David speaks with Wes Kao, an entrepreneur, coach, and advisor who writes a newsletter. She is the co-founder of Maven, an edtech company that raised $25M from First Round and Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, she co-founded the altMBA with Seth Godin. Wes now writes for over 300,000 operators across LinkedIn, Twitter, and Substack, coaches tech leaders, and teaches a 2-day intensive course on executive communication and influence.
They talked about:
🔗 How social media is redefining connection
💬 Why it’s good to disagree sometimes
🔥 The trap of chasing viral content
📝 How writing builds rigorous thinking
🧩 The danger of memetic ideas
🧭 The importance of being clear and decisive in leadership
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📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[02:06] How different places shape our work experience
[03:32] Why NYC feels like home
[05:04] Online interactions are the new norm
[07:59] Strong opinions set you apart
[10:34] Originality wins over popularity
[13:05] Why your unique ideas matter
[15:47] The challenge of writing a thousand words
[18:33] How to avoid writing like ChatGPT
[24:23] How to repurpose content without losing quality
[26:12] What really drives creative success?
[28:24] How to choose the best angle for any story
[31:30] Should you be more definitive or ambiguous?
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Seth Godin | https://theknowledge.io/why-seth-godin-is-eminem-in-a-suit/
altMBA | https://altmba.com/
Andreessen Horowitz | https://a16z.com/
Spiky point of view | https://www.weskao.com/blog/spiky-point-of-view-lets-get-a-little-controversial
ChatGPT | https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/
Wes Kao’s Blog | https://www.weskao.com/blog
Wikipedia | https://www.wikipedia.org/
Rick Rubin | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin
Substack | https://substack.com/
Nilay Patel | https://www.theverge.com/authors/nilay-patel
Decoder | https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel
Maven | https://maven.com/
👤 Connect with Wes:
Website: https://www.weskao.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weskao
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wes_kao
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
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📜 Full transcript:
Wes Kao: It's more beneficial to have a smaller following of high quality individuals than a huge following of lazy thinkers and people who are just like, not as rigorous. And the kind of content that you put out attracts a certain kind of person. So if you are tweeting stuff that is super generic and the 99% of people do X wrong, or I'll teach you more in five seconds than you'll learn in five years. That kind of content is attractive to some kinds of people, but it turns off a whole lot of other people too. You wanna be thoughtful about the content that I'm putting out? Do I feel like this is a good reflection of who I am and my level of thinking and what I want to be known for?
David Elikwu: This week I'm speaking with Wes Kao. Wes is the co-founder of Maven, which is a platform for live cohort based courses.
We had a really interesting conversation talking all about her background, both in corporate and creative spaces, and the lessons that she's learned as she's transitioned between them.
So one of the ongoing themes that you'll hear us talking about is this idea of rigorous thinking, and it's something that Wes talks and writes a lot about. And on the topic of writing, we're also talking about this idea of using writing as a tool for clear thinking. And how you can use writing to be able to think at various levels of abstraction.
And then the final thing that we talked about was education and what the future of it might look like and how courses, like the courses that you'll find on Maven can shape the future of education.
So overall, I think it was a really interesting conversation for anyone interested in improving the way that they think and the way that they engage with ideas and also the way that they learn.
You can get the full show notes, the transcript, and read my newsletter at theknowledge.io and you can find Wes online on Twitter @wes_kao.
All the links to everything that we talk about will be in the show notes. If you're listening to this as a podcast or in the description, if you're watching this on YouTube.
And if you love this episode, please do share it with a friend and feel free to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts because it helps us tremendously to reach other people just like you.
David Elikwu: How have you found the difference in, I guess not specifically populations, but having made some of these moves location-wise throughout your career? First of all, the Canada one's interesting because I think I typically hear people moving from Canada to the US either for work or for other reasons.
But then even within the U.S you kind of moved from one coast to the other as well. So how have you found all three?
