This Week in Startups - Meta's precarious situation, $AMZN earnings breakdown, James Gunn to run DC + OK Boomer | E1598

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

First up, Jason goes solo to break down more Meta fallout and Amazon's Q3 earnings. (1:59) Then, Lon Harris joins J+M to break down House of the Dragon's huge finale, James Gunn hired to run DC Films, and more! (21:56) Finally, Producer Rachel wraps the show with another edition of OK Boomer! (1:59) (0:00) Jason tees up today's segments! (1:59) Jason breaks down Meta's predicament (11:21) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist  (12:55) What Jason would do to fix Meta's stock tumble (16:28) $AMZN Q3 earnings breakdown (20:32) Smash Digital - Visit https://SmashDigital.com/TWIST to get a free SEO video audit for your business (21:56) Lon Harris joins to discuss House of the Dragon's S1 finale (34:33) Kalshi - Sign up to win $100K at https://kalshi.com/efc  (36:01) More House of the Dragon discussion: show content, massive ratings; then they discuss Black Adam and James Gunn taking over at DC (42:37) Bob Chapek's comments on animated content spark backlash; streaming business predictions and streaming recommendations! (1:08:36) Molly and Producer Rachel tee up this week's OK Boomer segment! (1:11:31) Tommy Clark joins Producer Rachel to discuss his experience with social media marketing  FOLLOW Lon: https://twitter.com/lons FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood FOLLOW Rachel: https://twitter.com/_rachelbraun FOLLOW Tommy: https://twitter.com/tclarkmedia Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Okay, everybody, it's Friday. First up, I'm going to do a solo dolo of the problems at Meta and Facebook. Talk a little bit about Amazon's earnings and how they might be able to turn all this around. Zuckerberg is, man, a disaster. There's no easy way to put it. Then Molly and I are joined by Lon Harris. We break down the House of the Dragon final numbers. Warner Brothers Disney appointing James Gunn to take over the DC Universe. And Warner Brothers Discovery, General Zodzlov, putting James Gunn, in charge. of DC and the ramifications of that. Plus a bunch of really great recommendations for your weekend watching. And I dip my toe into one of them and it was awesome. So really get these recommendations towards the end of the show. Finally, we wrap with another awesome OK boomer segment.

It's a lot of show today. And it's a great show today. So stick with us. This weekend startups is brought to you by Open Phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back. But using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them. Open phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team, right on top of your existing devices. Visit openphone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six months. Smash Digital. Scaling organic traffic for your startup can be challenging, but it doesn't have to be. Visit smashdigital.com slash twist to get a free SEO video audit for your business. You'll see if SEO is right for you and what it takes to become an

industry leader. And CalShe just launched an election forecasting challenge ahead of the national midterm elections on November 8th. Go to calshy.com slash EFC, fill out predictions for each race, and if you get a perfect score, you'll win $100,000. If no one gets them all right, then the best forecaster gets $25,000. Sign up and play at calshy.com slash EFC. All right, everybody. Welcome to Friday's show. I'm going to go through some of the earnings reports and what's going on and Amazon and meta and how that relates to startups and innovation. And after that, Lon Harris is with us. We're going to talk a lot about streaming and a lot of great recommendations. I've got to be honest for this weekend's viewing pleasure. First up,

we've been talking about Facebook stock getting crushed, also known as the Meta Corporation. They've been down 25% after its earnings report. I covered it a little bit. with Vinny and Sunny in a quick reaction, a real-time reaction yesterday on the crypto roundtable. But, you know, looking at Meta's Q3, the third quarter of this year, their CAPEX, and this includes like payments on finance and leases and all this kind of stuff. It was $9.5 billion, which is the highest ever. Reality Labs had a $3.6 billion operating loss in Q3. And Meta said it anticipates significantly growing losses next year.

A head count up 28% year over year. and that is extraordinary 87,000 people. The market cap is $264 billion. It's down 71% year-to-date, 76% off. It's high of $1 trillion in September of 2021. We've never seen anything like this in the tech industry, just to pause for a second.

They've lost the value of Tesla, or they've now lost the value of, I don't know, 10 Airbnbs. This is extraordinary how much market cap has evaporated. Now, why is that important? Well, there are employees. It's not just about Mark's personal wealth, which will be fine, obviously. There are pension funds. There are all kinds of investors, endowments, people's retirements accounts, right, that have Facebook exposure. And so watching this collapse, one has to wonder, you know, what happens to all those people who lost money. And will he be able to retain this talent? So he keeps hiring people. But why would somebody work at a company that is in this amount of disarray. And you'd really have to be a true believer in this vision of VR and AR.

Of course, we've had indications that nobody's using this stuff. And when I say nobody's using it, the employees at Facebook have been admonished in memos and online forums that's come out. They're like, hey, please use this product. If you're not dog fooding, your own product, this is a term in our industry. You've got to eat your own food, what you make. I call it dog food. It's pretty gross, right, to eat dog food.

But if the people who work at meta, who are building the Metaverse, really don't have time and couldn't be bothered to even use the software. And everybody you know who bought a meta Oculus headset, you know, did the, you know, the try, oh my, and goodbye, as I call it. They tried it. They said, oh, my, this is incredible. And it is super interesting when you try these things on and you have that VR experience for the first time. But then you say goodbye very quickly. It just, it doesn't have the stickiness that your iPad, your PlayStation, your PlayStation. your laptop, your iPhone, your Tesla,

pick a gadget, your AirPods, your watch. You can see which devices and gadgets you've used in your life become, you know, permanent fixtures in your daily life. The VR headsets are not one, and I don't think there'll be one ever VR headsets. I do think AR glasses, very distinctly different, where you can still see the reality around you, but maybe you augment the reality with pieces of data.

I do think that's going to work, unfortunately, I don't think Facebook's going to be the company that wins it. We've talked about this here for a long time. I think Apple actually is going to win that because you'll have a smartphone in your pocket. You'll have your AirPods. You'll have your watch. And then you'll put on a pair of glasses and there'll be some amount of compute audio coming from those other devices, even biometrics, which is super interesting when you think about it, what they're going to be able to know about you in your life. And you can just imagine if you were skiing and your goggles or you were mountain biking, your that you see the path ahead of you. This is the extreme example because you need to keep your eyes on the road when you're skiing or in your mountain biking or even when you're driving. Can you imagine driving, skiing, or mountain biking, or just bicycling generally, and being able to get information about the world around you? And that could include, hey, you know, a text message from your spouse saying, hey, the kids are ready to be picked up or five minutes until the fish hits 145 degrees internal temperature.

These little notes could come up without forcing you to stop skiing or get off your mountain bike. And you know these things. The things that make you, when you look down at your phone or you see somebody riding a bike through Manhattan and they're on their phone and you're like, oh, that person's about to go over the hood of a car. Those kind of moments are going to go away. Really interesting with AR.

And I think some people have become enamored with this. The problem is when you've got a company that a lot of people are relying on and you take a bet that is this crazy like Zuckerberg is doing. investors just might say, you know what, I'm not down for this. This should be a startup. This should be a spin-out. But at the core of this is the governance issue. In Silicon Valley, for those of you don't know, we started giving super voting shares.

Google was a big example. Shopify, Toby just got himself some super voting shares. What does it mean? It means your shares typically have 10 or 20 to one voting. So if I own a million shares, I get 20 million votes. And you're a hedge fund. You own a million share. You get a million votes.

The New York Times actually is known for this. So you can participate in owning Facebook or the New York Times, Shopify, Google, but you may not have the ability to change management's mind about how the company is running because it's not one share, one vote. Companies with one share, one vote? Yeah, Tesla actually has that. And Elon has been pretty upfront, actually, at the AI day. He said AI is really important.

Robotics is really important. If I do a bad job, I hope that you all vote to fire me. And if you don't trust me and what I'm doing in, and I'm not a good steward of the safety. He's talking about the safety concerns around AI and robots. It's very important that the company that owns the robots and AI has a proper governance. And you can see here, Facebook is the now become the number one example of this governance issue. And I think it's going to have a major impact. People coming and saying, I want super voting shares. I want to control my company. It's just not going to fly anymore. After what Zuckerberg has done. And by the way, this is the second time.

Zuckerberg has changed the industry for the worst. He makes really poor decisions that are very selfish. He became very, very skilled at stealing people's innovations and incorporating them into his platform. We saw this over and over again with his behavior with Snap. He also was a terrible steward of people's data and sucking up a bunch of people's data. And we saw this with the Cambridge Analytica leaks and other leaks and the election interference and Russians buying ads with rubles. And we see it today when people try to buy fake news ads on Facebook. they can still do it. Suckerberg is not a good steward for society or for his shareholders, and now the chickens have come home to roost. People are giving up on the stock. And that is going to be,

perhaps it seems, based on people's betting here. And when people have skin in the game and they bet, you kind of get to reality a little bit quicker. And now that there are other options than the economy has corrected, and there's no free cash because the Fed has raised interest rates, I think this is the beginning of the end for Facebook. And I don't know that anybody's been able to get through to Zuck. In fact, friend of the pod, Brad Gersner wrote an open letter. You probably saw it. Where he said, hey, listen, here's a very easy path. Instead of spending 10 billion a year on this crazy VR-A-R future, how about $5 billion? And how about instead of spending $10 billion a year and doing this in five years, just do it in 10? Take your time. What's the rush? And then keep working

on the main business. I have never seen anybody do this in the history of Silicon Valley. And And former Facebook employee in front of this pod, Antonio Garcia Martinez, you know, he's pretty, he's a, he's one of the sharp knives in the draw. And Antonio tweets, Metis Business has been kneecapped by Apple. He's referring to the fact that you can't target ads by phone anymore. I used to be able to do that anonymously. So if you were using different apps, you know, fitness apps, I could, um, market to you, calm or, uh, some fitness program, a Peloton, etc. Second point Antonio makes, growth is stopped in favor of rivals like TikTok. Okay, yeah, that's true. And it's too late to build a phone. Referring to the project Chimoth Polyhapatia,

a bestie of mine, was working on for a short period of time where they were thinking about, since they didn't have Android or iOS, and usage was moving to mobile phones, building a phone. That would have been a much better idea. Spent $10 billion on that and just give people free phones or highly discounted phones and see if it works. Antonio sums it up. Zuck is making an existential, bet the company move at enormous scale. Most companies would just elude themselves and die slowly die. So I agree with his framing of this. We all know. TikTok is a huge headwind.

