Writing Twitter Threads 101 with George Mack, Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole | Ship 30 for 30 🚢

thanks everyone for joining this is now our gosh cole this is our fourth fifth fourth i think yeah fourth uh kind of ship 30 countdown audience building webinar uh today is going to be just an absolute crash course in writing twitter threads and we have with us an absolute legend in writing those threads george mack uh george thanks for joining us today if you want to give anyone who might not be familiar i don't know how they wouldn't be if they're they're dialing in here but just a little on your background and maybe how you

think of writing twitter threads in your kind of creative arsenal yeah so yeah as dickie mentioned my name's george um i've been sort of uh tinkering around on twitter for a few years now uh largely accidental which kind of snowballed a little bit uh my background is primarily like uh growth marketing so come out pl always explored how different platforms work how different algorithms work um and then that kind of skewed in with my writing accidentally um but yeah primarily split between growing out high growth businesses and then twitter's kind of the outlet to stress

from really what got you started writing in the first place was it just i'm interested in these things and i want to curate it for myself or it's a good question um what got me started i've always been like writing so um just using particularly notes on my phone notes on my ipad of just getting down ideas i just find it quite a it's a way of capturing a current thought process it's usually linked to mood or state i'm in ie if i'm on caffeine or anything i want to immediately capture down a certain thought

i've had and then review it later so that's how i primarily got into writing it wasn't really about necessarily a love for writing it was more that's a good for i want to capture it what i what i love about the idea of i think you said you know i have a growth marketing background is uh you can't go to school for growth marketing not really it's kind of a self-taught you just you enter it you figure it out i assume that's what you found too a hundred percent yeah so i was at a company

called social chain which is again basically manchester uh went from kids in their bedroom and they kind of built it up to a public company and everybody there was sort of under 25 and a lot of them were university dropouts so it's very much yes something that's insanely self-taught and the one thing they have there was like this concept of like the ever-changing landscape because the internet is an ever-changing landscape so even if there would be even if you could put the best like university degree together for growth marketing by the time you've managed to

get it out it's it's it's it's done it's outdated yeah amazing yeah this will this will be really interesting you know as vicky said we we do these office hours in ship 30 and one of our sessions is all around twitter twitter thread writing but um we pulled a bunch of your examples so we can walk through you know why some of your threads worked or maybe your perspective on what you would do differently this time but um i think it'd be great to just walk through and actually get your perspective on a lot of

the things that we've put together and other things you've learned what you've seen work not work um dick you want to just dive in yeah let's go for it so um yeah i think the the premise of this is writing twitter threads is a a little bit of an art right it's not like writing a blog post it's not like writing individual tweets it's kind of its own thing and it's got such a unique set of constraints with 280 characters per uh tweet you really can't go over like 10 to 12 if you want anyone

to read it and you're competing in a sea of you know very easy things that if you don't grab attention in your very first tweet it's going to go nowhere so it's kind of this interesting creative medium that brings a lot of different aspects from copywriting storytelling all into one thing and so coming up with frameworks for doing it effectively i think just brings together so many of these different principles of of writing and and that's why we enjoy it so much yeah yeah i assume george when you sit down to write a a twitter

thread it's not it's a completely different thing than sitting down to write a blog post or a email newsletter or something how do you how do you think about it it's a good question um i'd say the way i usually approach it is it's usually a topic i've been kind of obsessed about like that that's the way i've always done it um ironically not purely from a growth my even i can see the the growth marketing elements work for me it's always been more art so it's it's just a matter of a topic i've been

thinking about and then how that's gonna go together in a story that flows seems seamlessly like a funnel from the first thing all the way to the end um and you just you've essentially the way i'd approach it is you essentially break it down and you go okay um again i always look it from the art but i can then take a growth marketing perspective and put that on so if i take a growth marketing perspective you just essentially look at it from okay um the way social media platforms essentially work is every piece let's

say for example you have 100 followers and you post out a piece of content there that will then get they will almost split test it to a sub percentage of your audience let's say five percent three percent somebody's actually published this for the youtube algorithm i can find it and i'm sure you can attach it on the show notes i had the exact way the youtube algorithm works is quite similar the split testing on that subsets of your audience and if they like it it gets a higher quality score and based off what quality score

it gets is the higher the distribution it gets um and then obviously that factors in when you get other people's audiences collaborating on that but you essentially assume that the more likes comments engagement it gets then the the greater reach is going to get and but then that the that's the growth market has happened right but then you have to take the artist out does the i heard somebody say the other day that if you if you a b test a website relentlessly you end up with a porn site right so you can't mind just

go down purely growth mind i think that's sometimes an issue you see on twitter now where people are just doing it for the sake of doing it rather than doing it for some kind of genuine art i try to put content out there that's uniquely different and you can do the growth marketing perspective and if it's purely to grow a business then yeah that's different but it is purely for the writing sake then i'd say don't lose the art of it because then the art is actually part of the growth marketing ironically as well so

it's a bit more complex and a bit more nuanced this is uh i've never thought about it this way now i'm just kind of riffing on what you just said but i'm curious what you think and also dicky what you think of this too is you know there's this big obsession of like find your niche what's my niche you know what what's my thing and really through that lens of the platform is going to split test your content to the first you know three percent of your audience really the idea of niching down is just

