Modern Wisdom - #328 - Jack Butcher - Visualising Value & Constant Creativity

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

Jack Butcher is a designer, entrepreneur and the founder of Visualize Value. Jack has gone from being a normal agency designer to becoming the one-man-army behind Visualize Value - a business that generates over $100,000 a month at a 99% profit margin. Expect to learn how to avoid getting distracted by shiny object syndrome, how Jack prioritises creativity in a hectic business environment, what becoming a father teaches you about algorithms, how to sustain exponential growth and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at http://bit.ly/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Jack on Twitter - https://twitter.com/jackbutcher Check out Visualize Value - https://twitter.com/visualizevalue  https://www.notboring.co/p/the-great-online-gamehttps://p.mirror.xyz/1EpvJwUpx_KlRcHOKLNqADEkwHL_Z1ZYKobF2uLwgBghttps://otherinter.net/web3/headless-brands/Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening to beautiful people, welcome back. My guest today is Jack Butcher, he's a designer, entrepreneur and the founder of Visualize Value. Jack has gone from being a normal agency designer to becoming the one-man army behind Visualize Value, a business that generates over $100,000 a month at a 99% profit margin. So today, I expect to learn how to avoid getting distracted by shiny objects syndrome, how Jack prioritises creativity in a hectic business environment, what becoming a father teaches you about algorithms, how to sustain exponential growth, and much more. This guy is a force of nature. I think Jack has been pushing the boundaries of what people

believed you could do in the creator economy. He's done illustrations for Stephen Bartlett's book and then the Valmanak. He's grown his course at this terrifying rate. He was selling NFTs for hundreds of thousands of dollars. What I wanted to really try and find out is given that his business is based around creativity, how does he not get tied up with the urgent tasks that inevitably get in the way of the creativity, which is the driving force and the lifeblood of his industry?

So yeah, we get to find out an awful lot about that today. Jack is an awesome dude, and I'm very happy that he's flying the British flag in this burgeoning creator economy as it continues to grow. If you're new here or if you're a long time listener, do me one thing. Take your thumbs for a walk and press the subscribe button on whatever platform it is you're listening on.

It's the only way that you can ensure that you're never going to miss an episode every Monday, Thursday and Saturday when they get uploaded. It's the easiest way to support the show as well. If you love what I do, the best thing that you can do for me is continuing to listen and support and you need to subscribe button for that. So go and press it. I thank you.

But now it is time for the wise and wonderful Jack Butcher. The British are coming, the British are here. Never arrived, we have arrived. Here we are. Was it harder to grow a business to a hundred grand a month or to deal with a newborn baby? Newborn baby, ten times over I think. Really? Incredible man. Just like everything you take for granted watching even people in the street

with babies is like, everybody has babies. you know, how difficult can it be? It's frickin hard. It's hard. What's been the biggest challenge? I think just like handing over your agency or just like just completely absolving yourself of agency for a period of time where the baby is in control,

right? The baby dictates how the day is going to go. This is not a, hey, this is the schedule for today. It's like, you don't make those decisions anymore, babies making those decisions. At least for a couple months, right? At the start, you're on a different set of rules than you had ever imagined you would be on beforehand underestimated that to some degree, but we're at 14 weeks now, so we're sort of arriving at Actually, we're recording this. He broke a record last night as long as sleep ever so 9 hours and two minutes You're tracking me baby sleep if you've got an ordering on him Hey, he's got more equipment than you could possibly imagine. That's cool. So talk to me about

lessons, right? You, this sort of one-man band running visualize value in all of the other stuff that you do and then you add fatherhood into the mix. What is some of the lessons that you've learned from that? I think a lot of the business today has been based on this concept of using the Internet to create leverage, like divorce, your time and income, great products, not services and those concepts all are incredibly, they're incredibly valuable to a business, but there is the connection between your time and the result is still very obvious when you take a step back from building those things. So big lessons, one was just how much uninterrupted focus can lead to these seemingly small things that create big results down the road. So you could be walking around for four or five hours or just on the computer messing around something, and then an idea just comes to you.

