Podcast
The Swyx Mixtape
Hosted by Swyx · EN
swyx's personal picks pod.
Weekdays: the best audio clips from podcasts I listen to, in 10 minutes or less!
Fridays: Music picks!
Weekends: long form talks and conversations!
This is a passion project; never any ads, 100% just recs from me to people who like the stuff I like.
Share and give feedback: tag @swyx on Twitter or email audio questions to swyx @ swyx.io
25episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Habit Formation [Andrew Huberman]
Jan 6, 2022Tap to summarizeListen to the Huberman Lab (1h18mins in) https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/huberman-lab/the-science-of-making-1VeFnGW6psA/?t=4702
Transcribe →AliAbdaal.com [Ali Abdaal]
Oct 21, 2021Tap to summarizeListen to the Nathan Barry podcast https://nathanbarry.com/048-ali-abdaal-building-multiple-income-streams-content-creator/ (7 and 21 mins in)TranscriptSo, I started the YouTube channel in my penultimate year, so I, I, I, I done five years of med school at this point. I’d set up a few businesses. I had like two SAS products that I was using to side hustle, income, most my, my way through med school. And then in 2017, when I was in my final year, the YouTube channel actually started out as a content marketing strategy for my, my business, that business was helping other people get into med school.It was like that standard thing. Once you do something, you then teach other people how to do the thing. and it was like, you know, the creative economy before it was really called that where[00:07:20] Nathan:Yeah,[00:07:20] Ali:You kind of follow that model. And so the YouTube channel started.[00:07:23] Nathan:Because you were you teaching people like test prep[00:07:25] Ali:Exactly. Yeah. And it’s so similar to pet Flynn story as well.You know, he, he started off teaching people how to do some architecture exam. I started up teaching people how to do the med school admissions exams, and that’s kind of transitioned into a coaching business, which then transitioned into the YouTube channel.[00:07:40] Nathan:Okay. And so as the YouTube channel started to grow, like, what were some of those first milestones, you know, as you’re getting to, how long did it take for you to a thousand subscribers and then maybe, you know, 5,000 or 10,000? Like what milestones stand out.[00:07:52] Ali:Yeah, so I started in the summer of 2017 and it took me six months and 52 videos to get to the first thousand subscribers, six months in 52 videos. I was putting out two videos every week while preparing for med school finals and kind of neglecting my exams for the sake of YouTube, because I could see the YouTube thing was like, oh, I really want to do this.I think the ROI on being a YouTube or is going to be higher than the ROI and getting an extra 2% in my med school finals. that was, that was the theory. Anyway, So, yeah, it took six months of the channel to get a thousand subscribers, another like four or five months for it to get up to 5,000 subscribers.And at the point where I was at around 4,005,000 subscribers, there were two like really good things that happened. Number one was a collab with a much bigger utuber. his name is Ibz Mo. So he and I got to know each other through university and he had 60 K at the time. And so he and I did a collab which took off and helped the channel get exposure.But also there was a video that I made my, my very first video that actually went viral, which was a video about how to study for exams. now this video is a bit weird because like I’d actually planned for it to happen like a whole year before I made it. So when I started YouTube, I, I sort of consumed the hell out of everything on the internet, around how to be a YouTuber and, Sara Dietschy and Casey Neistat had this thing whereby Casey Neistat, enormous YouTuber, Sarah DG would take YouTube who was smaller at the time.She went from 40 cases. Over to like one through over a hundred, a hundred thousand, basically overnight because Casey Neistat shouted her out. and the way that she described that, and I, that I found in some random interview, like on the YouTube grapevine, was that you, you benefit from a collaboration with a bigger utuber, but you only benefit from it.If there is already a backlog of really high quality content on your channel. And so I took that to heart and I knew that, okay, at some point I want to do a collab with a bigger utuber. And at some point I want to try and make specifically a video on how to study for exams, but I knew number one, I needed to have a backlog of hot, cold, high quality content because otherwise no one would care.And secondly, I knew that it would take me about a hundred videos to get good enough at making videos to actually be able to make a decent video about exams. And so that was like my 82nd or something video, which I, I, I I’d had in the back of my mind for so long since, because since getting started button, you know, I need to get my skills up.I need to put in the quantity so that I can actually make videos that are hopefully.