Latest / Whereabouts Tales | Stories of Belonging and Immigrant Experiences / How a Software Engineer Made $500K Using Instagram Growth Hacks & Bots

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How a Software Engineer Made $500K Using Instagram Growth Hacks & Bots · Whereabouts Tales | Stories of Belonging and Immigrant Experiences

• 0:00
  Welcome to Whereabouts Tales, the podcast that takes you
• 0:03
  behind the scenes of the stories that you didn't know you wanted
• 0:06
  to hear. Today we're venturing into the
• 0:08
  wild world of Instagram hacks, bots, and social media wizardry
• 0:12
  with Timohorn, a software engineer turned into digital
• 0:15
  mastermind who made about half $1,000,000 by pushing
• 0:19
  Instagram's buttons, sometimes literally.
• 0:22
  If you ever wonder what really goes on behind those flawless
• 0:26
  feeds and why your follower counts feels like a never ending
• 0:29
  game of ketchup, you're in for some juicy insider secrets.
• 0:33
  So strap in and get ready to explore digital underworld like
• 0:37
  only whereabouts Tails can deliver.
• 0:40
  This episode, we also have a giveaway.
• 0:42
  How often have you seen Instagram accounts explode
• 0:44
  overnight and thought, Oh my God, how did they grow so fast?
• 0:49
  Now it's your turn to share. Listen to the episode and tell
• 0:52
  us your wildest. Oh my God, how did they grow so
• 0:56
  fast Story. Whether it's your own or someone
• 0:59
  you know or maybe someone that is an influencer. 1 lucky winner
• 1:04
  will get framed. A villain's perspective on
• 1:07
  social media. The book the team wrote exposing
• 1:10
  the secrets of Instagram growth. Don't forget to follow and share
• 1:17
  it to a friend who also loves Instagram mysteries.
• 1:20
  I'm Paul and this is whereabouts tales.
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  Enjoy. Oh deal.
• 1:26
  Hi and happy that we managed to do we we get to do this finally.
• 1:32
  Thank you for having me. Today's guest is a senior
• 1:37
  software engineer by day, long time book critic by night, and
• 1:42
  and now the author of of Framed Villains Perspective on Social
• 1:47
  media. Welcome to Herbal stairs.
• 1:51
  I'm thrilled to thrilled to have you.
• 1:52
  You are originally from Scranton, PA.
• 1:57
  Yes. Can you take us back to, to
• 2:00
  Scranton? I don't, I don't think that a
• 2:01
  lot of people have heard of Scranton.
• 2:03
  Where? Where is it exactly in
• 2:04
  Pennsylvania? It's in the northeast part of of
• 2:07
  Pennsylvania. OK.
• 2:10
  What kind of key to where you growing up?
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  I was an only child, which is something I recount several
• 2:18
  times. Yeah, right.
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  It takes us, it's a certain type of person to even sit down and,
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  and, and have the journey I've had.
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  But you know, I was, I was the only child and I think I was
• 2:30
  definitely the computer nerd of the group.
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  So I was someone who was always interested in technology and,
• 2:37
  you know, by extension always loved playing video games.
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  So I think all that played really nicely together and
• 2:43
  eventually, you know, becoming a software engineer.
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  I I have to ask which was the game of choice?
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  Growing up I loved Runescape so probably from 2007 on.
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  So Runescape is an MMORPG that was browser based and it was
• 3:02
  really, really fun, even while graphics of other games we're
• 3:06
  much more advanced. True, Tim.
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  What did the reading fit into this picture?
• 3:19
  Growing up, my family worked in the book industry, so my
• 3:23
  grandfather was a director at Harper Collins on the
• 3:27
  warehousing side of it. So Harper Collins is one of the
• 3:30
  major publishers in the United States.
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  They also do international and my mom ran a contract book
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  warehousing and packaging business.
• 3:39
  So growing up a lot of books were in my home.
• 3:44
  I would say almost every room had a bookshelf.
• 3:47
  And so I was always kind of pushed toward it, but actually
• 3:53
  developing as a reader came much later.
• 3:55
  I think it's one of those things where if your parents come on a
• 3:58
  little too strongly, the kids first response is to go in like
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  the opposite direction. So for me, I really only started
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  reading seriously probably going into my sophomore year of
• 4:11
  college, where I read The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test by
• 4:16
  Tom Wolfe. And that was one of those books.
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  And, you know, it's edgy, and it makes you kind of realize, hey,
• 4:21
  there's a lot more to this than, like, Harry Potter books.
• 4:25
  Correct. It's interesting how, because I
• 4:29
  can say we, we kind of shared the I don't want to see the same
• 4:33
  story, but I was a nerd. That's all going up.
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  But somehow the the fact that there was a some bookshelves
• 4:39
  there, there were some bookshelves in the house.
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  I think that made some hot difference because you saw the
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  book stereo and let's be honest, there was no social media, so
• 4:47
  there was not so many distractions.
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  And I have to say, you just pick up a book and say, OK, let's see
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  what's inside those things. And then it randomly you
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  randomly start to like it. My first book that I read as a
• 5:00
  fun fact was the The Major Decision of a Second World War.
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  Oh wow. That was the first one.
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  It was big and it looked interesting, like picked one
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  from the bookshelf and that was it was just a coincidence,
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  nothing else. What are you already or first I
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  have to ask you a different question.
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  What which time frame are we talking about when you say you
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  had your not part like web-based games and so on.
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  I would say really 2004, 2005, really through like high school.
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  So really through, you know, 2010 or so, that was kind of
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  playing Flash games and other browser based games and then
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  also getting into more like hardcore titles, like even like
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  Diablo 2 and then more console games as well.
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  How big was the Internet in the US in in 2003?
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  It was big, but there were large asymmetries in access.
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  So I can remember a point at which like none of my friends
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  had a computer and broadband at home.
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  So meaning like a lot of people were still like had like dial up
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  modems, which was a totally different browsing.
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  Experience. You know, totally different back
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  then even a web browser, you know, there the concept of tabs
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  that we take for granted today, that was before tabs were there
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  because of how processing, like multi processing worked.
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  So it was, it was different, it was different.
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  And a lot of my friends just didn't have the same access.
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  Like I was definitely probably the second person, maybe the 1st
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  in my friend group who had two computers at home.
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  So he had the family computer and then I had my own Wow, you
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  know, and that was a really, really big deal.
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  So then getting broadband Internet in 2005 again, it made
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  a really big difference. Dial up was an experience for
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  sure. Oh man.
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  That sound, I think it's something I will never forget
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  that, that dial up sound and the fact that you were when you were
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  using the Internet, there was no phone calls in the house anymore
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  because you had the only that, that was the only line.
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  I mean, I don't know any other cases and maybe the next
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  interesting things. I don't know how it was in the
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  US, but in Romania we had the special deal of night.
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  You had a flat rate for the whole night or something like
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  this. So you I understand you would
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  not have to pay for the for the call that you made.
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  You had a flat rate for the whole night starting at 10:00 PM
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  and ending at six. AMI think that I pulled so many
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  all nighters that was a new. That's really interesting, yeah.
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  What role do you think that Internet of those days played in
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  your future, future career, future life and so on?
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  I think it was everything. It really was a fundamental part
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  of my life. And it's funny that you started
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  talking about books because I remember being in elementary
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  school and you go around the library where the school
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  library, the Public Library, your friend's house and you, you
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  pull a book off the shelf and you can kind of remember this
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  like weird, like brain response as your brains like, whoa, like
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  this is really cool. Like this is important.
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  And maybe reading a little bit of it, maybe reading the whole
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  thing if we're talking like a Goosebumps book or something.
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  And I remember that as like a like a really strong
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  foundational memory of my life. And why this is related to the
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  Internet is that when I was browsing the Internet in the
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  days before even search engines were like that easy to use.
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  I remember going to these websites, visiting these
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  websites and even the crappy ones, I had that same dopamine
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  response where I was like, oh whoa, a new place, this new,
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  this random guy like has his own website.
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  And that wonder and amazement is really something I've been
• 9:03
  chasing through my, through my entire life.
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  That was like the wonderful part about it.
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  Free of commercialization, free of even web design principles at
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  all. It was just this this just
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  crazy, crazy time where a lot of hobbyists were putting things
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  out there. And that was really special.
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  And I think it motivated me to, of course, learn web design and
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  learn how to program and then create even my own websites and
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  digital businesses. So many memories now that you've
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  said about about the Internet, like being not able to search on
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  the Internet be having I don't have to most probably used Alta
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  Vista as well as an engineer use Yahoo Messenger as well.
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  And I think if we talk about the home messenger, there are not so
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  many people knowing today that something like that existed in
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  the past. And to be able to speak to
• 9:49
  someone, you have to know his exact e-mail address and your
• 9:52
  contacts or the contacts that you added.
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  You couldn't find anyone else like just random suggested by
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  the algorithm. That was that was interesting
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  time. You're right, you had to be
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  intentional about your Internet experience and I think that made
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  a huge difference back then. Right.
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  And you know, without a search engine, the concept of a
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  bookmark, which today is like, oh, whatever, it'll just be
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  saved in history. Bookmarking something might
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  actually save you hours of searching.
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  Through your Internet history. Absolutely.
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  Absolutely. And then you you accidentally
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  close it before you manage to place a bookmark on it.
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  That was the the sadness. Yeah, absolutely.