Those periods of time are drastically compressed after you're in a situation where there's a human being depending on you, and my wife doesn't incredible job of holding back the tidal wave there, but at the beginning of the process, it was very much a, you know, the baby's in the room with you, you get like 90 minutes at a time before stuff kicks off. And that is like, I think you start to reflect on the fact that the space,

that the space that I had before led to a lot of the, you know, the best work is not necessarily, I think Morgan Howe's will talk about this. It's, it's not when you're doing the work. It's all the thinking that you do for days on end and then you just arrive at this epiphany and you're, you know, when a child is really small and you're looking after it, then those windows to create epiphany

is drastically compressed. So you feel like at the start there, it's like, am I ever going to get like 90 minutes of clear thought time? And that's also a product of it being your first baby and you're like, you know, you can't walk two steps away, you're really nervous. And I've heard these stories about people have their second baby in the hospital and they're just like, oh yeah, be fine, you know, but when you're like first time parents, you're just panicking about, oh, he's making that noise. He's making this noise. You're right. You call somebody. And you're just, you just realize how much like subconscious, like,

how much work your subconscious do was doing previously because it was unencumbered with like the thought of having to protect and raise another human being. So just that leveling our over time has been a big adjustment and also just looking at time in a different way. So if you have an hour, be a lot more intentional with how you use that hour, if you can, and sometimes that's not possible. Yeah, it definitely gives you an instant

perspective shift in the short term and what might do and what I want to teach somebody, how do you want the trajectory of your life to be now that you're in a very different situation than you were a few months previous. So yeah, I mean, the shift in thinking is kind of profound in every direction. It's hard to even articulate a lot of the different mental models that emerge as a result of it. It's such a multi-polar, multi-discipline, multi-modal change, right? You've just got all of these inputs and experiences layered with emotions and all manner of other things.

It doesn't surprise me that it's hard to condense down, especially as someone who does this for a living. Like you synthesize complex ideas as a job, that's your profession. Yeah. You're struggling to do it. I think as well, an interesting takeaway from what you've just said there is to go back to deep work that Carl Newport says. He talks about how social media particularly can fragment your days into blocks of time so small that it's impossible to get any meaningful work done at all, to some people who perhaps have a less mindful relationship with their social media feed than you do, their Twitter is your child constantly crying in the background,

constantly permeating the subconscious, just this ambient anxiety that, oh, I might have a notification, oh, I need to check whatever's what ever's happening online. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. I think there you can have those tracks running with a level of importance assigned to them that is not consistent with how important they actually are, right? This is an exception to the rule. The problem is over time you habituate

just that myelin gets wrapped so hard in your brain and it gets wired down so hard that it no longer is a conscious decision. It was just a race to the bottom of the brainstem and now you just type in T.W. on your browser thing before you even know it, which everyone's got right? Everyone's got the T.W. Reflex. T in the Fair enough. So the other thing that makes me think of is, is those things become so, so much a part of your routine that you, it's difficult to subtract them from what the actual driver of progress is. It's like it almost becomes a part of the pattern so heavily that you're like, if I stop doing that, then this result is going to stop showing up. And it's because it's tapping on so many of those like primal,

I'm not a biologist, but there is countless numbers of reports, research like into how much that is like drilled into your biology at this point. It's so hard to separate it. And I've gone through a number of feasts and famines or fasts on social stuff. And the idea that staying stuck in that feedback loop is good for the long term results of a business is a myth in most cases.

So many people, myself included, struggle to work out what the effective inputs are that are causing the right outputs to occur. And my industry, nightlife, right, it is so messy to work out. There's no such thing as direct marketing. There's the brand, everything you do is branding, right? So you have no idea, why is a night cool?

Why is an event cool? No one knows. It just is. If you know, then it's is branding, right? So you have no idea, why is a night cool? Why is an event cool? No one knows. It just is. It just doesn't know then, it's not cool, right? Well, yeah, exactly if you know you don't know. And it's, so what we're trying to do, we're like, me and my business partner have this conversation every year.

Do we need to spend as much as we are on and then pick any different category on guest list is on online marketing, on physical marketing, on DJs, on bookings, on celebrity PAs, on whatever it is. And we always come back to, I don't know, because I don't know what's causing the night to be effective, but systemically, from a habit sense, a lot of the time, especially if you found

a modicum of success, what you can do is go, right, nobody fucking move, nobody move at all, just stay right where you are. Keep going, what you can do is go, right, nobody fucking move. Nobody move at all. Just stay right where you are. Keep going, what you're doing. Continue to do the thing that you're doing because this appears to be less broken than it was before. So let's not try and fix it.

