebook immediately on Instagram be like, you know what, to Instagram and invite them to events. And whereas by the time you get to final year, you're like, Oh, God, allow that. You know, just being you know, just keep it real man. A big part of it. It's just you know, this. Ryan from Twitter has been on Twitter for 10 years. He's been on Clubhouse from day one. He's, you know, he's more than welcome to pass judgment on the first years. But you can't knock the first years for doing first year stuff.

Taimur

That sounds like a fair point. Let me think about that. Okay, I agree. You can't knock the first years for doing first year stuff. But there may be a potential issue. Where I mean, to keep this analogy going. The first year is doing first year stuff does not actually help them achieve their goals. So Ryan, wrote another thing about Clubhouse. This was like a while ago, last year, like very, very early on last year. He says, I've been talk on the phone first for the last three years. So he's big fan of just like phone out people on the phone rather than texting, blah, blah, blah. And he's written some stuff about that. And one of the points the one of the things that he thinks is very interesting about talking on the phone, about like, actually talking like on Clubhouse, like a conversation rather than tweeting, and texting and things. Is that in live dialogue, there's a very different bar. He said, and yeah, I think this is referring to the Clubhouse he tweeted some point last year. Funny to feel think boys are bad. He coined the Think boy, it's so good. This is like this is now a general term. On the twittersphere It's really good. He said It's funny to feel think boys exposing themselves after the first five minutes of discussion and bulleted facts, Uncle Pete statements, no brainer observations, fake biz inspo don't hold up for long in live dialogue that's tweeted, and in this blog post, whatever. It was actually just like a Dropbox paper article. Not even like how to be on medium or blog or anything. I love it, man I love it.

Ali

Informatively keeping it real. It's more like write an article in Dropbox. Just write it on your medium blog.

Taimur

I don't think he's actually, anyway he said he says he says look, you know about someone, you follow them on Twitter, you watch the videos, you build this idea about them. Then you see them speak, the thrill of excitement comes as you're now meeting them. They open their mouth and you can't and you can't just wait for them to spit those same thoughts in person. Yet as you hear them, you realize it's different. They're not the same as their online persona. That's a regular occurrence in Clubhouse. Why? Because talking and having to do so within an active conversation for 15 to 60 minutes is far different than editing videos, tweeting 178 characters or being on a scripted podcast. It rivals truly meeting someone and perhaps even more pure given that you can't be distracted by body language, aesthetics and hundreds of other signals, it's not Clubhouse specific. It's the medium, it would be the same as the Beer garden. Very quickly, you get a fuller picture of who they are. Can they actually listen? How high is their EQ, emotional quotient? If you're into that kind of things, we will say this. Can they speak to a subject with depth that they so often tweet about? Are they actually wildly funny? Do they ask thoughtful questions? Do they keep the beach ball going, etc. Some folks certainly treat other social apps as a means to build a reputation and yield influence through distinctive tactics. That narrow and well honed pattern has the potential to get disrupted when you find yourself surrounded by actual voices, jokes and questions. He has a subheading that says talking transforms. That's why you call your mom go to lunch with friends, tap house party notifications, and open FaceTime. That's why we're all using Zoom, Slack calls internet town upstream tandem, an icebreaker for a mix of personal and professional uses. These are all like talking apps, basically, talking is actual social tweets and stories are just surface area meant to be talked about how to use Clubhouse, you open your mouth and your ears. That's it, you're off and running and immediately are doing the most important thing, talking. It makes doing the most difficult thing very easy. Not every interaction in our day has to be synchronous. But if social distancing and quarantine have shown us one thing that you can't get by as an internet citizen, family member or friend. with endless swiping, scrolling and tapping on feeds, you don't truly feel fulfilled emotionally, socially or mentally without conversation, you need to actively engage and earn the opportunity to get to random topics, nuanced stories, jokes, and depth through dialogue. Why are folks listening and talking for hours after hours night after night in clubhouse. Because it's inherently healthy and normal. You don't get the same social media hangover and thoughts of regrets you get by tapping passively on Instagram stories or Tiktoks or tweets for hours. I think that's a really good point. Like last last year, when I was sort of using Clubhouse for a bit, I used to on and off for a couple of weeks in like July or something. It really was quite magical, like I'd like stay up past my bedtime for like two three hours just like listen to people talk. You know, at occasion join the discussion, it's so true that you don't have the same social media hangover after doing that compared to scrolling through Twitter for an hour Instagram stories, whatever. Like it is fundamentally a different thing. Another tweet of his which is embedded in the post

Ali

[...] Dropbox paper.

