The Swyx Mixtape

Thanks for 100 episodes! You can read the blogpost in full on my site.

My ideas for future episodes: http://simp.ly/publish/BQJJ5b

Main points covered:

Personal Podcast Superpowers

• Infinite Game
• Hot Medium
• Independence
• Completionism
• Superfans
• Scheduling and Creative Control

Why Mixtapes

• Giving Value
• Curation
• Brevity

Downsides

• Audio Editing
• Discoverability
• Analytics
• Depth
• Feedback

Making $400k by punishing robocallers automatically. Genius!

Audio source: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-pomp-podcast/557-joshua-browder-on-p8id7SOsmCD/ (41 mins in)

See more: https://donotpay.com/

I am a mentor for the Notion Advanced track of Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain, Cohort 12. This is the cleaned up audio of the second of 5 mentorship sessions with Q&A at the end. The first session was last week.

Recommended reads

• PARA: https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/ 
• Blogpost Annealing: https://www.swyx.io/blogpost-annealing/
• Twitter as Universal Meta-Commentary Layer: https://www.swyx.io/twitter-metacommentary/
• Digital Garden TOS: https://www.swyx.io/digital-garden-tos/
• Devon Zuegel on Epistemic Status: https://devonzuegel.com/post/epistemic-statuses-are-lazy-and-that-is-a-good-thing

Slides and Video.

Timestamps

• Prelude [00:00:00]
• Housekeeping [00:01:09]
• Content Recap [00:02:34] 
• Q&A: Constancy/Consistency [00:11:17] 
• Q&A: Maintaining the Second Brain [00:14:34]
• Q&A: Weaknesses of PARA [00:17:55]
• Q&A: Broken Links in Notion [00:19:16] 
• Q&A: Automation with Zapier [00:22:34]
• SMART Goals [00:23:25]
• Denormalizing Notes [00:25:01]
• Open Source Knowledge [00:28:27]
• Brag Documents [00:29:28]
• Just Do It [00:30:57]
• Q&A: How do you share in public? [00:31:45]
• Q&A: Atomicity/Denormalization [00:34:02]
• Q&A: Why Notion? [00:37:33]
• Q&A: Book writing? [00:38:28]
• First Wrapup [00:40:23] 
• Q&A: Twitter Links Extension [00:42:30]
• Q&A: Chrome Extensions [00:43:33]
• Q&A: How do you balance research and writing? [00:44:39]
• Q&A: Converting Resources to Projects [00:47:37]
• Q&A: Video/Audio Capture [00:49:11]
• Q&A: Speaking [00:50:39]
• Q&A: Writing My Book [00:52:58]

Transcript

Prelude [00:00:00]

swyx: [00:00:00] Why PARA? Have you considered why only four letters? I really liked the thought process going into that.  That's actually touched upon in the blog post. I'm not sure that you covered it in the lectures, but I think it's just really great to have something that's barely minimal enough that it covers the span of everything that we organize our information because I think in past attempts, I know I have probably, this is a common experience, you try to organize all the things and then you have like 15 different categories to spot stuff in and you just get overwhelmed because  you're like, I don't know where to put stuff in. So the second week, week two is really about organization. So that's what we're trying to optimize for.

And that's what PARA is. Christopher says some of the mentors have modified the acronym shock. What, what modifications have they said?  Some mentors only have PAR or PA. Yeah.  I will say my A and my R are merged, Maria says PTARA for tasks with silent T that's. Cool. 

Yeah, because you do need tasks as well.  So I'll mention something about your calendar as a to-do list, because that's pretty important. Someone should blog about that because then you scoop Tiago. Alright. 

Okay. So I'm going to get started and I'm going to try to keep the chat alive. 

Housekeeping [00:01:09]

This is a little bit stressful as always, cause I'm not used to such a big zoom but thanks for everyone for making the time on the weekend. This is the notion advanced group that I lead. It's Sundays at 5:00 PM, as you might know. And it's a very developer focused the meet up because there are a lot of developers in BASB, but we do try to keep it generally accessible. Part and just I'm going to give an agenda that's happening cause last time it didn't. So you know what to expect and you can jump off  if you have other stuff going on. 

