the CEO is everyone's boss and the boss's boss is the market what you see at the top is just a fraction of everything beneath [Music] you have to get closer to reality some are like the best people to hire uh former Special Forces they're amazing because their closeness to reality and the feedback if you're in an environment that doesn't
optimize for like real feedback you're just you're stuck in this stagnant thing but luckily you have access to the internet and you can write and then you get to move on to making the next thing basically for yourself but informed by the feedback you're getting from what you're putting out onto the internet not
having reality as your boss it's really hard to get that feedback if your job is asset management in the market but I think it's selling stocks reality how's you in the face right every day if you're in a room with someone they almost can't ignore you even if you're not making that much sense but if you're not making sense on the internet you're
just Dead on Arrival [Music] well hello everyone it's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another infinite loops and we have another return guest I loved him so much the first time and he has been tearing it up since he was last on please welcome back Jack butcher the founder of visualize value a network of mentors with one million dollars a year
in product business and a media platform with an audience greater than 500 000 man I I gotta take some tips from you because I think I don't even think I'm at a thousand true fans yet man uh my first question before we get into all the cool stuff you've done since we last chatted was I I saw it in our team's notes that
um you you really did a big Direction change after reading naval's how to get rich uh thread on Twitter can you tell us about that sure so my background is I studied graphic design at University in the UK and then just went basically straight into the agency business so I had some work experience when I was 16 in a design agency which
is what led me to eventually want to pursue design professionally as an adult and uh yeah got into the agency world and it took me probably almost 10 years of changing jobs thinking that the different agency environment was the fix to my frustration but ultimately had like a fundamental disagreement with the way those businesses functioned the the
incentives that were almost diametrically opposed from uh client side and at least on the creative side of the agency you're kind of fighting against this very strange incentive model and the in Reading Naval stuff initially that really reframed a lot of my understanding of how to I guess how to present yourself and how
to think about your relationship with the world so the agency model really is like this you get invited to participate in something and then you kind of like scrap and fight to be out other people that have been invited to pitch work for free and then try and basically eke out the engagement as long as possible because you're billing time and
materials versus the ideas that were presented in that thread which were really about this concept of judgment and leverage so if you're able to articulate what you do really well you can create you know basically a magnetic force that brings people who want to work with you to your door as opposed to the complete
opposite model where you're chasing people and then in this really interesting conflicting relationship with them from that point forward so that's where basically the Genesis of visualized value came from is if I can articulate the type uh if I can make things that represent the type of things that I want to keep making in a
very specific way that that in theory would become a way to attract the types of people that I want to work with and Theory turned out to be true after 6 9 12 months of repetition of just kind of pursuing that in public and yeah just completely reshaped the way I interacted with the world from that point forward and it's taken a few there are a few iterations
out from from there where we are today but that was the huge turning point in um in the way I thought about looking for opportunity in the world fascinating and it's a it's a little bit you you could listen to what you just said and think oh yeah build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door and that isn't really
it exactly I when I was listening and it's like you figured out a way to essentially align your incentives with your clients incentives which I think is brilliant and has proven incredibly beneficial and fruitful for you how was it starting out did did it like was it hard incredibly hard so I use this uh I I've
told the story a bunch of times now but when I first started my own agency business I was able to do it based on the relationships I already had from my old jobs which I think is most people's Ventures at least in like service world or white collar business world is like they have a connection somewhere and they're able to like get that jolt of
energy to kick-start the business so there was a client I was working for as a employee of another agency that wanted to run leaner and I was able to basically build a little freelance business off of that and I quickly learned that all of the infrastructure in that corporate environment the sales people the client
the account managers all of the things that were kind of orbiting me there was a level of I guess arrogance and naivety that I'd built up in the fact that I thought that I was doing all of the work right I was the designer so I'm like making the thing that gets shipped out of the door but that's two percent five percent whatever
it is of the equation of answering all the phone calls that the client wants you to answer and taking people to dinner and doing all of these things that ultimately I wanted no part of I just wanted to be in front of the computer making stuff and initially that I guess I just didn't understand that until I was out on my
own and started to try and just put work out into the world and I was like a lot of agencies do this where you you're working on a video one week the next week you're working on a website then you're working for an automotive brand then a chocolate brand then uh you know washing up liquid and you haven't there's no like coherence to
the stuff you're putting out so I was just kind of posting work that there was no kind of thread through it or point of view of mine that was in my mind I map that back to this idea of equity that Naval talks about that's not just you know a signature on a term sheet or a cap table it's really about this Collective understanding in other
people's minds of what you do what you're capable of what you stand for and it wasn't until I really honed in and focused on a very specific not only visual style but kind of filter for the types of ideas that I would put through that filter that I started to see a little bit of momentum happen and before that it's like my mom commenting
on my Facebook posts you know like that's that looks great Jack and that was like that was at least a year of just doing that into the void and then completely separate you maybe have someone from your old old world that's like hey Jack I've got this bit of work that I'm gonna throw you away I was getting no momentum from the internet
until I really honed in on a specific um set of constraints and tried to really challenge what it was that was what qualifies as something that I should be publishing and and what other you know second and third order consequences of of publishing that stuff but until that point it was extremely difficult and another I don't know if
it's in that Naval thread or not there's another um statement that he made said 99 of all effort is wasted and that resonated so much with me from the agency background where basically nothing you do sees the light of that it's this like I'm not trying to everybody who's listening to this I'm not like I have no issue with that it's
just not for me but this like the the charade or the lopping that goes on in those environments for months and years on end it's just so frustrating when all you see in the final product is what was removed from you know your intent or what was like committed into something that doesn't represent the thing you wanted to do so um
yeah that was hard for that reason and then starting out was hard for another reason there's always obviously always trade-off and however you choose to conduct yourself yeah a horse is a or a camel rather is a horse designed by a committee right yeah yeah absolutely true so so moving from like one to one where you're basically
selling your talents uh and time to a more Protestant uh product based environment um surely a lot of your clients would come to you and say you jack I love it but right what how do you how do you handle that how do you handle everyone that wants an exception a tweak a pivot Etc so I I went through that
in stages from the extremely Hands-On um the stuff I was putting out really early on lent itself to people reaching out about doing pitch decks or they have some complex idea or string of ideas that they want to simplify into five slides ten slides whatever it may be used you know some hero diagram for explaining to investors what they do or
training people internally there was all these different interesting use cases for distilling ideas into visuals so I would do that to begin with where I would um I would basically take the the discipline or the the process of distilling an idea and then add do it in the style of the brand I was working with that was like first
iteration so it's like visualized value but your ideas and your brand or the elements of your brand so it's kind of this agency relationship in a way then I moved to okay we don't do any stylistic changes you bring the ideas and they come out as they come out as you see like the the visualized value stuff and then basically demand took over on the
consoling side I was like there's probably something here that can you know take the form of a product and the first thing I did was to try and build a curriculum around the process of visualizing values so how do you take an idea kind of separate it into its logical parts and then ship it back out as a diagram that
captures the essence of it and then moved away from the the service component entirely after after doing that there's been a few things over the last couple years I've like really wanted to get involved in because I you know beyond a um commercial purely commercial interest or something that's like super fun to work on but the amount of