Apple, huge headwind. And obviously, yeah, phone is Microsoft. The mighty Microsoft couldn't beat the combination of the duopoly of Android and iOS. So why would Zuck have any chance? Which does give you a little bit of a view into the future. Like how on earth is Zuck going to beat Apple or Google or Microsoft or all three of them? or at least two of them. And I just don't think it's going to happen.

All right, everybody on the phone today is Open Phones founder, Darina Kulia. Welcome to the program, Dorena. Thanks, Jason. Great to be here. What about the situation where you have, you know, a phone number that's a common number? So customer support number, or maybe you wanted people to just be able to call you and generally talk to the sales team. How do you handle that when you have a group number, a shared number? That's actually one of the super unique things about the way we've built open phone is that we allow you to,

to have a shared number for your team. First of all, when you call into that shared number, you can set round robin if that's applicable. Or by default, everyone's phone would ring. The first person to pick it up will be able to have a call. I like that for customer support. Wow. Exactly.

Exactly. And also, if I am on a call with a customer, I don't want to be interrupted. There are other people who can pick up new calls coming in. But I also really think what's very cool is that this workflow works as well for text messages. And not only can you just like, share responsibility for responding to text.

But you can also use this as a training exercise because the way that it works is that if I am a customer support rep, there is a text message from a customer. I don't know how to answer. I can actually tag my teammates privately on that conversation and get help and say, hey, is this okay to say or how would you respond? Okay, everybody, Twist listeners can get 20% off any plan. For their first six months at OpenFone, just go to openphone.com slash twist. If you got an existing number, they'll put it right over for free.

Head to O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E.com slash twist today for 20% off. What is the right thing to do here? I actually think this is a really, really bad idea to bet the farm on virtual reality. I don't think it's a bad idea to have a virtual reality department, but to bet the farm is not a good idea. If you looked at Facebook, if you looked at Instagram, they did some very interesting commerce experience experiments. One of the commerce experiments was Facebook Marketplace. If you're hearing my voice, you probably know somebody in your family, probably a boomer, maybe a Gen Xer, maybe not somebody living in a city, but maybe they're living in a major city on the coast who love, love Facebook marketplace.

It's kind of like Craigslist and eBay and people really use it. Instagram started dabbling into commerce and supposedly TikTok is going to go all in on commerce. And they kind of never finished that. And they also never shared revenue with creators in a meaningful way at the Facebook corporation. So those would have been much better projects to put a couple of billion dollars into, let alone 10 billion, and maybe building a super app, right? Why doesn't Facebook and Instagram have really great payments involved? Why don't they buy Lyft?

Oh, right, they can't buy stuff anymore because the government doesn't trust them and they're going to block them. But they could start building commerce experiences and payment experiences into their giant platform with billions of users, and that would throw off money. So all you have to do if you're Zuck, if you want to stock. to go back up to two or three hundred is to cut 20% of the employees. Not a big deal, to be honest. The company probably function better.

Cut the amount of spend by 20, 30, 40, 50% on the VR meta. And then get Cheryl Sandberg to come back and be CEO of the Facebook collection of assets. That's really what should happen. These should be two different units, just like Susan Wojewski runs YouTube. And, you know, there are other people running Google and other products there. Just split this up. Let Cheryl Sandberg come back. That would have been the power move. I said this for years. Let her run that collection of assets. People

trust her. She's an incredible operations person. She built two the two largest at-scale online advertising networks, Googles and Facebooks. Just give it to her and let her keep making it a better product. Here's a chart. Meta's revenue growth is stalled. Its Kappex has skyrocketed and free cash flow. How much cash this thing's throwing off has fallen 98% year over year. Zuck change is the company's name to Meta in October of 2021 and everything goes downhill since then. And it's not just their stock price that's going down. If you look, their free cash flow went down. Now, this, of course, correlates with the market correction, right, October 21st. So it's not just that the name of Facebook changed. In fairness, the market collapsed after this. But capital expenditures,

the blue line here, if you're watching, have skyrocketed. And their revenue has dipped and free cash flow has just been crushed. Why put your money here when you can put it into Apple, Amazon or Google, other companies that seem to be taking things more seriously. Or if you don't believe in this company, you can get muni bonds that are tax-free, four or five percent right now. And yeah, it's guaranteed. And you don't have to deal with this agita, you know, your stomach flipping over, over and over. So anyway, this is going to be a disaster. I almost feel like this is such a disaster. I'm going to make a prediction here that I think Zuckerberg cannot ignore it. I think this is now existential. I might put it.

trade in at Facebook, you know, at 90, 95, 100. I do think that this business can print money and somebody's going to come in here and get through to him. And actually, I don't know if somebody's going to get through to him. I think the stock price and losing employees is going to get through to him. All right, Amazon was down 10% in after hours trading after just slightly missing on revenue and profits and AWS's growth has slowed down. So cloud computing is slowing down. We saw that with Microsoft. Total revenue for Amazon was 127.1 billion up 15% year over year, 5% quarter over quarter. So it's healthy growth. It's not nothing. And it's nice growth on a big number. But, you know, people are comparing this to previous quarters and the last 12 months. Net income,

$2.9 billion. That's down 10% year over year. It's way up quarter over quarter as Amazon lost $2 billion on a net basis last quarter. AWS revenue is the driver here. They were up 27% year of a year, a four percent quarter. They slightly missed expectations. You saw Microsoft's Azure, all of these assets, I think, are going to miss and they're going to slow down. Why, everybody who's running a business in the cloud is looking at their expenses and just going to their developers and saying, hey, we're spending a million dollars a month on our cloud, get it down to 800, optimize it, turn off servers, you know, clean things up. Because in a down market, the best way to make money is to cut expenses.

You may have a hard time growing your revenue. So how do you grow your earnings, right? Your profits? you can't grow your profits by growing the top line because consumers aren't spending money or businesses aren't spending money. That's the headwinds. So what do you do? You cut expense. I've been looking at this myself, just going through our expenses saying, hey, what can we cut now? And employees, sadly, are part of that, but it's also a healthy part of this. And this is why the boombust cycle in economies is actually a good thing, because you flush out inefficiencies. And the inefficiency

could be a person on your team. You know, you've got somebody at the office who just doesn't work hard. You're like, why are they here? Why are they wasting money? You know, and that person should get cut. They're just not a good team member. I'm not talking about, like, as a human, should they lose their job and suffer and get unemployment? I'm just talking about they're not a high performer.

They shouldn't be at the company. It's a drag for everybody. Well, in an upmarket, growth will, you know, make management be lazy and they won't cut low performers. Now low performers are going to get cut. SaaS software that people aren't using is going to get cut. Marketing that's not working is going to get cut. Office space.

not being utilized, it's not going to get renewed, or people are going to get consolidated. And when somebody says, hey, I want a bigger office, they're going to say, yeah, you can go office suite. No way. And all those conversations are happening inside big companies. And of course, Amazon's going to face those headwinds in their cloud computing. They're also giving lower than expected guidance for Q4, which is their big quarter. Net sales, they think will be 140 to 148 billion.

That'd be 2 to 8% growth year over year. Here's the old Sanky chart. As you can see, they have a lot of businesses at. Amazon's one of the nice things. They have physical stores now. They have third party sellers. They have online stores. Supposedly the third party sellers are having their inventory and how much

inventory they'll hold for a third party seller. That is being reduced, I guess, so that Amazon is more efficient. We're going to talk about that on All In today. I think Freedberg had pointed that out to us. So listen to Allend 102. They have subscriptions, right? They got Audible and all that kind of stuff. They have advertising on Twitch and Amazon is just an amazing

ad network with $20 billion, and of course, AWS, just absolutely crushing it. So there's just lots of money sloshing around and a lot of diversification of revenue that you don't see at a Facebook, like at a Facebook. And this is why Amazon is such a great company with multiple pillars in there. And Apple crushed it. Their stocks up. People still buying phones. So congratulations to Apple. All right. Next up, I'll go into it next week. We don't have a little time today. Can't do a three-hour show. But next up, our friend Lon Harris, Twitter.com slash L-O-N-S, Inside. Inside.com slash streaming newsletter. He's going to talk all things streaming, and he's got some great recommendations. And one of the recommendations he has,

I, you know, between taping his recommendations, uh, the peripheral, great recommendation. I watched the first episode and I was, I was all in on this William Gibson. So, enjoy this weekend stream with Mon Harris and Molly Wood. One of the things you want to know before you invest in a company, which is what I do, is how good is their SEO, their search engine optimization. Why? Well, because when people are looking for your product, where are they going to go? They're going to Google you. They're going to Bing you. And if a startup understands search engine optimization, well, that means they understand one of the foundational ways in which traffic gets to your website. Some people now, they just overlook the fundamentals of SEO, and you need

to get those right early. So let me tell you about Smash Digital. They are hyper-focused on SEO, and they specialize in high-end link building. This isn't a generic digital marketing agency. No, it's not Facebook ads and all that stuff, which is transient. No, they just focus on world-class SEO. You understand, of course, that if you're going to hire an in-house SEO person, that's going to cost you like 100 times a year. It's literally going to be $100,000. And then you're still going to need a budget to build content and to get people to link back to you. However, Smash is affordable. They understand what you're going to go through. They want to be your partner for the long term. And so they're going to charge you as little as $3,500 a month for their service. You're going to learn a ton.

