#211 with Julian Shapiro - The 3 Cheat Codes Startups Use to Print Cash

If you can't make the economics of an ad channel exciting, can you at least A, not burn money while B, building a huge lead database that likes you because of your free thing or your cheap thing? I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off.

On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

I'm actually I'm surprised you haven't been on this before. I feel like you're made for this in a way.

Maybe. I mean, I was doing pods for a while. I was trying purposely to get on podcasts for IndieHackers. Yeah, for getting the word out about The Mancurve. Then at some point I'm like, this is cringe, man. I don't like listening back to myself. And so it took the process of actually starting a podcast, uh, you know, in part thanks to also watching you do your, your magic, to be like, you know what, I can just totally be myself and not have to worry about it as much. And then it stopped being cringe, so now I'm all for it.

And how, how has it been since you launched the pod? So you launched, uh, what's it called, Brains, right? Brains with S or without the S?

Yeah, Brains with the S. It's been good. It's been— I guess it's rare to have reasons in your life to be very seriously self-reflective about whether or not you're boring the shit out of people. So like, I have to be so deliberate about, can I be charismatic? Can I be interesting? And I'm not saying I'm there yet, but I'm saying I'm at least thinking about it, you know, in, in the context of trying to not bore people on a podcast. So it's been a really good forcing function.

Okay, I like that. And, uh, has it been— so you launched this podcast, you did it very methodically. You recorded like 8 episodes with badass people ahead of time. And so I feel like you were pretty thorough about how you went about it, or more so than me at least. Did it go the way you wanted to, or what did you learn?

Yeah, I was thorough because I felt that I kind of had no choice because I listened to a bunch of podcasts and found most of them to be like unlistenable.

Right.

And then when I heard My First Million, I'm like, there's something special here, but I don't actually know what it is. And so my co-host on the podcast, Courtland from Indie Hackers, He's like, what's going on here that's special is they're not asking boring interview questions. They're literally just riffing on ideas collaboratively and making charged statements and letting other people respond to them. And the net effect is it feels way more like rapport, like a dinner conversation you're overhearing. So we really rolled with that. And then we try to be deliberate about, well, how do we choose guests that can actually play into that? Can they speak spontaneously? Are they willing to play ball and bat ideas around? Right. So I feel like it's probably a lot of the stuff that you're thinking about as well. And yeah, it's been, it's been great. So we're basically, you know, in a way, we're My First Million but for everything outside of business, like writing a book, being a storyteller, you know what I mean?

Yeah, the episode I was on had, uh, uh, Alexandra Botez. I don't know how you say her name actually. How do you say it properly? That's right, you got it. Chess champion, uh, Twitch streamer. So she's like content creator, really interesting person. Her content is about chess because she's really damn good at chess. Um, and so I found it pretty interesting. Like, that was not what— like, I've been on a bunch of podcasts, that's not usually what I get to, to talk about or talk to. And, uh, so I immediately was pretty bought in just as a kind of guest on it. But anyways, I wanted to have you on here because, uh, this is, you know, the pod for ideas, and I I feel like you have a lot of interesting ideas and also see a lot of interesting ideas. And for people who don't know, we are in a group chat together. And being in a group chat is like the closest thing to being in a dorm together, I feel. You get to know people over time. You get to see them walking around in their boxers. You know, you, you just— you're going to the shared bathroom together. There's no place to run. You're going to be yourself over in enough time in the right group chat. And so I feel like I've gotten to know you even though we have never met in person. But you are an idea person. Do you consider yourself an idea person?

I think of myself as someone who just loves to brainstorm, but I'm not as fixated on ideas, I think, as you are. I know you and Sam love the treasure hunt. You love the chase. Right. Like, who's making money how? I'm more like, "All right, give me a problem. I want to solve the problem." And so what I did for this show, actually, is I went through the community of my startup. We have about 40,000 marketers. And founders. And so I picked out the 3 most interesting growth trends I could find, and I came with some examples of each of those trends. So there were like 3 things that were popping out that felt almost like cheat codes, like ways that startups were printing cash and reaching unicorn status much quicker than one would think they should. Okay, so that's something we can jam on. I got a few— 3 categories there we can jam on if you'd like.

Yeah, let's do that right now. Don't even say anything else besides that. I'm completely—

You just have to do the paperwork and request it, and nobody ever did it.

No loss. So imagine no loss lotteries called, right?

Yeah, exactly. And just imagine their ads. Like, just think about how compelling it is to position that to a lot of people who either love the lottery or just really want a way to make extra cash. So a couple more examples, if it's helpful for me to run through here. We got Main Street.

That's when you said it. That's the one that came to mind as soon as you said giving, you know, basically giving away money, I thought of Main Street as a company that's growing fast doing this.

It's brilliant, right?

And so, so explain, explain what it is if people don't know.