the amount of impact you can have by adding two new modules to a curriculum that 10 000 people are already a member of is so much more significant than working you know booking another meeting with with one client so uh yeah it turned into being completely focused on the the product stuff and then almost like a
transition to a media company in that way so you're just creating things on the front end that are increasing the reach of this thing and then that creates all these opportunities to really just like make something and ship it and have people uh consume that thing and then you get to move on to making the next thing basically for yourself
um but informed by the feedback you're getting from what you're putting out onto the internet so it's been a it's been an iterative Journey from a very very Hands-On service-based thing to uh yeah producing media and Building Products basically remember what surprised you the most in in your journey thus far and obviously
you'll have more surprises uh but like what are you because it happens to me all the time right like uh you know we'll we'll be doing an investment we'll be doing a new project or something and like almost every time it's like God damn I I would never have guessed that would have been the thing that everyone valued the most how about you and and
and your curriculum and and what you're doing I think the like compounding Network effect of people who have consumed the material as the most like the thing that you can't really you know you can't really understand until you see it in action and it takes a long time to take hold so just I guess a good example of that is what
I've been doing for the last six months has really I've seen so many people that joined or been a visualized value two three years ago that once there is a canvas or an opportunity to contribute to something the almost like those shed the shared comprehension of the type of material and the like the idea that all of the people in this
digital Gathering Place have all consumed the same 500 images and it's kind of this like filter for a world view a like mentality in many cases like these people who for the most part join this environment because they want to work independently as a creative on the internet and like identifying those people and having them
meet and work with one another has produced outcomes that I would never have been able to predict before people getting together Building Products or making like having like successful careers as digital artists after understanding more uh intricately how the how the internet works how you can build distribution why you should uh simplify
and communicate your ideas as best as you possibly can and having this like small network of people that you trust to get feedback from as you do that has been uh you know powerful tool for a lot of people and along the process yeah it's it very much uh resonates with uh our thesis around Ashanti Ventures right uh we use terms like smart swarms
over loose networks uh but same same idea right um the internet we we really need to recontextualize and think about the platforms that are available to us where and you know we we get I mean we're going to talk about semantics later on because you have a lot to say about that as well uh but you know we get captured
by our old our old models and our old language uh and and you know it sometimes prevents us from seeing oh wait a minute like I have this whole new platform I have this whole new way of gaining leverage and then you know we still do it the old Mad Men way so to speak be in your uh vernacular um another thing you talk a lot about
that I'm really interested in because I share your opinion is this idea that like it's all it's all really uh the metaphor of an iceberg right what what you see at the top is just a fraction of everything beneath right and and one of the things that I find really fascinating about you is you you seem very good at capturing on that top piece
right a lot of what is below the surface like what's your process how do you do that I mean that's really a talent and a skill thank you first I think the maybe the story of how visualized value came to be is can shed some light on that I guess like the ideas that I put into practice and as you rightfully credited at the
beginning of the episode the naval-isms that basically kicked off and inspired this um amplification of these ideas that I was completely unaware of as a frustrated creative in my mind is almost like putting those things in practice and when you get positive feedback from them they these like these things like Compound on
top of one another it's a hard thing to describe I think but once you have belief in an idea from the um from experience not just from like reading that thing and and kind of identifying with the truth of it tangentially somehow where it's like oh that sounds like the opposite of what I've experienced therefore it might be
true versus like I have now experienced this and I can I guess talk about it with far more conviction because I have evidence that it that that I've gone through that feedback loop and I think the maybe that is symbolic of the top of the iceberg it's like you can really get to or get to more of the truth of something if you have those
those different layers or levels of real feedback against what it is you're trying to say and I think the navalisms come from and I'm this this is I don't know this is me this is conjecture from me come from watching a thousand companies try and become something and 900 of them failing as an investor or as a somebody building
a platform like Angel list that is capturing real-time feedback from like essentially these organisms going out into the world and trying to become self-sustaining things and in many cases not doing that in my mind there's like a real incredible feedback loop happening there that spans so many different disciplines businesses types of people countries all
sorts of different inputs that if you can make a statement that kind of TR like remains true across all of your experience that's what you're doing or that's what I think comes out as looking like tip of the iceberg type thing where you can I always had this exercise where before I would send a tweet I would
kind of try and defend it from its worst critic so like if I was trying to interpret this in the least generous way possible what would I say and then I'm not saying I get this right but that was the like way in which I would edit something is how could I write this to a point where I feel the most confident in defending it I'll just keep rewriting
it until like the worst thing I could imagine somebody saying in response to it I would have a uh a uh a response to and I don't know that's that's how that seems to have been a reasonable um like little mental framework for not getting dragged into silly discussions on on Twitter and like really thinking through do I believe this is it
responsible for me to say this can I back it up with any evidence that I might have or experience that I might have gone through that is a a great way because what you're really doing is you're still Manning your argument whereas most people uh prefer to straw man their opponent's argument um and and they end up often building a
straw man of their own argument so they don't even understand the most obvious problems with it right it leads very nicely into something that I really admire about you as well you flip fear on its head so many people are like fear is what prevents them from like doing what you're doing from starting a new company
from you know trying a new idea out the other thing that you seem to intuitively understand which is not that intuitive which is like most things are complex adaptive systems and if you're dealing with a complex adaptive system all emergence comes from below not from the above right and and so what you were just saying about you know uh your your
ability to take all of that feedback did did you like was there a moment when you were just like [ __ ] it I'm just not gonna be afraid I'm just gonna do this and I'm gonna let as I said flip fear on its head can you walk us through that process to help our listeners who like maybe a lot of other creatives right now
and they're like God I love his work I love what he's doing but I terrified to put my own stuff out there yes I'm trying to think back to my my transition as I mentioned before from like it's fine I also moved to the states when I was 21 right so I'm almost in this I'm also like running this weird experiment on myself by taking myself out of the
environment where I had you know the the people I went to I studied design with for example like I lived with eight of those guys at the end of my career when I was in the UK and then you put yourself in a completely new environment and trying this is all me like in hindsight trying to analyze some of this stuff where
Stakes feel lower almost when you're in a when you completely you completely change the environment you're in so you're you know everything is upside in many ways when you're like not trying to moderate your decisions against things that people expect you to do like you kind of Hit This Clean reset button or something um and that's I don't think that's
always a physical change but I always like even earlier on in my life I would have these like reactionary moments where I'm like I don't like this I'm gonna go do something else you know and that's I guess that's there's like a fundamental Paradox there where there's there's there's some safety that comes from being in the same
environment but there's also this like anti-fragility that comes from just messing stuff up over and over and over again put yourself in a different place do this do that do that like you may be capping your upside in the short term by moving around quickly and I would get that a lot of the start of my career
where people like you've been here for six months like you should give it more time and see what and I'm like I know that this is not what I want to be doing so if you're telling me that I could be doing the same thing be getting paid twice as much I'm not interested in that so I'm not really sure what the argument is from that side so I think
throwing yourself into these environments after two or three of them you're like okay worst case scenario I get a little more experience and as a designer specifically you're building a portfolio of work and this is something that I'm like have realized retroactively is after going through all these interviews at these design firms