how do i get clearer and clearer about what type of person i'm attracting so that that first three percent the likelihood of them engaging goes higher and higher because i know exactly what they're gonna want so like do you do you think about that in terms of you sit down to write something and you go hey i really have this great idea i'm curious about this thing but it doesn't really gel with what i typically write about how do you make that decision that's a really that's a really good question the honest answer is i

don't have the answer so i thought a lot about this i think the way the future of social networks is going to be or the way i design it is you'd always want to fork personalities right so i've i've got this issue if you'd be obvious issues where there's certain accounts out there especially as a brit i follow so many american accounts and that i love and they start talking about american sports and my heart like this is nonsense this is literally using i'll see like the raiders or or whatever i don't even know what

that means right same way if i was talking about manchester city it goes over people's heads yeah i think long-term what i'd actually like to do is i go in dickie's profile and i can see like 10 forks of content and i go okay i like the mental model stuff i like the writing stuff i like the business stuff but the raiders no like that's not for me and i think that's the way it should go because the issue you face right now is people then this weird kind of content loop that they end up

in where they feel that they have to get in that niche um i've chatted to a few people about this it's an interesting one how you break out of it i i think the platforms are kind of broken because you've got a few ways so you have like a a youtuber in the uk a guy called ksi and he wants to chat about crypto so he's just created a completely new account which is ksi crypto um so that you could literally fork off with a separate account and then you've got 10 different accounts going i

know jack butcher from um visualize value he did that and then twitter started suspending his accounts so platforms aren't currently built it's actually built for a niche which is quite frustrating um because it limits people's personality um i think it's that's more of a wider question for social media hmm that's a fascinating thought because i i feel sometimes of like uh i know i'm not going to write about this because i don't think it'll get a very good response given that followers i have i don't think would engage with it so it becomes almost self-limiting

that if you can't fork you know but that that i could see how you could go to someone's profile and click yeah show me this this this not these three and then you know that that's a cool idea that is and the language too i mean i assume you use that language because of your familiarity with blockchain and that's kind of how it works too but that that is a fascinating way of thinking about it i never thought about that yeah i i think that's the way the future is going to go um and i

i think there's i mean obviously we're supposed to talk about it for us today there's a slight fork in the conversation ironically of this i call it like width versus depth and what's interesting is certain twitter threads i can get a huge amount of reach with but the depth i get is different so you've got like the um the john do i think of like what gets measured gets managed and the kind of inverse of that is what you can't measure you can't ever manage and the issue with twitter for us to some extent is

it's very easy to kind of get feedback on impressions likes and reach but less kind of easy to get input on did people like save i guess you've got that save read-wise thing but people just write that anyway do they actually save it and revisit it did they actually use it the information and i think that like dms is quite a useful proxy is like a depth measurement that people dm you and say hey that was one of the best things i've ever read that's probably a bet like you want to pair that with the

likes and the comments the same way you want to pair um if for example you like so like i had somebody message me saying that if they could buy it as an nft they would i was like you you want the same way going back to the growth market versus artists you want the depth versus width because trust me you can go down the width rabbit hole but like i said you'll just end up with a with a porn site so you kind of always don't want to neglect that which when you're starting out it's

like i just want to get as much reaching impressions but once you get there you realize that the depth of the audience is much more important than the width don't get me wrong the whip is important too but you need the depth i've seen firsthand going back to the growth marketing background of facebook pages and instagram pages back in the day that used to get 2 billion 3 billion views but couldn't sell 100 worth of product and you don't ever want that scenario yeah we call this density the density of an audience responds to something

right you could write something that's like life advice that everyone reads and says oh that was great or you can write something almost very specific that one one thousandth of that many people are going to read it but for every person that reads it it resonates so heavily that the total amount of like emotional response i think is is really what you can't measure but you can tell there's one there's one example slightly off topic that i found which is good it's called i think it's iyc yeah iyc.com luxury yacht yachting worldwide they sell yachts

online and it gets about 70 000 visits per month and i was thinking like the visits to that is the perfect example of depth versus width um yeah yeah and it's it's a really interesting thing we'll we'll uh i promise we'll get into the tactical stuff here here for a second but we're we're riffing is uh you know i've been writing online for probably a decade at this point and george i'm sure you know you're speaking to it so clearly you've experienced that dicky you've been at twitter for a year now so now you're starting

to experience it i've had hundreds of millions of views on my stuff and like the first few times it happens it's that dopamine hit you're like this is super cool and wow i just got two million views on this thing and then like you do it five or six or 10 or 20 or 50 more times and then you kind of are like what's really the point of this like like that's great like that's amazing and it's a it's a great skill set i think to learn how to write things that have that reach but

it's really i've just noticed this for myself and george i'm curious if this has been your experience too like when you first start the game you kind of think reach is the goal and then as you keep playing it you're like it's not i don't really care if i get 10 million views or a million views or 10 000 views it's the density that i actually really want i want who are people finding this super valuable are they willing to retweet it are they willing to attach it to themselves and their identity what questions do

they have can i build a relationship with them do you have you found the same 100 um there's a very very good talk um key for a boy how to operate i think a lot of the principles come from uh high output management the book but essentially one of the points he has in it has always stuck with me where you want pairing metrics right so if for example you have a customer support team and you set them the goal of reducing the fraud rate they then start treating every customer like a potential fraudster um