Same with service, by the way. Service— the airlines were like, what, what the hell is going on here? And they just shut it. They like closed. They started tightening up the policy. And so sometimes that actual wedge can be a very flimsy one. Yeah. But if you, if you ran away with happy customers who now trust you for other products, then maybe it was still an okay one. So I, I wouldn't necessarily recommend these flimsy, unsustainable channels, but, but Main Street does not seem flimsy to me, right? On paper. Another great example, I'll give you one last one cuz it's, it's my favorite because it's under everybody's noses, which is if you look at the top of buildings when you're driving around, you have those Clearview, you know, these billboard ads. And so imagine being a business owner and someone comes to you and says, hey, I'm going to pay you, let's say, $50 grand a year. All you got to do is put this billboard on your roof, right? I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, but the idea is that sometimes when you get pitched with a revenue stream that's super low friction for you that you did not realize was possible, it just becomes a crazy growth wedge.

Yeah, that's— yeah. And there's You can basically create value out of thin air just by, just by knowing the rules of connecting the dots. I feel this way about— there's some bigger businesses that do this principle. One for student loan refinancing. It's just like, hey, you're paying too much. Just tell us what you pay today and we will find you a cheaper student loan. You just click a button and boom, you change to this monthly payment instead of this one. I think CommonBond or something like that is one of those. And house refinancing is another, but these require— it's not as— they can't do the whole thing on your behalf, unfortunately. But I'm— I feel like somebody could get closer to doing the whole thing on your behalf, um, and that seems like a pretty big opportunity to me.

You don't even have to remember to open the app, right? That's most apps, you just— for person just forgets to open you ever again. But with Chrome extension, they're opening Chrome, they already have that habit, You just get to tag along like a little, you know, like the flea on an elephant's back.

Exactly, that's right. And so if you can find a way to make something so painless where it's like 2 clicks, set it and forget it, the idea is that now you're around, now you have a bunch of exposure opportunities. You keep popping up when relevant on web pages that the user's browsing, and eventually when the time is right and you can deliver real value, like contextually, because like This is gonna be a monster coupon I could give the customer. We're gonna save them $1,000. Right. That's when you finally ask, "Hey, can you make an account real quick before we give you this monster coupon?" And now they're completely bought in and they've come to trust you.

Yeah, that's smart. What other Chrome extension ideas have you seen that you like or you have? Like, what else is like Honey? Does anything come to mind? I know it's a hard question, but what else is like Honey?

Yeah, it is a tough question, but one good example is extensions in the SEO space that give you data about web pages, a competitive analysis as you're browsing so that if you are a marketer, you can get this like X-ray vision into how are they growing, right? What are they— what keyword terms and all this stuff, right? So it winds up educating you to better grow your business and it becomes very sticky if that data is valuable.

Which Chrome extensions do you have installed? I have SimilarWeb. Which is what you're talking about, basically gives me traffic information about different websites so I can see how popular they are and where the traffic comes from. I have MetaMask, which is an Ethereum wallet or a crypto wallet. And then I have Adblock. Those are the 3 Chrome extensions I have. And I'm very particular about Chrome extensions because when you install a Chrome extension, it says this extension can read everything you type into any website. I'm like, wow, that's so insecure. That's crazy. What do you have installed?

Yeah, so nothing exciting. I got my ad block. I got the thing that tells me if I'm on a website that had their passwords sort of broken into, so it'll tell me if I should switch my password, you know. Um, and then I have, um, uh, oh, this awesome Twitter extension that when I'm looking at someone's Twitter profile, it'll show me all their historical best-performing tweets. So I get like a snapshot view of who they are and what they're known for. It's called, uh, TWE M-E-X, like Tweemex.

I like that, that's pretty cool. I was thinking there could be a couple others. Like, uh, while you were saying that, I was thinking, what other X-ray— we used to— X-ray vision, I like that. So I was like, what X-ray vision would I want as I browse the web? So one is just taking, uh, like the Twitter thing, but sort of like anytime someone's name is on a web page, if I just hover, can it just pop out a thing that basically tells me about that person? It's like, here's, you know, Here's their Twitter profile, you can click follow. Here's some things about them, here's the wiki or whatever. So it's like, you know, the quick who is this on any name on any website. That's one. The other is Facebook ads. So I'm constantly going to the Facebook ad library to find what ads a company is running. I actually just want that done automatically. So I just want to go to any product's website, any company's website, and be able to click this and see what ads are running without having to go open up the ad library.