no one really asked me about what school I went to you know they asked me where I worked before but all they cared about was what I'd made and they would make hiring decisions for the most part at least early in my career based on Purely on my ability to produce the thing that I said that I could produce and I think that is
different and it's an incredible advantage that I even realized a couple years into my career I don't even need to be given a brief to make my portfolio better I could just go and redesign something that I don't think doesn't work or that I wished I could work on and um actually have to give a shout out to an agency that was
I think they're still around it's called fantasy interactive and they used to do these like hypothetical design exercises where there were UI ux agency predominantly and they would say what is the future of air travel look like this is us imagining how we would redesign you know let's say americanairlines.com and their app
without their permission without a thousand stakeholders in the way of us and and the end goal we're just gonna do it create this sexy highlight reel of how it works and then my assumption is they were flooded with inbounds from airlines that want to be the first to own that concept or pay for the development of that thing and that was a
I guess that idea was implanted in my mind way before the um the naval stuff even where as if you have the ability to create something that represents what you think or what you would do if given permission you um yeah you have such a massive advantage and you you aren't relying on the position you're in at that moment in
time necessarily you have this ability to like build this compounding proof of work that you can take into a different context or a different environment or you know worst case scenario you can work at the lower end of that industry if something you know something goes wrong in your career and I was in New York at the time where
you know you could a freelance graphic design work will keep you alive worst case scenario you know there's there's obviously so much opportunity on the upside but yeah I also I worked in a Honda Factory before I studied graphic design in uh in the Swindon in the UK so all of this stuff was like gravy to me earlier micros like
I can't believe I'm getting paid to you know come up with a skateboarding brand or to shoot a Ferrari commercial or today I was like this is insane so that part of that was like I know I think that also gives you this interesting perspective to operate from where you just you just continually surprised by what you're getting away with being able to do for work
I love that idea and you know you just touched on so many things that uh I'd like to even go further on uh the first is uh I had a friend uh pre-internet who made a fortune doing exactly what you described that agency did he would get forms and things in the old snail mail there was no internet right and what he would do is whenever he found
something that confounded him he would he designed the entire thing and then he would send it to the company and literally he got ridiculously Rich doing this because all the companies were like holy [ __ ] that's so much better that's like tedx better than what we had and they ended up buying it from him and and
hiring him so I love that the other thing I have a lot of friends from the UK and I'm fascinated by this idea that hey he keeps coming back to me as I talk to them especially those who live here in the United States so for example our interior designer that we use is a working class Brit from the north of Britain and and and she said something
really that kind of shocked me uh when she first said it to me uh we were out and and she'd done some really great work for us and I'm like wow I I mean you you're amazing you're everything and and like uh why didn't you do this like when you were in the UK and she looked at me and she goes you would have never
hired me in the UK and I went what and she goes no no no no no she goes the UK says we don't have a class system anymore we still have a class system and somebody like you would never hire somebody like me and I literally like called [ __ ] on her I'm like I can't believe that and she goes listen she goes before I moved to America I'll I'll
just be really honest with you I hated Americans I thought they were like yeah and she said then I moved here and she was like holy [ __ ] I love Americans yeah yeah do you is is that is that something I mean like is that a real thing is interesting like I've spent my entire adult life in the states too so much so
my point of comparison are incredibly I guess this so far in my distant memory but there is definitely there's definitely like massive cultural differences between the states and the UK in my mind and and again I'm speaking from very very limited experience but the in the design industry for example like the amount of responsibility that was
entrusted to me when I got to New York versus the guys that I graduated with that were literally making tea in their in their agency businesses and I just it was a weird it's this is a bit of a personal uh realization or a personal uh experience I had when I was in uh I was in the pub watching the World Cup this is probably two years ago three
years ago or something and it was an English pub in an American city full of Brits and the national anthem comes on you know the British national anthem God saved the queen at the time God saved the king now and uh it was a really interesting moment for me I was listening to that normally I'd be belting that out like screaming it out
that was my my youth and I was like this is like a fascinating I mean there has to be some massive sociological Insight in this idea of being the subject of a a royal family that in my mind has to trickle into culture in some way and maybe is responsible for a lot of the uh yeah a lot of the way people behave
subconsciously even like there is this like your your Society is fundamentally structured around this idea of uh inherited importance you know like you are important because you come from bloodline X and that is obviously true across every you know that's true in the states in certain families and but it isn't the identity of the nation
necessarily so that is something that I've been thinking about ever since I had that experience and there's so much about British culture that I love and miss and like the self-deprecation of it is like what makes it almost like you know the dry humor of the UK the like there's a lot of crabs in a bucket um like almost part of the uh
the the fabric of society there was a a guy who owned um a bunch of karate schools where I grew up and he came to speak at our school and um he drove red red convertible Ferrari parked it outside the front of the school and not a great reaction from the the you know the kids that went to that school which I don't know if that'd be
different in a different part of the UK you grow up in um and I don't know how much of a myth this is about the states either but there is definitely a different um in many cases there's just this different attitude towards Building Wealth I think it's uh it's it can be frowned upon or it can be dismissed because of maybe it has something to do with the
way in which wealth has been distributed in societies like that it's uh and I have you know a very specific experience with this idea of just coming somewhere starting from scratch basically and pursuing my interest trying to try and to uh build stuff and it's you know happen to work in some instances which has really
changed my mentality around the possibility of that I didn't grow up around like this is a maybe a it's a strange thing to say but I didn't even understand the concept of an entrepreneur until I moved to the states like I didn't even know that a person came up with an idea and started a company just like and that sounds so ridiculous
to say that when I'm like growing up both my parents are in the military um and I was around it I think you know where I grew up as a lot of people had um like trades people would start businesses and you know build incredible lives around these small businesses but it just wasn't I never really like thought about it or
dug into it to the point where I was like wow somebody had an idea one day and they started this thing and now it's X I uh the one of the first companies I work for in the States was a massive digital Consulting agency and it was I think 15 000 people by the time I joined and I they would do like an onboarding thing so you go to this
week-long onboarding and they would I was probably 24 at the time and they would talk about there's a publicly traded companies they're talking about the market they're talking about you know our performance is uh contingent upon or our performances reflected in the price of the blah blah completely over my head no idea why they were telling me this right
and then when I was late into my agency careers like super jaded like oh all this work we're doing is not getting you know not getting through the client blah blah then at two years later I start my own business I'm like man I was so out of line for criticizing that like how incredibly difficult is it to build a business of
that scale keep that many people employed you know it's just a like an appreciation I don't think you have until you have exposure to that either directly or through somebody really close to you that is kind of going through the process of trying to build something from essentially nothing like create this thing that people believe in
and contribute to and unless you have great examples of that in your life I think it's really difficult to to start something up yourself yeah and uh that that I I I I remember the first company that I found it I remember the moment when I like woke up in a cold sweat and I looked at my wife and I said Buck I am responsible for so many
people's homes their kids educations all of that and like it was this originally at least it was this huge week it was kind of like oh my God I I better like I've been a really do this well yeah yeah because uh you know if if I don't uh lots of people are gonna suffer not just me and and then the other thing is
I was listening to you there there's a a book the book itself isn't great to be honest but its thesis is really interesting it's called The hypomanic Edge why America is built differently than other countries and essentially the author's thesis is listen man we are a nation of people who left their home country they left their kith and kin
