I went on Fox Business this week for a segment with Stuart Varney, who hosts one of the biggest business shows on television.
I don’t watch TV and none of my friends my age have cable. Still, getting booked on a show like that feels special and I find it thrilling to get even a few minutes on the airwaves.
I arrived early Friday morning to the greenroom, where I met a couple of other guests waiting to go on before me. A makeup artist took the shine off my face while a producer with a clipboard looped a microphone through the back of my suit jacket.
I walked on set and sat down next to Stuart. As usual, we started talking about the stock market.
Then he asked me about Grok Bot, a relatively new AI tool from Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI which I’ve found so compelling and intuitive that I’ve become a power user in a few short weeks.
I gave Stuart a few examples of how I use the tool — video editing, content creation, research, email triage — then we cut to a commercial and I went home.
What typically happens after going on TV is that my friends see the clip when I post it on my own social media channels, then I get some emails or LinkedIn messages from older colleagues or my parents’ friends who caught me live.
But something extra happened this time.
Katie Miller, who hosts a prominent podcast and has a quarter-million followers on X, tweeted the segment and highlighted how I was using Grok Bot.
Then Elon Musk — arguably the most famous person on Earth — reposted it with three words “Try Grok Bot” to his 241 million followers.
Within an hour, the clip had almost 600,000 views on X.
Elon took a cable segment and put it in front of everyone cable no longer reaches. I don’t know how many people watch live TV these days, but it’s clear X reached far more of them this time.
There is a lot of luck at play with what I’m describing here. I post my news segments all the time and Elon has never once engaged with any of them.
But part of this is also a matter of surface area. Luck needs somewhere to land.
This clip traveled because it existed, and it existed because I’ve spent hundreds of hours on camera and have published millions of words on the internet the last few years.
Putting out a high volume of work on the internet remains the highest-leverage way to spend your time. It’s what opens the door to opportunity.
There is no secret formula. Draft and post, draft and post. Again and again and again with the knowledge that most of your efforts will fall flat.
…until the moment they don’t.
The more you publish online, the wider the surface area, and the higher the odds Elon Musk tweets your video clip.
You can watch my segment here.
This is so freaking good!