Taimur

Hot take the majority of people have been lazy with personal communication and friendships. If it took the quarantine to realize that actually talking to each other and not glancing at fetal stories was the lifeblood for trust context and genuine connection. Right, there's another subheading, why can't we just talk? This is a tweet of his 2019. It says it's really this magical moment of time. 3, 10, 40, whatever. So refreshing and pure when it's done. It just feels clean and refreshing. If you said I'm tripling the rate of you're talking on the phone, I'd be up for it. And you know, there's this thing about like, our kids don't like talking on the phone these days. And he says in response to that. I actually think it's that people know, you know, hearing each other's voice is essential. And often. how you get to that point isn't, there's like a lot of social and logistical friction, in getting to that point of hearing someone's voice and talking to them. Like, it sometimes feels awkward to like phone someone, right? It's like, it's not a very standard thing to do nowadays. He says today's phone call is a terrible packaging and delivery of something great. He says good old phone app, FaceTime, Zoom and Slack calls were all around pre clubhouse and pre COVID. So why weren't people talking through on those at a higher rate before? Why are they now flocking to use these every day and night? Getting to talking was actually tough, both from a cultural norms perspective and a practical UX level. UX meaning like user experience of using a product who wants to cold call their friends, nevermind their acquaintances who wanted or even thought to schedule regular catch ups. You couldn't actually tap your thumbs to start hearing someone's voice who actually wanted to be on video for each FaceTime or house party push notification. Why can't we just talk who was going to go through the thumb tapping and mental efforts to mix and match different pockets of groups to get overlapping friends on the same text thread to then group FaceTime audio with no agenda? Like there's a lot of friction to just arranging an impromptu voice hangouts with people. Who was going to regularly slide into DMs of modern friends on Twitter and asked to hop on the phone call, get the number and set up a time without, instead of the time where the calendar invites, again, lots of friction. A nonstarter if the they ask for conversation wasn't around a meaningful topic or an explicit request of their time. You know, like, a ton of friction, a ton of like, weird social baggage around like, you know, DMing someone to say, hey, let's, you know, let's just like chat for a bit. I haven't got any agenda or [...], I just want to chat. We can put it in the calendar if you want. It is such a weird thing to do.

Ali

Have I told you about how I did this a few weeks ago?

Taimur

Well, you have your like, friends can just book it. What book on your Calendly?

Ali

Yeah, I've got that. But there was this guy who I this other YouTuber that I wanted to be friends with. And I saw that he follows me on Twitter. So I DM him like, Hey, this is gonna sound weird, but I think we've got a lot in common. We should be friends. He replied, I felt so scared about doing that. And he replied like my thoughts exactly. And then I said, fancy phone call sometime soon. And then give him a Calendly link. And he was like, Wow, that's so organized. Sure. Let's talk and we're chatting at 7pm today. And he was like, like, last week, I got, I got another message from someone who I follow on Instagram, who's also a YouTuber. And she said, Hey, Ali, I didn't realize you were following me on Instagram. Just wanted to say hi. Love your content. I just said, Hey, we should be for I don't think I said we should be friends. But I said something like, hey, we'd love to have a chat on the phone sometime. Are you free any of these times Calendly link and we chatted yesterday and just choose an America is a YouTuber. Used to be a software engineer, and we just kind of had a chat about general stuff. That was great. So what I decided to do this, hey, should we just talk on the phone? Yeah, I think right now, I actually prefer I'm not sure how I feel about audio only versus audio video. Because there is something I feel like for first meeting It is nice to see what someone looks like. And you know but for subsequent meetings, audio only I think is much more. I don't know like I can I can I can walk around the house. I can like go for a walk. I can I can do whatever audio only, once I don't need to see the face anymore.

Taimur

Yeah, I do think there's something nice about audio only, and being able to like walk around and not having to like, maintain composure, in terms of waiting, but that's really cool, man. But it feels weird, right? Like, it felt like a really weird thing for you to say like, Oh, let's just chat

Ali

iIt felt weird. The more I do it, the the more desensitized them becoming to it. And so like, Yeah, I just want to Yeah, I want to want to keep it going.

Taimur

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I mean, I think it was actually originally, or one of Ryan's tweets, or one of his Dropbox papers, or something that got me to start calling people up on the phone, when I start doing this a few months ago. Yeah, just to like finish the thing. You know, he says, who was going to talk with perfect strangers that they didn't even know existed? You don't, because you literally can't go try to try and talk live with one stranger in the world tonight. Just one, and maybe just a friend of a friend, then tried to go to do that every night. What's the easiest way to get people talking? Place them in the same room right next to each other. That's elimination of friction. Whether it's a best friend, friend acquaintance or stranger, you'll have to start talking. Just don't open up with a lame so how do you know our mutual friends and you'll be fine. Clubhouse borrows a room metaphor and brings that to life with your ears. You just pop into a room and start listening and start talking if you like, it's effortless. And then yeah, the rest of the post just talks about Clubhouse and why why like they've really held something. Ryan also has this concept of modern friends. Another sort of terminology that it hasn't really made into the Twitter mainstream like think boys. But he says modern friends is simply relationships that primarily originate and develop through digital channels, like, you know, friends who are very much real life friends that you make on Twitter or you know, on whatever. I think that's a useful concept. The best way to know if you would get get along with someone question mark, talk to them, or listen to them for an hour, it will be quite apparent where you now fall on thehow much do I appreciate their vibe spectrum. If it took many months of looking at someone's sparse tweets to understand if you will want to grab a beer, coffee or a phone call with them. It takes about a week of passive listening plus talking to get the same confidence. Budge more stuff about Clubhouse. And then this is another interesting thing. He says the actual amount of two way discussion that follows relative to the initial velocity and strength of hot takes signaling and onlineSpats is stress staggeringly low. Take a second to reflect on the last week of fights takedowns and feuds you have witnessed on your timeline. Now imagine being able to ask each main contributor if they would like to actually talk about set points of debate, tolerance for those all too convenient fingers on keyboard takes, and virtue signaling has fallen to an all time low. Now that I've experienced clubhouse and small group voice chats, each time I see one of these debates kicking off I think if you really cared about this for yourself and others, you talk this through, sure we'll be will become a small audience. But I want to hear you get to nuance and depth on the subject, stop polluting our timeline with surface level emotional takes. It's partly a human problem and partly a medium problem, folks are never going to want to admit they're wrong or acted appropriately. But tweets and rambling threads are a format that make it inherently worse to actually find common ground or discover where each actually stands. Right now the precedent is to shout, never get into the details and continue parading your point of view in subsequent tweets and podcasts for months. You're never forced to meet your mental master. The Clubhouse format of active dialogue is quite clarifying. It forces you to be human. And if you truly care about maintaining a reputation, you will have to handle a conversation that quite differently. If the point of conflict is centered around a different life business or social perspective, I actually think one stands to win or lose a lot more credibility slash commerce that slash reputation for how they handle the discussion as opposed to the merits of the original point. There's no hiding and you've got a lot to lose if you can't be civil and respectful. Yeah, the post goes into a lot more stuff. I do think like I think I've mentioned this before, like the format of chatting on the podcast. I think it just like forces you to, like, have a have a productive conversation like I think I think it's it's like it's it's a good like I think live dialogue a is just like very good because you have to like look at the other sort of face the other person as a human being rather than as an anime avatar on twitter.com. But yeah, I think like the format of like live discussion is, yeah, it really is the is the way to do it.