So we're going to do a little bit of content recap. I got very positive feedback from last week about what did we cover this week? From my point of view, and then we'll talk a little bit about projects versus areas. I'll give some extra content around what I think para is. I don't have, I didn't modify the acronym. That's a very smart move. I wasn't smart enough to think about that. And then we'll just have a general Q&A . 

Last time we went for 90 minutes, this one, we try to keep it to an hour, but.

Some housekeeping, the three rules that we have from zero, because we start at zero in this house 

stupid questions are welcome 

Second rule Often beats perfect. So don't try to do it right, but I try to do the best, just do it a lot and you'll find that you do more than if you try to do the best 

and third rule this is a discussion, not a lecture, so I'm not an expert and I don't have the right answer. And I fully welcome people here to answer questions that other people have asked, because I don't know the right answer as well. So it's a discussion that I'm  facilitating. So that's the framing that I want to set for this session. 

Content Recap [00:02:34] Okay. So now into the content recap I'm just basically going to pick the three best slides that I thought really represented this week. So if you remember nothing else from this week, hopefully you remember these slides.

So the primary thing I think that everyone needs to get from this week is that completed creative projects by the oxygen of your second brain. In other words, action. Right. Or what did someone say at the start of the session, christopher said, para is a methodology to organize the action ability, basically like optimize for taking action, nothing else matters.

And your system needs to help you get there. And your second brain has helped me get there. I 

like the metaphor of oxygen because without oxygen, your second brain is going to starve. And I definitely find that very true of myself. We all have stuff, we haven't competed. And then we just reinforced this identity of a person who does not complete projects. So the smaller your ambitions the more you can feed them the more you have reinforces image of someone who completes projects and you get more done. 

This is PARA in one slide, very ambitious. I basically wanted to summarize, what the main aspects of PARAwe should have for those who might've missed it. I did share the slide deck, so you don't have to screenshot or anything. So I'm going to share that in the chat right now. Well, it's actually P stands for projects, A stands for Area, R stands for resource and archive is basically inactive  items from all three categories. 

And one of the key insights is that it's arranged in order for more actionable to less actionable.

And the other order that you see as well is that there are less projects in there. There should be the most number of archives. So I think if you saw Tiago live session, he showed you his own Evernote where he actually showed like the number of projects was like 5% of the total number of notes that he was taking and yet hundreds of archives.

And that's w...

• Audio Sources:
  • Byron Chambers (Mr Talkbox) sample https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOL1owQq4oc
  • Lorenz Rhode - How to Talkbox
  • Scary Pockets - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
• Wikipedia on Talk boxes

Audio source: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/village-globals/the-state-and-future-of-KNpTy90h4XI/ 40 mins in

A 2019 recap of devtools investment theses, by two of the most prominent up and coming devtools founders.

- What hackers play with during weekends will become the things we use at work tomorrow
- Reducing Time to Code
   - TabNine (i tried it recently and quite like it, it just saves keystrokes, end of story)
   - Kite.ai
- Level 1/2/3 platforms - Marc Andreesen
- Netlify, Zeit, Dev.to

Audio source: https://art19.com/shows/the-founders-journal/episodes/a77afe33-236f-44b6-a2e8-55b6ff5c8e02

Ben Thompson's own writing on Aggregation Theory

Transcript

swyx: [00:00:00] I generally think that Ben Thompson's aggregation theory is the most important tech strategy concept of our time. It explains a lot. But Ben Thompson himself doesn't really have a good explainer on his own site. So I really appreciated this. Summary by Alex Lieberman of aggregation theory. I thought it was the clearest explainer, with some examples, that I've ever heard. So enjoy.

Alex Lieberman: [00:00:23] Aggregation theory says that some of the most dominant companies in the world became dominant by doing three things. 

First, they have a direct relationship with their customer. 

Two, there is zero marginal cost to serve their customer 

and three, they have network effects. 

I'm going to unpack each of these qualities. 

Own The Relationship [00:00:43] 

The first quality that I mentioned was having a direct relationship with the user. 

