Deep Knowledge Podcast with Shawn Twing: Insights on AI, Books, Marketing, and Politics

All right, what is up, my fellow anti-eters, uh, and followers of my YouTube channel? Scott Shepard here, coming back at you. I just got off an hour and a half long call, a Zoom call, with a man named Sean Twing.

And this is an individual who has been in the online marketing game, the knowledge creation game, course creation game for a very, very long time. Name, I believe he said 1996 is uh what he says in this uh Zoom call that we just had. And he's an individual that discovered my anti-et zetocasten whole movement and book very early on. He subscribed to the Scott Shepard letter, like I think from day one. And he is a kind of a a legend in the background within the world of uh marketing and course creation essentially for for independent creators and thinkers.

And uh he and his uh former business partner started, who are still on good terms, still friends, started a a massive um essentially entity called uh Tiny Little Businesses, and they were well known for uh their course um it was called I think like gosh, what was it? It was it was it was all about like email domination, autoresponder madness, I believe it was called. It's something that Russell Brunson talks about in his dot secrets book.

And uh the individual I'm talking about um is uh Andre Chaperon, and uh the individual I spoke to is his uh business partner in that venture called uh and his name is Sean Twing. And every time I speak to Sean Twing, I'm like, man, I wish I recorded this Zoom session and I wish I was able to actually share it uh with the world. And so this time around I said, "Hey Sean, let's shoot a um, you know, record our call, our Zoom call uh on Zoom, and that way I'm going to upload it to my YouTube channel so that people can glean insights from u what we talk about and what we discuss."

And what you're going to discover in the topics that we discussed is we initially had three things to bring to the table. One was like our most recent best book that we read recently. Uh, gosh, why does that freaking, you know, I don't know, FaceTime camera always like puts up the thumbs up? Look at that! Watch that! That's so funny. Um, so you know, what's the best book we've read recently, uh what is the best knowledge tool that we have gotten a lot of value out of, and so we each share our, you know, very best things that we've been kind of obsessed with and fascinated with lately.

And we talk about a lot of things, a lot of things in the uh we, you know, we even talk about like uh of course, branch into the political realm of like talking about, you know, the crazy polarization of modern day, of the modern day age of um of Elon versus a and Trump and uh, you know, kind of all the craziness and we and we touch on that and you know we're both measured, like we're both not like, you know, because on the fringes of each side there's, you know, crazies, right? Like the far right, far left, you know, we are two individuals that are not like, you know, polarized. We're we like to think uh we like to uh think through stuff instead of just hammering our head against the keyboard and just spouting off on X or Twitter, you know, and and being like hardcore MAGA or hardcore like woke left or whatever, you know, that is, right. So um I want to preface it with that. You know, like if you're looking to get some like, you know, confirmation of uh one polarizing political side or the other, um you are not in for a treat on this on for this uh this essentially Zoom session and this this essentially call that we had.

Um, now if you are interested in learning about the latest and greatest books relating to AI, learning about the latest greatest practices of using AI and specific tools in your uh everyday life, if you're interested in learning about certain analog knowledge tools, and I'm talking about my favorite analog knowledge tool that I've been using for the past uh two years religiously, almost every single day. And it is note cards. It's not 3x5 inch cards. It's not 4x6 inch cards. I'm talking about some other medium and some other device with specific properties that I think you're going to really want to hear about. Then you are in for a treat. So uh get ready. I'm going to transition into sharing with you our conversation that we decided to record this time and hopefully you can glean some fantastic value out of our call.

All right, I will see you in a moment. Welcome aboard. Uh, we are having a a podcast session with uh myself as well as Shaun Twing. And Sean Twing is an OG subscriber of the Scott Shepard letter and an OG like I guess uh book purchaser of antinet when there was crickets, when no one no one knew, you know, about the book uh, you know, you were one of the first people, you know, that I got in contact with from uh from the marketing world and it there's there's kind of a spectrum in the world of I guess what you can call it uh online marketing or knowledge business or knowledgeers or knowledge entrepreneurs. And like on one side of the spectrum are like the people that are not deep thinkers. They're like the 17-year-old life coaches and funnel hackers that just rip off everyone else, right, and uh you know try to like blow things up with rented Lambos and you know like that type. And then there's the perennial guys that last and you know have been in the game for a long time and love the craft, right, the craft of just uh marketing, creating knowledge, getting that knowledge distributed, you know, out there to the world. And uh that's like the the the deep thinkers, right, and and they tend to be soloreneurs, right? Like I would I would put even Russell Brunson in like that category. He cares about the craft, but he's not a soloreneur, right? They tend to be like solopreneurs like you and your former business partner or I don't know former whatever your friend Andre Chaperon. You guys used the brand that you guys um used to have was uh tidy little businesses, right?

And um it is that was Andre's, Andre was TLB for a long time, and then we worked together uh under that, and then Andre wanted to do something new back in 2023, so I rebranded as the modern marketing system, but he and I had co-created it so it's still his his fingerprint parents are still all over it.

Yep. And he and I are still very close, dear friends.

Yep. Yep. And you know you guys, both of you, fall into the, you know, the the other spectrum of the category of of the the deep thinkers, the people that love the craft of knowledge creation, knowledge development, you know, and I'm talking, you know, from PKM to marketing and distribution and just making a fantastic killer living as an independent um thinker. So um, you know, you and I, we we usually have these Zoom calls uh maybe every once every like either year or every six months or something like that, you know, and every time we have it I'm like, gosh, I wish we recorded it cuz my mind is full. It's about to explode. Uh, not only for my own benefit to rewatch but also I it'd be amazing to share our conversations and um you know what we talk about with the world. And so that that's why we're here. This is like the first pod, you know, I don't know if it'll ever get a name or whatever, but this is it.

And um how we decided to do this is we, you know, I I said, "Hey, let's talk about three things um via email, you know, that we bring to the table. One is like the best knowledge tool. I'm looking at my screen up here. Best knowledge tool that we're using lately, maybe the best book we've read lately to share with everyone. And then maybe the best writing tip pros etc. Something like that. Um I didn't necessarily prepare a third one, the best writing tip pros, I can riff cuz I, you know, and and come up with one off the off the cuff, but I'll probably substitute another thing that's on my mind to talk about for the third one. And uh yeah, that's that's kind of the format that we're going to we're going to go with and we'll see how far we take it. And uh so let's do it. Um you said you have a bunch of stuff prepared. Why don't you kick things off and and uh do the first share? So I didn't I don't think I saw the uh that structure, but luckily Okay, I at least get I at least get one of them. I've got three things. The first one's in couple of books. So I'll start there. Yeah. And you know the way I thought about this, this is what I generally do. I talk to smart people and I just, you know, it's always fun to have a conversation and just figure out like what has somebody interested, yeah? Like what's somebody fascinated about right now and yep, you know, when you have those conversations because I, you know, fascination is infectious. You have someone like super interested in something, they can tell you why they're interested and they're a mile down a rabbit hole. It's like, "Oh hell yeah, I want to do that." So um something I got fascinated with lately is I I know just enough about AI to know that I don't know anything about AI, you know, and and I'm not saying that to be Glenn, but I'm but I recognize the limits of my expertise and they're vast. Um so I I stumbled on to Mustafa Sulleman's book The Cong. He wrote it in 2023, but it's a it it's a pretty it's one of those books that I'm I when I finished reading it I actually listen to, which I I I drive a lot. So um the two books I'm referencing now I've listened to instead of read, but the I listen and I think for those people who are listening, the coming wave is about and you know Mustafa Sullean was the co-founder of Deep Mind. He's now and he's also the he was the CEO and co-founder of of inflection AI, and it's the coming wave basically is it's a book about but what's coming with AI, like how profound AI and synthetic biology, these two technologies that his perspective is we have to figure out a way to contain these tech these technologies, like we don't have any choice or we're screwed, right? It's a very simple paraphrase. It's one of those books when I finished it I thought, you know, I I might if I could I might want to go back and not know this. But that was really like that was really my visceral reaction. But to balance that because again it's this one perspective, a very informed perspective, but it's one perspective. So I said, okay, you know, recently Reed Hoffman's book came out, super agency, and super agency is sort of the other approach, which is oh no, AI is going to just enable so much and it's going to make us so much better and we're going to be so so much more capable. It it's not the opposite perspective, but it's kind of an opposite perspective, and at some point early on in the book Reed Hoffman mentions that he's business partners, the co-founders of perplex of inflection AI with Mustafa Aulle and I. So if I had this moment where I'm like, wait a minute, I'm supposed to figure this out, and you two guys have like you're you've co-founded an AI company and you have this vast experience I don't have, and both of you were basically telling me one of you is saying like hold the hell on, we're we're effectively screwed if we don't figure this out, and the other one is like oh, it's sunshine and unicorns, it's going to be amazing. And I'm like, I just had this moment where I thought if if you guys can't figure it out, the hell am I? Like where do I even? It was yeah, it was it was such a weird experience.

What's interesting from that is it's it's not as if they are in they have two polar opposite uh viewpoints or opinions yet like their opinions are like they're not necessarily for like fully formed. What what they it sounds like is they are both looking in completely like different directions, right, of uh of where this thing is going to go. It uh reminds me of uh, you know, I just finished uh well we'll get into this in in in my in my my share um the book um but I, you know, Elon Musk's kind of perspective was a little bit like the the the former uh the first book that you mentioned, like AI is going to be you know something that could you know has a has a what like a maybe a 20% chance or something like that of ending human civilization as we know it, and he was kind of early on, you know, speaking and proclaiming doom and gloom and kind of like a pessimistic, we have to control it, which is what prompted him to want to create open AI uh because he envisioned a world where all everyone everyone's models were completely open and all openly competing competing against each other was a lot better future than everyone, you know, having it like kind of uh be closed source, which ironically, you know, has and paradoxically as you know has been said is and Elon proclaims open AI is maximally, you know, closed source, closed AI and maximally for-profit instead of and it's started as an open AI and non-profit. So Elon has kind of like shifted into well, all right, well there's I tried to play the, you know, we need to be freaked out and put on a warning about AI, it didn't work, so I'm just going to dive all in and you know create X AI. And uh you know that that's it.

