Creator Economy with Naval Ravikant, Sahil and Ben Thompson | Clubhouse

Well, it's power law distribution on a particular thing, but you can have many power laws because you can have many different things you compete on, right? Someone can be a YouTube star, someone else can be a 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. And if each one is relatively authentic, they can kind of do their own thing. Now, in the sense that money is a single scorecard, then yeah, in the money game, there will always be someone higher up than you and there'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 enough. These are not zero-sum games. The economy is not a zero-sum game. The internet economy is certainly not a zero-sum game. Status hierarchies are zero-sum games, and if you're overly concerned with status hierarchy, sure, you'll never be happy, you'll never be satisfied. But if you're fine with the wealth hierarchy where you only just hit a certain threshold and your basic needs are taken care of, then we can all get there.

There's always an advantage to being first in any given medium. Like Ben here is a poster child for the paid newsletter before there was such a thing. Stratechery was doing it. And even on Substack, the people who started early, like the Matt Taibbis and the Glenn Greenwalds and the Matthew Yglesias of the world and the Byrne Hobart, they get an advantage because when people first wander into that medium, they look around, 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 it doesn't mean they can't be successful. But there is an advantage to being sort of a connoisseur and figuring out which platform's going to do well and adopting them early on. Clubhouse is an example. I've met people in Clubhouse with over a million followers, and I'm like, who the hell is this person? That might have been interesting, but they were on there early and they got just user model or they kind of built a fan base early on when nobody else was around and available. And that pays off. It's a bet that they took and that bet paid off.

I don't believe in self-promotion. I think that what the world is really craving is 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 attractive. It doesn't necessarily pay dividends immediately. It doesn't necessarily pay dividends in a way that can be easily measured and tracked, 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 a hundred thousand weak fans. There's a lot of people on Twitter who'll say things that are non-controversial, 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 and you look at how much people care or 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 follower counts and not the metrics that Twitter and Clubhouse want you to play at.

That's 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 know what you should be doing generally. It might be the thing that you're doing on Friday nights.

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 they get product market fit and the founder is really passionate, and the company doesn't have product market fit and 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.

Now, by the way, when I say what feels like play to you, that's just half of the thing. That's not enough. The whole phrase is what feels like play to you but looks like work to others. And all those words are deliberately chosen. Like, feels like, because 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, my sense is, for example, Ben, I listened to your podcast, your Dithering 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 gonna compete with you on that because it's just two friends chatting about the tech industry, and they have a genuine love for the tech industry, so they're enjoying themselves. So there's no way to compete with that because you can't lose.

Yeah, there's a common trap, right? Like, people try to fix their weaknesses whenever you want to double down on your strengths. But even when you double down on 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'll reread it, you'll reread it, you keep going with the points until you get it. It's the same as like when you feel soreness or pain after lifting weights, you're gonna build stronger muscles. On the other hand, if it's a topic you're not interested in, you'll 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 non-linear world 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 always have to be at the cutting edge of your domain.

It's very important, yeah. Exactly. All three of us up here are tinkerers. Like, I, you know, was early on tinkering with Twitter for philosophy. You know, Sahil, you're tinkering with Gumroad and like the weird way that you run it. You're tinkering on the crowdfunding side, you were tinkering and rolling funds. I was tinkering on how to mechanize angel investing and VC. I was kind of opening things up with the blogs on Venture Hacks, and that was tinkering. Ben, you were tinkering on Stratechery and Dithering. Like, we're tinkerers, right? And I think most successful creators are ultimately tinkerers. They're just kind 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 genuinely interested. And most tinkering is wasted. It's like when your kids are playing, most of 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 it might be a vocation.

