Rich from light speed, which he's a Tim T analyst and basically spends all day thinking about the stuff. He once told me this, and I think it's probably the best way to think about all of the different platforms. He said, most people think of like the streaming wars, right? It's Spotify versus iTunes versus whoever. They think of the video platforms. It's Netflix versus Hulu versus whatever. They think of the social networks. It's Facebook and Instagram versus Twitter. And when you start to think about that, like, okay, those are like vertically related, but he was like, that's the wrong framework. The right framework is it's a war of attention. Yes. And Spotify is actually competing with Netflix, which is competing with Twitter. Right. And Fortnite or, you know,

in a game and I mean, you can go through it. Like literally, there's probably hundreds of platforms. And the way

to think about it now, I think, is I just look at like, how much time do I spend on my phone? Right. I'm scared to look at my computer time spent, but on my phone, I know I spend anywhere given the week between four to five hours a day on my phone. And that's phone calls, that's text message, platforms, all the stuff. So let's just say that every person is pretty

good. That's that's that's low.

Is that low? Yeah, I think that's low. That's why I don't want to look at my computer. I try to get off my off my phone. But when you look at that, and by the way, we should make sure that we cut this clip and we're going to send it to Pleyna so that she thinks that I don't spend that much time on my phone. Right. But no, when you see this, let's say the average person is five hours, I'm making this up. If you have an hour podcast dressing for 20% of someone's time a day, and maybe that person is just sophisticated podcast listeners, they're going to put on two exp. So now you have 30 minutes, right?

Like that is a

huge ask to get them to do that. And then if you're doing it two or three times a week, like, you know, a nearly impossible. Yes. And so I think that like, when you look at all the platforms, you start to then actually want to almost prioritize what are the passive consumption platforms, right? Like, if I can get you to listen to me in the background while you're at work, that's a way bigger advantage for me. We're double using that hour. Yes. Then like, okay, you have to sit down and read this 20 minute email. Yeah,

exactly. Like, good luck. Right. So the best. There's two analogies I've heard about this. One is from the Chinese social networks. They talked about their product. I think it was the, I think it was the parent company of TikTok by dance. Maybe it was like the WeChat company or whatever. But they basically just said somebody had come into a meeting and they presented a, like a competitor, like landscape, like you were talking about, like, oh, you know, they could use us or they could use, you know, this other product at the same time, we both do video and they're, you know, they were like, no, this is not the way to think about it. They just mapped out a customer's day. So, okay, if a person wakes up at 7 a.m., what do they use? What technology do they use between 7 and 715? How do we build a product that's going to fill the while you're brushing your teeth time? Okay, then how do we get to the next? And so they just mapped out every hour of the waking hour of someone's day and it sounds like kind of like big evil tech, but hey, look, this is what they do. They're making slot machines. They're trying to like get you to keep pulling the lever is how do we, how do we fill up every hour? I mean, you know, for every minute of your day, you're waiting in line at Starbucks. Well, what should be a product that you should use during that time versus when you're on your commute versus when you're at work versus whatever? And then they wanted to build products along that because they're like, this time is the scarce asset. It's the, you know, that's the unchanging thing. We all have the, you know, just the same amount of time in a day. So that's one thing I'd heard. The second was from Sarah Tavel from Benchmark. She said, she put it as a blog post. I was like, imagine a jar and you're going to fill the jar. And so you have these like big rocks you put in first and the big rocks are things like, you know, like maybe the time you're spending on email or Facebook or whatever. And then, and then you kind of have like, oh, well, that, you know, that's a Netflix. It's like an hour experience. Then you have like, I'm in line and I'm going to just, you know, send a quick text message. So then you fill in kind of like, you know, the smaller pebbles and you put those in and then you have the sand and that's like the passive experience and stuff. You could just, it'll fill in all the gaps. So if you want to fill the jar, you got to know which type of product are you building? Is it a big rock, a small pebble or is it sand? And then that's, that's the way a consumer will sort of like fill up

their time. When you think about that from the content platform, you said Twitter first podcast, is there another platform or is that just YouTube and that and

you would have skipped the podcast and gone to YouTube. So we dabble. So I would go to YouTube now, but I think that now that I've worked inside of these big companies, I'm like, oh, this is how this works. Somebody at the top is like, Hey, TikTok's big. We need TikTok inside YouTube. We'll call it shorts, you know? Okay, we're going to build it. TikTok keeps growing. TikTok keeps growing. They reported a new number. Oh my God. They're analysts as it's eating YouTube's lunch. Hey guys, where's that shorts product? Get that shorts product out there. They get it out there. Okay, numbers look okay. Cool. Put it in the feed, put it bigger in the middle of the feed. Every time you scroll three times, show it again. And like, there's product managers that are trying to get shorts, views up, right, or stories, snapchats rising. Hey, Instagram, Facebook, we need stories. Put stories in. Okay, cool. It's good. Put it at the top, you know, like, send a notification about it. Make it blank. Make it play exactly to put a red flashing thing around it. And so, you know, like, I think, so as a content creator, you're like, all right, if that's the game, what's your new thing? All right, I'm going to make some optimized content for that. Well,

and to be clear, they're boosting the distribution early on because they're trying to tell the creators you get reach here. Yeah,

either there's a market is like,

send a price pricing, right?