they left everything they knew many with nothing right got on a ship came to a new country that that type of profile that type of genetic innate though might be different than the baby stuck around right and and so I I find that interesting and it's this kind of Frontier mentality which you definitely see in America uh even
today right now it was much more pronounced earlier in America but you know it leads to one of my kind of little hobby horses that I'm always on which is we we despite all of our problems we still are the place most creatives uh entrepreneurs want to live and work and and my answer is let them let them let them come 100 100 yeah because like if
we can still be that draw that I mean that is an asymmetric advantage over like virtually everywhere else but you also we also bring up something that as I just mentioned a second ago really resonates with me running a business requires that you assume complete and utterly full responsibility but for what the outcomes are and you
know it's like Harry S Truman the buck stops with me yeah like I tell me a little bit about how how that kind of dawned on you I I you know I told you about waking up in a cold sweat myself did was there a moment or was that something that just kind of slowly became really apparent to you there's almost an inverse of that moment
I had with my wife one day uh we were living in Brooklyn and this was in the like hodgepodge agency days I was I had a a reasonable sized corporate client but I was just like totally burned out I was not enjoying the work I was doing I was just like kind of all of the downside of being responsible for everything with none of the upside
just like completely yeah just a shell of a human being she's like you know what maybe we're not cut out for this maybe we're not entrepreneurs maybe this is not the right decision and you know whether it was I don't know there was just some response in me where I was like you know what I have enough evidence at this point
that I don't want to go back to work and do this just basically in a different setting so I need to figure this out and that was when I I read this article that I can't even find anymore it was on medium and it was referencing the film in time have you seen that film yes sir yeah yeah yeah yeah and that that
um I think led me that or primed me for the navals of the world and the the people who are thinking at a level of abstraction higher than punch the clock do the work get paid repeat um and reading that I was like there's something fundamental about this that I that resonates with me but I don't get it like how am I gonna do how would I do
this with my skill set I am a a designer that people pay to make the thing they want to make and that just it took so long to break through that mentality it's really not something you read and you figure out like you don't just go oh okay then I'll just start doing that then like that's not how it works obviously like all of this is a product
of this has been said many different ways but it's like your decisions from five years ago three years ago two years ago why you're doing or experiencing what you're experiencing today not yesterday not a week ago or whatever else so these things take time to to uh take effect or if you're truly acting upon these ideas in the right way you're
not going to get feedback on day one that it works so you do have to rely on your instinct that there's some truth in it when you start because you are giving up like I was giving up really really good contracts with these Brands like I could live a comfortable life like they would send me work as much work as I could handle basically
um and there was no no real end in sight to that it was just you feel like you're making zero progress like you're a lot of this stuff's even on the NDA so I can't even publish it I'm just like doing the work delivering the work getting more work delivering the work and uh yeah understanding the opportunity that existed on the
internet and Twitter specifically that was a huge Turning Point too um making the leap from my mum commenting on all my photos on Facebook to understanding how an open network like Twitter functions was a huge a huge leap um I forgot the question but there's uh another Ramble On on the power of the internet I guess yeah no it's it was an
excellent ramble and and the thing I would highlight is something you said about decisions so there's a good quote that goes along the lines of you make your decisions and then your decisions make you yeah very good um so uh being aware of that and cognizant of it but also being aware that uh external validation is maybe not
as useful as internal validation I know you agree with me because I've been reading your stuff but but expound on that a little bit too because I really believe that a lot of people don't get that in yeah I think that is well contextualized by the last this idea of the day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit I don't know who
to attribute that to but that's uh like these are biological natural processes that you can't get away from like these abstract things you read them like that's corny it doesn't make sense it's cringe and then it's funny all of these quotes some of them that I've now worked with and made stuff to represent if you'd have
showed them to me when I was like 21 I'd be like yeah I would I would really dismiss that stuff with Vega let's just say that um but these things are cliches for a reason because they're so broadly applicable as like so many people have seen the truth in them and kept them alive because there's a fundamental mapping to the the truth
of The Human Experience that keeps this like little phrase on the wall or in a trinket gift shop and you know there's also you know people operating at the highest level in business in sport in you know whatever discipline science that you want to imagine that continue to reference these quotes and until I think you're
experiencing some form of that feedback you're very skeptical about that stuff because it sounds like people just reciting these like party lines um the the process I think of doing it for the sake of doing it is also a hard thing to convince people up and the and the sake of it is like visualize value for example like I found
this little set of constraints that even if nobody saw what I was doing I was getting better as a designer like I was solving these little puzzles and I just happened to be broadcasting them out like I was scratching a little creative itch of my own and happened to just be able to send those out as these like network of signals that represent my
puzzle solving ability I guess um and then that that compounds in so many different ways it's like I get a little bit better at doing that each time and the collective uh the collective understanding of my ability to do that grows because someone seen me do it 50 times then a hundred times then 500 times um somebody had an incredible definition of what a
brand is and I'll try and dig up the reference but essentially it's this decentralized belief that exists in other people's minds of your capabilities and that is the most intangible thing you can imagine it's like somebody is a reputation brand that could be used interchangeably there right it's like expecting somebody to
trust you to do something important the first day you meet them highly unlikely and you do something a hundred times in front of somebody not and don't ask them for anything they're likely at a certain point if they need the thing that you do come to you and say hey I've noticed that you've been doing this for however many years
however many times I need help with that specific thing um yeah trust is this intangible thing that that requires almost like yeah just the demonstration of your ability without the weird incentive structure creates the most amount of trust and brand and Goodwill and people have written very eloquently on all of the
above um but it's really not a difficult it's not a difficult thing once you've found something that is intrinsically motivating or interesting to you and this is this is that massive fundamental debate about don't follow your passion follow your skill or something I can't even remember it's a very good I think controversial
line and my critique of a lot of that is there has to be some level of Interest sustained for you to be great at something and I don't know if anybody's come up with the perfect answer to this because it does a lot of it also comes down to competition right it's like people love basketball the amount of people that
love basketball relative to the amount of talent needed to get paid to be a basketball player is that Delta is like the biggest thing you could possibly imagine right so it is about getting really creative I think with like the trade-offs there of what am I great at but what also can I kind of manipulate that into something that
would have value to others um and in my case I'd already been in environments where I understand this concept of if you can help somebody communicate more effectively then they're going to be able to capture more value and you are going to be able to ask them for a little fraction of that value and I think that's true in most contexts
especially on the internet so people do it in different ways like building a YouTube channel for example the amount of time it takes to build a YouTube channel to you know livable income stream is enormous it takes an incredible amount of time and yeah there's they asked it's actually inspired me to write more about this it's like that Gap
that you have to transition is almost um you have to there's this this massive trade-off happening between what you're good at and what you ultimately want to be doing and you're kind of just pointing it a little bit more in that direction each time like the I haven't heard that many stories of this like Ultra pivot of the
of a creative person at least it's like one day they're doing this and then they completely shift to a different field where they have no reputation and they're you know living off it on day one there's there's a the transition between those two things is largely a painful process it seems yeah and uh I I I there's just so much that we could go
down so many rabbit holes on what you just said because like the the idea all of the really super successful people that I've met in my life for the most like let's not generalize and say all many of the most successful people I have met in my life have found that intersection between what they're intrinsically interested in and good at