Google is the most trafficked site on planet earth. There are 63,000 searches that happen every second on the site. By the end of this episode, there will have been 50 million searches that happen on the platform. Since you started listening. Google's power is in its relationship with you.

The user, when you search something on Google, you are Google's customer. You're not the customer of the website that you end up going to Google captures your data. They monetize you. They recommend the most relevant content for you to click on. And Google is the website that you go to when you want to find an answer.

And so just so you have a comparison around like what it looks like to own your relationship versus not own it take most retail companies that sell through brick and mortar, which many of them do? So let's say you're Patagonia and let's say you sell pullovers through Bloomingdale's. You don't own the customer relationship as Patagonia Bloomingdale's does.

Bloomingdale's has your information as the customer. They know what you bought and they can market to you moving forward, because they have things like your email address or your credit card information beyond getting the sale. If you're Patagonia, you haven't learned anything about your customer.

That's the first characteristic of aggregators. You own the user relationship. 

Zero Marginal Cost [00:02:08]

Now, number two, the second relationship of aggregators is that there is zero marginal cost for serving users. Let me explain what that means. If you're an aggregator, you don't incur any of the marginal costs that most businesses have to.

So take Airbnb. All Airbnb does is provide a great user experience for the customer or the renter to find homes or apartments for rental Airbnb. Doesn't have to worry about the normal costs that most businesses do in serving their customers, because they're not the supplier of the product. There's no such thing as cost of goods sold for Airbnb because they are simply aggregating supply or homes or apartments.

And they're playing matchmaker for demand, which are the people who want to. Rent homes or apartments, whereas let's say your t-shirt business, you have to incur the cost of each additional t-shirt to serve each customer. Airbnb doesn't have any marginal costs for adding another customer on the platform, because if someone decides to find a place to stay on their platform, Airbnb isn't paying for it.

They're simply just connecting that person with the home or the apartment that they were looking for. On top of that, Airbnb also doesn't have to deal with distribution costs because their business exists on the internet. Unlike say a fulfillment based business like Amazon, which literally has to ship physical goods everywhere across the world.

Airbnb is built on the internet and the internet has made delivering goods. Zero cost. That's the second quality of aggregators. 

Network Effects [00:03:41] 

The third and final characteristic of an aggregator are network effects. Basically all that, this means is an aggregator gets more valuable over time for the user and aggregators. Find that the cost of acquiring new customers goes down over time as well, which is completely opposite from what most businesses experience for most businesses.

When you start your company, when you achieve product market fit, your initial customers are generally your most passionate, your most loyal and your perfect fit customers. As you grow your company, you find that the quality of your customer goes down because it isn't a perfect fit. Aggregators are different in that regard, it actually costs less to get good customers moving forward.

Whereas for normal businesses, as you expand, you have to pay more to convince. Less perfect customers to join your company or buy your product. What that also means is aggregators generally operate in a winner, take all fashion because it becomes increasingly difficult for any companies in the industry that an aggregator plays into compete at scale, if not only does the product get more valuable for users, but it also gets cheaper to acquire users.

What Antonio García Martínez actually wrote, and what happens when gonzo journalism meets 2021 tech culture (note: I am not defending him).

Audio source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDLBGriyky8 (45mins in)

- Antonio García Martínez Wikipedia page
- Hunter S Thompson Wikipedia page
- Gonzo Journalism Wikipedia page

Audio source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl2ciIU4Qm4 (30 mins in)

Blog version with better writeup: https://www.swyx.io/clones-fail

Reply via tweet!

Transcript:

Why Clones Fail

swyx: [00:00:00] Something I love collecting examples of is the Innovator's Dilemma, which was coined by Clayton Christensen in his book on the Innovator's Dilemma. He really demonstrates how successful outstanding companies can do everything right, and still lose their market leadership, or even fail as new unexpected competitors rise and take over the market. 

And part of this thesis is basically that the incumbents company cannot clone the upstart for whatever reason.

And it's really amazing when you see someone that's so giant, that's so well-known, that has such great distribution, that has so much resources, be constitutionally unable to clone the small startup. 