They're going to be a great partner for you. And for a limited time, Smash is offering a free video review for Twist listeners at smashdigital.com slash twist. That's right. A free personalized video audit of your startup's SEO and Smash will map out the exact next steps for you to take to outrank your competitors. Again, it's free. Go to smashdigital.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome for Friday. It's time for this week in streaming. Why is this week in streaming, Molly, moving from Thursday to Friday? Jing. Let me tell a little air traffic control issue. We started this. next Unicorn series. Everybody loves it. You've been doing a great job on it. We're really finding

interesting companies. But for some reason, I put those on Wednesdays. Wednesdays, of course, we have this great crypto roundtable every other week. Well, that got moved to Thursday, and that means Thursdays now move to Friday. Anyway, all that matters is Lon Harris is here with us. Tell us what's going on in streaming news. Yeah, that's the most important thing. Welcome, Lon. You know, Friday feels fine for a streaming show anyway. streaming, it's actually like Friday's the new streaming day, you know. You can set us up for like the right, like what's dropping Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Yeah.

It sort of fits in a weird way. Yeah. Making it work. We're making it work. I am absolutely enthralled with House of the Dragon. And my wife loves it too. Was that the last episode? Season one.

Oh, I thought we got one more. No, where we wrap this week. This Sunday was the, I mean, you couldn't tell with Rayana. Targaryenera Targary receiving that that word from from Damon at the fireplace and then turning around and we zoom in on her face and we know that look from a Targaryen means all hell is about to break. Yeah, Dracarus is upon us. That was by the way, I was reading about this.

That was Matt Smith's stage blocking suggestion. He was like Damon comes in. He pulls her aside. They go to the fireplace and then she spins around to camera. that's where we close. He kind of put that final sequence together. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. Well, I don't want to get too much into it. I just want to say that this is as good or to me, probably better than an average season of Game of Thrones. I don't know where you put it. If you were to rank the Game of Thrones seasons now, we would this one rank?

Definitely the, I think most of us were afraid, is this show going to shake off the curse of those last few seasons of Thrones where it felt kind of aimless, a little rudderless, a little bit like it was rushing to the climax without knowing where it was going. And I think this lays all of those concerns to rest. I think this is easily on the level of the first six seasons of Thrones, if not better. And I'll tell you one thing I really loved about it is, other than the drag, obviously there are dragons in this world. So it's not exactly a realistic historical world. other than the dragons, if you take that element out, they are really leaning into the politics, the negotiation, the palace intrigue. It's not a lot of God stuff. It's not a lot of prophecy

stuff. It's not a lot of magic. It's really not very much about the fantasy. It's much more about the political stuff. That's kind of interesting. If you think of the dragons as just a metaphor for like a really big nuclear arsenal or weapons. Like it's just it's a cool government story. Do you think that the time hot? That is how they're treating it. Yeah. Worked because then that now there are questions I've seen, you know, people are sort of saying,

well, either the back half of this season shows that the fast forwarding totally worked, or it shows that they should have just started there in the first place, maybe, because that's when it all like really picked up. I'll tell you, from my perspective, I think, uh, I loved the, the, the Rainira Targaryen Allison Hightower storyline, and I think it worked brilliantly, and I think Olivia Cook and Emma Darcy both absolutely killed it. They're tremendous performances of the second half of that season to bring us up to date with those characters and make us believe these are the same people, and it feels coherent.

I do feel like I got a little mixed up with all the children. There's a lot of these children. I'll tell you one other thing, not to get too much on a tangent. Before this season started, there was a lot of concern about the Valerian family, you know, not black in the books and they cast these black actors and people were like, oh, is this going to be another one of these racial, whatever? Not only does that not bother me at all, I think, like, you know, diversify the cast. But it works great because it helps you tell everybody apart. Imagine if all of those characters were Aryan-looking blonde kids, how much harder. At least this way, that family and that family are visual.

distinct. I could be like, well, that's obviously a Valerian, and that's obviously a Targaryen. But yeah, that gets a little messy. It's a little hard to tell your Agons and your Amens from your Baylas and your Raina's and your lanos and your lanors. But otherwise, I thought the time stuff worked really well and it didn't, it didn't

bud. That's hilarious. That was a win. It was a massive win. Like, audience wise. I think we have to talk about how this is dovetailing with the TikTok issues, because at this point, I'm not sure that this show can survive a Negroni Spagliato. With Prosecco? With Perseco in it. With Perseco on it.

Stunning. Stunning. I'm having a hard time watching the latest episode because I keep seeing her saying a Negroni, Spagliato. You know, you don't have to say, I look this up. You don't need to say with Prosecco. Most Negroni Spagliado just means a Negroni but instead of gin

It's made with sparkling white wine Because the gin is so overpower Or because the Kampari is so overpowering anyway It wouldn't make sense to use an expensive fancy champagne You might as well Just use a Prosecco So most bartenders are just going to use Prosecco Anyway if you order a Negroni Spagliato

I'm just thinking I love the internet age is all I'm saying Like all I'm saying Is that this is the next This is the natural progression of conversation. And it's amazing. The point here is, it's a win. She is iconic.

And this is an iconic exchange. Yeah. And I just, you know, people have to think of the ramifications of the media they create. With Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, there are people with PTSD about various things that have occurred in their life. And you really need to think about that. And when it comes to this TikTok exchange, we now need to think about the PTSD that bartenders everywhere, cocktail servers, waitresses, waiters. I was like that.

It's not that hard to make. It's not the issue. It's only three degrees. But you worked in service, I'm sure, at some point, line. Not food service. I worked in retail a long time. I was never working like a behind a bar. All right. Now imagine you work in retail and somebody comes in and says, I want a sweater.

that's cashmere that's a medium and like literally the 50th person a day comes in and they expect you to say stunning so now you just have a legion of bartenders and wait staff that now have to deal with this and really this is going to create a level of PTSD

across the food service cocktail industry that's going to be years years of this nonsense along these lines it's the it's the viral TikToks that ruins Starbucks all the baristas hate that You know, because people are always giving their 30 ingredient recipes for like, go into Starbucks and get like a pink unicorn frat.

It's the strawberry and this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing. And you take this out and this kind of milk. If you pull this BS, Molly, anybody pulls this BS. You better be given 100% tip. You want to play the Spogliato game with your weight server. And you got $40 worth of cocktails. I expect to see at least minimum $70 total, at least of $3. $40 tip on the 40.

It's just Prosecco Campari and vermouth. I don't think it's that bad. I think you can get anoboni Spagliata. Right. Of all the things that could be ruining a bartender's life. I don't think an ingotty. Like the return of the lemon drop.

This is not that bad. I mean, I'll have a limoncello. The thing to avoid is you don't want to order the drink. Yeah, you don't want to order the drink they don't know how to make. That's the one thing. I just, it's, I know they're trying to do call and response with their waiter. And you know these idiots are taking their phone out. and then videotaping the bartender while they do it in giggling.

And it's enough people. It's enough. I would watch an entire like counter programming series on TikTok and Instagram that's just like people in restaurants talking about influencers and how influencers are ruining everything. I mean. Like have you ever been at a restaurant when like a gaggle of influencers comes in? And there's like there's just the one who's the ringleader and then she brought all the friends. Yeah. Why does it have to be a she, Molly?

Why does it have to be a she? I'm good to know. I'm just, I'm not saying I'm thinking of one in particular. Yeah. I'm my favorite taco joy. I'll tell you when you know this gets really bad. I'm just saying step away from the case of video. We know it's a thing.

There's, there's entire restaurants that exist only because of like that, like that guy, salt bay has his own steakhouse here just because of leaving foods. Just so people can make this stupid thing with him running the salt down. He's greasy, dirty arm. Yeah, it's disgusting. It's absolutely disgusting. It's vile.

I was in downtown LA, by... You know what I'm talking about, right, Molly? Salt Bay, the guy... Of course we know, salt. I do not. And he tastes salt and he drops it from his hand like this. He's got a steak house. He rolls down his arm.

He elaborately like slices your meat and then he drizzles steak on it, but he does it over his form. So the stick there, this guy, this guy. Yeah. And he's wearing a dirty white t-shirt. Are you kidding? I don't think I've ever hated anybody more than I hate this guy. He's the worst.

It's like thousands of. of dollars to go eat at his steakhouse. And he puts, he's one of these like gold foil guys, too. So you get the steak. They take a steak and they wrap it in gold leaf. And you're like, okay, gold leaf has no flavor. I am enraged right now. And the only word that comes to mind is one I just do not want to say.

Yeah, it's just gross. Anyway, I just, I'm just putting fair warning out here. I will say the most annoying thing. The most annoying thing is the wing man or the wing woman. I don't know what you call a wing man that's female. But these wing individuals who, when the person is taking their picture decide, you know what their job is? All of a sudden, they're like the lighting grips.

And they take out their three phones. They put on their, or they take out a ringlight. I saw a woman going into a restaurant the other day, and she had her friend who was a hotel. And they were coming in out of the hotel through the lobby, and their friend was holding the ring light. And I'm like, what is going on here? You got to have your ring light with you.

Enough, enough. I'm telling you this. Like literally the ticket. talker who starts stalking influencers and just showing how obnoxious they are behind the scenes, that is the TikTok that I will watch all day every day. I want an influencer ban. There should be a sign. Remember they had the no hipster rule?

That would be amazing. It needs to be a sign. No influencer. No influencers on this. I'm opening a restaurant just to ban influencers. It's going to be called no influencer steakhouse. It's going to be amazing steaks. They're very Instagramable.

They're very TikTokable. But you're not allowed to TikTok or Instagram them. All right, we're going to play this one time, people. If you miss this trend, for the four people who missed the trend, here it is, first and last time. What's your drink of choice? In the groni. I was going to say, I was going to say, with prosaco in it. Oh, stunning.

Yeah. And now, just to break this down, there's a couple of things that make this so perfect. I don't know if they, I need to understand if they practice this and it was on purpose. But the fact that she is going to tell you. you her drink and you cannot interrupt her is what makes this charming. She's barreling through with the description of this and the other person's trying to, oh, oh, oh. And then she leans in to deliver with present.

And she drops down to another octave. And this is why actors are extremely annoying to have his friends is because you try to have a normal conversation with them. And it's like, hey, what did you do last night? I went to the gym to lift kettlebell. else with my mate. And you're just like, can you just talk normal? You're like, can you just, not that traumatic?

You went, you lifted cattle bells. You went to CrossFit. They're making it a story. It's enough. It's enough. All right, you've heard me talk about KAL-She before. K-A-L-S-H-I. I want you to remember this name.

