A boat, I'm going to break the rules. Careful Ben Thompson up
here. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Let me make you a mod 2.
Oh, yeah, I can't do that.
Here's Ben. It's like putting been on the spot. I don't know what opens got kids in the
background. I actually joined the room.
Set your audio quality the high been so we can hear the kids screaming in the background that I don't think you want that.
All right. How you doing? The numbers here 1.3?
That's pretty good. We can we can start I mean either there's so many questions and maybe like ask people in the audience.
Yeah, I guess the the first question that a lot of people had is like if success follows a power law distribution, how can we expect everyone to be a success in this
economy, which is kind of similar to you know, people say if everyone's Rich no one's rattray. Like how do you what's power-law Distribution on a particular thing, but you can have many power laws because you can have many different things you can pee on right someone can be a YouTube Star someone else. Can you YouTube comedy star? Someone else can be a YouTube comedy star in Taiwan? So there's many many ways to slice things.
Yes, only one person can be the top of the leaderboards, but you can have many many many leaderboards the internet creates millions and billions of niches and so you can have millions and billions of people if each one is relatively authentic they can kind of do their own thing. Now the sense that money is a single score card then yeah in the money game there will always be someone higher up than you and they'll always be someone lower down than you but that's not necessarily a cause for alarm as long as you can meet your basic needs and it's making a good living for you and you're having fun doing it. That's
These are not Zero Sum games. The economy is not a zero-sum game. The internet economy is certainly not a zero-sum game. It's status hierarchies are zero-sum games. And if you're overly concerned with status hierarchy show, you'll never be happy. You'll never be satisfied. But if you're fine with a the the wealth hierarchy where you'll need is hit a certain threshold and your basic needs taken care of then we can all get there. Yeah, it's more about it
than absolute number of people who are earning a living and getting by
Has you know the people how much how many people are making gazillions of dollars? I mean, do you think that like, you know, the competition it is getting easier to get started right? There are more newsletters and more podcasts and more
all sorts of things. Do you think it's there's harder to start today?
There's always an advantage to being first in any given medium like been here as a poster child for the paid newsletter before there was such a thing as abstract. I was doing it and in fact, you know, even on sub stack the people who started early like the Matt Taibbi is in the Glenn greenwald's in the Matthew yglesias is of the world and the burn Hobart they get an advantage because when people first Wonder into that Medium, they look around and they're like, well who's here? And so early adopters do get a leg up.
And later adopters will have to work more for it, but doesn't mean they can't be successful but there is an advantage to being sort of a connoisseur and figuring out which platforms going to do. Well adopting them early on clubhouse an example. I I've met people on clubhouse over a million followers and I'm like who the hell is this person that not even interesting, but they were on their early and they got into this just use your module or they kind of build a fan base early on when nobody else was around and available and that that pays off its a bet that they took and that bed
paid off.
Yeah, yeah, how do you how do you how do you promote yourself today? Like if you were getting started from scratch today?
How would you how would you get started? I don't believe in self promotion. I think that the world is really craving his authenticity very very few. People are actually authentic. A lot of people are putting on a show or wearing a mask. And I think people deep down in their gut they know when someone's putting on a show and when they're not and so I think people crave truth and when they find someone who is speaking their truth and is being authentic and honest that is naturally
If it doesn't necessarily pay dividends immediately doesn't necessarily pay dividends in the in a way that can be easily measured in track. But it builds you the single most important thing which is credibility credibility matters more than distribution. So a thousand true fans matters more than having it at a hundred thousand week fans. There's a lot of people on Twitter who will say things that are like non-controversial and they're very careful and Bland and they'll have a big follower count. But when you actually look at the engagement on their tweets on you, look at the actual how much people care a listen to those people. It's actually quite low.
So I would argue that authenticity is a thing that you want and that will lead to credibility not follow accounts and not in the metrics at Twitter and Clubhouse want you to play at
yeah, I mean, I think you have to find out what you want to do. You have to like I think that is the hard part is actually figuring out what what feels like play to you. Right? I think that if you can find that out then then you will be able to find a thousand true fans. I think if you're
dragging you just you just observe yourself. What is it that you do for fun? What do you
I doing No One's Gonna Be able to compete with you on that. And so the best way to figure that out is literally to observe your own behavior. And that takes time you can't rush it but you'll figure it out eventually and if not your friends and your family around you. Well, yeah, I feel like most
people it's like when
someone's you know relationship isn't working out. I feel like everyone else figures it out before you do. That's right. You didn't you have it right you have an idealized relationship that you desire that you're aiming for and that's what you're holding in your head while they're seeing the reality of the
actual relationship that
You're in
yeah, so people people know what
you should be doing. Generally it might be the thing that you're doing on Friday nights. Like yeah, it's interesting. So I would just add I would just add two things to it and of all said first off its kind of annoying most of all because it's funny how many people miss the idea that the internet inverts everything. Well, yes, there's a power curve but Neva already beat me to the point. There's infinite power curves available to be filled by think that leads to a way to dig deeper on that.
He is there's lots of ways to differentiate and everyone's like oh you have to differentiate by being the best writer of the most clever. And actually you can also differentiate just by virtue of which this you fill if no one is talking about a particular topic or known as covering a particular subject that by definition is differentiation. Even if you're only averaged at it just by being the only one doing it. He's a real opportunity number one and then number two I push back a little bit on the whole passion or what you find fun. Just because I think what is
Is being really good at something and you get very passionate about something if you spend all your time doing it and they're I think there's a function where there's so many things to cover so many things to talk about and if you do it and you practice it and you get better and better and better at it, if you're going to turn on it's only realize you're super passionate about it at the same time. And so I think there's a there's a bit where all this is true. You want to find something you do for fun? And you want to be differentiated have a niche but the order in which that happens and the up
portunity is revealed. I think is kind of the opposite of whatever one sort of assumes it is.
Yeah, I mean riffing on that for a second like product Market fit has a way of creating passion. Like I've seen a lot of companies where like they get product Market fit in the founders really passionate and a company doesn't have product Market fit in the founders aren't that passionate or then they find product Market fit later and then suddenly everybody's passionate so they do kind of go together. It is hard to say which came first. So I think that is a very important point to bring up. Yeah.
Well, I think it's exciting about this sort of subscription thing. I mean, I've been I've been very excited about the potential for this model for like local journalism, like very nice short of things and it's a great example where if you like the geography still matters right geography didn't work for business all for newspapers want to sort of fell apart, but that because their cost structures were way too large to stay in it, but that doesn't mean people still don't have sort of local concerns for example, and local concerns could be geographically
Right covering a game covering a particular company or something on those lines. And to me there's I think that yeah, maybe it's a little late if you want to be a generalist Tech blogger, right? I thought I was too late when I started in 2013, but I think it's very very early for I think just in a massive methods number of dishes
and what's impressive event is he's always tinkering. So when he did trajectory as a kind of the first real paid blog out there a newsletter, he was just playing
around and then by the time other people started doing paid newsletters to sub Stacks. He's onto did the ring where he's doing paid podcasts and you know kind of these serial episodic paid podcast or bundle with his newsletter. So there's this tinkering mentality that can kind of keep you ahead of the curve if you want to if you're an early adopter type now, by the way, when I say what feels like play to you, that's just half of the the thing that's not enough the whole phrase is what feels like play to you, but looks like work to others and
Those words are deliberately chosen like feels like cuz it's your internal feeling like play so it's fun but looks because the outside person doesn't have the feel like work to them. And if it looks like work to them, then you can monetize it and it can be useful. So all four of those pieces are important in that sentence all of those criteria have to be fulfilled for you to find something that is a worthwhile Endeavor where essentially it's your hobby, but it's everybody else's vocation. It's your avocation their vocation and then you can
Out-compete them in that and do well and enjoy every step of the way like I my senses for example been a boost in your podcast your did it in podcast with John Gruber and it just sounds like you guys are just having fun. I mean, it's just like two friends chatting right and no one's going to compete with you on that because it's just two friends chatting but the tech industry and they have a genuine love for the tech industry. So they're enjoying themselves. So this is this is no way to compete with that because you can't lose
this is what the other thing to you.
you
That's the old a differentiation that by definition no one can compete with is being yourself because there's only one you so to the extent you can get to that I think that's right. And I also love your point about feels like work to others. This is my biggest groups as like as a kid was I had it stuck in my head that the subjects I needed to study whichever ones were hard for me where the important ones and the ones that for were easy for me were not important at all. And so I spent my time taking classes.
Hopefully God like Majors that were very very difficult. And finally I kind of like gave up on that half way through college and I was going to do is classes. That sounds awesome and that I like and then like it's so like the whole world opened up to me and I think it was a weird mind that I do if it's common to people with simply one that I fell into that like, oh, it's challenging a but yeah,
this is yeah. There's a common trap right people try to fix their weaknesses when really want to double down on your strengths. But even when you double down your strengths you want to go to the things you're strong on and then find the hardest things.
In that domain and hone yourself against those so you get even stronger. So it's like if you're reading a book that's really difficult, and you kind of are confused. If it's something you're interested in. You will reread it. You reread it. You keep going where the points until you get it and it's the same as like when you feel soreness or pain after lifting weights. You're going to build stronger muscles on the other hand if it's a topic you're not interested in you just wander off and you'll just never get anywhere on it. So I don't believe in trying to cover for your weaknesses, especially in a nonlinear your
Old with specialization of Labor where you can hire other people to cover your weaknesses or partner with other people to cover your weaknesses. So you really just want to double down on your strengths and to do that. You have always have to be at The Cutting Edge of your domain.
Okay, I mean it feels like there's a lot of people who want it you have a point on the map that they want to get to and then they have to figure out how to get to there but really everyone should just move from where they are today, right then. I think that's what's so important about the tingrong. Is it sorry
exactly. All three of us up here tankers like I you know was early on tinkering with Twitter for philosophy, you know, you soil your tinkering with gumroad and like the weird way that you run it you're tinkering on the crowdfunding side you were tinkering.
Enrolling funds I was tinkering and how to mechanize Angel Investing in DC. I was kind of opening things up with the blogs on Venture hacks that was tinkering Ben. You were tinkering on Street a curry and dithering like we're tinkerers. Right? And I think most successful creators are ultimately tankers through the sort of playing around at the edges of their field on something that is interesting to them, but it's not really with
some strong motive. It's play it's not really with a motive to
like create something great out of it because they're they're genuinely interested and
Most tinkering is wasted. It's like when your kids are playing most that time is, you know, quote-unquote wasted but once in a while it will result in something which for a child might be a hobby and for an adult in might be a vocation.
Yeah, I think it's also inherently low status right? I think you you you kind of spend years not making any money and maybe not building an audience and getting really good at a skill, but you don't have any any any way to know if you know if that's actually going to turn into anything that sort of turning
To something is you know kind of happens all at once 10 years later. Well, there's something to about learning how to be in your particular moment and people get so fixed full five ten years in the future particularly comes to the career and the real danger is you end up like succeeding and then you ended up in a place that just not very relevant or interesting or there's a ton of competition and I look back like how I ended up what I'm doing and God said they had the quote, you know you
Look Backwards, you connect the dock.
Warning I was you know, maximizing whatever I was doing at that particular time. That's what pays off and you see so many people get so distracted about where they want to go and they don't take full advantage of the spot that they're in and then you look Bowers like man. I wish I would have spent that time better because I could have really used that experience and it's already it's already too late.
You certainly don't want to plan for trying to predict too much in the future. Like I think the worst title you can
Possibly have in your bio is futurist. First of all is this tone deaf? But when someone says futurist and it's like, you know, they're trying too hard to try to hard to live in the future. When yes, you're right. You're only moment of power and knowledge. It's a present you just act from the present. It's not to say you shouldn't have like goals and plans and those kinds of things. It's kind of nice to have them loosely held but if you stick too closely to them, you'll miss reality reality is very fluid and very complex and it's much more about navigating.