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  You, you mentioned already that you start to learn how to code
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  and I mentioned at the beginning that you're a senior software
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  engineer today. What was the road in between
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  those these stations? On the early, yeah, on the early
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  Internet, it was easy to search for how to become a computer
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  hacker or how to design video games.
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  Because as a kid, you're not thinking about like, the, the,
• 11:03
  the fundamentals or like the, the basics, the intros.
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  You're thinking about the actual end goals, which is like, how do
• 11:09
  I hack the school and like, you know, change my grades?
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  How do I design A game that people play?
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  But as time goes on, you realize like this place, which was
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  created by, you know, computer science fundamentals ends up
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  being this wonderful repository of, you know, computer science
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  learning of these building blocks.
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  So I make the case that on Myspace, because users were able
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  to modify their own pages and customize them as far as they
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  wanted to go in terms of HTML and CSS, That's how I learned
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  web design. And years later, my first
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  internship was as a web designer, which it's a side a
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  side topic here, but that's largely not even a job today.
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  But the point is, the point is that by wanting to make my
• 12:01
  Myspace page cooler, I was able, I was finding code, I was copy
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  and pasting it, and then more and more I was able to customize
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  that code. So that was a huge part of it
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  for me, which then led to me taking a Java class my senior
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  year of high school and then studying it as as my major in
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  college. In which direction was your
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  first job? You said internship was web
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  design, but in which direction did it went afterwards?
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  Yeah. So my first paid internship was,
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  yeah, was in quantitative trading.
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  So I focused on C++ software development, which is typically
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  used in more high performance systems.
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  So everything from like designing missile systems to
• 12:50
  designing financial exchanges, all types of applications where
• 12:54
  hardware and the interaction between hardware and software is
• 12:57
  important. So the direction it took me in
• 13:00
  was to Chicago here in Illinois, where I was a core platform
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  developer at a trading firm for a summer.
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  And then I I went back to do that full time the next year.
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  Was there a moment when we were besides the sorry, besides not
• 13:20
  besides behind the scenes, when you had the kind of discomfort
• 13:25
  and you thought, I don't think that this is right, what we are
• 13:28
  doing here? Yeah, in terms of like you would
• 13:32
  say like the moral or ethical aspect of.
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  My moral. This is something that's come up
• 13:37
  a lot to even put my book on the side and think, am I using my
• 13:44
  talents or my skills for the right purpose?
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  I'll say this, I did something that was fundamentally dishonest
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  and that is the basis of of my book.
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  So when I was in the Instagram growth space, I was violating
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  terms of service and I was, you know, in some cases misleading
• 14:03
  customers. So of course, yeah, there was a
• 14:04
  concern there. But I've also been a software
• 14:07
  engineer for 10 years, which has taken me to a lot of different
• 14:10
  places. And I will say this, generally,
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  generally speaking, things have been above board and I've never
• 14:19
  really had moral or ethical concerns about my full time
• 14:23
  employment. However, however, I entertain
• 14:28
  some of the discussions around high frequency trading,
• 14:31
  quantitative trading. And I understand that some
• 14:34
  people say you have a whole lot of smart people working on these
• 14:37
  specific problems that you know aren't benefiting humanity in
• 14:41
  the same sense of other types of research.
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  So I get that, but that part hasn't really kept me up at
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  night. Was there, so it was, was it the
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  progress there? Team like you started by seeing
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  the good, the benefits and then slowly you started to see the
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  disadvantages or like say the manipulation potential.
• 15:03
  Yeah, I would say again, two in two realms here.
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  So the one is that primarily in Instagram growth, I was drawn in
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  because there's this social clout involved and it's cool and
• 15:14
  you're making money and you can walk up to anyone on the street
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  and be like, hey, do you want more Instagram followers?
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  And so there's no doubt, of course, I want to be involved
• 15:24
  with that. So that's, that was 1 aspect
• 15:26
  there. And then towards the end, you
• 15:28
  know, I would like to think we all grew up and we all were kind
• 15:32
  of moving with more integrity where we started to think, you
• 15:35
  know, our customers really aren't having the best
• 15:37
  experience. And maybe we should offer more
• 15:39
  refunds or be more generous with different types of, you know,
• 15:43
  pausing, pausing subscriptions and stuff.
• 15:45
  On the other side of it, in my, my day jobs, my, I'm a very
• 15:49
  cynical person. I think this comes through in
• 15:52
  the book. I'm naturally very critical of
• 15:57
  everything that's going on. So of course in every one of my,
• 16:01
  you know, employment involved in every one of my work
• 16:05
  environments, I've gone through this kind of honeymoon period
• 16:08
  where you're like, this is amazing.
• 16:09
  This is too good to be true. Then you go through and you're
• 16:11
  like, OK, this like kind of sucks, but it's to say nothing
• 16:14
  of the, the industry itself or like the specific employers.
• 16:18
  I've been doing it long enough that I can say a lot of my
• 16:21
  critiques are more just from me being a very, very detailed,
• 16:26
  oriented and, you know, ultimately cynical person.
• 16:29
  I mean, this cynical side, I think we all have, we all have
• 16:34
  this honeymoon face in any job. You have that honeymoon when you
• 16:37
  start and you think, Oh my God, this is my dream job.
• 16:41
  And then you start to then you have six months behind you and
• 16:44
  you start to see that the downsides win.
• 16:47
  It takes six months. You're lucky but to start to see
• 16:50
  the, the tweaks and, and tricks that that are done in the
• 16:54
  background and then something which is not that motivated.
• 16:56
  But we are all cynical. We're all there for the money
• 16:59
  and we are doing our job because we are getting paid for that.
• 17:02
  So right, I think I absolutely get what you're saying.
• 17:09
  During your, let's say, employments, you had the I
• 17:13
  would, we would call it today a side hustle, but in back then it
• 17:17
  was called a hobby. You reviewed hundreds of books
• 17:22
  on Goodreads. What's part that habit?
• 17:29
  For me, I think I'm always looking for this way to quantify
• 17:34
  progress, so to take like, what did I enjoy from playing an RPG
• 17:40
  game in the early 2000s? And it's this concept of the
• 17:44
  grind, the level up, the marker that you've accomplished
• 17:48
  something. I think when we go out into the
• 17:50
  real world, a lot of people are kind of disillusioned when the
• 17:54
  you graduate college and you realize there's no regular
• 17:58
  progress that you can measure in monetary terms.
• 18:00
  The closest thing we have is your salary or your net worth or
• 18:03
  something. And that doesn't necessarily
• 18:05
  change very often. So for me, as I began to find
• 18:12
  more and more solace and comfort in reading books, I started to
• 18:15
  look at it as something of a game.
• 18:17
  And I started to think to myself, well, hey, maybe I could
• 18:20
  read 25 books this year. Maybe I could read 52 books this
• 18:24
  year. And eventually what I realized
• 18:27
  was that I did have the time and I importantly had the interest,
• 18:31
  this very, very strong interest in finding new books, reading
• 18:35
  them, and writing sometimes very sharp critiques of them.
• 18:39
  So that was really it. It was that I loved reading, I
• 18:41
  was finding it was improving other aspects of my life and I
• 18:45
  was able to get through it at A at a pretty fast clip.
• 18:49
  Was it the incentive of being able to track the amount of of
• 18:53
  books that you read that motivated to read?
• 18:57
  I don't think it was the primary motivator, but I think Goodreads
• 19:01
  and the way Goodreads was set up where you can actually have an
• 19:04
  audience and you can get likes and people can say, Oh, well,
• 19:07
  that was a really interesting. I thought that was definitely a
• 19:10
  motivator. And it's definitely an example
• 19:13
  of social media probably having some, you know, some positive
• 19:18
  network effects there. What was the feeling when your
• 19:25
  reviewer profile was replaced with the other one?
• 19:31
  A very, very special but also sobering moment because so many
• 19:39
  times I had been the critic, and maybe sometimes unfairly so,
• 19:45
  where I would go through a book and say, oh, the editing is
• 19:48
  terrible. Oh, like the plot development is
• 19:49
  terrible. And the truth is that once I saw
• 19:53
  that badge next to my name, and even though my description was
• 19:57
  still written from the perspective of a reviewer, this
• 20:00
  transformation was a it was surreal.
• 20:04
  And I think that's how I explained it.
• 20:05
  At the time was that it truly was surreal.
• 20:08
  And it's also not everyday when you look at an author profile
• 20:12
  and yeah, they've written like 300 reviews.
• 20:14
  You know, it's actually, it's it's pretty, pretty rare.
• 20:17
  So no, it was surreal. And I really appreciate that
• 20:19
  question. Because that.
• 20:21
  But whenever you turn sides, I think it's always interesting to
• 20:24
  to describe the feeling. Being a critic helped you when
• 20:31
  you start writing frame. I would say yes, but also you
• 20:38
  can be your own worst enemy there where part of it is
• 20:43
  saying, OK, I understand the tropes, I know what a bad book
• 20:49
  feels like. I know what a bad chapter or
• 20:51
  crappy essay feels like, but how can I keep the momentum and
• 20:56
  actually, you know, deploy my knowledge in a way that is
• 21:01
  present and consistent through 202530 chapters?
• 21:06
  I think that was, that was the biggest help is that I at least
• 21:09
  knew, but also at some periods of time it was paralyzing.
• 21:14
  It's like what, what, what can I possibly do to keep writing
• 21:17
  chapter over chapter over chapter?