Ali

Yeah, on that note, I was thinking that I feel like this, this thing of having no agenda is, is actually very, very valuable. And one of the one of the sticking points, one of the sticking points of me, or the non sticking points with me for this podcast was the need to come up with a topic every week. But I think since we've become okay with the you know, what, we'll just talk about whatever. We don't need a topic for the week, I think, I think like having topic free episodes is also valuable. Slash useful, slash the way that we're approaching this is more about, at least for me, that was just nice to have a chat and if people want to they can listen in. And so the emphasis that we had in the past about all this week's topic has to be good, was probably, I mean, it was fine at the time, but I think we've now evolved kind of away from that.

Taimur

Yeah, I think I think early on, we see it a little bit anxious or nervous if we didn't have a concrete topic, because then it's like, I want to talk about, I think there's always something to talk about, like stuff just comes up like today, we were sort of planning to do this righteous mind. But we're not doing it right. Yeah, but look, just to go back to to the grifting thing, I feel like, I do want to take a position on this. Rather than that we've sort of talked about it in a very, in a very hedge is the wrong word, but very inconclusive way. Okay? I think if your intention is to use Twitter, or you know, replace it with any social media. If your intention is to use this thing, as a business tool, it's a great business tool, go for it, you know, you know, like, definitely [...] for you for that you'll have a ton of fun, you'll probably make a bunch of money and stuff good for you. I think a lot of people are playing the role of the Twitter businessman, when their intention isn't really to use it as a business thing. Because they don't they because A, they don't yet have like, a business that they can, you know, start doing on Twitter. And B, I think what a lot of people want is actually the genuine connection. People want the genuine connection, people want to be able to keep it real people want to be able to connect with others, and really, truly make friends. You know, if you can, if you can sort of monetize some stuff along the way. That's all well and good. But the thing is, I think that like the, just by making friends with people, there's a lot of like monetary benefits that will come out of that in an unexpected way. Like Ryan, for example, you know, has less than 8000 Twitter followers. But, you know, he, I think he, he's made a lot of sort of deep connections and genuine friendships with people, and builds, like a very strong and well known reputation for himself within the tech community, where like, for example, a year ago, whatever. When he decided to quit his job and start his startup, he had absolutely no problems raising funding, because a bunch of, you know, rich investors had been following him for like, years, and knew that this guy was really smart, really thoughtful, real, legit, keeps it real, you know, all the kind of stuff you'd want in a business partner. And so, like, honestly, I think if you're someone who doesn't have, if you're not, if you're not, like Sweatystartup, where you you have this established thing, and you can very, very legibly say that, you know, I have this thing I want to like, I want to push it forwards. And I'm using Twitter in order to do that. If you don't have that thing, I think you're probably doing more harm than good by play acting in that way.

Ali

More harm than good?

Taimur

Sorry?

Ali

More harm than good? I'm not sure I agree. What do you what do you mean by that?

Taimur

Okay, look, it's all just

Ali

To be clear, by play acting on Twitter, you mean sort of being a think boy?

Taimur

Yes.

Ali

Okay.

Taimur

I think like, what, what?

Ali

Being a think boy does work. Okay, so..

Taimur

Does work for what?

Ali

This is, in my role as the head instructor for the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. I run into this question quite a lot. The question of what the hell do I make videos about? And do I need a niche? Do I need an angle? Do I want to be the notion guy? Do I want to be the SEO girl Do I want to be like, whatever. The way to grow on YouTube is by niching down. It's by being the notion guy, or, or by being the room notetaking girl or whatever, like by having a box that you can put into that you create, create content around, and then people find the content because it's searchable and people care about finding educational content. And then hopefully, the model is that they'll follow you because they like your personality. And you'll then be able to, you know, leverage that in some way further down the line for friendships, for connections for selling stuff for doing whatever you want, basically. The issue is this thing of how do I, how do I find this niche? I think it's the same problem on Twitter. It's like, let's, let's imagine there is a 21 year old medical student who has who follows me listen to the podcast, which is Matt D'Avella, and Thomas Frank's videos on YouTube. And that is and maybe listens to Tim Ferriss, you know, that sort of person when, like, I know, a lot of people have hit that particular profile. Now, let's say that person wants to start a YouTube channel or wants to start going on Twitter, it's a lot easier said than done. To say, Look, man, just be your authentic self. Like, the only their only real content diet is, you know, the productivity business self help cannon

Taimur

it's like the metagame rather than any kind of game itself. Right?