[00:10:06] Nathan:Okay. That’s interesting. Yeah, because coming, doing a collab and coming to a channel and it’s like, okay, they have four videos. And the one that I saw in the collab is actually the best one they’ve ever done. Like it’s sort of, it doesn’t have the same ring to it as if you come in and be like, wow, this is incredible.Like, one of my favorite bloggers, you know, it’s separate from the YouTube space, but I got him, Chris Guillebeau was an author and blogger and I followed him in the early days. And I had the experience of, he had written a guest post for Tim Ferris and I was reading Tim versus blogging. This was probably 2011, maybe.And I was like, oh, this is really good. I love it. I think it was on actually on travel, hacking, you know, credit card points and all of that. And so I clicked over to his site and I think. Over the next, like two days, I just read the entire website, you know, Nate, it was like years worth of blog posts and all that, but that was the experience.Right. The guest posts is a collab of some kind and then coming over and you’re like, you’re just deep dive and consume everything rather than the experience of coming over and be like, oh, okay. That’s interesting. You know, and like moving along and the back catalog is what, what, drives that?[00:11:09] Ali:Yeah. Yeah. I had, I had that exact experience with Derek Sivers who I discovered through the Tim Ferriss show and Mr. Money mustache, but it’s coming through a temporary. I was like, all right, I’m spending the next week of my life. Just binge reading all of your blog posts that you’ve ever written for the last 20 years.And now it’s like, I’ve got this information downloaded into my brain.Clip 2So in the process of building a team around, which is something I wanted to talk to you about because you’ve built a big team over time, I was speaking to Derek, you’re a director of marketing as well about building a team and he had, so he had loads of advice to share.So that’s, that’s a challenge for me right now. It’s like, you know, two years ago, it was just me last year, this time, last year, there were three, three of us full-time well, two full-time. It was me working as a doctor and a part-time assistant, and now there’s 12 of us, but now we’re hiring another 10 people.So by next month it’s going to be maybe like 20, 20 of us a hundred. It’s all those problems associated with scaling a team and leadership and management. And that’s the kind of stuff that, I’ve been really as sort of very much on the steep learning curve of, and that I’m very excited about getting better at,[00:21:44] Nathan:Yeah. what’s the reason that you’re growing the team so quickly.[00:21:48] Ali:Well, let’s see, because we just have a lot of money. once, once we launched our, yeah, it’s a, it’s...
Transcribe →Writing Newsletters for a Living [Nathan Baschez, Dan Shipper]
Aug 4, 2021Tap to summarizeAudio source: https://swyx.io/podcast/learn-in-podcast/rss.xmlNotesInterviewing People Good Writing = Engine + Drag + LiftEngine: The core idea. "Why am I here in the first place?"Drag: Writing problems, eg jargon, run-on sentencesLift: Stylistic points — jokes, fun tone, deep insight"Trying to make a writer do something that they don't want to do is like not going to really work""Write pieces that put their finger on things that people have been thinking a lot, but don't have the words for"hit on timely topics, but have something to say that is new and interesting"you almost need to have your finger on the pulse of what people are publishing... but once you start doing that, once you start like looking at what everyone else is doing, like you, you lose whatever that is that can get people interested in what you're doing, because you're no longer original."Reading things that other people aren't necessarily readingTranscriptDan Shipper: I think especially when you're starting out, the thing to do is just make good stuff, especially in media, because that's, the idea is if you write something really good, it's going to spread. So another thing that we've done.[00:00:09] Over time is the model that I started with super organizers, which is interviewing people. So when you do an interview with someone and you write it up and you do a good job and they like it, they share it with their audience. So if you can write really good interviews and get people who have successfully more and more followers, every time you publish.[00:00:25] You, you get exposed to their audience and you can recruit their audience to be your audience. And then that means you can get someone even more famous next time. It doesn't fully work exactly like that all the time. Like sometimes the fans, people don't share it. Honestly, you have to mix in people who are not famous.[00:00:38] Cause sometimes famous people are just, aren't very good interviews. Have these bits that they just give you, but they given it to a hundred people before. So it's feels like raw other things that we've done right now. Something that we're experimenting with is just like during cross-promote with other newsletters, we have someone who's doing growth with us and he's just setting up different cost promos with newsletters that, that we're a fan of.