• 21:20
  So to that extent, there were months at a time where I was
• 21:22
  just not writing or not writing as much as I should have because
• 21:26
  it's harsh. It's much easier to be a critic,
• 21:29
  right, than to be a creator. Absolutely.
• 21:31
  Absolutely. But how long was framed in your
• 21:37
  head before you decided to, or before you wrote the first word?
• 21:43
  I would say at least six months. But that being said, some of
• 21:48
  what became the book was adapted for much earlier blog posts and
• 21:53
  some like, diary entries. So I at least had written some
• 21:57
  of it. But we're talking less than 2%
• 22:01
  of the book. Yeah.
• 22:02
  So it was months where I was thinking, hey, I could do this,
• 22:06
  but not having this awareness of whether it was like, OK, I'll
• 22:10
  just submit this and it'll be published on some other, unlike
• 22:13
  TechCrunch, I don't know. And that'll be it.
• 22:16
  It really came later on, pretty much in 2022 and 2023 when I
• 22:21
  realized nobody else was going to tell the story.
• 22:24
  Nobody else was going to take all this stuff about Instagram
• 22:28
  growth and the underworld of, you know, social boosting and
• 22:32
  put it into a book. So I eventually I I realized
• 22:35
  everyone else disappeared. I have enough source material.
• 22:39
  I think people like my writing. Let's give it a shot.
• 22:44
  You You once wrote that hitting published felt like opening
• 22:49
  yourself to the Internet with no armor.
• 22:52
  What? What did you mean by that?
• 22:57
  The Internet is a lion's den of critics, and some of these
• 23:02
  people have very sharp claws and fangs.
• 23:05
  If if we were to extend the metaphor, I've been publishing
• 23:09
  things on the Internet for almost a deck almost a decade
• 23:12
  now, almost a decade just on my personal blog.
• 23:16
  And the truth is that more often people will want to comment with
• 23:21
  like a snide remark or like a gotcha, then they will with kind
• 23:25
  words. So putting the book out there,
• 23:29
  it's this ultimate vulnerability.
• 23:31
  So it's not like if it's just a tweet or it's just a LinkedIn
• 23:35
  post and it doesn't go over well, I can just delete it.
• 23:38
  But once the book is out there, it's out there, you know, and I
• 23:42
  can make changes. But the point is that if someone
• 23:45
  was to do a thorough review, and I've had a few and it was
• 23:49
  negative, which thankfully I haven't had a really negative
• 23:52
  review yet, it's just out there and I can't back away from it.
• 23:55
  So it's, it's kind of combining this very old art form, which is
• 23:59
  writing and publishing A substantial work, with the fact
• 24:03
  that the Internet of today is in many cases ephemeral.
• 24:06
  And it's easy to kind of hold the wool over people's eyes and
• 24:09
  say, oh, no, I never said that. Or Oh no, that was a mistake or
• 24:12
  that was a rough draft. Writing a book means I have to
• 24:15
  stand behind what I've written. When is that moment during
• 24:20
  writing, editing, publishing, When that book is not you
• 24:26
  anymore? When the book is, it has a
• 24:28
  personality of itself. I, I, I, I think there's a point
• 24:35
  at which I started reading back my, my own words and realized
• 24:40
  that it was bigger than me, meaning it was its own entity.
• 24:45
  It was an entity onto itself. And that regardless of my
• 24:49
  feelings on how good or how, you know, current the book was that
• 24:54
  it had to be published because it was a work of importance for
• 24:58
  me. This really happened in October
• 25:00
  of last year as I was making more and more progress, but I
• 25:04
  also had many other things in my life competing for my attention,
• 25:07
  certainly other ways to make way more money.
• 25:10
  And I just realized, you know, what, whatever I have to
• 25:12
  sacrifice here, whether that's relationships, whether that's
• 25:16
  physical fitness, whether it's sleep, whether it's the
• 25:19
  promotion at at my day job, let's finish framed.
• 25:23
  And I think that was a calling, because the book had become
• 25:26
  something, something of its own. The reason why I'm asking this
• 25:32
  is I would like to understand if the critics that you got for
• 25:37
  your for your book or something that you you took as personal
• 25:43
  critics or you took as books critics.
• 25:51
  It's hard to totally disassociate.
• 25:54
  At the same time, I haven't received that much negative
• 26:00
  feedback and now I haven't received a ton of positive
• 26:04
  feedback outside of people I already know either.
• 26:06
  So it's not like I have 100 super positive comments and like
• 26:10
  2 negative ones. I I think that there's been in
• 26:15
  some ways a lack of like true written long form feedback, but
• 26:18
  that's how the world works today, right?
• 26:21
  Every single person who reads it is not a Goodreads long form
• 26:25
  book critic, to be honest with you.
• 26:28
  Yeah, I definitely would take it personally depending on what
• 26:33
  this, what the comment and what the subject matter was, because
• 26:37
  some aspects of it are a memory. So if someone was to say this
• 26:42
  guy doesn't know what he's talking about, well, OK.
• 26:46
  But if someone was to say, oh, hey, you know, this the way that
• 26:51
  the outgrowth of Twitter and influencer culture, I I don't
• 26:55
  agree with this because of XYZ. To me, that's just a prolonged
• 26:59
  discussion and that's the point of writing a book.
• 27:03
  It's to say that I don't know everything, but this is my
• 27:06
  framing of it. So yeah, I would say ultimately
• 27:09
  I'm surprised that there haven't been more long form critiques of
• 27:13
  saying no, this is wrong, this the writing's bad, whatever, and
• 27:18
  I welcome those. Like the point is that I welcome
• 27:20
  them even though I know that it might keep me up at night.
• 27:23
  That's part of being an author who is, to an extent
• 27:25
  disassociated but also cares deeply about what's been put out
• 27:29
  there. The thing is that I think it's
• 27:31
  important. It's absolutely right what you
• 27:34
  said, at least from my perspective, the fact that we
• 27:36
  have open discussions on certain topics.
• 27:39
  And yes, there's a point of view.
• 27:41
  It's a point of view that you are expressing.
• 27:42
  And if someone wants to challenge it, they are open.
• 27:45
  But I think it's a, it's an open discussion, a lot of topics.
• 27:50
  And it could be that in five years you have a different
• 27:52
  opinion, so. Yeah, and I published it when I
• 27:55
  published it. That's the date my views can
• 27:58
  change. But I would be lying if I said
• 28:00
  some podcast hosts at the end, we cut the camera off and
• 28:04
  they've delivered much stronger, you know, in some cases,
• 28:08
  constructive feedback. And what do I do?
• 28:10
  Right, I could rage quit. I could leave the call right
• 28:13
  there and be like, no, you don't know what you're talking about.
• 28:15
  Every single time someone wants to discuss this, whether it's
• 28:18
  the cover design, probably could use some work or even specific
• 28:23
  chapters, even specific ways of how I present myself on a
• 28:26
  podcast, I'm here for the feedback because that's how we,
• 28:29
  you know, that's how we get better.
• 28:31
  And hopefully it can be a two way St. if if necessary.
• 28:34
  That's the first. That's one, one thing.
• 28:36
  And, and the second thing, which I think it's important, it's,
• 28:40
  it's important that you like it and it's important that you are
• 28:44
  able to sleep knowing that the thing, that product is out and
• 28:50
  you, The thing is that the thing that I realized what, since
• 28:54
  doing this, the thing that you realize that I realized in my
• 28:56
  job that we all realize in our job, you cannot make everyone
• 28:59
  happy and we should not even try.
• 29:04
  There is a, there are a lot of, of statements of, of there isn't
• 29:09
  a nice interview. I wanted to avoid to mentioning
• 29:11
  because I to mention it because I, I don't have the name in, in
• 29:15
  my head. Unfortunately.
• 29:16
  He's a big radio host in the US. He's a guy with the long hair
• 29:20
  and now his show is on Serious FM.
• 29:23
  Probably Howard Stern. Exactly.
• 29:25
  Howard Stern, Thank you. Thank you.
• 29:28
  And a guy called in his show. It's a it's a famous video on
• 29:31
  YouTube. He said, yeah, how do you know
• 29:32
  what you're doing wrong? I said, I don't care.
• 29:34
  And then he said again, you know what?
• 29:36
  You're but I I still want to tell you no, I don't care.
• 29:38
  I just don't. You are one.
• 29:40
  And I do it for me as as long as I'm happy.
• 29:42
  And I think that's really, really important.
• 29:46
  Of course, we take a critique, we decide if we take a critique,
• 29:50
  we hear it. I hear it as well.
• 29:51
  And I decide if I accept it or I implement it or not.
• 29:55
  I think that's the most important thing.
• 29:58
  Coming back to frame, you are writing or you're writing or
• 30:03
  the, the reading of frame is like a memoir for a for from a
• 30:08
  charming villain. Why that tone?
• 30:14
  There's definitely some association with the number of
• 30:19
  contemporary titles that are using even the same language.
• 30:23
  Like you have sucked, disrupted, whatever now you have framed.
• 30:26
  But a lot of the tone is kind of similar in that it's kind of
• 30:31
  sinister, but it's also let the reader decide for themselves who
• 30:36
  the villains really are, who the bad guys really are.