which you don't want right um so what you do want alongside that metric is like high quality customer feedback so then you're not just kind of ending up with a sku one way so even though the the width is important if you only optimize for that you end up in the kind of the trap that you mentioned there um so 100 the issue is is how do you create those depth metrics and it's tough and i think 10 years from now we'll look back at the current model of social media and and we'll have them

because i think the way it is right now is a bit broken so you have to create them yourself and say like dms is a great metric to go off quality of people that follow you is a great message to go off replies is a great one relationships that you can build is a great one and kind of keep a rough track of that in your notes because otherwise if you and don't get me wrong you may want to go off the witch metrics as well but this yeah as you as you mentioned then nicholas

is is uh so much more important once you get past that initial rat taking the hit of the cocaine um yeah yeah dinky dicky you know i mean you had that that early thread right you got like all the all the cocaine for like three days exactly and then it's like okay i might as well never ride again right i wrote one they got 45 000 and i was on the little hamster wheel like for three or four days and they just had me i'm like i gotta break out yeah and then and then you

start to they get you on the drip and then you keep coming back so no that's just so important of the pairing metric is you know fun followers or negative replies to saying something like this is not useful right you you need some kind of some kind of like negative indicator of people saying yeah this isn't that valuable you're clearly trying for reach at this point or something like that like it's not easy to measure but there's a lot there of who are you optimizing for at some point you want only to put things out

with like a a filter of is a smart person gonna follow me because of this or something like that uh it could be a good way of doing it yeah i i i i think we're out kind of just looping the same point i'd almost apply it to music as well where you don't want to be or maybe you do right if you do want to be the the number one pop artist in the world that's what you want to be and you can you and you take pride in that form of music but i

don't there's another like sadder story than you know the sort of pop artist that kind of resents their own music doesn't want to play sold out so you've got to but you've got to build those metrics for yourself because those metrics don't exist so you have to have a high sense of quality and taste rather than just pumping [ __ ] out for the sake of it there's there's a fascinating um ted talk daniel maybe if you do a quick google search you can throw in the chat for people it's by elizabeth gilbert and she

wrote eat pray love and the ted talk was all about like creative inspiration and basically in her talk she says i have had to come to the conclusion and realization that i've already written my most popular work in my lifetime eat pray love was just like a monumental bestseller sold a gazillion copies on oprah's book list like every achievement right and she's basically like i'm never gonna out do that in my whole lifetime so now what's what's my inspiration to write and i think that's a really interesting question because so many people want to start

writing online and they chase the once i get a million views my whole life changes right once i get five million views my whole life changes and the question i love posing to people is okay tomorrow you will write your most read article blog post twitter thread whatever ever it's gonna get a hundred million views whatever and you're never gonna write something ever again that exceeds that highest pinnacle now what and i think it's an interesting way of kind of reflecting on like well then why are you writing like what's the real purpose because if

you take away the carrot then what do you have it's a great point man that's really really good you know so daniel through the uh the link in the chat if anyone wants to watch it it's a great it's a great ted talk but all right let's get into some tactical stuff uh i i found this funny i almost deleted the slide but uh dickie you're on here and george you're on here i'm sure uh these numbers are outdated both are crushing it um these were some of the things that we talked about dickie this

was your insanely viral thread doing five million this was in your first like six months of writing on twitter too this just blows my mind the scale of twitter when i pulled up this metric for the slide i mean to have something seen by five million people that when at the time i had 9 000 followers just it's absurd how these social networks work and so you know you pull these things up and it the ability for things to go viral that provide value organically just absurd so yep i saw this and i was like

wow yeah this is this is why we uh we preach over and over again you know if you want to start writing online don't start with a blog a blog does not have the distribution flywheel that a social platform does you know no one knows your blog exists this this was another one you know six hundred thousand views it's another six hundred thousand you've i've done these since then thinking we need to update the slides yeah exactly exactly so here's a couple um and george we pulled some of your examples too these are kind of

the different pieces that we've thought about with threads i would love to get your take also on how you assemble them how you organize the information but one of the big things is you know that we like to share is that you know there's essentially three different types of threads that we found that work really well ironically the three examples dickey that you pulled of george's these were the three that you used oh i tried i tried to find them yeah yeah okay cool so yeah the the three are you're either telling a story you're

giving a framework or it's very actionable takeaways very tactical you know do this achieve this result um there are threads that do all three combined and there are threads that do each one separately so we're going to walk through examples of each one kind of break it down but the big thing that we point out is it's this lead and tweet the lead in tweet is essentially the make or break it's what tells everyone this is what it's about this is who it's for and this is what you're gonna get out of it and if

you aren't able to answer those three questions then the reader's gonna sit there and go i don't know what this is i don't know who if it's for me and i don't know what i'm going to get out of it so george i'm curious when you sit down to write your your lead in tweets are you thinking how am i going to frame this for the reader how am i going to hook it for them like what's your process there yeah it's a good it's a good question um sometimes sometimes i think about it sometimes

i don't depends again i'll have this this duality of the art versus the growth um i i'd say yeah there's very very easy ways of just being able to hook it i think the shorter the writing the better i think the again it's just the the more it just makes like more makes somebody want to click through the better so it's just there's not that much complexity it's just you you've always got to assume that if you guys haven't been on the this is true of all social content and it it just also applies to