Well, then there's something too about learning how to be in your particular moment. And people get so fixed, the whole five, ten years in the future, particularly when it comes to their career. And the real danger is you end up succeeding and then you ended up in a place that's just not very relevant or interesting or there's a ton of competition. And hey, I look back, like, how I ended up what I'm doing, and John said they had the quote, you know, you look backwards, you connect the dots. 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 backwards, like, man, I wish I would have spent that time better because I could have really used that experience and 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, it's just tone-deaf, but when someone says futurist, it's like, you know, they're trying too hard. They're trying too hard to live in the future when, yes, you're right, your only moment of power and knowledge is the 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 A then B and C.

Yeah, first I picked sperm number 3,768,412 that then routed its way to egg number 14 on the exact date of blah, blah, blah, right? No, so it's funny...

It's funny, AngelList has a similar story because first there was a network for sharing deal flow that Babak and I built, or mostly Babak built, called the Babak Deal Flow Network. It was literally a little social network with a feed and you could follow people, and nobody used it. And then he built a Google Group, and nobody used that either. And then finally we're like, screw it, none of this is working, just freaking email them the data. And that was AngelList. It was actually originally AngelList plus StartupList, but then I just stuck with AngelList. What was the StartupList side? It was just a list. It was going to be amazing. Yeah, AngelList was going to mail the angels and StartupList, we were gonna mail the startups, but we just never got around to the StartupList side. Yes, I still don't know, I can't even tell you how it happened or what worked. It just feels like a foreign country in a distant time.

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 100 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, Da Vinci, 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 gonna be the next Facebook, this is great. And then two, three years, I'm like, this is total crap, it's complete crap, why did I do this, what a waste of money, I knew all along. And then 10 years later, some small percentage of them work out well, but you can just never tell along the way. You can only create the narrative looking backwards. To be a good creator, you just 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, as you know, as David Deutsch says, it's conjecture plus criticism that drives science. Or Matt Ridley would say, you know, trial and error drives innovation. Or you could say that variation and selection drives evolution. These are all just variations in the same theme, which is you just try a lot of stuff, you get feedback from the world and from the market, and you see what works, and you stick with what works. And that's just it. There's no shortcut in that process.

Yeah, I would say there's most people, when I mean, like, if I talk to a bunch of aspiring painters, if like there are people that I go to these painting workshops with, and the last time they painted was the last painting workshop that they went to a year ago, right? And those people, generally, 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 100 hours, right, of that 10,000. I think by the time you put in 100 hours, most people have gone home. Maybe because they want to be painters, but they don't really 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 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 gonna go anywhere for several years potentially. It's very hard to stick with something unless you have some inherent joy of doing that thing. It's really that self-directed curiosity and passion. I think everybody has it. Sometimes it gets drilled out of you, or you get convinced it's in a useless domain, or you're just too embarrassed to do it, or you're too busy to do it. But everyone has self-directed curiosity in something. You know, people will joke, someone would 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 peer groups. Maybe they're losing it in 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's 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 and obsession that's driving them. 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, and on the work-life balance thing, 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, you are not in a work that is going to lead to great creative outcomes or building this sort of business. Like, I mean, it's definitely something you're obsessed with, right? I can't imagine wanting to sit around and watch a Netflix series instead of thinking more about the stuff that I'm working on or something I'm doing. And it just seems like 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. I'm not saying anything about that. But this particular, like, we talk about authenticity, talk about being like mastering something, like, you obsess about it. It's like your life. And I just had this moment last week where I had an unbelievably busy week. I got to Friday night and I was like, so pleased, I was so satisfied, just because I had felt like I've had such a great week. I made progress in lots of places, and that my life felt very, very imbalanced at that particular moment in time.

Yeah, and not to double down on getting cancelled, but, you know, it's easy to look at, you know, today, you know, Naval and I are doing well, and like, oh, it's easy for you to say. But like, I started Stratechery while working another full-time job. And what I mean by that is I found it, like, this is the part where it actually does pay off to do something you love. I love tech. I love thinking about tech. I love writing about tech. And so it was actually a form, like, by work-life balance, my work was kind of drudgerous, but my life was actually what I was really obsessed about. And so that was a place where I was able to align the idea of doing what I loved in my free time, and it was able to transform into my work. I feel very, very fortunate about that. But this isn't an incompatible idea where if your work is drudgerous, that's actually all the more opportunity to figure out what it is you love. Because if you love it, you're not going to feel like, oh, 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 an indicator of something that you might be worth spending more time on.