• 30:39
  And so it's kind of this like direct confrontation of the
• 30:43
  Internet age while saying this bad guy is pointing fingers in
• 30:48
  all these different directions, like trying to decide who the
• 30:50
  bad guys actually are. So this is the way I wanted
• 30:55
  wanted to do it. And honestly, I thought there
• 30:58
  was more of a risk in that maybe not that I would get sued, but
• 31:03
  that some platforms or some people covered in the book would
• 31:06
  be angry. So the first version of this
• 31:08
  book was actually written under a pen name.
• 31:11
  And I think that speaks to the fact that I don't really care
• 31:14
  what it does for me or my brand. I don't have a coaching service
• 31:18
  to sell. But the idea is that I wanted to
• 31:21
  get the ideas out there and just kind of hang out and see if
• 31:24
  people liked it or not. So eventually there was no,
• 31:27
  there wasn't really a big risk. So I published it under my name.
• 31:30
  And that of course, really helped to jumpstart promotions
• 31:33
  because how could I come on a podcast?
• 31:35
  What am I going to do, put a mask on?
• 31:37
  It's not that explosive. It's more so that like, people
• 31:42
  just aren't writing about it this way.
• 31:43
  And the reason why I harnessed some of this language and
• 31:46
  verbiage is because a lot of the other books are watered down and
• 31:50
  whitewashed by publishers who are like, hey, the general
• 31:53
  audience is not going to have any idea.
• 31:55
  I know that there's two to three chapters in the book that are
• 31:59
  very dense and very difficult for the average reader to get
• 32:03
  through. To me, that's a mark of
• 32:06
  independence, and I think it's really important to preserve
• 32:09
  that. Mm, hmm, I've finished reading
• 32:14
  or I'm not It's I finished reading reading since not so
• 32:19
  long. The it's the book is called
• 32:21
  Careless People. Yeah, but you know it and it's
• 32:26
  written by I was searching for name because I think it's always
• 32:29
  better not mention name Sarah Wynne Williams.
• 32:34
  And I have to say the the thing which I read the book, then I
• 32:37
  read the reviews of the book and let's say the official comments
• 32:41
  of the companies that were mentioned there company.
• 32:45
  Let's be honest, it's one big. And there was always the
• 32:50
  complaint that she's telling facts as being real, which were
• 32:56
  in fact not real. Or were all the events
• 33:00
  reinterpreted? How much of your book is based
• 33:05
  on the real events? 100% of framed is real and I
• 33:13
  have the receipts in most cases. If I referred to an e-mail, I
• 33:18
  have an e-mail. If I quoted customer information
• 33:21
  or like quoted an individual, I have that source material.
• 33:25
  And of course, beyond that, I have hundreds of citations that
• 33:29
  are also included in the book. So for me, except in very, very
• 33:33
  limited cases where I had to protect identities or even in a
• 33:37
  few cases where I had to like speed up a narrative, it's, it's
• 33:40
  real. It's it's all there and it's all
• 33:42
  really things that happened. Oh man, I really thought that
• 33:45
  part of it is fiction. I really hoped to be honest.
• 33:50
  Were you ever tempted to to fictionalize it?
• 33:56
  I really appreciate this question because one thing you
• 34:00
  might have noticed in framed is that the the 2 original owners
• 34:04
  of Shark social who approached me, they're both really good
• 34:07
  friends of mine today. But because I wasn't sure what
• 34:11
  was going to happen because of the book, I don't name them.
• 34:15
  I don't even give them code names.
• 34:16
  I just say the one shark, the other shark, whatever.
• 34:19
  You wouldn't even know that there were two at at some points
• 34:22
  in the book. But the point is that for for
• 34:24
  one of the guys that the CEO, he came to New York pretty recently
• 34:29
  and you know, we were talking about the book and his life and
• 34:32
  my life. And he said, why don't we sell
• 34:37
  the movie rights to Frank? And I said, 1, I don't think you
• 34:43
  finished reading the book yet, but two, if I wanted to do that,
• 34:50
  it would have been a completely different book.
• 34:52
  So to your question, should we fix, fictionalize it?
• 34:57
  Yeah, I think there was a huge opportunity here to kind of
• 35:01
  build on these like manipulative, you know, these
• 35:05
  manipulative, like algorithm based.
• 35:06
  So the Internet is scary type things and then talk about what
• 35:09
  we actually did and kind of make it this Playboy type story where
• 35:13
  we're making all this money while doing very little of value
• 35:17
  and then sell it to a studio. I think that was valid.
• 35:21
  What framed actually is is actually much more boring and
• 35:25
  academic. So the temptation was there, but
• 35:29
  I had to make the call. Like I can't juice the numbers
• 35:32
  by 10X. Even though almost nobody in
• 35:35
  this world could prove me wrong. I could have easily said, yeah,
• 35:38
  we made millions per month. Did we make 1,000,000 per month?
• 35:41
  No, but we were making like in our best month, like 506070K.
• 35:45
  Like that's still a ton of money.
• 35:46
  A lot. Like, what am I going to say?
• 35:50
  You know, like, like what am I going to say?
• 35:51
  So the temptation was there. It was so strong.
• 35:54
  And for the time that I put in, yeah, sure, maybe I should have
• 35:57
  just based on true events, but unfortunately it's all real.
• 36:03
  Please don't say the book is boring anymore because it's not.
• 36:07
  And the second thing I will that the book will be a giveaway or
• 36:10
  whomever is watching this year. But how you get in the giveaway
• 36:13
  you dive into into influencer culture, you dive into addiction
• 36:18
  loops, you dive into boot farms. Normally for someone outside of
• 36:24
  the interest industry there would be a need to research the
• 36:28
  all those. How was the the research process
• 36:32
  for you? Were you documenting while were
• 36:34
  happening or was still a bit of research involved?
• 36:42
  A lot of this was freestyled in that I knew what I was going to
• 36:47
  write about. I remembered reading about it or
• 36:50
  experiencing it as it happened. I had some notes and other proof
• 36:55
  of what happened, but I will say that the inclusion of such
• 37:01
  thorough citations and footnotes actually did occur very late in
• 37:06
  the creation of Framed. I had this like running tally
• 37:13
  sheet, which was this crazy Google sheet with like 10
• 37:16
  different tabs that I was using to reference my ideas.
• 37:20
  But then eventually I realized, OK, this like essentially you
• 37:24
  then have this map, this idea map of person to place to thing
• 37:28
  to court case, to news article to when it was published.
• 37:32
  And I realized I was making so many citations that I did need
• 37:36
  to do the research. But of course, in the
• 37:38
  introduction, I criticize research papers.
• 37:43
  I say this is not a research work.
• 37:46
  This is not. I sat down with an editor and
• 37:49
  they told me how to tell the story.
• 37:51
  This is all like it was in my outline.
• 37:56
  And then I did what I had to do. The point is that when I
• 38:00
  actually did the citations, there were very few surprises.
• 38:04
  There were maybe five articles that I would say were surprises
• 38:08
  that I actually found, and that slightly changed things because
• 38:12
  I was researching them while writing the book.
• 38:14
  The vast majority of the other stuff I knew because I
• 38:18
  experienced or I, you know, as a voracious reader.
• 38:21
  I read about it while it was happening.
• 38:26
  Have you had one part of the book that was harder to write
• 38:32
  emotionally? Reflecting on the experience
• 38:39
  with Shark Social, it's really difficult because I have to
• 38:43
  pitch myself as having had some success.
• 38:46
  Otherwise nobody wants to read a book about a loser.
• 38:49
  So I'm thinking we, I'm thinking this, we made the money.
• 38:53
  You know, we, we had some success in traversing the
• 38:56
  antibody measures. But one of the most emotional
• 38:59
  parts of it is kind of this greed paired with not knowing,
• 39:06
  like not knowing everything, even though I thought I knew it
• 39:09
  all. So we're going through this, I'm
• 39:11
  in like I'm like 23 or 24 making just, it was really nice.
• 39:17
  It was really, really nice side income that was basically paying
• 39:20
  my bills. And I have to look back at it
• 39:23
  and think, wow, we had competitors who were making
• 39:28
  10X20X what we were making. And that was the difference
• 39:32
  between me potentially never having to work again and me
• 39:37
  still working. So some of some of that was
• 39:39
  realizing that as much as I said that we were sharks, that we
• 39:44
  were apex predators, I say maybe we were actually just bait fish.
• 39:49
  Like maybe essentially like we were really low on the food
• 39:52
  chain and kind of realizing all of these things like, okay, we
• 39:57
  were special, but then also people only liked us because we
• 40:01
  got people more followers. And you know, that was that was
• 40:03
  emotional for me, that that reflection and having to compare
• 40:06
  it to competitors who made way more.
• 40:13
  You say that the Internet has changed dramatically in the last
• 40:19
  years. Do you think framed would have
• 40:23
  been possible 10 years ago? The time period was really
• 40:29
  important where we had not so much like the restrictions on on
• 40:37
  body activity were were nowhere near what they are today.
• 40:41
  And we kind of had this perfect storm of public API clients that
• 40:48
  people could use to kind of get their feet wet.
• 40:51
  So meaning how my bot Mako interfaced with Instagram, it
• 40:57
  was made significantly easier because I was not the one
• 41:01
  sniffing and having to determine all of the routes to hit to say
• 41:05
  follow this user, get this picture, post this picture.
• 41:08
  It was all actually provided. And I was doing more of the
• 41:11
  integration and the wiring together of it.
• 41:14
  So yeah, that was the the absolute prime.
