The Art of the Banger, with Signulll

@signulll and I went through some of my favorite posts and accounts of all time and attempted to explain why they are good.
Thank you @a16z for having us. 
Thank you for the golf cart rides. 
Thank you for the vodka sodas.

Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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Transcript

Why we started posting

SPEAKER_04 0:00

So that's it with the George Orwell style struggle session. Oh yes, we should do ours. You should go first. Yeah, I I need to go first because you have me completely follow the mod. So I am at creatine underscore cycle. I've just ticked over 38,000 followers as of last night while I was drinking vodka sodas. So very important because I was just kind of posting everything that was happening. The ad read is great. Oh really? Yeah, the performative ad read of the function? Yes. Oh really? See, this is this is why you sponsor MOTS, right? Because it's the only ad reads that people will ever watch, right? Sorry, just at least one person. At least one person did. One person did. And yeah, mostly uh mostly self-deprecating. Uh a lot of tweets about SF. It's sort of like how I think creatine cycle gained traction, but at the end of the day, it was started as a joke. It was started as like this angsty gym, bro, account sort of circa 2021, 2022. You could think of that period as like peak woke, however you want to think about it. Like there was just something about having an anonymous account during that era. Not necessarily to like be absolutely deranged or stupid or racist or whatever. It was just kind of like, I don't know, the way that I think about that particular time period, Rune was there, Growing Daniel was there, these are all accounts that have hundreds of thousands of followers now, but had maybe, you know, Rune was probably at like 10k when I started. And so there's just a bunch of us that spun up anonymous accounts and just did like the anti-Linkedin thing. You know, it was like, it was jokes about zero to one. It was like, you know, Broduct Manager talking about like, you know, the first rule of Fight Club is to talk to your customers. Like stuff like that, right? Like very sort of just like, you know, quick one-liners, but stuff that just wasn't really flying. Like a lot of these people, they worked at big tech, uh, you know, Broduct Manager, he was at big tech, Rim was at big tech, like like, and we just felt like we needed some sort of outlet. And so like all of these accounts sort of spawned at the same time. And I think in my case, it was grown completely by accident. It was just like this thing is just kind of fun. So anyway, uh, there's that fucking essay. You can you can go now.

SPEAKER_02 2:07

I have a small Twitter account. And um largest in the room, actually. What was that? Yeah, the largest in the room. I do I? Yeah. I guess that's true. Weirdly enough. But uh no, I my entire account is a giant accident. Um I went to go, I don't know, I was screwing around and I was like, I just want to I had my previous real name password situation. Yeah, and like a year and a half ago, a little over, I guess. I don't know, something happened, I lost my password, uh, I couldn't log in, and I just wanted to read Twitter, and um I created a big DOM account and I was like never intending on posting or anything like that, and then I um I posted a reply, I think, after I don't know, and one of those replies went completely viral, and everybody started following me because of that reply, I think, Rune and other people. And then I was like, whoa, this is fucking fun. And I post about I guess weirdly enough, I've been in attack for such a long time that I have more of an interest in culture and um and then um yeah, I love the intersection of attack and culture is ridiculous right now. And I I guess there was like some sort of AI wave or whatever, like any good anybody who wants to like surf, you need to find a good wave, I guess. Um and uh yeah, here we are. I don't know why I'm giving this talk.

SPEAKER_04 3:22

Are you able are you able to say like which account like because you had one in you had a different account in the beginning, then you went away for a little bit, and then you've brought yourself back since.

SPEAKER_02 3:30

Yeah, well, I it's so weird. I I was like, I need to quit Twitter for a while.

SPEAKER_04 3:35

This is why we have it like spaced out as like an AA meeting.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

Like exactly what we're doing. This is way too serious than I intended, actually. Um no, I I I honestly it was kind of a weird that transition. Oh, it was kind of the same thing, but a little bit of a different uh take on the on the world, whatever. I was talking more about um New York culture on the other one, whatever. Yeah, which was I find really fascinating because. You're able to say which ones they are. The second one, I mean, yeah. Yeah. This is um, I actually joined uh Runge. I don't think we should talk about that one.

unknown 4:05

No.

SPEAKER_04 4:06

You're dodging my question. Which which account is yours? Signal. Yes, okay. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Yes, yes, finally. Some people didn't know who I was, and I was talking to them yesterday, and they're like, oh my god, it's you. I was like, this feels like the weirdest. One of the one of the last standing anonymous accounts. Well, no longer, because TechCrunch bothered, like threatened me last week and doxxed the hell out of me. I think no one reads TechCrunch. Exactly. This is like the sign where the new media is taken over because literally they wrote an article, but it didn't register a single bit. Uh yeah, they they emailed me. They were like, hey, we found all the SEC stuff and your name and your whatever. We're gonna write an article. Do you want to participate? We're gonna publish it anyway. And we have a policy of not or we have a policy of decl disclosing any financial stuff that we find with like real names.

SPEAKER_03 5:00

Many such cases. Many such cases.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Yeah, so they found it. But anyway, yeah, here we are. Alright, I have a question now. What do you guys want to get out of this? Like, what is the underlying motivation for why you attended this talk? Get good at posting.

unknown 5:13

Tweet good.

SPEAKER_04 5:14

Tweet good. Yeah, yeah. Want to move around to here. I think um so so what I want to do now is actually actually I I have um, and and I'm gonna say I, because it wasn't we. No,

Defining “banger” and what goes viral now

SPEAKER_04 5:26

it wasn't I. I prepared some of what I consider to be the greatest posts of all time. But before we do this, I do want to actually, for the sake of this, define banger in this context, right? Because the thing is titled Art of the Banger. And so, simply put, for me, a banger is something that makes me laugh, right? Because this is totally arbitrary, right? You know, somebody, some people might consider a banger to be something like, oh, well, it got 500,000 likes and however X million impressions, therefore it's a banger. I don't necessarily consider that to be a banger because I kind of want the high converting, high brow, like something that I have couldn't have thought of myself. You know, because I I think what tends to go viral now, there's there's a couple of couple of trends, and I think this has been the case, like post Elon, but a lot of just like copied posts can go viral. Like there's there's there's like a one off the top of my head is like, oh, you know, every person needs to have a sick jacket. And if you just post that every six months, you'll just get a bunch of like impressions. It's like, okay, cool. I've only seen that like every three months. Whereas the ones that I have picked out are just stuff that I would have never thought of, made me laugh, and you know, even revisiting them now, I still laugh. And so I think the theme is novelty. The theme is novelty amongst these. And so I'm gonna load this and we're just gonna go through a few of like what I consider to be the greatest tweets of all time. Um, there are a couple of deleted accounts, and yeah, like some of these accounts they got, they they went a bit off the rails. Um, but I want to start with

@basedsrini reaction

SPEAKER_04 6:59

this one. This is based screening. And so this account no longer exists. Uh it used to be called Pageet Bateman. Is this to be this account? And so it reads, so this was from 2023. Diet Coke is the techno dharmic drink of choice because it is entirely synthetic. It is no taste analog in nature. It is a testament to the spark of divinity in man, evidence that we can prescind from our base conditions to mirror our creator in infinite creativity. Like, what the fuck is he talking about? But it's just amazing. Like, just the the craft, like this guy, like just like peak at a roll or something. Um but I do remember uh uh around sort of this time, like the whole sort of like Diet Coke billionaire discourse was happening. And so, you know, and and like obviously like Diet Coke is sort of like a staple of you know the tech pro stacks like okay, just like we can just, you know, we can just drink Diet Coke all the time. I really like um uh where is where is the bit it was uh entirely synthetic? Like it has no taste analog. Like this is this is stuff that I just wouldn't think of. Thoughts?

SPEAKER_02 8:05

I mean, I guess this was when was this? This is uh May 23rd. Why was Diet Coke in the Zeitgeist?

SPEAKER_04 8:11

Uh I think I think it was around the time of like the Diet Coke billionaires discourse. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. Or all Fridge fridge fridge cigarette. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 8:19

Um, that's actually an important thing where every time you want to make sure it subtly relates to the zeitgeist in some fashion, shape, or form. Not all of them will, but some of them are so in the moment that you're like, oh my god, this is this is incredible insight. And it'll give you like a dopamine hit pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_04 8:38

To be fair, to be fair with this particular post, I would actually say that you could post something like this at almost any particular time now, now that like diet, we you know, we all sort of know that Diet Coke is a thing.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

Yeah, there's that's like a foundational thing in culture now. Yes. It doesn't like move.

SPEAKER_04 8:53

Yeah, so you could post, you could probably post this at any point in time. This is gonna, this is gonna, it's not gonna go ultra viral because it's too niche. It's like an important distinction, right? I think like again, that's why I wanted to like like have a have a distinction between, you know, the 500,000 like banger that everybody can access versus, you know, I I would have bet that this had maybe like 6,000 likes, you know, but it reached the right audience. And this is how I always sold myself, right? If sponsors come to me, I'm like, I I I can tell you who you'll get in front of. I'm not I'm not trying to reach mass market slop, right? Which is what a lot of the X algorithm now optimizes for.