twitter threads but when you're on um it's in london you've got the tube and you go up these escalators like that and savvy marketers have figured out okay you just put ads here right and that's kind of what the social media news feeds like if you ever watch people just scroll through stop scroll through stop scroll through stop so you're catching people usually at their worst when they're kind of tired after lunch looking for a quick escape and it's really interesting just even from a growth perspective you see people when they design an advert they're

really happy with it but then when i watch the adverts they watch it's completely different so you kind of i think the first thing to do is just be mindful of your consumption so when you're going through twitter or any platform just noticing what stops you so even now tiktok now for example is a platform and i'll just notice the trends that stop me and then i go okay if it stops me it probably works on other people but instead people work from some kind of false ideal whereas if you just observe yourself it's quite

easy and then if you just look at what vicky mentioned earlier in one of his tweets like the advanced search feature if you just go for advanced search and then filter by somebody's most engaged tweets you can kind of just see the data for itself like the science is there really but again i think you have to balance the science of the art because if you just become a regurgitation machine yet it might work but as you mentioned earlier nicholas what's the point so is balancing those two things yeah we call we call that um

you know being uh you're either a passive reader or an active reader you know you're either just passively scrolling or you're actively it's it's such an interesting thing because every person you know when we do these these uh zooms and we talk to other people whose work we respect and we're like hey you're crushing it let's let's break down what works universally across the board everyone shares the same thing in common in terms of you're an active reader we're all scrolling through like dissecting and learning and going why did this work why did this work

and nobody that is kind of winning the game of writing online is a passive reader they're all active readers so i find that interesting and i i think just one last point on the lead-in is what's interesting about twitter is you're competing with just other like bite-sized content whereas so that you have to focus on if if what you've written is high quality and the the worst thing you could do is have a tremendous thread with no just no effort at all into the lead in and so no one's even going to read it they're

just going to scroll past and i i mean you're competing with just the ability to keep going and have this depth of information all below that never gets seen kind of ups the ante for you to at least have some kind of incentive to to write something compelling yeah yeah george you uh the way that you structure your lead in tweets i'm i'm excited to look at these because it's a little bit different and stylistically it's different than i typically structure mine or indicate how you structure yours uh but just to point out you know

again every reader has these same three questions you know what is this what's it about who is it for and what am i going to get in return and so just to point this out here dickie and yours right what is this about it's about dave david ogilvie's rules on writing that's okay cool if i'm interested in that i'm gonna stop if i'm not i'm on to the next one you want to force that binary decision the second is okay well who is this for right like all right if i'm interested in writing and here

this is really interesting it's framed in this story format in 1982 david wrote an internal memo to the employees of his advertising agency titled how to write right so in not so many words basically saying hey if you are interested in learning how to write we're going to tell you from this credible person and then the promise right what do you get in return as the reader and then just 10 bullets he put together a master class in effect of writing here's a breakdown of each one so what do you get you get to learn

the master class that david ogilvy gave in 1982 and that is going to teach you how to write and so it's these three components you know george i was looking through your threads if you can get there in one sentence great if it takes you three or four different sentences great but it doesn't it's not length or word count or anything like that that matters it's just you have to answer those questions for the reader otherwise they go i don't know why i should stop and give you my attention so let's look at a couple

examples here these are just two of the different frameworks i mean this is super in the weeds that we talk about but you know this ada framework how are you grabbing someone's attention hooking their interest you know peaking their desire and then there's some sort of action here's what you're gonna get in in return we're going to distribute these slides if you want to go back and reference them everyone uh and then we've got this other framework as well right problem agitation solution this is very copywriting uh 101 you know here's the problem twist the

knife a little bit hey this is this is what happens when you don't solve the problem and then here's the solution so that's that can be another really great framework to look at as well so george looking at uh this one this thread i found fascinating this is uh if you take the framework right so uh you see sahil bloom uh write about frameworks all the time this is like a curation of all the frameworks so you're like hey i'm not just going to break down one framework for you i'm going to introduce you to

a ton of different frameworks so what uh what sparked this thread how did you get here how did you think about it i wrote this one on a beach when i was bored the honest answer um and i just was thinking uh i just going through different races of like if this than that i'm just kind of combining them all in my notes and then wait the way it usually works is i have a couple ideas i'm just drawing [ __ ] in my notes all the time and then i'll just there'll be a loose

like sentence there and i'll go okay can i turn this loose sentence into like seven or eight bullets and then go yeah okay and so you're almost like imagine if you're watching the way i describe it is i've never thought about like this before but imagine if you're watching the sort of big bang begins so you kind of start or like the first ever organism you start with one organism here i've got a loose idea and that kind of splits off into two or like let's say you believed in the like christian model of an

adam and eve um so you've got adam and eve here um it just starts and then it kind of these two create two which create more and it just kind of then begins to interlink and then some just die out of evolution but after a series of events you've got a whole little world that exists so this one is very much i'll have like 10 different ideas of things i want to write about in there and i go right there's this one here can i get like five or six bullets on that and then those

five or six bullets have five or six bullets some get killed some keep developing sometimes i look at the whole thing and go listen this is an absolute mess let's put it in the bin and do something else um but and then and then that's how it kind of begins so it's very very rough to begin with and then i kind of layer it on in terms of complexity i find if i go and try and get something perfect to begin with it's just it just it just never works yeah yeah this is uh again

