Phan: Writing a daily newsletter without an editorial team causes burnout
Trung Phan · Trung Phan on The Hustle, ChatGPT, and TikTok · Mar 9, 2023 · at 14:29
Trung Phan discusses his time as the lead daily newsletter writer for The Hustle during the COVID-19 pandemic.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The daily stuff is truly a seven day a week job. If you're in the writer's seat, right? Because at a minimum it's six days because you got to hit all five days during the week, but you just never stop thinking about it. Cause you just wake up like, oh crap. Like, I gotta make sure I got the next one. And it's honestly a recipe for burnout. If you don't have like a team in place”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Trung Phan
Phan: YouTube will acquire TikTok and IPO at $500B within 12 months
“I'm making a prediction. YouTube is going to buy TikTok. They're going to spin out YouTube. It's going to go public, five hundred billion dollar company. Done. Clip this. Editor, clip this for when this happens in the next 12 months.”
Phan: The US government should ban TikTok and force a sale
“I think they should ban and then force a sale.”
Phan: Former operators make better newsletter writers than trained journalists
“The best writers I know are not people that came up as journalists. The best writers are former industry people. Like, I mean, who's going to outright community stuff or what your expertise is, right? Like you're going to be the best about that. Like, A journa…”
Phan: Solo newsletter writers rely entirely on expensive legacy media reporting
“The reality is that the actual reporting that we all riff on and write on, like that is actually extremely difficult and very like time and financially intensive, right? Even when you look at Some of the best solo newsletter writers. I mean, they're just rippi…”
Phan: AI models will commoditize, making UX the primary daily differentiator
“If the underlying models are going to be largely commoditized because every browser will have it, like every productivity tool will have it is People will be like, okay, well, which one will I actually use every day because it's convenient.”