Yeah, spot on. I think the smaller the business, the more that's true. Right, because you haven't crossed the chasm into systems and delegation to the point where you can start you can start to identify what's working and what isn't, but I think there's also this weird middle ground between something being really special and unique and small, which produces cool things typically, and then these behemoths are more commoditized, like low margin businesses that

have spent decades making systems and you can get stuck in the middle really easily and I built a business like that a few years ago and it was absolutely horrible like productized agency service business. It's just the most brutal thing you can imagine and it's just a race to the bottom. So, yeah, it's a, this whole idea of the creator economy or being the solo capitalist, all of those traps are very, very dangerous and hard to avoid for sure. What else did you learn? Any other things from integrating fatherhood? Mums, man, m's are just unbelievable. My wife's resilience is just like just next level, man. I think somebody told me the other week, they've got a really good friend who was like

seal team six, you know, like insane top tier military veteran had his first baby a few months ago and he's like, this is the most brutal thing I've ever experienced. Yeah. And it's like, can you even, and you're the dude in the relationship, it's like you don't have the like the biological, you know, physical stress that that, um, the mom goes through and it's just remarkable to watch. And you have just a new found appreciation for your own mom, for everybody else that has raised the child, people that are raising kids on their own, it's just just remarkable, man. That's definitely the biggest

takeaway is like mercenaries, moms, just mercenaries. Just total killers. What about taking time off then? So you have this child, you want to be a good dad, you want to spend time with them, you also want to enjoy the experience, right? You know, this is the first time you're going to have the only time you're going to have a first child. So you think, I want to immerse myself in this, which presumably meant you took time away from the business. But there's algorithm loops occurring here. There's the fear of being less seen. Did he anxiety about spending time off? So interestingly enough, like the first few weeks, I was like, I didn't really, I was

really focused on like, what's the high leverage stuff, right? Like what are the like two or three things I can send out a day or where can I pull like stuff from the archives hasn't been out for two years and just surface it back up. And that kind of kept them momentum going and you're running on adrenaline for a little while the first few weeks. It's like, oh, I can get on my phone for 15 minutes and then you're just so wired that you can go back and experience fully like family time too. And then when the toll start, or when the sleep deprivation starts to catch up with you,

it's like while we're talking about the beginning of the conversation, where are these original thoughts gonna come from and where is the window of time to start to, you know, when that starts to open up, so you can start to produce at the same level you were before. Yeah, you start to think, man, am I ever going to recover? Or I'm ever going to get back to that rhythm that I was in before? Yeah, you start to realize that there's...

Logically, the risk is low. Right? You've built a huge network, you can go back and kind of... There's this anti-fragility to building an online business and a brand under your own name, which would, short of like nuclear fallout disaster. There's not, I'm not really worried about opportunity on a grand scale. It's like even like freelance clients or whatever else. But to sort of lose the momentum of a huge thing,

is something that you start to get anxious about. It's, because like you say, the way your content gets shown and you work on YouTube, which I think is even more brutal than something like a Twitter where there is some element of, on say meritocracy, but if you plug into the right thing at the right time, you can have these outsized results, right? Whereas YouTube is the grinders, like you have to get this many people watching it

for this, this percent of time over this period. It's so with the mercy of the algorithm on YouTube, I think more than any of the platform. Yeah, and I Started to get that YouTube momentum maybe a year ago, and I've not come back to the YouTube very seriously because of that because it's like, man I need to really decide to do it and pursue it properly But yeah, you start to see it showing up all over the place and Yes, it's just a reframing of reframing in general, I think the the world is changing in a lot of ways too. What do you think about that like feast

feast and fast mode of creativity and in the type that like the type of business that I've built, you really can do a month of intense work, do a launch, and then go away for three, six months, make something come back. That's never been how I've operated, but I don't think that's not an option. So it's kind of... Sean Pury had this really great analogy, where's like, if you have like a loyal network of people, you have essentially a stem cell.

So you can use it to produce anything you want, right? You could turn that into this execution or this product or you could build a community or you could like self physical product. There's all the different ways that you can like apply this, these relationships that you built at scale. But if you just used this like muscle repetition that you've been in, you lose sight of some of those other possible executions. So if the situation changes, you have to zoom out a little bit

and be like, okay, there's still, like, did you see that Tim Urban graphic, the weight, but why the path dependency there? It's very, that kind of conjures up that image in my mind too. It's like, you've gotten here by posting six images a day to Twitter, but you don't have to get there by continuing to do that necessarily if that makes sense. Yeah, it's so interesting when it goes back to the right, we found some success. Please, nobody change anything. And especially as a one-man army, you think, well, there's only me and my own neuroticism to deal with with this. I've just got my own thought loops and no one really to pull me out of it. You know, when one of the advantages, I suppose, that you get other than scale and the ability

to pass work down to people and delegate and stuff like that, one of the advantages you get is the pattern break within your own neuroticism in a business. If you have a conversation with somebody else and they go, well, let me just challenge you on that idea for a second because I'm not sure. But you are only you, right? And you're holding on to this success that you've built, bread and butter ground floor up. You've seen it every single step of the way sat there on Photoshop or After Effects or whatever it is that you're doing continuously iterating and coming up with ideas. And then somehow you need to have a new perspective because there's a child in the mix.