From the small set of options presented to you much more Choose Your Own Adventure style than you know, top-down soviet-style planning with five year plans and I'm going to get to Aid and beaten see
you. I think the other thing with that too, you do need a long-term goal, but that gives you a way to think about the immediate term options, right like so I three options today that are not my long-term goal. I know the general direction I'm going so I can choose this one. That maybe is suboptimal or maybe seems further, but I'm building up a particular skill or getting
In a particular sort of experience that will get me closer to that long-term goal without having yeah like a Five-Year Plan. I've got the exact like the exact wrong way to go about it. Well, I think it's what's so difficult when you when someone asked someone who's successful like why did you become successful and it basically forces I feel like the person to lie because you you look back connect the dots and then you can't help but sort of believe that it was it sort of happened on purpose and that you sort of had, you know, you can't remember what it was like,
Not know where you were going.
Yeah first I pick sperm number 3 billion 76112 that then routed its way to egg number 14 on the exact date of blah blah blah,
so sorry.
I told the story I'm exactly where it's hilarious that I known as the newsletter guy is I it was a total accident where I had I had the vision to have a subscription base.
Mine was all websites entering and it was a total disaster and I actually watched it on a Thursday. It was a total mess. I toured all over the weekend. I told people like well, I just screwed up the website hostile for anyone's on a subscriber. It's the wrong direction. I'm just going to email you if you subscribe. I'll email you additional stuff in addition to the website like literally like a spur of the moment. I have to fix this problem figure it out. How am I going to get kind of my subscribers about having a bad experience or not and subscribers and then now today on
His letter guy it's like it so there would you work backwards. You're actually honest about it. There's a lot of luck for serving a lot of like just in the writer poet take the right
choice. It's funny Angeles has a similar story because first there was a network for sharing deal flow that Nivea and I built or mostly nidhi bill called the pound deal flow network is literally a little social network with the feed and you can follow people and nobody used it and then he built a Google group and nobody use that either and then finally were like screw it. We're this. None of this is working. Just freaking email them.
The data and that was Angel list.
It was actually originally Angel this plus startup list, but then I just stuck it in jail list.
Well, what was the startup Le side? It was just a it was going to be inside of
yeah Angeles was being mailed the angels and start up with we're going to be able to start ups, but we just never got around to the startup this
side. Yeah, it's I
still don't know. I can't even tell you how it happened or what work. It's just feels like a feels like a foreign country in a distant time.
Well, I mean, you know going back to the question of like howdy. How do you kind of get started as a Creator? I feel like we also have that in common. Like we all started writing and putting our thoughts out there. Right and that is sort of a universal truth that's been true since sort of Martin Luther like put your thoughts on paper and then, you know distribute them
or even better put your thoughts and code write your business planning a code. Like I think for every hundred companies that I have like seriously made effort at starting like one has gotten launched.
Hit rate, is that low you just constantly trying stuff. You just constantly
iterating.
Yeah, I mean that's the other issue with asking people. You know why they're successful is it's asking them about the one out of a hundred attempts that they made and this is the one that ended up working but they all looked roughly, you know interesting at the
time. Yeah, it's like yes DaVinci, like how'd you do the Mona Lisa and you know, there's all the other paintings or like when I make an investment every investment I make I'm super excited about first. I think this is the one this is going to be the next Facebook is great and then to three years and like this is total shit. It's complete crap. What I do this. What a waste of money. I
Long and then 10 years later some small percentage of than work out well, but you can just never tell along the way you can only create the narrative looking backwards to be create to be a good Creator is have to be creative and creative means that you're constantly creating things. It's not like you're just creating one thing your creativity is who you are and what you do, you're always creating things in your domain non-stop constantly and it's that you know, as David Deutsch says is conjecture plus criticism that drives science or Matt Ridley would say, you know, trial and error drives.
Innovation or you could say that variation selection drives ever drives Evolution. These are all just variations on the same theme, which is you just try a lot of stuff. We get feedback from the world and for the market and you see what works and you stick with what works and that's just it there's no there's no shortcut in that
process. The other thing too is the iteration like it makes you better it increases your differentiation because you you just get better and better at doing this particular thing in knowing what
Works and what doesn't and like you know, I write a daily update every day is like I'm way better at writing daily updates and I was before not just from me like inside perspective from having the opportunity to learn and think about stuff for a long time. But you like the actual mechanical Act of doing it. Like I know what needs to be done. I know I days I'm not feeling it. It's like well, how do you ride don't you have writer's block like well, no, it's like just what I do and I think that's something that develops over time. And and so the it's not just the iteration just the practice but
But also the Improvement it just yeah, nothing nothing replaces the hardware part of it.
Yeah, I would say there's most people when I mean like I talked to a bunch of aspiring painters, if you like, they're people that I go to these painting workshops with and last time they painted was the last painting Workshop that they went to a year ago, right and those people gent like that's when people say they're you know, when people complain like there's too many people. It's too easy to get started. Most people never actually get very very very far. They don't put in a hundred hours right on that 10,000. I think by the time you put in a hundred hours. Most people have gone home
maybe because they want to be painters, but they don't
love
painting
they like the idea of being a painter. They I mean it's the same with books. I think people really enjoy the idea of having written a book, but the process of writing a book is quite quite different
and not as rewarding. And also I think
when you're in the tinkering phase like you don't really know if this is going to go anywhere for several years potentially, it's very hard to stick with something unless you don't have some there's some inherent Joy of doing that thing.
It's really that's self-directed curiosity and passion.
Everybody has it. Sometimes it gets drilled out of you or you can convince it's in a useless domain or you're just too embarrassed to do it or you too busy to do it. But everyone has self-directed curiosity and something, you know, people will joke some of be like, oh yeah. Mine is watching Netflix or smoking weed. But that's not entirely true. I think humans are creative. Nobody just wants to sit there and do nothing all day. It gets really boring. And so it's just kind of like not losing that streak and I think look a lot of people lose that in school.
They lose it in a peer groups may be losing the drudgery of their day-to-day work. But you kind of want to find that thread of Natural self-directed Curiosity and just follow it. Everyone's curious about something, you know, if you talk to someone long enough, you'll find out. Oh this person is obsessed with like Natural Health Foods, or that person's obsessed with workouts or that person's obsessed with fashion or this one's obsessed with technology or this one's obsessed with even Logistics or Transportation or you know, what have you but everyone has some personal curiosity an obsession to
And the beauty of the internet is no matter how bizarre and strange that is there's a bunch of people out there who are really into it and probably large enough that you can form a small business or audience around it.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that is kind of what the Creator economy is. It's just like it's an honor a pain to just self-employment and it just I think I think a lot of people, you know, I've definitely heard that sort of like that. I you know, the only thing I don't like I like playing video games all day long. How do I make well obviously twitch so there's a pretty easy answer to that.
If that really is your answer, but I think most most people.
Yeah, I do think even if you if I think basically I think instead of thinking about it like work-life balance. I think the work thing throws everyone off. I think I think about it personally like creation versus consumption or like contribution versus consumption and I think everybody even the people who consume generally you find that you like a certain kind of art or a movie or book or you like working out or whatever and like I think it's figuring out how do you turn this into a
you know, how can you do this thing but in but instead of consuming the thing
as your relationship with it,
It you are able to create value and you're able to contribute to other people in this in this, you know in this vertical or this Dimension. Yeah on the work-life balance thing if if you feel the need, I mean not to get myself in trouble. But if you feel like you need to pursue work-life balance, do you are not in a work that is going to lead to great creative outcomes or building this sort of business. Like I mean you use it sent me something you're obsessed with right? I can't imagine why this it around and watching Netflix series instead of thinking more about the stuff that I'm working.
Or something I'm doing and it just seems like such a such a bizarre waste of time to me and that's not to say that if you're watching Netflix, that's a bad thing or that you like. Some people want to live a different kind of life. And that's fine. But I'm not saying anything about that but this particular like we talked about authenticity talk about being like mastering something like you don't you obsess about it? It's like your life and I just had this moment last week where I'm unbelievably busy week. I got to Friday night and I was like, so please I Was So Satisfied
I'd just because I felt like such a great week. I made progress and lots of places and that might well I felt very very unbalanced at that particular Moment In
Time.
Since been is about to get cancelled I'll get cancelled with him too. I agree. I think the work-life balance thing is nonsense. It kind of implies that work is suffering and life is relief and that just means you're in a bad situation to begin with and you need to get out of that situation where you control your own life. I've been as guilty as anyone to watching Netflix and playing video games, but that was escapism from suffering and once I sort of align my life with doing what I wanted to do then I just did that for fun. And then when I don't want to do that anymore, I don't need to do whoo. Hi.
Hi mental, Contour High commission activities. Like playing video games. I can just go for a walk or I can hang out with my friends or I can hang out with my kids and it's just as fulfilling so your work should be fun. It takes just as much effort to do well at a video game as it does to start a company somebody need and it used a phrase that really stuck with me. I think it goes by illimitable band or something one of these inspiration accounts, but he said that he said that video games are Shadow careers and when I read that
At that moment. I knew video games were leading my life because it was absolutely spot-on right? I was building a career except I was building a career in some fake lens of fake game with the rules would change or some twelve-year-old would come along and crush me the next week and I saw it for what it was. It was a shadow career because I wasn't putting that same effort into my main career because my main career didn't really line up with what I want to do and that's why I knew it needs to make a change. So don't waste your life in these shadow careers, even even if you find yourself craving holidays, that means that
Enjoying every day that you're sort of like robbing yourself of your do of what should be a pretty good day. Even like a no this is an extreme example, but you eventually want to get to a point where you don't look down on Mondays. You don't you don't dread Monday's Mondays are no worse or better than any other day. And so you that means I kind of getting away from this idea of work-life balance. It's rather getting into a mode of work where that is your life and this fulfilling its good work you enjoy it you you have
To align again to use the old Robert Frost phrased align your vocation and your application.
Yeah and not to double down on getting cancelled. But you know, it's easy to look at you know today, you know Duvall and I are doing well and like oh it's easy for you to say but like I started trajectory while working another full-time job and and what I mean by that is I found it like this is the part where it actually it does pay off do something you love. I loved Tech I love thinking about tech. I love writing about tech and so
Was actually a form Like You by work-life balance my work was kind of drug arrests, but my life was actually what I was really obsessed about and so that was a place where they able to align the idea of doing what I loved in my free time and it was able to transform in the wrong with my work. I believe I feel very very fortunate about that. But this isn't an incompatible idea where if your work is drudge Juris that's actually all the more opportunity to figure out it what it is you love because if you love it, you're not going to let go now I'm doing two jobs.
You're like, oh I have my work during the day and now I get to go home and do the stuff that I'm excited about that's actually a indicator of something that you might be worth spending more time on.
Yeah, I'm so I have mixed feelings about the phrase the Creator economy because I think the economy has always been the Creator economy in the sense that the creative people are the ones who get to run things and get paid the most is just there been very few of them. And so now what's happening is that the number of creators that we can support is broadening thanks to the Internet. So many more people can be creative and yeah, maybe not everyone is going to be created just yet, but that doesn't mean that you can't be if you're in clubhouse if you got an iPhone if
You're sitting here. If you're listening to this just because half the world can't be created or doesn't mean that you can't be a greater. You can't be the leading wave entrepreneurs are creators, you know, the best financiers are creators obviously artists or creators best actors or creators. The best producers the best directors the best, you know in any kind ever in any Endeavor. Yeah. If you look back in history, if you look back in history history really remembers the artists, they're the people who are breaking new ground her.
Creating new things or generating new ideas in an age of infinite leverage ideas are the most important things judgment is the most important thing and so we've always been in a creative economy. It's just that there haven't been that many people who were the creators they collected all the rewards because they were the real creators, but now many many many more of us get to participate in the creative act.
Yeah, and it reminds me of kind of the size of the firm breaking like I just think that the average size of the firm is shrinking and it's getting closer and closer to 1 and for all intents and purposes certain brands look like it's a company of on even though it has its to Army behind them
as external transaction costs come down. Thanks to things like gumroad in the internet and Clubhouse
and so on. Well, the other thing the other thing too is if you're in a job that isn't great, but whatever it's paying the bills you actually have this sort of weird.
