One of GritCult's podcast guest appearances. For the full list, see Podcast appearances.
| Other Life | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Episode | |
| Show | Other Life |
| Host | Justin Murphy |
| Released | November 2021 |
| Length | 1:12:28 |
| Watch | YouTube |
Get jacked, build a cult, and get $$$ with Gritcult is an episode of Other Life, hosted by Justin Murphy, with GritCult as the guest (November 2021). A long conversation with Justin Murphy on turning a pseudonymous Twitter account into a business, how to handle powerful people, why men should post physique, and how crypto will change human organisation.
Summary
Justin Murphy's Other Life podcast presented him as a pseudonymous account that had turned a philosophical Twitter persona into a real consulting business. GritCult explains the name (a crypto-themed handle dropped during a bear market, with cults as the fascination that stuck) and recalls the David Goggins phase that left behind a group chat of physical challenges. He calls himself anon in layers rather than in the dictionary sense: plenty of people know who he is, and meeting interesting people means trading away some privacy.
Much of the hour treats Twitter as infrastructure. He finds the formulaic funnel of tweeting value and selling guides boring and prone to churn, and uses the account as a network instead: group chats of domain experts he sets up to learn fast, replies and quote tweets that get him into someone's head before a DM, and a CRM logging every meeting. The all-caps style, he says, was a deliberate branding experiment he began on returning to Twitter, which he remembered being off for most of 2020 (the archive shows a lull that spring rather than a year away).
On powerful people, his rule is that everything is communication: grooming, bearing and speech are all being read, flashiness only signals new money, and the commonest mistake is trying to extract value instead of giving it. Murphy's unease about men posting physique sets off the liveliest exchange. GritCult says get jacked and post, because a good physique advertises months of disciplined work, and rejects Murphy's claim that men historically set themselves apart through ideas rather than looks, citing peacocking, Victorian dandies and Roman attention to appearance. He also calls the idea of bullshit jobs misinformed, blaming coordination and information problems inside large organisations.
Asked for influences, he names Daniel Dennett, memetics, Spinoza and postmodern thought; later he calls Nick Land's essay on humans as hell-baked one of his big influences, leans on Darwinian sexual selection, and reaches for Venkatesh Rao's Gervais Principle and Peter Thiel's reading of Girard. He closes on crypto as a new layer of the internet that reinvents identity and, he argues, every institution, with states left competing for people who can work from anywhere.
Key moments
Timestamps link to that point in the episode.
- 3:45 Why the name is a cult
i'm very fascinated by cults in general especially you know social like um tribes and collectives
- 8:34 A network, not a funnel
the biggest value that twitter brings for me is the network
- 31:47 The all-caps experiment
i think it catches attention people talk about it and you know it's again it creates an association with you and your brand so like yeah it was a conscious effort of branding
- 32:48 Everything is communication
everything that you do in a sense is a form of communication so how you present yourself how you speak how you carry yourself
- 41:40 Flash means new money
there's a lot of people that are very flashy they'll flash a lot of things but that all that tells me is that they are new to money
- 45:25 Get jacked and post
if you want to get more followers get jacked and get jacked and start posting
- 55:42 Against the bullshit jobs thesis
i think it's quite misinformed mainly because they don't know the complexities of running a giant corporation
- 1:09:24 Crypto rebuilds the institutions
a lot of people say it's gonna change the world but how is it gonna change the world it's basically gonna reinvent all the institutions in the world
Themes
- twitter as a network, not a funnel
- anon in layers
- communication with powerful people
- physique as a signal of discipline
- crypto reinventing institutions