Yeah, 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. It's just there have 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 a creator. And yeah, maybe not everyone is going to be a creator just yet, but that doesn't mean that you can't be. If you're in Clubhouse, if you've got an iPhone, if you're sitting here, if you're listening to this, just because half the world can't be a creator doesn't mean that you can't be a creator. You can't beat that leading wave. Entrepreneurs are creators. You know, the best financiers are creators. Obviously, artists are creators. The best actors are creators, the best producers, the best directors, the best, you know, in any endeavor. Yeah, if you look back in history, history really remembers the artists. They're the people who are breaking new ground, who are 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, as external transaction costs come down thanks to things like Gumroad and the internet and Clubhouse and so on. Well, 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...

Yeah, I had a slightly different route, which is unlike Ben, I can't be creative and have another job. I just find the working, the drudgery, over the soul-crushing. I need a lot of free time to be creative. So rather, for me, within my own endeavors, I just drifted more and more to the creative side of the work, and I just refused to do the non-creative work. I refused to do the drudgery. I would outsource it or decline it, or I would shift away from it until I ended up doing the creative roles in the positions that I was in. And then people eventually realized that that was my superpower and they kind of left me alone at the other stuff. But I was not able to do the day job, night job thing, because it just takes up too much time and I need time to be creative. I need like empty space in my calendar. I think creativity sort of begins with an empty calendar. When you have an empty calendar, you can be creative, or at least I can be creative. And then creativity ends with a busy and cluttered calendar, because once your creativity is demonstrated, everybody wants a piece of your time, and then 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.

Yeah, it all cancels out.

That's funny. Yeah, you get enough advice, it'll all cancel out to zero. So anyway, this is all meant to be inspiration. Don't take it too literally. You can't follow anybody else's path to success.

Yeah, I think, I mean, 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 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 you get better at it because that is the thing that you're doing, right? You have eight iterations per day compounding instead of one.

Also more time efficient.

No, I try to not have any to-dos at all, because I have four, twice a week, I have four articles that I write every week, and basically nothing in my life should ever be so important that it becomes more important than those four things. So I mean, I've gotten to the point where I'm fortunate to have folks helping me, and so that can, you know, 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 don't want to have any mental space connected to deadlines that aren't connected to your actual output. So my life is entirely geared around four times a week I have to publish something, and nothing else should just sort of get in the way of that.

Well, no, I do lots of other stuff. Like, there's a lot, you know, I'm working on another project, I do calls, I have 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. And 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 and very exciting. Like the week I had last week where I was so busy, I was doing a ton of stuff unrelated 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's eliminating the have-to-do stuff for me that's super important.

Yeah, well, I mean, this is, it's miserable. And didn't Naval talk about this earlier? 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'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 one good thought partner, maybe two 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 large 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, brainstorming interesting things, or coding, or writing, or whatever it is. These are largely solitary or best pairwise activities. These are not activities that are done in large groups or meetings. And it's just the nature of most business these days that it's done very socially. People kind of work and they 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, whether on a laptop or they're having conversation or watercooler talk or what have you. So I just think that if you want to be creative, you have to be in either a 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, this is going to, I don't mean to drop into like one percent privilege, but I think most people are working too hard. I think most people are just basically spinning wheels and spending a lot of time in 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 iterating your way to the 1% that is useful. But in an ideal world, if you're omniscient, you would just cut to the 1%. So for example, 99% of people that you went on dates with, you didn't end up marrying, so that wasn't the final answer. 99% of stuff you learned in school, you've forgotten, you weren't really curious about, it doesn't apply to your life anymore. 99% of the presentations you did at work, the 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 1% that worked, or perhaps it was trial and error, you should do it to find the 1% 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 I take 10 or 20 or 30. 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 to experience. But if you're becoming more and more experienced and you aren't filtering projects, and firing customers, and not pursuing certain marketing strategies, and declining working with certain kinds of people, and even turning away the money when it doesn't make sense, if you're not doing that, 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 in 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're becoming an expert in art history or architecture or 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're coding up the next cryptocurrency or whether you're marketing something or whether you're HR or whether you're a 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, 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 he's 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. Where does he find the time for all this? The guy at the corner convenience store is 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 working less 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 outsized fortunes. One person decides to code up a 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 in the app store for a week and then it was gone. So it's not really about hard work, it's about judgment. So hard work is important to the extent that it builds up judgment, but eventually when you have the judgment, you should be saying no all the time.