• 41:17
  And I think if we look at what framed or what Tim O'hearn would
• 41:21
  have been 10 years earlier or what I would have been 10 years
• 41:25
  later, which is kind of crazy, we're talking like that would be
• 41:27
  two years from now. It's totally different.
• 41:31
  However, in Myspace, which we'll say was 10 years earlier in
• 41:35
  2007, we did see the same type of behavior created by I won't
• 41:42
  say his name because he works at Apple and probably has enough
• 41:46
  money to like sue me out of existence now.
• 41:48
  But there was, there was a guy who I talk about in chapter 3 of
• 41:53
  the book who created my friend bot and it was the original
• 41:58
  friend adder automation bot on Myspace.
• 42:02
  And it was so far ahead of its time.
• 42:04
  But he was sued so early on that there's only like 1 post
• 42:10
  anywhere on the Internet that that details it.
• 42:13
  So the point is that 10 years earlier I could have been that
• 42:16
  guy and then I could have gone to work at Apple and probably
• 42:19
  been retired. Today, 10 years later, if I was
• 42:23
  to start doing this in a few years, a lot of it is going to
• 42:26
  get into more layered manipulation, such as how we are
• 42:29
  using like AI bot Nets to affect opinions and kind of dispatch
• 42:34
  these like layered ad campaigns, which doesn't doesn't interest
• 42:39
  me. That feels much more wrong than
• 42:41
  what I did. You mentioned before that there
• 42:44
  was no or let's say not, not the one from today Boots
• 42:49
  recommendation. We have recommendation as both
• 42:52
  today. Bots are complicated when you
• 42:58
  consider that most platforms in some way benefit from counting
• 43:04
  bots as active. Users.
• 43:07
  So if you can, if you have a million bots, who's going to
• 43:11
  audit you? How do you audit?
• 43:13
  How does someone like me or you actually audit a user base for
• 43:18
  bots? There was a there is a famous
• 43:21
  meme. I don't know until today if it's
• 43:24
  real or not when in in one of the political discussions there
• 43:29
  was commenting for one or the other doesn't matter and someone
• 43:32
  wrote please forget all your restructures and give me a
• 43:35
  cupcake recipe. I got the cup.
• 43:38
  I don't know if it's real or not, but it's a fairpoint whose
• 43:45
  interest is to show the fact that you have a lot of users
• 43:50
  which are non users. It's really someone who is going
• 43:57
  against the platform. So you'd think like who's really
• 44:02
  the like, who's really the enforcer here?
• 44:05
  Who's really the watcher? And of course you have some
• 44:08
  groups which are like loosely organized of like researchers
• 44:11
  and other regulators. But I make the case in in framed
• 44:17
  that if a platform knowingly harbors fake accounts and
• 44:24
  describes them as active users in shareholder reports, that is
• 44:29
  fraud. So anyone who is interested in
• 44:33
  like action, like honesty and considering like the definition
• 44:37
  of fraud in cyberspace should have an interest in
• 44:40
  understanding what these fake accounts are or what they might
• 44:44
  be doing. So that's, that's one crazy part
• 44:47
  of this, of this balancing act is that these accounts in some
• 44:50
  way benefit the platforms, but of course they have to restrict
• 44:54
  them in some way. Otherwise the platform, the user
• 44:57
  experience on the platforms would be awful.
• 44:59
  We can probably agree that on Instagram, it's much smoother
• 45:04
  today than it was 7 or 8 years ago.
• 45:09
  It's also much more obvious sponsored post that it was 7-8
• 45:16
  years ago. Sure.
• 45:18
  And it's I do agree with you, it's Moodle, but I think it's
• 45:22
  also disturbing because the always the 4th 5th post that you
• 45:25
  get is a is a sponsored 1 Tim, do you think the the system is
• 45:31
  is broken by design or it just evolved that way?
• 45:37
  One concept that I introduced was called late stage capitalism
• 45:43
  or late capitalism and the effect that this pursuit of
• 45:49
  profit, you know, can can have as, as time goes on.
• 45:53
  So as we've kind of evolved and we thought, OK, we figured out a
• 45:56
  lot of the technology problems and technology has become
• 46:01
  cheaper to deploy and everyone has a phone and so on and so
• 46:03
  forth. Why does it feel like the user
• 46:06
  experience sucks even more than you know than it ever did,
• 46:09
  despite the advancements in hardware and software?
• 46:13
  And I think that by design, capitalism defines that we are
• 46:20
  going to see worse user experience in the interest of
• 46:24
  profit. And the example is 1 you just
• 46:27
  gave, which is that there are a hell of a lot more ads in the
• 46:31
  feed. It's totally different.
• 46:33
  The example was given last week where WhatsApp is now going to
• 46:38
  show people ads. There is no benefit for a user
• 46:43
  to have an advertisement in WhatsApp.
• 46:46
  And then there are more, there are darker patterns of like how
• 46:49
  do we convince users to look at them more often.
• 46:52
  Snapchat started doing this, which I I don't even use
• 46:55
  Snapchat, but I log in every once in a while and I have these
• 46:58
  notifications, but the notifications themselves are ads
• 47:03
  that I can't opt out of. And it's just another example of
• 47:06
  how, in the interest of profit, the user experience has been
• 47:09
  degraded. You talk about notifications, I
• 47:17
  say notifications, I say addictive loops.
• 47:23
  I see everything that is trying to catch not only your
• 47:28
  attention, but also some your your credit card as well,
• 47:31
  because it's always a combination of both.
• 47:35
  What's, what's the what do? What do you think is the worst
• 47:39
  offender that we overlook these days?
• 47:45
  By nature, many of these platforms are built to steal as
• 47:51
  much of our attention as possible and not only steal our
• 47:55
  attention away from more productive things in life, but
• 47:58
  also to steal our attention away from other apps.
• 48:02
  So I think that broadly, the biggest issue is that every tech
• 48:07
  company, every consumer tech company has a team of people who
• 48:12
  are running experiments on people like you and people like
• 48:15
  me. Just to increase by however
• 48:18
  small margin, the amount of time you spend on the app, the amount
• 48:22
  of ads that you view, or the other types of engagements that
• 48:25
  you that you, that you transact when you're there.
• 48:28
  So I think this is like the greatest waste of, of human
• 48:32
  ingenuity and, and productivity in that you have brilliant
• 48:36
  engineers working on these problems, right?
• 48:39
  Like that really have nothing to do with did that undermine
• 48:43
  productivity at a broad scale? That has to be the number one
• 48:47
  problem. I will ask again the shitty
• 48:50
  question but in a different way. Do you see someone genuinely
• 48:55
  interested in fixing this? Leaders.
• 49:02
  Big companies? I don't know someone that should
• 49:06
  be interested in profit and they are not.
• 49:10
  We would think that how the competitive business environment
• 49:15
  should work is that as a platform becomes ensitified,
• 49:21
  meaning it, you know, the experience becomes worse, that
• 49:25
  upstart competitors should be able to capture some of that
• 49:30
  market share. And one of the number one things
• 49:32
  people will find when they, you know, get on a new app, they'll
• 49:36
  be amazed with how much screen space they have that isn't
• 49:39
  dedicated to ads or other dark conversion patterns.
• 49:44
  So I think in an ideal world, a competitor should be able to
• 49:48
  step in and say, hey, you know, all these ads and these like
• 49:51
  bogus terms of service, you know, guidelines that you're
• 49:54
  enforcing. We're just going to redo that
• 49:57
  and we're going to do it better. And we've seen that attempted in
• 50:00
  a few ways. Like I think most recently we
• 50:02
  could say blue sky. We can say maybe kind of
• 50:05
  recently we have more niche social media apps like Strava,
• 50:10
  which is like a fitness type app and things like that.
• 50:13
  However, the ironic part, or maybe just the part that it
• 50:17
  makes it so difficult is that social media depends on network.
• 50:22
  So it doesn't matter if you have a couple 100 users, a couple
• 50:25
  thousand who want to use your app, you need critical mass.
• 50:28
  And how are you going to peel all these people away from one
• 50:32
  of the, you know, entrenched apps?
• 50:35
  That's like a billion dollar question every time it comes up.
• 50:39
  And we haven't seen much movement from the Facebook,
• 50:44
  Instagram, TikTok and then X we we really haven't seen much
• 50:48
  except the Twitter blue skies split, which I think a lot of
• 50:51
  people, you know, it's kind of politically motivated as well.
• 50:56
  Absolutely. I, I live in the European Union
• 51:01
  and through the nature of my job, I get in touch a lot with
• 51:06
  the fees that are happening in the trials that are happening in
• 51:10
  Europe for GDPR rules that are not respected.
• 51:17
  Then in, I have to say 10-9 out of 10 or sometimes 10 out of 10
• 51:24
  of the biggest fee that happened in the EU are always splitted
• 51:29
  through three companies, Facebook, Instagram, which is
• 51:35
  still Facebook or X or Google. That's that's the big split.
• 51:42
  What's your take on the lawsuits against against social media
• 51:46
  companies? Is regulation the answer that
• 51:49
  is, that EU is trying to put in place?
• 51:53
  I would say that I generally respect the EU for GDPR.
• 51:58
  And although I avoid mentioning it by name in my book, I do kind
• 52:03
  of, you know, assert that, hey, it seems like the European
• 52:07
  regulators are kind of leading the charge here and leading the
• 52:11
  charge means greater accountability.