Yeah, I love that. The, um, the way I think about this, this type of a question is like, what type of Chrome extension, or like, what's a framework for thinking about which category of Chrome extension would be the stickiest and would people love to download the most? And I think about how to appeal to vice, like, how do I appeal to people's desire to make money? And so where my brain goes right away is, what about some sort of x-ray vision where you're on like Bloomberg or you're on Twitter, and anytime the Chrome extension picks up a keyword for a public stock or like some crypto token, right, cryptocurrency, then it just suggests, um, like it gives you an X-ray into like how it's performing, who else talks about it a lot, who should you follow to learn more about this, right? And that then it kind of triggers more so like this greedy, like, okay, well, I can make money off this, so I'm going to pay a bit more attention. Because when you do the educational route, really with any tool, like, hey, let's give X-ray vision, let people know, like Amazon's X-ray vision to when you're watching a movie It'll tell you like what music is playing in the background, who are these actors. Like, do people really care? I mean, maybe some, but it's probably nerds.

Yeah, yeah. The, the, the, um, one more on this is, uh, that I was just thinking of. While you're browsing websites, if it basically— could you create Robinhood in a Chrome browser, a Chrome extension? I think you could. So you could basically have it be like Acorns where it sort of rounds up on anything you buy, and then it buys either a fraction of that stock or it adds up until you, it tells you, hey, you've been shopping a lot on Apple. Why don't you buy $100 of Apple stock? Click here to do it. And maybe there's a way to kind of like use that roundup model to get you to own instead of just being a customer and not own any of the underlying company, in which case you could. So I think this is one interesting idea is just look at every app on your phone and say, could this be a Chrome extension? How would you do Robinhood as a Chrome extension? How would you do blah, blah, blah?

That's super clever. So to recap that, you're basically saying, as I'm browsing, like literally as I'm on robinhood.com, right, can there be an Acorns— it can be some Acorns-like extension that's like, hey, why don't you spend a little bit more and actually invest directly in this company? Exactly. And get a sense of ownership and incentive alignment. Or even better, like, hey, we like— it pops up right as it sees you're about to do a trade. It's like, hey, we see you're about to trade for like $97. You want to roll this up, get the extra $3? In Robinhood itself. Yes. That's, that's super clever. I love that.

All right. So that was, that was theme 1. Let's go to theme 2.

like, people make it their profile, right? So CryptoPunks are an NFT, and if you go buy it, cool, you bought this digital file. It sits in your digital wallet privately, and there's no— you know, it's, it's even worse displayed than art because you're not putting it in a frame in your house. But what people started doing was they put it in the most visible frame they have, their profile photo. So they're swapping their Twitter profile photo with a CryptoPunk, and one person started doing it, and 2, 3, 4, and then more started doing it. And so now I can't use Twitter without seeing fucking CryptoPunks and reminding myself how I missed out on CryptoPunks. And so I feel like that's like a version of billboarding. Uh, it's like wearing your favorite company's t-shirt but wearing it every day and in front of thousands of people a day.

Exactly. It's like the Twitter equivalent of having like AirPods or Nikes on. Like, everyone's gonna see it. And it's also identity building. Like, if you, if you break apart what makes for brand loyalty, like, why would you want to put a CryptoPunk as your Twitter avatar? Right. Or why would you want to wear Nike shoes? It's because you actually feel a sense of prestige. There's either social signaling, you're in the club, or you're signaling you have good taste, right? Uh, if you want to be the girl or the, the guy who wears Nike shoes every day, or the girl or the guy who has Slack stickers all over his laptop every day, like, it becomes this identity-based affinity for a brand. And when you have that, it becomes very hard to compete with because now it's almost approaching tribal, for better or for worse. For sure. And just because there's another CryptoPunk competitor, it doesn't necessarily mean that they can just take over through better marketing, because better marketing has a hard— will hit a hard wall against tribalism and a building identity around something that people want.

I think the way it plays out is with one, it's good but it's not great. As soon as you get two tribes, now they have somebody to fight and feud with, and so you'll get Republicans and Democrats, you'll get, you know, Yankees and Red Sox. On Twitter right now, you'll get CryptoPunks or Bored Apes, right? Bored Ape Yacht Club, it's the other NFT project that is rivaling them. And so people are switching to those two. Now, you're probably not going to get like 20 of these, and so there's like room for 2 to 3 like main tribes, and then everything else will be very, very fringe. And there'll be some people who want that. But okay, so you were going to say Mercury is one of these. Where do you see Mercury billboarded?

Yeah, Mercury is interesting because— well, let me just back up here and wrap my head around. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So yeah, Mercury is a great example of billboarding because it's a modern and hypergrowth example, and it's all digital. I feel like anyone can find an equivalent way to do the following. So Mercury, first of all, is a bank for startups, but not necessarily just startups. And it's become the de facto startup that YC companies use. So what happens is when YC companies go to Demo Day, where they fundraise with investors, they have to then—

They send a link.

Bingo. Bingo. So here's the interesting thing. All these investors are now getting these, like, PDF wire details with the label Mercury on them.

Yeah. And they're very nice, very well formatted, looks beautiful, looks better than a normal bank. But you're right, it's a silent signal that I use Mercury.

