First of all, creating something that goes viral is such a crazy feeling. And you've done it a ton. I mean, you built the hustle with a bunch of really viral blog posts. Like, this is kinda nothing in comparison to the blog post you guys wrote.

And also you're a writer, so you kinda have a process where you sniff out

stuff that you think is gonna go viral. Whereas for me, I'm not really a writer. This is kinda me just trying to get it. You you you have the it factor. I think that,

I think you can study in how to do it. I think that you can just be born with the skill set.

I think you and I are quite similar in that it's both born or we we have that natural gift and also we learn and master the craft. Right. I think you've you've tried it a lot more, and therefore your hit rate, I think, is is higher. Personally, I just think that. But, the question I was gonna answer is No. I mean, dude, you got to a hundred and twenty thousand followers on Twitter in, like, basically six months.

Yeah. That's true. So I wanted to share. So when I, so the way this this came about, because I think this is ultimately more interesting, Right? The the rant is kind of interesting. But the how this happened, I think for people who are listening, they'll probably find it I think they find it interesting.

The way this started was, a pretty high profile VC person called me one day. I never met them before. They had said, oh, you seem interesting on Twitter. I'd love to meet. So we did a phone call. And then we were talking just about each other's background. It was cool. And then they were like, well, what do you think a clubhouse by the way? I gotta ask.

And,

and I think they asked this because they had looked at investing. They ultimately didn't invest, and they were trying to figure out, like, am I gonna kick is this gonna be is this gonna haunt me? You know, for the next five years that I missed this deal, or is this gonna be a good one? And, you know, a good pass. And I basically I I just went on this rant on the phone about this. It just kinda came out of my mouth, and it led just the way I kind of explained it here. And,

without the whole, like, kind of dramatized, like, TV show script. But just the reasons why I think it's gonna struggle.

And,

and they were like, wow, that was great. It's like, that was amazing. And I I was like, shit. I should've wrote down. That was, like, that would have,

I feel like that would have been, like, a good, like, piece of content. And so I went in. I, like, kinda, it was like, I gotta go. And I hung up the phone, and I went to my computer, and I just typed the whole thing out.

And, and it turned into, like, and then I was like, okay, whatever. I kinda edited I took it out. I did your your tip, which is I took a break for an hour. Yeah. When it went and did something else, came back and I edited it for about thirty minutes. Editing is the magic to everything. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a viral tweet. A good email editing is the magic. They say, right drunk, edit sober.

Oh, that's a great one. I've never heard that. I love that. I I think you're in a ten day edit.

I used to just edit in the moment. Like, I'd write

And that was a mistake. The tip you gave me a while back was go do other shit. Let it simmer in your head while you do other things. Don't even actively think about it. The time you come back, you can make it twice as good in twenty minutes. Yeah. And there's actually some science behind it. I I I can't tell you the exact science off the top of my head, but basically, you know how there's like a shower

of, like, not doing it. So there's, like, science behind, like, doing something really hard and then not doing it and then things hit you.

There there's science behind why that works. And that's kinda what you're doing. Yeah. Basically, like, the brain relaxes in some way. And then when it relaxes, it's able to be creative in a in a new way. And so,

Okay. So then I post it and then whatever, you know, it should go as well. So then,

so that was the that was the oh, sorry. The other part that I I forgot, which I think is my new It's something I've been doing. And I'm curious if you do something like this.

Before,

before I write anything now, at the top of every page, I have a template. And at the top, there's, like, seven lines. It says, what reaction is this meant to get? And I have seven emotions. It's like, l o l. Like, this is meant to be really funny. Is it w t t f where it's like, dude, what the fuck? And that's when you're talking about something that's really unjust or people are pissed off and you wanna you wanna explain, hey, there's this really messed up thing that's happening and people will be like, oh my god.

Then there's other ones, like, you know, like, a w a w w something really cute. A w e r, like, like, that something is awesome. Like, wow, that is, like, kind of amazing.

Wait. Did I tell you that I do this?

No. I actually learned this from these other guys who make viral videos, rubber republic.

They had a search engine

where you would just search by one of these emotions, and it would pull up viral videos that had that that were based on that emotion. Well, I used to smile. So the way to go viral is you always wanna start

you start with the emotion that you're trying to get out of someone.

And you and we already know that certain emotions get more shares.

So for example, creating depression or sadness doesn't get shares.

Creating outrage gets far more. And with small tweaks, you can make something sad, outrageous, and that's far better. Right. You know, so it's either amazing. It's super funny. It's really, really outraging.

It's,

it's really touching and heartwarming. That's another one.

Hard to do. And then the one I had for this, which is kind of like a new emotion, which was I wrote,

finally someone said it, And I actually think that's a that's its own genre that I didn't even have in my template, because I was like, I think this is gonna go viral, but it doesn't match any of these. Was like, I think for some people, it's gonna be WTF, like, dude, this guy's a jerk. Why is he predicting failure? What a what an asshole? But I thought, no, it's gonna go viral because If you say something that a lot of people have been thinking, but they've been afraid to say, or they couldn't put words around it exactly, but they had this hunch, they will share it because they agree with your opinion and you state their opinion for them. It's the idea of recognizing

something that you feel that you weren't sure if other people feel, but you see on paper. So the same example is with location. So when you see, like, how you know you're a San Francisco bro, or how do I know, do you know Sean per, like, I set if I saw an ad that said, do you know Sean? I'd be like, oh, wait. That's directed just towards me. Right. And so with the emotion that you just evoked was like, finally, I didn't think I was the only one who thought, like, it's a recognizing it's it's a rec recognizing something type of vibe. And they're they're really sharing because they're like, I knew it. I I'm right. So they're not saying, wow, he's so right. They're actually saying I'm right. Read this. This proves I'm right. Which is like a real subtle thing, but I'm so interested in studying the, like,

psychology around why people do what they do. Why do they share what they share?