Wes Kao: Well I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, so it was kind of, you know, you always wanna go further from home, you know, it's like, oh, this is boring. And it's so funny because so many people love San Francisco and you don't wanna move there. It's the start of capital of the world. And it was really awesome growing up there.
But in my late twenties, like many other people from the west coast really wanted to move to New York. And so I moved to New York, lived there for a couple years. That's where I worked with Seth Godin, started the alt MBA. And then, you know, moving from New York to Canada now being in Toronto. It's not too big of a difference, I think. the interesting thing is that, all three of these cities are very different, but I spend a lot of time working. So I'm plugged into the internet, so my brain is thinking about stuff that like, work stuff basically. So it actually doesn't really matter where I am so much.
Besides the weather and stuff, I know it's, it's not as satisfying of an answer cause people are like, oh, like how, how, how are they so different? You know? But I'd say that it's not super different because I am plugged into the internet most days.
David Elikwu: Did New York live up to your expectations?
Wes Kao: I love New York. It's amazing. Yes, I love New York. A big part of our team is based in New York. We have a lot of instructors in New York. The density of New York is just unlike anything else. You can just walk on a random street and bump into cool shops, cool cafes, cool restaurants, an interesting public space, a library, a small park you know, a local park.
Like, there's just so much in such a condensed amount of real estate. and I love that, you know, I love cities that are walkable where you can just stroll around and you're almost guaranteed to find something cool just by walking down a random street. So, yeah, I love New York.
David Elikwu: I empathize with that a lot. I feel like London is a lot to like that. London and New York are different in many ways, but I, some of the things you mentioned are a lot of the things that I love about London.
Wes Kao: Yeah, I love high tea in the UK. I wish we had that concept in the US right? Like, you know, instead of, and I didn't even realize that, well, I guess there's two types of tea. I remember there's one that's like at 1:00 PM ish or something, and one at like five or six. So like the later in the evening one I think is a great substitute or alternative to getting drinks. You know, like a lot of people, don't necessarily wanna drink that much. And being able to hang out with people in a casual setting where you're able to grab tea, you know, not quite as formal as dinner, right? But the equivalent of drinks basically, but not center around alcohol. I think that's really awesome.
David Elikwu: So I'm thinking of two analogs here. One is of this the tea concept that you were just talking about, but then also with what you were saying about with work, right? So you are working online a lot and what's interesting is even with what you were saying about some of the stuff you loved about New York, which is that you can walk around, you bump into lots of interesting people and you get to have a lot of really interesting interactions.
I think a lot of that is moving online, where people are gravitating towards spaces which are also locuses of serendipity where, okay, maybe you go to Twitter or you go to a particular area on Twitter where actually there's a lot of thought leaders sharing lots of interesting ideas and you're able to enjoy this intersection of things.
But then also places where you can kind of have breaks from that and spend time online. Yeah, I'm just interested in what you think of that concept and how that might evolve as we spend more and more time online.
Wes Kao: Yeah. I love that you bring this up because I love making friends online. It's actually my preferred way to meet people is through Twitter or through LinkedIn. It's funny because I went to a networking event that was hosted by one of our investors Andreessen Horowitz last year. It was in LA and my co-founder and I were gonna be in LA anyway.
And so we, we popped by and was that this cool bar, like really cool space. And the whole time I was just thinking about how much I would rather have met these people online first and like DM'D with them a little bit maybe, and like how awkward networking in person is at events like this. It might be because I'm more of an introvert, but I also think that this is just something that probably applies more broadly that there's something really cool about DM'ing with someone because you read an interesting post that they wrote or they tweeted something that resonated with you or they said something and you're like, oh my God, I totally think that too. Like, I didn't realize, like that person thought that and you just have something to go off of. You have something to talk about.
When you're meeting people at networking events, everyone is basically grasping and trying to find similar ground as quickly as possible, right? Like, you ask where you, where you based? What do you do? Or, you're trying to find some commonality so you can build on it. But when you're online, there's years of the person's tweets or blog posts or LinkedIn posts, you know, there's that person's LinkedIn history. Like you can look through and see more about what that person is about. And it just gives you more to talk about.