No rent, right? Yeah. You know, it's we also have to think about it. You know, Elon has been pretty vocal about the fact that he thinks we're we're in a simulation. So if you if you really do believe that, and I'm familiar enough with simulation theory to to understand the basics, and it makes sense, I mean it's not disprovable, but you could it's not hard to see the logic in it. And if Elon really believes that, then really the consequences they get diminished. So if we take it to the logical conclusion, if you if you're Elon Musk and you're like, look, I'm smart enough to see that if if we're eventually going to get to a point in technology where we could create a a simulation indistinguishable from reality, We can see that that's on the near horizon. The likelihood that we're the first time that ever happened is effectively zero. So I could see very it's not it's not a strange thing to then say, well, what do I care if I'm you know contributing maximally to to AI adoption because this isn't really it's not real anyway, like that it makes that it's very congruent. So that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. To me. And so what was your your your ma basic main takeaway from this was like okay, if we have two co-founders that can't see eye to eye and are like their opinion of the future is like kind of diverging in in completely opposite directions, you're like, how the heck am like how the heck am I going to be able to make sense of this or right? I mean it's almost like um, you know, from one of my perspectives on the big question, the what does it all mean type questions, I they're unknowable. So one of the things I've thought about pretty deeply is that if a question is unknowable, then it doesn't seem to be there seems to be no value in trying to answer it. Like if you just know there's no possible answer. Mhm. So there was a part of me that said like okay, if if this question if if if I could at least get directionally right and prepare for some unknown future that's accelerating and coming at me pretty quickly, I'd like some direction around that. But if the if these two people who both they they they forgot more today about this topic than I'll know in my lifetime. And if they look if they've looked at their body of of information and their expertise and they come up with essentially opposite perspectives on it, there's there's fundamentally no chance I'm ever going to figure it out, right? So that just tells me like well, just stop trying. Like just just give up trying and and focus on something else because I'm not going to figure this out. It kind of messes with my uh the way I approach the world. I want to have some agency in my life. So I want to I do want to have some thought about this. But yeah, there's there's no solid ground to stand on AI. That's something I notice a lot like it's it's very polarized. Uh, but there's a there's an underlying sense and I use AI all the time. I have a a newsletter or specifically using AI to grow a small business. It's not like I'm a blood and I I don't like tech, but I don't It doesn't take a It doesn't take much to get a sense of where this goes. Yeah. Five years, three years. Like it's we're It feels like we're driving really fast and there's a clip up ahead and everyone's like "Slam on you know slam on the gas like go like okay." Yep. But I just I don't know enough about it, you know? It's a dumb experience to speak to how fast we are moving. Um you know I was earlier today I was reviewing some of my note cards. Um you know I have you know as you know I'm like the note card guy, you know, to some degree, right? And I've been uh keeping note cards since 2006. And um and that was before you know this whole zetto cost and figuring out a a great way to kind of evolve it and always index it and find you know each individual note card. Um I used to just I call them chaos boxes, completely unordered, you know, 3x5 inch cards with like interesting facts about certain things and just interesting ideas that I would glean from books. And you know for the first 10 years I would just con you know I think a chaos box is actually very underrated because people are like, "Oh, how well will I be able to find it?" Well, the point is to like put in all of these chaotic random facts and it forces you to constantly recycle and review every single day. Like a small chunk and I I review every single day and you kind of install that in your working memory and that's like one of the I don't know effective uses. And so anyway, today I was going through some of these, you know, chaos box note cards and I saw like it was on the front of the 3x5 inch card said, you know, what is the what is the most common occupation and employment and job in the US and um you know I turned the card around and it said um oh, truck drivers. And you know it's like I think there's like maybe I forgot what the actual figure is, but it's like the number one job and occupation in the United States. And then under it and I think I I it was from the book I think industries of the future something like when I was like starting to plan my like next big thing I was like what's going to be the next big thing so it's like AI and and so and under it from this book it said you know the no most popular job is um you know truck driving, but it's probably going to be displaced by self-driving cars in the year 2050. You know that was like the best educated guess. And I'm like 2050? Yeah. Right, like try like it's it's sped up so dramatically. Try like you know I don't know 2030, you know, so it's like 20 they they they were off by 20 years, and I think we're going to see that trend like what we think is going to happen like um maybe 50 years from now is is probably going to happen more like 20 years from now or a decade from now, right? Um so it's moving at this like hyper hyper speed that we've just never seen before, kind of like the the whole singularity theory, right? And like um I saw Kurszswhile, you know, Ray Kurszswe stuff and and Kurszswe I mean he I saw I I don't do much on Twitter because I absolutely hate Twitter, but the uh I I did see someone post I had a tweet the other day that said something about like here's a form that we can that you can go to and fill out to apologize to Ray Kerszsw like the guy was right like he's been right, you know, and his whole point was that we were at the very base of an exponential curve. And when you're at the base of the curve like as you approach the base of an exponential curve it goes like this. It doesn't it doesn't feel like much. And then all of a sudden it's overwhelming. Yeah. Hold on for dear life. And he talked about this, you know, convergence of these things. And his his timelines were like 2030 timelines were things like you know I remember um one of I won't get the the timing exactly right. He he did an NPR interview at one point and he said this was like 2012, 2015 something like that. He said, look, if you're under 60 years old and you're listening to this interview right now, you are going to be faced with the the possibility of living forever. Like you you have to like you have to start thinking about that now. And people are like that's the most ludicrous thing in the world. And all of a sudden you're starting to hear more about that now like okay, as these exponential texts come online and they reinforce one another, we're very likely going to have to confront either a very significantly extended timeline for our lifetime or potentially in what the hell do we do about it? It's just it's crazy.

Yeah, thanks. Excuse me. Um, now bringing things back down from uh theory AI land and craziness, which is kind of like the the mind type of feeling I get after reading like uh Homodos and uh Sapiens, right? I'm just like what is the point of anything, right? And like theory it's like mind-blowing, right? Especially if you read that book for like at your desk deliberately two hours straight taking like detailed notes, like those types of books are just like how do you like go about operating and you know answering an email from an accountant to pay like $800 in estate tax or something. You're like, wait, oh, does it matter, right? Right. Um tell me so you've you've gotten into AI as a as a newsletter. What is your what is your go-to AI tool and workflow every day? Like what is the let's go from AI theory back down to like the everyday your everyday use of AI because you always introduce interesting AI tools or it doesn't have to be interesting, but I I'd love to hear your everyday AI tool and workflow.

Yeah, I mean for I started off primarily with Notebook LM, Google's Notebook LM, which I don't use as much anymore. It's it's u it's a phenomenal tool for a lot of really great things. What I like to do with Notebook LM is I would put um everything from an individual course into Notebook LM because the notebooks are a discrete entity. It's uses Gemini, but it only looks at the contents of that particular notebook. So I could put all the course modules, transcripts, Q&A uh the emails that I created for the promotion, sales page, everything I could put it in there. And then from that I could interact with that and I could um I've used to create onboarding emails. I I don't like to write sales pages, so I've used it to create sales pages in my voice and tone and style. It was fine. But my go-to, you know, pretty much every and I've you know I use Cloud I use um I use Perplexity. I've had a $200 a month subscription to OpenAI for a while. I just downgrade it some. I used it I just wanted to see what Deep Research was all about when it first came out. Um but my go-to primarily is Open AI as Chad GPT and and I you know I use it a lot. Yeah. I've created a one of the big epiphies for me was that I felt like I I had to do all the I had to bring everything to the party to get it to work. Meaning that I would have to figure out the frameworks and I would have to figure out all these different things. And what I didn't realize is I can interact with it's an intelligent entity. So I can interact with it. And one of the

Things that I've done interacting with it is um I've built a workflow that models essentially what, because I used it so much, it understood when I was at my best using it, like what created the longer duration flow sessions. And then I just had it reverse engineer that in a series of so now I just have a structured approach where I'm like, okay, I want to start a new uh deep, you know, basically it's a new deep work session on, and I put the topic in and some details, and it has a rest of the prompt and then it cues me and it knows the process I like to brainstorm and then I like to begin to synthesize and then I look for tangents, but it's a very structured way for me to interact with it.

Yeah. Interesting. But something—it's funny—something happened recently though. Um, and it it has so bothered me that I haven't used any AI tools since. And it's weird. It's been this happened like almost a week ago. Yeah, it was I think it was last th—was it—was it last Thursday? Um, so this is a very short version: two years ago I interviewed—I interviewed eight friends, peers, colleagues um for a—it was for a course that it was do—I was doing as a surprise for—for Andre, talked about earlier. At the time I knew Andre had already left the business; we hadn't made that public yet. So there was sort of this bittersweet thing where I wanted to honor that he had moved on, and it was for his birthday and other things. So I reached out to eight friends who are, you know, legends in the marketing world, people like David Deutsch, copywriter Todd Brown and Kevin Rogers and um Alex Katon, and I—you—I reached out, said, hey, I want to do this thing for—for Andre; I want to do an interview. And so I interviewed eight of them; I know them all personally, so I asked them specific questions in the interview, and the interviews were incredible, and I knew—I experienced it like this is like there's so much pure gold in it, and I've gone back and I—I've listened to different—you—I said the interviews and I've taken my own notes and I started to arrange them. But I said, "All right, AI tools are great at pattern recognition; I'm going to put all of these transcripts into—" I did it with Notebook LM, I did it with Claw, I did it with check with OpenAI chat. And I wanted it—I wanted it to see the patterns that I couldn't see. And it was an interesting experience, and it—it surfaced some things and it was great and it had its own weirdness and um, but then one of the things I like to do—to—is a way to um prompt my thinking for a value proposition is I give it a very—I did this with ChatGPT—I gave it very specific constraints, right, being a 400 to 500-word email in my voice, tone and style where you're—where you're selling this product that I've imagined—this course that I've imagined.

Mh. You're selling it to me.

Mhm. Right. Because then I want to see what it thinks is valuable. So it wrote the email and I read it, and it lied. And I don't mean it hallucinated.

Mhm. I mean it—it blatantly lied; it wrote this email to me saying—and it was writing it as if it was me—and I don't have it directly in front of me, but basically what it said was, hey, it's Sean, really excited; I—I've been—I've been working the last few weeks on this idea, and I can't wait; and I—I looked at—I was like, that's not true; like it's—and it's not like it hallucin—like I understand like hallucination, but this wasn't it; this was a blatant blot; and I—and for some reason that so struck me like, wait a minute, why would this tool lie? Like why—like it could have presented—it could have made the value proposition; it could have just left that sentence out.

Yep. And it wouldn't have hurt the thing, but it—and maybe there's some perfectly reasonable, you know, it's predictive; it's—it's mathematical. Was this one of the ones that—that also had external data, so it looked out—okay, what is—what is something that can increase conversion rate? Maybe it thought that, oh, uh, in order to actually make this sell, I need to, you know, include a phrase that implies that I've been just working hard on this for the past few weeks. I mean, it—it—it made this—it made a very strange judgment call. Yeah. Because as far as it knew—I mean, it knew two things, because I went back and I looked—like it, you know, did I have—I said anything in here that established a time frame?