SPEAKER_03 9:29

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SPEAKER_02 10:32

Oh, okay. One thing, one more thing is um, do you guys notice another pattern about this tweet particularly, which is I guess I'll just give it away, but anybody have any thoughts about the structural element of it?

SPEAKER_05 10:44

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:46

Real. Alright, let's move on. Um, wow. It was so fucking easy. Okay, that's actually important, but you'll notice there's three points. It was like an opener, there's a secondary supporting point, and then there is a very, I guess in this case, a deeply profound conclusion. But you'll know every single if you look at what my posts are, they're almost always three is my favorite number because it gives structure to the mind. There's like obviously a lot of writing done on threes, but a lot of the patterns on tweets are all something that will get your attention first, add a level of insight on top, and then you have to perform some anal like a a sort of a gathering of it. I mean just like the classic storytelling, I guess to a certain extent, but you'll notice this pattern exists everywhere. So there's three main points here, you can probably highlight it pretty quickly. But um that's such an important thing because if you want to if you want anybody's attention in the world that exists, that moves really, really fast, um you need to have a great hook. And you need to be super um the reason why I picked Shakespeare as an avatar is because one of my favorite quotes is brevity is the soul of wit, and Twitter requires all of those things to like interplay well uh in order to structurally hit. Yes, that's pretty good.

SPEAKER_04 12:14

I got nothing to add. Let's move on to the next one. Okay,

@browserdotsys reaction

SPEAKER_04 12:18

the next one is like just totally random. This is also uh deleted account uh from 2019. This one's very, very good. One of my one of my favorites of all time. Uh so browser.sys. And so this, you know, I think he was actually like a like an some ML engineer. He sort of would bring his account back every few years or so. Um but yeah, the classic. I don't know why scientists have been missing the obvious conclusion that we can make tons of medicines more effective if we make humans more mouse-like. And so, you know, I mean it is like like a pretty self-explanatory joke, obviously, like all the all the all the mouse rat studies, whatever. Um this, I don't know, like like this is this is just kind of like off, I bet this is just off the dome. There's there's nothing, there would have been nothing in the same way.

SPEAKER_02 12:58

The time to tweet is zero, basically. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 13:00

The thought to tweet uh gap was pretty much zero. And so we come into this theme of accidents. Like like accidents and get fucking good. But like, yeah, I mean that's that's really it. No other analysis to that other than I just found that really funny. And you can you can actually, like, this tweet was so renowned that you can actually look this up and it'll appear in Google Images, even though his account no longer exists.

SPEAKER_02 13:23

Oh, that's the best way to find bangers, by the way. Google Images. Because there's so many screenshots of tweets that are either a deleted or so good that they needed to be screenshotted and shared. Yes. And so if you go to Google Images, they document all of them. Yeah. And if you search this guy's name on Google Images, there's probably gonna be hundreds of screenshots of tweets or whatever. Also, this is good too, because um it's not structuring the thought as a pure conclusion, but it's also just very the reason why it starts with IDK, which is like it gives your brain a little, oh, this guy's pure, you know, in his head, but he's it's not a conclusion. And it's not like take getting but that's that actually um is a good framing of the schizo posting.

SPEAKER_05 14:08

What was that? Research on Google Edges.

SPEAKER_04 14:11

Yeah, so I so so I I I I have username. I remembered this, like I have some of these tweets just stored in my mind. And so we don't which says a bit about me. But like, yeah, and so yeah, just just Google the user.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

Every popular account, you can go to Google and type their username with an at. And Google does a deep image search on it. And so turns out if people take screenshots, they're sharing them elsewhere, like Reddit and other places, or Instagram particularly. I think there's another account that shares all my tweets as a screenshot. On Instagram? I'm pretty sure they make more money than I do. Of course. I swear to God, it was kind of hilarious. Just bombing the high stuff. Some fucking idiot is reposting all my content. Yeah. Um, and uh, but this this is a good signal because uh no pun intended. Um because what it why why screenshot something? That takes effort and time, yeah, and there's probably some more substance there. Or, you know, you can probably like cancel the person after they delete it or whatever. True, true, very true. Cool.

SPEAKER_04 15:09

Let's keep on, let's keep moving. So I I wanna um I wanted to actually get into my bookmarks tab here. So now we're now we're dealing with uh accounts that actually do exist. And you can probably see underneath there um one of the one of the most notorious accounts uh on the timeline right now. This one gets a little bit edgy, but I did I did really want to bring

@hopes_revenge reaction

SPEAKER_04 15:27

this one up. So this is the famous hope's revenge. And so yeah, this is the kind of stuff that we get into here at New Media, right? He's talking about uh 4chan and sensing minorities to the walls. But like hopes, he is a true original, true original, right? One that must be studied, has over a hundred thousand followers now. Um, but he he tweets like this all the time. Like it's like proper schizo posting, like actual, like, and and you know the thing is you meet him in real life, he's like a teddy bear. Like he's like one of the nicest people of all time. But whatever is going on inside that mind is it needs to be studied, which is why we're studying it right now. And so it reads I spent my peak neuroplasticity on 4chan, and now I can sense minorities through the walls. Now, I just think who the hell who the hell thinks that way? But as you can see, it did pretty well. It did pretty well, and honestly, the spaces, like Yeah, that's how you can tell it's a schizo post. The spacing is a dead giveaway. He always, he always, like, he always tweets like this. Always tweets like this. Yeah. And so I think just like one of the greatest that this is one of those posts in which no rhyme nor reason, just straight off the dome, like he probably didn't even necessarily like, he didn't think like, yeah, this is gonna be, this is gonna go viral. Like, this was just properly just this is just Hope's Revenge being Hope's revenge.

SPEAKER_02 16:51

This is just how many followers does he have?

SPEAKER_04 16:53

Over 100,000 now. There you go. Uh we could go to his profile in a bit, but I'm kind of concerned what would actually pop up next. Um, so we can we can continue on here. Um, I

@gbrl_dick reaction

SPEAKER_04 17:03

want to get into some of uh Gabriel Dick's uh posts here. So I want to actually start with uh this classic of 2022. So Gabriel, of course, uh fellow uh wherever Theo went, he's gone. He doesn't he can't shill anymore. But Gabriel, Australian, um, has always lived in Australia, he's actually never lived in the US, but for whatever reason, has always had these sort of profound sort of fan fiction-y style posts in regards to the uh Silicon Valley VC ecosystem. He's just like he's just that plugged in online. Um and so this one, July 28, 2022, 2022, really a golden age for posting, in my opinion, just before the uh Elon buyout, you had the sim clusters still there, and so like all of this sort of like more high breast.

SPEAKER_02 17:45

Before the permanent underclass.

SPEAKER_04 17:46

Before the permanent class, yeah, that's right, that's right. So this one uh reads You're at the Jason Calicanus versus Founders Fund cage match on a barge in international waters. A guy in the stands is selling raw beef, liver hot dogs, and modafinil. Dark web prediction markets keep getting shut down for running mortality odds. Trey appears to be wearing a jetpack. And so we must continue this. Could you please scroll for me? This is I mean, it catches your attention. Jason has cupping marks on his back and three Dagestani Sambo champions conferring in his corner. No one can find Peter Thiel but Chamatha's shirtless and trying to pick fights. People keep asking, but none of the concessions will take Dogecoin. Lucky Palmer apparently has a plan to set off a distress beacon and lure Somalian pirates in for drone practice. Grimes won't stop telling Elon to intervene. It's not clear on whose side. Inexplicably, Taylor Lorenz is there, but no one will talk to her except one 55-year-old Bitcoin maxi. A statistically unlikely number of people are wearing backpacks to an MMA fight on a barge. There's a rule against recording podcasts during the event, but Harry Stebbings is visibly breaking it. Deep in conversation with the DX organ trading platform. Trey has an obvious reach advantage in one round, but is hobbled by the jetpack, which Jason keeps activating deliberately with teeps to the control panel. The hot dogs are pretty good, but you can feel the motor hitting, and you notice yourself becoming transfixed with the ring timer, which is sponsored by Hugging Face and appears to advance the count, but feeding the prompt a countdown timer at 354 1.4 aperture codachrome to Dali. Between rounds two and three, Jason is getting a small cut under his eye dubbed with Vaseline, and Trey, now without the jetpack, is on his back, naked with his legs spread under a high wattage UV strobe, recharging his balls. The fight ends in mutual knockout when both men slip on a pool of Jason's sweat. David Sachs uh misses it, arguing with Lucky that the pirates would be right to invade. The entire OpenAI crew get monkey pox. Vitalik writes a balanced 4,000-word essay on the fight for Playboy. That's it. And then yeah, of course, the key, every day I go to bed and stare at my ceiling and wonder why an Australian Annon account is the voice of Tech Twitter. Anyway, any thoughts on that? Does anybody have any thoughts? Do you like you understand what kind of mastery we just witnessed then? Like, how does again, and when I read stuff like that, I'm just in awe. I'm like, how the fuck is this man like just continuing? You know? Like, like, where does that even come from? Hmm. Do you have do you have any thoughts to even like attempt to break this down?