So, yeah, a lot of my good friends I met initially online. So pretty exciting. And people are, almost always how they are in person. Like they were online, you know, they're just three dimensional, so you kind of like look around them a little bit, like, okay, you're 3D here, you know, but the mannerisms and their attitude, like, if you've talked to the, you know, on the phone with them or, or done video calls, like, I find that the way people are in person is very close to how they are. If you've interacted them online.
David Elikwu: What I find really interesting about exactly what you were saying, you made a really good point where it's the essence of it is almost the complete opposite from how you interact with people in real life. In that when you meet people online, the avatar is their ideas and you interact with their thoughts first, and you validate, okay, do I get these what this person thinks? Do we have the same points of view? Where do some of our points of view differ? And you engage with their ideas and then you decide whether or not you actually want to engage with the person. Whereas in person you are, you know, you're meeting the person based on a bunch of circumstance or some other specifics. And then based on that, you then get to figure out what are their ideas. That process is actually much slower where you get to know someone and you get to understand what they think and how they feel about certain things where online yeah, you start from the position of like, how do I feel about how you think?
It made me think of this idea that you write about, which is about like rigorous thinking and then also spiky points of view. And I guess maybe first of all, you could frame what those two ideas are.
Wes Kao: Yeah. So a Spiky point of view is a thesis that you have about something that's in your realm of expertise that other experts might disagree with. It's a strong belief that you have, that you have conviction about.
So if you brought 20 marketers into a room, all 20 people could have different spiky points of view about what marketing really means. What kind of marketing works. They might have different viewpoints that are directly contradicting each other and equally valid. So I think that's the part that is really important. To think about is that, you know, a spiky point of view is not something that's just a hot take. It's not a mic drop moment on Twitter where you say something in scenery and try to get a reaction from people.
And the reason why spiky point of view is so important is because it's a really noisy world, whatever it is that you do, whether you are a designer, a coach, a consultant, a product manager, there are hundreds if not thousands of people who have similar backgrounds, who have similar years of experience, who have worked at similar companies as you have.
And so only trying to rely on your background to be a differentiator isn't enough. You have to have a unique point of view that adds value to whoever you're talking to. So something around fresh insights that make people think differently. That make people say, huh, you know, David, that's, I've never thought about it that way, right? Like, that's so interesting. Now that you say it, it feels so obvious. It feels inevitable, but this is really making me think about things in a different way. So that's a really good spiky point of view is when you can get people to think differently.
David Elikwu: Yeah. I love, I think there's two things that you just said there that stand out to me a lot, which is, two mistakes that I think a lot of people make when they're trying to stand out online, which is One, assuming that you need to have hot takes, and assuming that the idea of having a spiky point of view is a really great thing, but a lot of people start from the perspective that they focus on the spiciness rather than the point of view.
And they start with, okay, I have to say something that is going to get attention. And often it's rewarded a lot of the social media platforms that we have, reward, engagement. And so whether the engagement is positive or negative, as long as you get people to engage and to react to something that you're saying, then it feels as though, oh, I've said something good. I've said something important. But that can be a bit of a trap.
What you think are some of the important ways that people can try to stand out online, because, you know, we just talked about the fact that a lot of people are spending more on time online. A lot of the opportunities that you might get in your life also come from being online.
I think you actually ended up working with Seth Godin because he had put something out in his blog and you answered the call and you responded to it and you ended up getting the job. So you can probably tell the story about that in a moment, but I'd love to know how you think people can best, I guess, set themselves up and set up their ideas in a way that is receptive to serendipity and good opportunities.
Wes Kao: Yeah, I think the internet is a worse place when people try to stir the pot just for the sake of stirring the pot. And I think that, that a lot of the noise that you see on social media is because people feel this pressure to create scroll stopping content, in lieu anything to get people to read.