That's how I feel about Macs, right? You go to Silicon Valley, you just see Macs everywhere, and then you You're in the filter bubble of everybody uses Macs, and then you look at the stats and it's like, wait, 90% market share for Windows? Like, how is this possible? And it's like, yeah, because, you know, the world is not Silicon Valley.

That's right. Yeah, that's exactly right. You can create this optical impression, and if you're making the impression on a persona that is itself a distribution, like lightning rod, like investors, or like very high social signal, like influencers, if they get the impression of just them narrowly think that you're everything, right? Well, then they'll act like you're everything, and then finally it trickles down to the mainstream.

Yes, it's like what— it's like high school but for, uh, you know, 50-year-olds. Um, okay, so that's, that's growth trend 2. So we got trend 1, no-brainer, no, no, no-brainer, no-loss offers. Cool. Uh, trend 2 is the, uh, the billboard effect. You know, either you intentionally create kind of a status symbol that people choose to flag Or just in the act of doing business, you're attaching your logo into their world. And so everybody that they use the product with sees you, sees you, sees you until it becomes a sort of like, you know, a self— it's a free ad basically that you're getting through your own customers. What's number 3?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, the way I think about it is, and this is a strong opinion of mine that I'm not saying is the right way, is I actually don't sell anything on my website. So julian.com is what you're referring to where I write these handbooks. I break down how to write well, how to grow your startup. There's nothing being sold. There's some ads for— not ads per se, but some references to demandcurve.com where we teach people growth. But by and large, if I'm making money from Demand Curve, then I don't want to have to make money from the things I'm doing for pure enjoyment and that I'm using to build an audience. I want to build this association that you can trust me that I'm never trying to sell you anything. And I think that's not critically required, but so healthy for the long term. And like, you think of Paul Graham, like this, you know, the writer guru, YC founder that everyone looks up to, you know, in a million years you would never expect him to have like a banner ad at the bottom of a blog post he writes because it'd be so out of character and it would really compromise, I think. Or a $199 course. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So yeah, so I just try to keep them totally separate. Anyway, so yeah, I'm not saying people have to monetize, they have to make a living. But if you make a living through other things, you don't have to make a living through the thing you're passionate about. Like, when I see very rich people start podcasts and still run ads on their podcast, unless you're doing it to pay employees, awesome. But if you're doing it because you're trying to make an extra buck, it seems like it totally defeats the purpose of why you're doing it.

Let's call them out. Reid Hoffman. You are a billionaire. You created LinkedIn. You sold it for $20 billion. Why does your podcast have ads? And I know the answer to it actually, but no excuses as far as I'm concerned. Now, people could say the same thing about me. I do, I think there's ads on this podcast. There are. I do courses. And the way I thought about it was pretty simple, which was I'm gonna spend my time doing something. And I value my time.. And I also want a scoreboard for if the thing I'm doing is valuable. And one scoreboard is likes, and the other, I think a more powerful scoreboard, is money. And I do a lot of things for likes. The podcast is free, all that good stuff. But if I do something like a course, or I'm actually going to sit down, spend time with you, and teach you something, then I want to charge for that. Most of the time I give away a bunch of like free spots. Um, and the last thing is I, uh, I do this to get myself more excited about it. So I'll set a, um, a reason, a goal for the money. So I'll be like, okay, like this right now with this course I'm doing right now, I was like, all right, I want to do two things. Um, I want to be able to— I made a list of 10 people who've been just awesome to me in life, and, uh, they've like mentored me or helped me in some form or fashion. I was like, I want to buy them all like a fat gift, like a gift that's like, you know, way more than what, uh, what they would be expecting in this case. The second thing is I want to, um, I'm really trying to get in shape, and I was like, I want to have a personal chef. I was like, how much does that cost? I used to have an investor, he had a, he had a personal chef, a private chef, and the chef would come cook for us at lunch at the office every day, and it was amazing. And I always just thought that was a one-day, one-day dream. I kind of looked up the cost and I was like, oh, I think I could pay for that. That's basically like, you know, 6 to 8 grand a month. Um, okay, cool. So if I sell, you know, if I do $100,000 profit in this course, that pays for a year of a chef. And now I got excited about it. So it made me more excited to actually do the thing than just my benevolence. And maybe it's because I'm kind of a, uh, a greedy or selfish person. Uh, that could be the reason why. But all I know is once I have a target, and that target could be anything silly, it could be, uh I'm going to go buy, you know, uh, you know, go buy a bunch of CryptoPunks, or I'm going to put it all in on this penny stock, and then I'm going to turn that into content of riding the wave of this penny stock. It doesn't really matter what it is, but when I have a target, a financial target, it makes me try to do a way better job at the thing I'm doing.