SPEAKER_02 20:16

Well, this is just pure fan fiction. Oh my lord. Yeah, I mean This requires a lot of imagination. Marissa, you want to comment? I have a question. Okay.

unknown 20:33

Like, do you still see this type of storytelling?

SPEAKER_04 20:36

Nope.

unknown 20:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:37

Not as much. I mean, like, I think it's uh that like like the the the reason threads are a bit weird right now is because I think what what used to happen is that you could very kind of you could very clearly see the entire thread, what used to be the case. Now you kind of see the original post and you see the last two in the thread. It's like like it's very unlikely, like you you have a whole other action to actually expand the thread now. And so like even when I'm even when I'm like sending stuff to like corporations, right? It's like okay, they want to do a product launch or something like that, whereas like I I always say like try and just keep it to three threads, right? It's like like launch post, launch video, whatever the fuck, attach your blog, and then you know, maybe something else, because that's what gets shown straight away. The behavior used to be different. And so, like, for whatever reason, these kinds of threads, again, this didn't go giga viral because like it's it's so niche and like all the references are very you know tech coded, right? Referencing like all the guys from the all-in podcasts, like um, you know, like sunning, like like like sun ball tanning was a thing in in July, like in 2022, like like you know, recharging his balls. And the founders fun guys.

SPEAKER_02 21:42

I thought it was the butt. What?

SPEAKER_04 21:44

I thought people were it was it was all of those, like it was like early biohacking. Now we've just got like peptides for that sort of thing. But now it's but like that was like you know, true natural like sunball tanning kind of shit.

SPEAKER_02 21:54

Uh in four years, I guess people lost their attention span even more, such that the threads are like. No longer consumable or whatever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 22:02

You also have like long posts now, right? I mean you can you can just break the character count and like I actually just don't think yeah it's kind of interesting how like like the users of of Twitter had already solved for long posts with threads. Like this was like, you know, forced you to split everything up and like it was like easily digestible. Uh so yeah, it was like like, you know, people people post long posts now, but yeah, it's like the thread is almost like a lost art. It's not to say that you can't do it, but it's just it's just displayed differently. Can we move on to Gabriel's next one? Yes. Uh so he just go back to bookmarks or just back. Yeah, so so Gabriel has uh a couple of like yes, yes, this one is amazing. This one is incredible. Okay, can we actually look at what what he was quote tweeting? Oh. Because this is important. So okay, so he's quote tweeting this uh back in 2025. Highest leverage things you can do in your 20s. Travel, start a company, join a company you love, fall in love, learn new languages, uh, challenge your physical limits. Okay, so this is just like, okay, this post did fine. I I will go ahead as uh I will go as far as saying it's that it's just a little bit cringe, but like it's fine. Um can we now go to can we now go to Gabriel's uh quote tweet, please? Okay. So he's just kind of roasted it. And again, he absolutely ratioed poor Allie, which is very important. Very important to recognize a good ratio. Um so yeah, he says, a lot of egregious shit in here, but calling travel high leverage is insane. It costs $1,500 to fly return New York to Tokyo. For $1,000 you could buy 50 rats in a one-to-four boy-girl ratio and release them in a competitor's we work at the iPad kids are caught. Let's continue the let's continue the thread if we can. He's like, um, you can just do things, flies to Cantoon for five days. He's like $1,000 has like two Estonians pen testing your rivals' social media security for a week. They're resetting passwords for $1,000. They're in Instagram DMs, or you could fly to Paris return. Go to the last one, go to the last one. He's just roasting. Good news, everyone. It's gonna be way more than 50. People are messaging him about the rats. Boy, do I have good news for you? So, this is why this is the greatest app of all time. This is just like, this is why. And so obviously, you know, Gabriel, he has this really, really great way of sort of lightly roasting whoever is quote tweeting without completely pile driving them into the ground. I think it's actually like a really nice calm strategy. The art of roasting. Yes. Because, you know, like like there are there, you know, I I find a lot of quote-tweet dunks to just be to just be that. They're just they're like one line of dunks, like, oh, this like this guy's stupid, like, you know, what the fuck are we doing here? I mean, I say that a lot. Uh, but like, but this is so carefully calibrated, like, oh, for $1,000 I could, you know, I could I could, you know, release 50 rats through Tokyo or some shit, or I could fly to Paris. And, you know, or and I or I could travel, right?

SPEAKER_02 25:02

And so, you know what a vivid picture in your mind.

SPEAKER_04 25:06

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Uh any any closing thoughts on this particular.

SPEAKER_02 25:10

Not really. I don't know how to think about this. Gabe, Gabe is so far from like analysis because he just it's just the most unusual thing, but that's what hits.

SPEAKER_04 25:22

Yeah, I also also one one thing that I want to uh hit on is hopefully by by analyzing a c or already analyzing a couple of Gabriel's tweets, you can sort of you can sort of see, like you get a glimpse into his mind, for lack of a better term. You kind of you kind of see how like where his mind ends up going with these things. Like it's like it's always some totally far-fetched comparison. And people can easily digest comparisons, right? You're comparing one thing to another.

The @MurrayHillGuy1 format (listing things)

SPEAKER_04 25:47

Another thing along these lines that I like to think about is just like listing things, right? Even Ali's original tweet, she was just listing stuff, like all you know, like high what was it, like high-intent activities in your 20s.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

I call it the Murray Guy, Murray Hill Guy format. Really? Every single Murray Hill Guy tweet is basically. Does everybody know who Murray Hill Guy is?

unknown 26:07

Unfortunately.

SPEAKER_04 26:08

Yeah, it is concerning, actually.

SPEAKER_02 26:12

The fact that he lives rent-free is incredible.

SPEAKER_04 26:14

Right. Right. So you so for those who perhaps you know have not seen Murray Hill Guy, basically just like is it fair to just character uh characterize him as just like dating discourse in New York? Yep, pretty much. Okay, so that's that's all you really need to know. Cool. Let's let's bring up um Gabriel's last one. So this one's very, very good, and this one is uh this one is another example of like context dependence, right? So like whatever happened at this particular time. Uh scroll up, I my my scrolling is opposite. Sorry. This one. Okay, so the context behind this was uh this was when uh Bashar al-Assad fled Syria, right? And so you had invasion forces, and so that was during this time. Uh whoever Polish hostage is who is quote tweeting, he posted sort of like a vibral from the Syrians. It turns out this this uh this edit was from a couple of weeks before Bashar Al-Assad fled, um, but it's like a vibrial of like Syria building, I guess. And so he says, Me, a genius, they go into Arab Springs this shit again, and there'll be Hyluxes getting blown out by DJI drones in the space of months. Guy who was literally ISIS yesterday, we will build walkable, mixed-use, medium density neighborhoods alumdulla. So, so you know, because obviously like like the the events at the time was sort of leading it to be like, oh, this is gonna be like some you know, some other like drawn-out conflict, you know, with with proxies on each side, and sure enough, um oh, there's me commenting. Uh yeah, and so I really I really like this one. Again, it's like another one of those comparisons, right? It's like like, oh, here's what I think, and then you know, guy who was in ISIS literally yesterday. Um other no other uh no other thoughts on that other than you know something that's context dependent. Again, Gabe is very, very good. You scroll the other way, please. Where do you want me to go? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's let that we can get into product

@broduct_manager (rip)

SPEAKER_04 28:04

manager's tweets because he's locked, he doesn't post anymore. Uh most of you will know product manager in some way, shape, or form, but I'm not gonna go ahead and dox him here. And so this is this is an example of a meme that he made. So not necessarily like a post, uh, not necessarily like you know, 140 characters, just like make the meme, post it, uh, and so it reads, yeah, I'm a journalist on SubSack, cool, I'm a soldier in Call of Duty. Again, these are just things that like I am personally laughing at. I think product manager is one of the greats of the games. I wish he would bring his account back. Um can we look at the next product manager tweet?

SPEAKER_02 28:39

Yes, we can.

SPEAKER_04 28:42

Is this the one? Yeah, this one's pretty good. Do you think Genghis Khan would have this app on his phone? I am loved, I am enough, I deserve love and respect, I'm stronger than my problems. I've made it through hard times before.