just kind of breaking this down tweet by tweet right what is this about simplifying decisions if you're interested in simplifying decisions here you go right who is this for well if you want to learn you know how the best of the best simplified decisions this is what you're interested in right and what does the reader get in return hey by the end of this you're going to have 15 mental models 15 frameworks to make better simplified decisions right all of that's being communicated in that first thread very simple um i'm curious george if you do

this too we we talked about this uh dickie we were talking about this in the last uh zoom we did where if you scroll down what's interesting is just kind of looking broadly at the the metrics here so these three all got kind of similar engagement almost exactly which i find interesting and then here all of a sudden oh this got 2 000 more likes on this one razer right and if we keep going we probably have more data that we can play with here so 5.2 these got less you know 1.9 oh this one

got a little more 4.4 so do you ever look at this george and kind of go okay broadly this topic's working and then sub topic hey you know a lot of people are interested in the bragging razor i'm going to break that out and do a thread just on that i should be that's a very good point that's a very good point yeah because it is like little um mvps that you've built right and you can see already the the engagement that's built in there that's a very very good point yeah i mean sahil bloom's

written probably 10 20 threads on on razer's what's so cool about this one is you basically were like i'm gonna figure out which ones are because he's probably spent some time on ones that did far less you know far fewer impressions or whatever you want to measure um but this is it's a cool way of saying what is the market really interested in i'm going to test 15 of these and you have a bunch of different answers there and i've never heard of that bragging that could be it too right like a bragging razor you've

almost coined that term in a sense what's interesting as well going back to the artist's growth i look back at this um quite a lot later down the line when i actually look back at this the stuff that i'm most proud of um rather than just the pure debt uh width metrics is the stuff where i put my own spin on it so like for example if you scroll down to half star there's law like this is great i i mean to be fair this bit here i have like every project cost two times as

much and takes three times as long but just copying the law for the sake of it don't get me wrong you can get a lot of engagement with that but i massively prefer it in hindsight when i've created my own things like elon's law didn't exist i was like what's the opposite of that and you kind of build on that and then say going back to the debt versus whip thing when you can don't get me wrong like the generic stuff will get the most amount of reach but in hindsight i'm a lot more proud

of like the elon's law or the bragging race or the look razer because they wasn't just purely copy and paste jobs as much um if that makes sense so totally that's that's really interesting looking back at it now that i think it the the issue with a lot of the twitter friends now is it's just purely just done for engagement and i don't get me wrong i've done it there's nothing wrong with that however i think in hindsight if you can put a bit more spin on it and a bit more of your own personality

through it i think you are looking back at it now i think they're a lot better and i enjoy them a lot more when i've done that so they definitely advise that um as well as like i i find that people message me a lot more of going back to death metrics about new ideas i've created as well so that's definitely one thing i'd i'd recommend yeah by far i've experimented really with telling trying to take the frameworks i want to talk about and then finding a personal story for my life for how i started

to learn about it and what i found is when i tell them through this personal story lens the the indicator that i've been using is just replies the number of replies of people saying whoa this was such a cool story shows the intimate relationship you've built like i told one of three marketing frameworks i learned from running for class president and that one it didn't have the same kind of nuclear vital reach but it felt so much better to say i've created something from scratch that resonated with people than just like my david ogilvy thread

there's really nothing new there so it is interesting to think about that dynamic 100 yeah i mean that's that's the ultimate goal right i mean after at least that's kind of the point i've gotten to you write a lot of viral things and eventually you're like okay viral for the sake of viral is what right the real goal is learning how to write things that can go viral but you're ultimately kind of wanting to introduce people to the thing you really care about you know so like george this is a great intersection right where you're

like okay i understand how to get a lot of reach out of this but i'm going to introduce you simultaneously to my own thinking because where your density is is people that go george is going to curate all this interesting stuff for me but i'm also really interested in how george thinks about this as well yeah but i'm going to ask a super dumb question by the way just so everyone sees how we're always uh in the learning what the hell does this mean i see this all what does htm so like you're taking off

your hat and tipping it oh my god it's like where you got it from dude i seriously for three months i've been like like it's gotta be some sort of mask yeah it's one of those things no one knows but doesn't ask how's the ht like like like originally found like i was trying to figure out what it stood for thank you see you guys we're always learning out here right do you think like tipping your heart i think got it hat tip all right now i'm gonna hat tip all over the place got it

okay so that's that's one frameworks are great i always like sharing with people um i think doing frameworks correctly is hard you know i think it's it's a lot easier to start with curating frameworks from other people have spent their lifetime creating frameworks and then once you kind of learn how frameworks work you can create your own but i find this is the bucket that is hardest for people to kind of learn how to do just once we're here as well one of the what's that what's the three uh topics with so we've got framework

framework story and actionable advice national advice one of the ones that you could i'll send it to you afterwards i found this one ages but i still think about this one years later which goes through it's a good debt of metric where somebody i forgot the exact context but it was something along the lines of somebody in tech and they said dm me what like what you're afraid to tweet and they just kind of combine that into a thread of like what vcs and founders were afraid to tweet and obviously you get some fake stuff

in there but like that was like one of the most interesting things i've ever read because you knew everything was done via the realm of like anonymity so like right by like different creative ways of doing it as well find that one later it's a really good example that's awesome yeah it's it's it's crazy to me how much you know so much of this game is like what lens are we gonna look through you know and and that's a perfect example of some person goes i'm gonna tweet a bunch of startup advice right and someone