This is known as counter positioning, as promoted by Hamilton Helmer in his book on the seven powers. And you can hear it in this clip from the MKBHD podcast talking about the failure of YouTube Shorts.

Andrew Manganelli: [00:00:53] Shorts in general that are just a really great way of explaining how like YouTube launches, these new features, they fall flat. And then they're trying to find ways to get people to do them. And I think that all because of that, it boils down to like, why are these not working? People love YouTube, like, people made their whole lives on YouTube. I literally have a job because you have, but like, why are these main creators not doing these other things.

Marques Brownlee: [00:01:20] I think I can speak to that. I, so first of all, the, the creator funds though, he keeps seeing, it's like my favorite new trend. Yeah. 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:01:27] Tick-tock one this week for tick docs.

Marques Brownlee: [00:01:29] Exactly the same thing. Yeah. It's because the platforms realize they not just want, but need creators on their platforms and making stuff to make them work that realization. Great. 

Now YouTube shorts. And so the hesitation by a lot of YouTubers to dive into shorts is really interesting. I think a lot of the longer-term creators like me have a bit of an aversion to YouTube releasing new untested unproven features because they could possibly have adverse algorithmic effects, they could possibly get killed in six months and you will have just poured a bunch of resources and pivoted your channel down a path that ends up being a dead end road.

Yup. So the other end of that is. If the feature works, I think there are a lot of younger creators or more nimble creators who will just jump right in and do a bunch of shorts or do a bunch of those lasting YouTube stories. I think that's, might've been dead already, but I 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:02:30] don't see anyone posts stories, 

Marques Brownlee: [00:02:31] but they'll they'll once they mirrors.

The thing is they launch a feature like that and they have a whole plan behind it, backing it as if it's going to be the future of the platform. So when creators see that they'll go, oh, okay. I see that story is going to be a really big deal for YouTube, for the foreseeable future. Let me pivot hard and make sure that's a big part of my content strategy.

And then when it's dead in a year, you feel like you wasted a lot of time resources. You might've hired for it. Like that's a. That's a big loss. Like that's a big risk to take, but if it does explode and let's say shorts is, you know, this huge future category on YouTube, a lot of younger creators who got in early and focused really hard on that are going to be really happy about it.

So shorts is clearly a response to tick-tock. It's literally almost the same thing. Like you go into hit shorts on the YouTube app and it's this endless scrolling carousel of vertical videos. That's what you'd expect. The algorithm tries to learn you. But YouTube knows that it needs youTube shorts creators instead of just people uploading to Tik TOK, and then copying that file and also putting it on shorts.

Andrew Manganelli: [00:03:37] That's what they're doing. That's what they did on reels. Like that's most real is 

Marques Brownlee: [00:03:41] literally like watermarked, tick tock. Like literally 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:03:43] all of reels has the Tik TOK, like watermark and the name on it. And probably just using reels to find more people to go follow 

Marques Brownlee: [00:03:50] it and tick tock. And they, they literally show up on my explore page.

Like, what is that? The gram is suggesting to me on my explore page, have tick tock, tick tock logos on it. That's 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:03:59] really funny. And if anyone was going to do though a tick-tock competitor, it would be Instagram. It just makes the more sense. The demographic that is on Tik TOK is very, very active on Instagram.

And it's just that social media platform, that short form social media platform that it makes way more sense on. Yeah. And it's Tik TOK still blowing reels out of the water. 

Marques Brownlee: [00:04:18] Yeah. Yeah. So YouTube, I mean, This is a smart move from YouTube. No doubt. Like they are the video home on the internet. And if you on YouTube and you see Tech-Talk a, another version of videos blowing up, of course you need to make a competitor for it to offer people on alternative and possibly they'll come to YouTube later.

The question is how do you get those creators to come to YouTube? Okay, well, we have a creator fund. We're going to start making it easy to monetize. Tik TOK is. Also still not easy to monetize. And they're also doing a creator fun thing, which is smart. But I think generally at the end of the day, the creators looking to make a job out of it are thinking about ease of monetization first.