Yeah. And like abandoning the thing that works in favor of something uncertain, when you're weighing up the cost of the time, the time you get back versus the momentum that you forego. And my wife is like an incredible feedback loop and none of this would have happened on the business side without her either. It's like that doing it really solo is just probably incredibly intense.

And I imagine there are very few people that have no form of local feedback loop. It's like that's been a huge, huge advantage. Did you notice? Did you notice drop off then with regards to reach or conversions or whatever with Twitter and with Instagram during that break? Yeah, I mean, you can map it on a graph. It's like, we moved house in August of last year as well.

And the charts go on like that. And then we move the month, they're just completely tanks and then it's back up again. Because you just, there's leverage, but there isn't, momentum, there isn't just like imaginary momentum happening, right? You can create a leverage result, but you're not, like, I think that's this myth of passive income

that people talk about, or it's like, oh, I wanna, I wanna build passive income. It's like, you can build a leveraged income. And maybe there are some forms of passive income that open up to you when you have just absurd amounts of capital, for example, but to live off of passive income when you're starting out is a myth in my opinion. You need to pursue leveraged income where input is disconnected from output in just an outrageous. It's like how clever you can be rather than just how hard you can grind.

Dude, that's a bomb. I really, really like that. The fact that people get confused with passive income, what they think is input-free outcomes. That's not what you get. You just get to overly magnify the inputs. Yeah, and I think if you've managed to create leverage income for long enough that you have access to truly passive investments, that is possible, but it's like, rarefied. It's not within the creator economy. It's not within the things that we're talking about here.

David Perrell can't do right of passage and not be there. But people are there for David Perrell. Like, he had a conversation with him the other week and he was like, dude, for two months of the year, twice a year, I stopped my life. All I do is right of passage. Ali Abdaal with his part time YouTuber academy.

Like, the guy just lives and breathes and his team now that he's got this huge big fat team because these cohort based courses are significantly more resource intensive than obviously just a buy and pay the play type thing. And man, these guys just, that's it, that's their life for a period. So yes, it's leveraged income.

Yes, there is a degree of passivity to it because you don't have to be there as each person buys, but it's just magnification, not true passiveness. Yeah, and maybe your labor slowly reduces over time or the intensity of your, like, the necessity of your physical presence, but then that will switch to mental presence, right? Then you have to be a great operator and that's still effort and decision making and, yeah, judgment at scale rather than just leverage via some technology like being able to broadcast by video, something like that.

It's like building a team that can keep doing that. I suppose that means that you need to love the grind and you need to love the work even more so because a lot of the time people look at the, this is pointless graph, for instance, from visualized value and they presume that, okay, so once I hit inflection point and I get these to the moon gains, I then get to take my foot off the gas and the rocket continues to go up. And you're like, no, you just get to magnify the amount of effort versus output outcome that you get. Yeah, yeah, it's what is it? The Matthew principle? Yeah, to more will be given to those who have gotten.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. more will be given to those who have gotten. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are some of the unseen challenges with your type of business? Forget the child. What are some of the things that people wouldn't think or don't see that you face? I think you touched on it there.

I think it's the shiny objects is definitely one. So you'll get to a point where it makes very little sense to do, it makes it. You really have to be good at identifying what the leveraged things are and it gets dicey after a period of time where I think of a concrete example here. So building building the MVP of a product and getting it out, then getting stuck in the iterations of that product, for example, is like, I don't know the exact phrase, but it's like of that product, for example, is like, I don't know the exact phrase, but it's like, there's such a marginal return on all of that tweaking that should be spent on, you know, getting feedback from people, building relationships with people, meeting new people. I think that

the inability to zoom out and recognize what the, what the true points of leverage are. I think maybe the biggest takeaway is the idea of self-promotion. So I think this is another thing that could be extracted from that graph. It's like past a certain point, you think that everybody's out there doing your promotion work for you, right? Everybody's out there talking about your stuff. Hey, I've published this many episodes, and now everything's gonna take care of itself. And it's pretty remarkable, like even with a really sizable reach,