else changes the lens and goes this is all the startup advice that everyone's afraid to share i'm going to go and curate it and that little tweak is the difference between like oh that's interesting to oh this is i'm going to think about this five years later interesting all right next one story i love did you read the book uh american kingpin george i flicked through it i but i listened to i'm more of a listener these days i listened to um the silk road podcast by true crime it was the best thing i've ever

listened to it was this um uh it's aussie i think he's aussie the guy that narrates it and that it was like nine hours long and i consumed it all like a day it was that good and this story i just kept saying it to people as i've do i've got to do so because it didn't seem to be a big story i couldn't get over how it wasn't a bigger story um and i just felt it was just it encapsulated a lot of my thoughts on just using google and i just felt absolutely nothing

out there that talked about using google i still think there's probably something there i don't know how you do it but isn't there teaching people how to google [ __ ] and this for me was like the craziest story for people who are not aware silk road the biggest online drugs marketplace um uh probably the main thing that kind of catapulted bitcoin into the mainstream uh where people could buy uh good jobs in front of me here could buy magic mushrooms heroin ak-47s etc and the fbi couldn't catch him the daa couldn't catch him and

you're talking about two of the best drug enforcement agencies in the world with billions of dollars of resources the best technology in the world etc but one kind of uh tax inspector on google was just started going back through old forums tried to find the oldest post and then the oldest post had uh that was on like a bitcoin forum was talking about this silk road site and it was actually the founder of the site doing kind of a pseudo post trying to advertise it for the first time um and when they contacted the forum

they found the email that was associated with it and it was ross over to gmail.com and like for me i was just still amazed that that was possible and that's why i had to write that one it's the same i had no one which was the francis and ghani one when that's in their stories that it's not even for me at that point it's more like this just story even i don't care if all i'm doing right now is just collating somebody else's story and trying to get it out there i was like this is

so good it just has it just has to exist at scale if it means i've got to make it a bit more clickbaity and give it more reach than it then i have to because it was just that good yeah you said i mean one interesting thing that i just like pointing out because we we talk about uh data-driven writing all the time like we did in your last thread right you have data saying people are most interested in this razor you should break this out turned into its own thread you basically told this story

to call it 10 people in your life and and all of the data points or the majority of the data points were like that's fascinating right so what was weird though was the dichotomy between that and then just it not really getting the pick up even like the youtube video i found it didn't get as many views and it was like it just didn't i was just more angry at the world that it wasn't a bigger story because this is the easiest story i've ever heard it felt like you'd stumbled upon a secret so sometimes

you get later but sometimes like it's a teal thing where you feel like you've stumbled i mean you could argue this wasn't an exact secret in that case but it felt like a secret relative to how many articles were written about and i was like you know what there's no data on this but the data right now is me and it's again going back to the science versus the art side of stuff like when you go to date with the crowd but versus when you go the data of like what you can see yourself and

sometimes the hedge is actually better when it's your if you're if you're so certain on it and the crowd isn't really talking about it that much then it's kind of there's actually quite a good arbitrage opportunity there don't get me wrong it's probably less consistent than the data like the data is always going to be sort of seven eight out of tens but i found this one there was very little data but yeah but i was like as myself as the data point it was so valuable so again there's different hats uh for going back

to the haptic metaphor to where depending on the context of what you're trying to produce yeah there's a uh the hero's journey here i just want to point this out because this is really important you know had you just said how one guy achieved more than the entire fbi i think that that would have been too vague you know readers would have been like achieved what what what are we even talking about here right so going back to the three what is this about who is this for what do they get in return so it's

this piece right where all of a sudden you're like what could possibly be achieved with google search like and then immediately i imagine just someone sitting at home on their couch on their laptop and it's like wait you have the power to do more than the entire fbi what what's going to happen here so you're kind of teasing the beginning of the story and the end of the story you're creating this thing we call the curiosity gap and then you go hey this is super underrated right this is another key word is this is an

amazing story but it's not getting enough attention so i'm going to tell you so what's pretty interesting about this is i've never thought by like that but you're so you're so spot on i'd say with the the writing the the first tweets as well i don't know about you dickie but i'll always write the whole thing i'll have like a loose placeholder for the the first one and then i'll write the whole thing and then i'll go back to the the actual original tweet and then just chip that one away and then i get it

and it's just like can i can i remove any words here can i remove any words here and as soon as i felt there's enough like there's no more words to remove then i've got it but that's what we this is always the last thing i would do is the first tweet same exact thing with me i i almost find it harder to to write that first week than the rest i'm like i because it takes more thinking because you do have to be a little bit more tactful because i i'm confident that any thread

that i write the you know 10 tweets that come after the lead in i know what i'm going to say and if someone's reading that they're going to find it interesting right if someone gets into this story they're going to read the whole story so it takes less it's just a completely different way of thinking so i just i like brain dump some bullet points on the intro tweet and then write the whole thing and then come back in a workshop with coal or something like that to to try and figure it out because it's

it's just more difficult it's like a different different writing skill entirely yep i love this i i uh and i'm right there with you george i read american kingpin which is the book on this i literally read the whole thing in like 12 hours like just it i just snorted it it was so good so good so sometimes you get the best stories are the ones that you find yourself just devouring and then you're like i gotta tell this to someone well i find some of the best content i find now so this kind of