Discoverability or right behind that. And YouTube is trying to lock both those things up and they all, they obviously have discoverability, but the tick-tock algorithm is something special. It just, just surfaces things you want to see. It's really good. So they have that to compete again. 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:05:11] I do think though, there's the aspect that we touched on really at the beginning of that you touched on it really quickly.

It's just like you're talking about bringing new creators in. YouTube. Definitely also already houses some of the biggest creators in the world. And they definitely want those creators to use their new features because if those creators use their new features, that's still bringing more people in. And I think that's where you talk about the unknowingness of the algorithm really starts making those big creators weary of jumping into some of these new features.

We still don't use premieres. They've been around for a long time, because from what we found, have I explained this. I don't know if we have, we may have it just might as 

Marques Brownlee: [00:05:51] well do a refresher. Yeah. So premiere is what happens with it. Premier is if you think of like a movie or like say a TV show where it premieres on TV, everyone watches it ...

I am a mentor for the Notion Advanced track of Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain, Cohort 12. This is the cleaned up audio of the first of 5 mentorship sessions with Q&A at the end.

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yY46bq527SyDCI3IgzMNrkumOnrhYwI9VeuhdGqr3Dg/edit?usp=sharing

Timestamps

• Intro [00:00:28]
• Why Build A Second Brain [00:07:58]
• Content Recap [00:09:32]
• Breakout Session [00:11:53]
• The CODE methodology [00:15:44]
• Q&A: Work vs Personal Capture Apps? [00:18:11]
• Q&A: Should I Capture Googlable Stuff? [00:19:55] 
• Q&A: Physical Book notes? [00:22:48]
• Q&A: Starting for the first time [00:24:23]
• Q&A: How to turn notes to action? [00:25:53]
• Q&A: Processing Notion vs SimpleNote [00:28:36]
• Capture Thinking [00:31:47]
• Q&A: Podcast Notes? [00:33:41] 
• Q&A: Grabbing notes on the go [00:37:06]
• Q&A: I dont like any of my apps, what do I do? [00:43:46]
• Q&A: Security & Privacy [00:46:31]
• Q&A: Triaging Information to be Productive [00:49:35]
• Q&A: Outdated content [00:51:46]
• Question: Defining Dealbreakers [00:53:25] 

Transcript

• swyx: [00:00:00] So we're here for BASB week one capture and I'm Shawn also known as Swyx. And I was part of cohort 10 and I'm back again to try to go through the new content. I know that Tiago has re-recorded a bunch of this stuff.
• Some of the content has changed and also just meet people. I think that you know something best when you teach it. So I do encourage you,  as you go through this journey to try to teach it to your friends or family members and you retain that much better as well. 

Intro [00:00:28]