Ali

Quite Yeah. And maybe, and this podcast, maybe they're getting some ideas from this, and probably a few people listening to this are like, damn, that fits me perfectly. And so if that person wants to start a YouTube channel, they're like, well, what the hell do I talk about I have no credibility, other than the fact that I'm a medical student. So why don't I make I guess I could make videos about medicine. But I don't really want that. Because I'm graduating in two years time. You know what, I'm kind of into productivity. I'm kind of into tech. I've got an iPad I've got I've got an iPhone, I've got my remarkable two tablet. Let me just start making a productivity tips video. Let me just start making this. And you know what? Twitter, Twitter seems good. The sorts of people I follow on Twitter are like, you know, the, the James Clear's and the Julian Shapiro's, and all these people are tweeting threads with insights, why don't I start doing the same? Like, it's, I can fully empathize with that person. Because it's that fear. It's that problem of when you don't know when you don't have your own sweatystartup, when you're not a 40 year old dude who's been buying self Storage, real estate and making money off of it for the last 20 years? What the hell do you like, okay, like, we all know that it is valuable to put yourself out there online. But how do you put yourself out there online in a way that doesn't already parrot the sort of stuff that you've seen? And that you've seen work? And that's the stuff that brought you in, in the first place? I wouldn't knock said 21 year old medical student for being a think boy on Twitter, because that's kind of all they know. And they know that.

Taimur

Wait, I think that's really harsh. I think that's a really harsh thing to say, No,

Ali

That's all they know on Twitter. They're not following people like Ryan, he's only got 8000 followers, they're following people like James Clear. And David Perell and Tim Ferriss and navall. would like, you know, hundreds of 1000s if not millions, of followers between them. And,and what those guys are doing is being think boys on Twitter, essentially. And so it's way too easy to knock that person because otherwise, like, they, they know, they don't want they know, they want to escape the, quote, rat race of the full time job. They know that being an online creator is one way of doing that. And they know that being a think boy on Twitter is one way of being an online creator. And so A leads to B leads to C. And it's so easy to knock that and be like, Hey, man, get some original insight. What do you want them to do? Read? I don't know, Plato's the cave. And be like, you know, I read Plato's the cave, here's a thread (laughs) [...] from gumroad are gonna see that and think, Oh, my God, this guy. This guy's performing. but the guy, you know.

Taimur

I don't, I think you're you're assuming a lot of outside from covered. I don't think he knocks his stuff nearly as much as you think he does.

Ali

No, he's just like, being like, hey, I learned 10 things from billionaire. Next one. They don't read [...] like this.

Taimur

Yeah, look a lot of people have been blocking the thread thing. I think you're mischaracterizing..

Ali

I'm using him as like a, you know, just as a stereotype.

Taimur

Yeah. I mean, his thing on Twitter is mostly tweeting like fortune cookie type startup advice. I'm curious as to what he's doing there.

Ali

This isn't about [...]. This is about a successful startup founder. Who who knocks people for, or, you know

Taimur

[...] is not that yeah. All right, whatever. Let's be..

Ali

Who make, who pokes fun at think boys, essentially.

Taimur

I think most of people who poke fun I think, boys I'd like not, you know, like, if you're on a sort of fairly prominent company, you're probably not going to be poking fun at most people.

Ali

[...] with Ryan from Twitter, who's definitely going to make a think boy from writing a thread about the cave.

Taimur

Okay, look, the issue. Wait, did you actually have a hard stop at one? what is it just move it. We're not at the bottom of this. I think this is really important.

Ali

I could take a few minutes on messenger and say, hey, let's do this mock interview 15 minutes later.

Taimur

Okay. Look, the thing is, I think, I think the issue is when the goal is to build an audience, right? You know, like, it's this like extrinsic thing, man. And look, again, like from a business point of view. Yes, understandable.

Ali

The goal is to build an audience, but the way you get to the goal is by creating stuff that people find useful. These people are simply trying to create stuff that people find useful and people are finding it useful. Okay, but it's just that the process of creating that stuff feels inauthentic to some people because they aren't they, they're the final years knocking the first years for not being their authentic selves, where the first year they're really just trying to make friends. Ryan from Twitter is a final year. He's a frickin PhD student who's been at the university, who's knocking the first years for not keeping it real.

Taimur

I don't think that's correct, because you're acting like the only game to be played on Twitter is the like building an audience grift. And the way you're talking is almost as if, you know, the people like Ryan went through that building an audience grift and now that now that they have some followers, and they've made some friends that now enlightened and they can look down on other people, I don't think that's what's going on.

Ali

I don't think it's only game to be played on Twitter, I'm saying it is one very legible game that people can play on Twitter to achieve their goal of I want to be a creator online, the way I know you the way to become a creator online is by providing useful content, creating the thread about the you know, my book review of Plato's the cave is actually a very good way of providing useful content online.