Mhm. Um, the—the only things that it had was the—the transcripts themselves, which were undated.

Mhm. And the fact that earlier that day I had been—I had already used Notebook LM and I'd already used Claw, but that was the day that I was using ChatGPT to do the same—to look for the same things. It all—it knew is earlier that day I had started this exercise. So it completely lied about it. It lied, and it was really—it was odd because it was—it was arbitrary.

Yep. Number one. But when that happened, I was like, wait a sec—I didn't—

Yeah. And it sounds truthy. I was like, oh, who cares if AI lies? Like I care if AI—especially if AI lies on my behalf.

Yes. Exactly. I didn't say—I didn't tell it like, oh, I can ruin the brand—not—not just externally, but mo—mostly internally, like, you know—and one of the most important and things that I learned from studying, you know, great copywriters like, you know, for instance Gary Halbert, for instance, is, you know, he had some sensational stuff, but it—if you read it—read it—he was always super authentic and never lied once, and it's how you sleep great at night, you know, and—you know, I—I was—I started my career and it's like—and it's especially—it's not that clear early on um, you know, cuz like I started my career at one point I was a performance marketer, you know, uh, affiliate marketer, and you're in the gutter, like, you know, all the ClickBank type of ads—like it's just lies left and right, just blatant lies, and then you discover actually if you actually want to make a killing and last in this industry, you need to be authenticity and not lying is the number one most important thing and the best—absolutely—you don't have to lie, right? Like—like that two weeks—you know, you could even say like—and that just ruins—ruins everything, because then once you see that they could have said it without the two week—I mean, you could have—you could have removed the two weeks from the—the sentence and it was—was great—like everything else was great.

Yep. And it didn't—it was—it was odd, and you know, for me, I have a very firm rule; it's—it's more of a heuristic than anything else. But any decision that I make, anything that I write in an email—and doesn't matter whatever I communicate to my audience—my—my heuristic is if somebody knew everything that I knew—that I—that I wrote—if they were standing over my shoulder and they watched everything that happened, would they agree that I was being truthful? Right? Like, and if the answer is no, then I won't do it. Period.

Yep. You know, I had this experience years ago when we—we had switched from uh ClickBank to Stripe for payment processing, and there was an error, and the error—to—instead of charging 14.95 for something um, it was—we were charging $1,000, but if you already owned one of our courses, it was—that was not unusual that you orders would come in for $1,000. So it didn't trigger anything; the first few came through, but then all of a—there was a point where I was like, "Wait a minute, only $1,000 orders are coming through." So I went, moked, and sure enough, we set it up wrong.

Yeah. So that had been going on for 20—for 12 days. So I sent an email to everyone who didn't own that, and I said, "Look, here's what happened. Between this day and this day, if you had decided that you wanted to buy this thing, you could buy it for $1,000 instead of $14.95 because we made a mistake.

Mhm. It doesn't seem fair to like have like a bunch of people got it for that price; you didn't get a chance. So for the next 12 days, cuz it's—it was 12 days before—for 12 days you can buy it for $1,000 with this link.

Yep. And it wasn't—it wasn't a bunch of fanfare; it just—here's what happened. And of course, I had a few people asking me like, "This is the biggest this and that." But it was so easy.

You're doing it on purpose.

Yeah. Yeah. I was like—and I—you know, I recorded a quick screencast and I said, "Look, I get it; people do this all the time, but look—like—and I just open up—here's, you know, ClickBank; here's when it happened; here are the on—you know, the email I sent to Andre when I found this out—like, here's everything." So if you could look over my shoulder and see what—what had happened, you would—you would look and say, "Yep, it was true; this happened; he didn't know it; it wasn't intentional; he's trying to make it right." No, as a good marketer, it was an opportunity—I turned, you know, to turn lemons into lemonade; I'm like, "Okay, sold a bunch at a thousand; it was great; I was excited for it, but it was true and it was ethical." So when there was just something about this realization that, wow, if I'm not really careful, AI might—or at least ChatGPT might—lie on my behalf, which—to me—is so—it's so outside my—what was comfortable to me—what is okay for me—it was just—it was absolutely glaring. It's just—it's a very jarring experience to have. So yeah, it's a long answer to a short question; it was a weird one.

No, no, it's—that's—that's amazing. That's incredible. Um, and you know, it's funny is at the—in very early in my early emails, you could see this; I had this—um, it was started as like a meta tag that I was using to write uh, you know, like um, when back in the day when I used to use Obsidian for my writing—writing tool. Um, now I've switched to Ulysses or whatever, right? Like—just—I use that too.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I had this like meta tag that was called t_off_core, you know, and what it stood for is authentic truth score. And so I—my goal every single time I wrote a piece—and you could see it at the bottom of some of my early—early emails—was to get a 100—red out of 100 and write as close to the authentic truth as possible. You know, don't sugarcoat anything, right? And like I had it—I like—when I sit down usually to write like a new piece—here's like my—um, you know, one of my—I'll—I'll be sharing this soon—a yellow legal pad of like when I write out the Scott Shepard letter by hand, at the top I have like—I write down my like dream customer avatar and then my—my goal—my authentic truth score, right? And I've since removed it from my emails because I had so many people just asking me, hey, what is it? And then I also—I like—I like not having it be there externally because then people like scroll and like go, "Oh, is this like a 92 or 93?" You know, cuz like sometimes I'm just hard on myself when I grade—when you grade for that because there's some things you don't want to go down the rabbit hole; you'll create an email too long. But I got that, you know, writing the authentic truth from a mixture of, you know, Halbert and then also, you know, Hemingway. He has a famous quote: Just write—write the truest sentence, you know. That's all you need to do—one sentence at a time. And when you do that, you're writing—just like—you stand out from everyone else because what you're going to see is out there is like all these—these uh, you know, fly-by-night idiot marketers that, you know, advertise on Facebook and just rip off and funnel hack at one another; they just, you know, they—they—they don't—they don't bat an eye over that—like, oh, the AI just made that up; okay, I'm just going to copy and paste AI and—and you know, who cares about authenticity and truth? But it's everything, you know, if you want to last as a—as a, you know, knowledge creator, solopreneur.

Hey, before we go on, what—what is your—what are your thoughts on the term solopreneur? I've fallen in and out of love with it, and I'm back to—I kind of like it again, but what are your thoughts on that term, solopreneur?

Yeah, I don't—I mean, I don't usually—I don't use it very often, but I don't think of myself as an entrepreneur, though. Like, I don't—I don't have a sense of being, you know, entrepreneurial, which is odd because, you know, what does an entrepreneur do? Adds value to things. So, okay, I think Roy Williams, the Wizard of Oz guy, had some great line about, you know, the—the businessman buys like grapes—like I think—like the businessman buys grapes and earns a couple of dollars, and he turns them into raisins, and then like the entrepreneur buys grapes and then makes a fortune uh when he turns it into wine, and you know, nobody brings raisins to a party or something like it. It was a beautiful quote that I'm—that I'm murdering of. But I don't, you know, my audience—I also refer to my audience as creative professionals; I don't know how they self-identify; I'm not entirely sure creative professionals is how they identify, but um, yeah, the knowledge—I've never used knowledgepreneur. Um, just—not too long; it's too long. Knowledgepreneur—sol—I mean, I mean, I should be more interested in solopreneur because I, you know, I have this fascination with this idea of building a one-person seven-figure business; like that's—that's really what the newsletter that I write on AI is about is now that we—we have those—we have those tools available, we can actually do it, because, you know, there—this has been an inflection point. I've been in the game since 1996, and there have been these weird inflection points; you—one was when Google AdWords came out and was like, oh, wow, I can actually just pay to get high-quality traffic; it was revolutionary. Then Infusionsoft came, which is now Keap, and it was like, whoa, people's behavior relative to like a link in an email can change like how I engage; it was mind-blowing. Then, you know, I also put ClickFunnels in there—all-in-one solution—but there were all these inflection points where I was like, oh, this is—now that we have this—now we—the one-person seven-figure business is reality. I had a conversation with Sam Woods last September—he's a—last October—he's a good friend, and I—I just have to ask her—I was like, is AI hit—are there—and he was—he, you know, Sam often has a lot of patience with me, and he was just very—very unequivocal; he's like, yeah, of course—of course you can do—he's like, you need like two tools; I think at the time he was like, you just need like Notebook LM and Notion AI, and you can do a seven-figure one person—okay, like here I am behind the times, and I guess that's technically a solopreneur, so I should be more—I should—I should use the term; maybe I'll start using the term more.

Yeah. I—I initially—I initially fell out of love with it because it's already kind of been bastardized and uh used and some, you know, a few people have kind of branded it to themselves. Um, what's the guy's name? I think Justin Welch is his name—Saturday Solopreneur, you know, and leaned into it. Um, and so I'm like, no, I don't want to use solopreneur; that's—that's, you know, gimmicky or whatever. Uh, then I've kind of fallen back in love with it because it's—it's—I think more precise. I—I'm not in love with it; like I don't like—but I—I do use it because it helps get the idea of what we're talking about here is an entrepreneur is someone that wants to, you know, grow as much as possible, get to a 100-person, you know, business, get to a, you know, it's kind of like entrepreneur is like who—uh Russell—Russell Brunson is and maybe Alex Hermosi are, you know, they want to get to like, you know, the unicorn company—a billion-dollar company—why? I don't know, because, you know, they're competitive; they're, you know, wrestlers—more—

Yeah. Yeah. More, you know. Um, and whereas the solopreneur is, you know, the one person interested in peace and fulfillment and making, you know, like seven figures without the headache. And it's kind of like—and there's no right—or some people have just different personalities. Um, you know, like it's like the Warren Buffett lifestyle, which he has like not one thing on—he doesn't have a calendar versus like the Bill Gates lifestyle, which he has like every 15-minute block filled out for the next year and a half, right? And they're like—you—and both can be billionaires, but it's like what preference do you have? And I think—I think so—my upcoming book—I've been working on since I last year—then I've been working on building what I call the analog knowledge funnel—like the analog book funnel, analog newsletter, all that stuff—I've been working on it all—all this year, right? Like the funnel—funnel part of like turning—turn like the funnel and the craft—I've written out every single word is like just as hard as the book to write, right? And that book's called Penpreneur—like, you know, how—how do—how do you be a solopreneur, you know, with just pen, paper in your brain—no, you know, I call it no-crap GPT, AI—how do you make—how do you make six figures writing one thing a month? So in doing that, I'm like, you know what? Solopreneur ain't so bad.