• Okay. A little bit of self intro, and then we'll go into the specifics. I'm going to basically try to recap the stuff that we covered this week, and then try to get some feedback from you and get you talking amongst yourself. On some of the questions that were raised this week. 
• So hey, I'm Swyx I blog at swyx.io, I am a finance guy, turned developer.
• That's a long story. I just compressed there. We used to work at Netlify AWS, that's Amazon web services for the non-technical people. And now I'm currently head of developer experience at Temporal dot IO. I helped to run the React-TypeScript CheatSheet, which is one of the ways in which I build a second brain which is very specific for developers.
• Probably a bunch of you here are developers. I see Glenn is using reveal dot JS and I also wrote the coding career handbook as my capstone for building a second brain last year. So, part of the reason why this is a notion advanced course, even though I'm like not a huge notion expert is because we are very focused on trying to get people to produce output.
• So not just getting comfortable with the habits but also producing by blogging, speaking, and writing and hopefully making money. I'm very keen on helping people to make money with their second brains. Okay. So, I'm from Singapore. These are the pictures that I, I tweeted this once basically saying Singapore's that would kind of Asia.
• It's not usually so super overexposed like this, so don't come here and be super disappointed. But it does look pretty great. It does have a lot of manmade slash nature blended with it. And it is home for me. So, happy to answer any questions about Singapore. Alright.
• So here's a brief history of my blogging. This is me in 2016. Nobody knows about this.  I never talked about this. This is me on medium writing, trying to get into the whole content creation game and not really having much results. So this is my attempt at thought leadership and not really, and just engaging with stuff that I thought was interesting.
•  I was very into voice user interfaces because I coded an Alexa skill and at the time Alexa was going to be this huge thing is going to take over the planet. Yeah. And then just kept blogging and then just like fell off. And I think a lot of people here probably have some experience of this where like you tried to get started, didn't go anywhere and then you just stopped.
• And I think it's very authentic and original And I'm here to say that I'm one of you, I've definitely been there. The first real hit was when, because I started reading and listening to Ben Thompson got a bit lost in Ben Thompson's universe. And so decided to make a map.
• And so I applied some of my data analysis skills.  this was my first hit because it focused on a person and a prominent person at that, and it solves a problem for myself that other people had.
• And that was my first real breakthrough, like all these previous ideas were just things I had in my head that nobody cared about. And then. When you focus on such a small, specific topic as one person. And it's such a small specific question as how do you rank things?
• You perform a service that other people are interested in because I also had that same problem. So I think that was the beginning of my journey as to how do I productionize this second brain or like writing system towards building a network, towards building a reputation for myself, and then just making things that people want to read.
• So since then I have become a reasonable React/TypeScript/ JavaScript developer, happy to talk about tech stuff after the one hour, because we try to keep this general and inclusive. But this has probably been one of my major projects, which essentially running the community documentation for React and TypeScript developers.
• I teach a thousand people a day, React and TypeScript off of this thing. And it's literally my second brain of how to react and TypeScript and people from Uber, Microsoft, Airbnb, you name it, they've all contributed and taught me stuff as I have taught them. It's just really great when you start to do these advanced forms of second braining I call this open source knowledge in the way that people can give back.
• So second brain is, is often very one way. And when you can open source your knowledge it can be very powerful. So happy to talk about that as well, but I'm just giving you a brief overview of like what I do. I also have been focusing a lot on marketing, right? Every time you do something, you should also tell people that you've done it otherwise does it really exist.
• So framing it in things in ways in which people understand, and then tagging people who have had the exact pain points really starts to accelerate your growth as someone who learns in public. 
•  I also have been getting pretty steadily into the personal blogging. This is me getting serious last year in January, and then going from 20,000 uniques to 35,000 and now 40 ish. This is April. But with occasional, really big spikes, I think something you suddenly everyone should understand about blogging is that. It's a very hits driven business, and you put out your it's a very common phenomenon to put out all your effort into something and then have it fall completely flat and then spend two hours on a rant and then just see that go viral.
• The effort is completely disconnected with the results and you should be okay with that because ultimately you're working through something. You're trying to log something for yourself. And it's it's always a side benefit or side effects if other people feel the same way too. I do definitely preach the idea of having a  public second brain as some...

Audio and Transcript: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/233/starting-from-scratch

Jorge happens to be an executive editor at Gimlet Media, a frequent background appearance in credits and shows like Startup and Heavyweight.

Ira Glass

Things are just starting to look up for Jorge, when the thing with the TV happened. He had just moved to a new town, started his life over, found some work, got a place. Years of searching around in vagueness were ending.

Jorge Just

It's going well. Like the way that I'm procrastinating now is by-- like doing work. You know? Coming into my home, I feel good. I'm paying bills relatively on time.

Ira Glass

He'd moved to New York City, which was scary. And walked into an apartment that real New Yorkers told him was a find-- a little studio in the East Village. One room. Good location. Cheap. And then one night he's sitting at his table, watching The Bachelorette on TV. And it's the episode where the bachelorette has whittled it down to four guys that she's going to pick one from, eventually. And she's in New York City visiting one of the potentials.

Jorge Just

And you know, she goes out to dinner with his family. And they eat, and you know, they've got the shifty-eyed sister. And you know, like everybody's family acts the exact same way. You know?

Ira Glass

Right.