So there's a couple thoughts. One is, there's always someone who's willing to be spammier than you. So, you know, to do a spammier hook, the, you know, 99% of people breathe wrong. Let me tell you how to breathe. Like, come on, right? Like, there's so much stuff that is insulting to people's intelligence.
The best way to stand out isn't to copy viral hooks. That's where most people start. They think like, okay, like, I'm gonna look at all these viral hooks. I'm gonna look at frameworks and kind of plug in in an Ad Lib style, my own content in these frameworks. And what ends up happening is you, you create really generic content, especially with chat GPT and AI powered writing. There is going to be 10 times, if not a hundred times more generic content than there already was. Okay, like there's, there's already so much generic content there's gonna be even more. And so trying to copy what other people are doing and being generic is not the way to go.
I think, you know, going back to the real heartless spiky point of view, it's really about talking about topics that you have conviction about that you wish other people knew, that you've been thinking about for years. And maybe a little bit afraid to say, because the zeitgeist or conventional wisdom is about the opposite. And you know that if you say this, people are gonna have questions, people are gonna disagree, people are gonna ask about edge cases. But it's really about leaning into points of view that, that you actually deeply hold. You know, if you've been a product manager for a couple years or many years, if you've been a marketer for many years, there's stuff that you've tried from personal experience, from experiments, from multiple chances that bat from different reps that you've taken, where you've proven certain things out for yourself or for your customer, for your clients.
So talking about those things where you can really add value based on something that, something unique that you bring to the table that would be helpful for someone who is, let's say a couple steps behind you. You from a couple years ago, right? Or you from many years ago. And always focusing on how can I add value? How can I solve a problem for people? How can I make their lives easier by teaching them something that I tried and then worked for me, right? So I think that focus on value is really, really important.
I think the other thing is sharpening yourself so that you have more insights. I see a lot of content online that is basically regurgitating the same stuff, right, the same stories, the same mental models That doesn't help you stand out. The stuff that really stands out is stuff that's maybe something that feels obvious but is said in a fresh way or hits differently, you know, because that person sharpened the way that they see the world. There's not a clear cut and dry way to do that. It's not like me saying like, okay, download these 30 viral hook templates and follow that. Like, that's straightforward. And so a lot of people do that because it feels more tactical. It feels more within reach, but sharpening your own thinking, pushing back on your own ideas. Thinking more rigorously, you know, we can talk about the next, but thinking more rigorously and learning to be skeptical of your own ideas. Figuring out like, okay, I think this, but does this actually apply across the board? What are the boundaries of this idea? When does it work and when does it not work? What are counterpoints to this idea? What's the biggest risk if someone did this and executed poorly, right? Those are actually all great content ideas.
Every question that I just threw out there, if you thought about it and answered, boom, another post boom, another post boom, another post. Those are born from actual insights, you know? And so I think leaning into your actual insights and sharpening your thinking that helps you create better content.
And then, lastly I'll say that, I've been writing online since 2010. I started writing my blog over a decade ago. And writing long form articles was really good training for sharpening my own thinking. I think writing in, in short bursts is also good. So like tweet threads or, you know, LinkedIn posts also great for learning in public. But there's something about a long form essay where there's a higher bar of rigor to make a point and build a case than there is in 280 characters in a tweet, right. 280 characters, like you can't say very much. And so it kind of lends itself to these short, pithy, generic sounding vague Buddha comments. Whereas if you had to write, like, could you write a thousand word article on that? Whatever you just tweeted, that's a really good challenge for yourself. The great part is that once you write that, that thousand word essay, you can turn that into a bunch of shorter form content. Because what you're, what's happening is that you're going from higher fidelity into lower fidelity.