and practice practice practice practice practice right and and put it out there put it out there put it out there I love Teddy Roosevelt's in the arena it again a little bit corny right but like really true really really true and and you know it it's it there's so many conflicting things right because without practice
you're gonna fail right that I think everyone would agree with that but by the same same token if you if you repeatedly practice the same thing getting it wrong right and you do that 20 or 30 times have you had a new experience or or have you just repeated the same mistake and I usually people on my team I used to say you know there's
nothing wrong with screwing things up but try to try new Miss make new mistakes right try to after you've screwed something up learn from it because I think mistakes are oh that's the learning Rich environment right that's how you learn by [ __ ] [ __ ] up and yeah and but you've got to say okay let's try to
let's try to make a new mistake and you know the line when an engineer builds a bridge and it falls down they learn from that they put it in their body of engineering a lot of uh knowledge and they don't build the bridge that way again and so much of what you see with these like huge flame outs right is people who try something either you know
quotidian or rebound and fail and then they just keep trying to do it the same way again and are surprised when they fail and it kind of gets into the idea that I wanted to talk about with you because you you really seem to be good at understanding that the power and importance of words but also the limitation of language of our human
language right Wittgenstein said the limits of my language are the limits of my world and you get into sort of korbitsky's the map is not the territory you know it was not the meal and I and I just looking at your work I see that you think at least I I see it this way I see a lot of your work that seems to uh signal to me that you've thought about
this really really deeply so so share a bit of of like how you go about thinking about that how you go about kind of almost transcending the language which binds us right yeah I think the I've had that experience in a lot of different contexts a lot of what the inspiration for visualized value or the conviction in what visualized value
came out of the gates as which is this translate something complicated and verbose into something uh succinct comes from pitching ideas to rooms full of people as a designer or an art director or in an agency context where actually as you were teeing up this question this idea of not even necessarily finding the skill
but finding the feeling that the skill creates the feedback loop that the skill fuels and in my case that was the aha moment that people have in a room when you explain something to them that they previously didn't understand or you give them this new layer of context that gives them a more appreciation for the company they work
at or the thing that they're building or and that is a really powerful thing to experience that I got addicted to that feeling basically that a good friend of mine uh his name is Jonathan Wilson he said success is an addiction that Society approves of which like if you're trying to solve problems or you're trying to make people um
see something more clearly that to me is the like I have this mechanism for doing that but there are many other ways that somebody could do that and then when you take that skill set over to the internet you're entire all of your opportunity I think this is true in the real world too but you're literally shouting into the void
on the internet if you don't have like if you're in a room with someone they almost can't ignore you even if you're not making that much sense but if you're not making sense on the internet you're just Dead on Arrival it's like you know the the necessity to clearly communicate what you can do is like life and death as a a commercial endeavor
and yeah just getting that the first the first part of that Journey was Twitter where there was a ability to see an idea that already resonated so you're just building on top of stuff that has already been validated by the market in many ways where a navalism let's say has X number of people that have Amplified it I'm like oh maybe I could add a
little bit of context to that idea or share my additional interpretation of how I would visually contextualize that idea and that started this feedback loop of sometimes the authors of those ideas would re-amplify what I'd made so you have this like real again incentive alignment there where the person who said the thing or
articulated the thing is getting this piece of media that further amplifies their idea they're amplifying it to people who are already interested in what they have to say and how they think which puts those people in my Orbit and they might a couple of them might follow what I'm doing and it's just this positive sum game all the way
up where you're introducing these ideas giving something away but also attributing the person who started the thing and um yeah then I guess when you get to scale on the internet and you just start to think about things very differently where if you're selling a product then you're able to pitch that product to 10 000 people
the subject line of the email could be the difference between one sale and a thousand sales it's really like it really starkly illustrates how important it is to to clearly communicate what you're trying to communicate and um that idea of the limits of the language or the limits of my world I think you can take that in
a really like conceptual way too where what visualized value has been trying to do for years is to expand the minds of people who are trying to compete in this world it's like the ideas that help me move from feeling trapped in a in an environment that and I felt did not make full use of my abilities and when I tried to offer more
of my abilities I was just hitting it up against a ceiling that the environment would not allow me to break through to operating independently and trying to you know you do it you're almost doing a lot less or you're spread across a lot less but you're way more concentrated on the things that are the best use of your Talent skill opinion whatever synonym
you want to use there so yeah I think about it in a couple different ways but but it's crazy how a single sentence can completely change the directory uh the trajectory sorry of your life you might write a tweet that resonates with somebody that you know I give a concrete example of this two people I collaborate with now on the
work I'm doing came through visualize value and have been following it for two or three years and it's almost like we speak a different language because of our shared context in that work there are ideas that I've been kind of hammering over and over and over again and anybody that wants to come and work on anything I'm doing
is more than likely going to come through having seen all of that stuff and your taste is aligned your perspective on what should be built is aligned and there's a really powerful and almost like Indescribable quality to the relationships that you can build with people that you have I've collaborated with people for years that
I haven't met I do a podcast with Trung who I know you had on recently I've never met him in person ever we've done a hundred plus episodes of a podcast we've never met in person and before that we're you know just going back and forth in Twitter DMs and probably following each other without interacting for you know 100 200 300 pieces of content
you feel like you know somebody based on how they express themselves so and it's just it's just totally obvious what Trung is good at right like there's there's a million different ways for him to apply his talent but he gets to pick exactly what he wants to do because he has demonstrated that skill for so long and
uh built like an insurance policy for himself in doing that too yeah you know um we are very simpatico I would say that of all the people who work with me at O'Shaughnessy Ventures I have maybe met a third of them in real life incredible yeah um and the head of my infinite media's vertical uh is Liberty on uh on uh Twitter um and literally
um I followed him for years and years on his newsletter and and uh built up the conviction that you know he is such a great curator and he is such a great thinker and he he he weaves very disparate disciplines together kind of seamlessly is he and part of the thesis for the new company has been that good taste for lack of a better word uh leads
to good curation leads to finding the people who love that kind of stuff right and but I completely agree the way we built O'Shaughnessy Ventures is very much like that with like you and Trump and the the the idea that you can find mind if you're willing to open your own aperture right you can find incredibly
talented people that you Vibe with and You Know It ultimately yes I want to meet all of everyone in your life in fact we're doing that this fall uh but um it it certainly did not stop me from hiring a bunch of people uh just on their work and the and the way that that um we we synced up but that also leads me to a question like Vision right is
that a skill or is that something that is innate is that something that that like you can teach to somebody or or does the colonel have to be there I think I think it goes back to the exposure to certain people and certain things happen I'm could basically speak to my experience which I definitely attribute a lot of where I am now to
definitely taking risks and being curious about how the world works I think that is something that maybe one has a disposition for or not but then the idea of being exposed to what is possible in my mind that's how your vision expands is a function of how far you've seen other people go or how far you've seen other people push
certain things um yeah so I think there's there has to be that that fundamental curiosity to expose yourself to those things but even like the smallest amount of exposure introduces you to something else in many cases like the first guy I worked for in the States was a xjwt creative director like worked Madison Avenue like 80s 90s advertising
and he started his own shop with five people in West Chelsea in a gallery building and I guess I got exposure to like the Nitty Gritty dirty business building from day one which in my mind at the time I'm not thinking oh I want to do this one day but it's it still lodges this memory that that's possible and I think the