Jorge Just

And then they get in the limousine, and they decide to go back to his apartment. Now I'm on the edge of my seat. Because I moved to New York-- it's an enormous city. And I would be so excited if I could recognize the street. I would be so excited. It would just make me so happy. And so I'm totally-- I'm totally excited. So they get out of the limo, and he hugs her in the street. And they pan and they show a building. They show an awning. And it's my awning.

Ira Glass

It's your building?

Jorge Just

It's my building. It's the awning to my building. It says the address. It says the street. It's-- you know-- it's possibly the only place in New York I actually know. (both laughing) And then he opens the door, and she comes in, and it's my lobby. You know? There's my lobby. There is the row of mailboxes, you know? And I'm just like-- I'm out of my chair. And I'm-- I can't talk. I'm like-- you know-- like pointing at the TV.

Ira Glass

If it were me, I would think like, are they here right now? Like in the building?

Jorge Just

You're too smart. I couldn't think. I was just like, aaah. [Ira laughs] You know? You know what I mean? I was just like-- I was just flabbergasted. It just couldn't be happening, you know?

Ira Glass

He watches them take the elevator up to the fourth floor. Jorge lives on the fifth. They walk down the hallway door. And then Jorge realizes something else.

Jorge Just

You know, he doesn't just live in the city as me. He doesn't live on the same street as me. He doesn't just live in the same building as me. He basically lives in my apartment. He lives in the exact same apartment. This exact same layout.

Ira Glass

So wait a second. So the camera goes inside this apartment, and you see your apartment, basically.

Jorge Just

A much better version of my apartment. His is much better. The walls are wider. The place is cleaner. The furniture is nicer. He has a half wall. He's got a half wall.

Ira Glass

A half wall with brick, glass, blocks?

Jorge Just

It's like drywall, you know? But it seems like it has some sort of counter top kind of thing on it.

Ira Glass

And at that moment Jorge gets this flash. He is not really doing all that well. His apartment is a kind of dump, compared to this guy who's on TV. Plus he's watching Trista Rehn, the bachelorette, on TV, looking uncomfortable in his apartment on national TV. In fact, she bails on the guy.

Jorge Just

She leaves the apartment, and they cut to like that head-on interview. You know? And she's looking into the camera. And she says, I've dated guys with really bad apartments before. I can't judge him on that. I have to-- I have to find out why he feels like he can live in an apartment like this.

Ira Glass

She ditched him because of the apartment?

Jorge Just

Yeah. Yeah.

Ira Glass

Wait. He lost out on the bachelorette because of the apartment?

Jorge Just

Oh yeah.

Ira Glass

And it was your apartment?

Jorge Just

But better.

Ira Glass

[laughing]

Over the next few days it all sort of goes to hell for Jorge. He's depressed. His new life does not seem so shiny. His New York friends console him. Look, they say, the bachelorette had never seen a New York apartment before. She does not know how people here live. This means nothing. Which helps him for a while, until one day Jorge picks up the New York Post, and right there is an article about his neighbor, Todtman-- the guy from The Bachelorette-- getting busted for cocaine.

Jorge Just

Third paragraph. "Todtman's fate on The Bachelorette was sealed the moment Rehn set foot in his squalid Avenue A studio apartment."

Ira Glass

[laughing]

Jorge Just

Do you understand the weight of that? Squalid. "Squalid Avenue A studio apartment."

Ira Glass

So this isn't just like people from outside New York.

Jorge Just

This is the New York Post. Nobody knows New York apartments like the New York Post. These guys have been in the most squalid New York City apartments. It's squalid, you know? It's squalid. Squalid. Squalid. You know? There's not that many definitions for squalid. There's not many ways to look at the word squalid and think, mmm, maybe they mean kind of hip. You know?

Ira Glass

Somehow, without ever meaning to, Jorge had the experience that a person would have if he actually went onto one of the reality shows, and then got booted off the show. National television came into his apartment, and then kicked him off the island, by proxy. He was like collateral damage to a reality show.

Jorge Just

You know, I never-- I didn't want to be-- I didn't want America to judge me and tell me my apartment sucked, you know? I didn't want that. But that moment when they came into my building, and they opened that door, and it was my apartment, I thought I was-- you know-- I thought that I was hot. I thought that it was-- you know.

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