SPEAKER_02 28:57

And so, like, this this brings me to uh his tweets are all rooted in like war and Napoleon and well his profile photo.

SPEAKER_04 29:07

Yeah, he had this whole he had this whole format where it was like, you know, when Lord Inja arrived on the banks of the Genghis to slaughter 10,000 Daisu Rap originals, the first thing he said was like, talk to your customers. Like he'd always like he'd always sort of referenced these like zero to one, like like really milk toast, like YC quotes. As war stories. As war stories, that's right, that's right. Um he also had a format called Check Out This, uh, Check Out My Run on Strava. And so instead of posting a Strava screenshot, he would post like war maps. Like like, you know, like invasion forces on one side. So, yeah, it's like like recurring bits, recurring bits. His recurring bits was like Genghis Khan, and he would also add the pronouns right next to him. So it would always be like Genghis Khan, he, him, right? Did did another did did uh did more than anybody to amplify AAPI voices, right? And so that was, you know, again, I'm I'm just reciting these because I love his account so much. And he was tweeting this sort of stuff in a time in which if he was not anonymous, he'd be just dragged. He'd be dragged out in the streets.

SPEAKER_02 30:06

His account was fairly controversial, I guess.

SPEAKER_04 30:08

Yeah, at the time it was. Now it's just like, oh, he's just now it looks like child's play. Yeah, compared to what is uh, yeah, some of the some of the stuff that's on x.com, the everything out. Um I think there's one more that I had from Product Manager. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 30:21

Okay, so we're after the little retreat now, but I must give a quick shout out to some more beloved mod sponsors. Zoe Computer, build personal apps and automations using Zoe, and it can do hosting for you and all of these cool things.

SPEAKER_04 30:37

That's what I use to help me get better at the gym, actually. I just text my Zoe assistant and I can get updates on my gym program. Uh, and of course, MOT's newest sponsor, Cappy AI. Of course, your agentic IDE run agents in parallel. You can also really like their Slack integration, right? Because you can actually let your non-technicals make contributions to your code base. Kind of fucking scary, but this is the way it is now, and this is the way it's going. Said like a very, very great and insightful cultural commentator. I say stuff like, I guess we'll see and time will tell. Very, very precise language without having an actual take on anything. Anyway, gonna go ahead and jump back in. I'm not sure where I'm even when I'm even gonna splice this in. So fucking W podcaster editor, um, but it'll be in here somewhere. So I hope that was cool. Uh back to wherever we were.

SPEAKER_02 31:35

Yeah, I think I think the the format is just like a delivery vehicle. Um, and sometimes people will stick to formats because there makes their account more familiar and easily digestible because now you don't have to parse your mind no longer has to parse the format in in general because you know what to expect. And so the content hits faster because you don't have to actually like process a structure around it if you keep it consistent. So some people some accounts are very consistent on the format. Yeah. Um some of them will switch over, but it depends on a variety of different scenarios. I guess I would only focus on the content and then pick a potential format or what it works.

SPEAKER_04 32:10

Content is actually the impact. Like I'm always just like, okay, what's what's the in what's the in right now? Is it the permanent under class? Like there was like a I had a tirade last year where I was just talking about how like founding engineers are actually the oppressed class. Um just like and then yeah, just like did like 15 variations of it. And then people, you know, people end up calling me out on it, but that's that's what makes it really funny. Because like people realize what I'm doing. And so, yeah, I think the the the theme is is to me is more important than the actual format.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

Also the formats will come. I would say one thing is people tweet as if their um content stands alone, but it doesn't, because it's part of a timeline, and the timeline has always has some sort of element of what's happening in the zeitgeist or whatever. But if you structure it in a way that it relates to that zeitgeist in some fashion, then people already have the surrounding structure around it and they can understand it much better.

SPEAKER_04 32:59

So I think that's more important today than it was pre-E Lon 2. Like for whatever reason, like like algorithms just further amplifies current thing now compared to what it did. Like, like you could, you know, product manager would just tweet this shit out, just like at will. And like granted, some of what he tweets, what he's tweeted back then would still probably do pretty well today because it's just like it's just really funny. Um, but you know, like he tweeted this one, this one's like Andrew Tate's Qi change leaving my body when Dancing Queen starts playing at the club, right? And it's like that's not related to anything at that time other than maybe Andrew Tate was, you know, starting to. I mean, I I don't know, he was, I think it was. Peak Tate. Wow, I mean, you said it. I was not you said it, not me. What did he say? He's like peak tape.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

Was that peak? Yeah, he was like all over this is before he got arrested, and then it was like a big blur.

SPEAKER_04 33:51

True, true. See, I mean, yeah, context bag.

SPEAKER_01 33:53

No, this is like during like political cycle, and he was.

SPEAKER_04 33:55

So this is still relevant r related to the Zageist, too. Yeah, yeah. So so you know, some of these, some of these bangers that I'm listing are properly timeless. I mean, but you know, this that that's also arbitrary. Let's continue going on. Oh, yes,

@LandsharkRides reaction

SPEAKER_04 34:08

so these are so so this one is classic. This one's classic, and of course, Landshark has been locked for a long time. I don't I don't actually ever think he's ever unlocked. But Landshark is um he's been tweeting for a long time. And and this actually, this the reason I bring this one up, again, do you think I would say this is a timeless. This is timeless because people are reusing this format. Yes. Right? And so he said, ayahuasca is insane because it appears to be one of the most legitimately dangerous drugs with the potential to gigifry your brain, but is exclusively taken by literal turbo normies who unironically want to like heal internalized racism trauma and basically get one-shotted by it. And he also he also continues in the thread, if we can. Um literally, the most spiritually inept people in existence have their little lib brains rearranged by some Mesoamerican 60 demon who makes them quit their email job, divorce their boyfriend or girlfriend, and become a traveling circus stripper or whatever. Fucking nuts. Exactly, exactly. And so this format, I think it actually came back like last year. People resurfaced this and it went viral again. Right? Like people were taking screenshots of it, and then they were using this format to create their own version of one-shotted. So this is this is like, at least on the timeline, this is where one-shotted originated from. Of course, one-shotted comes from video games. Yeah, on the timeline. So making a very clear distinction between like why people in tech say one-shotted versus, you know, the gamers have been saying one-shotted for, you know, I don't know, I didn't game that much, but I do remember it being said when I was like 14. And so, yeah, and and and so this is just one of those things in which, again, in the Zeitgeist, right? Like the idea that sort of like these, these um, you know, people who yeah, like made a bunch of money in tech, they needed to go sort of like like like figure out their inner self or something by going to the Amazon and taking like, you know, ayahuasca or something like Jack Dorsey style or whatever, you know, like like like it was for whatever reason this was just in the Zeitgeist. And Landshark, he he posts a lot about like powerlifting, and you know, he's like clearly like right of center and all these sorts of things. Um but he just has like a way of uh a way of words. Are you gonna go through his account?

SPEAKER_02 36:13

I was curious when he last post- Oh, he's still posting.

SPEAKER_04 36:15

Yeah, he's still posting. He's still posting. He's just a locked account. So one of those, one of those guys. But like, yeah, it's it's just that that is uh the reason I bring it up is because it created a format in itself. It created a format in itself. Nothing else to that

@pmarca and the thread format

SPEAKER_04 36:28

other than other than.

SPEAKER_02 36:29

Does anybody know how the thread format came about? Do you know who invented it? I don't know who invented it. Mark Andreessen. Really? Yeah, he when he was schizoposting, he would just literally like he put one and then sentence and then two in the sentence, and then Twitter built the whole thread format based on Mark's.

SPEAKER_04 36:48

I didn't realize we do you do you remember the the date?

SPEAKER_02 36:51

Like like That was like probably a decade ago, I suspect. Yeah, maybe more. But that's how the thread format came about because of Mark Andreessen. Andreessen, Mark invented the modern Twitter day threads. Shout out. Shout out. Fun fact.

SPEAKER_04 37:04

Yep. Yeah. Hopefully, hopefully, um, hopefully he can return to his glory days. That's all I'll say. Cool. Let's um let's let's move on to the next one. The next one is actually Howling Mutant. So again, we have a couple of tweets from these sort of like definitely like right of center accounts. Um, but you know, we are not we are not discriminating. Uh up, other way, other way. Sorry, my my um my reverse scrolling is just completely one-shotting near Rav.

SPEAKER_02 37:26

Yeah, I don't know how you'd live with this, dude.