Yeah, that definitely resonates, and I think it's healthy, and I think that's awesome. Um, I see it a bit differently, and my different way is not a better way. My different way is I see what I spend my time on outside of earning a salary through demandcurve.com in the context of a craftsperson. So I don't want to do anything, even if it's for some extrinsic goal like getting a chef, unless I would be happy doing it if I got nothing else from it. The process itself is the reward. I feel like it took a really long time for me to figure out what those things are in my life. Where the process alone is really rewarding. And to me, so yeah, yeah, it's just like, it's such a beautiful thing if you can find it. Um, and, and like, I was going through this binge on YouTube where I was watching videos of creators, uh, and like artists and musicians in the process of making their music. Uh, like if you Google, uh, if you search YouTube for Ariana Grande, I forget the name of the song, but she's like, Ariana Grande in studio.

Dude, I've gone down so many rabbit holes of this, uh, There's an Ed Sheeran documentary if anybody wants to watch on Apple Plus of him making his, uh, on Apple TV Plus or whatever, of, uh, him making his album. And it's like he invites a bunch of people to his house and you literally see him like in a car ride just messing around on the guitar. And he's like, you can see, you can hear him figuring out this one guitar lick that became, you know, uh, you know, Love Yourself or whatever becomes one of these like hits today. And you can see him just trying to like humming and being like 'Oh, what if I said, you know, blah blah blah,' and then he's like figuring it out live. God, that, that stuff is like, you know, that's my business porn. That's my creativity porn.

Yeah, it's a dopamine hit. And a great one is if you guys search John Mayer Beats Live Radio on YouTube, you'll see him like literally make up a song in real time. It's such a— isn't it such a dopamine hit to watch people? But the thing I take away from all those videos is if they made no money from that, I know I— in the deep in my bones, I know not all of these musicians that are successful, but some of them, like John Mayer, they're just obsessed with doing this. And the reward is, can they come up with something awesome?

So, um, yeah, the, the, the flip side of that is— the flip side of that is you don't want John Mayer to have to build Demand Curve as a business in order to fund his musical pursuits. And so if, if this is the thing you love the most and you want to spend all your time doing it, and you didn't have some major, major exit beforehand, which is a big criteria for most people, then this is how it becomes sustainable, right? Like, I want to create more content, I want to teach, so that I need teaching to be sustainable so I can spend all my time on it. I could hire the best people for it, all those things, right? So I think that's the caveat. Do you have any kind of like, yeah, other backup stuff as far as opportunities or ideas or things that caught your eye?

Now, what do you make of the, like, Casey Neistat, uh, MrBeast, or whoever— these guys that basically they made their, their bones and their following by doing a daily vlog, and they got— they chose to get on that, they chose to handcuff themselves to that treadmill. And the fans kind of loved that. And their premise was different. It wasn't, this is great, it's, this is everything.

And I think there's many ways to win. Like, I think you typically want to be on either end of the spectrum, either, uh, light touch, high frequency. So, um, you— my— I'm comfort. I'm like Friends. There's a million episodes you can go through and they're all all right. Or your Game of Thrones, and there's like, no, there's 8 episodes that you can go, go to for this season, but they're all epic. And, you know, I think I find that if you're going to choose one strategy, polarize to either end of that and focus on quality, or focus on frequency. And, um, and in the middle is tough because if you try to be high frequency, high quality, you lose. Right? If you try to be low frequency, low quality, you lose. If you try to be— right? So it's like, there's— you have to hit one of those in order to make it work, um, as far as I've seen in terms of, in terms of how content goes. By the way, tell me, uh, share with people your thoughts on, uh, bios. So I hit you up and I was like, hey, I want to redo my Twitter bio, and I feel like you've probably put some thought into this. And you were like, funny enough, I have. Here's some thoughts. And you gave me this audio note, this 2-minute iMessage audio note that was fire. And I was like, this is such a Julian thing. So share with people kind of what you've seen or how you break that down, though. The whole idea of bio, which sounds really lighthearted, but in reality, how you talk about yourself matters to yourself, like your own self-concept. But how you talk about yourself to others, how you present yourself to others, it's like, it seems frivolous until you got to go write one. And then you sit down and you're like, fuck, I have so much to say that I have nothing to say at the same time. And it all sounds bad. Then it sounds too braggy. Then it sounds too unimpressive. How do I do this? And so give me, give me your thoughts on bios.

So you're kind of saying, what are you gonna get from me? What's in it for you? And why you can trust this source, just enough to get you to trust, not everything.