Um, I don't know. Yeah, that's just uh—

Yeah. And it's hard because so much is overplayed now, right? I mean, I have this—I won't ever use this exact term, but I have this like—what I—what I think we all really want to be is—I think we want to be like intellectual alchemists. We want to turn lead into gold, you know; we—we want to—we want to take ideas, and we want to combine all these things, and we want to like create something from nothing—something of value from other things—and but they're so much of what we're dealing with now is every—anytime somebody has an idea—like a term, whatever it is—all the funnel bros that you talked about before—like it just gets smashed up against um just over and over and overused, and it becomes—it just becomes a caricature, but it's really hard to carve out a little space for—you're like, "Look, just leave this alone."

Yeah. Like, stay off my lawn.

Yes. You—when you were talking about, you know, optimizing for more earlier, I think—I think people like you and me and the people we attract—I don't think we're optimizing for more; I think we're optimizing for enough.

Yeah. Right. Like that's the only thing I really want is enough. Y—and I don't have—like enough for me isn't, you know, a billion dollars; I would never want that lifestyle. But, you know—and it seems to be the thing, you know, I don't know. Obviously Elon Musk doesn't know who I am, nor does Bill Gates or—or Warren Buffett, but I don't—I think—I think Buffett probably comes close; I mean, he—he does what he does because he loves what he's—what he was wired to do, but I see a lot of really wealthy people who don't seem to me like—they don't seem very happy.

Oh, yeah. And I'm—and I—they don't seem like they have enough.

Yep. Right. I'm like, interesting. It's—I don't know. You know, and it's funny because there's such a—this idea—like, oh, why—you know, why would—you know, Jeff Bezos want any more money? I'm like, the guy built Amazon, and he was like, "Oh, what am I going to do next?"

Rockets.

Yeah. Right. I mean, you can't—they're trying to fill a hole that can't be filled. It's interesting. Anyway, it's just—let's hear about the book that you—I'm excited about.

Well, it's—it's a perfect transition because um, you know, I'm actually kind of—I'm reading two books uh, or I read—I'm—I'm still reading one of them, but I'm reading two—to massive books. One is—it's insane; we're not going to dive into this one. Um, maybe we can at another time. Uh, there's one called James, the Brother of Jesus by Robert Eisenman. And this guy goes deep into—it's just like a—he is a fascinating writer that goes deep into—he studied uh the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he did some badass move of—it was the Dead Sea Scrolls were closed source, only owned by this like—I think this one institution or academic, and he like snuck in somehow and uh was able to democratize and photograph them and free them up for everyone else to study. And um, so I'm—I'm making my way through that at—in the evenings, you know, chipping away to get my mind off of, you know, uh, just, you know, the everyday stuff—like copywriting, marketing, writing, creating, you know, all that stuff. There's, you know, so I—it's hard for me to like get home and then want to read a book about like, you know, copywriter or market—it's like freaking—so—um, but all—but so I've got that book, but the more relevant one that I just read through, and it reads super fast—this—this author—and that is uh Walt Isaacson's book Elon Musk, the biography, and I couldn't put it down. It was a page-turner; it—it was—I think maybe like—I don't know—it's a thick book—600 pages or something like that—it's like—it's pretty beastly book, but he writes in a very short prose way that reads kind of like an article, kind of like junk food writing, frankly, you know, just like very fast, right? Uh, but in reading that, I can attest to what you've said—like, he—he admits and he says freely—if you lived inside of his mind for a day, it's like a—a hellish storm out of like the hell of Diablo II. Uh, it's just one big storm, and he's, you know, because he's got a lot—also a lot of—his—his dad was a psychopath. You can read up on him—like his—his father—it's kind of his father is like—I don't know—75 something years old and married—or had an affair with—married his 30-year-old stepdaughter. You know, that's a tough anchor to get out from under—that's a rough one. But so Elon has some of that drama, you know, but like the main thing is Elon Musk's brother Kimbal has said Elon Musk is a drama magnet; he just loves craziness and drama, and we—we're seeing that play out today. You—like—look, you've got—you've got SpaceX, right, which is one big drama, you know, um, trying to like land and, you know, get to Mars, right? Then you've got Tesla, another massive drama. There's so many things that he's trying to accomplish with Tesla that are just insane. Like, you know, like what about the Roadster 2.0? And just like what—you know, CyberCab—will that actually happen? Like, I have a—I have a CyberTruck, right, and I put it into self-driving mode, and it's pretty good for the most part, but then it's like really dumb; it almost gets in crashes on—on some certain, you know, turns and stuff, right? But, you know, then he's got Neuralink, the Boring Company, Starlink, um, you know, I'm probably missing some—there's—there's other things. And then you have all that drama—all that stuff. And then on top of that, you know, you add Doge, right, to the mix. And he's—I—it's like he's focused all of his time and attention on—on that. Um, but you know what? I—so I read that book recently, and for a long time I wasn't—because I'm like—I—I just—for a long time I—um, it didn't appeal to me because I read—I read his another biography about him in 2016 by—I think the guy's name is like Ashley Vance. Um, and because I internally know—

That I don't want you to know, to get pumped up and motivated to be a billionaire, or like, you know, a workaholic like, like Elon. Um, you know, I want enough. I want I want to spend my days reading, writing, thinking at my desk behind me that doesn't have a computer on it, right? And make, you know, seven figures, like, you know, and I've I did that last year in revenue, believe it or not, from more, you know, multiple seven figures from a small teeny-tiny book about an analog note card system. Right, it's a damn good book though. So I'm like very clear on the life I want. I don't want the Elon Musk life. I want the maybe more of like a Warren Buffett life, of the independent intellectual life.

So I resisted for like several years, I think at least a year and a half, of reading this Elon Musk book by Walter Isaacson. And then I'm like, you know what, fine, I'll pick it up. And it was just, it's really fascinating to, uh, it was fascinating to read and hear the inside story of stuff. Um, what I also got out of it too was, you know, when he went into Twitter, and you know, and I've I've had some contractors, and there's there's complacency that can kick in when you're like, "I'll just leave it as is." You know, they I don't want to have to rehire, retrain someone. Um, and I I kind of got Elon's, pled a little bit of when he went into Twitter, you know, it was probably like, I don't know, maybe a 4,000-person company. He's like, "No," he got rid of like everyone besides the hardcore A-team, A-players, and it's like running on, you know, 500 employees. I don't know what he got it down to, but it's like it's but I I was kind of I my one of my big takeaways from that was like, you know what, sometimes, you know, and I'm talking not just like in work life, but like personal life, like, um, you know, with uh, with people you work with, like, let's just say I I need to say this in a way that makes me not sound like a dick, but let's just say as an example, a house cleaner or something, right? If if if they're constantly like a C-player, not into it, and giving you excuses, stuff like that, or you know, whatever it is, it's like you need to rip off the band-aid. It sucks. And just with contractors, with whatever it is in any department of life, and go with just the hardcore, the A-team. And I got that out of it, which was very, I think, helpful for, um, you know, uh, yeah, I think a lot of people, um, and it's and uh, so I kind of got that was a a helpful piece.

Um, the other thing was Elon is, he's I I and I truly believe this, He's not money-driven. He's like mission-driven, but he comes up with these like psychotic missions that make sense in his mind of, "no, no, we we need to, you know, consciousness is a very rare light in the universe, and in order for this light to not go out, we need to become a multi-planetary species," you know, and whether or not like, you know, cuz some people are critics of Mars or whatever, he like chooses kind of like it's important, and you touched upon it's like if the if the if the purpose of life is unknown and it's like a book that you recommended to me once, it's like then one of the best things you can do is pick something with definiteness and become irrationally passionate and obsessed with that and get lost in time with that. Whether that be, "let's let's freaking get to Mars," or whether that be, you know, "let's I don't know, create some," you know, for me it's like create a, you know, a book like anti-net zettocasten about like, you know, a resurrecting a note-card system, you know, from a the 1970s from a sociologist and, you know, revive the analog and revive that, restore the purity of analog, so it's Boom! Like, just Yeah, that's another thing I got out of it. Anyway, um, that's my share for my book. It's uh, the Elon Musk biography.