[00:00:59]And that has been actually fairly successful so far. But yeah, I think we're just at the very earliest stages of figuring out like how to grow beyond. Yeah. Just writing stuff that, that people really like. [00:01:10] Nathan Baschez: Yeah. And I think all the other stuff depends on that first core layer of just the writing being really good.[00:01:17] So it's like we focus way more time on editing pieces and like figuring out what makes a good piece on that kind of stuff. Then we do. Doing cross promo or whatever else, we're just now starting to do some cross promo, but it's like the cross promo wouldn't work. If the pieces weren't that good.[00:01:30] And if the pieces are good, you don't need cross promo that bad. Cause people just share it on Twitter. So it's like really the higher order bit is just editorial focus, basically. [00:01:39] Courtland Allen: Yeah. There's nothing more shareable than basically articles online. We've got a URL. Every single social network is formatted to allow you to share links and blow it up into the cool little expanded version with a picture and stuff.[00:01:48]If you write good content, people will share it. What have you learned? [00:01:52] Nathan Baschez: Writing good content. We're developing some like frameworks around this one is engine drag and lift. So three interesting things. Lift is a new one that Rachel Jepson, our executive editor came up with that. I love, but so the engine of the piece is like the core idea of like, why am I here in the first place?[00:02:08]It's just oh you're going to if you're here, it's oh, you're going to learn how to start a new media company. Or at least how these people did it. And. Whatever, like you're going to learn a bunch of like random other bits about this kind of world along the way. Like maybe co-founder relationships, whatever.[00:02:20] That's like the engine of this podcast interview that we're doing drag is like, Okay. Maybe you have a really strong engine, but just the way you wrote it, like the sentences don't make sense. They're not they don't logically flow from each other. You start to feel lost, and so I think about it like a car.[00:02:35] This is funny. This is before I got into formula, now that I'm into formula one, I'm like way into this analogy. But it's if you have a car that has really terrible aerodynamics, no matter how strong the engine is, people are going to fall off, but. It's really hard as an editor to fix an engine.[00:02:48] That's just not there. Like sometimes the engine is just weak or oh, it only appeals to a really tiny subset of people. And it's this is very specific. Like maybe you might want to make it a little bit more broad or something like that, but you know, the engine is like the core reason why you're there.[00:03:01] The drag is like anything in the way that it's written, that gets in the way of accessing the power of that engine. And then Lyft is just funny little things like. Or jokes or tone that kind of keep you sticking around. It's like when someone makes you chuckle in the middle of writing or someone just points out something that's really insightful.[00:03:17] Even if it's besides the point of the engine, you're just re-upped for another, like two minutes, at least of reading, cause like something good may be around the corner. And so that little lift, those little nice those kinds of help too. But yeah, I don't know that's like our overall framework.[00:03:30]Dan. You've got a lot of other stuff on this too though. Yeah. I mean, I [00:03:33] Dan Shipper: think that there's a lot of things within that. What makes a good engine and also like, how do you get the best out of writers? So like one, one lesson that we keep learning over and over again is like writers.[00:03:42] The best pieces are written by writers who care about those pieces and wanna write. Yeah. And trying to make a writer do something that they don't want to do is like not going to really work. So it's like a lot of the best pieces come from writers digging into their own with soul on what they're interested in.[00:03:56] If they're interested in it, then it would probably do well for people who are like them. And so, or interested in the same things as they are. And so that's reflected in our model like Nathan and I don't go to writers and be like, Hey, you should write about this week. Like we're like each publication inside of.[00:04:13] Yeah. Each newsletter is its own publication with its own writer who has the voice and vision of the newsletter. And is the one who has the finger on the pulse of the audience and gets to say this is what I'm into. And this is where I want to lead the audience, within certain bounds obviously.[00:04:26] And our job is to help them do that better, to bring that out and bring more of them out into their pieces rather than being th...