Advantage when it comes to pursuing your passion because you don't have the necessity of supporting yourself or supporting your family or where or whatever it might be because you sort of your costs are taken care of and so there's actually an opportunity to you know, a lot of great businesses don't work out because they took too much money upfront or because they just couldn't like they couldn't get to that sort of Break Even point because it takes a long time to build the newsletter businesses like this, right? It's a great business once you have a thousand.
Fibers with getting from zero to a thousand takes time. And so there's actually an opportunity to sort of Arbitrage the factor in a job. You don't like that. You can spend your free time doing stuff you do like and figure out and experiment with monetization and how you're going to make that your business and such that it could be a business five or six years. And this was I'm is what I got luck with trajectory that happen faster than I expected. But I started rejecting With A Five-Year Plan. It's like this is gonna be my job five years from now and I was going to figure out what worked until I could get to that.
Point and I selected jobs that were going to give me room to do that. And so that was how I thought about like the my day job. I want to have rooms I can build this job at night and I think that that's a that's a gives more possibility of actually figuring out what it is that you want to do.
I had a slightly different route, which is unlike then I can't be creative and have another job. I just find like working the drudgery over the soul-crushing and he'll of free time to be creative. So rather for me was in my own Endeavors. I just drifted more and more to the creative side of the work and I just refuse to do the non-creative work. I refuse to the drudgery, I would Outsource it or decline it or I would shift away from it until I ended up doing the creative rolls in in the position that I was in and then people eventually
They realize that that was my superpower in the kind of left me alone on the other stuff, but I was not able to do the day job night job thing because it just it just takes up too much time and I need time to be created like empty space in my calendar. I think like creativity begins with an empty calendar. When you an empty calendar, you can be creative. At least I can be creative and then it and then creativity ends with a busy and cluttered calendar because once your creativity is demonstrated,
he wants a piece of your time and you fill up your calendar because all of a sudden you're popular but now you can no longer be creative.
So watch your calendar
the inverse of your calendar is your creativity.
Well, this is a good example of why you should always be careful who you take advice from because we are like the exact. Yeah not canceled. Right exactly. It's way too easy. That's what I get lazy. Like it's like way to he's just sort of sit around whereas like my secret powers.
Is for daily deadlines, like that's what actually makes it happen. Right? It's the fact that I have to get it done. And so and just funny that you mention that because I work in the exact opposite way.
That's funny. Are you getting this advice at all cancel out the 0. So anyway, this is all meant to be inspiration. Don't take it too. Literally. You can't follow anybody else's passes to success single player game.
Yeah. I think I'm a one other way of looking at turning your job into what you love to do is generally you have the job because there's something about it.
That is compelling to you. And I think a lot of it is figuring out. What is that one thing that you actually like doing more than all the other stuff and then leave the company and you know provide that single service to other companies so that you know that thing you might have only been able to do an hour a day because it just, you know, sort of, you know, the diminishing returns to it for that company, but there are eight other companies that you could do this for and then you could build a company that just offers that service at scale and and you get better at it because that is the thing that
Doing right you have you have eight iterations per day compounding instead of
one?
One thing I started doing that may be a useful hack is an obviously have to be a certain position to do this, but people ask me to do things and I would say hey actually that's something other people can do so you should ask other people to do that asked me to do the things that only I can uniquely do and you know, obviously it helps if you list those things, but that way you really focus on your strengths you focus on where you where you like to work. It also helps people differentiate when to ask you things and when not to it kind of builds your brand and
Leans into your super power and it's also just more enjoyable. It puts you in flow more often also more time efficient.
Then do you have a to do list like do you think in terms of like I need to get this done today tomorrow the week the month or are you more like these are things I need to do now and tomorrow I will have a new set that it will I will you know Realize by tonight. No, I try to not have any to dues at all because I have four to the week. I have four articles that provide every week and basically nothing in my life should ever be so important that it becomes more important those four things. So, I mean, I've got an appointment fortunate to have folks helping me and so
Can be like doing accounting and taxes and stuff like that and stuff that needs to be done. But that has absolutely nothing to do with what actually drives my business. And so that's the stuff you get other people to take care of you. You don't want to have any mental space connected to deadlines that aren't connected to your actual output. So I my wife the entirely geared around four times a week. I have to publish something and nothing else should to sort of get in the way of that.
And most of the most of the time you're you're spending than is actually contributing. It is being creative. It is like well, I need something towards one of those four. I'm working on another project. I do calls I meetings but all this is stuff that I can drop at a moment's notice. Like I don't none of it is something that has to be done. Like I think there's a difference between doing lots of stuff and there's a certain mental burden that comes with something that you know you have to do
So I think that's the bigger thing is avoiding the stuff that I have to do and if I want to do other stuff by choice or want to be involved in other stuff that's often very stimulating very exciting like the week. I had last week. I was so busy. I was doing a ton of stuff on related to writing but it was you know something I was choosing to do affirmatively as opposed to something. That was a burden that I had to do it swimming the have to do stuff for me. That's super important.
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people talk about like ten time management, but I think if you enjoy the work if you enjoy what you actually get to do it's not like I know one that I met that does that really has time management problems? I think most people who think they have time management problems have energy management problems there stop doing something. They really don't want to do so, they waste all this time. They get old, you know distracted, they're never in flow. So they you know, it's not really a lack of Time problem. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is It's miserable in Nepal talked about this.
Like and this is the hard part of having a job that you don't like is there's a lot of stuff you do have to do that. You don't want to do and that that's how you burn out that is like that burnout fuel is because it's sheer willpower to make yourself do something. You have no desire to do and you just no one has that much willpower.
The thing about creativity also is that other people are not going to give you the space to be creative. You're going to be most creative on your own or maybe the one good thought partner, maybe to maximum. Once you start getting past that point you're not going to be creative anymore. It's just too hard to be creative in larger groups and other people are always going to fill up your time with you know, well-meaning tasks that have to be done. They're not going to understand this idea that you just need like large blocks of alone time or with one partner brings.
I mean interesting things or coding or writing or whatever it is. These are these are largely solitary or best pairwise activities. These are not activities are done in large groups or meetings and it's just the nature of most business these days that is done very socially people kind of work in this socialize at the same time, like a meeting is like a cocktail party by other means, you know with coffee instead of with cocktails and a lot of people are just kind of, you know, sort of spending time or their laptop or their having conversation or water cooler talk or what have you
You so I just think that if you want to be creative you have to be in either very small organization, or you have to be ruthless downright rude about protecting your time so that you have blocks of time to do solitary or pairwise work.
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the one of the concepts of crypto that I think is so important is composability and I think the more that you can basically sort of use that function and say look the governor does one thing and basically everything else we're Outsourcing or Outsourcing the stripe or Outsourcing to
WS we're Outsourcing to all the new tools like we should basically be doing almost nothing.
Yeah, I mean this is gonna I don't mean to drop into like 1% privilege, but I think most people working too hard. I think most people are just basically spinning wheels and spending a lot of time and make work and the older you get the better you get at just declining work that you know is useless. Like I have this theory that 99% of work that you do is useless you still have to do it because it's entering iterating your way to the one percent that is useful. But in an Ideal World, if you are omniscient, you would just cut to the one percent.
So for example nine percent of people that you went on dates with you don't end up marrying. So that wasn't the final answer nine percent of stuff. You learn in school you forgotten you want really curious about it doesn't apply to your life anymore. My 9% of the presentations you did at work with spreadsheets the code that you wrote got thrown away didn't account for the returns. Now, of course you had to do that to build up the expertise for the one person that worked or perhaps it was trial and error you to do it to find the one person that worked. But as you get older you just get better at figuring out.
Well, actually instead of taking a hundred shots on goal to get the one that works. I'm actually going to narrow it down. So it take ten or Twenty or Thirty and a lot of judgment is just knowing not what to do in the first place the ability to say no and be correct that that was a no is a superpower you want to be able to filter out things very efficiently and that just comes through experience. But if you're becoming more and more experience and you aren't filtering projects and firing customers and not pursuing certain marketing strategies and declining working with certain kinds of
People and he would turning away the money when it doesn't make sense. If you're not doing that then you're not going to then you're not going to scale properly. So I do think that a lot of people just end up spending a lot of time and busy work and make work. We're also in this odd Society where we think that well every degree takes four years isn't that a coincidence? Whether you become an expert in art history or architecture computer science or physics, it takes exactly four years. What a heck of a coincidence. Every job takes eight hours a day five days a week whether you are coding.
Going up the next cryptocurrency or whether you are marketing something or whether your HR or whether your receptionist. It takes the same amount of hours. What a coincidence obviously I'm being facetious. Obviously, that's not correct. So we have these one-size-fits-all rules that don't make any sense and yet we look around and some of the most successful people in the world Warren Buffett, you know, that guy makes like one decision a year that matters. He spends a lot of time reading books on a lot of time playing bridge and he's one of the richest men in the world. So it's not really about hard work Elon Musk is working around the clock but
Also partying hard, he's dating. He's tweeting. He's running multiple companies. He's driving cars. He's moving around. He's engaging in politics. He's getting sued by the SEC busy guy. What does he find the time for all this the guy at the corner convenience stores working 80 hours a week. I don't see him being any more successful than Elon Musk or even close to that so clearly hard work. Although it's important. It's an element. It's one leg of the stool. It's probably not the most important one and you can definitely make trade-offs as you get older and wiser about
Unless hard, but working more smart. It's very very true. And especially in the age of Leverage that we live in judgment just gets magnified one little decision magnified a thousand times hundred thousand times million times. That's why you see such outsize fortunes one person decides to code up facemash at Harvard and they become Facebook the other one decides to code up something that you've never heard of because it was close but not quite it just hit number 100 on the app store for a week and then it was gone. So it's not really about hard work. It's about judgment. So
Work is important to the extent that it builds up judgment, but eventually when you have a judgment, you should be saying no all the time.
Yeah, I mean, I think also overtime you you have Capital. All right, you have credibility you have potentially just money that you can pay people to do the work.
Which is something a lot of people you kind of I think that's sort of stuff. Now we have to figure out how to do the thing that you like to do all the time or at least make free free the calendar.
Well, there's a three forms of Leverage and you should employ all of them one is labor. So Outsource anything that is less than your hourly rate and set your hourly rate to an aspirational level. Another is capital, which is you can when you make a decision you invest Capital behind it, you multiply the force that you are exerting through a free markets and the last of course is through creating a product or with
Could be writing. It could be a podcast. It could be an actual physical product or it could be a piece of code that is no marginal cost of replication and that last form of Leverage is largely permissionless in the most powerful modern form of Leverage. And that's where the modern fortunes are built. The older ones were built on Capital and the oldest ones were built on labor if you want to get rich in the 1700 or 1800 you did with labor you want to get rich in the nineteen hundreds you did with capital you want to get rich in the 2000s?
And you do with code maybe
media.
What do you think cryptos like fits into this? I mean, I feel like an idiot, you know, someone someone had this question. So let me ask this question, which is about investing. You said somewhere. Apparently that most people are going to be investors in the future, especially when full-scale AGI kick some that seems like maybe not telling you'd say exactly but
that's something I'm apology said actually this morning quote and I'm not Balaji, but I think I know what he meant. He's basically saying we're going for him and economy where
People are labor to where most people are capital. We're going for most people in workers to most people you investors this trend started with a 401k crypto makes it even easier and you know cryptos like this giant Casino in which you can invest in stocks bonds derivatives options all this Venture new blockchains new protocol stuff that was traditionally closed off and only a creditor sophisticated investors and now everyone can invest in it. So it's sort of creating this mentality of everyone's an investor owner, which is a good thing, right? Everyone's everyone's
A laborer and everyone's a capitalist and ideally I think the highest form Beyond labor and Beyond capitalist is Creator. Everyone's a Creator everyone's other creating product or the creating code or the creating media. The cleaning ideas. They're creating books to creating podcasts quitting YouTube. They couldn't which what have you but the creative economy in that sense is the apotheosis is the highest level above the laborer economy above the capitalist economy is the creative economy.
Yeah. I mean, I think even crowdfunding kind of fits into that, right?
It's taking that idea of like defy like basically, I have 7300 investors putting in five million dollars instead of a single investor putting in 5 million dollars.