It's interesting that you mentioned that because I I have a very visceral reaction to Elon Musk lately, and and when as soon as you said it, I'm like, okay, this is, you know, signals from the universe. I don't like to have opinions that I don't deserve. Like I if I haven't done the work, I think it's Charlie Munger said that like you you've got to do the work to deserve an opinion. I have a very strong opinion about Elon Musk. That's that's not Ed deserves to have it, right? It's a very visceral reaction. I wish what I wish Elon would do is he certainly has the resources, but I wish Elon would hire someone. Remember when Barack Obama did his last um, he did his last appearance before like the Washington correspondents or something, and he had I can't remember the comedian, but it was the his anger personality like, so he was an it was an anger translator. It was so great. So Obama would say something very measured, and then the comedian behind him would lose his mind like saying what he really meant, like, but what I really wish Elon had was somebody who was the like when Elon goes to do something, that person is like, "Hey, tell me what it is that you want to do or say here, and let me let me kind of do it in a way that humanity will appreciate and understand your," Yeah, you got your infantile 14-year-old, um, in I think a lot of this is he I saw that and I don't I try not to pay attention to anything on Twitter at all, but the I happened to see, um, in an attempt to better understand his persona on Twitter and why it seems to rub people the wrong way so much, I just looked at some Elon on Twitter, and one of the things I saw was whatever the whoever this judge is who is, um, you know, trying to he's has been a thorn in Trump's side with the whole deportation to New El Salvador, you know, Elon Musk first of all, you don't you don't say the stuff he's saying when you're a, but whatever, any but what he did is he put he put a a picture of a poster of this of that judge's daughter. She looks like she's probably in her 20s. She works for a nonprofit, and it was somehow the implication of him posting this, and it was it was typical Elon, very just like he just spends something very lightly, but the implication was, um, this this judge can't you know can't be trusted because he's probably just funneling money to his daughter's nonprofit such and such, and I have a daughter, she's in her 20s, and I'm thinking to myself, if in my professional capacity I was acting in good faith and Elon Musk put a picture of my daughter on Twitter and effectively put a target on him, Um, that to me would be it's an uncrossable line. Yep. And it's a line that what he deserves, I think I think that some of the best thing in the world for this country would, and this is true for Zuckerberg, for Elon, it's true for Trump, it's true for J, especially for JD Vance, but these are all guys who've never had their ass kicked, and you can tell. And they all need it. They all need to be in a bar fight, get their ass beat once and make them much, I've had my ass beat before in a bar fight. It it humbles you. Makes you a much better person when you realize like mouththing ass has consequences. Um, but that when when he did that, I was like, "Okay, we're we're not going to be okay." Like we can't like I don't care how smart you are. Um, and I I have no doubt he's truly brilliant. Um, I like none of like it's funny there's just little things like you can do something that's that's so outside what's okay, and I think he doesn't surround himself with people who moderate it is he has not one person that says, "no," I was like, "dude, what what is this," right, you know, and uh, the only person that tells him no and is uh, Kimbal, his brother, and Kimbal got they had I think like a two-year, maybe a multi-year falling out kind of right around or after the Twitter acquisition because Elon would not shut his mouth, and you know, he he he sleeps maybe I don't know, 5 hours a night maybe, um, and you know, he just works like a maniac and then plays Diablo 3 until he goes to bed, and when you're like constantly tired, right, kind of like that your your judgment is is po is poor shot, and if if you have if if you have like an outlet to the world, right, like Twitter, and you own that outlet, like like you can't get you can't get banned for anything that you say now. Uh, it's not a good combination. Uh, and he, you know, he's gotten in trouble so many times with saying stupid things, and it's gotten into like uh, you know, into hot water on so many occasions, like he alleged that this one guy, you know, uh, you like like look this up, you know, he just gets into just so many things, any natural like disaster, for instance, like when those um uh people got stuck in that that well in Thailand. Yeah, He got in some like fight with those guys. Yeah, He's like, "We're going to do it." And then he like, you know, brought some uh, I don't know, SpaceX or Tesla engineers or whatever, and then it backfired on him because he accused one of the guys being like a pedophile. And so he just gets into these things where like if if he had like a a 48-hour rule of like he wasn't he his tweets didn't go live for 48 hours, and right before they went live, you said yes or no, do you still want to send this, like he would solve, grateful. Yeah, He would solve 90 or I mean, and I get it. He's mean I have compassion for him because he said openly that he's you know he's on the spectrum. Um, so I think there are probably emotional intelligence challenges that he has that like I absolutely have compassion for that. But it's it's one of those things like it but you you've got nearly limitless resources. So if nothing else, hire somebody who's just kind of your uh, you know, it just fills in the part like we all need. Any good entrepreneur needs somebody who fills in his or her gaps, right? And I would love to have some because what I would really love to see is, you know, what what's the world like when Elon Musk is at his best and he doesn't have the anchor neck of his worst. Yes. Right. And which is what we all want. That's what I want for myself too, anyway. Yeah. Yeah. You know, interestingly, I have I have Well, you go ahead, and I'll I'll tell you the next thing I have is kind of right. It's right in your wheelhouse. It's fun to talk about. Yeah, you go. So this Yeah. So this um I'm going to talk about a book that I've been reading recently, but it's before that I I want to tell you a book I I listened to a book years ago. It led to a very crazy experience that I'd say if I were to create the poster for why anal like why analog is better, why choose an analog life. So if I had if I had to like sit down and make the how do I how do I make the case for what you're showing people how to do this is probably what I would tell them. This is this is at least a story itself, which is this was a few several years ago, I was listening to the audiobook version of Sam Harris's book, *Making Sense*, which is just a collection of edited conversations that he had on his podcast. Very very good convers, brilliant brilliant intellectuals. I think I probably bought a hundred books as a result of that because I would hear something that I just most of it was outside my it's just so far outside my capabilities, but there would be things that I would understand enough to say, "Okay, I can learn more about that, and it would be interesting, and I should," and there's a lot of stuff that's just so far out my outside my conceptual scheme that I didn't even bother. In that conversation, I don't remember who mentioned, but there was a conversation about Alan Turing, and then a reference to Turing's theory of the universality of computation, and for some reason that jumped out. They were the way that they were talking about it was kind of like, "well, everybody knows, you know, that how like what a fundamental impact Turing's theory of, you know, universality of computation had," and I thought based on the the description of the term, I understood what it meant. I was wrong. Like I I I inferred what I thought it was. It was not that at all, but but I I felt it was kind of one of those things like when really smart people are like, "well, everybody obviously knows this and how important it is," I don't know what they're talking about. I'm like, "well, all right, let me go figure it out." So I, you know, did my research, which I usually do, and I just, you know, I'll find best biographies of whoever they are, whatever. And so I read this book called um, it's called *Turing's Cathedral*, and it's just all about really the development of the computer era after World War II. So much of that was interwoven with um, Princeton School of Advanced International Studies or Advanced Studies I guess, um, like they they built it to bring Einstein over to attract Einstein, and it was kind of haphazard in the beginning, and it was but the book is book is it's hard to read, it's not a page-turner by any stretch, but there's this scene in the book where I, you know, Albert Einstein and Gödel, Gödel being the most pre, you know, one of the most preeminent mathematicians in history, you know, they're walking along like this the sidewalk, author this talk or whatever. And Einstein is reassuring Kurt Gödel, who is ragged to his self-doubt, but reassuring that no, he is indeed a smart man and his contributions are important. And there's something about like if I just asked ChatGPT or went to Google or Wikipedia and just said, "Oh, tell me about Turing's universality of computation," like what is it and it summarized it for me and like, "Okay, yep. Okay, I got it. Check the box." That is so fundamentally different than having had the experience of of knowing that out like these two intellectual giants were like walking around, you know, talking to each other about the most mundane stuff. And here's Kurt Gödel, who is racked with self-doubt, who is, you know, you know, Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem is is is the pinnacle of mathematics, right? And like like that experience was so profound. I'm like, that's what happens when you really devote to this lifestyle that you're talking about. You have a quality of experience that is incomp it's not a little bit different. You know, Mark Twain said it's, you know, it's he talked about the difference between a lightning bug and lightning. Right. That's the difference here. I I could have I could have checked the box and learned the basic overview. Who was Alan Turing? I could have uh, you know, understood theoretically as much as I could is universality of computation, but I wouldn't have put all of that into a memorable context that made it so meaningful that you will have for the rest of your life too. Yeah, I can't forget it because it's just it's it's so like part of who I am, you know. And I I just had this experience again in a very different way over the weekend. My birthday was on Monday, and one of the things I bought for myself birthday was was a biography of Muhammad Ali. My dad was a big fight fan. He I was born after the Raj Ali Foreman like I was I was born around that time, but I never saw them in their prime, but my dad did. He loved Ali, and Ali has this huge presence, and you know, George Foreman died recently, and I' I've watched the Rumble in the Jungle probably 20 times because it's such an amazing thing that happened. Ali was basically Ali was 32 who'd come off he he hadn't been fighting for several years. He was just coming back because of the whole draft stuff, and George Foreman was like way scarier in his time than like Mike Mike Tyson in his prime, and everybody thought Ali was going to get destroyed, and Ali beat Foreman, knocked him out in the eighth round. Y um, but I wanted to read his bio, but when I when the bio arrived and it's like this thick and I'm like, oh. Um, but I sat down with it, and I' I've been reading the biography, and every time I get to a site, I watch the fight. And that experience of like biography plus the fight, it's not a little bit diff, it's a it's a thousand times different, right? Like it's because you essentially you read like everything that's going on. You what was going on for Ali, okay? He fought wherever Sonny Liston. And when you just watch the site, it had a certain quality, but you don't know Liston was the big, everyone was terrified of Liston, like and like what a big deal it was, and and then you watch the fight like this is like it just adds this richness. You're not you're not going to get that from you're not going to get that from a bullet point on ChatGPT. No, you're just it's not like it's a there's a there's something happening now with a synthetic intelligence like where it's it's like it's sugary sweet, right? And it's got like whatever, but it's not nutritious. Yep. Right. You're just like, "Oh, yeah, like I'm learning so much." I mean, so many of these of these AI bros are, you know, like you learn so you don't learn. You don't learn anything. The things that I actually know are the things that I have taken like like taken notes on. Like when if I look back like when you if you ask me like what were like five really impactful podcasts that you listen to, I could tell you five, and every single one of them would be one where I like I didn't look at a transcript after and copy and paste, like I took my own notes. Yep. Painstakingly, and I referred back to them. Yep. I've interacted with them. Right. Like that's we're we're we're in danger of screwing ourselves of like really thinking we're so smart, right up until we realize we're so dumb.

What what I do like about uh, I agree with you 100%, and I used to, you know, probably about like six months ago, just never really even used, you know, crap GPT is what I call it, right? Uh, but what I have discovered is that the one benefit use case, the thing I I do love about uh, ChatGPT is I don't know if you've noticed this, but like the mobile web has just gone to in terms of ads blasting you. So the the user experience of trying to find out and answer something just basic, you know, like or simple, um, like, you know, for instance, you're watching a documentary or something on Alexander the Great and you want to know about this fact or like this battle or something, you know, pre-ChatGPT, the experience was uh, you go on Google and you search, and then you click through maybe three to five articles. And you know, probably um, out of let's let's say five out of those five, three of those five are kind of clickbait ad, you know, ad stuff, list to get you to like accidentally sneeze and hit your nose and click an ad, right? Like and that that experience has gotten even worse today. It's just insane like with with uh, with just with just the ad experience of like basically the Google the Google the Google uh search experience on mobile, even, you know, to some degree desktop too, is basically here's five links, um, probably four out of five are are going to slow down your devices memory with like the the the cognitive overhead load of all the ads, and you're going to you know get some crappy stuff instead of that. Now my experience is like I pull up, you know, ChatGPT, I hit the dictate um button to like audio speech, you know, to text, right, which is amazing on ChatGPT. It's better than Grok. Grok, you know, I've I've played with Grok. I do like Grok to some degree because um, you know, um, especially for like image generation stuff like that. Um, but I go back and forth. But the thing that Grok does not have, but they're moving like so fast is um is ChatGPT's speech to text is like flawless for like crazy weird terms that it it shouldn't know. Like if I'm saying like Ebionites, you know, or like any um or usab or or Ebionites, you know, like these ancient uh Judean or first-century, you know, uh figures, right? Like um, you know, Grok will type it out as YOU and then say BS, right? And then ChatGPT gets it perfectly, right? Stuff like that. But anyway, like with you don't have to experience the the five blue links from hell and ad experience with ChatGPT, which is nice, but it's not a replacement for thinking and neuro-imprinting an idea and a framework on your mind that you're going to have forever, right? And it's kind of just I don't really use it, you know, maybe also maybe sometimes I'll use it to brainstorm a title for like a product like a knowledge product or a course that I want to create, and then what ends up happening, I'll get like say, "hey, give me 10 ideas alternatives to this name," and then I'll throw away all 10 ideas that it gave me, but one word in the one of the 10 ideas gets me on a train of thought that becomes helpful, right? Um, that's essentially where we're at with AI right now. It's super impressive. Um, but uh, anyway, yeah, thanks. That that was a good chair. Um, I kind of went off on a tangent on it. No, it was a fun tangent. I think one of the things that really makes ChatGPT stand out for me, and I didn't know this until recently, but ChatGPT has memory, and it know it can learn about you. I mean, you can and the more it learns about you as an individual, as a specific person, I mean, there's some settings that you can change. First of you you can turn memory off if you don't want it on, but you can also tell it to only shares memory about you with you. It doesn't that's not then backing the system. But when when it starts knowing more about you, you can design a system where it can get much better. It can make the ex the experience of you using it way better because it it understands in in as much as a machine can understand, I suppose. But it it begins to develop a very profound understanding of you as a unique entity. And that gets really weird. I didn't know I didn't realize that he even did this. And then Rich Shefren had created this program called Zena's Mind. I because been doing that and I've doing it one-on-one with Rich, and and Rich is a genius. I mean, he's one of those people who's not satisfied with like the top 1%. He's got to go to the 0.01%. Mhm. And but that that revelation that it's like, oh, okay, like not only did it know, I mean, here's a perfect example. Rich uses this example, but I use this example all the time too is Robert Kegan's subject-object theory, and Kegan was I think he's a Harvard psychologist. He has this theory of of adult development, but for a theory of development where essentially the process to through to adulthood is to continuously make more things that were subject to object, right? So when we're a kid and we're hungry, we don't know that hung Hunger is a thing that can be managed. We're just hungry and we have to eat. Or if we're sad, we cry, right? You're subject to it. Yep. You don't think you have any agency because it doesn't occur to you. And as you become more and more sophisticated, you make more things object, right? Like I used to have a a temper, and I still could if I wanted to. I'm a pretty nasty temper, but I can I can I can have somebody be you know treat me like a a jackass, come up to me and be like, "Hey, you're an asshole." And I I I could just stand there, right? And you know, like Viktor Frankl's stuff about you know in *Man's Search for Meaning* that we get to choose our reaction to