Because I wanna grow an audience, and this is the best way to grow it. And, I feel like this I'm I'm this process that I'm doing. I'm so glad you said you do it too because I thought I was a little crazy. I was like, oh, my gosh. No. That's what we used to do. I mean, that's what I do. When I I'm like, I I I start with the emotion, then I start with the package, like, how am I packaging this? And then I start with the headline, then the preview image, and then I work backwards from there. Right. And I always trying to find, like, I'll find something catches my attention. Just one fact or one line. So for example,

I was just doing research on one yesterday. Do you know, what recaptcha is? You know, like,

Well, you know, signing up for something. You're signing up for something that says spot nowadays, they say like spot, click the thing or type in the, the the what whatever pictures assigned, click it.

Yeah. It'll be like, you know, where are the traffic lights? Click all squares with traffic lights.

And, by the way, this is a good example. I saw this meme that was that recaptcha with the traffic lights. And in one of the squares, just the tiniest corner of the traffic light is in it, And this shows the guy, like, suit, like, sweating, like, crazy, like, oh, fuck. Should I include that, or should I not include that? And that's one of those where it's like, me too, dude, I have I always feel that way. I'm always so confused by this thing that's just supposed to So we could turn that into, I always feel that way meme. Now here, I can take it another You wanna know when I look that up on Wikipedia, you wanna hear a fun fact. Do you know why they do it this way? It's because people like Google

I might be butchering this just a little bit, but the idea is the same. People like Google are paying recaptcha

to translate stuff. So, for example, somehow picking out that sign or saying where the headlights are that actually helps Google and Google's paying you money is paying for capture. I have a little so so the original captcha was done by this guy. He was a professor at Duke and Carnegie Mellon. And Kaptcha originally was letters. Remember? It was always these like, like, kinda hard to read letters, but you could read it. And that was basically taking they have scanned a bunch of book pages,

but who's gonna convert the the the computer was not good enough at getting all the book pages

to translate over to text in the computer because some of the book pages were ruled around it or wrinkled or kind of fuzzy And so the the computer can do it, but a human eye could easily do it. So they Yeah. Basically outsource the work and solve two problems with one stone. On the website side, they just wanna make sure you're not a a bot who's signing up for their service, like, a scammer who's gonna spam everybody,

but then

they did good in the world also because that project

ended up transcribing,

like, millions and millions of books. I think all the books that they had scanned eventually. And then Captcha two is about or recaptcha, I believe, is about image classification. So for self driving cars, we need to know, is a is this a bus, or what is this? And so I think that's where the original idea was, classifying images, let humans do it while they sign up. And the inventor of recaptcha, the second one. His name is Lewis von Hahn. I think that's how you pronounce it. He did both and that guy started duolingo. And he when he started duolingo, he started it for two reasons. One, he I guess he just cared about helping you learn language But two, when you are learning the language, you're actually translating

stuff that a third party service is paying for you to translate.

So this guy's crazy. So what a genius? The exact

emotion that you just had of this guy's crazy. That is the emotion. Wow. This guy's a genius. I trying to evoke by sharing that. So I can tell that story in probably five tweets, and I bet it will, like, virality is pretty impossible to predict. But I can bet that there's like a three out of ten chance that it's gonna that it has legs. I could say that I could say this has all of the,

this checks is all the box. To get popular. I can't I can't anyone who says that they're gonna be able to predict it, they're wrong. Like, Sean's thing just reached five million people. He was like, this is not gonna work.

It's a lot more about it. Another part. Another part you had there that was good is that you took a thing that we've all seen. It's a relatable. Oh, yeah. I've I've filled one of those in and you So you took a very familiar thing, but I told you the uncommon truth around it, which I think is, like, really cool. Like, I and there's one yesterday I saw you know, Tom Cruise's name is not Tom Cruise, his real name? No. What is it? It's Tom,

Tom Cruise something. It's, like, his middle name is Cruz, and his last name is, like, some, like, where you look it up. It's some, like, I don't know, random ass, like, name. And he changed it to Tom Cruise, which sounds like a total movie star name makes total sense that he did it. And,

says, yeah, his real name is Thomas Cruz

Mapothor, the fourth or some I don't even know how you pronounce it. Yeah. I can't even pronounce that. Mapothor. Yeah.

Tom Mapothor. Versus Tom Cruise. And so you take something really familiar. We all know Tom Cruise. Right? Boom. Here's the uncommon. Did you know? And then it's like, oh, sweet. Like, Wow. You know, and that one doesn't have as much shock factor, so it won't go super viral, but it'll get a lot of likes. But, you know, the the closer you can get to that the surprise gap between what I thought I knew and what's real, the more shares people will get. Yeah. I think if anyone cares about this stuff, I like the book made to stick, and like to book contagious by Jonah Burger.

Contagious

made to stick is how to to say something so people remember

Contagious is a great book by this Wharton professor on how to make things get popular.

I feel like I could root a word. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like the day's off on a road. Let's travel never looking