the closer you can get to that the more the more likely that stuff subconsciously influences you too uh I think some people know that's what they want to do I certainly didn't when I came out of University I'm like if I could get paid to be a graphic designer that will be incredible like if I like that the part-time jobs and the stuff I
did to support myself when I was a teenager most of it was like I'm gonna go and study graphic design because I don't want to do this for a living like if I can make myself useful enough that I don't have to I worked it like um an industrial shredders for a little while um Honda I mentioned I had a ton of jobs that would have
I was not looking forward to spending another 40 or 50 years doing and I got lucky enough that my cousin was a graphic designer when I was younger and I was like that sounds better than going and you know doing a week's work experience at the bus station which is where the school would have placed me so I got lucky on that front
and that's a whole nother thing about how uninspired a lot of the education system is for so many kids like if you don't get exposed to this stuff you just don't know and that's I guess the other promise of the internet is you can be exposed to that stuff regardless of your physical situation which I think is one of the most
positive Arguments for the internet you can make is the idea that you can get a job at a Shaughnessy Ventures if you're a great writer doesn't matter where you live um but when I was when I was coming up when I was at University age I think Twitter existed but it was like people posting pictures of their lunch right or it was it's
really fascinating how we had the tool basically in the same form back then but the way in which we used it was so much less sophisticated and obviously that's only going to compound crazier and crazier and crazier and the the difference between being somewhere physically and not is really compressing I guess so I think um yeah I imagine this is like
we share a lot of opinions on this where vision is about what you're exposed to and the internet when used correctly or when pointed in the right direction can really change your trajectory of your life because you're exposed to you're exposed to people you're exposed to ideas you're exposed to experiences that you don't have directly but you
you get so fascinated by that you you find your way into it the whole thing is such a perfect example because I was like mind blown by that stuff two years later I'm illustrating a book with Eric johmanson of naval's ideas like if you'd have told me that the day I read that tweet I'd be like there's no way you
know but yeah you can there's there's a great Steve Jobs quote right you can manipulate the world you could shape the world you can change things you have agency and I think a lot of it just comes down to being exposed to there's a huge amazing irony in that agency as a word like this idea of being able to do whatever you want to do and my entire
background was agency businesses where I had no agency Eric is a friend and uh the uh the interconnectedness and synchronicities of the web just Astound me and and always have like I was an early adherent to I was so fascinated by the internet and and another Brit friend of mine who we're also an investor in his uh company
entrepreneur first uh Matt Clifford gave me the great term that the internet is the greatest variance amplification system that humans have ever invented and I loved that description because like he's so right right it's like all of the things that we're doing that you're doing um impossible without the internet right
just could not happen and and one of the things that I'm always pounding on is that theme right like you and I uh if this is 1965 we're 1970 you and I will never meet each other unless it is absolutely accidental and and so one of the great things about the internet is what you what you've done what we're trying to do is it it
allows you to step into so many situations or learn about so many things then you simply would not have had an opportunity to do so right and and I see this progressing as you just mentioned right it's gonna get it's gonna compound upon itself and you know I'm a big fan of Robert Wilson's work um he was 50 years ahead of his time and
and he he stole from Timothy Leary the idea that we all live in these reality tunnels that are different from other people's reality tunnels but one of the things that I find fascinating and very enthusiastic about is we are now developing methods and technology that will literally let us inhabit somebody else's reality tunnel and and it's an
insane concept yeah isn't that unbelievable like imagine like you let's say that you uh are live in New York right and you're very liberal and X Y and Z right imagine being able to wake up in I don't know Arkansas or Alabama and and just experiencing what that is like I personally think it will make people much more tolerant you know and
again right we were talking earlier about why are all these acne phrases still around they're still around because they make a lot of sense and that's you can walk a mile in somebody else's shoes you you have a lot more empathy for them you might not agree right you might you in fact you might you probably won't but if you have the
opportunity to inhabit somebody else is reality I just think that's very cool I'll be incredible yeah and and I definitely see it coming um with the tech that we are developing and and so I'm very excited I mean like my my version is like I am so [ __ ] lucky to be alive at this point in history yeah 100 because like all of
these things were impossible like I'm 63. so 10 year old gym in 1970 like not zero zero of the if if I could time travel and tell 10 year old Jim what he was doing now he would go no way oh yeah yeah yeah I know how could you do that right um I want to shift gears too to just keep this as useful for all the folks who are listening to us because you you
have a really interesting formula for Success that I want you to chat a bit about um the the first part of it is you know Scott Adams the now disgraced I guess uh Cartoon uh he he had a really nevertheless great idea about building a talent stack right words you you don't have to be top percentile on one thing it's much better
to be like really good at seven yeah which which you which you uh agree with and and then but the other part that he doesn't like kind of goes into but he just does it to show like all the ways that people interpret things differently another one that you you that you insist upon which I want you to expand on is you got to be
able to communicate clearly and so that's one of those interesting things like it's really interesting to say hey uh and you got to be able to make you know make yourself clear okay good advice how the hell do you do that and you're particularly good at that so is there any like I don't know process something that that
somebody could listening to this uh uses a jumping off point I've got I guess the the feedback loop that I've had working on visualized value has been one of them but one tangible or practical thing that I've found helpful when we've developed curriculums before I've had somebody who has no idea what this stuff is go through the
entirety of the curriculum and say if you're and if the context is different like if you're building somebody up from zero knowledge on a subject and trying to get them to basically stack these Concepts on top of one another until you understand it that has been really helpful for me to like understand where I missed something
and I think I got that in the agency world too where you're you're telling a story sequentially Slide by Slide by slide and you obviously have to have a good enough this is another problem I think with agency world is sometimes there's not enough conflict or there's not enough pushback or there's not enough like you know people don't want to step on
toes or or and and the idea of getting great feedback I just attribute so much of my growth professionally to a couple of people in my career that have genuinely told me that's not good enough you know like they'll say at my first boss told this story a few times on podcasts now but I the guy that I was telling me about worked at JWT
um and we do these like reviews of work in the office it's like bring me to work at this time right and I'll come over and I'm walking out and we're in like a 300 square foot Studio I'm like uh um like all these caveats before I present it I'm like oh it's not really good enough it's not really ready and he's like why are you bringing it to me then
yeah like go and sit back down and tell me you need more time don't waste my time bringing me stuff that you know isn't good enough like if you know it's not good enough what do you think I'm gonna say about it like I'm not here to like make you feel better about that stuff I want you to get better at what you're doing
and if you don't feel like you've taken it as far as you can take it go and sit back down and do it um and I had a few like really Direct funnily enough German European creative director bosses in my early agency days that were like so incredibly direct about what they thought at that um yeah just I'm so grateful for that and
that's another like putting yourself in uncomfortable quote-unquote situations where you might not be the best um and and huge props to anybody in a in a professional environment that is empathetic enough to do that somebody has heard I I've heard somebody refer to that as uh macro empathy so the idea of if you really care about
somebody you really want them to get better and feel more confident you will tell them that what they're bringing to you isn't good enough or needs work or whatever else like the discomfort you feel in the short term is a massive uh is a massive favor that you're doing over the long term so um a lot of it has to do with that and I
think um just be like maybe this comes across as a bad advice just like be harder on yourself sometimes like you as you meant like the reality tunnel thing I think is a good frame for this where it's like this might make sense to you but you're operating from a completely different set of references not completely different set but you
have like cumulatively a different understanding of the world than somebody else right even if like one word might have like you might have a better grasp of the definition of a complicated word for example than somebody else and this all depends on what you're trying to accomplish but if your goal is to