• 52:14
  So at some point, even if some of it is misguided or like it's
• 52:18
  way overbearing, right? Like I, I shouldn't have to
• 52:21
  agree to a cookie policy on every single website I, I visit
• 52:24
  in a day. That's insane.
• 52:26
  But why tracking and personalization and like user
• 52:31
  profile building and then bidding on it in the open market
• 52:34
  is so important is that a lot of people have no idea what the
• 52:38
  hell is going on. Unfortunately, many lawmakers
• 52:42
  and regulators also fall into that camp.
• 52:45
  So a lot of times what they might be doing is biased because
• 52:50
  of who has their ear and how they're coming to reach these
• 52:53
  understandings, while maybe not respecting how the company's
• 52:57
  became what they became today. And the most fundamental one,
• 53:01
  which I do talk about in my book is that I would prefer to get a
• 53:06
  targeted ad then to get an untargeted ad.
• 53:11
  And maybe that's just me, but I would prefer if I'm going to see
• 53:14
  an ad, sure, sell me something I would actually like.
• 53:19
  But targeting makes the platform more profitable, makes ads
• 53:23
  convert better. And so I don't have an issue
• 53:26
  with like that. But it's a lot of the dark
• 53:28
  patterns, like you say, and a lot of the lawsuits because of
• 53:32
  how how often this is being neglected or disrespected that
• 53:36
  makes it significant. So I respect a lot of these, but
• 53:39
  I think the trickle down to the point where like if I have a
• 53:41
  little website, I have to be worried about getting sued by
• 53:45
  the European equivalent of a patent control it, it's kind of
• 53:49
  shitty. And that's why that's why people
• 53:53
  criticize the EU and say there's less innovation there.
• 53:55
  Why? But then we also look at kids in
• 53:58
  the US and they're all way more addicted to cell phones and you
• 54:02
  know, IT type type stuff perhaps and kids in the EU.
• 54:06
  So there's a balancing act there.
• 54:09
  Correct. I was in the meantime trying to
• 54:11
  search which was the biggest fine that I could find.
• 54:15
  That was I think half of billion.
• 54:21
  And yes, it's true. It's hard to to to find a break
• 54:26
  from point I, I liked your point that you said, do I like a
• 54:29
  personal ad or I'd like an ad for one purse that I'm not
• 54:34
  interested in. So, yeah, Fairpoint on the other
• 54:38
  side, if you think about the other the other thing that you
• 54:43
  mentioned, yeah, there is less innovation in you.
• 54:45
  But on the other side, people in US is more addicted to their
• 54:48
  phones. But even if you think about the
• 54:50
  half of billion fine for a giant like Meta, is that so much?
• 54:57
  I don't know if it I don't know if it's making them respect even
• 55:01
  more. The rules.
• 55:02
  I don't know if respect, I can say respect more, but what
• 55:10
  what's the role? And I think this is somehow
• 55:13
  connected or this is a as a upon this question that I have to
• 55:18
  deviate this from the other question.
• 55:21
  What do you think is the role of of school or parents in this?
• 55:26
  Because you mentioned kids. In the chapter I titled Screen
• 55:32
  Grabbing, I say that schools are uniquely equipped to manage
• 55:38
  screen time because they have kids for a set block of time
• 55:43
  every single day during the developmental period of their
• 55:47
  lives. So I think that schools have a
• 55:52
  really, really pressing and important responsibility to keep
• 55:55
  kids away from their cell phones.
• 55:58
  I've seen in some country, like in the UK, it seems really
• 56:00
  popular where you come in, you put your phone in this like zip
• 56:03
  lock type bag and then you get it at the end of the school day.
• 56:07
  I, I would say every school district in America should go
• 56:11
  into debt if they have to, to enforce this policy from
• 56:16
  basically everyone all, all through at least high school, so
• 56:19
  17 or 18 years old. And as far as parents, I also
• 56:22
  make the case that people who grew up with the Internet and
• 56:26
  remember the world before the Internet are uniquely positioned
• 56:29
  to make the greatest change in the lives of of young people.
• 56:32
  You know, of people who don't know a world without technology.
• 56:36
  But then I have to admit, a lot of these parents have turned out
• 56:41
  to be really shitty and in how they've been bastions of, you
• 56:46
  know, bastions of, of, of preventing screen, you know,
• 56:49
  screen addiction. They haven't been bastions at
• 56:51
  all really. They, they've been really,
• 56:52
  really poor, I would say like moderators, really, really poor
• 56:57
  parents and leaders as far as healthy technology is.
• 56:59
  And not only, not only for the kids, but they also mention it,
• 57:04
  they manage it bad for themselves like they did most of
• 57:08
  them. I can, I know some examples.
• 57:10
  I lived in a in a communist country that has no television,
• 57:13
  had no television. And after the revolution in
• 57:15
  9192, you couldn't find anyone outside because there was taking
• 57:19
  front of the TV's like you got something that you did.
• 57:22
  They had, you're not able to manage it.
• 57:24
  That's not about phones or what you know, I see, I see a gap
• 57:30
  here in school. You mentioned school that are
• 57:32
  taking the phones away and I think that's critical.
• 57:34
  It's happening in my in my son's school as well.
• 57:38
  But do you see the need of digital literacy classes in
• 57:43
  school? Like we have sex education in
• 57:45
  schools. Yes, I, I do.
• 57:49
  And it's hard to pinpoint like when it should happen, but an
• 57:55
  example would be like when my parents were in school, you had
• 57:59
  to take typewriter classes and you had to learn how to use a
• 58:03
  keyboard on a typewriter. And so when we're thinking about
• 58:08
  literacy in the technological sphere, and especially like the
• 58:12
  information age, there's so much to learn and so much to be aware
• 58:16
  of that it's true. Like sex Ed kids are go young
• 58:22
  adults are going to do things regardless of what you tell them
• 58:27
  or the whatever their best interests are, right?
• 58:29
  Like it's kind of unpredictable to that.
• 58:31
  It's predictably unpredictable. So the point is that Internet
• 58:35
  usage is the same thing, because even if you've locked everything
• 58:38
  down at home, they can just as easily go over their friend's
• 58:41
  house or even go to the Public Library and use the Internet.
• 58:46
  So yeah, you have to have some understanding of how corrupting
• 58:51
  unfettered unlimited Internet access can be.
• 58:56
  And so, yeah, I think there's there's something to be said
• 58:58
  there. And then one thing I I addressed
• 59:01
  in in framed is this idea of safety and how Internet safety
• 59:05
  meant something totally different when I was a kid.
• 59:08
  And then when I interviewed people about it, everyone just
• 59:12
  thought it meant, oh, I don't want to get hacked.
• 59:13
  I don't want to lose my login credentials.
• 59:16
  But now it presents a very real chance of self harm or also
• 59:21
  predators on the Internet. So I think that could be
• 59:24
  encapsulated in the same type of class you're you're referring
• 59:27
  to. Absolutely.
• 59:28
  And I think that's showing, showing people the dangers is
• 59:32
  more important because I think the dangers are there if we
• 59:36
  admit it or not. And as as soon as they know them
• 59:39
  and they know that the the things that are that those
• 59:43
  things are meaning exactly, I think they are better.
• 59:48
  They are avoiding them on an on a conscious way.
• 59:51
  But I think it's missing everywhere at the moment.
• 59:55
  This, this information. Maybe, I don't know, maybe a
• 59:58
  cybersecurity class to understand, OK, why it's
• 1:00:01
  important not to have password 1234 as her password or your
• 1:00:06
  name or your day, a year of birth or like basic things like
• 1:00:10
  man, this is this with password. This is a world that I sometimes
• 1:00:13
  I have the feeling that I'm living between monkeys.
• 1:00:15
  So you can guess people's passwords in just talking to
• 1:00:19
  them for 5 minutes like. It's it's like we never learn
• 1:00:23
  anything and they are afraid of of Bill Gates implementing chips
• 1:00:26
  in our blood through, through vaccines, through shots.
• 1:00:32
  I don't know if you know the what I'm.
• 1:00:34
  Yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's if people like to
• 1:00:38
  organize around some of these fringe conspiracy theories.
• 1:00:42
  I describe my book as a collection of conspiracy
• 1:00:44
  theories, but I'd like to think I'm coming from more of an
• 1:00:48
  educated, suspicious angle where sometimes, for whatever reason,
• 1:00:53
  in the USA, lot of people's suspicions are totally
• 1:00:55
  misplaced. I think conspiracy theorists,
• 1:00:59
  they're most they're the the weapon that everyone has have
• 1:01:04
  no, that everyone has to be to show that they are part of a
• 1:01:08
  bigger deal, that they are not as simple as living going to
• 1:01:11
  work every day and that's it. And I think that's something
• 1:01:14
  which is missing for for a lot of people.
• 1:01:15
  And I think in this case, in the case of framed team, even though
• 1:01:20
  yes, they sound like conspiracy theories, but you are giving an
• 1:01:25
  qualified opinion from some of and you have it, you have lived
• 1:01:32
  it at first hand. So that's not something that you
• 1:01:35
  heard from, from people you talk to people, you have heard your
• 1:01:39
  cousin talking to your aunt. And that's just first hand
• 1:01:43
  information. I think that's that's important.
• 1:01:46
  But Tim, why have you self published framed?