Things like, I don't have to be subject to, like, you. You call me, I'm going to punch you in the face and just be like, "Oh, maybe you're right." And like, walk off. Right, um, but you know, Chad GPT knows Keegan subject-object theory, and you can, as it gets to know you in a very structured way. You can ask it like, you know, "What are there things that I'm not seeing that you see that I might be subject to?" And I did that, and it, it told me something that I was like, "So yeah, I didn't see that," and something very profound. Like it, um, I had this very weird, I, I have very high productivity drive, but I had it for the wrong reasons, and they were reasons that were no longer valid, and they were reasons that didn't serve me well, but they, and they came with consequences that I was not aware of, and I felt them, I experienced them. And, and in about 30 minutes of interacting with this entity, it surfaced to me and reflected to me that, "Hey, you know what, you're, you're act, you're, you're responding to something as if you have no choice about, but you have agency here, and you can make a different choice if you were to make this subject or make this object." And it was like, okay, like that, that's pretty, like that's pretty crazy stuff.

So there is, there is something like that. I mean, if you want to do an, you know, internal family systems session with, uh, you know, Chad, it knows IFS, and it'll do a damn good session, and it will remember your answers. Yeah, and it, and it will remember that about you, and for how long? Do you know the frequency? Is it for life? You know, is it, or is there—you go—you can manage, you can go in and manage the memories, and um, you can, and if you look at something and you're like, "No, like I don't," because it just shows you, so you can go in, you can pull things out. I mean, you can tell it things like your Colby store, your Myers-Briggs, like whatever is re—like you think is relevant. You can just, and you can ask it to remember it. Um, and you can, you, you can do something like, you can say, um, and I did this, I can't remember exactly what it was about recently. Oh, one of the things I talked about, uh, I shared with Chad GPT recently is it was giving me feedback about some things, but I said, "Look, that here's the thing, I'm a very visual-spatial thinker. Um, and I'm very visual to the point like, if something goes in a drawer or in a closet, it doesn't exist for me any—like in a very weird way. It stops existing until I stumble on it later. I have to see it. So I, I like that visual nature of things is very important." And then there was some dialogue and asked questions to, to further refine like, "What about this versus that?" and we answered it, and at the end, I just came to, "Please save this to your memory for future conversations." And then later, when it's interacting with me, it's making a first a suggestion about something. It's making those suggestions knowing that I have this very highly visual nature. It's fascinating.

That was a tangent, but after this, after this, I'm going to tell it that, you know, I'm an INTP personality trait. You know, all you go. Yeah. Cool. All right. What's your next thing? All right. Here's the next thing. It's kind of a, you know, we're going completely away from AI mode. And that is, here's my past, uh, it's this. Do you see this? These are all yellow legal pads filled out, um, uh, completely, you know, these are heavy actually, too. Got a bunch more stacked. Yeah. And, um, you know, a lot of people think that, oh yeah, I'm like the analog, the note card guy. 4x6 inch notards, or notards are my thing. And you know, note cards are a great tool, especially if you're working on like a large book that requires a lot of research and you're like, you know, creating a book or like, it's also useful if you have like one core important idea that you don't want to ever forget into like the, the black hole of digital and you know, Obsidian and just forget about, right, and install it in like the Zettelkasten, right? So note cards are like, yeah, that's, but my dominating like analog null knowledge medium and device for the past two years, you know, have been yellow legal pads, and they are so underrated, uh, because everyone, like especially in the analog knowledge space, you know, they get obsessed with either, you know, a small faction of either like, you know, Zettelkasten or they're like, they get obsessed with Moleskine journals, or they get obsessed with, um, what is the other stuff? Bullet journals, like, "Are you a Bujo person?" Right, stuff like that, and all these like notebooks. And you know, notebooks and even Zettelkasten has an appeal to people, and it can be like this procrastination device, 'cause a person is like, "Oh, I'm just going to, you know, map out my, my thoughts in my Moleskine notebook or my bullet journal, and I'll have it forever because it has a physical, you know," and I, I've got some, a stack of Moleskines over there that I've just never really gone back to. But when I created the notes, I was like, "Okay, well, I'll, I'll do the work now, and I'll have it forever." So what I'm creating is the output. It is the end result. Right, correct. A yellow legal pad makes no such, uh, claims and appeal to be like this, "Oh, I'm going to have this forever," right? A yellow legal pad is ephemeral in nature. Like, 'cause these, you know, they, the pages rip off easily. They get lost. It's hard to go back and reference a certain page, a certain idea because they're not numbered. Um, it's flimsy. It's, it's not meant to last forever. It's meant to like, it's, they, they're meant to act as staging posts for you to create something and immediately get that creation out into publishable form, out into the world, um, because otherwise you've just completely wasted your time, and you're not going to be able to go back to it. That's why y—and yellow legal pads also, when writing on it, is just like the, the, you know, the pad and paper behind it are perfect for like the pen, you know, instead of just writing on regular paper and stuff like that, and, um, you know, so like every single issue of the Scott Shepard letter, which is like, you know, grown like, like significantly over the past what, two years, two and a half years, have been written on, on these things. Every single, you know, piece of copy that I write, any, any important email that I write or autoresponder that I write, I do it first, you know, by hand on a yellow legal pad. I've written like, all this year, I've written this massive—got them over there—two yellow legal pads full of my upcoming book for the, the sales page. Every single word, character has been thought out, um, on these things. And the best part about it is that every, anything I create or put down on a yellow legal pad gets out into the world. Like, it's published, right? Because it, because otherwise it's useless. They're just the perfect staging post, and the perfect, the perfect, they're perfect because they're imperfect. They're ephemeral. They don't last; they decay, um, because they're, you know, flimsy, and the pages rip off, and you lose it, which it makes no bones about being like this Moleskine commonplace book that you can reference forever. No, it's like, "Screw that!" Like, I have so many notebooks that have filled up, and you know, spent days doing that, I could have actually created a piece of outward-facing knowledge instead. And, um, that's why I love these, this, so the yellow legal pads are my, you know, are my knowledge product device that I think doesn't get any love today, and it's the, yeah, so that's, that's my share.

I like this, I like this idea that what makes you the thing that you would think would be their weaknesses, their strength, right? They're ephemeral. Yep. So you think like, "Well, that sucks because like, I want them to be, you know, whatever. I want to be able to refer back and have some indexing system so I can." And it's like, "No, you don't actually, then you get the illusion. Then you, then you fall prey to the collector's fallacy. You're like, 'Well, I have all these things, therefore they're valuable.' It's like, 'No, there's no value in collecting all those things and having all your bullet points,' just so the value is, did you create something from—like I think that's really the essence of that, that intellectual alchemy that I was talking about before, that it's like, it's not the notebook for the notebook's sake. It's the note, it's the notebook for the sake that you're creating gold as a result. Yep. You've, you've made the goals. You're not just writing the formula for how to do it someday. Exactly. Yep. Yep. And they're, and they're, I love that they're tactile too, right, and that they're not so precious that you won't scribble something out. So many of the—you get a beautiful—and I've slammed millions of them—you, these gorgeous notebooks, like, I'm not, I can't write a word in this unless it's perfect. Yes. Exactly. And it's like, "Wait, well, no, you know, dude, I use, um, you know, this is the size paper that I use all the time just because I have small—" Head kind of got blurred out. Show, show it up again. Uh, 'cause it got blurred out by the background. Yeah, this is the size here. Um, put in front. Wow, that's a very—right. It's probably 8 in by 3. Um, I use it vertical and horizontal, but it's, uh, yeah, you can kind of see I have really tiny handwriting, so you can see like, um, you know, super tiny handwriting. Amazing. But it's just, and sometimes it's vertical, sometimes it's a quick note. Often times in a conversation like this, like I'll write down a sentence, and that sentence is, you know, it's a Trojan horse. It carries so much weight. You know, I had this conversation, I'm sure it's in here somewhere too. I had a conversation back in February with Kevin Rogers, founder of Copy Chief, and he's a dear friend, and we were, they were talking about the state of marketing education and like what's going on in that, that world, that, that as a market has just been completely decimated, and we were bouncing some ideas around. He, he said something like one sentence that was really in like five words communicated the central thought, the central problem, and it's like, and I have somewhere in the stack of paper, I have that, you know, written in pencil where he said that thing, and that thing actually create—that thing, um, coalesced six months of thinking; it created, um, the impetus for a product that I created, I just barely finished up today, a six-week course. Like, all of those things came from a sentence I wrote down in pencil on a throwaway piece of paper.

