What's up everybody? This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com and you're listening to the

EndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot

of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these indie hackers to discuss the ideas,

the opportunities and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same.

All right, I'm here with my friend, Julian Shapiro. How's it going, Julian?

Great, man.

For those who don't know, Julian's been on the show a couple times, maybe three times now or four.

You're my podcast co-host for our other show Brains. You're an investor at Julian. Capital.

You're a writer at Julian.com. You are a tweetmaster with an unimaginable number of followers.

How many followers are you up to you now?

Man, it makes me feel cringe to give you the answer because I'm, like, I'm boasting about it, but I think a quarter million. Quarter of a million followers. And like this time, two years ago, you were like 10 times less than that, I think. Yeah, it's been, I think I was one of the first people to realizing the power of threads for fast follower growth. Yeah. And now everyone's doing it. So I think each one of us, unless you really want to lean hard into the clickbait game, which I find a bit cringe and it's not something I want to do. But unless you lean hard into that, the rate of growth for Twitter followers now, I think, is declining because everyone's doing these threads. Everyone's doing it. I'm almost never on Twitter.

I actually sent out my first tweets in a while a couple days ago. But when I do go on Twitter, half of what I see is people saying, I fucking hate Twitter. No, it's like, it's like, I made $4 million doing X and I lost $100 million doing Y. Here are my 10 biggest lesson, you know? But my question for you is, if you're not addicted to checking Twitter, I'm sure you're addicted to checking something. I'm guessing it's Reddit? No, I'm honestly, I check Hacker News probably every day, but it's not like I spend very little time on it. I go, I browse the stories. I leave. I'm just living life, man. I've been like living my offline life much harder than I have probably in the last 15 years. I was in Italy for a couple weeks recently. I had a big party for my birthday. I got an Airbnb, invited a bunch of friends before that, just stuff like that. And so I'm mostly, if I'm at my computer, I'm working, and if I'm not working, I'm doing other stuff. So what gives you the greatest happiness these days? People, easily, people, meeting new people, introducing them to each other, hanging out with them. Indie hackers is super fun to you. I've been like rejuvenated because I was trapped at an Airbnb with my brother for a couple weeks in Italy. We both got COVID. And so we were just like jamming on Andy Hacker stuff. And like work for me, I'm a very social person. So work for me is like way more energizing if I'm working on a cool project with somebody else that I like. So it's like maybe a tie between those two things. What about you? Interesting really jazzed on investing nowadays.

Yeah, I find it's interesting because I originally had the impression, which I imagine a lot of founders do, that investing is this sort of thing you do when you're out of ideas. And you're just kind of, you're just like. They're washed up. Yeah, maybe. but it's more like you no longer want to be an operator or you don't have what it takes to be an operator, like a founder. Then I got obsessed with it and someone asked me like, why are you doing this? And I said, it's extremely fun to just work with the very best of the best founders and ride those rocket ships without doing any of the work. You know, I get like a front row seat to the coolest companies.

And if you're actually making a concerted effort to not just invest in like MarTech tools and, you know, a Twitter clone, I'm not saying those are bad companies

or even that they're not good for the world, but they're not exciting.

What is exciting is when you're working with a climate change company or you're working with like a quantum

computing company, which I'm not because I'd be in it over my head. But there are some types

of companies you're like, holy shit, this is actually the future. And I'm looking five years

ahead into the future. Like A great example is there's

a gut health company, so a microbiome company that I invested in that pioneered something that is

easily four years ahead of the market. And most doctors don't even know such a thing as possible,

like a supercharged version of probiotics that actually works as opposed to being this

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