Bingo. And what's interesting about this question actually, Sean, is that you're fundamentally asking me a growth marketing question, which is, hey, if I look at my Twitter account, my Twitter profile, and if we think of it as like a landing page for my startup, What would you do to modify either one to increase conversions? So on conversions with the startup, we're talking about clicking and signing up, but on Twitter, we're talking about clicking and following. And so you could, if you actually dive into the weeds, there's more you could do to your Twitter profile. And maybe it's a fun exercise we can walk through because it just shows how to apply the lens of growth marketing to Twitter or to YouTube or to your podcast, right? Right. So I'll give you one quick example. Like if you just think, ask yourself this question, If I'm presenting the public with a page of any sort, what are all of the elements that surface on that page that factor into their decision as to whether they're going to convert? So if I'm looking at my Twitter account right now, I'm seeing my bio, I'm seeing my headshot, I'm seeing my pinned tweet. So let's just talk about that. Let's use that one example, pinned tweet. So your pinned tweet can reinforce what your bio said to further qualify why you talk about that. Why you should talk about it, rather, and it gives an example of it. So they get the quick dopamine hit off the bat that your pinned tweet is delivering on. Like, for me, I said I talk about storytelling and critical thinking, so my pinned tweet is exactly— it's just a tiny little blog post. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that's your surface area. Um, and the same thing goes for YouTube. Like, every little thing is surface area. When added together, it can increase conversion, you know?

Yeah. So you, uh, and then you have like the follower count, which is like your social proof that you can't really fake. I guess you can buy fake followers, but that's the other signal that they're looking for is, do other people trust this person? Do other people follow this person? Um, or the blue check mark, right? That's, that's another signal that, that you could, you could have or not have. Not fully in your control, but that's what counts towards conversion. All right, I like that.

Um, wait, Sean, tell me about your blue check mark journey. Didn't you already say something in iMessage about your blue check?

Uh, no, what do you mean? I don't have one. I tried to get one. They said the They just didn't reply because that's Twitter. Uh, I don't remember, was there something else?

Okay, so I remember you had a story about trying to get it.

Never mind, we'll skip it. You know, if you remember it, say it. I don't remember it. Maybe, maybe you're mixing me up with somebody.

No, that, that actually might have been this. It might have been the world's worst story. That might have been it.

So never mind. Fair enough, fair enough. Um, okay, I think we can, we can, uh, leave it with kind of like one last little piece and then we'll, we'll, we'll wrap it up to go. But The last thing I wanted to say is, if you weren't doing what you were doing now, right? So you're not doing Demand Curve, you're not writing. I can't let you go back through those doors. Those doors are now locked. Where does Julian go? How does he spend his time? What would excite you if I gave you all your time back? Where would you go spend it if you couldn't spend it how you're spending it now?

So the answer, actually, no, reflexively is movies. The thing I actually came to the US to do from Canada was to try to make movies. And so that remains the thing that I find so interesting because I don't have a good— it's going to be hard for me to explain this, but the brief version is it's so freaking hard, Sean. It's so hard to break in. It's so hard to write a good screenplay. It's so hard to turn that into a good film. It's so hard to get people to watch it. And the requirements for actually pulling it off are how resourceful, how creative, and how sort of, um, uh, well, really those are the two key things— resourceful and creative you can be. And do you have a good sense of taste, right? Right. And I love that forcing— I love that burden on my shoulders, try to crack what I see as one of the hardest problems, the intersection like creative and business. So I've always wanted to do it, plus I just love the idea of being able to tell people stories that moves them. It's such a beautiful thing.

So what kind of movies are we talking? Like comedy, action, drama, indie, artistic, you know, documentaries? What are you talking about?

Well, I'll tell you, I'll give you 4 movies I absolutely love, and I think it'll answer the question. So Whiplash, incredible fiction film. Um, The Prestige, uh, Christopher Nolan's film about magicians. Uh, and then a documentary on Netflix, which I'm so stoked I get to tell people this because some will actually go— well, not enough people will listen that it'll get some views. Searching for Sugar Man on Netflix is the best documentary I've ever seen. And then the last one I'll recommend is— who's that one about?

Who's the Sugar Man one about?

Okay, so this is really tricky, Sean, because the entire movie is a spoiler. So I'll just say— I'll just say this. I'll say it's about a musician that disappeared off like the face of the earth, um, and where he went to and how he came back. And, uh, Fuck, you should cut that because now I'm giving spoilers. You should bleep that. You gotta bleep the "and he came back." But the last thing I'll say is Counterpart, which is, um, it's an amazing show on Amazon. It's my favorite TV show maybe ever. Counterpart's amazing. It's like a James Bond type thing. It's brilliant.

Okay, I've never even heard of that.

Uh, I'm not pitching anything well, Sean. I suck at this.

You're great at things until they become very personal. Like when it's like, what do you really want to do in your heart of hearts? You're like, I don't know how to say it, but like you can say everything else. Or it's like these movies that you love, that you really want other people to love, the pressure in your head goes so high of how do I sell this right without ruining the, the first time magic of experiencing it. Um, you almost create a, a pressure cooker for yourself here. So, um, okay, so what you want to do is you want to make, you want to make a movie about, uh, you know, Searching for Bobby Fischer style, right? Uh, about, you know, Kobayashi the, uh, the competitive eater in It's like greatness/enigmas/prodigies, and like, you know, with a dash of sort of drama and mystery.