Well, there's 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, so you multiply the force that you're exerting through the free markets. And the last, of course, is through creating a product, which could be writing, it could be a podcast, it could be an actual physical product, or it could be a piece of code that has no marginal cost of replication. And that last form of leverage is largely permissionless and 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 1700s or 1800s, you did it with labor. You wanted to get rich in the 1900s, you did it with capital. You want to get rich in the 2000s, you do it with code, maybe media.

Actually, a technology quote. And I'm not Balaji, but I think I know what he meant. He's basically saying we're going from an economy where most people are labor to where most people are capital. We're going from most people being workers to most people investors. This trend started with the 401k, crypto makes it even easier. And you know, crypto's 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 accredited, 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 a laborer and everyone's a capitalist. And ideally, I think the highest form, beyond laborer and beyond capitalist, is creator. Everyone's a creator. Everyone's either creating a product or they're creating code, or they're creating media, they're creating ideas, they're creating books, they're creating podcasts, creating YouTube, they're getting Twitch, what have you. But the creator economy in that sense is the apotheosis, it's the highest level above the labor economy, above the capitalist economy, is the creator economy.

It's, yeah, you've got your fans invested in your business.

Yeah, it's funny. One of the, when I started considering doing this crowdfunding, one of the, 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 round, right? Like, my general rule in venture capital is if the venture capital industry by and large hates it, you should do it. And I'm like, yeah, are you asking why I want more people in my army than fewer? I don't get it.

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're kind of a, you're not unique as a company that can do it, but you're in a limited set of companies that's willing to go with the hassle of doing it today. And I think more and more companies will open up and do it, you know, for their one true fans. But where the real competition is coming from is crypto. The largest angel investor base is in crypto, the largest funding base is in crypto. The market cap of crypto altogether is approaching two trillion. That's a lot of wealth splashing around. There's a lot of people who recently made money in crypto that only understand crypto, and they're happy to invest 100 million dollars in a DeFi protocol that's not even launched, when they wouldn't even know where to start with the YC companies raising two million. So I think the real competition for venture is actually happening in crypto. There's a lot more money sloshing around than in crowdfunding. Crowdfunding will happen, and there will be more and more and more of it, but because of the artificial regulatory apparatuses 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 know, the gray markets, it just ends up being, even though it's crazier and frothier, it ends up being a much larger market.

It's just, what, it's impossible and that it's very difficult to regulate without, too expensive?

Yeah, I feel like crypto in 2011, 2012, like, had this market risk of like, it could have been stopped, I think. But you know, I think it got to scale, and now nations are sort of, it's at a showing point where no nation is going to, you know, it's kind of bigger than any nation at this point.

Do you think it's as fundamental as that, right? Where it is sort of an inevitability over time as humans?

Yeah, it's hard to globally 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 or Jack Dorsey in charge, you know, now we have a way to do that with a distributed network where the users are in charge and there's a free market within the user to 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 a 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 is structured. 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 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.

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 don't 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 if other people who look at it think it has value. The same way Bitcoin only has value to the extent that other people out there are Bitcoiners and think and will accept it in exchange for material things and physical things in the world that we all agree has value.