goes a bit higher level right like not just how do you write it but how do you get interesting [ __ ] to write um and i found when i try and just get when i'm trying to make myself write interesting [ __ ] it never works but there's something to be said about um i i find just searching for random topics so even like youtube you've got the youtube you get a chrome extension where you can hide the home feed often the best content i've found is when i'm using a search engine ironically in

this in this case versus just waiting for the algorithm to serve me [ __ ] because the issue of the algorithm is it just serves you the sake particularly youtube there was a point i think went before rogan moved to spotify it's still to some extent now my whole home page for you i love joe rogan it was just all joe rogan i say no even if i'm eating kale every day like this is just there's just no variance in my diet so again you you have to go back to like with the death metrics

where you have to create this for yourself i find with finding interesting content don't wait for an hour to do it for you try and figure out ways that you can do it for yourself so in my case that some of the biggest stuff now is i'll literally sit there i don't do this enough but i'll sit there sometimes and i'll blank out the youtube home feed and i'll be like what do i want to think about and you actually get when you just start putting in topics you go what about this or somebody mentioned

this the other day you put it in you find content that never would have found you just from the algorithm and create the algorithm yourself and again i think 10 years from now this will be a thing i found recently i searched ice baths and there was this lady who lives the craziest life in nordic sweden who's escaping she lives 100 miles from nowhere and she's got millions of youtube subscribers um i'll try and again i'll try and find the youtube video in uh in a second but it is and she literally goes underwater take

her morning routine takes ice class this video about 20 million views but it was oh my god i think these algorithms are so i like the same way we're talking about using them they're so dangerous if you're not having agency over them absolutely and i i've been starting to say that great writing is a byproduct and not a result and it's a byproduct of your information streams at this point right if you are constantly feeding information that is going to get you to think and it takes so much more effort than anyone really wants to

put in to generate like a stream of information that's delivering you high quality it takes hours to make twitter lists or newsletter filters that send you the right information but that's a the reason it's like arbitrage if you can master these platforms to deliver you the high quality stuff you're you're gonna accelerate versus if you just sit on the drip of it um you're gonna kind of end up like everyone else that spends too much time on it out of interest what's been the highest value you think to yourself dickie in terms of like doing

that like from a paradigm perspective so for me it's having twitter lists for each interest and using tweetdeck and so having all of them like very intentionally scrolling one list when i want to explore something i've been using mailbrew which is this you know it's like a you create your own newsletter and it lets you pull in rss feeds from different blogs uh you can pull in tweets from certain lists ranked by popularity so i have like a crypto mail brew that pulls in all the latest headlines from coindesk and coin market cap and all

this other stuff same with the twitter list same with the newsletters and i think having one of those for all the information that you want to consume consistently um and then it just takes effort to prune it you have to update the list over time it's just not easy but i think we'll get there eventually where it's i would love someone to do information as a service and not just curation newsletters but like because then it's they still have a filter on it more just like i'm going to set up some stream that is objectively

pretty good and you can have access to it and it it pulls from these 15 sources and trusted people like i think curation newsletters are going to go away but just curation where you can tap into someone's information sources is going to be even better 100 yeah especially if you can then have them put their own like spin on it a little bit as well like even one of the things i thought would be cool i mean there's a few people doing this now but where you've got like a private telegram group of some sort

and just different even like so let's say for example vicky you could be posting in the right this flat red here's the brief summary here's a conversation i've just had with nicholas here's like a key takeaway like that i think would be very very interesting one of the best uh things i've ever had is like different and not i don't use tweetdecker twitter list i i might experiment with it actually but just creating folders in my chrome browser of different topics and then i'll actually go to the individual's account and i'll scroll through um so

i kind of get that individual blasted at once and then another individual blasted at once i find that really really useful you know um real and real quick we'll go to the last one here but uh in terms of stories i mean think about how much potential there is to take you do a little digging but think of all the stories that haven't really been digitized yet like think of all the stories that are in books or in are in old recordings or um are buried somewhere on the internet that haven't been refreshed in today's

how we read today like there's all this opportunity for writers to just go do a little bit of digging dickie your ogilvy thing is a perfect example right that book was written or whatever that that memo was written 40 years ago 50 years ago right so just going doing some digging taking it refreshing it putting it into a twitter thread a lot of people go hey thanks so much that book's out of print i don't have it anymore right you just change the format so i think there's just so much opportunity out there it's such

a great time to be a writer right last one actionable takeaways these i find are the easiest which means they're also the most uh overused as well i see them all the time on twitter um but if you can do it well the actionable takeaways is super powerful um dickie you do this all the time i do this all the time george this thread that you wrote was great um talking about this is this how does this compare to writing stories for you and doing frameworks how do you think about this kind of bucket of

things so this this is like it's really weird to describe this but i'll give it a go this one requires quite a lot of context so when i first did this this wasn't as big of a thing of like finding somebody and compiling them was the first thing what this is still like and it doesn't sound that long ago but it's like um over a year and a bit ago and since then that's become a more and more prominent thing i'm sure you can see a map of twitter friends this is very early on and