SPEAKER_04 37:28

Okay. And so this is from 2021. So again, this is like we're sort of we're sort of in this peak woke era, and so this is what he's making fun of. Uh Hallie Mutiny says,

@Howlingmutant0 reaction

SPEAKER_04 37:35

a black woman invented the telescope. You might disagree, you might even have some evidence to the contrary, but you have to ask yourself, is this really worth losing my job over? A black woman invented the telescope. Okay, and so you know, again, the reason I bring this up is another one in which the format's stuck, right? This actually came back a few weeks ago, right? We were all talking uh on the timeline. Uh there's always debate about like uh who rune actually is, and there's like the joke is that, oh no, rune's actually white. And everybody in this room like knows who like the account rune, right? T S Z Z L. Just making sure. Okay. He's actually a black woman. He's a black woman. Yeah, so I use this, I use this exact format and said, no, Rune's actually a black woman. Uh and so, you know, it it circulated the timeline again. It's one of those things in which it's poking fun at, well, the idea that you could just be like gaslit, at least at this particular time, and like lose your job over it. Uh, but yeah, the mo the reason I bring this up, again, Daniel is in the comments. I still randomly think about this tweet. Again, clearly timeless if growing Daniel is uh is is tweeting about uh Yassin in 2024. We're not studying Yassin, uh, but so so you can you can see like big accounts actually returning to this post years later because it's so timeless. Um let's move on to the next one. Um the next ones, I believe. Rune. Yep, rune. So these are for

@tszzl reaction

SPEAKER_04 38:57

like Rune's interesting because I think like he he's he's a lot of his he became famous during the whole like Word Soul versus Shape Rotator thing, right? Which was his coinage, right? It was like his bit. So we're kind of coming back to like the theme. If you have a theme, you have a particular thought that you can put into words. Obviously, he wrote a substack on WordSoul versus Shape Rotator. Mark Andreessen completely blew Word Soul versus Shape Rotator up at the beginning of 2022.

SPEAKER_02 39:22

Um and those two words changed his entire life.

SPEAKER_04 39:24

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 39:25

That's right. And he invented two words that completely changed the game for him.

SPEAKER_04 39:30

And if you actually, if you actually like do a Twitter search, Word Soul versus Shape Rotator on Rune's account, like it it dates back to like 2020. Yep. Right? Like like he like he sort of, for whatever reason, he had this particular thought in his mind and just hammered home on it for like two years. Uh before and then he wrote a substack, and then guys like Bology, guys like Mark and Dreessen, they amplified it, and then that was you know Rune's account stuff.

SPEAKER_02 39:55

And then Sam hired him at OpenAI.

SPEAKER_04 39:57

That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_02 39:58

You know?

SPEAKER_04 39:58

And that's yeah.

unknown 39:59

Word is it?

SPEAKER_04 40:00

Word cell versus shape rotator. So it's kind of like the idea that uh Ooh, there's I mean the the the simplest way, the simplest way uh is to think shape rotator is more sort of like math brain, word cell is more like, you know, uh uh word, verbal IQ, that sort of thing. Again, it's it's like it's that's like probably the simplest explain to me like I'm five way. If you actually read the substack, it's a little bit deeper than that. Uh, but I think for sake of brevity, I'll probably leave it there. So that that's is that it's a good thing. That seems fairly reasonable, yeah. Cool. Okay, so this one, New Bay Area races. We got Wasion. So he was actually ahead of the Wasion thing, because this was in March. And then everybody's had the Wasion meetups like last weekend.

SPEAKER_02 40:41

The good accounts are always ahead of culture, yes. Like, so if you watch South Park, I don't know if anybody watched South Park, people dismiss it as a um, you know, a kid's show, they curse or whatever. But it turns out South Park actually predicts culture.

SPEAKER_04 40:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 40:54

And um I don't know if you guys know the whole trends about like the gentrification of neighborhoods. So typically what happens is um you know, there you get some apartment buildings that look exactly the same as every other apartment building, and then you get a Whole Foods, and there's a noticeable pattern for modern gentrification. And turns out South Park had an entire season on it way before it even hit the zeitgeist. And um they they literally so there's a whole uh area in South Park, and turns out all the names of the gentrified neighborhoods are similar too. So in South Park it was called Soda Sopa, which stands for uh south of downtown South Park. And the entire season was on Soda Sopa, and um and then it would be like okay, there's a poor house there, and uh that was called Kenny's House, and then the surrounding apartments were called the villas at Kenny's House. Um but the whole point is like good accounts will actually predict culture uh as opposed to talking about it. So that's a huge distinction. Yep. Um that's how I was able to do mods. There you go.

SPEAKER_04 41:59

Literally, literally the reason. Like the only reason I've ever been in any sort of mainstream press is because of what I've tweeted about. Uh so there's that.

SPEAKER_02 42:06

It's kind of nuts. Well, this one is literally kind of predicting the case. This was this was a heads, right?

SPEAKER_04 42:10

We had Washin, synthetic weaker, Chindian, synthetic Nepali, Windian, synthetic Persian. And again, like it's like like it's also I think it's also important to note here, right? Like, it is it is uh it is out in the open, is very clear uh this is like public information that Rune works at OpenAI. So the fact that he is sort of, you know, like I think it's important to realize that some of these big accounts really walk a like walk a fine line between like, okay, like and I should also preface that like OpenAI's comms, I think is probably the most laser fair out of all the big AI labs. I think it's kind of fair to say, like they're all tweeting. Obviously, Rune's allowed to tweet. Um, but you know, like even even in 2026, like I don't think this is sort of coming up against some sort of like red line in the Overton window. Like, I think this is actually like pretty safe, even though he's like, you know, talking about like quote unquote new races. And so I think that's all that's always like a I I find personally that that's a really, really interesting uh like line to find. It's like, okay, am I like am I crossing this line in the Overton window? Is this something that I would usually say? Like, is this so or is this so edgy that I probably should, you know, step away? Because again, like depending on how you've actually branded your account, like we looked at Land Shark, we looked at Howling Mutant, both of those guys are like very right of center, Howling Mutant, especially very right of center. And of course, they've built up a following that is much more uh resilient to stuff that's probably like outside of my Overton window, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:38

It's more cultish than anything else. Those guys actually believe the same things that you do. Yeah. Whereas no one can figure out my politics from my Twitter ever. Like, and that's intentionally so, but like those guys have defined their presence and and the way they talk about all of the content. You can clearly tell they're MAGA or they're whatever. Yes. Um there's accounts to take aside. There's accounts that don't ever they sort of walk that line back and forth almost effortlessly.

SPEAKER_04 44:05

Yeah, the the the the beauty of having anonymous accounts, especially starting in 2022, and I would say that that rune is also similar. It's fine. And that's why like I think that's why a lot of people found those kinds of accounts so interesting, was that it's like, okay, we actually don't know where they side because one one day they're tweeting about like you know uh like like new races, and then the other day they're talking about like end of history, and like China's not gonna like China's not gonna invade and Taiwan actually, like neoliberalism. Like I think there is there there's there is uh there's beauty to being inscrutable online. Uh that's all I'll say. It's an art. Yeah, let's uh uh let's go to Rune's next one that I brought up.

SPEAKER_00 44:43

If you ever hold out posts for like, you know, I think this would be funny, but probably doesn't jive with my audience, and so I can't.

SPEAKER_02 44:50

Yep. At any point you have that thought, you should probably post it. I'm not sure about that. Um let the timeline do the work for you.

SPEAKER_04 44:59

Um this is a classic. Okay. And he actually he actually uh he retweeted this again like not too long ago. Um so he says, you need to be modifying your speech to piss off the non-believers. Don't say unrelated, do say orthogonal. And then he's got random to stochastic, this is fine, I guess, to local minima, sort of like to isomorphic. So like I I joke about this a lot, um, you know, the idea that like in San Francisco, at San Francisco events, people can't just speak normally, right? Like the idea that it's like, oh, you know, I need to be, I need to be dropping words like orthogonal or isomorphic in like perfectly normal human conversations, right? There's like, and I think there is definitely some truth to that. It's like it's almost like the whole, like, you know, the first question that you get asked at a San Francisco party is like, not how are you doing, or like, what's your name? It's what are you building? Uh same sort of deal. Again, this was in August 2022. I don't think any of that discourse had actually started yet. You know, the whole like like there was there was some San Francisco party discourse, there kind of always has been. Uh, but I think back to like this particular tweet where it's like, okay, we're just gonna use totally complex math language. Uh, and you know, this is just one of those, one of those timeless uh timeless posts. And he also follows it up. People think this is a criticism, but no, it's a guidebook. It's a guidebook. Can we go to the next one, please? Yes. Oh, we should also do a okay. This is the last one. Sorry, I've just lost aura because my shoelaces came undone during a talk. We've also

@paularambles reaction

SPEAKER_04 46:25

got Paula. Yeah, we need to we need to study Paula real quick. We need to study Paula real quick. Uh and so these were a few recent tweets. So this just this just gives you an idea of to the kind of run that Paula is on right now. Legendary. And so, and so, and you know, uh, I say run. Like, Paula, she's she's the queen of puns. And so she's built this particular brand. And we're coming back to sort of like having a theme to your posts, right? Having a particular idea, not necessarily some sort of like format, right? You're not you, you know, I don't wake up and I think like, oh, I'm gonna post a meme today versus I'm gonna post a one-liner versus I'm gonna post a list. Like, Paula's like, cool, I'm known for this, she's really good at them, and then she has, you know, these just constant streams of 20,000 like bangers, nuclear bangers. And so this one reads When your friends go to the Brazilian Steakhouse without you, that's FOMO to Chow, right? Obviously, a play on Fogo de Chow. Fear of missing out to Chow. And you know, just classic, just one-liner, classic one-liner. And the beauty of this is like uh this also reaches a broader audience, uh, which is great. Which is great. You know, like some of my tweets, they also reach a broader audience, some of your tweets reach a broader audience.