Taimur

Yeah, I have no issue. I think threads are really valuable. I think it's very interesting to see the different kinds of threads that there are, for example, there's a guy called the chap called Dan Rose, who used to be an executive like Facebook and Amazon. And now he's the the chairman of a fund called Coatue. Which is like a hedge fund. And they also do like startup investments. And his threads are really interesting. He posts he posts maybe like one thread a week or something, just about some like interesting war story from his time at Amazon or his time at Facebook about like, some problem with the company was going through, you know, how they like resolved it and stuff like that. And I think that those threads have like a difference. Like those are interesting. Like, yeah, of course, very interesting

Ali

The think boy is not likely to be a 45 year old exec Amazon and Facebook, who's got interesting war stories that other people would find interesting, it's likely to be a kid who doesn't really have much of a much kind of unique life experience, other than maybe being a medical student having gone through school, which is not a particularly unique thing, trying to dabble into the world of putting themselves out there online. And having this bar of your thread has to be interesting. It's like, well, I mean, it's, I would be interested.

Taimur

I think book threads, I think a book summary thread is interesting. I have nothing, nothing against book summary threads, I think I think the issue is more than mind, the performative mindset. And like, yeah, I think, sorry?

Ali

Why is that an issue?

Taimur

I think, I think the performative of mindset detracts from me, you know, like, fine, you could you could, you could do it, you could sort of be very performative for, you know, two to three years build up like a medium sized following. And then you can, you know, come out of Plato's cave, enlightened. And then you can be like, Alright, I'm done with the performance-ism. You know, me, I'm not going to lock my Twitter account. That was a really funny tweet where I think Lin-Manuel Miranda locked his Twitter account at like, 100,000 followers or something. Someone like screenshotted that it said. (laughter) It said something like, finally, that was just me at the population of Bosnia. Becausehe likes look to the account despite having like loads of followers, anyway, like, yes, you could, you could be like, super formative for three years, build up a medium sized following, then change tax decide to start keeping it real, discover your authentic self, all that kind of stuff. That's one way to do it. But I think you can actually also just do that from the start, you know,

Ali

With what?

Taimur

Sorry?

Ali

With what? okay, imagine you're me, at the age of like, 19, where my, or rather, at the age of 21, where I haven't yet started my YouTube channel. And I've just, I'm a medical student. What the hell do you want me to tweet about?

Taimur

You do tweet about I don't think tweeting about life as a medical student is like not keeping it real? I don't think that's, you can do that in a non performative way. I think that's, I haven't got an issue with that. Okay.

Ali

Okay, fine. I can I can tweet about life as a medical student. Let's say I want to, I want to become an online creator, because I'm like, this medical student thing isn't I don't want this to be my full time hustle. Would you not you surely wouldn't knock me for, I don't know, tweeting a thread about productivity, or tweeting a thread about how I manage my time as a medical student, which would vary, you know, varies very much on the verge of falling into Ryan from Twitter's camp of performative threading to grow follower count engagement baits. In fact, medical Twitter would think it's even more performative. If you were like, you know, I just had my first patient death, a thread of lessons that I've learned, people would cringe at that. But it would get followers it would get likes, it would get retweets, it would be like, Oh, this guy's interesting. You know, there is a game to be played here and the game to be played. And one way of one way of playing the game is by providing pithy and useful content about the stuff that you know. And when you don't know anything other than the canon of productivity books and YouTube channels, that is all the content that you can produce when you're a 50 year old Amazon exec, okay, fine, you know?

Taimur

Well, okay, I think you're, I think you're wrong and two counts here. Okay. I think the first way in which you're wrong is that you are conflating the stuff that will get likes and engagement, with stuff that is actually useful. I think that's, I don't think that's the case.

Ali

I don't know. I think I feel like likes and engagement are a reasonable, reasonable rough proxy for useful to the person who's like to engage with it. Okay, me liking a tweet a tweet where someone's like, my 10 favorite YouTubers, someone, someone, someone, someone Ali Abdaal seventh on the list. Sure, I agree. That is, that's irrelevant, which like is not not correlated with whether this is actually useful. But a thread from Julian Shapiro or James clear or anyone about 10 lessons they've learned from reading Plato's cave. A like there, all of the likes there are not, you know, are very highly correlated with the thread being useful. And useful threads is how you grow an audience on Twitter and growing an audience on any on insert social platform x is how you monetize that audience further down the line, which is how you become a, you know, you enter the creator economy, and then you release course.

Taimur

I think it is a weaker proxy than you think. I think in the in the realm of tweets that will get 10 likes, you know, all right, let's say something more interesting. In the realm of tweets that will get good engagement. There are, there are ones that are more genuinely useful. And there are ones that are less genuinely useful. And I think, I think the it's what you were saying amounts to saying like, Oh, yeah, I think but I think BuzzFeed listicles. You know, are equally as meaningful, as you knows, you know, what were the opposite? I don't know, some, like, long, long form piece in The New Yorker, I think, well, BuzzFeed. listicles get more likes and shares on Facebook. And so that's like, that's a good proxy for like, usefulness or meaningfulness compared to this long four B's in the New Yorker, right? I think that's just nonsense.

Ali

Okay, no, I disagree with that. I think it depends on it depends on your definition of useful more people are reading the BuzzFeed listicle. It's more accessible to a mass audience. The New York Times has a paywall behind it. It's got it's like some long as 10,000 word essay that a handful of people are going to read. I think. [...] is more useful than a 10,000 piece word piece in The New Yorker that fewer people are gonna read. Sure, maybe it's not contributing to the meta discourse, but like, what, what's your what's your marker for utility here?