The thousand word essay is higher fidelity, right? There was a higher bar for building that case and making sense, the logic, the flow, the narrative arc and then you can kind of turn that into a bunch of other things. Whereas if you write one tweet it's way harder to turn it into along from essay, cause it's kind of like adding pixels to a photo, right? It's like, I love law and order and crime police procedural shows, and there's always like, the police go to talk to a liquor store owner and there's video footage and you caught the, the license plate and it's like zoom. Oh, it's so blury. Zoom in on that, right? And it's like, where do these pixels come from, right? So now with AI, actually there's, there's awesome image sharpening tools. So this is this analogy, you know, getting a little bit out of date. But, you know, it's harder to add pixels basically than it is to subtract pixels.
So, yeah, I think it's a longer way around, but sharpening your own thinking, becoming a more rigorous thinker allows you to then produce content that is more valuable, that helps you stand up.
David Elikwu: Yeah. Ah, I loved so much of what you just said. I think even starting from the, the Chat GPT point, and I think what I found so interesting about this moment that AI is having is that it's highlighted, for me at least, the amount of mediocrity that we've accepted and the people have bought into. Because if Chat GPT looks like the work that you do, it's probably not good work, because it's generic. It doesn't have a point of view, it doesn't necessarily have an opinion. It can feign having an opinion and it can write something that looks like it's an opinion, but very often it's not. And maybe if you write a really good prompt that you know, gets it to write an opinion, but that's not what most people are doing. And I think that's precisely the point. Most people just start at a very high level of abstraction. And I think that is also something that you reference where, I think you call it like the ladder of BS or something, which is essentially, you know, it's very easy to write a 280 character tweet or it used to be 140 characters, right? And it's very easy to sound wise when you only have to say a handful of words. But when you actually have to expand on that, then you get to see the depth of the ideas.
And I think there's two parts of it. One is just how deeply people think about what they are saying and what they are writing, and the depth to which they actually believe in the ideas that they talk about. Because I think there is this, the memetic scene of ideas that go around and ideas that are shared. And that is why you get, you know, people just regurgitating Wikipedia threads and whatever, because they are just, I guess, absorbing or, there are ideas that are broadcast to them that they just take in without actually thinking much about them. And so they go back and say out the same thing without it being changed at all.
And it just makes me think about, I had dinner with some friends yesterday, and sometimes I'm the, the weird person that will come up with some, some random facts. I don't know. Someone will say something and it will remind me of, oh, you know, in the 15 hundreds they used to do this. And someone asking like, oh, you know, like, how do you think of all these things? And I was like, okay, first of all, I write this newsletter, but specifically when I write I'm really rubbish at quotes. If you ask me, oh, a quote from what this person said, I have no idea. But it's because when I write notes, I write notes for me. I write what I think about what the person said. I don't actually write what the person said, so I have no idea what the original quote was. My notes are like my thoughts. So when I want to write something, I'm going back and I'm looking at my own thoughts and I can use that to write something else. And I guess when you have the craft or the practice of iterating on things that were originally your ideas or at least your response to someone else's ideas, then you end up with something that you actually believe in and you actually think, and that is so much easier to remember. I don't need to remember what someone else said. I can remember what I thought about my response to what someone else said.
Wes Kao: Okay, David, I love that you mentioned this because I am exactly the same way when I take notes. It's my reaction to whatever it is that I'm reading. So, and I love marking up the margins of books and it's always like, here's what this is triggering, you know, example of this in my own life, or like, how does this apply to this situation?
I hate writing summaries. There actually, I think there, there is skill in summarizing and writing a good summary. I think that, that is more and more potentially going to be taken over by chat GPT cause chat GPT is also really good at writing summaries, maybe better than humans. So I think jotting what reactions something is triggering for you is a much better way to create content ideas essentially.
The other thing that, as you were talking that it reminded me of is, I think a lot of people wanna build an audience for the sake of building an audience. Like the end goal is like 10,000 followers, 20,000 followers, 50,000 followers. They don't think as much about the quality of the people that you're interacting with, the people who are following your work.