make knowledge accessible which mine has been for a few years the idea of making things more complicated for the sake of you know chasing a more sophisticated reader is completely in the antithesis of my goal I'm not saying nobody should use uh complicated language or you know if that's if that's what you're trying to
do you should absolutely do it but the the imperative to to make your ideas as accessible as possible if that's the thing you're trying to build it does come down to empathy I think it's like understanding my wife Celia has been a massive um help to me on the last few years where I will sometimes get on the like stubborn creative like I'm not dumbing
this down you know I'm not gonna you know I'm not gonna explain why I did this and this she's like that's what people want to hear like that's why people are listening to you in the first place like there you made a name off of simplifying complex ideas and now you're in this you know I get stuck sometimes in these like oh I'm not
gonna I'm not gonna go back to it's like you're completely working against the thing that you know resonated in the first place so happens people to check you is a lot of it you know don't believe your own [ __ ] that's another another good one um and just yeah reps repetition of of getting into rooms or writing things on
the internet trying to explain things that you've learned and there's always I wrote this tweet a couple years ago it's like there's always opportunity in simplifying something like there is always something out there that a large number of people do not understand that would be useful so like communication as a skill there's always excuse using like
a a cold term but there's always like an Arbitrage opportunity there right take this complicated thing simplify it and introduce people that would not have been been able to access it through that lens and you're like straddling these two spots where you might understand something that you have an opportunity to
simplify because you spent more time around it and that just unlocks it unlocks a lot of opportunity but it's also like a really good feeling to be able to create to take something that somebody didn't understand like I still get emails now about like one graphic I posted two years ago or three years ago so I was like this changed the way I
think about thought about X forever and like you can't even quantify the the benefit of that it's it's very powerful yeah and uh I as you were speaking I was thinking about uh Chuck Mingus the jazz musician his son was a uh oil painter and and and his son presented some work to him that was abstract kind of
expressionist and and Mingus was really hard on him and he said you know what go go and learn how to paint an apple that looks like an apple and after you've done that then come back to me with it hahaha yeah because and I always loved that line because it's really harsh but there is so much truth in it right like the
the the the people like Picasso horrible human being great artist yeah uh but like uh Trump uses the the bull example about him first off in his early work man did that guy know how to paint a bull but then his genius was in abstracting it to just the LIE right that Steve Jobs ended up using in an apple uh commercial and and and so I see that in your work
as well and um you know as far as it sounds like we've had similar experiences because my wife saved me too uh one of the first things that I ever wrote I wrote for Barons when I was 32 and a particular investment strategy and and my wife graduated so in journalism and and was gracious enough to be willing to look at
my work and the first time I asked her to do that was for that article and you know I had been the editor of my school newspaper in high school and worked on the college newspapers everything I thought I was a pretty good writer and like literally she looked at what I wrote that I was going to submit to Barons and we were on a train going into
New York City and she looked at me and she said this is the worst piece of [ __ ] I've ever respect I got really angry right like you do to begin with right now man I was lit up I was so mad like and and you know the night didn't go well right but then the next morning I woke up and like get a huff like so what's wrong with it
and she's like everything uh you know you're you're using these ten dollar words when uh five cent words gonna make your point a lot better she she goes and so here and she had redlined the whole thing and she handed it to me and I looked at it again got angry but then as I reworked it I realized oh my God she is so right yeah and that kind of feeds back into
what we were talking about earlier right we we I as I've gone through life I've come to realize that the average human it the the fragility of the average human myself included oh of course yeah um is much more profound than than I thought when I was a young guy let's put it that way um and and so like I don't know that there's a hack I don't
know that there's a hack that you can uh learn like like you had with your wife reminding you I had with my wife telling me that what I had done was just absolute [ __ ] um like how any how uh writing on the internet would be one way any other ideas like for how people could like jump off into the willingness
to like be told like yeah I think I think as you were explaining that the language that came to my mind is like you have to get closer to reality yes and your wife for the most part you know is gonna be as close to somebody telling you that you're high on your own Supply as anybody right right and and that's true in the market sense
too like in the agency sense you are so many layers abstracted away from the market right like you're kind of shielded from I think this is another navalism maybe maybe uh maybe biology I don't know it's like everyone's bosses the CEO is everyone's boss and the and the boss's boss is the market and like that mentality I think
it's really really I guess paradoxical because what I'm saying in the context of not having reality as your boss it's really hard to get that feedback like if you have a great boss like I had when I started that will tell you what they think and you'll get better really really quickly if you're in an environment that doesn't
optimize for like real feedback you're just you're stuck in this stagnant thing but luckily you have access to the internet and you can write it like Twitter in my mind is reality like you're getting for the most feedback on um buttons you're pressing not necessarily on the truth of your statement but the Resonance of the thing
you are saying is being tested in real time and now even like the idea of literally monetizing the amount of eyeballs natively through Twitter is just an evolution of that right YouTube Twitter all of these things are um and it is a is really an uphill battle I think if you have a you know if you're trying to do something
counter-cultural in many ways if you're in education let's say the platforms available to you in MO for the most part do not optimize for quote-unquote educational content I imagine a lot of people listening to this are lean in that direction I don't think there's that many tick tockers listening to our conversation here thinking about you know how to make
investment thesis more accessible for example just like you're fighting against you're fighting against these incentives but being on the platforms that give you like instant feedback from reality in my mind is uh is a huge a huge accelerant of the the learning Loop um it's really comes back so I think we said this at the beginning of the
conversation it's like it all comes from putting yourself in a situation where you can potentially fail or be uncomfortable or feel some kind of downside because by trying to protect your downside you are obviously giving up any potential upside and there's there are risks to anything obviously but of the you know writing blog posts
on the internet for example what is people call that like it's asymmetric upside to that right you're becoming a better writer like take the Morgan houses of the world is probably a good reference for this podcast like incredible all right other just kept going and going and going and going Talent is obviously recognized published
an Incredible Book yeah another book about to be published grow an amazing personal Network um and I think that I know that feedback loop seems more real to me than um trying to do that in a environment where incentives don't necessarily line up with what the person consuming the work wants I think eventually they do but
when you're trying to grow and you're trying to learn quickly those environments definitely slow you down like the do you have 20 years of experience or one year experience 20 times over you heard that one before yeah that that to me feels like that doesn't happen on the internet like every day on the Internet is is vastly
and wildly different For Better or Worse it's like the variance machine that you're talking about um yeah I just I think that is the unlock especially if um especially if access to those environments physically is is difficult which most for most people it is yeah I and and I love your idea that uh the unlock is being able to get closer to reality
and and you know uh another one of my favorite authors is the what I call the fictional character known as Jed McKenna who is an Enlightenment uh author and he's got this great quote which is um if you're having a little tea party with Lord lion and Lady gazelle and somebody comes along who doesn't buy your fantasy narrative it isn't that
they're mean it's maybe that your little fantasy narrative is just a bit too fragile right and and and the somebody coming along in this is the internet right in in your example and you know that was one of the things that I learned at a very young age because of what I was doing the market man I'll tell you if your job is asset management
in the market buying and selling stocks reality how's you in the face every day yeah and and you know you can say well I'm right into my it's wrong you're not going to do well if you're going to maintain that yeah you're wrong the Market's right and if you take that the right way it becomes this really powerful unlock because the other thing
like it I'm always trying to build algorithms that's from being a Quant for so long but but you know who who are some of like the best people to hire uh former Special Forces they're amazing because they're they're closeness to reality and the feedback on the map yeah and that right and so these are people