It's yeah, you've got your fans invest in
your business. Yeah, your fans invest in your business is great. People are going to in fact, if you go onto Twitter, you'll see how people are invested in crypto apps just like promote them non-stop. So now you're going to have 7320 fans are gonna be up there promoting gumroad Non-Stop and that is a formidable army. And I think for example if you get Tesla Tesla is partially the most valuable company in the world because Tesla's car owners are also shareholders and True Believers in the product and they did
We really push it. There are that intolerant minority that works for Tesla instead of against which is how most intolerant minorities tend to work.
Yeah, it's funny at one of the when I started considering doing this crowdfunding around one of the feet like some of the feedback from the industry was like, you know, don't like isn't that like do you want more investors? Like why would you want more investors? And this is kind of what people would say about the party around right?
Like why General Aventure capital is if the Venture Capital industry by and large hates it you should do it.
And I'm like, yeah. What are you asking why I want more people in my Army
then fewer. I don't get it. Yeah, you know, it's yeah, it's basically I think Parker Thompson had this great tweet a while back where he said every investor who invested before me. It's right in every investor who invests after me is a spreadsheet jockey and every investor invest in before me as a dart throwing monkey and it's just the nature of investors that they look at people who are
Like earlier than them or smaller than them and they think this is a start to a monkey's they don't know what they're doing. And anyone who comes in afterwards is more rigorous to like these which is Wall Street Bankers with their spreadsheets don't know what they're doing and you can kind of hear this complaint The Venture business a lot. Another thing you see a lot in the Venture business is people saying, oh welcome to venture so and so you're going to learn the hard way that blah blah blah right be seized hate competition because they're selling a commodity product money is the ultimate commodity its branded by the Federal Reserve, right your
And doesn't matter and so they have the hardest sales job in the world. They have to Brand money. So so much of it is about status and signaling and condescension and you know positioning and know-how in the appearing like you're in the right class. So VCS have developed a black art instead of creating signaling and transferring status on the company's and you kind of have to see through that as an entrepreneur and if you can see through that as an entrepreneur you can actually get great bargains. Obviously if you see through it incorrectly and you end up with like people in your cap table who
You over then, you may be in trouble. You may have done a bad job, but in modern fundraising good entrepreneurs retain control their companies. They don't really have to worry about that. In fact, I would argue these days is investors who get taken advantage of much more than entrepreneurs do on like 20 years ago when I was mostly investors taking advantage of entrepreneurs.
What do you think crowdfunding will take off like you think this is a trend that will like the will this become the default or will this just become like just more competition for VCS that will encourage being all like music labels are still around book publishers are still around they clearly like do something,
right? Yeah. Well crowdfunding is highly highly regulated and because it's so regulated it's limited, you know, it's five million bucks. No more than ten thousand dollars a person you have to publish two years of financials. You have some liability like it's just really hard to pull off.
So you kind of a you know unique as a company that can do it, but you're in a limited set of companies that is willing to go through the hassle of doing it today. And I think more and more companies will open if you do it, you know for their one true fans, but the where the real competition is coming for his crypto. The largest angel investor base is in crypto. The largest funding base is in crypto the market cap of crypto altogether. It's approaching two trillion dollars. That's a lot of wealth washing around. There's a lot of people who recently made money in crypto that only
and crypto and they're happy to invest a hundred million.
Dollars and it's not even lunch when they wouldn't even know where to start with the YC companies raising two million dollars. So I think the real competition for Venture is actually happening in crypto. There's a lot more money sloshing around then in crowdfunding crowdfunding will happen and they will be more and more and more of it. But because of the artificial regulatory apparatus is slapped onto it for user protection quote-unquote. It's going to be much more limited in size because crypto is resistant to The Sovereign nation-state because it kind of routes around and operates you
In the grain markets, it just ends up being even though it's crazier and frothier. It ends up being a much larger market.
Is it just because it's impossible to actually regulate they just wouldn't it's impossible and
that the it's very difficult to regulate without are too expensive. Well, it's difficult to regulate it without scaring it overseas or destroying it locally. And if you do that, then you pass up on the fruits of it and the fruits of iterate tantalizing.
Yeah, I feel like crypto in the in 2011-2012 like had this Market risk of like it could have been stopped I think but it you know, I think it got to scale and now it nations are sort of it's at a selling point where no nation is going to you know, it's kind of bigger than any Nation at this point.
Yeah. It's like capitalism or technology like you can definitely squish it in your country, but it will cost you a lot and it will just go somewhere else.
Do you think it's as fundamental as that right where it was sort of an inevitability over time as human? Yeah, it's sort of like this was a part of our evolution in a sense.
Yeah, it's hard to glibly describe crypto, but I think at one level what it does is it replaces networks with markets and so in a lot of places where we had networks of abundance where we didn't know how to govern the abundance and we had to do it with, you know, having a dictator or a king or a sovereign or Corporation or Mark Zuckerberg.
Jack Dorsey in charge, you know now we have a way to do that with a distributed network with the users are in charge and there's a free market with the users determine how the resources get allocated. That's a very very fundamental shift. If you can build a clubhouse or Twitter or Facebook or Sovereign money or gold or Wall Street or Spotify like Network and you can do it. So it's run by its users that is going to be a fundamental Innovation on infrastructure and governance and it'll change the way that you know our society.
It's very powerful. It's very next generational. So you could forego that but then you're kind of stuck in the old model of organization. It's like being stuck in, you know, some some form of Communism or socialism when the rest of the world is moving to capitalism or it's you know being stuck in some kind of a Walled Garden internet when the rest of the world is moving to an open internet. So I think the difference will just become more and more Stark over
time.
Yeah, it's like I feel like the internet didn't really do anything to the way that we work it like we still work in these 925. We were still going to be the offices like not too different from the Industrial Age or era, you know,
and I feel like crypto and the greater
economy like that. It's finally that's finally happening. Like it took we just had to get on ramp to the internet. We just kind of took everything we were doing offline online and then the next phase like cool now there were all online like actually a lot of these assumptions we don't need anymore.
And critically give the
head like the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. Like it's very unevenly distributed like the first phase of the internet you had the web or even if I go further back like there was a time when we see is only used to invest in Hardware companies, right IBM and digital electric corporation and Sun Microsystems. And the idea of investing in software is ludicrous software. This thing has no value. You can copy. I can't even see it. How can you sell it? So investing in a Microsoft was like a daring act and then of course when software
Normal as people as all devices and software then it became about. Well, you can invest in the web you can invest in the Yahoo. That's a website. You got to invest in software, but then it turned out the Yahoo, and Google were really valuable. So the next thing comes along people like but what about this crypto? Well, there's nothing there. There's not even software. There's not even a website. It's not owned by anyone. There's nothing there. It's just a hallucination. How can you invest in the idea of a new thing called money and then people got rich in crypto another new ones coming along and if T is like that's art that's not art. This is
A signature that's just a this is a hash that you own the blockchain. It's not even a piece of art. How can you invest in the Hat and honestly, I'm even a little lost in that last one, but it just shows you how much more ephemeral this idea of value is getting and how each generation has to make a mental lead past the last one into where the value is coalescing
and I think part of it is that like the Next Generation sees the sort of shared social myths that create the value and like the last generation doesn't so we look at this and we don't get it because we don't see any of the activity we
See any of the millions of people agreeing that this thing is interesting and that enables, you know, whatever interesting Behavior that's right. The art on the wall only has value of other people who look at it think it has value
in the same way Bitcoin only has value to the extent that other people out there bitcoiners and thing and we'll accept it in exchange for material things and physical things in the world that we all agree has value. Yeah, totally. I mean we plan to
open source gumroad completely and it's because like the code of gumroad should not really be
Valuable it's that's not why Gummer do another way of
looking dig. Another way of looking at crypto. Is this the business model for open source open source was this incredibly powerful force that upended the entire back-end
infrastructure and software domain
but never had a business model that was done purely through this is free. This is abundant go and go and spread this but now we've added a business model to open source, and that's tokens. And so now we're getting the open source Revolution with all of its open apis and composability and hack ability.
And how people can just build on top of each other like Lego blocks, but now we've also attached business model to the whole thing while still miraculously somehow making it's a not a single person is in charge of the
whole thing.
Do you think it's a there's a way to Port like my goal is you know, one of the reasons gumroad. I've tried to maintain as a sort of tiny size of the firm a one-person company effectively is sort of like allows me that ability to kind of like centralized. You know, like I'm the single point of failure and I could at some point My Hope Is that I would be able to decentralize myself effectively and then you know, and I can do that because I'm I'm me I can I can choose what to do with my my sovereignty is there or no? I have like they're basically has to be totally new.
That has to be built sort of from first principles in this new universe. Yeah, my guess is it'll have to be a new
organization first principles cryptos. So weird, you know, you have to like build with wallets and private keys and tokens and and the cryptography and the curves
and it's just so complicated. It's like,
you know, you're building with Legos and they're playing Minecraft over there. It's literally a different game. I think by the time you you may end up starting a second company. And by the way, this is kind of what I did with the angel list, right? AngelList is what started as
As a mailing list for Angel Investors, and then we built Angels Venture, which was almost a completely different thing which is sort of this back-end for firms and syndicates and rolling funds and then we spun out coinless which the crypto and then we spent on AngelList talented Italian, but trying to build Everything Under One Roof is really hard. So every single one of these was a new creative act within the company that then got spun out with its own leadership and Zone cap table and that's hard to do. So my guess is it's very hard to move an organization not just because of the
The people infrastructure which is what your finessing but I think also because of just the design of the application that said gumroad is a very very thin thing right? It's closer to a protocol that most applications are so it's possible that you might be able to turn it into a protocol but I think it's just equally likely that you're going to see this jumbled mass of things out there in crypto land that don't really make any sense to you and then one morning and woke up and they will have coalesced in some kind of a decentralized gumroad.
But look what actually protects you and you are going to love this is regulations. You're operating in the fiat currency domain. So someone has to handle credit cards and wire transfers and you know, like the normal payment infrastructure and mechanism and that's just not going to that's not going to go into crypto cryptos incompatible with the Legacy Financial system. It can interface it some key points and those key points can end up being incredibly valuable like coin basis and go public for between fifty and a hundred billion dollars being
Worth more than most of the banks but those interface points are still kind of on the edges of where crypto operates crypto wants to operate in an all-digital on chain all crypto domain.
Yeah, I mean it's also I think that the amount of code in these universes like what they are actually doing what problems are solving are very very very different right like in crypto. I assumed mostly around the decentralisation of you know, and making sure that these things actually they just like Co defying all of these things making these things composable. I seems very very very very difficult like functional programming to someone, you know, someone who hasn't done it before it's gonna look very weird
and most of the
code that is written in this universe like most of the code that we write a Gummer.
Basically, like fraud detection of various degrees, right? It's just basically almost everything we build is is just bad actor prevention, right? Like it's just we can't trust the people who use gumroad enough. So we have to build passwords and two Factor authentication and payments and risk and fraud and chargebacks and you know, we have to protect against database manipulation and authentication and also like just so many so many is almost all of the code is basically preventing that from happening whereas in crypto that almost isn't an issue right like it sort of assumes.
Assume that when you enter this world everyone is sort of done that already and you and you enter this new world and sort of trust. It's sort of trustless in a sense. Yeah. I mean one of the
assumptions that crypto violates is you remember like in the old days we would look at passwords and were like old passwords are horrible users should not have to manage passwords. Let's figure out how to get users to not manage passwords because they're the worst right instead. It turns out the answer is let's let them manage private Keys which is irrevocable Bearer wallets, that is a thousand times.
More difficult, but it turns out if you can get a user base that can not only just manage passwords again manage private keys and wallets, then you can really secure the data in such a way that you can you can sort of then focus on other things. You don't have to worry about all the issues that you spend building on gumroad because in crypto land every user controls their own wallet the control their own data.
On his
back the baseball game is over. I am back home.
amazing talent
It's amazing that things can happen.
It's amazing. It's someone's playing baseball somewhere.