It's more beneficial to have a smaller following of high quality individuals than a huge following of lazy thinkers and people who are just like, like not as rigorous basically. And the kind of content that you put out attracts a certain kind of person. So if you are tweeting stuff that is super generic and you know, is the, the 99% of people do X wrong, or I'll teach you more in five seconds than you'll learn in five years. That kind of content is attractive to some kinds of people, but it turns off a whole lot of other people too. I think just being thoughtful, you wanna be thoughtful about the content that I'm putting out? Do I feel like this is a good reflection of who I am and my level of thinking and what I want to be known for?
You know, cause you, you can do shortcuts and hacks and tricks to try to hack the algorithm. But if that signals that you are a certain kind of person, that you don't wanna be lumped in that same bucket, you know, you might not wanna do that. Even if that does get you an extra, you know, couple hundred followers.
David Elikwu: Yeah, I love that. And even what you were saying made me think back to the analogy of you can't add more pixels. And I actually really love that as much as, you know, it's starting to grow away now that we can actually enhance our photos with AI.
But the fact that I think when you can think in the big picture, if you can think in 4k. Well, so I do photography and I take loads of photos and stuff and what I love is that you can reframe the photo to almost tell a different story. And so if you take the big photo enough pixel density, then you can zoom in and just capture one certain angle of it and that is its own thing. And actually then you can reframe it in a slightly different way. You include some other people in the frame, and now that's a different picture. And if you have the idea, if you can think of an idea in enough depth to capture that big picture, then you can transpose different versions of it. And you actually have that fidelity to be able to think of it through different lenses and in different ways.
But very often people don't, and people only get, you know, the meme version of the picture, right? And the meme is everywhere. It's, it's just the same meme that you copy and paste. And they're not able to go into any more depth on any of those areas because all they have is the, the commonly shared idea.
Wes Kao: Yeah, I love that analogy. it's really a good analogy for repurposing content overall. There's a lot of talk about how do you repurpose content because, you know, so many people are feel like they are on a hamster wheel, a never ending hamster wheel of trying to create more and more content to feed the content monster who is always hungry.
And it does take skill, you know, going back to your analogy of, of the picture and then zooming down different areas, it takes skill and judgment and taste for you to figure out which part of the photo do I wanna zoom in on, right. You're not just throwing a dart and be like, okay, this random piece of the sky, or like this corner of this leaf plus the sky. Like, right, like there's judgment with how do I reframe something, taking it from a broader thing so that it is a standalone unit and makes sense on its own.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people think that repurposing is this brainless activity and they're just like, oh, awesome. Like, let's just repurpose this into 10 other posts and then they'll share with me. You know what they repurposed and it's like, this is garbage. Like all 10 of these things are garbage, because they basically took random parts of a post and then just like turned it into something. And there's no tension, there's no narrative arc, there's no beginning, middle, and end. You know, it's like you can tell that someone just copied a random section of a post and like tried to pass it off as this new thing. And so I think there's absolutely an art to repurposing and it takes judgment.
This is a drum that I beat internally with my team a lot is developing that sense of judgment and being able to repurpose in a way that is thoughtful and where the end result is a strong standalone unit in and of itself. If someone reads it and is like, I feel like you repurpose this, like you are doing it wrong, you know, you're doing it wrong.
David Elikwu: Yeah, what you were saying just reminded me of, there was a, it wasn't a meme, but it was a video that was going around from an interview with Rick Rubin. And a lot of people laughed at it at the time and basically someone was asking, you know, why do all these people come to you to produce their music? And he was like, I don't know much about music, but what I have is taste, and I have an ability to be decisive about what I think is good and what I don't think is good. And it's funny that, okay, a lot of people, there's an aspect to which that can seem funny because it's like, oh, you don't actually know much about music, but what do you have? The ability to be decisive? How much does that matter? But I think it matters almost more than anything else. I think like the ability to have judgment and taste and the ability to be decisive is something that I think is missing from a lot of what I see.