It's a regulated exchange that offers financial prediction markets on everyday events. So you can trade on things like, hey, what's going to be next month's CPI, or whether certain legislation will pass, maybe what global temperatures will look like at the end of the year, and more. But now, Kalshi has an awesome new contest. They just launched an election forecasting challenge ahead of the national midterm elections, which are taking place on November 8th. Basically, they're looking to find the best election forecaster in the country. Here's how you join. Go to kalshi.com slash EFC election forecasting challenge, EFC. fill out predictions for each congressional race. It's like March Madness, but for voting, if you get a perfect election call, you win $100,000. Are you following the polls?

You can change your submission right up to the day before the election. If no one gets them all right, then the best forecaster gets $25,000. This is like crowdsourced predictive market right here. Super interesting. The contest is free. All you need is an email to play. The entire twist team is on Calci now, and we are going to be talking. about our bets during these ad reads. When you hear me talk about Kalshi, you want to listen

and hear our bets. I want you to sign up and play at kalshi.com slash EFC. Calshe.com, K-A-L-S-H-I-com slash E-F-C. I do like this, by the way, Molly. This won't by pretty quick, but I do like the analogy of the dragons or nukes. This is something that I never considered. Is that just came to me? It feels right. I feel so right. And also the way they talk about it. Like if we remember in Game of Thrones, only the target, only DeNaris has dragons. They're gone for the rest of the world. And the way everyone else thought, it gives its absolute power. She could basically do whatever she wanted. We saw what happens to Kings Landing if they defy her because she's the only one. But now in this show, there's multiple houses with dragons.

And so they have to, they're a consideration, but it's more like a piece on the board. We can't just go do whatever we want. Well, they have, well, they have dragons too. It's like, well, we have big dragons. It's like, well, but, you know, now, now you're, now it's gamesmanship, just like in reality. So, I mean, it's just like Ukraine. We're like, what do we do with Putin? It's like, well, he has nukes. Stunning. Right. It's, it's not just a, it's not one, you know, it's not one sided now. It's like, you know, we have to think about a balance of power in a world where multiple houses can control dragons. Yeah. I like the fact also that nobody remembers in both cases. They're like, nobody remembers dragons in games.

of Thrones. And in this, nobody, they know how to ride dragons and they have the illusion of control over the dragons. But nobody actually knows when dragons fight each other, what's going to go down? Like, it feels like it's dangerous and out of control. And I kind of like that aspect too, almost like nukes, where it's like, we don't know exactly what's going to happen if we drop these things. We think we have control over this, but we do not. Another illusion of control. Parallel with Game of Thrones. Because in that one, DeNaris, she's the mother of dragons, they have this very tight bond. That was the only relationship we saw. And she really does have sort of ultimate power. We just kind of assumed that's how the relationship worked. But

if you go back and see how it used to be when dragons were still wild and in the world, it was like, okay, you're sort of, it's a collaborative relationship. But it's not mastery. It's like they, they have minds of their own still. And in the books, which I know no one remembers and will never have to remember because they will never get finished. But by the end, end of the fifth book, she has lost control of the dragons. Like, remember, she's basically going back to try to learn the ways of the horse riding, like her,

the original husband. Yeah. The Dothraki, right? Because the Dothraki, she has this, like, realization that, like, yeah, one of the dragons takes off. And then she's like, oh, I have to rebuild this relationship. And she's going to go to the Dothraki because they have that symbiotic relationship with the horses.

She's like, maybe they can teach me how to rebuild this relationship with the dragon. She's like not in control. It doesn't matter because the books are never getting done, but that was a thing. Deep pull there, Molly, well done. This week, he's mostly done with the next one. I read all the books, yes. I read all the books. I don't, you know, I'm chicken for the show, but I read all the books.

Also, stunning. Stunin. Stunin is the number of viewers this thing got. 29 million average viewers in the U.S. It was doing great, yeah. It was just stunning. Big hit for them. They need.

it too. I mean, they really neat franchises over there. And it was up against, this is kind of mind-blowing. Nine million people watched that season finale, and it was up against Sunday night football, which usually always wins, right? I mean, like, it's either, I mean, football and the American League Championship between the Yankees and Astros. And it still pulled in nine million viewers. All right. Who owns HBO? Well, who owns HBO? Well, it's part of, it's WBD. Warner Brothers is your boy. Correct. General Zazlov, another wins for the general.

Zodzog has won again Big week for David Zazlav That's what I'm getting at Another notch in his DC film Yes and I took the girls to see Black Adam On Friday I am not

A rock guy Not my thing I loved it Why did I love it? It was fun It had a great pace I like all the characters around I love the Hawkman Like the other guy who's like the Dr. Strange in this world.

It's Dr. Fate. I'm a big fan of Dr. Fate going way back. Yeah. Pierce Brosnan. Is it fake? What wait? F. F.E.

Oh, F.E. T.E. Dr. FATE. I love Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Fate more than I love Dr. Strange, which is one of my favorite characters of all time. He's very much the DC universe's version of a Dr. Strange. A little bit with a little moon night because he's got the ancient Egypt mythology going on. But just to put a pin in it.

This, my daughters loved it. I went to the nice theater, the airter where you can order the food. Molly and I talked about it earlier this week. Huge hit. Obviously, a big spoiler in the Stinger. But this is another gigantic win for General Zodzlov this week. And then a third one coming out. That's the final film of the sort of the prior era.

That's the sun setting on the Hamada era. And we're now going to get the gun era. James Gunn, Peter Safran, the new DC Studios chiefs we saw this week. You're not going to see any more brown people in the movies going forward. I'm sorry, that was the last guest. I don't know. It's all Henry Cavill from now on. One fascinating thing about this is they're leaving.

So Gunn's going to come in and he's the new Figey. They're going to, he's going to oversee DC Studios. But they're leaving Joker 2 and the bat. man under Warner Brothers. So they are going to basically do what I was pitching last time. They're going to keep kinds of these independent franchises siloed, and then they're going to let Gunn make his own DCverse now, whatever it may be. So the triverse is strong. We're keeping the Triverse is strong. Yeah, I mean, the Warner Brothers Studios is going to continue to oversee the Matt Reeves Batman series and the Todd Phillips Joker series. And then James Gunn's going to make whatever

the James Gunn series is. So, love it. There you got, there you have it. All right. So I guess you couldn't close the negotiations. They didn't meet your demands. So Gunn gets the nod after Lonz walks away.

You walked away. I think James Gunn makes a lot of sense, a very, a very, a very sensible choice. You're so gracious, Lon. You're so gracious. Oh, yeah. Zodzlaw finally got, seems to have met his match in super villains because my new favorite villain in the streaming universe, Bob Chappek, delivering today, delivering this week with enraging the fans. It was Wednesday, I think he made some comments at Wall Street Journal

live. I was like, oh, I cannot wait to hear Chappek step in it. Because if there's anything we're learning about this guy, right? There are, you know, clearly there are divisions in opinions about his leadership. But what they seem to be based on is the fact that he just puts his foot in his mouth every chance he gets. And so he went to this event. And while discussing Disney Plus said, quote, our fans and audiences put their kids to bed at night after watching Pinocchio,

Dumbo, or Little Mermaid, then they're probably not going to tune into another animated movie. They want something for them. And that led the internet to go absolutely insane about how he's anti-animation. Jason's just making this face right now. By the way, by the way, you're not

watching the video. It's like, what? Okay. So when I Well, no, when I saw it go by on Twitter, I already said adults like don't like entertainment. When I read it here, I agree. I'm happy to watch Little Mermaid, but I would like something more adult after it. Yes. I think the overall point he's making is undeniably correct, which is you need these services to have a diversity of content, even if you add everything, every big animated movie

that kids and families wanted to watch, you'd want to also have some counterproducing. programming for people who are into other, you know, procedurals or sitcoms or sports or whatever. I think we all agree with that. I think it's just the way he said it. Out of context, it makes it sound like he's saying adults wouldn't want to just sit down and watch a Pixar or Sleeping Beauty or animation. And obviously, adults love animation. And there are Disney adults who love Disney animation. And that's a ridiculous thing to say.

But I do that you have to kind of take it out of context. You do, but the idea, and everybody did, to be clear, right? Every headline all over the places. Well, Twitter, that's all they do. Because the idea of the Disney CEO casting even a tiniest version, even something that appears to be a glancing blow on animation is so beyond the pale. But what I think is so interesting about Chappek and Zodzlov both is that they, by the way, I'm like never going to remember his real name.

Like God, for I ever have to interview the guy? I mean, I know. I'm just going to, I could imagine a scenario which I'm like, that'd be great. Mr. Azad's love. Great to me too. But like, they, the two of them together seem to have a really fundamental misunderstanding

of fandom. Like, fandom is a precious jewel of loyalty and love that you do have to do service to. Like, you have to protect that. You cannot be the same. CEO of Disney and suggest that your Disney super fans as adults might not want animation. Like, you can't do that. They're just, yeah, they're not, they're not showmen.

I mean, I think that in some ways, that's why Gunn is a good hire for DC because he's not just a guy who's got good instincts about the characters, but he's like an entertainment guy. Like, he's funny and like he knows how to go up on stage. Yeah, he would like to watch two animated movies back to back. He would. Yeah. When they're talking about their new slate at Comic-Con, he's the guy you want to send up on stage to get excited about Shazam. And I think that that's not Chappek, that's not Zazlav, their suits.

You know, they're being, like, that's what Wall Street wants them to be. That's why they have their jobs. They're there to be the bean counters. But, you know, like, we can't expect them to get up on stage and be like, you know, hey kids. Pirates of therapy and five He said more panache, right? Iger shows up in a nice suit, shakes hands better.

Yeah, better at shaking hands. That's not, I'm just, you have to bridge it. Fandom is your engine. Like, it is the core of magma at the heart of your planet. And if you, you know, I just think that you blow them off at your peril and you do have, like, you're only where you are with the Wall Street suits because you have this sort of core

of people who will pay whatever you friggin't tell them to pay at Disney. I respect Bob Chapman. Or is it Chapek? I think it's Chapic. I think that guy in the comments is right that it's cheap. I'd say Chapix at the same. I think it is Chapic.