Beautiful. That's, that's it. It's exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. And you didn't, you didn't necessarily take that sentence and like, you know, file it away in your, you know, commonplace book and reference it and be like, "Oh, I'll have it." No, you turned it into a six-week product. Like, it's, it's 'cause if you didn't, you would, you know, you would lose it forever. So it's like, it's the perfect anti-procrastination device, you know, like these, you know, like you, you want an imperfect staging post of analog knowledge that, that, that that forces you to get it out into the world and produce. Yeah. Yeah. There's a story I think Elizabeth Gilbert tells this story. I don't know why I think it was her. It might not be. Now I'm having a second—anyway, I won't get any of the details right, but the story is so beautiful. It was about this woman who, I believe was a US poet laureate, and she talked about her, I think she grew up as like a cotton farmer or something. So she worked—it was like working in the fields. But she said that she would feel a poet, a poetry coming on, like a verse coming on, and she would sprint to the house, and she would write it; like she would sprint to catch it and to write it down, and, and sometime—and I think even the story was like she remembered like sometimes that she felt like she was pulling it back and that she was writing in reverse because she was trying to catch this thought out there, and, and there's something, there's some—for some reason. And it's funny because I had such an imp—my memory of it so imperfect, but there's something about when you write something on, on a, a legal pad or a piece of paper that's not precious and beautiful or whatever, that there's an immediacy to it. Like, "This is going to be gone if I don't do something with it," like the clock's ticking. And if that idea that I heard somebody say that day on the, on the in a call, if I don't grab that and run with it, it won't be there in three weeks. It won't be there in two weeks. And then there's—and I don't know why that medium does that, but wow, it does it, because I mean, look at this. This is, this stack is ridiculous. Look at this crap, right? I mean, I bet this is like, if I don't—this, that's not going to cue me at some point later at just the right time and show up and, you know, write something for me, right? If I don't, if when I'm taking those notes, I don't do something, the something doesn't get done. I'll, I'll, and if I look back at a quote that I wrote three months ago that somebody said and I'm like, "Oh, it was super meaningful," but I don't remember why. Exactly. Oh, right. It's like, I've got to—Yeah. Got to have it there. Yeah. Interesting. I love it. I love it. Well, I got one more thing to share with you. I want to do more. All right. So this is, this is a request of your audience. This is a request for the world actually, which is, I would like to see us get back—maybe get back is the wrong way—I would like to see everybody who wants to comment on anything, especially politics, um, I would like to see us get back to a deeper understanding of Occam's razor, right? In Occam's—usually Occam's razor is interpreted as, you know, "All things being equal, the simplest explanation is true." That's not what Occam's razor is. It's really, um, when you're comparing two possible explanations, the one with the fewest assumptions is usually the correct answer. Like that razor, and you know, there's this great—I, I don't—I think it was Mark Burnett. I heard the story secondhand, and I think it was in a book from Mark Burnett. Mark Burnett was the producer for *The Apprentice*, um, and, and take some credit for Trump's rise. I think the way I heard the story was that Mark Burnett basically said that they would film an episode of *The Apprentice*, and then they would bring Donald Trump in, and Donald Trump would—he hadn't, he hadn't really paid any attention to anything that anybody did; like he wasn't there, paying attention to them or anything. He watched a little tape maybe or whatever. He made some decision about who was going to get fired for reasons, no, but that were not anything you and I would call logical, right? And then he would, they would film that scene, and then the producers of the show would have to go back and edit all of their footage so that that decision made some kind of sense, right? So it was kind of like, um, you know, they, they, they gathered some information; Donald Trump did his own thing, and then they had to change everything to fit the narrative, and it's to fit the nar—and it's such a beautiful metaphor. Like last night I was, uh, I was on X, just because I wanted to feel bad, and you know, I, and I usually only—if I, if I'm on Twitter, if I'm on X, I usually only will look at the following tab, like not the recommended for me thing, last. And I'm like, I'm like, like I wanted to understand the broader—like I'm fascinated, I'm just, I'm fascinated by the attraction to Trump, and, and the fact—from an intellectual perspective—I'm fascinated by how it's, it's a unique phenomenon, and it's a really fascinating phenomenon, is that we have two large—you know, we obviously have much more nuance than this, but there are two groups of people who are talking about the same thing, and they're not describing it in the same way at all. Yeah. But we don't have a shared sense of reality, which is fascinating. But when—and I was looking at, um, I was looking at Stephen Miller, Trump—I don't know what he does for Trump, but he's been around for a while. But he, he had some tweet about essentially—it was, you know, what you just saw. I think Cameron Levit said this too, but basically the idea was, what you just saw was, you know, an example of the most masterful strategic art of the deal, like a—fusive praise for Trump. And I, I was, I was looking at it, and I was like, um, I, I don't think that's what happened. I think like, I think he did something, and it completely blew up, Y, and he went, and everybody was like, "Hey, Don, shit's getting real now. Bond market is going up." I mean, Trump even said that, like, I mean, he basically said it, but it's, it was so fascinating. So I started thinking to myself, like, it is interesting to me, and you see this a lot on Twitter in general, but something will happen, and there will be two narratives. Yep. One narrative is usually—like in this example—Donald Trump did something that was not particularly well thought out. The math wasn't right. The economists who were recommending it aren't really that great. It blew up in his face, and now he's got to figure out a way to walk it back. It kind of seems right. And then there's this other narrative that's like 65 assumptions. It's like, "No, no, what you're seeing with your own eyes, that's not what's happening. Exactly. What really happened is this 3D chess. It was this, you know, at a Donald Trump place, or like, you know—" I'm like, "No, I think, I think the guy who they used to have to edit the same—" And I think, I think, you know, and you can like him or—I don't—it's like, if you, you do you, I'll do me. Like, I'm not going to tell you how to do you. You don't tell me how to do me. If you want to go full guns MAGA, you love Trump, respect, you get to do that as long as you don't try to tell me I can't do that, or we're not going to—I'm not—we're not doing that. But, but it is fascinating to me that that there isn't this—there, there seems to be a, a very intellectually defensible, clear, few-assumption narrative that's kind of like, "Donald Trump is really good at telling people what they want to hear, and he's popular. He's, he's attracted an audience around him that has a cult-like fervor. And he's backed by people like Peter Thiel and others who have so much money that they're used to being able to do whatever they want. But the only entity that can tell them they can't do what they want is the government. So they want the government gone because they want to be able to do what they want." And it's a pretty clear narrative. It doesn't take, it doesn't take 200 assumptions, um, the fact that it coexists with this other narrative, and there's so much evidence of this 4D chess, and then there's also the, uh, you know, people just are obsessed with—in like literally scared at night and can't go to sleep because they're obsessed with and convinced that, you know, Trump is engineering this, you know, "Project 2025" thing, right? And I know, you know, there's like just—and, and it's like, I don't, I don't think he's, you know, he's literally, you know, successful and effective because he's so simple, right? And his message is so simple, it's, you know, third-grade level, right, uh, and polarizing and clear, and he just goes all in, you know, on one direction, right? And, um, and it works because it's, you know, that it's being polarizing and kind of like, uh, charismatic and a psychopath in one direction is a lot better in a lot of cases than being confusing and mumbling and tempered with everything, right? And it works. And it's like, yeah, he's, he's—Yeah, I, it's, it's interesting. I've seen him—Yeah—my—like he will promote like, just like the some of the dumbest, griftiest stuff out there, and I know because of personal experience with like, I know individuals behind like certain crypto projects that he's like promoted. I'm like, "How the heck did he—their team not do due diligence on certain people?" Right? And, uh, and it's because he's just, he just moves fast, doesn't, you know, think through stuff and plays it, you know, and it's not, not that insanely complex. Um, uh, yeah, it's, it's such an interesting thing because yeah, it's like looking at the options, and it's like, "Well, I don't know," like the options for candidates out there. It's like, "Well, you know, they're polar extremes." Yeah, it is. It's weird to see it. I don't know why it's—it seems to be just Twitter, and maybe I'm just not—I don't spend much time on social media at all, so maybe I don't see it elsewhere, but Twitter has this really fascinating anti-Occam's razor eye. That's why so fascinating because it's like, you know, it'll, you'll see a picture of something, and it's like a picture of Kamala Harris getting her COVID vaccine, but the real story is—and then it's like—and this other thing—and I'm like, "What?" And every—for some reason, anytime I click on the, um, anything that I'm not following on Twitter, I just click on the recommended or whatever it is called, I see like story after story where it's like, it's the same format all the time. The thing that you thought was true that seems kind of obvious and simple is not. What's really true is the most convoluted explanation, like, you know, "Hillary wasn't dehydrated. She was being led off in chains for because she was satis—" and like—and I look at this and I'm like, um, okay, I mean, I, I don't, I don't have firsthand knowledge, so I don't know. But at the same time, if I compare the assumptions here, like, you know, Hillary on the campaign trail, it's pretty strenuous, like whatever, dehydration, X number of, of assumptions versus like 68 contingent assumptions, I'm like, it's just, it's a funny mindset to me. It's funny, and, and I, and I—well, I mean, I just, I, and I know I have some biases because, like you, I know the dark underbelly of the marketing world, and Trump to me just always feels like the worst marketers I've ever encountered, like the guys that would sell you anything, would like—so I, and I, and I know I'm, you know, going back to subject-object, I'm subject to that. So when I see Trump, I kind of see an amalgam of the worst people I've ever had interactions with who are marketers who will tell you anything that you want to—they'll tell you, they'll say anything to you to, to get the sale, and that's all they care. And I'm not saying that's necessarily true for Trump, but what I'm saying is that's who he reminds me of. I mean, yeah. And that's a lot of his character. I mean, he's a, he's a, he's a showman. He's a, um, you know, he's, he's kind of a carnival barker, right? He's a game show host, basically. Like our company—our country now is run by a game show host. Okay. Like, it is what it is. But it's just, it, it's so funny that they—when it's so obvious, but it's not—like that there's this, there's this alternate reality where it's like, it's not—He's not a game show host. He is the most sophisticated—like it's 12D chess. And I'm like, I don't, I don't think it's checkers. Like, I'm not sure we're playing Connect Four or anything. Yeah. But fair. So I'll say one thing on, on this, and I, I actually don't have a, a, a third—maybe we'll talk about my third share on our next one or something like that because it's, it's a bigger, bigger topic of, a curiosity of mine that I'm, that I need more time to like, turn over in, in my mind. Um, but I want to, I want to share because it relates directly to X and what, what you're talking about here. I think what's kind of crazy is, um, they are using X, you know—

Because Elon's just like, hey, just test it, ship it, ship out different algorithms, right? It's kind of scary because with, I don't know, how many pe- how many users there are on Twitter, let's just say there's like a billion users on Twitter. I don't know if it's that high. Okay, okay, let's say I don't know, whatever, whatever the number is. Conducting a mass social experiment, just rolling them out on uh, with their algorithm updates.