Yeah, another way of looking at crypto is it's the business model for open source. Open source was this incredibly powerful force that upended the entire back-end infrastructure in the software domain, but never had a business model. It was done purely through, this is free, this is abundant, 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 hackability, and how people can just build on top of each other like Lego blocks. But now we've also attached business models to the whole thing, while still miraculously somehow making it so not a single person is in charge of the whole thing.

Yeah, my guess is it'll have to be new or built from first principles. Crypto is so weird, you know, you have to like build with wallets and private keys and tokens 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 AngelList, right? AngelList is what started as a mailing list for angel investors, and then we built AngelList 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 CoinList, which did crypto, and then we spun out AngelList Talent and did talent. 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, its own cap table. And that's hard to do. So my guess is that it's very hard to move an organization, not just because of the people infrastructure, which is what you're 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 than 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 you're going to wake up and they'll have coalesced in some kind of a decentralized Gumroad. But look, what actually protects you, and you're not 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 mechanism. And that's just not going to go into crypto. Crypto is incompatible with the legacy financial system. It can interface with some key points, and those key points can end up being incredibly valuable. Like Coinbase is going to go public for between 50 and 100 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, one of the assumptions that crypto violates is, you remember like in the old days we would look at passwords and be like, well, 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, it can manage private keys and wallets, then you can really secure the data in such a way that 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 to control their own data.

Amazing. It's amazing that things can happen. It's amazing that someone's playing baseball somewhere. I thought about that when I mentioned it, like, actually, it's a bad thing to mention because people get very jealous. San Francisco, especially South America, is like the zombie apocalypse. There's like a big theatrical act going on, you know, it's like COVID actress, and everyone is pretending that they're caught in like this massive sweeping pandemic. It's kind of entertaining.

Yeah, I am seeing some fuzzy progress in the creator economy. And I would say at least so far, what I see in the creative economy is a three-step thing. Step one was in the old days, you created on the internet, you created a website, and then you hope that Google sent you some traffic, right? But in the very old days, you created a website and you just had to build your own brand and run ads and try and get traffic. But then after a while, Google started sending you traffic. And 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 social creator on a social network is you're building your castle in sand. Tomorrow Jack Dorsey might change the algorithm, or Mark Zuckerberg decides to change his rake, or Apple changes their app store fee, and now all of a 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 three, where you have things like Patreon and Gumroad and all kinds of monetization vehicles that are cropping up, where you're having creator-first networks, you're having networks that are all about monetized 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 that cross social networks. Like for me, I mean, I don't really consider myself a creator, I don't really monetize, but it was very easy to cross from Twitter into Clubhouse. Like most of my Twitter following will follow me into Clubhouse to the extent they're in 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 trying to figure out how to monetize separately from the platform that they're on. The platform they're on will always have a big advantage, like when Twitter does 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 that 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. Substack is obviously another huge one, right? Like it's the same people who can get famous on Twitter, but if they want to actually make real money, then they go on a Substack and build a newsletter there.

Interesting. So it's not about the creator's use of social media, it's about 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 exactly it. And this has been incredibly powerful for much longer than I think people realize it. This is what I didn't realize. I mean, I warned this just because I mentioned I had a five-year plan for Strategy. And the reality is that I ended up going with the paid, the subscription version of Stratechery within a year of launching the site, because I completely underestimated, had no appreciation for how powerful social media was, not from my tweeting, but from other people's 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, like, as we were saying earlier, you can escape competition through authenticity. If you are authentic, there's no competition for you. 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.

Oh, I think it's better today. It's much faster to build followers in Clubhouse or TikTok than it is on Twitter. Like, I routinely see people just build huge followings on TikTok 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, 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 an age where there's so many non-linear upsides floating around. And you want to take a lot of these bets and tinker and iterate until you find one that goes non-linear. The proper philosophical approach is rational optimism. You generally want to be optimistic because things can work out 100x or 1000x on the upside, and you can only lose 1x on 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.