Transcribe →The three kinds of platforms [Amjad Masad, quoting Marc Andreesen]
May 21, 2021Tap to summarizeAudio source: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/village-globals/the-state-and-future-of-KNpTy90h4XI/ 40 mins inA 2019 recap of devtools investment theses, by two of the most prominent up and coming devtools founders.- What hackers play with during weekends will become the things we use at work tomorrow - Reducing Time to Code - TabNine (i tried it recently and quite like it, it just saves keystrokes, end of story) - Kite.ai- Level 1/2/3 platforms - Marc Andreesen- Netlify, Zeit, Dev.to
Transcribe →Tobi Lütke on Software and Blacksmithing
Mar 24, 2021Tap to summarizeAudio source (with video): https://thisweekinstartups.com/tobi-lutke-on-shopifys-impact-on-the-creator-economy-covid-forcing-focus-early-internet-breakthroughs-evolving-as-a-remote-manager-much-more-e1184/Software and Blacksmithingswyx: [00:00:00] So recently Tobi Lutke, the CEO of Shopify was on theThis Week in Startups podcast with Jason Calacanis and he has some really interesting thoughts about software, which I shared. But it sounds better coming from him around why software engineering is an attractive career it's because we get to make tools that we then use to help us the next day. And so if you apply this over a 40 year career, you can really compound your productivity and your output. And here he is:Jason Calacanis: [00:00:30] Do you still write code ever? I think sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. You miss being, 12 hour a day, coder.Tobi Lutke: [00:00:36] Yeah, it's a really good question. I think the 12th hour day coding has never been a goal, but sometimes happened just because there wasn't anything more interesting going on in plateau and figuring something out to read like it's so in a way that's not the objective, but I love coding. I find, I think the, all, I think the narrative around programming is more interesting than people have realized just because really, since blacksmithing, we never really had a craft that makes whether the craftsman actually make their own tools.And I think there's, the who's had it first we make two of the tools and number two, it's make us I'm making this part of it. Yeah. I think, Jason Calacanis: [00:01:15] I mean, to make tools, right? Like you see this gorillas take sticks and stick them into the Antell to get the bugs out, to eat, to get the heads out, to eat and say Tobi Lutke: [00:01:24] it's purely cause and effect vote for four primary purposes.I think what we do is I'll give you a genetically no different in the last 70,000 years, we event like so the difference between aspect van, and now it's really the tools we have available that don't really invent the stories we tell each other. And it's amazing that we can put people on the moon or, go to space on your usable, the rockets and do all these things and have internet based on just to a building point to a building.And then of course softwares, like what would you make of. Plenty of leverage because you have zero marginal cost copying infrastructure that everyone on planet earth can add to and constantly come up with trying to come up with better ideas. So I'm like, this is the thing that I'm really excited by and why I love being here programmer, because for leverage, you get as an individual, being able to build something that then is available to everyone.It's just enormous. I'd like obviously Shopify as a good example of that. And I, I think that's that's really important. There's so many stories about, w what you said earlier is totally true about, Ethernet, like DSLR camera and an SM7B microphone.But in a way If you need technologists to come in and make it so that someone can buy a single thing and then plug it into one thing. And then all of this needs to work well. And you need to marshal the complete infrastructure that we've built around machine learning to to take tiny microphones and make them sound good.And we need to like all of this. Like it needs to be like significant movement to make the setup you and I have here, which we can do because we have tinkerers available to everyone, this kind of democratization of goodness studio. Yeah. It's important. Jason Calacanis: [00:02:57] Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting.I love the thought of the compounding nature of software and it's also happening in hardware. Now, if you just think about what happened with the smartphone revolution, If we hadn't an Apple hadn't produced and Android phones, billions of smartphones and billions of batteries and billions of charging stations and got obsessed with how fast can we charge these phones?It would have never trickled down into your Tesla and that would have never trickled into your quad-copter. And now the quad copters, I don't know if you said Joby is going public Reid. Hoffman's taking a public Mark Pincus. I said, read on the pod, talking about it. That would have not been possible if Elon haven't made a million cars with those battery packs, because now the battery management and fast charging allows you to have a Vitol.So you're going to be able to go from Ottawa to the airport in a veto, and it's going to have eight rotors and it's going to I would never get an, a helicopter. Those things are death traps, but a veto with eight rotors and to go out and it just the software it's like, Oh, two Rutgers are out just.Redeploy the energy and it's done, and it feels like that's happening with software so quickly. Startups today, I had a startup that built a million dollar business, basically on Slack, like just charging people subscriptions to go into a soccer room. And I was like, there's no, you don't have any developers.So no. We just charge people on this Stripe account to go to this landing page. And then they are in a Slack instance and we built some glue with Zapier. If this, then that. The no code startups I'm seeing, which actually is what Shopify is right too. And people can build an online store with no work. swyx: [00:04:33] I think if you've been in software for a while, you've probably thought about this where one thing that we do builds on another thing that someone else did and so on and so on and down the stack. And it's just really empowering. And I really like this discussion from Toby.
Transcribe →