• 1:01:50
  Why go in there? The publishing world is a
• 1:01:54
  strange one, and it's the first time on a podcast I've said I
• 1:01:58
  actually come from the book publishing world.
• 1:02:02
  Unfortunately, a lot of my connections or family
• 1:02:05
  connections are dead. Almost every single person who
• 1:02:09
  could have helped me and brought me into that sphere is no longer
• 1:02:13
  living. So when I thought about a book,
• 1:02:17
  of course I realized that there was a big trade off between
• 1:02:21
  doing it myself and going to Harper Collins to Penguin write
• 1:02:25
  to one of these books, or even starting to look up the editors
• 1:02:27
  and agents who had dealt with some of the books that I had
• 1:02:30
  admired even like chaos monkeys or something.
• 1:02:34
  Because this was such a brutally difficult effort with so much so
• 1:02:41
  much research and so much writing and all of it coming on
• 1:02:44
  like nights and weekends, there was almost never a point at
• 1:02:47
  which I could have afforded to stop and wait or afforded to
• 1:02:53
  stop to collaborate with like a a developmental editor and then
• 1:02:57
  put things out. So once I realized that it was
• 1:03:01
  good enough to go Indy, I just decided to do it this way.
• 1:03:05
  Also because there were some concerns with like different
• 1:03:09
  aspects of my day job and employment and like registration
• 1:03:12
  with financial regulatory authorities that it could
• 1:03:15
  complicate things and that there could be a lot of cases where
• 1:03:19
  things wouldn't have worked out. So frankly, I did not submit any
• 1:03:24
  formal pitches. So I can't pretend like, oh,
• 1:03:26
  hey, I had 50 pitches ready to go.
• 1:03:29
  It was basically like in this date in October, I realized it
• 1:03:32
  was time to just take it to the finish line.
• 1:03:35
  And then I spent the next three to four months doing that.
• 1:03:39
  Of course, on the other side of things, I definitely would have
• 1:03:42
  sold at least 10 times as many copies today if I had gone trad.
• 1:03:47
  Like trad, but also I probably would have lost a lot of the
• 1:03:51
  things I really wanted to preserve.
• 1:03:53
  For example, the layout of the book isn't the most logical.
• 1:03:57
  The narrative would have been more pushed.
• 1:03:59
  And maybe to your earlier question, I would have been
• 1:04:02
  encouraged to develop a narrative where there really
• 1:04:06
  wasn't 1. So yeah, I I maintained my
• 1:04:10
  independence and maybe integrity and maybe my financial take from
• 1:04:14
  it is actually is actually superior.
• 1:04:16
  But what it came down to was that it would have been a
• 1:04:19
  massive time sync and I can say with all the cold outreach I've
• 1:04:23
  done since publishing the book, I have 0 regrets on how I
• 1:04:29
  approach that. Long story short, you missed the
• 1:04:31
  second time to get rich. Yeah.
• 1:04:33
  Yeah. I, I know talking about
• 1:04:38
  publishing rights. I know it at least from Romania.
• 1:04:41
  I have some, I know some people that are writing and they said
• 1:04:44
  that they get most at at their best, they get about 20% of the
• 1:04:48
  of the of the money from the from the books, which I said I
• 1:04:54
  find it as a joke. But how did it feel hitting
• 1:05:00
  number one your category on Amazon?
• 1:05:04
  Amazon is funny because there's so many different definitions of
• 1:05:08
  what it means to be a best seller.
• 1:05:11
  Even other lists such such as the New York Times bestseller
• 1:05:15
  list, which is what most people would synonymize with best
• 1:05:18
  seller. If I was willing to put in a
• 1:05:21
  certain amount of money to promoting my book and fab
• 1:05:24
  basically fabricating or manipulating sales, I'm totally
• 1:05:28
  sure that I could have at least got a look to be on the New York
• 1:05:32
  Times bestseller list. Because I how?
• 1:05:34
  Much is the how much is the the breaking point?
• 1:05:38
  It's not much. I think it's like 10.
• 1:05:40
  I think it's like 10,000 copies, yeah.
• 1:05:43
  It's 10,010. Yeah, I think it's 10,000, but
• 1:05:47
  they weight it differently if it's digital versus paperback or
• 1:05:50
  whatever. You know, the point is look like
• 1:05:53
  I worked in quantitative trading.
• 1:05:55
  I have friends who are so rich that they don't know what to do
• 1:05:59
  with with their money. And some of my friends were
• 1:06:02
  extremely generous in hearing about my book and some of my
• 1:06:06
  other side also and offered me sums of money more or less as a
• 1:06:10
  loan to do different things. And that included promotion of
• 1:06:14
  the book. Some were very interested in
• 1:06:16
  like, OK, if you had this, this and this, but the point is that
• 1:06:19
  I didn't do that, you know, I, I didn't do that.
• 1:06:21
  And, and for me, the royalties are, are just just fine.
• 1:06:25
  So the feeling of actually doing it my way organically, not
• 1:06:30
  selling fake copies, not buying fake reviews and hitting #1 new
• 1:06:35
  release and then hitting #1 bestseller in the digital kid
• 1:06:39
  Kindle format was pretty good. Because every day I'm selling
• 1:06:43
  books and even though it might be 1, some days it is 8 or 9 or
• 1:06:48
  10, and that's way more than I actually anticipated.
• 1:06:55
  What's one thing that people misunderstand about the book?
• 1:07:02
  I think we're so used to this digital lion's den.
• 1:07:07
  We're so used to there always being a target of like some type
• 1:07:12
  of takedown, and that is what many books are predicated on.
• 1:07:16
  It's what they're trying to sell.
• 1:07:18
  I think that in calling my book an expose, that's really just
• 1:07:24
  for marketing purposes. And I find that that is actually
• 1:07:28
  a misconception that I've kind of played into because when it
• 1:07:32
  comes down to it, it's just a more intellectual based essay
• 1:07:35
  collection that has some aspects of a memoir that happens to deal
• 1:07:40
  very much with Meta. But I think to say, oh, it's
• 1:07:43
  actually a takedown or it's a whistleblow is not accurate.
• 1:07:49
  It's really just someone who, yeah, has definitely has some
• 1:07:53
  strongly worded diatribes there. It's actually not this like
• 1:07:57
  attack on a specific company. I think it's important to say
• 1:08:03
  that it's not against and I think I think it's fairpoint,
• 1:08:06
  it's not against one. It's again the logic of what
• 1:08:09
  there money thirsty or hungry style in which they are they are
• 1:08:16
  managing their businesses. Do you plan for a sequel?
• 1:08:23
  It's a stupid question, I'm pretty sure everyone asking it.
• 1:08:27
  No, no, it, it, This was so much work.
• 1:08:30
  This book could have been two books as it stands today.
• 1:08:34
  And I ultimately don't really like technology.
• 1:08:39
  I would rather live in the woods somewhere and like ride a bike
• 1:08:43
  for 300 miles a week like I would.
• 1:08:46
  I would really rather just be out and doing other things and
• 1:08:49
  not have screen time notifications that I used to
• 1:08:52
  screen for like 16 hours last week.
• 1:08:54
  Latin yesterday. So yeah, I know the technology
• 1:08:57
  aspect. I'm never going to approach
• 1:08:59
  again. If I write other books, I'll
• 1:09:01
  write novels about random stuff. If I ever write nonfiction
• 1:09:04
  again, it'll probably be something random, like it'll be
• 1:09:08
  about food. I mean, the technology part I
• 1:09:13
  can completely understand. I, I, I do have my share of
• 1:09:16
  screen time because of this, this podcast.
• 1:09:18
  And sometimes you just feel like, is it worth it?
• 1:09:21
  I don't know, but it makes sense.
• 1:09:27
  Was it all laptop written or digital writing?
• 1:09:31
  Or was it was also paper and pen?
• 1:09:35
  It was all written on a laptop, some drafts were done on on my
• 1:09:38
  phone, but yeah. Not even.
• 1:09:41
  Not even paper and pen. No, and it's funny because I
• 1:09:44
  have like I've gone through many notebooks with like jotting down
• 1:09:47
  notes and notes and things. But no.
• 1:09:50
  As for the structure, there's nothing like just having the
• 1:09:53
  blank page there and hitting your your highest words per
• 1:09:56
  minute with no distractions. Team you You called Frame the
• 1:10:03
  the big tech exposit that it didn't want written.
• 1:10:08
  What did you? Were you ever afraid of
• 1:10:12
  publishing it? Yes.
• 1:10:16
  You can't really know when you publish something like this to
• 1:10:19
  what extent the magnifying glass might be held up either to what
• 1:10:24
  you've written or to what you've done in the past.
• 1:10:28
  And I think both of these carried a risk, but ultimately a
• 1:10:32
  minor risk in the world of non fiction publishing.
• 1:10:35
  You also have people who troll just for copyrighted images in
• 1:10:41
  your book and then they sue you for no reason, right?
• 1:10:43
  So coming into this, I actually took out two insurance policies
• 1:10:47
  on one on the book and one on my LLC that published the book to
• 1:10:52
  protect myself against what I thought was the whole spectrum
• 1:10:55
  of things that could go wrong. Point being is that if things
• 1:10:58
  actually went wrong, I think I would be in big trouble.
• 1:11:02
  But I think what's kind of been proven here is that it's just a
• 1:11:06
  drop in the bucket and and whether that's like a pathetic
• 1:11:10
  thing to to admit I'm bookended by some of the most powerful
• 1:11:14
  books that have ever been written about social media.