Yeah, this is classic marketing wisdom, but you want to have a small number of die-hard fans and a small number of haters. What you don't want is a large number of kind of 'meh' people who are like, 'Yeah, sort of interested,' but no one's going to lay themselves down the line, positive or negative.

I actually, I'm not sure about the community. Like, it's funny because by 'not sure' I'm like, I don't know what to do. I know there's definitely a Stratechery community. I'm not quite sure how that materializes and how I personally leverage it. But I think part of that is that's more of a personal choice. Like, this is where you're talking before, people have different perspectives. I just personally don't want to put in the work to manage the community. And like, part of it is my focus is again on those like four things a week, I want my mental power focused on those. But that doesn't mean that'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 Stratechery fans, and I'm just totally dropping the ball doing it. And this is why you should be careful about who you listen to advice from, because some of them might be terrible at stuff, 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 a Discord or they create some 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, Ben and monetization, I have a funny history with him there. And Ben, you can back me up on this. Every year I read some article of yours and I 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've gathered from McKinsey or Forrester by far, even if I'd hired them as consultants.' And Ben always writes back and he says, 'Nope, I'm charging 10 bucks a month to everybody. That's my business model. It'll break if I try and do something otherwise.' So you're sticking to your guns is smart, because I think there are people who would have tried by now to do tiered subscriptions, who are trying to do consulting, and all kinds of things that weren't authentic to them that would have led them astray and destroyed their creativity, and not allowed to scale this beautiful core business where you just charge everybody 10 bucks a month and you got a lot of readers.

Yeah, so what you're basically saying is that currently NFTs are, you buy an object with the digital rights to an object from the artist, and those digital rights can be resold and the artist might get a piece of it. But now 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, sure. And I think there are people trying this. Look, the good and the bad with crypto is going through a Cambrian explosion. Every possible scheme you can dream of to make money where 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.

I don't think I really heard the question. There's some background noise, maybe.

Oh yeah, 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 provide a computer to do it and invent 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 brain with all kinds of problems and interesting things. Next thing you know, you're connecting things together and you're just having ideas. You're calling up your friends and your colleagues and pitching them. Most of them are nonsense, a few of them stick. You figure out how to brand them, you figure out how to 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 engineer creativity. You can foster the conditions for creativity. Like when the cloud is heavy with rain, you know, or it's like a big heavy cloud, the odds are higher it's going to rain. So for me, that is being alone or 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 on walks. Showers are good places for ideas because you're accidentally meditating, you can't do anything else, and your mind's just kind of wandering freely. So I think there are positions you can put yourself in for creativity. If you have to solve a specific 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.

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, 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're probably going to come up 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 creative 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 the two key guys, 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 six days flat. And the first three days are just spent brainstorming what's going to happen. And you can see through that 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, but certain kinds of creativity, I think, almost require small groups. So you may want to consider getting a partner or someone who thinks very differently than you, but is a good, like, the kind of person who says 'yes and' as opposed to 'no' or 'but,' and you can just brainstorm with constantly.

Yeah, there's two other hacks you could try. One is Scott Adams has a footwear theory of motivation, where he says 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, you'll follow through. Or if you want to go for a run, just put on your sneakers and go outside, but don't commit to 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 or the mindset, or as a trigger. So you could try that. There are things you could do, a form of 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 say, 'Okay, today's my day, I'm going to do my taxes. This is my tax day.' You're going to sit down for a computer, do taxing, and I hate it. You'll be like, 'Fuck, how to avoid doing my taxes?' Next thing you know, you're journaling or you're writing. So if it's like your second thing to do, and there's something in front that you're supposed to do that you don't like even more, you might end up doing it.

Yeah, and I mean, I didn't, from the outside, I did nothing until I was like 30. So I mean, which I think is, you know, I look back and I say, all right, all these amazing, interesting 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, there's, and you can leverage that. So...