But I think Disney CEO is sort of a story. Like he's because Michael Eisner too was like. Yes. Great smile. Big tall, big suit, great hair. Maybe you disagree about all his business decisions. But I think he was a guy you could literally put on TV to host the did the Walt Disney presents.

Shake your hand and smile. Yeah. Shake your hand smile. And he's like, hey, I'm here on Main Street, USA with Donald. and here's the cartoon this week. And like, you need that guy to be Disney CEO. And I don't think that's Bob Chappek. Here's what I like about Bob Chapik.

It's very important that people understand this. He absolutely holds in contempt the adults who will not grow up and who come to Disneyland as adults alone without kids and dress his characters. He's appalled. He wishes they, I mean, he understands that there's 7% of the revenue. The wrong job. But no, he won't say it. But just like the rest of us, we all have friends who are adults who go to Disneyland like more than five times per year.

They dress as characters that they're on a Tuesday. They're taking pictures. I love my Disney adult friends. I've been full support of my Disney adult friends. No, you're not. I have some too. I have some too. Are you wonderful?

Yeah, like watch it. Good. Would you invite them over for Thanksgiving? Yes. Sure. You would. Knowing that they're going to bring a cake that's like a Disney. character.

I would maybe not go to a Disney park with them, but I would invite them over for a non-Disney activity. They're the only ones to go to the Disney park because they know all the secrets and they know where you can like where the one bar is. You know what? That's charming. It's charming once. It's charming once.

And then you go to Disney with them for day two and you know all the stuff. And then they start repeating themselves. And then the long tale of Disney knowledge becomes completely inane and unimportant. And they become insuffer. It can be a little intense. It can be a little intense. It's a little too intense. It's a lot.

But I feel like you just, you're not a geek maybe. Listen, I love the stock. I love the geek about anything. I love the stock. I love the deal making. I love the revenue. I love it all. These people.

You cheap. These, I'm in line with, I would, trust me, I will take pictures with those people. I'll tell them they're amazing. I'll tell them like they're the spirit of Disney. And then I'll walk away and I'll just lean over to like my entourage from a Disney executives. I'll be like, freaks. These people are strange.

They're sick, sick people. They should be in the DSM4. They should be a specific, like, there's like bipolar. Whoa, whoa, well, reel it in, reel it in. See, now I sit here and I say, you don't understand fandom and understanding fandom is the key to keeping your loyal freaking core of the universe. And what does Jason do? He's like, oh, yeah, no, I hate them.

These people are freaks. Come on. You just said it yourself. You said you would have them over for non-Disney activities. It does. I'll tell you, I'll tell you exactly what it is. I love rides. If it was, if going to Disney was just like, let's go on these eight rides, I'm in, I think rides are super fun. I as an adult very much enjoy a ride. Where I, where it falls apart for me is like the role play stuff. The like, hey, this college student is dressed like Chip and Dale, like, go take a picture with them or like, that's supposed to be Jack Sparrow. Like, go talk to him like he's Jack Sparrow. Like, go talk to him like he's Jack Sparrow. That's the issue. You nailed it. That's the issue.

They're too involved. This is where it gets super weird, Molly. This is where it gets super weird. They want to be involved with the characters. I agree. I think it's weird. Yeah. I'm like weirdly with you, but at the same time, that is who keeps, if you are a Disney or

you're a Warner or you're making Marvel movies or whatever, that's who keeps your engine turning. Yeah. If you're selling $5,000 Star Wars, hotel rooms, you have to sell it to people who want to, like, be in Star Wars. And you cannot make them think that you think they're freaks. Like, if you do that, you were never going to be able to get them to pay. I mean, Disney just jacked up prices again. Who you think is paying that? Somebody with four kids? No. That's, that's the part that's amazing

to me is that Cheapex strategy is all built around luxury, high-end, very costly experiences for very rich people. It's like, well, those are, who do you think those rich people are? Parents of five kids? No. Nope. Single Disney adults without kids. That's who can afford to pay for $10,000 Star Wars Hotel experiences. You need to lock. These people need to be locked up.

If you go to Disney more than five times a year without a child. Oh, come on. It should be like, I don't say it's a felony. They're not hurting anybody. It should be a misdemeanor if you come a six time. If you want to get rid of those people and lock them up, then you better dump the stock first. I will say, one good thing has come from these people.

I also had some of these people in my life. The only thing productive that ever came out of this was the Monte Cristo sandwich. You and I have had it long. This is a battered and fried turkeys, ham, and Swiss sandwich with a little bit of fruit on the side. And they give you some preserves. It's like you fry it like French toast and then you put like strawberry preserve on top of it. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

That's an amazing sandwich. But how do we get here? Well, that's the blue by you. And what I'm saying is, I don't even know. there's a Blue Bayou restaurant. I think you go to Disney. I eat before I come. I bring a Power Bar with me.

It's in the Pirates of the Caribbean queue. It's where the boats take off for Pirates of the Caribbean. And there's all those people sitting and it looks like you're outside in the bayou in Louisiana or wherever. That's the blue bar. You have to make a reservation. It's a 2000. Yeah.

It's a 2,000 calorie sandwich. I would go. I'm not eating chicken fingers. I'm not eating a drumstick, a turkey deep fried drumstick. Oh, but I would literally go. I would literally go to Blue Bay. I would go to Disney to go to the Blue Bayou. Lubei restaurant.

Right. They used to also have B-Ly for the drumstick. Yeah. By Big Thunder, they used to have the Big Thunder barbecue.

It's got long gone now. But they used to have this like barbecue pit by the Big Thunder railroad and the other side where it was really good too.

You can also get a then you got to go to that stupid that crazy old the dole whip one and then they got that weird the tiki room. The tiki room.

Exactly. The tiki room experience is just. Nope. I get them. You know what? I get the mint. I get the mint.

I like getting the mint julep of the Louisiana lemonade to have like very nice beverages along with your 2,000 calorie sandwich. And I like that 2000. No, I like the 2,000 calorie sandwich because you're going to walk for five hours, right? So you're going to be walking around for five hours. You're going to burn it.

Anything else in streaming news? Listen, everybody's overreacting. No sane adult wants to watch two animated films back to back. Don't say it next time, Bob. The only thing, you're not wrong for thinking it, Bob. You're wrong for saying it. Exactly.

He also said he was open to our radio. content given the elasticity of the consumer base. So back to back. First, he's like, I know you just want to watch some porn. No, that's a mistake. But he said, quote, we probably ought to listen to our audience, which means we have more degrees of freedom than we probably thought. So you see this drift.

This is drift from the core mission. And you've got Disney and you've got them into getting sports betting with the SPS. They're probably going to be a match fixing. Like, he doesn't get the brand. It's the ESPN Hulu Disney Plus. like, are they going to be one service? Is it a bundle of three?

Is it three distinct services? And it's international now. Like, they're doing it differently in different markets and kind of like playing around to see what works. And so I think that's what he's kind of dipping a toe in there and testing the waters. Like maybe, maybe, you know, they've got Disney and the Star Plus service in other parts of the world where they're just one service.

You just do tubs, like what Hulu does with FX. So I think they're playing around with that. idea like what if Hulu was just a subsection of Disney Plus in the U.S. instead of a distinct service? All right. Listen, in this case, Bob's wrong. The Disney Plus service should be PG-13 max. You should never put an R-rated film on them. If that's what he's dipping his toe in. Hulu is where that stuff exists. If I want to watch dope sick about opioid and fentanyl, I don't want my six-year-olds having a tab for, you know, like fentanyl and opioid, you know, stuff. Right.

The one, that's not supposed to be on Disney Plus. Where it gets a little, a little bit tricky now is like comic book stuff. Like, you know, the Netflix Daredevil show or Punisher, pretty violent, but it makes sense to house that with the rest of the comic book stuff that's on Disney Plus. So, like, there are, there are areas of overlapped. lap like that where it does get a little bit muddled. Deadpool, you should have to

like age verify or something. Right. I do not want my kids, you know, I don't want six to 10 year olds all of a sudden getting deadpooled. Not cool.

That's way too risque. I'm telling you he's messing with it. He's messing with it. I would dump that stock. That is not a best of advice. I'm going to buy more. I'm going to, that's not investment mice either.

I think I'm going to Warner Brothers, Disney. Warner Brothers, DC, I think, is like. Yeah. Warner Brothers in D.C. are one and the same. Yeah, they're doing great. Discovery and they're doing great.

They're making a lot of moves. The notice they should go short, but I don't know how to do that. And then we also got, go short anything. We also got Comcast. Oh, yeah, we got Peacock being like, Codcast 2.3 today. Peacock is basically stalled out around 15 million paid US subs,

which is, you know, I mean, it's a thing. It's not super great. They're doing better on the ad-supported side than they are the paid side. But I think we're all seeing right now, like, they're really having a tough time convincing people, even when they've got popular shows. Just today, they release the trailer for the new Ryan Johnson, Natasha Leone show, Pokerface. Looks great. Mystery of the Week. Natasha Leone from, you know, she just did Russian doll.

she plays a woman who she has a supernatural ability to tell when someone is lying, and then it's going to be a mystery of the week where every week she solves a new murder investigation using her skills that every week is like guest star. So L'Rell Howrie this week or Adrian Brody's involved in the case this week or whatever. But nobody's going to watch you because it's on Peacock. That's true. I think I signed up for Peacock for some reason. There was some show on there, and I probably still have it because I forgot to cancel

That seems to be the peacock's jam right now. I really enjoyed the resort. And they just had one called the resort recently that I thought was really good. But I tell these, I'll tell people, you know, I'll be like, hey, girls five ever. They just renewed it for season three. It's funny. It's the new Tita Faye show. But it's like, but if you don't have the service, what are you going to do?

You're not going to go get it. Yeah. It's getting tough out there. It's getting tough out there for a stream. I think, I think, uh, HBO Max is going to buy it. I think that's what that's what happens next. They buy peacock. I'll be smart.