I know I thought about that one. I mentioned it the like that actually it's about the convention because the people get very jealous since San Francisco, especially
South of Market is like the zombie apocalypse. There's like a big theatrical act going on, you know, it's like covid actually and everyone is pretending that they're cotton like this massive sweeping pandemic. It's kind of entertaining
One thing I would say sahil, you mentioned I was still listening. You mentioned that you know, we're this far along in the internet and nothing has changed yet. I think that if you look back in this happen with like
electricity, I think I just wanted to actually
a great one where it used to be that factories were they had one massive steam engine that ran the entire Factory and so everything in the factory had would plug into like, you know, they're like these these cranks going through the whole Factory they would plug into it and it connect to
it and what happened was
Electricity came along it was useful as grateful bites and stuff along those
lines, but it didn't actually really impact the production of goods until they built new
factories. And that meant that the current factories had to age out. They had appreciate that at the breakdown because if it's already built, it's already built. There's a certain sort of Advantage there and I think that's very much that happened
with computers right there. Is that that
article by computers everywhere except the productivity statistics like 1987 or something like that and then after that productivity since
Suddenly very much. So that computers were thing and I think the same thing with the internet where things need
to be reworked and rebuilt around it was sort of new
assumptions. And so that's what takes time to happen. But that doesn't mean like stuff along the way but there's other grown up being late. Like
I think from the Creator economy like we went to this area where there was just the social networks, right? And oh they're taking all the value
well now going forward you're not going to make money on the social networks, but social networks are greatly generation tool like phenomenal and like the
Entire advertising ecosystem
is in place for the Creator economy the way it wasn't
before and so like that and you see this again in Tech where stuff doesn't disappear. You keep sort of
building on top of stuff that came
before and I think that that's what you're seeing with this and where
there's been a lot of foundational work done
and you never see or realize how important that is until stuff start sort of
popping off just because the everything's in place. Yeah. I am seeing some fuzzy progress in the Creator economy.
And I would say at least so far what I see in the crate economies a three-step thing step one was in the old days. You were created on the internet you created a website and then you hope that Google sent you some traffic right on the very old days. You create a website. You just have to build your own brand and run ads and try and get traffic but then after a while Google started sending you traffic and then so there's a certain kind of Creator who operates kind of a storefront or a Blog somewhere on the internet and then step two was the social networks came along and they started Distributing.
Huge amounts of links user to user link sharing and so then it all became about becoming a Creator on social networks. The problem being a socially created on social network is You're Building Your Castle and sand tomorrow Jack Dorsey my change the algorithm or Mark Zuckerberg decides to change his rake or apple changes our app store fee. And now the sudden you're out of work or they're just taking a lot of the money. So it's very very hard to monetize and I think we're now kind of entering step 3 where you have things like patreon and gumroad and all kinds of monetization.
Ation vehicles that are popping up where and you're having Creator first Networks, you're having networks that are all about monetize creators popping up. So I'm starting to see this trend. Maybe it's too early to be a trend but I'm starting to see this thing where the top creators are becoming relatively independent of the social networks themselves. They're monetizing outside of the social network or they're starting to build Brands across social networks, like for me. I mean, I don't really consider myself a create an early monetize, but it was very easy to cross.
Twitter into Clubhouse like most of my Twitter following will follow me in the clubhouse of the extent there and Clubhouse and if I want to monetize I could do it a different way. I could run ads against a podcast. I could put out a patreon I could put a gumroad. So the creators are starting to kind of figure out how to have their audiences be a bit more mobile and they're and they're trying to figure out how to monetize separately from the platform that they're on the platform there on laws has a big Advantage like when Twitter the super follow then you know,
they'll have that advantage of monetizing their creators, but now just the fact that patreon and gumroad and other venues exist means a Twitter has to start giving its creators a quote-unquote fair cut or has to give them the tools to monetize and then make sure that it doesn't take too much because there is competition out there, especially at the head of the curve for the top creators.
Sub stack is obviously another huge one. Right like it is the same people who can get famous on Twitter. But if they want to actually make real money, then they go on a sub stack and build a newsletter there.
How do you how do you get a distribution and you know in this it's you know, step step one is sort of SEO step two is social media in this step three. You still are relying on the sort of yeah, you should rely on social for distribution
and and that's things like Twitter is probably the best one because Twitter is just pure distribution, you know simple photograph with minimal data attached to it. So yes, you're still beholden to them for distribution, but you mentioned something earlier on of all talking about
like Tesla and how
Shareholders are there such a powerful force that because they're their Advocates I suspect I mean much much much much smaller scale, but a similar Dynamic is the case for creators. Your distribution is your users
and you are like when you have passionate
fans that love your
stuff they will tell other
people and it's interesting because it's
not it's much more of a linear sort of Advantage than exponential damage to people only know so many people and so they'll exhaust the people they can tell
But then
those new people will know some other people and they'll tell them and to me that like, yes Twitter and Twitter is a part of this because your fans may use Twitter to talk about you but it's still really the core unit there. The core driver is your supporters and that's that's the sort of superpower and super
distribution channel that creators have
and that is also portable affordable cost Twitter across Facebook across email wherever it might be. I mean deterring like, how do you have
The pay podcast. Well, it turns out you have other people who listen to podcasts or who do podcast and they'll talk about it on their podcast. So this happened on the ring and that's actually our best Channel by far as people talking about dithering on their podcast and the listen to that podcast Like Larry fight off you go check this out. So it pops up in all kinds of sort of interesting ways. But that's the real advantage and like there might like I've never bought a social media ad I didn't mention the advertising. I think the ads are important for certain types of businesses, but the real power, is that your
Fans can use social media so they can get free distribution to talk about your stuff
interesting. So it's not about the Creator's use the social media. It's about their their one true fan type people using the social media to distribute the Creator's message and profile regardless of where it is.
That's that's exactly it and this has been a incredibly powerful for much longer than I think people realize it. This is the what I didn't realize and I were in this just because I mentioned that A Five-Year Plan for trajectory and the reality is that I ended up going
with
Pay the subscription version of trajectory within a
year of watching the site because I completely underestimated had
no appreciation for how powerful social media was not from my
tweeting, but from other people tweeting my stuff and it's incredibly powerful.
Yeah, it's funny like back in 2017 2018. I kind of had this idle wish that I was like. Yeah, I want to build like a media Empire but I don't want to do any work at it. Like I'm too lazy. I literally just wanted to happen by itself and sure enough. Somebody else compiled all the tweets into a book and they did all the work. So the media Empire kind of came around but I just got to be authentic and the beauty is that as we were saying earlier, you can escape competition throughout the anticipate if you if you are authentic, there's no competition for
And so we really are in a golden age of creativity where if you are a good enough Creator and you focus on your Creations other people will spread it for you.
I mean, I would say that is almost another that's almost another. Yeah, I mean for what it's worth and I think this is
useful in the context of talking about sub stack. Do I go? What are
these big guys these
popular people are taking all their sort of fans. They're like, I
started trajectory with like less than 400 Twitter followers. So I I I'm always amused when people are like, oh, yeah. Well that worked for been. It's like well, no, actually I am it's absolutely true.
That you can start from nothing and make this work now, that's not to say it's going to work for everyone. You still have to find us a place that is an
issue can fill and you have to fill it well and you have to give people reason to share right people want to
share stuff that reflects well on them where they feel
smart for having shared
it and so that's an important Dynamic but the fact of the matter is that the
ability to start from nothing exists today without question.
Oh, I think it's better today. It's much faster to build followers and Clubhouse or Tick-Tock that is on Twitter. Like I routinely see people like we just build huge followings and Tick-Tock very very quickly. So the new platforms are spreading faster and faster. In fact, usually when someone becomes cynical and says, well that's easy for you to say because you did blah blah blah or you had Advantage XYZ. It's like no you don't know what struggles we went through. We went through a tougher time. We might have started with less and that pessimism is self-fulfilling especially in age.
There's so many nonlinear upsides floating around and you want to take a lot of these bets and tinker and iterate until you find one that goes nonlinear the proper philosophical approach is rational optimism, you generally want to be optimistic because things can work out a hundred extra thousand X in the upside and you can only lose One X in the downside and you want to be rational about it. So you can pick from a bevy of choices and pick the one that is most likely to succeed and sort of not fool yourself when something is not working but pessimism is self-fulfilling.
I love that observations because I mentioned like I when I started trajectory I thought I'd missed it. Right because the all the bloggers started like 2002 or 2003. But actually if you look back the fact that anyone got tracks into the blog in 2002-2003 is a miracle like there was no social media. The only way you got traction is by another blog maybe picking you up and people literally putting you in there bookmark bar. And so actually I had a huge Advantage by virtue of having Twitter around what I started but to your point. Yeah people did.
If you want to start a podcast, for example, the fact that Clubhouse exists and you can actually build up a fan base that you could leverage into a podcast or I think Clubhouse is so smart about the fact they've said they're going to focus on like
figure out greater monetization sooner rather than
later like it's a
really great point where it's not too late.
It's actually better than ever.
And also a four hundred followers is like an insane amount of people right depending on how engaged they are like if
you spoke at an event with
400 people, that's a lot. That's a big event. You know, that's something that you would fly getting a plane and fly to another city and you know sleep in a hotel for you know, like I think people underestimate like it's so easy to get caught up in these millions, but 400 people subscribing to your newsletter for 10 bucks a month is a living for
almost anybody in the world. Yeah. This is classic marketing.
Wisdom, but you want to have a small number of DieHard fans a small number of haters, which you don't want is a large number of kind of met people who are like yeah sort of interested but no one's want to laid themselves down the line positive or negative.
Yeah, I think also like in the distribution a lot of it is moving. I feel like like about you are like your own economy at this point. You are like a mini economy of and people can kind of just do stuff and get traction like within your community that sort of is in your wake and so I think that's another way people build distribution is they just assume that sort of like sub stack comment threads will be is our sort of kind of like the new Hacker News like I build my audience on Hacker News reported them to Twitter.
And I think a lot of people when you know getting started today will find the people the creators that they really like and follow and start commenting and contributing and building relationships Within These these community.
Should we ask anyone if they have questions or should we end things? What do you think the boss? Is this
the part where we run out of material?
That's more of a personal choice. Like this is where when you
talking about four people have different different point, you know different
perspectives. I just personally don't want to put in the work to
manage the community
and like in part of it is like my focus is getting on those flight for things a week. I want my
mental power focused on those but
that doesn't mean it's necessarily the right way for everyone. I
do think someone could
be in my position and
actually make a massive Community out of like trajectory fans and I
I just
totally dropping the ball doing it. And this is
why you should be careful about who you listen to advice for because some of them might be terrible and stuff. But it but it works for you you're being authentic and I think eventually at some point if a community has to form it will form naturally people will create Discord or the crits and Message Board somewhere else or a slack and they'll start doing it and then they'll invite you in you just kind of have to wait around long enough as a funny aside been and monetization. I have a funny history with in there and then you can back me up on this every year. I read some
Of yours, then they email you and I say I can't believe you're only charging me 10 bucks a month for this find a way to charge me more because this is worth a lot more. It's like better analysis than I get in McKinsey or forest or by far even if I'd hired them as consultants and been all this rights back and he says no I'm charging ten bucks a month to everybody. That's my business model and will break if I try and do something otherwise, so you're sticking to your guns a smart because I think there are people who would have tried by now to do tiered subscriptions or try to do Consulting and all kinds of things. That weren't.
Take to them and would have led them astray and destroyed their creativity and not a lot not allow that to scale this beautiful Core Business. We just charge every 10 bucks a month and you got a lot of readers
well to be fair. I did try that to beginning. I started out with tiered subscriptions and I was gonna do Consulting. I was gonna do all this sort of stuff and I got about six months in and and I'm like, this is way too complicated.
I'm way too stretched out. I just need to focus on
this thing. And so I actually, you know, another example of where you have people look at me now and it looks like it was
also so
Right by doubt. No, actually, this is an ad to iterate to had to figure it out. This is the
core thing but it's definitely one of those things
where if you can get it to scale like not owing. Anyone anything
is that I mean, that's the dream right like you like if you want to put three do cause you're mad whatever take your ten dollars. I don't care the moment I get someone that's
like, oh, I you know pay-what-you-want and someone pays me a million dollars, like that's that's actually a place. You don't want to be
if you're doing this sort of work that I'm doing.