Yes. Search pricing. And I'm a Uber driver. They're saying, if you go over here, you're going to get double rates. All right, I'll go over there. And then that changes and you're like, Oh, shit, the double rate thing ended. I got to go back over where I wanted to be anyways. But for a moment in time, there's like this, like, it's the money ball. There's an extra point you can get by using these platforms. So I've been dabbling with that right now, which is what are the things where I pick the same amount of effort or maybe even sometimes less effort making some content and get double or triple exposure, either because the platform's juicing it or a topic is just like, dude, every time I talk about Bitcoin, it just gets bigger. Or like, if I say some conservative thing, you know, it goes bigger. And like, you don't want to totally sell out, but it's interesting to observe which of the things you talk about get much more play than the other thing you're equally interested in. That just like, seems like the market is not as interested in. Do you

use that to inform the content? Like, do you actively sit down and you're like, okay, every day I needed to have one tweet about Bitcoin, because that's what works and seems to get the most kind of distribution. Or is it more so just something like kind of you have a feel for and it's less data driven? It's more like, it's more like into observe it. You're like, okay, there's a

truth. I accept it. I'm not, I don't have to act on it. I know a lot of people, I have good friends that are like, dude, Twitter threads work. I'm gonna publish four a week. I've noticed that any more than fours, not optimal. I'm gonna publish them all at nine AM. So now I wake up at seven and I do the thing and I'm like, that's cool. But that would suck the fun out of this for me. So maybe I'm leaving stuff on the table by not doing that, not optimizing it using all the sort of schools at my disposal. But I need this to be fun, because if it's not fun, I'm not going to keep doing it. And I know that like in the long run, the only thing that really works is if I stick with this for a certain amount of time. And so I think that's like a pretty important like realization, which is like, most people burn out doing this. Who are the people that don't burn out? They're the people that they talk about what's interesting to them. They're not trying to just guess what the audience wants. And then secondly, they do it in a schedule that like is sustainable for them. And like, it depends on your level of discipline. You're like, you know, you're an army guy, you have discipline, I know you wake up every morning and you write the newsletter. And that's hard. Like, I could not do what you do. Because I'm like a lazy bastard who like, you know, just... But you're also on the West Coast. It's harder. It is harder. But like,

I do, I think about this a lot. I do think that what Ben Thompson is in Asia, right? Yeah, yeah. So like, I do think there's something about either living in the eastern part of the world. You're like, moved to Greenland or something. Yeah. And you basically get a right during the day and then your night is the morning east coast. Or you got to be on the east coast. I think it'd be very, very difficult to write daily and publish morning time west coast and still get the same results. I don't know why I think that. But like, that for some reason feels right. Right. I

had a paid newsletter. That was a daily newsletter. That was... It was an interesting premise. It wasn't publishing like analysis or information. I basically had just said, hey, this is called All Access. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do these three projects. I'm going to launch a fund from zero. I'm going to raise some money. If you want to learn how raising money works, you can follow along. I'm going to build an e-commerce project. If you want to see how you come up with that, how you get to 100,000 in monthly sales for that, I'm going to show you that. I said, I'm not going to teach you because I don't know if you... I'm not going to turn this into content. I'm not going to turn this into like a you can do it. I'm just going to show you how I do it. So it's like you're getting to sit next to me at my desk. I'm just going to tell you what I did that day. And then if you learn from that, or you think you could do it, great. And that thing got to $50,000 a month of paid kind of like revenue, which is how much was it a month? What was it? $200 a month?

Pretty high price. $150 to $200

a month. Yeah, because it was like you're going to learn things that like if you did that, if you implemented them, would be high business value for you. It was the idea. And so I was doing it, but I was only able to last like three months doing it. And then I was like, okay, like, I turned off a 50,000 a month income stream from this paid newsletter, which my mom and anybody else was like, just sit down and write it. It's just writing. That's easy. It's free. You know, like you write it, mom. Yeah, exactly. And she was like, tell me what to say. But that was, you know, that wasn't sustainable for me.