And one of the updates, at least I've noticed with my feed, and I've got some like, you know, like uh, covert accounts that I like, you know, that I like to like log in and use so that it doesn't have built-in biases and uh, you know, then it's funny to see like, you know, what what uh, it thinks you're into or what political party you're into and see what the differences are in the stories that you get recommended. But I've noticed this trend lately. I I'm I'd be curious if if you noticed the same. And it happened probably in the last starting like a week or two ago, maybe two weeks ago.

And it used to be when you click into a polarizing post, let's say you click into like a post by the Twitter account like endwokeness or something, you know, and they're like they're all about endwokeness, you know, and and um, or like let's say you click into um, I don't know, whatever Jordan Peterson or uh uh Ben whatever his name is. Um, I I don't forgot to say what's—Yeah, Ben Shapiro, right? You click into one of the posts and they say something like, "You agree with this? Hell yeah!" Like, you know, "screw the the woke," you know, something like that. You you expect and what you want, you know, when you click into that are like five really funny comments confirming and riffing off of that to make it like even—you're like, "Oh yes, they're confirmation bias, right? They're confirming that this post is right." And what ends up happening, you're in this echo chamber, and you you when you see that, all of a sudden you you believe that. And I'm I'm describing the old Twitter, previous to two weeks ago.

Now what I've seen in my my feed, you know, depending on whatever you click on, like let's say I click on the inwokeness um, that is um, you know, praising let's say Elon Musk, the first like three to five comments now are like people hating on that post and the opposite. So you're like, "Oh no, wait, you know, cognitive dissonance are here." Like there's like I want to only see confirmation bias, cuz it's a lot easier than me now having to parse through this entire thread and seeing, okay, what are the comments that agree and what are disagree. So I think what they have done is they realized that they've just created this one massive echo chamber that's like like anyone that clicks on a thread, they're just like creating confirmation bias into what um what they agree, but now they've created it so that it's a lot more like a group chat, because Elon Musk recently said, oh, is like the or X is like the group chat for the world, where they're trying to get it so that when you click into a post you're seeing both sides kind of argue, so it doesn't look so biased that you're only seeing the stuff that you want to see, which is uh, it it'd be interest cuz it they're probably setting up some massive long-term A/B test of, okay, when we introduce this um, you know, randomness comment feed that have both polarizing sides instead of confirmation bias, only the side that you like—Um, what is the, you know, twoe retention rate, the 30-day retention rate, um, the trustworthiness in Twitter, because they might have done that because they're like, "We don't want, you know, all the people who are like uh uh like not pro-Elon to just go over to Blue Sky," or they want they're trying to reinstill trust that you'll hear both sides of the argument in in the feed.

Anyway, have you noticed that at all, or is it just maybe it's just my—Well, I mean, I did—It's interesting when you said, and I I didn't—I mean, I don't I I can't tell you the A/B version because I just so thoroughly don't engage with with Twitter, but I happened the other day—I'm trying—one of the things I try to do, like, you know, if you ask me if you if you're like snap judgment, do you like what Elon's doing? Do you not like it? I'm like, I don't I don't like it, but I also know I haven't done the work to have that opinion. So I've actively tried lately, I'm like, "Okay, like let me go let me go see some of this firsthand. What kind of behavior is going on?" And I did know, and I happened to click on something that Elon—something he had posted the other day—and I did see that actually like the first two or three responses were sort of the same meme that was attacking Elon, and then there was another like one that kind of periodically showed up with like the same graphic where he looks stupid or something. Very infantile, right? The whole thing was very infantile. But if you know if you try to if you try to do some like inductive reasoning here where you're like, okay, I think it's inductive where you're going up instead of like trying to deduce that—I guess we would be deductive reason—but if that's the output, like if that's the change that's happening, then you would ask yourself like, okay, what what could what are they trying to get or like what what would lead you to want to do this as an exper—as a as an experiment, right? Is it that you want—do you want to create the illusion of dissent, or did you did you over-calibrate to too much echo chamber where then then somebody just won't engage with an Elon Musk post that they don't agree with them, right? Because like, I'm not welcome here. But maybe it's this idea that like, at least see some of your pe—whoever your people—Yeah. At least see some of your people in every thread.

I did notice this yesterday because I did click on—I couldn't help it—I I clicked on Stephen Miller's uh tweet because—and I think Bill Arian maybe had tweeted too—and you know, he's been super critical of Trump, and then he had this like very abusive praise tweet like of how brilliant Trump was, and people were like, "Dude, like four hours ago you were like end of the world this guy, like come on." So there was a real interesting—it did feel like an environment where—in Twitter to me never feels like an environment where people are really having intelligent conversations. There's just so much—there's so much nonsense. But it didn't feel like I clicked on Steven Miller and like every single person was like, "Yeah, you're right. He's a genius." But I would say 70, 80% of them did. Which makes sense though. That's probably a real-world thing. Well, I'll tell you, I'm not going to follow Stephen Miller because I don't need to. I can I can write his script for him. Like I can tell you what he's going to say. I'm not going to learn it. Um, and I I'm guessing that the people who don't like what he's going to say probably by a 7 to 1, 8 to 9 to 1 margin aren't following him on Twitter. So that you would see—Yeah, you would see—it would make sense that you would see a minority of people disliking him. And maybe that's what they're trying to do.

Excuse me. It's exactly what you said. Maybe they're trying to see if they can get the algorithm to actually closely match reality, right? Like the percentage of people who follow Stephen Miller because they like it is probably somewhere in the 9 to 1 range, 10 to 1, whatever range. And maybe the algorithm is trying to to accurately represent them. And to me that would be a noble act. Yeah. Like I I like if you if you're like, "Look, we want our algorithm to display reality more accurately to the world," because that's wrong with the Facebook algorithm. So yeah, the Facebook al—and I've done a ton of Facebook advertising—The Facebook algorithm is absolutely giving you more of whatever you have shown any interest in to get you to buy stuff. Why? That's the the whole algorithm is to influence your opinion primarily to to buy—to—it's not necessarily buy, but to to engage with ads. Yep. Spend more time, engage with properties that you're going to click on so that they can charge advertisers, and the entire experience is is geared to—and I've I've seen it, and I've worked with Facebook reps, and I've had them say things they weren't supposed to say and like realize they weren't supposed to say them, but—and a lot of that info has come out. Facebook is a reinforcement engine. Period. Yep. It will—whatever you show it you like—it will show you more of it over and over and over and over again. Yes. In a very weird way. People don't want to not have that reinforcement because it requires them to think. They go to Facebook so that they can not think, right? And just have their opinions reinforced, right? And uh, they begin to think that's reality, which gets very strange. That's where it gets scary, right? And uh, I mean, and if you think about it as you looked around—there—looking around my physical environment—if everybody I talked to—I mean, pick a team—let's just assume everybody I talked to was pro-Trump, was die-hard MAGA, u—and every any store I went into it was all Trump, every—when I went to buy a vehicle it was all about Trump, everything I did was all about Donald Trump, and you came to me and said, "Look, majority of the of this country doesn't like this guy," you're insane. Trump deranged syndrome. You're making up—like you're crazy—because you know you you don't you don't know that that a lot of people think their Facebook feed is is a reflection of of reality. Like you go to CNN and you see CNN, you go to Facebook and you see Facebook, and it's like, "No, no, no, your Facebook feed is a reflection of what you have told Facebook you're likely to click on, and it shows you more and more and more." Yep. And if you don't know that—holy—Yes. Oh, I know. Like if it's like the Truman Show, right? If you don't know you're in the the—if you're on the Senate like—And then somebody tells you like, "Wait, what?" Yeah. Well, it's it's it gives you anxiety going around the world, especially if like, you know, I I own a Cybertruck, right? And so whenever I go on X, I see like, you know, five people spray painting Nazi symbols on and lighting Cybertrucks on fire. So like that conditions me, and and I'm in Orange County, which is like hardcore like the only Republican on, you know, county on the coast, right? That that are mostly like pro-Elon, but it gives me like anxiety where I think like, oh wait, I I can't go to uh, you know, this this part of town and park my park my uh Cybertruck there because it's going to, you know, have a Nazi symbol on it, and then you go out into the real world and you realize, oh, everyone's everyone's chill, like no one's—that I'm only seeing like the—but what I'm exposed—opposed to—It seems as if every time you walk outside, you know, you have an 80% chance of your your Tesla getting keyed or something like that. And it's it doesn't reflect reality. You're always 5 minutes away from someone peeing a dick in your Tesla, right? Like oh—Most people, you know, when they see your Cybertruck, they're just laughing at you because it's Gucci. That's all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At least some wise crack about your Cyber—I already—I already see all those comments in the uh the YouTube comments. Okay, I'm I'm immune to the the Cybertruck hate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's so funny too. It's like at the end of the day, who cares, right? It's just gets fancy thing. Yeah. It's like you like like if you want to like whatever like—Yeah, do that thing. It's when it's that weird imposition from like—that's the weird thing to me. Like I don't want like I don't want somebody to tell me what I can and can't do, but I also don't—it's like the part of the deal is I I don't get to do that to you either, like you the the Imperial you, right? Like I can I can give you tap because we're friends about it—Your Cybertruck—but at the end of the day, cool. Like as far as I know, you made the money to buy it, and you chose it, and you like it, and it's like if he checking all those boxes, hell yeah. Yeah. Like get another one, right? Like do I want to be able to do the same thing? It's just when we decide that the other guy can't do the thing. Oh yeah. To me when I go sideways like, oh oops. Yep. Um, and I think that gets back to the whole libertarian thing that I said before. There's this kind of like I'm cool with libertarianism if it's for all of us. Yeah. And I'm totally cool with free speech if it's for all of us. Y—like absolutely all that. But it's when it's like, well, libertarian—I don't want to pay taxes. Yeah. But you know you're going to have to do your part. I'm like, wait a second, like I thought we were libertarian. I thought I thought it was it was me. You know, like no, not really. Yep. Yep. I love it. All right, man. This fun. This is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna edit this and get this up, you know, like uh, get this up and up and uploaded and um, this will be fun. Yeah. Let me see. Cool. See what kind of reaction you get. Yeah. Let's let's let's uh let's see. And whatever you're percolating on, let me know. I want to uh I want to uh hear about it. It's be awesome. Yeah. For our next one maybe we'll do uh we'll each bring two. That way we can go deep on each one instead of gonna be gonna be our inclination. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. To go deep. All right, man. I love it. Good checking in with you. I'll talk to you again soon. Peace. Bye.