Doing because you it's not just that
one people probably overstayed through. Oh, I can be independent. I won't let that affect me. It probably will affect you too. It will affect your reputation. Like the fact that it's aware that there's this
possibility of people having that over you it's going to like if you want to have a particular impact there's my driving force is not just money. I want to have an impact on people to pay attention to what I say. And if you keep those
priorities in mind
and let them dribble down the other stuff then you're just end up in a much better spot.
Didn't it again? I got a lot of
subscribers. It's easy for me to say this right like this. So take it for what it's worth.
Hey guys. I hired you guys run out of content. So I figure take advantage and ask a question. Yeah, so I want to ask a question which some friend that I advise informally asked me and I didn't feel I was qualified to give a great answer. So I just want to get you got reactions to this idea that they were trying to do and so using the nft space and the idea is that you have passion like you guys have mentioned you have only fans you have all of
platforms that people subscribe to and get access to content and so the idea would be is it the right time where and if Caesar gotcha now to have a similar platform, but we're rather than paying for a subscription you paying a token that gives you access and if this artist or content creator that you know, you bought the content you bought this token for the access to them blows up and becomes
Big and all that that token, you know rises in value so you can actually resell it as opposed to a subscription where you can't really resell it. So you can resell it in the artist can get some more, you know can get a portion of it and you know, you can make money out of it. So what do you guys think of that?
Yeah. So what you're basically saying is that currently NF teaser, you buy an object of the digital rights to an object from the artists and those digital rights can be resold in the artist might get a piece of it, but
You're buying access to the artist in some way either to their future work or maybe to the artist directly and you can resell that access token. I mean Josh and I think there are people trying this look that the the good and the bad with crypto is going through a Cambrian explosion every possible scheme.
You can dream of and make money. What
do you recombine A and B and C and stir them together is being done and it's just dizzying how fast it's moving. So the market is going to try all of these things. It strikes me as
Kind of a trivial Improvement. Honestly, like yes, it will probably happen. It feels kind of obvious and I will bet you there's at least like five different platforms working on it. So, I don't know if it's enough of an observation or a leap to sort of build a company around unless you already happen to be in crypto. You're doing something adjacent and related and you add this as a
feature. What was that? Go ahead?
Be insane because the increase in value of such a token is directly correlated to your increase in value sort of as a person and so of course, yeah that values you know
that if you're the most famous person in the world for the present the United States that token is
priceless. But meanwhile you like have you is that really worth it to have that
token folding out the world and you have something that you're
compelled to do. I just think like there's a problem of like
Where does the increase in value
come from it comes directly from the Creator's
own sort of like ownership of their own sort of
time and value. I
mean just to get into this sort of specifics of that example.
I mean the situation is royalties right where you you don't actually have to do anything anymore and you continue to get paid but but like Jennifer Aniston would not show, you know, the value of friends to her. Is this residual Pat really truly passive income if she were to force to show up somewhere like what I do? Yeah. I don't I don't see the value and I do think it's kind of a mess right now. But in the long run, there are some things that are just
created.
Did you want to realize
value from them, but I think that the Creator economy part of what's made it so fascinating right now is been the
rise of subscriptions which sort of aligned with ongoing work and there's some creative work that is ongoing work. Like what I do and there's some creative work that is one off work. And so I think it's great that I think both are necessary and important and it's great that sort of both. There's like pasta both to exist.
Also, I would also advise skeptical of anyone who sees entities now and is like I need to start an entity based company because yeah exactly
the people you solving a problem are two to three years
into this at least and and those are the people who they're being rewarded for having tinkered four years ago now, right right all valid points. Thanks. Thanks for getting your perspectives.
Thank you Felix.
I let's invite a few Folks up and see who jumps on.
Well, if it's not in line, I'll be happy to take on sahil. Thanks for inviting me in the wall. So good to hear from you.
I have a question about
when itch is in a creation state.
What you know think the most of and essentially meaning that you can get
crack.
I don't think I really heard the questions and some background noise. Maybe something else. Yeah, that's okay. Let me repeat it in your creation state, but you know think the most stuff and essentially can't yet crack.
Oh, yeah, I don't I don't approach creativity that way it's not like there's a specific problem that I'm trying to solve my way past. It's more that I'm just always thinking and absorbing walking around learning and then ideas will come to me and I don't know where they come from. If I knew where they came from then that would be pretty unique then maybe I could program a computer to do it and then the AGI but the reality is nobody knows how this stuff works. So you just kind of follow your natural intellectual curiosity you load your
With all kinds of problems and interesting things next thing, you know, you're connecting things together and you're just having ideas you calling up your friends and your colleagues and pitching them. Most of them were nonsense a few of them stick you figure how to Brand them if you gotta execute on them. It's just like a big soup. I don't think too much about it. I don't think you can really you can't engineer creativity. You can you can foster the conditions for creativity like when the cloud is heavy with the rain, you know the or it's like a big heavy Cloud the odds are hired.
To rain. So for me that is being alone, or you know comfortable. It's kind of like not having a lot of meetings but yet still having intellectual stimulation having quiet time going for walks, you know something about the brain is mechanically stimulated. I think a lot of people have their best ideas and walks showers are good places for ideas because you're accidentally meditating. You can't do anything else and your mind is just kind of wandering freely. So I think there are positions that you put yourself in for creativity if you have to solve a specific problem.
Problem creatively then I find that just loading it in your head before you go to sleep works well, and then just giving it time to percolate but I don't really do things that way I kind of just I'm always thinking about a zillion different things. I'm interested in and creativity comes out. It's kind of fun that way. What do you do with this? It's funny because this is I think this is the area where we're just totally different people right from my perspective. We are totally different people eating in getting into something and I have to figure this
out and
the walking does help by the way, whenever I get stuck writing I take the dog for a walk, but for me, it's like it's forcing myself into it. And for sure
that saying it was own same thing with flow all those
sorts of things, but just sort of lie if I just want to let myself sit around and wander.
No, I feel like it's like a consistent discipline application of thinking that leads to sort of
breakthroughs.
Serge do you have a question about the Creator economy or anything tangentially related to it? Um, yeah, I do have a couple questions. Um, you know, I make treasure hunts for a living and I have to create on a daily basis and you know, I definitely come with some roadblocks, you know, I try to do the lion, you know Sprint and then walk what do you guys do when you hit a creative roadblock? And I know you answer that with walks and exercise and and showers and whatnot. But is there anything?
In addition that that helps contribute to getting past that creative block that
wall. Honestly meditation is really good for me, but you'd have to be a serious meditator. I think for it to kind of work. I wouldn't pick up meditation just to solve creative blocks, but if you are a meditator you can lean into it.
Yeah, I've done of a policy and I meditate I find that whenever I meditated try to meditate for one hour a day and I just block out for an hour and then somehow am I my day gets a lot better, but I find meditation does help.
Yeah, I think that's I think probably
different for every person and if this is but this is an iterative learning that you
get from being creative. There's a reason to always be working and trying to do new things because you don't just figure out the stuff that you're working on. You also figure out like what are the what are the hacks? What are the things that I can do that? Help me get this done and
and so iterations like pays off in all sorts of crazy ways. Not just the actual like work itself.
Yeah, and some creativity is a solitary act like painting, you know, you're going to do that on your own but some of it is a group dynamic like comedy. You probably come with better comedy skits. If you have another friend to improv with so in your case what you're doing, it sounds like it may benefit from a thought partner or two that you're brainstorming with and kind of open-ended just being created with like, I don't know if you've ever seen that documentary six days. It's about the making of South Park and it's really fascinating because like the two key guys, they they
They do an episode of South Park from start to finish from just like we have no idea what we're doing to shipping it to satellite production and distribution in 6 days flat and the first three days are just spent brainstorming what's going to happen and you can see through the creative process. If you watch that documentary that it would have been impossible to pull off with just one person so much of it is that riffing back and forth. So it depends on the creative act of certain kinds of creativity. I think almost require small.
Oops, so you may want to consider getting a partner on someone who's thinks very differently than you that but it's a good like the kind of person who says yes, and as opposed to know or but and then just brainstorm with constantly.
I mean, I think there's two ways to think about it like discipline and actually doing things maybe that you don't want to do all the time one is internally and one is external. Like I think the internal one is your identity like that generally just comes from having done it, you know a bunch of times. It gives you the confidence to know that you can actually do it,
you know, you could go anyone listening
can go for it. Almost anyone should say can
go for a 10-mile run
tomorrow, but like most of us won't accept the people who went who have gone for a 10-mile run in the last few days and then the other
The external one I think is environment like you just construct a sort of external environment that basically forces you to do. The thing that you want to do, right? Like you have the for daily Spore you have, you know, 10 bucks a month or whatever sort of constraint where you have a company with employees that you know expect you to be there. You know, you
just figure out okay, what do I want to do? Okay, you know, I want
to paint I want to I want to do one Plein Air painting a day for an hour while you know, I can get a gym buddy for painting, you know, like there's you just have to figure out
Like what works for you? And if you've done it a bunch of time, the only way to know what works for you is to have done it and then often you kind of know what you need to do and that really sucks because then you kind of know that like you're just you're just making up excuses to not do the actual the actual work.
Yeah, there's two other hacks who could try one is Scott Adams has a footwear theory of motivation where you say is like if you want to go dancing just put on your dancing shoes. That's the only thing you commit to but once your dancing shoes are on your follow-through or if you want to go for a run just put on your sneakers and go outside, but don't commit.
Actually running but once you're in your running shoes and you're outside, you'll probably want to run so you can kind of just do the First Act that sort of puts you into the mood of the mindset or is it trigger so you could try that there are things to be do form a structured procrastination where if you don't feel like let's say You're supposed to write today journal and you don't feel like journaling then secular today's my day. I'm going to do my taxes. This is my tax day. You can sit down from your computer do tax and going to hate it and be like, oh shit how to avoid do my taxes next thing, you know your journaling your writing. So if
it's like your second thing to do and there's something in front these supposed to do that. You don't like even more you might end up doing it.
Yeah for I mean for me with gumroad, I knew I wanted to work on it for
five years and I knew it was going to you know, I wanted to work on it 40 to 60 hours a week for that five-year period and so I raised money and that solved the you know that gave me the time and it also gave me like I needed to do this now. I raised a million bucks to solve this problem from these people and this is you know, I'm going to be in this industry for a while. So like I better actually start, you know, trying to turn to turn that money into something more.
And you hire people and then hiring people having a team. That's a great forcing function to be
productive.
Ammonia, raise money. I was I think I was in Phil's coughing that and then yeah Phil's yeah Phil's Coffee remember he was just so young. Oh my God, this guy is so young. And you're so getting us 18. I mean, I didn't know you were so hot in the
billion-dollar company, right and you were like and I was
number two explorers first employed Pinterest and I'm leaving to build a billion dollar company and it's all going really well and
I was like, oh my God, he's so cocky. It's amazing.
Well, you know, it's the rational optimist.
I felt like such a loser. I was like what the hell was I doing when I was 18.
What were you doing when you're 18, how do you get school? I wasn't I was in college like everybody else. I didn't
have the, you know, believe it or not. Even though it looks harder the younger generation is the easier you have more venues when I got to school you either went to management consulting or Investment Banking or you went to an MBA program or a Ph.D program. There was no like jump into Tech and start do startups and go to Y combinator those options.
didn't exist
Yeah, and I mean I didn't from the outside I did nothing for until I was like 30. So I mean which I think is you know, I look back on and say all right, all these amazing and she experiences living abroad and teaching English and stuff like that. But on the flip side, it's like, you know,
it quite literally is not too late. Right? I mean the there's
and you can you know, you can leverage that so
Nidia do you have a question? Hi. Yeah, so my question is about a decentralized apps and nf2 use of so, I'm basically new of the started earning like five
months back and
I've been searching about FTS as well. So I'm also a like I create Art Online as well. So I tried putting out my art on all of these platforms like open see rebellion of that but I think at this stage are like there are a lot of hurdles that come in the way like there's a lot of yeah, there's a lot of gas.
Is and whatnot. So I think is it because the nft is are fairly new that there are all these hurdles or what do you think will be the future of nft is and will it be much easier for a Creator to actually put out the work then?