And then put it in. I think Comcast spins off NBC Universal and WB Discovery buys it. Oh, it was Yellowstone, by the way. That's what I signed. I've signed up to watch Yellowstone. Right. Like many of us, and then I have forgotten to cancel ever since. Right.

Thanks, Jennifer. More consolidation. More consolidation. Well, and Warner Brothers Discovery, they've already kind of floated this idea that, you know, right now they're worried about this debt and spinning things off and selling things off to pay down this debt. But once that's done, the next goal might be grabbing NBC Universal. It does make sense in terms of all that great peacock content could live somewhere where people would actually have a chance of seeing it. And it would be one fewer competitor to worry about in the U.S.

You know, like you just grab those 15 million paid subs, take that off the table entirely. Is it better for those of us in the viewing public? You know, probably not. But it's better for the companies. Anything we should be looking forward to this fall. I love the Black Adam. Anything we should watch this weekend. What's your recommendations?

If I was going to watch something this weekend. What's streaming this weekend? Yeah, what should I dip into? Because I can't keep up. So anything from the last 18 months, anything new, things that you've picked up on that, you just said, you know what? Can't miss with this.

Can't miss with this. You know what I like. A few things on Netflix I would draw your attention to right now. The first one just debuted this past Wednesday, I want to say, Guillermo del Toro's cabinet of curiosities. This is like a new take on A Tales from the Crypt or an Alfred Hitchcock presents. I love that.

I love that. G. Harror. Guillermo del Toro personally introduces every episode. He's in like a suit and he's doing a Rod Serling and all great horror filmmakers. Jennifer Kent, who did the Babadduke, David Pryor, who did The Empty Man, Vincenzo Natale who did Cube, Ana Lilleamirpour, who did Girl Walks Home Alone at night. all great filmmakers. I watched the first three.

They're all fantastic. I love GDTA. Abraham is in one. It's terrific. I love GDT. And also for my nerds, the peripheral is out. It came out last week, but I haven't watched it. Is that where you're going?

Yeah. I need to clear some time. My final one, I'm three deep on the peripheral as well. And it's really good. It's really good so far. It's good. Oh, I'm so relieved. Oh, thank goodness.

Okay, wait. So we got the. Peripheral. I haven't read the book. Where the future. Which is based on that William Gibson book that I have not read. So I'm going just based on the show. But it is Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy who produced. Oh, I'm friends with them.

I'm friends with them. They're executive producers on this. And it does have a very Westworld vibe. Like if you like Westworld, I feel like you would like this as well. I love that. You should definitely read the book after it's over too because it's. Yeah, I'm going to check out the book for sure. The book is by.

Gibson? William Gibson. It's a 2014 William Gibson novel that they're adapting. It's basically in like a near future and Chloe Grace Moretz is this video game virtual reality video game tester. She's great at video games. So these companies sent her these new VR games to like play it and test out and give them feedback. And she tries this one game and it's like very cutting edge VR to where it doesn't just feel like a game. It feels like you are really in this like alternate world playing through this like spy, very high level conspiracy spy mission, but then I don't want to give anything more away. Okay, good enough, good enough.

Layers and layers of twists. It's not what, the world that she's going to is not what you think. Has Zuckerberg bought the rights to this yet to rename meta into the peripheral? It's a pretty company. He can't afford to anymore. Hey, oh. Yeah. It's a little bit of a scary take on a meta, on a, what of the implication.

of a metaverse kind of world. I mean, the last thing I was going to say, the last thing I was going to say, there's another great Australian crime drama on Netflix that was it, I think, Cannes earlier this year. The Stranger with Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris,

who's the bad guy from the Mission of Possible movies. He's Solomon Lane, Ethan Hunt's nemesis from the Mission of Possible movies. A lot. It's based on it, it's based on a true story from Australia, and it's about I didn't even know this was a real term, but it's a certain kind of sting operation called a Mr. Big Sting, where you convince a criminal that he's being recruited to join like a cartel. And then the cartel is like, we want you to join our cartel.

We don't care about what crimes you've done. But before we let you join, you have to tell us about your background as a criminal. So we make sure you don't get the whole organization in trouble. And that's how you trick the guy into confessing. Love it. So it's a, it's this real story about this time they pulled this very elaborate Mr. Bigsting on this suspected murderer. Really fascinating stuff. All right.

So just to be clear, we got the peripheral, which is on Amazon. That's on Amazon. That's Amazon Prime video. Then my guy, GDT, because I've interacted with him on the, on the Twitter, the social media site. He used to shop at the video store where I were. Well, he follows me and I've had exchanges with him because I love his film so much. So shout out to GDT. I'm going to watch that.

I'm going to watch the peripheral. You're fantastic. Yeah. And then finally, we got a, the stranger, which, uh, this sounds great to me. This sounds to me a little bit like, um, Sicario. Am I in the right zone? Yeah. Well, I mean, less action, more of a, more of a thriller, like a crime thriller, but very much

like a procedural, like step by step. Here's exactly how the cops sort of like found this guy and like how they got, how they seduced him into really believing their story. but it's very well done, really smart. It reminds me of maybe Shotcaller. I don't know if you ever saw that, but that was a fantastic, very hard to watch film, but I loved Shotcaller.

That kind of where it's like the criminal story, but it's also very deep about the characters and the emotions and the personalities and like, yes, it's very much like that, like slow burn. And I just want to give one other suggestion. I watched House of Gucci. Have either of you seen House of Gucci? Sure.

No, yeah. Oh, no. No, no, go watch it the House of the Gucci movie. I enjoyed it very much. Tassar Gucci, this film is so great. You got a Lady Gaga, she plays. No, you don't understand a great performance of a Jared Ledo with the prosthetics. He got so many prosthetics and he's the bald of the bastard.

And he's a freaking fantastical. He's acting in a different film. Like you've got Pacino doing this very subtle, very, very, you know, like, very, like, thoughtful. where you've got Adam Driver doing his own thing. You've got Lady Gaga playing like a vampire. You've got Jared Ledo doing whatever he's doing. It's great. The four main characters are over, I don't want to say overacting,

but they're so in it as performances that you literally, how this movie did not become Wolf of Wall Street level meme, this is the wolf of Wall Street. It's just because people didn't see it. They didn't see it. It's so good. Lady Gaga is unbelievable. It's incredible.

The Star Wars kid, he's always great and he is awesome. Adam Drive. Adam Driver, wonderful. And then you've got these. Jeremy Irons. So great. Jeremy Irons. Amazing.

And then you have these two bit parts. And Jerry Irons are both in this. Yeah. Then you have, Picino and Jericho. Chino and Jericho. No, no, no, no. It is, it's literally.

every Academy Award waiting actor just being given free reign. Yeah. Ridley's holding no one back. He's just do your thing. Really, he's like, go. You interpret it on it. Just be you. He's also, the needle drops are insane. Because it's, it's set all across the 70s and 80s, but Ridley refuses to use a single song in the appropriate era. So you'll be, he'll put like heart of glass on. So you'll be like, okay, we must be around. 1984 and then it'll be like

1976. Like that's wrong. That's wrong. That's wrong. That's wrong. Wow. Just everybody watch this. House of Gucci is so good across the boards. And shock caller, absolutely amazing. There's all your deep cut, folks. You have five. Shot caller, I've seen twice.

Just the performance in it are unbelievable. All right, they have, Molly, you have something you love right now? I'm just trying to find time to watch TV. All I care about right now is the peripheral. I'm like a laser. Like a heat seeking missile in the peripheral. And all I need is like three freaking hours of my life.

I thought it was going to be more like cerebral trippy, heady and it is. But there's also a lot of act. Like it's an action thriller kind of thing. I mean, I read that book like three times. It's amazing. Wow.

I'm so excited for this. And I've heard that the, that it's really, really well done. So that's all I care about this weekend. That's all I care about. Nobody call me. I got this one Halloween party.

Are they going to that? Are they going to do a devs season three or is it not over? Devs is done, I believe. I think Garland is totally done with that and he's moved on to other stuff. All right, there you go. All right, everybody. That's it for lawn. Everybody follow Twitter.com slash L-O-N-S.

And always feel free on the Twitter to play Stump the Lawn. You tell him two or three movies, restaurants, dishes, colors, seasons, countries to visit, obscure political figures or philosophers and then he'll tell you a movie or a streaming show you'll like. We'll try it. Racing tires. Start again, make the prompt,

racing tires recommendations and you'll get some good movies out of it. I guarantee. Yeah. Bye, bye, Lon. All right. All right, Lon is gone.

Until next week. What's next, Molly? Next up, it's OK Boomer. Fantastic. Okay, it wouldn't be Friday without OK Boomer. and Rachel reporting is here to tell us what she's uncovered in her intrepid adventures around the world. Oh man, I came on too early.

Now I'm going full like 50s newscast over here. So this week I'm really excited for you guys to listen because this is actually somebody that we mentioned on the podcast before on one of my favorite episodes that we've ever done when we talked about the Minions movie, The Rise of Gru. We talked about Tommy Clark's thread. And Tommy Clark is joining me today on OK Boomer. What's his deal?

What does he, uh, he looks. So he's a head of social already? It looks like at triple whale. He is head of social at Triple Whale, which is a e-commerce operating system. I'm pretty big on Twitter, but he just has some of the best threads out there. And they've really caught my eye. And one of the most recent ones that caught my eye was when we were talking about ghost writers back on episode 1586.

He had an awesome thread all about him, not debunking, but maybe calling out some flaws or errors that he saw and the ghost writing piece that came out from Business Insider. I'm talking about how some VCs were hiring people to ghost tweet for them. And it was a great thread. So it was the one who had the kind of like the back of the envelope math. Yep, exactly.

Exactly. So it's like, Tommy, you got to come on. I also love his newsletter. It's really, really good. So you can definitely check that out. in the link in his bio, but excited for everybody to listen to Tommy. I feel like Twitter threads are a new. They're a hit or mess.

They're an art form now, right? And if you hit it, do you hate them? You hate them? Right. Yeah. I'm curious to hear you ask him like, so why are you running their lives with these? Because Twitter hasn't figured out how to deal with them yet. Threads stuff.