NFTs are not the panacea that I think all the artists hope it is. There's this groundswell of support for NFTs because people are like, well, this is how artists are finally gonna 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 we've made fungible are largely man-made and rare. 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? An NFT is too broad of a term. It covers an item that I pick up in a game that is enforced scarcity, it could be a piece of land in a metaverse, it could be a domain name. Those all have enforced scarcity. But the problem is 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 uploaded to these platforms. Every JPEG, every image, every video, every sculpture that you can imagine. So as soon as someone sold something for 69 million dollars, and there are reasons to believe that that was not a completely legit sale, if there were some other motives involved, then everyone comes in thinking, oh my art's finally going to be worth something. No, your art is only going to be worth something to the extent that society has already come up on a consensus that your art is worth something. All NFTs do is give you a way to trade the digital representation of ownership of that art as opposed to the physical ownership of that art. So it is an interesting innovation, but the vast, vast, vast majority of art out there is not going to make any money in the NFT platforms. You still have to build a social consensus around your piece of art. But then suddenly enough people believe that it 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 NFT. The NFT part comes more into play when ownership matters, and ownership matters in a status context. And that matters in 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 have just shown up. I think art, ownership of art is 100% a status game, and so it's inherently very unpredictable. It's very, very difficult to be successful at a status game because it's not up to you. It has the most market risk possible. It's basically other people have to all agree that this stuff that you've created that inherently is not valuable in any other way. 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 have merit, some credibility. Yeah, NFTs 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, it's like, cool, I have the asset that's actually difficult. I have the true non-fungible 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 use them with the scarce resource that I have, one of which is my audience or government equity or whatever.

No, not really. I mean, NFT is a very complex and weird topic. I think we're all still trying to wrap our heads around some of the stuff going on there.

That's kind of you, but I live an unscheduled life. I don't schedule to commit to anything, but thank you.

I don't know, it's fine. I mean, my answer works on all of them. I've seen this movie before. I mean, these are all good causes, and I reserve the right to drop in on 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.

That's very kind of you. Yeah, I mean, COVID definitely accelerated a lot of tech trends. It made us all introverted for a little bit, made us all tech-driven for a little bit. It's reflected in the values 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 party, or if the health scaremongers manage to keep us all locked up for another six or 12 months with all the scariest circulating viruses and 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 digital codes. Eventually, the Uber drivers will go on strike or the Postmates drivers will go on strike.

Yeah, Australia's in a weird position because if you're a small island, you can just keep COVID out, as New Zealand and Taiwan and other people have demonstrated. And if you're a large country, you basically can't. It's just too hard because the borders are too large, there's too many people involved. And Australia is kind of right in the middle. It's just large enough that it'll have problems controlling a 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 that it's more like the United States. This tough spot.

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.

Well, Demello 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. You even started out by calling us critical thinkers and then said you're a critical thinker. Are we really? We're just monkeys. I mean, we're 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 mantle to bear. It sounds like a big burden. The more seriously you take yourself and the more seriously you take your thoughts, just the less at ease you're gonna be. Just sort of go through your life, just enjoy it. If you have your health, if you have a roof over your head, and you have some food, you're doing great. Everything's fine. Think all the thoughts you want. They can be entertaining, they can be liberating, they can be optimistic, they can be pessimistic. That's a choose your own adventure.

I think it'll be great when our AirPods can translate in real time, and you can walk into a foreign country and whatever someone speaks to you, 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 things like tweets, like the tweets that I've written, translating those into Chinese, I think is just going to translate very poorly, unfortunately. 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 you can even translate it into Chinese well, but I would be skeptical because half of it is 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'll translate. I'm reminded of, you know, I'm a huge fan of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu's work, and I read the Stephen Mitchell translation and I thought, hey, I read the Tao Te Ching. And then I found this website that has a hundred different translations of just the first chapter, the first tiny one and a half page chapter of the Tao Te Ching. And you read all 100 translations and you realize you're literally reading 100 different books. So I'm not sure I ever actually read the Tao Te Ching, I just read Stephen Mitchell. So it's 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 how general relativity works or 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 adjectives or balance of the words or the length of the words, it's not going to matter. But the more it approaches poetry, the less translatable it is. And I don't mean this as a bragging thing, that just means the nature of 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 what have you. And so it just doesn't translate that well. But it's nice of you to do it to get it across. I really do appreciate that.

