Welcome, what is going on, gentlemen? What's going on? There he is. Hey, there he is. Good to see you. Look, you're looking fantastic. You got the lighting, you got the real mic. You look like a professional.
Yeah, clearly a professional. I had to show up, right? I wanted to come here and just lay down a gauntlet. I'm not a technology brother, but I would like to be the technology cousin, perhaps technology uncle. I'm still workshopping names, but I honestly like Uncle.
Uncle is... you've got that sort of elder, you know, elder statesman. That's what I'm going for.
Be like, uh, yeah, no, that's perfect. That's fantastic. It's great to have you on, and the audio is... and I hate to, um, you know, throw shade at Justin Mares who was on five minutes ago, but it's just night and day difference. It's great to have the sound.
Yeah, we're professionals. Gentleman scholar. It's not my first podcast. Gentlemen, let's go. What's on your mind today? What, you know, maybe let's start there. I don't think we need to warm you up. We can just dive right into it.
Oh, I just think what you guys are doing is genius. So I needed to first come on and give you some flowers for that. Thank you. I think innovative is an understatement. I think we need to just acknowledge what is actually happening here. The Andrew Tate might have been the first, but you guys are the second to say, hey, I'm going to create a podcast, and it doesn't... the podcast is nothing. The podcast is just feedstock for the shorts, for the clips. And that is a core, core insight that you guys have pounced on. You're doing great with the branding. Love it. Love everything you're doing.
That's what Jord said. He said, I want to be the Andrew Tate of technology. And so I said, I can make that happen. I have experience in YouTube. And it's also John's... John's dream is to be a Harry Potter fan fiction.
Harry Potter fan fiction, yes, that's the rip we have going. Well, we can talk Harry Potter. I can go deep on Harry Potter if you want. But Jordy, I think that Andrew Tate is trying to be the Jordy of, you know, felons and or whatever he does, cam girl sites.
Well, you know, the funny thing, it was weird timing, but Andrew Tate showed back up in the US and then there was that lawsuit against, uh, Passes, and that was sort of like potentially convenient timing. It seems like he might be, you know, kind of coming, trying to enter the US market.
Competition is for losers. Anyway, if you don't want to compare ourselves... regulatory capture.
Yeah, I actually... so one of the things I'm like super curious about, you're a content creator yourself, you know, you have the podcast. What's your information diet like? Something that John and I talk about a lot is our show is heavily based on what's happening right now, what the current thing is. We obviously focus on X as a platform, but if you're only consuming content on X, then you're not injecting anything sort of new, and you're just like part of the hive mind. How do you think about your information diet and kind of where do you spend your time kind of coming up with ideas?
Yeah, it's a great question. I think that the information diet is probably like today something that only nerds like us talk about, but is going to become a very popular concept as people realize that it's garbage in, garbage out. So, um, what, you know, I think the problem that the tech guys have is we will all go consume not necessarily garbage content, but just the same content, right? So we're all on X, we're all reading the same things, listening to All-In, and listening to the same podcast. And then guess what? You have the same thoughts as everybody else, and like while calling yourself a contrarian, right? It doesn't really make sense. And so, you know, for me, I do a couple of things. So I have a phrase that I like, which is kids, dogs, and dead people. And I want to spend as much of my time as I can with kids, dogs, and dead people. And, you know, so what does that mean? Kids will teach you a certain set of things. So kids are highly playful, they work with their imagination a lot, they're completely delusional, they have no idea of what's realistic and what's not. And so the more time you spend with kids, the more playful you become, the more imaginative you become, the more delusional you become. So I take that from them. Dogs are sort of these unconditional lovers, right? Dogs are always down, always loyal, always happy. They are there for you in every way. And so, you know, pick that up from dogs. And the last is the dead people. So how do I change my ratio of tweets to books, right? Because, you know, long form, as everybody gets interested in consuming short form, I want to consume as much long form as I can. So old, whether it's old videos on YouTube, like I watched this thing with Max Levchin from like 2004 talking about, and I was like, this is fantastic. And it has like, you know, 89 views on YouTube. And so, you know, you start to get excited about being a collector of pieces, right? It's like, oh, this is a wonderful old memo, you know, when they first pitched PowerPoint at Microsoft, or this is a great book. I read this book recently called, um, Talk Like... what was it? It was, uh, Talk Like Lincoln, Talk Like Churchill. It was about like public speaking and just being a goddamn man and the way you show up to things. And I was like, this is fantastic. And so I'm trying to spend as much time as I can with dead people.
It's great. Great answer. Can you take us through the triangle of talent? I really love this. We printed this off here because I think it's a fantastic framework for elevating talent within an organization. We're a small company here, but I wanted to know, like, what inspired you to map this out this way, and what do you think people are taking away from it? How's the reception been?