Like just show it to me. I don't have to click it. And then no, no, no. Yeah. They're not great. And then it's like one of those things where it's like, once you find one that's gold, it is just so good. It's like it's going into my safe.

Like I screenshot every tweet. Like we use it for the show. But most of them are just like clogging at my feet and I see bits and pieces of them. So he's definitely mastered like that art, I guess, from marketing standpoint too. But his data collection is great. How he's presenting it is easy to follow. Everything's super simple.

I kind of hope that I see more people present data like Tommy moving forward, explaining like even more difficult to understand topics besides just like The Minions movie, because I really like having the data broken up in a thread like that. Like, I think how, what he's using threads for is actually a great use case. It's better than like what I've learned, like, as a VC, like, 10 days in. Like, I don't love those, but I do love like the data point threads. Yeah, absolutely. The ones that really add value.

I can't wait. I'm excited to hear this art of the Twitter thread with Tommy Clark. Here it is. Enjoy. Awesome. Thanks, Molly. Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment.

Thank you so much, Tommy, for joining. me today on this segment of OK Boomer. We are a huge fan of your threads here. The first thread of yours that we actually featured in our podcast was way back when the Minions movie happened, The Rise of Gru, excuse me, that's like not the official title, but you had a great breakdown. And to be honest, I was following you before that Minions Breakdown. So when I was writing the show notes, I was super pumped that I was able to include that

and knew pretty much since then that I wanted to have you on the show. but recently another threat of yours caught my eye and kind of inspired me to reach out. And it was about the ghost writers that are tweeting for venture capitalists, which again, we covered in the podcast already. So we don't have to dive into that. But again, you just had one of the best breakdowns that I saw on Twitter. Incredibly well-spoken, social media expert. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for all the kind words and gassing me up like that. I really appreciate it. I'm stoked to be here. I've been watching your guys' show for a minute. And really, really stoked to be here. Awesome. Well, to dive into it first, after you're doing some research, I thought social media and writing about social media was like your main number one thing.

I follow your newsletter, the social files or social files. I know you're a creator at Workweek, and I believe that newsletter is under that umbrella. But after reading your bio and checking out your header, I realized that you're ahead of social at Triple Whale. Can you explain to everybody what Triple Whale is? and then we can dive into all the social media stuff. Yeah, so the main goal of Triple Well, it's an e-commerce SaaS company, and we help e-commerce companies need to see brands get accurate data

and use their data to scale more confidently, especially after iOS 14.5, Apple kind of introduced these rules that made advertising a lot more difficult, and it made getting accurate data a lot more difficult. So one of our main products right now is a pixel that helps these brands get accurate data. And we consolidate all this advertising data from Facebook, TikTok,

snap, whatever platforms are advertising on into a really easy to understand and consume dashboard, which makes it easy to log in, see your data. You know it's accurate, so you can actually make good advertising decisions and informing marketing with it. That's great. I think one of the cool things people can do is,

you know, they always say you can't manage what you don't measure. So tracking data is always important, but making sure that data is clean and easily understandable. It's like a whole other story. I find that a lot of times people collect data and don't really know what it means. So triple whale seems like a really useful tool. Awesome for you doing that. But that's not even what I wanted to have you on today to talk about.

I want to hear everything about the social media space and your thoughts on it. So first things first, social files. How did you get into social media marketing? Because when I'm reading it, it doesn't even sound. So I think you're around the same age as me. Maybe like a grade below me in college. I think I graduated maybe a year below. and usually sound like you have been doing this for years and years and years.

How did you become such an expert in the social media space? It's super roundabout. So just to give you some context, I graduated from college last year in December. When I first got to college, I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon. Like, I was pre-med. That was the goal. I had that plan set. Obviously, they didn't happen.

Now I get paid to make memes for a living. And I'm much happier that way. But when I was doing that, I was also playing basketball for my first year and a half in college. And during that, I got super into health and fitness and decided to switch my major, switched to nutrition science, transferred schools to Cal Poly. And when I did that, I also started up this fitness coaching side hustle. And I had to get clients. So I started an Instagram account and this whole like fitness Instagram account.

And that was my first, that was like my gateway into content creation. And I did that for about two-ish years until kind of during the pandemic, mid-2020 is when I pivoted fully into marketing because I realized that actually enjoyed the process of creating content, figuring out how to get clients more than I actually enjoyed the whole like fitness side of it. So over that two-year period, it just created a lot of really bad content until it started to not be so bad anymore and got better at it. And then it got to a point, like I said, where I enjoyed the content creation of marketing

side of it more than I enjoyed the actual fitness coaching side of it. So then pivoted into marketing, got a part-time job for a company in that industry while I was still in school, did that for another year. One of my friends that I met in that health and fitness space, from Ms. Kendall, she referred me to a freelance position more in this e-com, D to C, like media world. And I took that position during my last few months in school. When I graduated, was looking for a full-time job. They weren't ready to bring me on full time at the moment just based on resources. My current CMO slid in my DMs. All this time, I've been creating content on Twitter.

So I've been tweeting about marketing, sharing my thoughts, documenting what I believe to be true about social. My current CMO, Raba saw my work with D2C newsletter, saw my tweets, slid in my DMs. We hopped on like a 15-minute Zoom call, and that was my interview process. So very thankful I didn't have to go through like applying to 100 different jobs like most college graduates do. So that was a really interesting experience. And that's how I landed in the triple whale role. And then I've been creating content around marketing and sharing my thoughts on it for about two and a half years. And then the newsletter, social files, became like

officially social files and under work week late June of this year. But I've been more or less writing a newsletter, albeit to not very many subs up until recently for about a year and a half, two years. Gotcha. So I didn't subscribe to your newsletter until you were under Workweek. So that is really cool. And did you start off that newsletter over on Substack? Was it like weekly? Yeah. So first it was Substack and then I switched over to Beehive. And then now it's not on Beehive anymore, but not because of the platform. It's just because of like Underwork Week. We use a certain ESP and it is what it is. But big fan of what the guys that Bih are building. Got you. So I was just about to say, which one? do you prefer? I have actually reached out to the Beehive team. If you know any of them, I want to come on, I would love to talk because I'm fascinated by,

I don't know if this is necessarily the resurgence of newsletters. I don't want to say that. Maybe this is just because when I was in university, the only newsletter I actually read was Morning Brew. So it's cool saying Beehive come from the Morning Brew team. But it seems like everybody in their freaking dog is writing a newsletter. And I love it. I'm a huge newsletter junkie.

I know that's very amazing. be a hot take. I know a lot of people are like, you don't need more podcasts on world. We don't need more newsletters. I literally, I have this one platform. I believe it's called just, let me check on Twitter really quickly because I actually just tweeted at them. I used to use this one platform called Feedly, right? All the newsletters that I subscribe to, I could categorize in this different platform. So it's nice like not clogging on my inbox. Being able to organize them by sector, I loved. but it is you have to pay for it monthly and I was like I know what like I don't know about that one so I'm experimenting on different platforms and the platform using now is called newsletters but it's spelled kind of weird and basically it takes all my newsletters creates another like email address and I just go to this website it's basically like a different RSS feed so it doesn't um you know just jam up my my normal inbox um which is already a little bit nuts to organize I'm sure um for you the same way. So here it is. Newsletters app. Okay, it just has two S's and app, newsletters app,

and that is its Twitter name. I highly recommend anybody that's looking to like clean out their inbox to check that out. Something that I've noticed is since like organizing and going through like all my newsletters is I don't think a lot of people are subscribed to some of the newsletters I'm subscribed to because a ton of them are honestly written by my friend. and I think my friends are industry experts but how can these people scale their newsletters and one of them I want to shout out it's called restaurant adjacent by my friend Paul

wonderful newsletter he spends like he like he is going to grad school in Columbia such a good writer has literally worked in the restaurant industry like as literally just like a horrible position like in the you know back in like the kitchen where he gets like horror stories securing his like perspective on the restaurant industry and like the stuff adjacent is so cool but the newsletter isn't growing.

What advice do you have? Sorry for that rainbow, no, you're good. I think that's where social comes into play. Okay. For me, I like using Twitter and LinkedIn. I gravitate a lot towards writing.

So, I mean, obviously social can include a lot of different things like TikTok and now there's a lot of short form video. I'm honestly not a big fan of creating content in that medium. I just don't enjoy it. So I focus more on writing. That's part of the reason why I have a newsletter. But for that type of content, I like Twitter and LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn right now.

in terms of organic reach. It's just absurd. Like, it's very, very... I post on LinkedIn pretty consistently, and I like to think my content's good, but it's not like, some of it's not that crazy and just consistently growth just keeps happening week over week and posts keep popping off. So I think if you're starting from scratch, LinkedIn is very promising. Like literally post on LinkedIn or like going through the LinkedIn newsletter feature?

Oh, post. Yeah, I don't use a newsletter feature. Just straight LinkedIn post. But I think the main theme there, to answer your question, as far as growing the newsletter, you need to create demand on other platforms and funnel that to the email. Because there's no discovery. Like, if you're just writing a email, it could be amazing, but no one's seeing it unless they're already signed up. And to grow, you're pretty much relying on your current readers to share it, which some of them might.

And if your newsletter is really good, referrals will happen. But I think if the goal is to really scale, you want to be on these other platforms that have the discoverability become known on these. these platforms, get your content out there, your ideas out there, and provide enough value there that then someone will want to go read your thoughts in a longer form format in your newsletter. So I found your newsletter from Twitter, so this totally makes sense. I believe I actually did find it from one of your threads. I think it was like at the bottom at one of your threads. Yeah.

As somebody that hates threads, I'm a thread hater. I'm so sorry. Freaking hate them. But I like yours. What makes a good thread? Can you please explain why I like them? I feel, specifically, I hate the ones written by, I'm so sorry to target an audience, investors or other people in general capital explaining things.

You mean, you mean written by ghostwriters writing for venture capitalists. I hate, I don't know why, because I've definitely done those before as well, like on my own platform, like done the threads. And I look at them and I'm like, yo, these are ugly. They're unorganized. Nobody, like, physically, they don't get a ton of engagement. How are you getting these like high engagement threads? I love them.