Taimur

Right, I think I think my market for utility is certainly not it's certainly not likes and retweets. And I think I think it's broadly accepted that the sort of like and retweet game and like, you know, game of round people's attention does definitely lead to local minimums, where y es, you can, you can have a ton of stuff, you can garner a lot of attention for something that is not useful, that does not contribute positively positively to, you know, people's lives. It's a it's a very common failure mode of social media for that to happen. And so for you to say that just because it has likes, it's good.

Ali

Let's move away from individual tweets, and let's move towards follower. What, okay, do you accept that people follow Twitter accounts whose tweets they find interesting, insightful, useful, or entertaining?

Taimur

Yeah, sure.

Ali

Do you accept that follower account is therefore a valid, somewhat reasonable proxy for how useful people think this Twitter account is?

Taimur

Ah, dude, I think it's just a lot more complicated than that.

Ali

Okay. I agree, which is why I'm saying do you accept that it's a rough proxy, like James Clear's Twitter account with a million followers? is, you know, in some more useful than someone else's Twitter account with 100 followers?

Taimur

Yeah, I think i think that's that's obviously a very extreme example. I think most of James clear as far as came after he became prominent for his book. I mean, he has like a bad like, a long time blog newsletter before that.

Ali

I think habits for like, a decade.

Taimur

yeah, exactly. But like, I don't think his million followers represents, like, okay for to use Ryan, as an example. Ryan has 8000 followers. And I think the, the genuine human connection per follower is obviously much higher, and probably even like the total human connection from someone like Ryan with his 8000 followers, I think dwarfs people with hundreds of 1000s of followers.

Ali

That's fine. I mean, that that's a conversation of depth versus breadth. Ryan goes deep with a small a small number of people that is significantly greater than the sort of surface level that someone tweeting fortune cookies is likely to have with a biggest swath of people think we agreed on that one.

Taimur

Yeah. How do we get onto this? I think you said something around.

Ali

Okay. My point, okay. I feel like I don't understand what what you're actually saying. What I'm saying is that you can't knock people for playing the game when they don't have anything quote, interesting to talk about.

Taimur

Okay. Yeah, yeah, that was okay. So the first thing I disagree with you on was that you said like, likes equals usefulness, and we just talked about that.

Ali

[...]

Taimur

You're saying likes is a good proxy. And I think that is like, I think is not a good proxy as like any, you know, I mean, look at anything that's ever that's been said about like, you know, the attention economy on social media, like I think everyone agrees that likes is it's not a great proxy for usefulness at the at least not, you know, not when it's so easy to like click like on a feed, you know.

Ali

My broader point is not about likes being a proxy for usefulness it's about you can't knock people for anything that you think is not interesting when they don't have anything quite interesting to talk about.

Taimur

Here's the thing. I think that is I think that's really problematic. I think that is like, that is like so demeaning. Like, just because someone's like 21, rather than 50 doesn't mean they haven't got anything meaningful or interesting. That's sort of authentic and real and personal to tweet or talk about, that's just not the case in the slightest. Yes, fine. It's probably not business experience, on the same level as Dan Rose, who's been an executive, sort of big tech companies for 20 years, they won't be tweeting about that. They guarantee it.

Ali

Okay, fine. This person. Again, if we're talking about two different use cases of social media, this person is not in the room to have an authentic connection and make friends and stuff. This person is in the room because they're like, I want to be a full time I want to be a creator, and I want to I want to, I want to make money in the creator economy. And the way I do that is by creating pithy threads about insights that I've read, read from books, that's different to Amazon executive making pithy threads about insights from his 50 years at Amazon, it is like a different ballgame there. Both are ultimately creating, useful..

Taimur

I agree, it's a different ballgame. I think, for the person who has less less life experience. I think the goal a lot of people have, like, like, yeah, certainly, a big goal a lot of people have is to make money as a creator, you know, and that's like the primary thing and they can figure out what that means later, they can figure out like okay, you know, what, what my topic be later. Again, I personally feel like that's a bit backwards. I think you can kind of the, I think the two can sort of be intertwined. And there's a spectrum of like, completely pandering to what will get likes and retweets and things like that, which we sort of touched on at the start of this podcasts. When you talk about your book and like, like maximizing audience, I think there's a spectrum from like, completely pandering, and, you know, you know, sort of not kind of losing yourself in order to just like, get, you know..

Ali

Yeah, there's a balance to be struck between what I want to create, and what I know, my audience will want to read and trying to, it's got that line..

Taimur

And I think when the starting point is I want to build an audience, you are 100% on the pandering side. And that is why there are so many people kind of pedaling, pedaling the same meta game stuff, when the metagame is really there in servitude of some actual game. Right. And I think, I think if, you know, I think what people want to do is find their actual game. I think if you're, if you're young, you're in a process of like, figuring out what that is. And I think I think this doesn't really you know, sort of having a goal of becoming a creator about you know, whatever you can possibly become a creator about.