No, I agree. What people are going to be reading is the Naval and Camellia combo, and not the Naval 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 they're actually reading the Bible. They're reading lots and lots of interpretations and connections 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 the transcripts from my podcast and How to Get Rich are gonna probably translate a little bit better than the tweetstorm. 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.

I'm unfortunately going to need to bounce soon, so I've got maybe one or two more questions for me, then I gotta go.

You know, I used to have this framework in my head, and I've forgotten most of it. But just to give you some 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 there's 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 could just continue the game, that would be similar to having multiple lives in Buddhism. I had a bunch of others, I had the whole framework written out at one point, but I never tweeted it because it's so esoteric and so bizarre. And I think simulation theory is just religion by another name. It's unfalsifiable anyway, and it's not really going to change your life because you just replace God with the concept of a programmer who's 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 awakened from the game and you get enlightened and then 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're kind of done and the game becomes uninteresting. So there's a bunch of different parallels. It's not quite a one-to-one mapping. This is an analogy, obviously not an isomorphism. But it's just fun to think about. 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 McKenna. Just read everything Jed McKenna ever wrote, and you're going to get your fill on this stuff.

Ben, do you split up the work? Do you have a part where you're kind of like the creative person and you do the creative part, maybe that's the writing phase or the ideation phase, and then there's the editing which is maybe more kind of scientific? Or how do you think, is there like that two-step process or is it just one?

Naval, do you have multiple steps or is it atomic for you? Like you just produce?

Yeah, I don't really think of creativity as 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 280 characters, and originally under 140, that used to be the real art, getting under 140 characters. And when you hone 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.

Can you hurry up with the question? Sorry, because I do want to... no, I think I get the gist of it. Sorry, I'm getting... that's okay, it's fine. So thank you for the kind words. I would say, 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 just gonna 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. And they move to Silicon Valley and they dedicate their lives to their craft and they work day and night. These are some of the smartest people in the world. And they build apps and they compete on a winner-take-all playing field where the number one wins everything, the number two gets a little something, and the number three just completely loses. So you don't show up in the app game to build any kind of a serious app unless you're 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-hearted efforts. So even 50,000 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 hireable. 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 rare. Ideas are actually quite common. It's the execution of the ideas, it's 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 the wrong place to be. You'd have to come to Silicon Valley. You'd have to track down the top, top, top athletes in the space. You'd have to convince them to work with you. You'd have to convince 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 and a good team, is in the order of millions, millions of dollars. You cannot build a great prototype by outsourcing it for tens of thousands of dollars overseas. Not unless you just happen 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 they've done that thing a hundred times before over a decade. So unfortunately, this is not a game for amateurs. And I don't say that to dissuade you or to discourage you or to make you feel bad. I'm trying to state it 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, if I were to say I have an idea for a book, do you have an author? Do you have someone to write it? The value is in the writing. The difficulty is in the creation. And every detail in that creation matters a lot. So you've picked yourself a big task. I think what you may be better off doing is trying to find out first if there's anyone else who's already done this or is doing it or is close to it. You have to find the best team possible that might be working on it. And then you somehow have to persuade them to involve you. But it's a difficult task. The idea alone is one percent of it, I'm afraid.

Yeah, I hate crushing people's dreams, and I don't want to do it unfairly. So Cat, if you're out there somewhere in the audience, you can just email me and I'm happy to kind of help you think through it further, and not in a glib context, but like, 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 guesses.