Dude, well, I'd say I knew I could rely on you. Yes, well pitched. Yeah, I just love this stuff. I just, I love making it. I love watching it. I love people. I love seeing people watch it. How about you? I'm curious. I want to flip this around on you. What would you do?

If I could do anything right now? Yeah. I would basically take like little 3 to 5 year arcs of my life. This is what I think I would do. I'd take 3 to 5 year arcs of my life and I would go try to do a really fun thing that I don't do. So I would, one would be standup comedy. So I would try to create a set that actually is good. And I would figure out how you do that. I would learn the trade. I would go to shows. I would do all that. I would coach a basketball team., and I would try to like be a high school basketball coach and, uh, and just give it my all, you know, doing that. I would, um, you know, like one is I don't actually want to make a show, but I do want to write a script. I'm actually trying to do that right now, trying to write a script for a mock episode of The Office, uh, which is a lot of fun. And, uh, I would try to make a song, like a hit song. How do you make a catchy hit song that pops off? Uh, I don't care if it pops off as a TikTok meme or what, but But that would be another one. And so I would just do these little, like, I would try to write a book, I would try to create a, um, a brand of a drink or a chips bag or something like that. I would just take these like little mini, mini challenges that are 3 to 5-year sprints. I would go really deep in them, try to win, and then I would come out the other side. I would basically switch careers, uh, each time I do them.

I love that. So you, you want to, you want to break up your life into chapters, and you want each to be a very creatively fulfilling thing where you're like maximally using, uh, actually not necessarily, because the high school basketball coach is a really cool one. It's a nice counterbalance to the creative screenwriting thing.

Yeah, because it's not all about making a song and making a stand-up set. It's like things that I just think would be really fun if you did them, um, and which typically is creative, but sometimes it's not, right? Like sports is its own thing. Competition is really fun, leading is fun, strategy is fun, all that good stuff.

What's stopping you from being a comedian in the next 15 years? Because What's stopping you from making the time to do it?

Uh, nothing. I'm just occupied right now. Like, I'm doing things. I got a business I'm running and, uh, this content arm. So I don't have the clear schedule at the moment to, to clear everything off to go, go chase that. And I can just dabble kind of like for fun in very small ways. But I think there's something really fun about the immersion. So I've set myself this challenge to try to write an episode of The Office by the end of this month. And I don't know how to do it, but I hit up my friend who writes for a TV show, and I said, hey, can we jam next Thursday and tell me how you write an episode of TV? Like, that's what I'm trying to do. So I'm, I'm doing little, like, you know, tiptoe in the water. But, uh, to do it for real the way I want, I would, um, like, I'm gonna clear my schedule for, for like a 2-year period. You won't hear about me, and then I come out the other side, uh, you know, with some, some story to tell.

You know how fun it would be for all of us to just watch you go do a set? I would 100% show up live. I would be the loudest laugher, even if it was artificial. I would 100% support you. Um, dude, that would be— I kind of want to live through you, Sean. This is something I really want you to do, almost selfishly, but also I think you'll just have a blast.

Yeah, I, I, I do, and I will. So, so the other thing right now is I just had a kid, uh, two kids actually, two babies. And so I kind of feel like right now The main project is actually I'm trying to get in the best shape of my life, and I'm also learning how to be a dad, like a new dad. And so I kind of want to like not skip that part because, uh, like, I already, I already made the baby, so I already did the hard part. Now I just have to like stay there. Don't, don't busy myself doing something else. Just stay here and actually do a dad bit.

Well, what I will say is, if I've learned anything from comedians endlessly talking about their process. It's that this is exactly the fuel in your life that turns into the comedy, right? Like the struggles of being a dad, right? The struggles of losing weight. Yeah, exactly. So it almost seems like if you don't act on it now, it almost seems like this is the time capsule where you write down your experiences and your thoughts and it can become future material. So I'm, I'm, yeah, I'll give you two.

So I was in the shower the other day and I wrote down two pieces, uh, two pieces of content. And I texted it to some guy who is a comedian that, uh, is a pretty famous comedian. I don't know him very well, but we kind of, we text or DM a little bit. And I said, hey, I got two little nuggets for you, two little truths about life that I think you could turn into jokes. Here they are. And, uh, it's just, they had come to me while I was in the shower. And one was, um, receipts. Like, I don't care how old I get, I got no fucking strategy when it comes to— if I'm at the cashier, they say, do you want the receipt? I say yes, I say no. There is no consistency, there is no logic, there is no strategy. And like, nothing is a more panic moment than whatever the fuck I do when they ask me, do you want the receipt or not? And why, like, why do we do that? Why, why does nobody have like any kind of consistency with that? The second one, uh, what was the second one I sent him? It was, uh, oh, racism. It's like people think America is really racist, um, and there's racism is a big problem. And when you think of racist, like, if I say racist, you know, think of a racist, what image pops into your head?