who very quickly like pivot change whatever and are very agile uh emergency doctors another people who are really interesting because they again life and death I gotta make a decision now what's the reality of this particular situation and and so those kinds of backgrounds like are very useful in a variety of of
Endeavors not just you know their original domain and and so I I completely uh agree on on that particular uh item well listen this has been like I could talk to you forever I I love weird stuff I love what you're doing I do have to ask I wasn't gonna do it but because I always try to be anti-memetic and like I don't want to
talk what everyone else is talking about but I loved your redesign for uh uh musk's Folly um by the way I don't I'm not sure it's falling uh which puts me in the minority yeah yeah I actually think it might be [ __ ] genius um and I loved your your redesign um what do you think what do you think about him changing this long-standing logo uh
of the bird which I learned yesterday by the way was a three-person job um and yeah I saw that throw down yeah right and so I was fascinated by that but but what do you think what do you think of of the ax and and what he's doing there I'm the almost reference the um the Buffett slide never bet against Elon Musk I was I I mean the guy
to imagine that there is not a massive amount of long-term thinking behind that move is in my mind a naive you know it's a naive position to take that this guy is not thinking in decades and I think there's probably some vanity play in there like you you you wanna want the thing that you are spending a ton of your time on to be reflective of
uh you know your idea or leave your mark on the thing and then on the the logo front I think that's a uni code I think that's just a standard character from the Unicode alphabet incredible um the the suggestion that I made was kind of uh this like snarky idea of keeping some of the visual Equity of Twitter so using
the scallop of the the check mark which obviously there's been a ton of controversy around over the last year or however long this thing has been going on now it feels like a year maybe it hasn't been that long um and flipping that on his head with the X like this idea also of um the con the contrast between those
two symbols the the the X and the check mark which in my mind embodies this you know the pursuit of Truth the you know independently verifiable um experience of the world all the things that he has been very vocal about his ambition of what Twitter should mean and do um I also there's like a there's a huge aspiration to integrate payments into
this thing right and that was that was like a huge story arc of his career is the PayPal days like bringing that full circle which feels like you know um yeah there's some personal motivation in there for sure but that's I think that's also uh yeah it's all very obvious why a decision like that would be made and you
get like a ton of the you guys are throwing uh this many years of equity out of the windows up but I don't know I think people don't give uh human beings enough credit a lot of the time you know it's like you think people are gonna forget that Twitter went to X like do you think anybody's gonna like not remember that that was the
transition no like it everybody like I imagine the the daily active users on Twitter since this has begun just continues to go up and up and up and up and up um yes I think that like from a brand perspective I think losing the verb to tweet that's that's gonna be I'm very very curious to understand what our new vernacular for that will be
um yeah we'll maybe emerge from the crowd but I'm such a huge fan of this idea of uh tapping the hive mind for the identity of it too which I just like that just aligns with everything that I'm about and I like it was uh so fun to contribute to that like I had to basically drop my entire day yesterday when I saw that tweet I'm like I have to
I have to work on this so I did three versions of it um but yeah it's it's uh man there's never a dull day on there it's going to be really interesting to watch it roll out I totally agree and for what it's worth I I did tweet uh Hey Elon I think we found your designer which I appreciate that yeah because I I thought your your uh
blending of the old with the new but also with the impact of it right like flipping it on its head uh was was really brilliant but I also love the idea of the Hide mind I've always loved that idea and and I you know way back when one of my I don't know five or six years ago I decided Well I decided that I was I was going all in on uh online
about 2016 I stopped doing traditional media for the most part um just because I saw what I think has been unfolding and will continue to unfold which is the world is moving and it's already moved frankly um and and you know that's why I'm amused by all the people saying oh you know uh dude that's not going to work well
it's very much the midwit meme in practice right it's like really yeah it's x.com easy to like the best domain in the world basically you know one letter domain for something of that magnitude is incredible and then in the middle it's like oh the brand Equity is being destroyed about the reality is like the the man even I've talked about this with
uh with Trung and Below on our other podcasts a lot and it feels like Twitter is such a hard business to value in real time like it really does feel like I've been looked at very funny for saying that like 44 billion dollars for that platform is like the biggest bargain ever like this idea of a yeah the the real-time mapping of sentiment
Consciousness uh even being able to report things from every corner of the earth it's like there is no there's no replacement for it there's nothing that has that level of network effect there's nothing that um heads of state announced things on as readily as Twitter or any you know I learned this when I started to
visualized value that it's so different from like the Facebook fan page for example where the person who it's about does not engage with the thing on Twitter these people are opening the app and checking their notifications natively it felt like such a massive uh just a huge unlock in my life like figuring that out I was like wow all
these people who are doing things that I really really want to be involved in are literally one sentence and a button click away from reading what I want to say to them and then the entire challenge becomes what do I say is not it's not an access problem it's like a articulation problem which is a like up until 10 years ago the entire
the entire thing was flipped on its head that that's like banging on doors and knowing this person and getting an introduction via that now stuff is still true to some degree but the yeah when you say like best time to be alive for just like creating access to things that you otherwise like would have to live
100 lifetimes to get the the chance to bump into somebody is a really really fascinating thing and it's so unnatural and you have to like you have to really lean into it and I think covid for me was that it normalized a lot of that stuff or it like it shifted us into the internet first you know fully digital relationships and completely uh
yeah completely decentralized businesses even just like I'm people I work with are thousands and thousands of miles apart different time zones all that same with me and uh it uh gave birth to the series that I need to get back to we've been doing a bunch of other stuff but we call it the great reshuffle and uh covet definitely uh sped up
a lot of things that I thought were coming right but I think that the lockdown made them happen seven ten years earlier than they might have and some of them are really good things I think um and and you know I for my thesis has had always been Twitter is going to become the worldwide Global intelligence Network that is always on
and when when you think about that for a minute you have everybody has access to that right and and so like the what you were just saying really resonates with me so strongly because like we have access to whoever we want really and and like it your abilities just sync up so perfectly because to get that shot right
you you've gotta you've gotta be able to have like it really owned because otherwise you're right you are just screaming into the void uh but and and you know that's the other thing I I just think so many people like do Twitter wrong and I don't think that it's like a function of what generation you're a member of um I think that it contributes right uh
but you know Zoomers are digital natives I certainly am not but um I think that um you're doing it right and and and that's why I I I love to be able to to chat with you and and have others hear hear the way you're looking at things well this has been a wonderful conversation uh at the end of this podcast we did it to you last time we're
gonna do it to you again so you get to do two more incepts work make you uh Emperor the world for one day as you know you can't kill anyone you can't put them in re-education camps but you can take a magical microphone and speak two things into it and you are gonna invest the entire 8 billion population of the
world whenever they wake up whenever their tomorrow is they're gonna wake up and think I've just had two of the greatest insights and I'm gonna take action against them right now what what are you going to incept in the world's population dude you said I got two two okay the first one I'm going to quote something that I heard a couple days ago
I was listening to an Alan Watts lecture you can have more Yin than yang that's the first one I'm gonna go for I love that I love Alan Watts too incredible incredibly articular guy yeah um and then the second one I would say it would definitely have to do with this concept of stop waiting for permission and that's like there's so much Nuance
to it so I'm trying to distill it into a single statement but it's like you have agency to create something that best represents what you care about and that thing will completely change the way you interact with the world we have to you have to start creating it putting it out there and it's gonna be uh an iterative process
I love it uh the the the the quote that I'm familiar with is it's far better to ask for forgiveness than permission and uh I've had to ask for forgiveness quite a bit in my life I imagine yeah and I suspect you too and Dave well listen Jack this has been a wonderful time thank you so much for coming on thank you I appreciate it