And not just in your decisions and opinions. And maybe we can talk about how some of this relates to even when you are working with people, the ability to actually take a stance and first of all, knowing why you've taken the stance. So being able to have some rationale for the decision that you've made, but then also just being able to take a stance. Cause I think I was looking at, there was a video going around an interview with the CEO of Substack. And I think they were asking him about content moderation, and I was just thinking, you know, I think he was maybe flip flopping a little bit in terms of I think Nilay Patel, who is the interviewer from Decoder, was just asking, you know, if they were going to have moderation on certain kinds of posts. And he didn't really want to commit to what he was saying. And I was like, if you want low moderation, there's a case to be made for that. Just make the case. Just say it and just say that yes you are or no, you want, and I think much more people will support if you take a hard stance on doing option A or doing option B than if you just seem ambiguous and people don't really know, or people can't necessarily trust or understand where you actually stand.
Wes Kao: I haven't seen that interview. I actually, I have a slightly different take on that, so maybe a spiky point of view. So, but, but we can dive into that in a second.
I wanna go back to, to what you said, who was the someone, Ruben, who was the, the producer you mentioned Rick Rubin. Yes. I need to look up that video. And the, reactions that people had, because I'm shocked that people thought it was funny or like that it was weird that he would say that it's about his judgment and his taste.
I mean, obviously he knows about music too, so he's probably, he's probably being hyperbolic.
But so much of creating content it's both a science and an art. And the art element I think is, is a part that people don't think is much about. The science element is the templates, the hook structures, the Ad lib, fill in the blank, you know, kind of stuff. the art element is, you know, we, we talked about how, that was harder to kind of put your finger on But, you know, I was talking to a coworker about this last week. We're interviewing some Maven instructors to do case studies, instructor spotlights about their story. We were talking about the art of drawing interesting insights out from people and having an editorial eye for what angle this case study could take on, right? If you were interviewing an instructor and you wanna write, you know, a post about them they might give you, you know, an hour's worth of content and you might get two gems from there that shape the angle of what this post is gonna be about, right? So this post might be about what it's like being a full-time operator and also teaching on top of your full-time job, or this post is about how teaching is about freedom. Freedom, flexibility, optionality, right? Or this is about whatever it might be, but there has to be an angle to what you're writing.
I was talking to my, my team member about this because she was struggling with this idea, it was kind of new to her. She was kind of just recapping everything the instructor said and kind of like saying a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. It didn't feel like there was any narrative arc to the case study, you know? And so we were talking about this idea of developing an editorial eye for what is the juicy hook here? What is the juicy angle? And I don't mean hook as in like, the first line of a post. I mean, the interesting part of this story that you should double click on and dive more into and flesh out and really draw out that specific area and like ignore all the other stuff that the person said that was not that interesting and like, not that useful.
And how it's our responsibility as the content creator, as a curator, or as the interviewer to draw out these insights from other people. And to, to notice when they say something that made you perk up, right? Like, why do you perk up in certain parts versus others? Some people don't perk up at all, right? Like, you've interviewed a bunch of people and so when you hear someone say something, you're like, oh, there's something there, right? Like, let's unpack that, right? And you can, you ask questions that are more likely to get someone to share things that will be interesting. There's a skill in that. There's judgment in that. There's taste in that. So I think more and more because of the onslaught of AI generating content your ability to see the interesting nugget, the nub of something that you wanna dive deeper into and focus, focus your reader on to flesh out, that's gonna be more and more important, not the summarizing piece.
We actually already have, my team is already using chat GPT to summarize the transcripts from, you know, recording these interviews, right. So if all we wanted was a summary of what that instructor told us, that's done, done, done yesterday, right. But that's not necessarily what is interesting for readers. You have to bring that point of view and you have to superimpose it and shape it and draw it out from who it is that you're interviewing and that requires skill.
David Elikwu: Fair. Yeah, I love that. So, okay, there's one question I wanna ask you, but before that I just wanted to get your pushback on what I was saying before. So maybe I would just clarify.