Every blog post I write is just a potshot at somebody. It's an annoyance from an employee in my company, and then I'm like, you know what? I'm going to write this over here. I hope you read this. I hope you really understand this. That's the honest truth. Is irritation the itch, and innovation is the scratch, as I like to say. You know, Steve Jobs had a line we just talked about earlier on the show. He told his team, 'I hope what you just did makes you hate each other.' Yeah, you should hate each other for doing this because they messed up the mobile, the email syncing, and it went so poorly that Apple was looking terrible in 2008. And he was like, 'You guys should hate each other for this, right? It's so bad.' Anyway, so the real insight here actually came when I sold my company. So I sold my company, and I went from CEO to now I was an employee. So, you know, I'm on the other side of the table, and I was trying to figure out, like, oh, this is interesting. Like, now I have a boss, I have a manager. What does this guy care about? How does he think about me? And like, what's this dynamic? And what I realized was that in every company, there's like this little number floating above your head, and it's your trust score. It's like, you know that movie where it's like how many days you have left to die or whatever, and people could see it on each other's forehead or something like that.
Yeah, it's like a Black Mirror like death note or something like that. Yeah. So the thing I realized was that basically for the CEO, they look at all their employees, and there's just a trust score. And the trust score is basically like, can I trust you to be watching out for problems and identifying them yourself, or am I going to have to deliver like the issues to you? I'm going to have to be the one telling you, hey, we got to solve this. And then even if I did do that, if I gave you the problem, do I trust that you'd be able to solve it? Do I trust that you could manage like a group of people in solving this, or can I only give you things that are like small bite-sized where you can alone do it, right? Do I have to give you the instructions on how to solve it, or could you figure it out, right? So everybody's got this trust score. You want to be at 100%, right? Like you want to be at 100. And those are the people ultimately, they get the raises, they get the opportunities. When the new thing comes up, that's who you put on the project is the people you trust the most. And really, like your trust score goes far beyond like your job title. And I realized this when I was working with Emmett at Twitch. Yeah. And so then in my own companies, I sort of realized like, okay, could I like assign some numbers to that score? Could I assign some levels to that score? And so yeah, that's where the triangle comes from. I don't know if you want me to like say what the levels are.
I'd love to know. Like obviously when you're the CEO, if you're selling your company, you're probably operating at level five, superstar. But then you go into Twitch, you said it was a very different environment. Did you feel yourself moving downward towards like level four, level three?
Yeah, gravity is moving you downwards, right? Because you're supposed to, you know, like if you go to these big companies, you're not the CEO or the founder anymore. Not all the problems don't roll up to you. All the opportunities aren't your decision whether you're going to do them or not. And so gravity is kind of pulling you down to get to like kind of like a level three, which is like a bit of a, you're just a sort of a task doer, or maybe you can manage a team of people to do a set of tasks. But I was just like trying to fight that. So like I had a great conversation with my buddy Furcon when we got acquired, and he pulled up the company metrics, like the company dashboard, and he's like the CEO view basically. And he's like, which one of these numbers do you think our project will move? And I was like, I was just thinking of they bought our company to do X, we should come here and do X. And what he was arguing was like, cool, that made sense when we were trying to sell this company to them. Of course, we wanted to say how big of a deal it was. But now that we're here, we're on the same team. We should just be more objective. Like, is our thing going to move any of these metrics? And he goes, don't you just think like whatever we do while we're here, we should just be able to move one of these KPIs like five or ten percent? And like we should just make that our budget. Like we're not going to do a project if it can't move the needle five or ten percent on one of the core metrics, usage, revenue, you know, profits, right? So and I looked at what we were doing. It was never going to do that. Even if we did it really well, it would never have moved any of those metrics. And so I literally just didn't do any of the work I was supposed to do for about a month. I just started walking around the office asking people like, what's going on over here? Like, what are the problems are you dealing with? What's something that somebody should be doing that nobody's doing right now? Or what's something that's worrying you? And our buddy Hubert, who sold Curse to Twitch, he was there and he was like this guy who had been like ringing this bell that nobody was listening to. And he's like, hey, look at this. Our market share in Brazil has dropped like dramatically and nobody cares. Nobody's doing anything about this. And he's like, it's because mobile gaming. It's all mobile gaming over there, streaming from their phone. And we don't even have like the functionality to do that. And internally at the company, we'd all written off mobile game streaming as like something that wasn't a thing because we tried it, it didn't work. Nobody watched Candy Crush and we all moved on. But hey, something has changed and here's the data. So we only started working on that. So that was kind of my real life experience of not letting myself go from a level five to a level three because that's where the gravitational pull was. And like trying to fight to be like, no, no, no, I'm going to try to identify the biggest problems and I'm going to try to go solve them.
That makes a ton of sense. I want to talk about branding. When we launched this show, I was very obsessed with like the growth hacks and the quote tweets and the clips, as you mentioned. But you came to me and you said, I think the fact that you guys have really thought about the brand, and Jordy was the one who really thought about the brand the most. But what is your playbook for developing a new brand? What's your stack? Who's in the room? Are you using AI tools? Is it starting a PowerPoint or a doc or a notes app? Like how do you think about developing a brand? What are the best practices these days?