And and if these are not the Panacea that I think all the artists hope it is there's this Groundswell of support for nft because people are like, well, this is how artists are finally going to get rich and I'm sorry to say I just don't think that's gonna happen. Look everything in the world is a non fungible token. It's fungibility that's rare Bitcoin is rare money is rare the things that like we did fungibility a fungible a largely man-made and rare, although there's a thing in particle physics are particles actually fungible. We won't get into that but almost everything you see
In the man-made world is a non fungible token. There's just an infinite amount of art. So the question is how do you stand out and nft is too broad of a term. It covers an item that I pick up in a game that is in for scarcity. It could be a piece of land the metaverse. It could be a domain the domain name system. Those all have been for scarcity, but the problem is like when you get to something like just pure digital art. It does not have enforced scarcity. There's abundance. There's so much potential art out there. It's all going to be uploading these platforms every
every image every video every sculpture that you can imagine. So as soon as people send sold something 469 million dollars in the reasons to believe that that was not like a completely legit sale at there were some, you know other motives involved then everyone comes in thinking. Oh my Arts finally going to be worth something know your art is only going to be worth something to the effect that Society has already come upon a consensus that your art is worth something all and if T's do is give you a way to trade the digital representation of unresolved.
Ship about art as opposed to the physical ownership of that Arc. So it is like an interesting Innovation. But the vast vast vast vast majority of art out. There is not going to make any money in the end of T platforms. You still have to build a social consensus around your piece of art that then suddenly enough people believe that has value that they will buy it or trade it or use it or own it because other people think it has value now, it's also going to have some intrinsic value for sure, which is just the pleasure of looking at
Or consuming that art but they can get a lot of that without the end of T. The end of T part comes more into play when ownership matters and ownership matters in the status context and that matters in sort of this consensus belief that this particular piece of art is somehow special and will hold value in a very distinct way from the next hundred million pieces of art that I've just
shown up.
I think art art is it an ownership of art is is 100% a status game and so its inherent it's so unpredictable. It's very very difficult to to like to be successful at a status game because it's not up to you. It has it's like the most most you know Market risk possible is basically other people have to all agree that this stuff that you've created that inherently is not valuable in any other way, you know, it's very very difficult. If you want to build a business. You want to make a living as a creator.
I think it's much better to build an audience around something that you know something that you have Merit of credibility. Yeah, and of teas are not going to just give you that that part when you have an audience, then you can take advantage of every new technology that comes out like every time there's a new technology like rolling funds or crowdfunding like it's like cool. I have the asset that's actually difficult. I have the true non financial asset, which is my audience. I can't give my audience to anybody else. Even if I wanted to it wouldn't work and then
All of these things come along and I can I can use them with the scarce resource that I have one of which is, you know my audience ER or gum earned Equity or whatever.
Jamil
Carnivale do you want to add something to that?
No, not really. I mean and if T is the very complex and weird topic. I think we're also trying to wrap our heads around some of the stuff going on there.
Yes. I had a
question for an of all I happen to be a military veteran and I'm
hosting a better attack upon over Clubhouse next weekend. Our judges have a background in crypto hasib Qureshi under keynote is the co-founder of twitch Kevin Lin. I was wondering if you'd be interested in dropping in for a couple minutes and drop some gems to our veterans.
That's kind of you, but I live in on schedule life. I don't schedule to commit to anything, but thank
you.
Sure, though.
No more no more asks for anything like that, please.
Oh, no, it's fine. I mean my answer Works in all of them. I've seen this movie. I did more. I mean look, it's all these are all good causes and I reserve the right to drop in and any of them when they're happening if they're open, but I just don't want it sitting like a big turd on my calendar.
I want to add any more on your plate in a while. Just wanted to say thank you for all the great work that you've done being.
Calling you on YouTube and your podcasts
and a lot of the information that you give out is probably some of the best
life advice I've ever come across and in terms of the Creator
economy. I
feel like
covid actually just supercharged this particular aspect in the world like NF
case people working from her people getting into art and music and I'm pretty
Bullish on on this Creek this Creator economy is such growing exponentially over the next five years particularly in countries, like India and Pakistan. So I really appreciate all the work you're doing. That's all I wanted to say. Thanks a lot.
That's very kind of you. Yeah, I mean covid definitely accelerate a lot of tech trends that made us all introverted for a little bit of salt egg driven for a little bit. It's reflected in the value of the tech stocks and Tech adoption. I'm kind of curious to see if we're going to have this amazing post vaccine Global coming back to coming back in party or if the health scare mongers managed to keep us all locked up for another six or 12 months with like all the scary ends of circulating viruses and
You know endemic coronavirus and so on but I'm hoping we get out there and get back to the real world too because there's a lot that needs to be done out there. We can't all just sit inside and consume digital goods and create. Mrs. Wilkins eventually will start or the UPS drivers will go on strike earlier Postmates drivers will go on strike.
It's very interesting. You say that because I'm based in Australia and here the approach has been probably some of the most Hardline we've had States shutting down.
Against each other. We needed a permit to even go to cease there was an Indian immigrant mother whose son went back to
India in the middle of this covid
lockdowns
six-year-old son and couldn't come and the sun couldn't wouldn't
be allowed back with the Australian
government and the mum couldn't leave Australia because she was in the
temporary Visa work. These are only a few left then
she wouldn't she feared that she'd never be able to immigrate to this country permanently. So
that's that's some of the
Strays in a weird position because if you're a small island, you can just keep cool without as New Zealand in Taiwan and other people have demonstrated and if you're a large country you basically can it's just too hard because the borders are too large. There's too many people involved and Austria is kind of right in the middle. It's just large enough that it'll have problems controlling The Strain that breaks out internally, but it's just small enough that it potentially could and it's an island.
But it's also a continent. So I think Australia can kind of live the schizophrenic life of trying to be New Zealand or of accepting the certain of the United States this
tough spot. That's pretty funny.
Yeah here I don't know to do right. Let's let's give everyone some sometime Jazeera. You have a question. Yeah, um, thanks again. Thanks for inviting me up. So I kind of have like very like two very quick questions. So I'm not sure how many you can answer between the two but I guess if you only want to answer one that's like totally fine. I'll just pose bow to them. And if you answer both like that's even finer so I guess like I feel like a lot of people like on the tongue like
On the stage right now, like really big like critical thinkers. And I feel like me as myself like I'm like a very big thinker as well and I was just wondering like how do you balance that? We're like happiness in a way. I feel like a lot of times the big I remember when I used to be like really unhappy all the time my parents or like like my mentors were always be like you think too much, you know, but like it's easier said than done. So I was just curious I guess. My first question is like, how do you like are you guys you guys just like you guys think you're happy?
He and if so, like how do you balance like happiness with being a thinker and then my second question, which I don't know why my head just went blank on it. But
yeah, you're thinking too big look intelligence plus experience equals wisdom, not necessarily true, but play with that
idea.
And wisdom naturally brings peace and peace naturally brings happiness. Peace in motion is happiness. So just give it some time
to
figure out what you can control and what you can't and I think there's there's some
aspect where
really couple hours ago at this point. I talked about being in the moment and not being obsessed about your goal for
like five years from now or 10 years from
now if you're obsessed about
In the future, you don't have control over that or if you're obsessed with only the paths you don't have control about
that. You always have control of your personal sort of
emotional state and you're what you're thinking about what you're assessing about at this very moment in time and people like shy away from that because it's kind of like it's kind of frightening because they do it like people in some respects do fear that control. And so they want to be think about something that they don't have control over and then you're just in a bad mental state because
you're there's a disconnect between your capabilities and your obsessions and the only place you can get a direct correlation between the two is in the here and now and I think that to the degree you can organize your wife and organize your activities so that you can be focused on what you're doing in the moment. That is that's where you get satisfaction and happiness is a is a fleeting concept. I don't you know, there's something that's more fundamental than that where you're satisfied in your please at the end of a week.
You feel good about it. That's that's the goal. That's what you want to get to and there may be tribulations and troubles along the way but you can only get to that goal. If
you're if you if you have alignment, well de Melo has this great quote. He's like if you want to make a happy person unhappy you just have to ask them if they're happy because anyone who's now thinking about if they're happy or not is sort of inherently unhappy, they're no longer in that state of happiness that they may have been
I would also say just don't take yourself. So seriously even started off.
By calling us critical thinkers and then said you're a critical thinker are we really we're just monkeys. I mean, we just chattering. I don't think of myself as a critical thinker. I'm just a guy. I don't know if you're a critical thinker that sounds like a big mental to Bear. It sounds like a big burden in the more. Seriously, you take yourself and the more seriously you take your thoughts just kind of less at ease. You're going to be just sort of go through your life. Just enjoy it. If you have your health you have a roof over your head and you have some food you're doing great. Everything's fine.
I
think all the thoughts you want. They can be entertaining entertaining. They can be liberating. They can be optimistic taking pessimistic. That's a Choose Your Own Adventure.
Camellia the hell neighbor one then. My question is the I translated navels twist storm into Chinese because Chinese speaking
people they don't have the access to Twitter and the
internet War. So what's your thoughts on the information exchange beyond the language barriers?
Because at the moment people
probably want to listen to the ideas and thoughts from our
Backgrounds and the languages. What's your thoughts on this movement since AI technology May translate the people because they're AI technology is developing so fast and the information is so easy to exchange between different nations and different countries. What's your thoughts on that?
I think you'll be great when like are are pods can translate in real time. And you know, you can walk into a foreign country and like what if someone speaks to you and you can just hear in your language what they're saying and vice versa. We're quite a ways away from that but it's not forever maybe 10 years or so. We should be able to get to a good version of it excited about that as for like things like tweets like the tweets that I've written translating those in a Chinese I think is just going to translate very poorly and fortunately it's no fault of the translator. It's just that
Very often when I write something on Twitter. It's not really necessarily that I'm saying some new and interesting thing. I'm just saying it in some new and interesting way. So the choice of words is extremely important and I'm flattered that you think it you can even translate a Chinese well, but I would be skeptical because half of it is like trying to be poetry or poetic in the sense that every word is chosen carefully for a certain kind of impact. So I just don't know how well it will translate. I'm reminded of you know, I'm a huge fan of the daodejing allows use work.
And I read it. I read the Steven Miller translation and I thought hey I read the daodejing and then I found this website as web page. You can Google it that has a hundred different translations of just the first chapter the first tiny one and a half page chapter of the daodejing and you read all 100 translations and you realize you're literally reading a hundred different books. So I'm not sure I ever actually read the daodejing. I just read Stephen Miller. So this just very hard to translate these kinds of things and I don't know how well they'll do.
Certain kinds of things do translate. Well, like if you're translating, you know, how do you know how general relativity works for example, or how to you know how to operate a specific piece of Machinery the factual content there is what matters so if there are some changes in the actual inflection or tone or choice of additives or balance of the words or the length of the word is not going to matter, but if it's going the more it approaches poetry the less translatable it is and I don't mean this is a bragging thing. It just means the nature.
Or Twitter where every word counts so you're forced to choose very few words. So it ends up looking more like fortune cookie work or Haiku or or what have you and so it doesn't just doesn't translate that well, but it's nice of you to do it to get across. I really do appreciate that.
Thank you. I just feel like it's
probably based on the
individual because I read a lot of dodging and other philosophies and ancient books.
So I kind of get the
meaning of what you want to
try to say, but I'm not that brag my
skill, but I do feel like we still need the human translation rather than AI or machine translation.
What people are going to be reading is Amelia combo.
Not the Neva stuff, but that's fine. I mean it's however the message gets across it's interesting right? It'll be interesting to see how it spreads like when people read the Bible today. I don't think it actually reading the Bible they're reading lots and lots of interpretations and connections and and photocopies and mixes and different agendas all kind of put together. They're just reading a different thing, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be read. It's still interesting. It's just a different thing. I would guess that like the transcripts from my podcast and how to get rich are going to
Probably translate a little bit better than a tweet storm. But by all means give it a shot. I think it's great that you tried and look at the end of the day a lot of these things. I write for myself. So even as a translator if you translate it yourself, you're going to absorb the principles better than most and you may be able to apply them to your own life if they're helpful.