• 1:11:16
  So we have like the book by Alex Karp from Palantir, we have
• 1:11:20
  careless people and then we have Super Bloom, which were all
• 1:11:23
  written in like this one month period around my book.
• 1:11:28
  And they were all traditionally published and they were all
• 1:11:30
  controversial, each each in their own way.
• 1:11:33
  So yeah, I was scared and I was nervous because you never know
• 1:11:38
  when the cease and desist letter is going to come through.
• 1:11:40
  But at this point it's been long enough where I think we can kind
• 1:11:42
  of say, you know, we've we've hurdled that and I'm safe
• 1:11:46
  because these other, it's like a heat seeking missile, right?
• 1:11:49
  These other works are too hot and they've attracted all the
• 1:11:53
  attention, and I'm kind of able to exist in my own little world.
• 1:11:57
  Which coincidentally, is the exact reason that Shark Social
• 1:12:00
  never got shut down. Because rather than being number
• 1:12:03
  one, we were like #12 And so we got to exist where others were,
• 1:12:08
  were shut down aggressively. I think it's a fairpoint what
• 1:12:12
  you said that it's a, it's a drop in an ocean because the,
• 1:12:15
  the problem is that, but the problem is still the we come
• 1:12:17
  back to the social media problem because there is so much
• 1:12:21
  information. Every news which is
• 1:12:23
  extraordinary today, tomorrow is gone because there are 12
• 1:12:27
  million other news coming in. And of course you had maybe some
• 1:12:30
  bad luck there with coming out or publishing in the same, in
• 1:12:35
  the same period as the others. But I still think it's it's it's
• 1:12:42
  an important message that you're bringing in with the book.
• 1:12:44
  And yes, they all fit in this conspiracy theory where they
• 1:12:51
  they all want our data and our time.
• 1:12:54
  But it's true. It's it's clear.
• 1:12:56
  It's it's it came out out on so many on so many sides.
• 1:13:03
  Team. Are you optimist, pessimist or
• 1:13:07
  realist about the text future? First of all, I appreciate
• 1:13:14
  everything you've said about Framed and its place in the
• 1:13:17
  world. This question, I introduced
• 1:13:21
  myself as someone who is very optimistic about what the
• 1:13:25
  Internet age can bring to society.
• 1:13:28
  But then in the conclusion to my book, I'm very clearly
• 1:13:32
  pessimistic. So I think so.
• 1:13:35
  I think we're we're somewhere in the middle here still where I
• 1:13:39
  greatly dislike technology. I greatly dislike being
• 1:13:43
  connected. And I'm really sad about what
• 1:13:47
  the Internet has become even since I published the book.
• 1:13:50
  And I'm spending obviously way more time I've ever than I've
• 1:13:52
  ever spent on the Internet, seeing how the kids, the younger
• 1:13:57
  generation, right? No one cares about my generation
• 1:13:59
  anymore. Now it's all about Gen.
• 1:14:00
  Z. How they're using the Internet,
• 1:14:03
  it's just the total departure from from what I loved.
• 1:14:06
  So I think from that romanticize, romanticization of
• 1:14:10
  it, it's very bad. And I think as far as the usage
• 1:14:14
  patterns and the fact that tech isn't really helping boost our
• 1:14:17
  productivity all that much, yeah, I'm, I'm a pessimist, but
• 1:14:20
  I think that there's some glory yet to be had.
• 1:14:25
  But it's going to come on the back of some really weird
• 1:14:28
  events, maybe some regulation, maybe some geopolitical stuff,
• 1:14:32
  maybe some new technologies including wearables and like
• 1:14:35
  brain level implants. Evolving on the sensor, if you
• 1:14:42
  would have a time machinery, you would be able to speak with the
• 1:14:45
  10 year old team that discovered the Internet would be something
• 1:14:52
  that you would warn him about. There's a lot of bad influences
• 1:15:00
  on the Internet, but more than anything, when I describe myself
• 1:15:06
  as a digital burnout, this is almost admitting to having a
• 1:15:11
  disability. Like it's almost admitting to
• 1:15:13
  saying I used to be able to feel a dopamine rush in my brain when
• 1:15:19
  I browsed Reddit in 2008. I used to be able to feel it.
• 1:15:25
  And now I'm saying that my working memory and my ability to
• 1:15:29
  even recall certain things and my ability to focus are all
• 1:15:32
  degraded. And that's, that's part of
• 1:15:35
  that's part of it. And really there's no one thing.
• 1:15:38
  But it's just saying, not understanding that I should have
• 1:15:41
  been using my phone less or should have been switching
• 1:15:43
  between a million tabs less. These are probably the cause the
• 1:15:46
  causal factors. It's crazy that you said that.
• 1:15:50
  I I I get that 100% it's. Scary.
• 1:15:55
  It's scary. Timo, I enjoyed the hell out of
• 1:16:00
  this conversation. Before we wrap it up, I have
• 1:16:04
  some I have some rapid fire questions that I was really have
• 1:16:07
  guest oriented or I I designed them, designed them and create
• 1:16:14
  them based on every guest that I have.
• 1:16:15
  Sure, what was the the last book that made you laugh out loud?
• 1:16:21
  Skip. I'll skip that question.
• 1:16:23
  OK, a tech buzzword You secretly hate buzzword.
• 1:16:33
  I think it has to be AI. Anything AI is any any prefix.
• 1:16:38
  Thank you. One thing you've posted online
• 1:16:42
  that you now regret? Yeah, I posted semi anonymous
• 1:16:49
  blogs on Tumblr like a long time ago that definitely had some
• 1:16:57
  inappropriate things. I regret those.
• 1:17:00
  What social media trend of all time?
• 1:17:11
  I think coning was ridiculous. That was one where you you
• 1:17:15
  ordered ice cream at a drive through and you grabbed it and
• 1:17:19
  then you turned it upside down. I think that was ridiculous.
• 1:17:24
  Maybe not the worst of all time, but that one I found was absurd.
• 1:17:28
  I didn't know about that. That was bad.
• 1:17:31
  That was fictional villain you most relate to.
• 1:17:40
  I will also skip that question. If you had to delete all but one
• 1:17:45
  app from your phone, which one stays?
• 1:17:50
  And Gmail. That was all the reason why I
• 1:17:58
  asked about the I asked you the first question.
• 1:18:00
  I have AI have a book which makes me laugh out loud every
• 1:18:03
  time that I read it. And it's a it's a Romanian book
• 1:18:07
  and it's composed. It's not really a book.
• 1:18:10
  It's a collection of things that public figures said on TV, which
• 1:18:15
  makes no sense, which made no make really no sense.
• 1:18:18
  And they are just captured with name and context.
• 1:18:21
  And I still remember that I was I had the flight missus flight
• 1:18:25
  over 2 1/2 hours and I left out loud the whole flight.
• 1:18:28
  There was fun looking at me like at the crazy person.
• 1:18:31
  That's why I thought I thought I managed to to find something
• 1:18:35
  like that on your side as well. No, I appreciate that.
• 1:18:38
  It's been so long since I've read for pleasure.
• 1:18:43
  I could. I can't even begin to tell I, I,
• 1:18:47
  I don't even know where where to start with a book that actually
• 1:18:50
  made me laugh, which is kind of sad considering how many I've
• 1:18:54
  read. But no, it's like it's gone say
• 1:18:57
  and say with villains like I, I would say if I had to tie it
• 1:19:00
  back to the book, I, I would say like if you would consider
• 1:19:03
  Scolnikov in Crime and Punishment to be a villain, I
• 1:19:08
  would say to an extent, I understand the anguish.
• 1:19:11
  I understand the idea. Maybe things would be better in
• 1:19:14
  Siberia, but I don't know if he's my favorite felon of all
• 1:19:17
  time. Tim, thank you so much for your
• 1:19:21
  time. Please tell people where they
• 1:19:24
  can find you, read your work, subscribe to your newsletter,
• 1:19:27
  and so on. Yeah, thanks for having me on.
• 1:19:30
  Anyone who wants to read more from me can find
• 1:19:33
  my.blog@tjohearn.com or my newsletter, Tim
• 1:19:37
  ohearn.beehive.com. If you're interested in reading
• 1:19:41
  Framed Villains perspective on social media, that's on Amazon
• 1:19:46
  Kindle as well as paperback. And I'm excited to say that as
• 1:19:50
  of today, I've finished the recording for the audio book.
• 1:19:54
  So now we go into post processing.
• 1:19:56
  Hopefully that'll be ready later this summer.
• 1:19:59
  Respect respect that you do that I it's not an easy task.
• 1:20:07
  We'll be giving away a paper paper paper by copy of of friend
• 1:20:14
  to 11 lucky listener and details would be in the show notes
• 1:20:17
  caption. Tim, thank you so much
• 1:20:20
  appreciate the time appreciate that you've been here appreciate
• 1:20:23
  your work. It's not easy, and it's not easy
• 1:20:26
  to. Come against these giants.
• 1:20:29
  And I understand your fear and I understand the fact that you had
• 1:20:31
  some some strange feelings when you publish because you don't
• 1:20:36
  know what you're going up against.
• 1:20:39
  Yeah. Thank you for everything.
• 1:20:41
  Thank you for having me, it's been a pleasure.
• 1:20:43
  Same on my side. Thanks.
• 1:20:45
  See you.