SPEAKER_02 47:33

Oh, that's another thing. You never know what will actually hit the zeitgeist.

SPEAKER_04 47:37

Yeah, that is that is true. Trying to trying to predict what goes viral and by like how much it's a full zerand. It's a full zerand. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go to Paula's next one. Um because this is gonna be the last one. Yes. This one was good. I like this one. Someone is crying at ChatGPT generated vetting wedding vows right now. Yeah. So we're getting into the whole sort of like, you know, does it does everybody know what Pangram Labs is? It's basically like this startup um, you know, you can tag at Pangram on Twitter and it will basically tell you down to the percentage probability of like whether an article or a piece of writing is AI generated or not. Uh and so the whole controversy, at least over the last few months, is the idea that most ex articles now are actually AI generated, right? And they take actually less time to write than they do to read. And so we're getting there with wedding vows. I think another one with wedding vows is the idea that we're just gonna be putting like corporate sponsors into wedding vows. That's what I'm gonna do, right? So just like corporate sponsored wedding, uh, you know, like like wedding dress. Like NASCAR like NASCAR liveries, right? The idea that, you know, like like the idea that software is becoming so easy to build that distribution is gonna be the only thing that matters. And so therefore, like corporate sponsors must be everywhere. It must be everywhere, right? And so, you know, it's a it paints a bit of a bleak picture of the world, but yeah, I I wanted to I wanted to feature that one from Paula as well.

SPEAKER_01 49:05

It's wonderful.

SPEAKER_04 49:06

Paula is one of the greats of the game. It should uh, you know, and especially like one of her other themes, of course, Waymo, right? Just tweeting about Waymo, like being in the Waymo, going home with your friends in the Waymo, taking a Waymo across town, right?

Getting good and finding your audience

SPEAKER_04 49:19

Yeah, unfortunately, unfortunately, a lot of this just comes back to like get good. It's like it's like, man, it's like it's such a you know, I I wish I wish there could be uh some sort of like two-hour talk on like breaking down how to get good, but it is it really is like you know, it it it does it does become a bit of a muscle, right? It becomes a bit of a muscle. It's like time in the game. Like, unfortunately, you do need to spend a lot of time on the damn app. Uh you know, it's like like I'm a jazz musician, right? Like you can't become a jazz musician without listening to jazz, right? Same thing I'd argue, you actually can't become a great classical musician if you don't listen to classical music. You can read the notes on the page, but you know, are you gonna be playing it as well as somebody who actually listens to it? Uh unfortunately, uh screen time, you need to you need more of it. You need to spend more time on your phone. What's my screen time? Uh about eight hours at the moment. Just on my phone, yeah. Just on X? No, no, no, not just on X. Eight hours a day, yeah, that's right. Yes. Exactly the same.

SPEAKER_02 50:14

This is why the uh bangers account failed. Dino Nikita started the bangers account. Um but good tweets are not correlated to the actual engagement.

unknown 50:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 50:23

Yeah, that's why very again, like if for for those who've just come in or come in before I gave the definition, I've I've simply defined a banger as something that is funny, something that I probably couldn't think of. Right? Novelty. Novelty is always the theme for me. Again, it's like you're not gonna, you're not gonna necessarily reach mass audience, but I know for me, I've had uh the most success, and you know, I hate to say it, but now my career is built off of it, of a fucking ex dot com, which is very concerning. But basically, uh, you know, just like like like picking an audience and just going for it, right? Like like really picking the audience versus mass appeal. Because even like I also found that the first time I had I had uh tweets that just completely escaped my sim cluster, like they didn't, they don't actually get you that many followers, right? It's it's the ones that are sort of like one to five K and they reach a very particular audience, some sort of insight that you've given, some sort of again, some sort of like timeless post, right? That that other people will be like, wow, how did they think of that? That's always the reaction I'm trying to think of. What is my audience? Uh people in San Francisco. Um people in Tekken in San Francisco, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 51:34

It's like when you start, I think you always have to have probably the need to target a demonstration. And then you expand the reach afterwards, I guess, to see what it hits. But if you ever try to dig in, I wish. Uh I don't know. I guess my audience is probably some intersection of people who are like highly technical and are curious about um actually that's a good question. My my pin tweet is something like, I'm fascinated with tech and culture, and people are like, oh that's I get it. I get what I get what might this might be actually about or whatever. Yeah. And it's almost always rooted in that, which is I guess my mind always I'm like a software engineer, so my mind relates everything to culture to engineering or computer science and then back and forth. I think that might actually have an impact on it.

SPEAKER_04 52:30

Yeah, if I can if I can also glaze Narav a little bit. Um I think his account has always come across as somebody who actually is quite an insider and who has actually done stuff. Uh that's always that's always what it's come across as to me. I don't think that my account actually comes across as that. My account comes across as a fucking joke. And you know, like I I I kind of like that. It means that I have a lot of plausible deniability. In fact, one of the uh one of the things that I like to sort of compare my account to say somebody with like a face account. Um, does everybody, you know, this is like you gotta be pretty online, but is it does everybody

“Imagine the smell” gate

SPEAKER_04 53:04

remember uh uh how's the smell gate? I'm gonna call it. Right? There like there was a there was a startup, right, a uh an AI researcher from this startup. It was a comment on a picture of a hackathon.

SPEAKER_03 53:16

I think it was actually an XAI hackathon, right?

SPEAKER_04 53:18

And he commented um Imagine the Smell. Sorry, it wasn't how's the smells, imagine the smell. He comment he commented, imagine the smell, right? And this completely blew up, right? Because there were sort of two interpretations of it. One was that, oh, it's a hackathon, there's a bunch of dudes, right? Guys in tech, you know, historically don't have the greatest hygiene, therefore they don't smell great. The other interpretation was he was actually being racist towards Indians. And so the reason I bring this up is because it became a whole thing, right? The CEO fired him, right? Just because, you know, they the the CEO initially came out and said, we stand by who said it, uh, like this was obviously not intended to be racist. Um, you're trying to find it. Um now it's a meme. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, now now it's a meme. Now it's a meme. But basically, the reason the reason I bring up this scenario is because uh who tweeted it, he's not known for shit posting, right? He's known for posting AI takes, right? That's his that's his brand. He has a face account, he's got an AI researcher in his bio. And so naturally he doesn't have any plausible deniability. It's like, oh, this is totally out of character, and so I think it left a lot of room, like there was it was just like so much surface area for attack. Whereas if I had said that, right, from my account, right? The joke fucking creatine, XD Jim, bro, you know, not felt the touch of a woman in like eight years, like that sort of that sort of thing. Oh, you found it. I think this is it, right? And so if I had tweeted that, no one would have bad deny. I guarantee you that nobody would have misinterpreted it's like, oh, it's just the joke account tweeting jokes again. And so I I think that's I it's really important because like I even even companies that I work with, like even as like a comms lesson, it's like, oh, actually, you know, you can't just go out and tweet whatever, right? And I know I know he I know he had good intentions. I mean, I don't actually know him personally, but I'm like, okay, clearly he's tweeting on, you know, he's he's making fun of Tech Pro Hygiene. But because it's not his brand, right? It's sort of off the cuff, it's out of pocket, it's not, it's it's uncharacteristic for somebody like that to be tweeting like that. It was uh yeah, he was dragged through the mud and it and it cost him his job.

SPEAKER_02 55:23

So now he works at OpenAI.

SPEAKER_04 55:25

Now he works at OpenAI.

SPEAKER_02 55:27

Moral of the story, postmore. He lost his job at a shitty startup just to get one at OpenAI.

SPEAKER_04 55:33

Just to get acquired by OpenAI.

SPEAKER_02 55:34

So this is like a huge blessing in disguise.