The point I was making is that I think people shouldn't be afraid to have some conviction. And I think you can caveat that by, you know, there's a popular saying, you know, strong beliefs weakly held. It's not to say that you have to be absolutely bullish on everything. You don't need to have an opinion on everything in time, but unless you're responsible for it. But if you do have something you're responsible for, or I think it's okay to take an opinion, but then also understand what assumptions underpin that opinion, and I think that's something that I apply quite widely. It's like, okay, this is what I believe. Assuming these things are true, if any of these things change, what I believe changes. So I am not going to believe the same thing today as I might next week, because some I could get new information that changes the reason I believe what I believe. So I think that's more the framing of where I was coming from. But I'd love to know if you think differently.
Wes Kao: Yeah, I absolutely agree with that and believe that. I think, I think that the part that this is probably a separate point, but about this, this idea of you know, if someone asks you a question. Are there times where the right move might be to answer in a way that is a little bit ambiguous?
So I didn't actually see the interview with the substack CEO, so this is just, I'm just extrapolating other circumstances where someone asks you something. And I think taking a step back, asking yourself, what is this for? And what is my strategy with answering that question, right? Because your audience might want a definitive answer. It is more satisfying for an audience to have a definitive answer, right? So like, as the audience, I'm like, yeah, I want you to just tell me what you really think, right? But as the person answering there might be a cost to doing that, and there are trade offs with being more specific versus potentially being more vague.
I'll use myself as an example here. You know, Mavens mission is to disrupt education. And we are starting with addressing working professionals, adult learning, basically, you know, you're a product manager, you're an industry and you want to, you want to level up your skills. But eventually we hope to shake things up with higher education too. College is really expensive. It's not a great option for a lot of people. It's fairly rigid in its structure. And so there's a lot of things that we wanna change about that. And so the question, as the, the brand, the startup, you know, the individual, if the creator in the situation is, how hard do I want to go railing on higher education? How much do I wanna say like, professors are dumb, college is stupid, universities are a scam, right? So there's a whole spectrum of ways to talk about an issue. And so I'd say that that's on the, the more extreme side is, you know, saying that that college is dumb, right? And just like really going hard after how useless professors are and like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What a huge waste of money it is.
And then on the other side, there's a way to talk about the issue without necessarily alienating or paying a target on your own back by attacking, right? And so, you know, for example, you could talk about how there are things about higher education that aren't great for everyone, right? but if you, if you are intellectually honest about it, there are a lot of things that higher education also does, right? It might not be the thing that is meant to prepare you for being, you know, working professional. But for many people it's a, it's a signaling mechanism. Like many jobs require a four year degree. So it would be intellectually lazy to just say like, don't go to college, right? Like, if you are 18 years old now, like, I see this advice sometimes, like, people will say like, oh, just start your own business. Don't go to college. It's useless, right? And like, that's not exactly true, it's not nuance enough. And you don't wanna paint in such broad strokes that you accidentally mislead or give someone bad advice, right? Like, there might be people looking up to you, there are people looking up to you, right? who might take that advice. And you know, I take that with a lot of weight and with a lot of moral responsibility.
And so I think that there are a lot of times where it makes sense to talk about an issue in a bit more nuanced of a way where someone might say, okay, Wes, like, you know, I wanted you to just say like, this is dumb, or this is cool, right? But like, that's not, like, that's not how I think about it. There is more nuance there.
But to your point, I think there is a way to describe that, whatever that nuance is. In a way where, you know, maybe the answer isn't a straight black and white yes or no answer. But you share the thought process behind it. That as a, a platform substack is not a publisher. They don't anoint, they don't approve the thoughts that are shown on substack, you know? And so, there's a lot of considerations that they have to make with making sure that people have a place where they can, they can share the thoughts that they have with their audience. And as long as it's within a certain container of not liable, not violent, right, like inciting violence, pornographic blah, blah, blah, like within certain constraints, it's like, if I disagree with you, It is what it is like, right?
The whole idea of I might not agree with what you say, but I'm gonna fight for your right to say it. Like, I think, that concept applies, especially for platforms for marketplaces. So
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.
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