Ali

no it's it's it's not about whatever I can possibly can become a creator about it's whatever interests me and that skirts, that Venn Diagram between things I like things I'm good at and things that the audience will pay me for. Crucially, and if and if you have that and you're like well, I don't I don't really know what this looks like I'm still in the process of figuring out my personal monopoly, you can do a lot worse than by being a think boy on Twitter to grow that audience and use that and now that you have a bit of a following a few 100 followers on Twitter from your think boy tweets. Now dabbling with like you know what, I'm I'm actually really interested in offshore oil mining rigs. Let me start, you know, tweeting a few things about that and seeing and just kind of seeing what happens because this is something I'm genuinely interested in. Okay, cool. Like it's all it's all part of the figuring out phase, and you can't knock people for something like think boys when this when that when they're trying to figure it out.

Taimur

Yeah. I'm sympathetic towards that. Like, yeah, I think I think there's..

Ali

like, my main issue is that I don't want you to knock people who are first years for not for doing first year things.

Taimur

I okay, I think this framing is wrong, by describing as first year things you're pretending like there's one way to kind of do things, and that everyone goes through this thing.

Ali

No analogy is perfect. But like you get the what I'm trying to say.

Taimur

Sorry?

Ali

Obviously, no analogy is perfect. But you get what I mean by first year things, some people who are figuring it out where someone more who's more experienced with the metagame thinks, performative threading. performative think bonus.

Taimur

I think, look, the whole point of the first year analogy is that everyone goes through that phase of being a first year, and like wanting to make friends and stuff like that. And everyone, you know, does that in broadly the same way. My whole point here is that, that you know, that even if your goal is to be like a, you know, become a full time creator or whatever, you know, make money from an audience and stuff like that. I think there are there are ways to do that there are a lot more authentic and a lot less performative. And my bet, I mean, My bet is that we are nearing we're nearing peak creates a Performatism, I think I think this shit is getting old. And I think people are realizing it. And the next wave is not going to look like the previous wave.

Ali

I can agree with that.

Taimur

And sure, you know, there's always the option of mimicking the previous wave in anything in order to, like, get ahead in that thing. I think now, you know, I think now is a dangerous time to be doing that. I think that wave is crusted, I think there is a new wave. And, you know, I think people are genuinely tiring of this approach. And like, more authentic. Again, if your goal is to become like a creator, well, I think more authenticity will actually help you from here on out three years ago, that was probably not true. I think from here on out, it actually will. But the point should not be. I think that there should and there can be more to it than just like, I want to get lots of followers, like you can, you can do that at the same time is like being authentic, keeping it real. And like figuring yourself out.

Ali

Okay. Again, I agree with you. My issue is and I suppose I'm coming from this from a different angle, given that I am giving practical advice to people who want to become creators. And every single one at the start has this issue of like, what the hell do I make videos about? What the hell do I write about? What the hell do I tweet about? And we know and this is pretty widely, okay, look, you know, the problem with the whole be your authentic self is that at the start, where you have no audience, there is no way for people to discover you, because you're not creating stuff that audiences find inherently useful, or at least surface level useful.

Taimur

Yeah, there is a legibility issue around, like, you know, if people need to be able to see, okay, what kind of stuff does this person tweets about? Well, I agree, there is a bit of a legibility issue. And so you do need to, sorry?

Ali

That's a huge legibility issue. There are YouTube channels that have been again, you know, making one video a week for the last two years, that will where the videos are good, but like, there is no clear niche to them. There's no clear like, Oh, he's not. This is the notion guy, the notion guys goes from zero to 50,000 in a year, by being the notion guy and builds a million dollar business off the back of that, the I'm keeping it authentic, and making the sort of videos that I want to watch the sorts of videos that I would want to see guy goes from zero to 100 subscribers on YouTube in the same amount of time with the same amount of work. Sure, the notion guys is, you know, probably not being as authentic self, because he's not talking about the stuff that actually genuine interest him. He's, yeah, he's, uh, he's providing a service. He's being useful in that sense. And so when I'm talking to the 21 year old medic, and they're saying, Hey Ali, what, what do I tweet about? What do I make videos about? I can't just say, Look, man, just be your authentic self. Because you know, the wave of creators creating threads of useful pithy tips has gone. And that's where I'm approaching this. Whereas I feel you're approaching this more from the metagame of Twitter, where the the accounts that you give the most respect to are the ones who tweets authentic insights, or authentic, potentially not even insights.

Taimur

Dont say the word insights.

Ali

Tweet authentically, whereas the business that I'm in is helping people grow and following so that they can then monetize that following further down the line by creating authentic content in the long run. But in the short term, you do have to play the game of what's, what is a nivhe amount of content that I can offer that in, given that I have no sort of unique selling point in terms of my life experience, what am I going to make content about other than the productivity canon that I follow on YouTube?

Taimur

Okay, look, I'm sympathetic towards that, I think I probably go too hard on the angle of like, kind of keeping it real and having like, the, the purest intentions before getting into something. I think that is a stupid bar. Like, for example, I'm very happy to admit that I primarily go to the gym, because I think, I think being in shape makes me more attractive to women, and garner's me more respect broadly for men and women in society. Like, that's the primary reason I go to the gym. I don't think there's a, I don't think there's a particularly pure intentions. But hey, if it gets me to go to the gym and stay healthy, and you know, all this other stuff, it can't be the worst thing in the world. So look, I'm sympathetic towards that. Like, I totally get it that legibility is important. And, you know, if you're starting a YouTube channel, fine, totally agree that like, you need to have some sort of niche so people can see what they're kind of getting into. I agree with that. I just think that, I think to an extent, Twitter and YouTube are maybe different. ButI'm not interested in getting into like, the details of like, you know, the best way to use each platform. Okay. Look, I agree with what you're saying. I guess my point is, I think people should just, I think there is I mean, the thing you're describing, by the way of like, Oh, you know, the way to grow on YouTube and stuff like that is by having this niche doing the stuff you got 50K in year one, you'll get to 500K in year two, you know, this sort of..