SPEAKER_04 55:36

This is this is getting cancelled in 2026. This is oh well, 2025, but you know, he got the job in in 2026. But yeah, I do think like obviously there could be countless other stories of that not working out quite the same way. Uh and so, yeah, exercise in branding, I wrap it back around to the idea that I'm just a joke account. Maybe because I'm a joke account, it's actually like throttled my my account growth a bit. I'm not really too sure. But it gives me a lot of plausible deniability to say stuff like that and not get dragged through the mug because it's like, oh, he does this all the time. Right? So like the whole branding thing is important is important. It comes back to you branded yourself as an insider. I'm saying this, not you. Uh but you come across as somebody who has done something, who knows people, and so is therefore an authority, right? Which again, I think it lends itself to building an a to building an audience.

SPEAKER_02 56:24

Wait, go for

How to get an account started

SPEAKER_02 56:26

it.

SPEAKER_04 56:27

Yeah, well, how do we start? What's the story?

SPEAKER_02 56:39

I never replied. I never thought about it very very much. My intention was never to post. And uh, but it turns out I have opinions and I would just respond to people um and uh that's I think that's probably what got me like maybe the first thousand or something like that.

SPEAKER_04 56:54

Yeah, same. Yeah, mine was just like replying to big accounts. And I do I do think that this is still the same. Like I think I think this if there's any if there's any stark difference between posting as a new account now versus posting as a new account before Elon, before, you know, X. Um I do actually think it's probably easier to start an account now. The reason being is because you can still reply and you can gain a following that way, but you must have a blue check. That's the very important thing. The if you don't have a blue check on Twitter now, like you're out of the game, right? Because all replies, they're gonna be prioritized, right? If you have a blue check, you'll come to the top versus, and again, and that's I I do think if you get Grak Pro, you get priority boost on replies. Yeah, yeah, Twitter premium. If you're paying the whatever.

SPEAKER_02 57:34

So if you get like Grak Pro or whatever, you're gonna be at the top of the replies for everybody, basically.

SPEAKER_04 57:39

That just is how it works now. I think um, yeah, and so where I'm going with this is that uh another thing about posting as a new account now is that is that you you have more of a chance to actually break through and reach the masses with some sort of witty one-liner. Um this is gonna be more likely if you have a blue check. It really is pay-to-play now. Uh, and so so yeah, I I should mention that, yeah. But for me, it was yeah, replying to big accounts. And then, yeah, it's like just spending a bunch of time on the app. There was also, like, I know when I personally got started, Twitter Spaces were really big, so we're kind of coming out of the Clubhouse era, everybody was falling off of Clubhouse, and we had all moved over to Twitter Spaces, so it'd be like all of the anonymous accounts, like like Rune, uh like myself, there'd be other accounts. This was also when uh uh Beth Jesus was getting started and just going on like hour-long rants about fucking like thermodynamics or some bullshit.

SPEAKER_02 58:28

Um, I think the other thing that happened was as a result of my reply, whatever, people would add me to group chats all the time.

SPEAKER_04 58:34

Yes, same.

SPEAKER_02 58:35

Yeah, we we actually And I got added to like 30 group chats, and I'm like, who the who the fuck are these people?

SPEAKER_04 58:40

One of the classic group chats, and this actually spawned a lot of discourse in 2022, uh, end of 2021, end of 2020 uh into 2022, was we a bunch of us, and again, all anonymous accounts, uh, we were in this group chat called A16Z Partners. And so this was when a bunch of anonymous accounts Oh, did you know how that happened? It was it was uh Lewis, right? Like, like it was going after.

SPEAKER_02 58:59

Yeah, because we were making fun of the fact that every per This is ironic because it's A16Z. But it's still true. We were making fun of the fact that every title at A16Z is a partner. Yes. So we all changed our bios to uh partner at A16Z, and it confused the shit out of everybody. They would DM me and it's like, hey, I'm building a startup. I used to get the same thing, but you guys are barking up the wrong thing. Like if we had like 400 followers and like people were like raging out trying to pitch this top. And then I think I put partner at A16Z as my bio, and then um all these startups would actually like message me all the time. And then I posted, I was like, oh my god, I think I'm getting a larger deal flow than A16Z. And then Mark unfollowed me. Of course. And then I po and then I posted something like, Well, I've left A16Z and joined Sequoia. And so I speaked into general partner at Sequoia, and then everybody would, I was like, what general partner at Sequoia would post content like this?

SPEAKER_04 59:59

Like, yeah, that's right. So I in my bio, I used to have Sequoia Boy Scout, right? Like like and so I still used to get deal for it. It's crazy. And like I would I wouldn't reply to these guys. I'd be like, be like, yeah, send the deck. Oh my god, send the deck.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:17

I get so many messages like this still today. It's funny. You still do it. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:21

You you you you don't have it in your bio anymore. Nothing. You just go it's still village retard? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:28

Retard was not kosher like two years ago.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:30

Yeah, I so so okay, so here's my hot take on on the R word. Here's my hot take. I think it's over. It's over what? I think the R word is over. Uh I think it's like out, I think it's like it's overdone, it's finished. I think the R word is finished. I think like, you know, like the R word was very 2022, 2023. Uh now we're in 2026. I think I think it's time to move on.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:52

Do you guys know how uh like regard is a substitute for retard? Yes. Because uh 4chan produced this entire dictionary of because back a little while ago, everything you say would be censored. So for example, Instagram censors words. Yep. And so there's an entire translation of a dictionary for uh words you can't say in a different word. And turns out regard is for retard. Yes, yes, yeah. And uh and then there's a lot more. Yes, yes, yes, yes. We can go into I'm just kidding.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:22

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, bring it up, bring it up. Um yeah, I'm trying to think, um, yeah, that that that 2021-2022 period was really, really funny because again, like like I mentioned before, right? It was like when a bunch of us had anonymous accounts, and like this was the kind of stuff like we're in group chats at the time and were sort of spinning up these little stunts. Like, oh, it'd be really kind of funny if like what if we all just started like putting a 16Z partner in our bio and like, you know, like like putting a spin again. Members of technical staff, what I'm doing, that's the exact same concept, right? The idea that now everybody's actually a member of technical staff, right? I've seen pre-seed startups with members of technical staff titles. Like, like it's it's just sort of proliferated. And so I wanted to play on that joke with exactly what I'm doing. Uh the same thing sort of thing. The inspo actually came from 2021, 2022, where a bunch of us anonymous accounts with like 400 followers started getting a bunch of deal flow by putting, you know, A16Z partner in our bios. And you know, that's like, gosh, if I can be prescriptive with anything when it comes to X.com the Everything app, is like have fun with your friends, damn it. Like if you find other like-minded accounts, right, like if you if you're just in the group chats, right? There's like there is something to be said about just like organic engagement from the homies, especially if you've all been posting for a while and all have a fair few followers.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:37

My tweets get posted to group chats, and I it's for one of two reasons. Either they're really good or really, really bad.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:43

Yeah, you get roast you get roasted in a few group chats for being just AI generated.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:47

Yeah, and it's funny, and then I lean on that because I want Rune to respond with Claude Slop. And then so now I actually intentionally make it look like it's AI generated. Right. Yes, yes, yes. Uh as a rage

Ragebait

SPEAKER_02 1:02:59

bait element, but I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:00

Yeah, the rage the rage bait thing is interesting.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:03

Um so so like my thing, my thing on ragebait is that I actually think it's like like it I think it's bad. I actually think most rage bait is bad. Like, especially if it's incredibly in the same way.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:13

It has to be super subtle.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:14

Yeah, yeah. Like I think like I think the Cluley Rage Bait's bad because I think now everybody remembers Cluley for that thing and not exactly what they're building. It's like cool, they have a bunch of distribution. Uh, like okay, but like I I'm I'm of the mind that like not all publicity is good publicity, actually. I actually think like you know, what people know you for and the vibe that you give off. And I actually think being a good thing. And you can never change that.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:36

Yeah. It's very difficult to change.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:38

Yeah, it's very, very hard to like to code switch like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:40

That's why uh product manager had to switch an entire different account. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:45

And I wish and I wish he didn't.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:47

I I wish he didn't either, but he had to completely launder that identity. Yeah, yeah and uh and then change it because it didn't it wouldn't have never it would have never worked for what he's doing now. Totally, totally. Um anything, anything in particular we should wrap on?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:00