Definitely. Thank you so much.
How are you? I have a question. So the
old Creator economy is like really about individualism and like you know, it's also true for any 50s. So my question is like how are you thinking about like more of a collective value? Right? Like if you're thinking about and if these and earlier than the valve mentioned that you know
artists are
looking to get rich right now with then if these and stuff like that but like vast majority of them won't
and like it's known that like you knowing the artist community and
generally there's a lot of like thoughts about collab kind of like socialism cool things that are more collaborative. Like what are the what are these like the collaborative aspect and like the collaboration aspects with this kind of new world of creators money collaboration and stuff like that. That's kind of my question.
I think one thing someone someone did send me a message during this
conversation. Noting that it's not a clubhouse true unless there's a mention of it and I've
teased and I think that there is an aspect here. We're
talking about entities in the Cotton's creation is like talking about credit cards
and it's like what I'm not sure like,
okay, I can understand credit cards are great. My biz personal business runs on credit cards, but that's not
what my business is about. Will they like that sort of like
a means to an end?
Like what what the creative economy is about is about your audience and it's about your
fans and to the extent that an N of T way to
monetize that connection great. That's the same as a credit card in that
perspective. But I think that is something that you know, the
creative economy the means don't matter. It's if the connection between the Creator and their fans
and that creator of course could be multiple
people could be a collective like there's lots of ways to be creative.
At the end of day, the big picture is about that connection and everything sort of flows from
that.
I'm enforcing a need to bounce soon. So I've got maybe one or two more questions in me that I got to go.
It sounds good. Yeah, we can end with Riley and then tomorrow you can ask you a question after Riley.
Riley do you have a question?
Oh, yeah, I do way off topic but none of all could you elaborate on the similarities between Buddhism and similarly? If not, could you tweet it or blog it at some point? Maybe thank you. You know, I used to have this framework in my head and I forgotten most of it but just to give you some you know Concepts like in Buddhism. It's basically the idea is that we're all kind of one unified awareness. It's non-duality and we sort of are separated into
These individual pieces for entertainment value. So the same way you could argue in simulation theory that they're sort of like one program that's running and we're all just individual programs within that in a simulation like a game. You would have multiple lives multiple characters. You can just continue the game that would be similar to having multiple lives and Buddhism had a bunch of others. I had the whole framework written out at one point, but I never tweeted
because so esoteric and so bizarre
and I think
In theories just religion by another name. It's like unfalsifiable anyway, and it's not really going to change your life because he was replaced god with the concept of a programmer who's you know equally opaque so I just don't find it that fruitful of a line to pursue but there's also for example in Buddhism. There's this concept of Awakening where you're waking from the game and you you get enlightened and then you don't you realize everything is sort of meaningless and you don't care anymore the same way in a game if you get a cheat code.
And you sort of win the game or if you just decide you don't want to play the game anymore because you have the cheat code or you're tired of the game. Then as a game character you can have done and the game becomes uninteresting. So there's there's a bunch of different parallels. It's not quite a one-to-one mapping. This is an analogy obviously not like an isomorphism but it's just fun to think about it's one. It's one of those late-night philosophical musings that I think will just confuse most people but thanks for asking. I'm glad somebody cares if you're interested in this topic, by the way, I would direct you to Jed.
Anna just read everything gently. Can I ever wrote and you going to get your fill on this stuff?
Taro time for your technical question. Yeah. Hi guys. I said I've never all I been so I would like to ask something. So when I was working on a product or music or a book or something like that, I was always find a way to deliver in doing you're right categorizing the stuff or soft asking stuff
and it's easier to deliver that product when
you ask what questions or do.
Them in right tasking, but the
create in this logic I lack creativity. What's the solution of
that?
Well, I would say creativity is asking the right questions. So that's kind of that that has a satisfied. So when you when you put subtasks when you do that soft ask that you you haven't known before you using your ish rationality, right? But when you do the product itself, there is a lack of creativity because you you over think rationally and you have to switch.
Back and forth, but it's very hard to switch back and forth from rational person to creative person, you know.
Then do you split up the work? Like do you have a part where you're kind of like the creative person and you you do you do the Creative part? Maybe that's the writing phase where the ideation phase and then there's the editing which is maybe more kind of scientific or how do you think of is there like that two-step processor? Is it just one? I mean one thing to know it's kind of hard to answer without sounding like I mean, the reality is is that I've been sort of thinking about tech and how stuff fits together for like 20 years now, right? And so when I write something out
It's cuz it's a fully formed sort of thought in my head. So the so the the lot of the pushing around the dog walking is forming that thought. It's like it's no different than coding right where you you have to sort of construct the logic in your head. And then the actual typing out of words is a very small part of it or
functions is a very small part of the
job. It's just substantiating the
structure in your head
to for me writing an essay is no different. I have to I have to form that structure and then pour it out and that that actually might my editing.
Is actually very it's just copy it just copy editing
but that works for me. I'm not saying that's I don't know that's generalizable to other folks. It's just how it works for my
perspective.
Neva do you have multiple steps or is it feels like Atomic for you? Like you you just produce Yahweh to start up guys. So we do a lot of jobs. So most of them are creative side, you have to deliver something beautiful something creative something different on other side. You have to deliver that product you have to go racional and you have to have certain tasks and you have to subtask them to so divide the job. So
You'll switch back and forth to create a person to rational person. It's very hard. You know, it's not so easy, you know.
Yeah, I don't really think of creativity. It's a group process. I have a hard time being creative with groups and for me personally because I kind of honed my teeth on Twitter the last few years. Although I sort of stopped doing it. I probably should get back into it, but I'm just not inspired these days on it Twitter forces you to go under two hundred 80 characters and originally under 140 that used to be the real art getting under a hundred forty characters. And when you home something to under 140 characters, it builds kind of a Lego block. It's a building.
Block that you can then use for your thought patterns later. So a lot of what I get credit for these days is just me reassembling my own tweets as Lego blocks into new structures on the fly, but that's the beauty of having very short maxims aphorisms and
axioms.
Cat you're bringing us home with the last question. Thank you so much for bringing me out. Hi, everybody the Vol. I initially learned about you throw Joe Rogan podcast.
And from then on I just followed your
interviews and podcasting has been really great for me to just like learn about it follow a lot of things that you said specifically in this culture of hustling and everyone just putting a lot of pressure on us and just have someone that you know talks about
Mindfulness and meditation and important importance of like being alone and spending some time together. It's not about working too hard. It's been really really helpful for me personally and about reading the books through, you know, help me like you don't have to constantly you read one book like from the beginning to the end and sometimes we get stuck. So you brought up a really good point. Thank you so much. I just have a question and just kind of I need an advice from you guys. It's regarding an idea that I have for a phone application.
Shame, I don't have any background in ux UI design or coding at all. I talked to a few people that are in the industry and kind of verify that it's pretty much not a bad idea and my initial step was to just basically little money kind of get it out there because for me initially it was just to get this idea out of my head. And and when I talk to my friends who are in the specially the design UI
Sui game, what I got is that I'm being bombarded with all this idea that if it's a good idea or not that you don't you don't want to hurt less money in it and have a very mature not a good design and then whatever coding because initially your products going to be out there and it's really not going to be worth anything because you smell gonna be good. So you really need to have a very good designer do it and someone offered me to do it, but they wanted to share in it and I'm pretty much very confused with I don't even
Why would they like how do they know it's going to be even something that they should want to share in it? And then and then they're talking about big money like 50k 60k to get the coding done and all that and I was just confused because my initial thing was just a little money maybe like an odd friends abroad they could do it for me because you can you hurry up with a question. Sorry because I do want to
know I think I think I think I get the gist of
sorry. Sorry. I'm getting that's okay. It's alright, it's fine. It's fine.
So thank you for the kind words. I
Would look I could be nice to you and make you feel good and kind of give you the wrong answer or I can save you the time in the future and the pain and give you what I think is the right answer. So I'm not a pull punches kind of person. So I'm going to give you what I think is the right answer startups are the Olympics of Technology. You're getting the absolute best and brightest people in the world who've been training their entire lives. Just like Olympic athletes in the moved to Silicon Valley and they dedicated their lives to their craft and they work day and night. These are some of the smartest people in the world.
They build apps and they compete in a winner-take-all playing field where the number one wins everything. The number two gets like a little something in the number 3 just completely loses so you don't show up in the app game to build any kind of a serious app, unless you are going all in with an A-Class team. And so that is the formidable structure of this industry because the winning solution can literally make a billion dollars and because of that there's no room for the second place and there's no room for half.
Hard efforts. So even fifty thousand dollars is not going to get you a great app. If you want to if you're passionate about a great app, if you have an app idea that you really care about and you want to see this thing succeed you're going to need the best people in the world to work with you and those people are often working on their own projects and they're often not even hirable no amount of money can hire them. They have to come on as co-founders. They have to be just as passionate as you and they have to be incredibly skilled. And why would they want to work with you even ideas are not that?
Not that rare ideas are actually quite common. It's the execution of the ideas is the details of how those ideas are implemented that really make the whole difference. So I think you're in for a very formidable task if you're really keen on doing this app, then it's not a money problem. It's a people problem even I think you're in La that's kind of wrong place to be you'd have to come to Silicon Valley. You have to track down the top top top athletes in the space. You have to convince them to work with you you'd have to convince.
It's them that they should keep you on board. You have to convince them to spend their time into it and the money will materialize and the amount of money that will eventually materialize if it's a good idea. It's a good team is on the order of millions millions of dollars. You cannot build a great prototype by Outsourcing it for tens of thousands of dollars overseas. Not only is he just happened to get incredibly lucky and you yourself are an incredible product designer who will sit there and watch every pixel and push it in the right place because you've done that thing a hundred times before over a decade. So unfortunately, this is not
Game for amateurs and I don't say that to dissuade you or can discourage you to make you feel bad. I'm trying to stay that factually one way to think about it is when people say I have an idea. Do you have a tech team to do it? It's kind of like someone saying it's like if I were to say I have an idea for a book. Do you have an author you have someone to write it the the value is in the writing the difficulties in the creation and every detail in that creation matters a lot. So you've picked yourself a big task, I think.
Think what you may be better off doing is trying to find out first is if there's anyone else who's already done this or is doing it or as close to it. You have to find the best team possible that might be working on it and then you some have to persuade them to involve you but it's a difficult task. The idea alone is 1% of it. I'm afraid.
Thank you so much. I've got a lot of baseless ideas. This was actually perfect. I'm grateful for it. Thank you so much. Thank you.
I mean just to add a little bit onto the Olympics idea is there's probably a
team that's already started on that idea that maybe you number one and often like for most people it's better to join that number one rocket ship then to try to compete with them.
Okay. Thank you.
Then any closing
thoughts before we call it
done?
I would agree with Nepal, but it's interesting to think about that in the context of like the Creator economy and and all this sort of idea if we spent a lot of time tonight talking about all these opportunities, right, but I think there is something in the vault answer that gets to the bit about
authenticity which
is if the manifestation of your idea is an application you either like
Hard to start if you don't give you get cold. I mean the manifestation of your idea is a book or blog it's hard to start puking out. Right and there is and this is I think something an opportunity particular when you're younger to develop skills to develop capabilities so that when you have the idea you can take advantage of it and that doesn't mean you're doomed if you don't there are other ways
to sort of work around it maybe join up with folks, but it does get
harder and this idea sort of like maximizing your
You're always be preparing so that when the when the idea does come you can sort of sees it.
Yeah, I hate
crushing people's dreams. So and I don't want to do it unfairly. So cat if you're out there somewhere the audience you can just email me and I'm happy to kind of help you think through it further and not in like a glib context but like a you know, how should you spend your money and time kind of way you can guess my email. It's actually very guessable take a couple of
gases.
Awesome. Well, that was that was fun. I'm glad it happened at 1:00 in the morning that was more expected than than you might think but awesome let's let's end the room and we'll do this again later at some point in the
future. Thanks for organizing. So yeah schedule. Thanks Ben for joining us
spontaneously as Creator number one.
Take care everybody. Good
night. Yeah.