Um, the Ku Klux Klan member, right?

So, you know, you think of the, the Ku Klux, the KKK, like a white guy in a white hood, or you think of like, you know, a white person in a MAGA hat or something like that. That's what people think of when they're thinking of racist. Like, who are all these racists in America, right? And, uh, and it just occurred to me, like, In reality, nobody is— white people are the least racist. Nobody is more racist than, like, you know, an Indian parent or a Chinese grandmother. Like, they'll just straight up tell you, like, you know, some pretty— like, hey, can I marry, you know, a person of this race? And it's like, uh, no, and here's why. And, and so I just— it sort of occurred to me that nobody's more racist than a Chinese grandma. And, uh, and so I was like, you know, that's a truth about the world that I believe. That I was like, okay, these are nuggets I want to write down. I don't know how you craft those into jokes. Like, what I'm telling you isn't a joke, it's just sort of like an observation of the world the way I see it. And then like, okay, cool, how do I write these down so that I learn how to actually like turn these into jokes and weave them together and make a set out of it?

And that's exactly what I think is the most interesting part, is like, what's the scaffolding, what's the narrative structure for taking that observation and making it laugh-out-loud funny as opposed to like just a smirk on my face? Right. And this is where it gets so fun to sit down and reverse engineer, like Dave Chappelle. Um, and this is actually one of the podcast episodes we did, uh, storytelling, is you're trying to reverse engineer what makes such a great storyteller. And it's like setting up the stakes, the hero's perspective, all these cool ingredients, the climax, the twist, right? Um, and that to me is the joy. That's got to be the most fun part, I think, is you figuring out how to craft it. And then the people who totally buck the trend, like Mitch Hedberg, He has a joke that's sort of like your receipt joke. But my point though first is he's not really doing the normal joke structure, I don't think. I'm not an expert, right? But it's still so funny because he has an extra layer. The extra layer is phenomenally unique and like tickling delivery, right? And so there's an extra layer beyond the structure of the narrative. If you just wrote his jokes on paper, it might not be as funny. But he has this joke going back to your receipts thing. Where he's like, uh, people who hand out flyers on the street as you pass by for like whatever, you know, organization they're running, they're basically saying, hey, you throw this in the garbage. And I remember that always stuck in my head. And like, I can't do that. I can't deliver it like he can, right? That was pretty good.

He got me to laugh. Actually, there's a thing you— there's a thing you had put out in your storytelling thing, by the way. You, you said, oh, here's all these elements. But the one that stood out that I actually was telling Ben, uh, my right-hand man, I was like, hey, Julian had this thing that I think is spot on, and we should— like, I think I do this to an extent. I think you should do it more, but like, we can all do this more. You were saying something like, the best storytellers, when they tell a story, it's almost like they're blowing their own mind again live. They are surprising themselves in there, or in a comedian's case, they're making themselves laugh, they're cracking themselves up. And, um, the extent to which you can genuinely blow your own mind repeatedly or crack yourself up repeatedly is pretty much the extent to which you can deliver a story or a joke. And, um, if once you realize that, you can't unsee it, and it gives you a blueprint to just be more charismatic and entertaining when you talk.

Yeah, exactly. It was totally spot on. And if you're gonna like try one thing, try that. Get yourself into the state where you remember what it felt like so that you re— you re— you tell it with that same emotion that you felt when it happened. If you were mind-blown then, you'll feel mind-blown now. If it cracked you up the first time you realized it, it'll crack you up now. And, uh, I, I love that. I thought that was a great, great little hack, great little deconstruction, uh, on your part. Um, all right, where should people— so Twitter is @Julian, uh, julian.com. Your branding is, is kind of amazing.

Um, where else should people follow you? Yeah, sure. So really it's, uh, julian.com, and then demandcurve.com is where, uh All these ideas we chatted about, that's where they come from. We teach people how to do growth marketing and that's basically it. And then if you want to see Sean himself on my pod, there's brainspodcast.com.

Yeah, that's right. I think I'm on 2 episodes of it. So yes, dude.

So we call you an honorary brain because Corin and I love you so much. We're like, all right, even though it's kind of weird to have one person twice in the first 6 episodes, there's no one more lovable and charismatic and just fun and interesting and juicy mental models and like a bag of cool ideas in the back of his brain. And we're like, we just, we, we love you. I love you. And so thank you for coming on. It's awesome.

I appreciate you. Thank you so much. Uh, all right, sweet. We're out of here. All right, peace.