Or uh I don't

Finding your edge

SPEAKER_03 1:04:01

know.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:01

Does anybody have any any like a third question? Like applies to content, I think on the other strategies or I mean like I you know I think you always I I think like like everything, right? Like I think like like anything that is content, uh I I think it's important to try and figure out your edge. And I and and like I guess like what I what I mean by that is like, yeah, what what can you offer that perhaps others cannot? Right? Like what what is what is some sort of theme, right? What is like some sort of topic that you want to want to cover, right? I think it's the same thing, it's the same thing for content, right? It's like what's the edge? It's like okay, you could be one of those people to spin up another sort of like interview series with like X Series B founder or whatever and get like a few hundred views, and like like that's that's fine, but you know, like like maybe it's maybe it's better to go after, I don't know, uh a particular set of guests that people don't have. Like maybe you want to try and uh uh tweet in a particular way that others don't. Hope's revenge. He puts spaces between every word, and he's sort of like schizoposts and like posts as his dog, and like, you know, every every uh two weeks he's like uh goodbye, I am leaving Twitter forever. And it's like a picture of like an a plane exploding, and he just posts that every two weeks. Like, again, I'm just sort of I I can I can think back to Hope's straight away, and I can tell you what his edge is. His edge is like kind of schizophrenia and putting spaces in his posts. I can think back to Gabriel with the whole sort of like fan fiction speaking in run-on sentences, right? Obviously incredibly high verbal IQ, but the idea that he's like read a lot of books and he's like really plugged into the VC ecosystem, even though he's in Australia. Um, uh, like, like, like I mentioned about Ridey, like he comes across as an insider, right? He comes across as somebody who has who has done something. He comes across as somebody who has credibility. And so I'm just I'm I'm going through all of my favorite accounts and trying to think about what is their edge. Uh, Rune, right? You can never tell what Rune's politics are. And of course, he coined Word cell shape rotator. He's always slightly early on the culture. Paula, she's got puns. Paula's got puns. And you know, she's got a Waymo tweets. And I mean, I could go on and on, right? It's like like find find your edge, right? Like I think with all of these platforms, it right really it actually does help to have some sort of edge, to have some sort of strategy. Like have something that you think that you can post about all the time.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:19

Also, if you notice a trend, it's too late. True. Um, I think a lot of people tend to like notice something and then they try to participate in it, but it feels inauthentic because they're doing it because they noticed a trend and they're participating in it. Whereas if you and it's weird how much people can feel uh in whatever 256 characters in the right order about like your emotional state or your whatever it's like the authenticity just screams even though there's no visuals, there's nothing. And um that's incredibly powerful, but also people will pick up on anything like that pretty quickly. Um that's why all the the stuff that was posted here screamed just pure.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:02

I've never seen stuff like this because it's arbitrary. Like I like I personally picked all of these.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:08

Yeah, also we're we're this is head heavy thing. We should focus on the ones that didn't do well.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:14

Yeah, yeah. Uh any any uh any more questions to wrap on?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:17

Uh any questions from you guys?

unknown 1:07:19

Um how do you think about like all the verses quality? Like people tweeted.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:26

Yeah, all the time.

How the algorithm works

SPEAKER_04 1:07:27

Absolutely. Yeah, fucking shameless.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:29

Oh, I don't know, most people don't know how the algorithm works, I don't think. Uh, which is the way it works is when you tweet, um, it gets sent to a cohort of people that might actually be, you know, uh uh relate to it or whatever. And then if that cohort, which is a small population of Twitter, engages with it at a certain rate, then that tweet goes to a larger cohort. And then it it it goes, it doesn't automatically just go and everybody sees it, otherwise you'd see a bunch of garbage um on the timeline. So basically it has this like ripple effect, and that's important because who are the first people that are gonna see your content? It's gonna be a handful of individuals, maybe the people that follow like constantly engage with your tweets or whatnot, and if they don't engage with it, then so like the idea of a bad tweet is that nobody will see it. Who cares? Who gives a shit? Like I'm still deleting that shit. Yeah, people have like a like a tendency, because if they notice a couple things, if it doesn't get like 10 likes in like a second or something, uh they're like, oh, this is not good. Or if it doesn't get whatever, um it is very hard to tell in the early stages, especially. Very difficult. For what, deleting them? I know I personally rarely ever delete stuff. Fuck it, okay. That's not a flag. Um I only I only tweet like maybe three or four times a day. Like I don't actually tweet that much. It's pretty hard. That's a good point. Depending on what's happening on the day. Because my my account is almost like a commentary on what's happening, but not defining it as like what's happening, but why it's happening. And I think that probably has like a level of I don't know, curiosity for people that want to know like the relatable elements in the past, how it potentially fits in the future in some dimension. And they could be totally wrong. Uh, but I never phrase them as conclusions. Like my tweets are never conclusive. Like you you have to go decide whether you believe it or not. Be inscrutable. Have other people try to stream. Oh, also, yeah, then I have deniability as well.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:34

Yes, yeah. Yeah, I know I know I don't have any rhyme nor reason to uh to the quantity or uh I mean obviously, you know, I I think I'm always trying to think of like, okay, well, is this like actual proper slop? Like I, you know, I I I I definitely do try and think about like, oh, I'm gonna have a read on whether something's gonna do well or not. I also do have probably a read on like how well something's gonna be. So for example, take all of my posting last night. Uh like, you know, like I took a picture of a vodka soda and I was like, zero likes and I'll have another one. And like that actually did way better than I expected. Because like I don't one, I don't usually post like that. Two, it's also like, you know, there's not there's actually not that much that's original about it. I think it's just funny that it's coming from me at a particular time.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:18

Um also it makes it seem like you have nothing to gain. Like you're not doing it to gain stuff explicitly.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:23

Yeah. And I think that that actually is a really important point. Like, I I and I think I could I probably speak for both of us here, is like we were tweeting with no particular intent to get anything out of this app. It was purely for the love of the game. Right. And, you know, now I would say that I it's still for the love of the game, it's just that I've happened to attach, you know, how I make money to it, which is again concerning, but it's my own problem. But like, yeah, I I think I think at the end of the day, if it's fun, uh you'll probably want to tweet more. So I have a lot of fun doing it, so I tend to tweet a fair few times.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:54

Worst case scenario, you get hired by MTS.

Crossposting

SPEAKER_02 1:11:00

Yeah, not by me. Not by not by Mart. One thing is um okay, here's a fun fact. Usually people think about the world in platforms, not the con not the actual explicit. So here's a good example. So when people look at a a thing they want to take a picture of, oftentimes it's like, hey, I'm I'm gonna take that Instagram or I'm gonna post that on X before they even take the photo. And so the content is a composition. So I used to work at Facebook a long time ago, and uh it turns out people knew what app they wanted to open before they pulled out their phone. Um and so people think in content platforms and the way the content so for example, X has like a perception in somebody's mind, Instagram has a perception, and oftentimes when you do cross post, um people find it cringy. So for example, on X, if you post too many selfies, you're gonna get roasted, which happens quite often, I guess, yeah. Um or it's like, oh, Instagram is that way, uh, or LinkedIn, LinkedIn is that way, yeah. LinkedIn is down the hall that way. Um so I think cross-posting is kind of a little bit more dangerous than otherwise because it feels inauthentic to the platform and it feels like you're just maximizing spread without necessarily putting in the effort for the uh for the audience and the structure of that platform, if that makes sense. Um but you know, some people pull it off very well.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:31

Yeah. Um I can counter that a little bit. Uh I think if you're gonna if you're gonna post if you're gonna post video or images on X, um I think what uh what I mean, a lot of companies make this mistake, in my opinion. Uh but people are one, especially with video, people are oftentimes just not even gonna watch it, right? Uh with like long form long-form articles on X, I think a lot of a lot of time people are just gonna scroll past it. I like to think of X as like the world's greatest billboard, but nobody watches a billboard, they drive past it. So like a ton of people will see labels, logos, all these sorts of things. Um, but not many people are watching stuff. And so I actually do cross-post a bit, right? I you know, the companies that I work with on this sort of stuff, I get them to like cross-post. Um, but the the the biggest difference, I'm like, okay, I just stress the copy, right? X is you know where people go to get 140 characters or whatever. I know it's like 270 now or some shit, but like, you know, the the shorter you can make it, the better, in my opinion. And so I just stress the copy. It's like, okay, you can post your your Instagram reel to X as long as there is uh meaningful enough copy, because honestly, that's probably all that people are gonna say.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:41

I think it works really well for X to somewhere else, but it works less well from somewhere else to X. Um, for example, there's a dude who's monetizing my tweets on Instagram. Um and he just like fucking posts screenshots. I'm sure he makes a lot of money, but it works for him, and I think it gets a lot of engagement. Um whereas I've rarely ever seen like Instagram stuff do well on Twitter unless it's like making fun of it or some dating discourse or whatnot.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:06

Yeah, yeah, you do have those those accounts that just like straight up post TikToks. Um I think like called it. Which is lucrative as fuck. Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:12

Although now they're demonetizing some of those.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:14

Yeah.

Monetizing

SPEAKER_04 1:14:15

Okay. Cool, we're at time. Good place to wrap.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:18

Any other thoughts or questions? Okay, good. Was this actually useful and fun? Fucking fishing for that. No, I was like, we're gonna have a vote afterwards, so please vote for our session. Oh, wow. Okay. Cool.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:30

Thanks.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:33

That was very good job. Good job, King. Okay, so uh we've been brought out here by the end of the day.