Ali

But I'm saying that the way to grow a following us by having a niche. As opposed to just, you know, creating content that feels authentic to you. That doesn't necessarily have a utility or a clear..

Taimur

The Is your kind of, I think you can, I think you can have authentic stuff that has utility. That is legible.

Ali

That's literally the aim. The aim is to how can you, you know, given that we're all setting the same sunlight? How can you? How can you be the lens to shape that sunlight in a way that feels authentic to you that, you know, showcases your personality that sort of shows your weird quirks on camera, even thinking about this systematically in terms of like, you know, the different branding elements and you know, special language and why do I use the word waste men and friends and every video because it's, you know, why do I make toilet jokes? Why do I talk about oh, I went, and I went opoo the other day, like, this is all stuff that shows somewhat performatively my real self, because this is stuff I talk about in real life. And that is one of the things that helps people connect to a creator. It's the fact that Oh, wow, you know, this person is showing their quirks and they're being authentic online. Of course, that's important. Okay. Okay, I also have to go like very soon, I promised I would do a mock interview for someone 20 minutes ago. So.

Taimur

Okay, let me just say one final thing. Look, I agree with you, I think, yeah, I think we shouldn't knock people too hard for them that kind of stuff. But I think everyone also has the goal of, of creating things of substance, and of developing their own personal, you know, intellectual curiosity is in a substantial way. I think the point Ryan made about how, you know, so you follow someone on Twitter for a while, they have like, 10s of 1000s of followers, they get loads of like, likes and stuff, and then you meet them in real life. And, they're sort of, you know, 10 times less interesting, engaging, blah, blah, blah. I think that I think that's a very real thing. And I think, I don't think anyone wants to be that I think people do want to develop systems substantially as a person while doing the creative thing. I agree, the creative thing is more of a business thing. I think everyone will also want to develop substantially outside of that. And I think the more kind of, I think focusing, you know, the more sort of authentic stuff if you want to call it that, the more unique, personal authentic, like non think boy, non engagement bait, non like optimizing for follower growth, I think that stuff is more likely to lead to meaningful and substantial, like, personal development or your own interests and things.

Ali

Okay, I agree. So it's, I think, I think the crucial bit was that that's more likely to lead to personal development of your own interests. Whereas think boy engagement bait is still and maybe this wave will change, but it's still more likely to lead to more rapid follower growth.

Taimur

Yeah, of course, of course.

Ali

If you're in the business initially of being a creator, so that you can, you know, pay some of the bills, I wouldn't knock anyone for doing think boy engagement bait, but Yeah, I agree. You know, this is partly why I am now, you know, I think one thing used to [...] against me for is the fact that I don't read widely outside of the productivity canon, or the business book canon. And my thing on in the past was always that look, this there's still so much low hanging fruit here that I can essentially be a think boy on YouTube, by recycling insights from other people. But now that I'm trying to create my own stuff, it's not about Okay, cool. Let me find as many obscure PDFs as I possibly can. And so my point is that Yeah, being a think boy is fine, if depending on what your goals are, but of course, you know, reading outside of your subject and being a bit more well rounded and developing intellectual curiosity is likely to lead to better personal development and likely more authentic connections with people just it's more about the personal and less about the business in that sense. And the problem here is because is that Twitter and Social media in general is a platform for both.

Taimur

Yeah, yeah. I think that's that's kind of what creates all this tension. All right. That was a long ass episode. Let's read review a and call it a day. All right, I'll read a four star review it's entitled love the podcast, but Joe, something something, something from Great Britain says, I'm actually a huge fan and have listened to every episode. But I found the last couple of episodes have been a bit slow. I'm not sure exactly what has changed. But I was wondering if you would change the day and time you record. For example, I am least inclined to overthink and talk with my friends on a Sunday evening. And maybe subconsciously. This is what's going on. Yeah, not. Not sure what was going on there. Maybe the last few episodes have been a bit slow.

Ali

We haven't had, I feel like for the last few episodes, we haven't had substantial, clear topics to talk about. And so when we're thinking out loud stuff is likely going to feel slower than when we have stuff prepared..

Taimur

I interpreted slow as like low energy or like we're less engaged or something like that. Yeah. Something to bear in mind. Maybe.

Ali

Yeah, maybe I think Yeah. Remote recording. Yeah. Thanks for the input.

Taimur

Cool. All right. That's it for this week. Thanks a lot for listening. I look forward to seeing all your Twitter threads and see you next week.

Ali

Bye bye. Bye. Bye. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening.

Taimur

If you liked this episode, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts on the Apple podcast website. If you're not using an iPhone, there's a link in the show notes.

Ali

If you've got any thoughts on this episode, or any ideas for new podcast topics. We'd love to get an audio message from you with your conundrum question or just anything that we could discuss.

Taimur

Yeah, if you're up for having your voice played on the podcast and your question being the springboard for our discussion, email us an audio file mp3 or voice notes to hi@notoverthinking.com.

Ali

If you've got thoughts, but you'd rather not have your voice played publicly, that's fine as well tweet or DM us at @noverthinking on Twitter please.