at the time toby lucky was very well less well-known like shopify was less well-known it was i didn't was it i think it might be public um but less well known as a company so it what what see i wouldn't write this again now but it worked perfectly at the time but now i feel this is way overdone um it's yeah it's again very hard to verbalize that but just from experience this this works insanely well at the time because of the two things one it was less well done and two not as many people

knew who toby was i think it was like when the first bits of public write you know about him at scale like this because it even got retweeted by him at the time whereas i think if you did it again now he wouldn't retweet it profile so there's some bit of nuance there that could easily get missed here but i'd essentially say i found somebody who was relatively obscure i mean he's still the ceo shopping still a billionaire right but at the time relatively so and it was quite a new format at the time um

so even that is a similar one i did which was about josh waitskin who's like i'd probably say it's a very similar one to this one um where he wasn't as well known and then you kind of blow them up but you can essentially it's similar to the google story like if you find a very obscure individual that you find insanely interesting and insightful you it's almost like you found something before anybody else and you you can essentially assume if the date is saying yes for you it's probably going to say yes for a lot

of people so this one there wasn't really any data apart from the fact that i loved it um so i've rambled on a little bit there but there's a bit of a bit of nuance behind this one no there i think there's a couple points i remember seeing this early on as like the very first here's a thinker and here's everything i've learned from them and what i also think is cool about this and i bet you felt it as you were writing it it was almost a forcing function for you to say i really

like this guy i've learned a lot from him but i haven't crystallized all the things that i've actually learned so i'm going to use this as a forcing function where if no one even reads this i'm going to be smarter as a result but i get the free upside of putting it online versus just taking notes on the podcast i've listened to on toby luke right 100 yeah the the key that i find with uh actionable take away threads or actionable takeaway articles whatever it is is you pick one central focus so here it's thinking

clearly right and then the credibility is well okay so who are we learning this from so it's thinking clearly from toby toby lutky and then now we're going to break out thinking clearly into a bunch of different things and that i find when people do these lists just something you know for everyone to think about is if you're trying to curate lots of different ideas it's confusing to the reader you need to orient it to a north star and you're like this is about clear thinking now clear thinking principle one clear thinking principle two clear

thinking principle three that's what makes it easy for the reader to go oh you're giving me a ton of value because it's oriented to this north star if you don't orient it to a north star and they're like here's just a bunch of interesting things i learned from toby then the audience is more like all right i don't really know what the point of this is if i'm interested in toby sure i find this interesting if i'm not then i don't find it as interesting so clarifying that what is this about is really the key

my advice yeah that are fantastic in terms of the direction and my advice as well would be try and pick somebody who's less well-known so again this one at the time he wasn't as well-known he's way more well-known now so it kind of feels like i'm contradicting my advice but you could easily do like you see these all the time now it's just like top 20 naval piece of advice and it may go viral but it's like nobody's going to really connect the dots with you there they're just literally looking at naval and you may

get a few naval fans that just also follow but if you then let's say for example i can see that post i may like it i may follow you as a result but it's very low content whereas if you told me about some individual i've never heard of so like for example this this time at the time it was less well-known or the google search one i think there's just so much value difference there even though they have the same morality potential there's a lot more depth potential yeah and any i totally agree looking for

like unconventional uh little-known you know weird unique like oh people haven't heard of this before those those make for the best pieces and if you do pick those things like you said shopify shopify and toby were a little less well-known i maybe you could have even taken this and said toby's the ceo of shopify you know what many people are calling the next amazon or something to add in that credibility so someone goes oh i don't know what shopify is but you just described it for me if you go on quickly if you go on

the search function so it's george underscore underscore mac and then search w a i t z k i n now this is this is a really good example this one i think um i think if you click on the the first one then just scroll your way up you know white sweats search functioning here i'd say this is the my favorite one um yeah he's against it might be the most again i probably shouldn't done caps in hindsight it's a very aggressive uh he might be the most interesting person in life he doesn't have twitter

and he barely uses the internet i compare my favorite five minute models of his below fred um this one is like so yes like somebody might be the most interesting person in life you've probably never heard of them i find that is you can still get the hook the viral hook but you're providing so much more value to the reader it's going to take harder work to find obscure people but i think that i remember the quality of people that retweeted this one and reached out to me was so much higher and i have to

say that because you can only see the the front-end metrics you've got to compare about the back-end metrics as well so the back-end metrics of this was fantastic so yeah i really advise if you're going down the story of rue find a story that nobody's ever heard of rather than just a popular story i wonder if you could have pushed this even one step further and said he doesn't have twitter and he barely uses the internet and i'm gonna butcher the specifics but um you say and he barely uses the internet but he's one of

the greatest chess champions in history and and right immediately after became uh it was jiu jitsu or something right yeah yeah yeah push hands tai chi yeah but yeah it was i i could definitely could have a nine-hand side but the issue of the issue with josh is like if you try even on this one here i try to compile it into a like a secondary and you can't there's just two yeah too many [ __ ] things so yeah yeah yeah it's an interesting one well i wanna i wanna be uh respectful of your

time george and uh selfishly i i gotta be respectful to mike because i'm not late for a call but uh this is awesome like i i love jamming with you about this like this is a lot of fun and i'm i'm sure a lot of these uh threads are helpful to other people as well so appreciate you making the time and coming to share your knowledge no worries at all thank you for having me that's been fun cool all right everyone we'll send a replay recap to all this i got tons of new takeaways so

george thanks again for coming on and we'll distribute all this and