Yeah. One, I appreciate that. That's kind of the vibe I'm going for for my threads because I don't, I don't want to say I don't like threads. I love threads when they're good. But I just can't stand, like you said, the generic. Like, here are 21 websites that feel illegal to know and 10 different accounts to use that same exact hook and it just becomes super played out. And the biggest thing is like, just make the threads valuable. Make it about like a really compelling topic that you're actually an expert in instead of just copy pasting stuff from Wikipedia or doing things.

because you see it work for other people. Any thread that I write, I try to make it about a topic that's relevant and that someone reading this will actually get something valuable out of it versus, oh, I know this is a format that does well. So let me game the algorithm and just try to grow an audience at all costs. Because if you do that, it might work. And you see it work for a lot of accounts where it's like they get these crazy engagement threads, but the engagement isn't from people that are going to buy from them

or want to hear their thoughts or actually be invested in them long term. So for me, it's just write about stuff that I have experience and that I consider myself, I don't want to say an expert, but I know my stuff when it comes to social, so I feel confident writing about that. And just trying to add value as cheesy and cliché as that is, it's true. Gotcha. And something that's interesting about your background that I've noticed. And before we even hopped on this recording, I put two and two together.

you said that you went to school in California or from California, but you currently live in Texas. And friend of the pod, Danny Miranda, I know, is also moving to Austin. It seems like a pretty big place for people our age to being like fawking to. It's super fun city. I love Austin. And something I've noticed also that's similar between you and Danny is that start with fitness and Instagram.

I feel like Instagram super easy to plateau on. you saw a brand and they were plateauing over on that platform. What advice would you have? Yeah, Instagram's tough right now. I think, well, one, if I was starting from scratch, I probably wouldn't build an Instagram account from scratch just because it takes so much work relative to other platforms. If I already had an Instagram presence and I ran into a plateau,

but I wanted to keep growing, I would lean into short form video content, most likely. At least start including it if you aren't already. I don't think you have to pivot all the way to reels. But Instagram is literally paying people to post reels and inflating metrics and really, really incentivizing it because they want to catch up to TikTok. They want to make sure that TikTok doesn't win that race. I don't know how that's going to go for them, especially since Zuck apparently spent absurd amounts of money on the Metaverse this past year. So that'll be interesting.

But I think if I was on Instagram wanted to break a plateau, I would lean more into short form video content and really make sure that was a cool. core part of my content strategy. I don't think you need to ditch all other types of content because that goes back to what we're talking about with the threads. Yeah. Just because something might work for the algorithm and you might be able to get more engagement or whatever in the short term doesn't mean it's the best play for your brand in the long term. But you do want to play into what's working to an extent.

Like with my threads, like I write threads because I know they'll do well. Yeah. And you do certain things in those threads because you know it'll help with the algorithm. So there's this balance of flowing with what's working, but also staying true to your brand. But to answer your questions distinctly, I would lean more into short form video content if I was trying to break a plateau on Instagram. How do you know what's going to do well in the algorithm over on Twitter? I started tweeting at the start of this year.

I wasn't a super big active person on Twitter. I actually didn't put my job title or anything to do with our podcast, which is like a verified account in my bio until a few months ago. and I noticed before that, like, I know that wasn't the only thing that attributed to my growth in followers, which I don't have that many, but I noticed the more I tweeted, the more followers I got. And I'm not sure if it's like a volume thing necessarily over there. Besides tweeting a lot, what other advice do you have if somebody like me or somebody that doesn't necessarily have an account that's tied to a brand? Like, I'm not the This Beacon Startups account. how could like a founder, for example, grow their account? Yeah, I think a really underrated aspect of Twitter growth is relationship building

and like actually becoming friends with dope people. And because what happens and what happened with me was I was posting a lot of content. I haven't posting content for four years in marketing probably for two, two and a half years. And what happened is early on, you post a lot of really good stuff and no one really engaged with it. Maybe you get a few likes here and there. Yeah.

kind of just a grind. But then one person sees your stuff that also has like a bigger audience and they see it and they're like, oh, this kid writes some dope stuff. I actually want to support him and engage and share and kind of lift him up too or lift her up too. And that kind of takes you to like a new level where it's like you have this relationship where they're sharing this person is sharing your content. And you start building relationships with bigger and bigger people and more notable

and notable people. assuming you're providing value and you know what you're talking about, you'll start to build all these really cool relationships and he just want to support each other. So if someone sees a thread that I put out, they'll support it or retweet it just because like, we're actually friends and like we have a relationship and we've added value to each other's lives. I think that's a really underrated part. And it's not even, that's not about gaming the algorithm.

That's just about being a good person and like adding value to people in the industry and building those relationships over the long term. and I think that's a really underrated part of gaining momentum on these social platforms. But the weird part is you can't really approach, like, you don't want to approach that from the perspective of, oh, I want to grow on Twitter, so I'm going to connect with these people. It's like, no, you just want to connect with dope people. And eventually it might turn into something. Yeah.

Gotcha. That's so interesting. Seeing that you, I saw like one over I was on your Twitter page that you've been tweeting since 2019. And so that explains a lot. Seeing how consistent you are, too, I think is really interesting. One debate that I see a lot on all social media platforms is that quality versus quantity topic. And I've talked about it to a few other people that are interested in the social media space on the podcast before, including Danny.

If you were going to pick between the two, which one would you gravitate toward and why? This is such a cop-out answer, but I don't think you can, I think both are very, very important. To give a little more nuance there, I think early on quantities, very important because you don't know what's going to work. You don't know what your audience resonates with. You don't know what type of content you enjoy creating. You don't know what's going to hit. But once you start to understand the topics and the ideas that work well, then you can be a little bit more selective. And then I think it becomes a bit more important to focus on quality. Because especially as you grow, if you're trying to be a content creator, you're trying to have

this online presence. It's exhausting. And yeah, maybe you might be able to sprint for two weeks. or a month with this insane amount of content, but you're going to burn out. Yeah. So I think the golden rule and kind of what I would keep in mind is post as much quantity as you can while maintaining a certain level of quality and not burning out. Because if you start posting too much, again, you might be able to sprint for a short period of time, but you're going to burn out, you're going to fall off. And if you fall off and stop posting, well, now you're kind of screwed.

Yeah. But if you don't post enough, if you're like being a perfectionist or you're too scared to post because you're afraid that someone's going to be a hater or it's not going to hit or you're not going to get any likes, well, then you're not going to have any luck either. So it's this constant balance. I think early on, quantity matters a bit more because you just need to get yourself out there. But as you start to get better at what you do, get better at content creation, get better at understanding trends and best practices on these platforms, then you can be a little bit more

selective with quality. But it's this constant dance, this constant balance. I don't think anyone really has it truly figured out. out. But yeah, that would be my take there. Yeah, I think the two people that I've had on the podcast that are like on polar opposites of the side, at least from like the outside in, is Danny, as we said again, I think Danny's a totally a quantity guy. Not that all this stuff is an absolutely great quality, but the other person I'm talking about Nate O'Brien who produces YouTube videos maybe once a month.

And they are just like these insane high quality YouTube videos. So that's always something that I think about because those are two creators that I look to up to quite a lot. And in between there, there are two other creators that we've had on the podcast. If anybody's interested in listen to other OK Boomer segments on the middle spectrum would probably be Jules Turpac, amazing stuff, super high quality, pretty consistent. And another YouTuber Taylor Bell, who, again, I don't know if it's necessarily weekly content, but her cuts and things like that. She's obviously putting a lot of time an effort, but she's not clipping each one down like Danny is making a ton of TikToks after them. So really cool to see everybody who's joined me on the podcast and whose professions has been,

you know, content creation, like span this quality versus quantity spectrum that there is. And I know this is significant startups. We're trying to up our TikTok game. So if anybody has any advice or anything that you think we should be posting on the TikTok, right now we're like resulting in clipping parts of the show. but I think it would be funny for Jason or Molly to make TikTok sometime. I don't know if they'd want to,

but that's something I want to fly by them. But thank you so much for coming on the podcast. If people wanted to go find you over on Twitter or on LinkedIn or wherever you're most active, where can they find you? Yeah, I would say most active data that I spend too much time on Twitter because if you want to get in touch with me,

probably over there, just at T. Clark Media. And then I'm also on LinkedIn. A lot of times the content on both those platforms that I post is very similar. I'll just free purpose. It just makes my life easier. What schedule? Do you use a scheduler?

Depends. So I'll go back and forth. If I'm really on top of my stuff, I'll schedule out some tweets in advance. But lately you really haven't been just because I've been just all over the place with work and my own content. So it's kind of just on the fly. I find that the on the fly stuff tends to perform better.

Oh, 100%. Just because it's like stuff that, like you're actually feeling. And I don't know, it just hits different. I don't, that's one of those things where it's hard to explain. But yeah. the on-the-fly stuff tends to do pretty well. But Twitter, most active on there, LinkedIn also post some stuff over there, and then obviously have the newsletter.

And I would say those are the three main places where I put out content right now. Awesome. Can't wait to check it out. And next time in Austin, I'm going to have to get a Torchie's Taco with you and Danny. Yeah, of course. I'm looking forward to that. Awesome. Thanks, thanks, Tommy.

Yeah, thanks so much. Okay, everybody, thanks for listening. What a great week. And it's not over yet. Sunday is VC Sunday School. We do a really deep dive. into just how climate tech seems to be still on fire and the valuations are still high. And how should a venture capitalist like Molly is now deal with an overheated market in a recession

slash down marketing chaos? How do you deal with that? If everybody's willing to overpay for startups, what's the right thing to do as a capital allocator? We also talk about warrants, which are showing up more and more as people do down rounds, quasi-down rounds. And then Molly has another amazing climate interview. this is another journalist-turned investor, a trend that's been occurring. So we'll see you on Sunday

for a nice walk. You do your Peloton. You go get some brunch, get your eggs Benedict, Florentine, whatever your jam is, listen to the show. And we'll be back on Monday as well. And then next week, I'm going to talk about Twitter. I've been on a little bit of a gag order, as you might have seen with legal issues going on. But it looks like the bird is free. And I can talk about it all next week on This Week in Startups.