like the world that moves at the speed of the internet will forget about you in 15 minutes if you don't keep showing up. So how do you maintain this sense of perspective? You have certain things as a small number of tasks or operations that you do that add the most value, that achieve the most leverage. How do you avoid being caught up in the shiny objects, Indra? So, hard one. I think there is some weird responsibility to allocate a certain amount of time to pursuing stay plugged into, essentially, but the perspective, I think, that's helpful is just understanding what

the engine is. For me, that's producing the visuals for you that would be like recording and publishing the interviews and sometimes in pursuit of those shiny objects that aren't, that isn't, it's not the work itself, right? It's just a different way to deploy the work or a different way to think about the work or a different medium for the work. None of it is a replacement and I think where we lose perspectives when we start to think of it as a replacement for doing the work itself. So that's how I find perspective and reset that. It's like, okay, none of this would have happened

if I didn't show up and make these images and post them every day. It's that simple. You just go back to that. It's like, if I'm lost or I'm like, oh, momentum is waning somewhere. It's like, go and pick up a book, find 10 ideas that are resonating with you, get in front of the computer, turn them into visuals, post them.

And then all of these opportunities that will come three, six, nine months down the road, you may not know exactly what those things are, but the one thing that you have to commit to is the catalyst that's going to bring the opportunities to you. And I think we can sort of lose perspective that that's the input that's generating those outputs down the road. And that this is pointless graph is essentially trying to illustrate that. Like, I could not have possibly predicted

that an aval book is a great example, right? Like, starting to post these images of ideas that an aval was published as a way to find these tiny consulting gigs to get people to pay me to like design a landing page for them. Nine months later, there's like, I have an illustrator credit in a book on Amazon. It's like, that's nuts. And that was never ever like I did not pursue that opportunity by

directly. So it's about like this, you're pursuing something and then all of these opportunities kind of start to pop out at you indirectly as a result of you just like practicing in public. pop out at you indirectly as a result of you just practicing in public. One of the things that I've noticed again going back to the Club promo example, me and my business partner used to tell people to come to nightclubs for a long time. We didn't have managers, I would manage all of the networkers, and then over time you're like, right, okay, well, if we're going to run two or three or four nights a week, I need to scale myself up, right? So I need to get some managers in between me and the networkers because I can't manage 500 members of staff that are all guest-listing for us.

And then, okay, well, I mean, if we've got 11 managers or 12 managers and four nights, we probably could do with a night manager that'll look after each of them. And it's that story, I think it's from the emith where there's a lady that has a bakery and she wants to build a bakery factory or something. And then three years later she goes in to have a look at the people making the bakery stuff that loves a bread. And they don't know who she is. She hasn't got a clue how the bread's made anymore. And a lot of the time, I think we use that paradigm as an individual creator, we take the paradigm of a big business and we throw that over the top.

We get so caught up operationally day to day dealing with emails, dealing with the back and forth. Perfect example for the podcast is dealing with advertisers and recording the pre-roll intros. Like that's what generates the majority of the revenue. Have you paid your invoice? What are the talking points that we need to talk about? Have I tried the product? Do I think the products any good or not?

Back and forth with them, what rates are we going for? How long is it going to happen? And that takes up just as much energy and time and effort as the thing which is the reason that you are successful and have enabled those opportunities in the first place. And focusing on the core and staying as lean as possible, it's an argument for just uncomplicating the entire business process to have a single product, one thing perhaps, or one channel. And I think Anthony Pampillanos done this quite well in that he did one network at the time. That right, I'm gonna crush Twitter,

I'm gonna crush podcasting, James Clear as well. I'm gonna crush blogging, then I'm gonna crush Newsletter, then I'll do book, and I think he's now about to start podcasting or something like that. So, some of the smartest people are constraining the amount of shiny objects and operations that they can become distracted by because they know over time you will end up doing so much of the ancillary shit around the outside that somebody who doesn't have those complications

will come in and punch a hole in the middle of what you were supposed to be the market leader for. Yeah, I think it's osmosis. It's like serious businesses or proper businesses do this. I need more skews. I need more channels. It's like reading a Buzzfeed article on how to be a good marketer. It's like, do this on Facebook and do that on Twitter and do it. It's not really advice. It doesn't actually say anything. It's more like figure out, like figure out the engine and we talked about the like if there's some selfish component to that engine, then

that's how you win either way, right? The ability to turn an idea into a visual is not something that is only commercially viable or monetized both through a Twitter account. It's like a thing that you can do for people on a one-to-one basis. So you have this net that sits below the thing you're doing and you're adding leverage to it. I think it's very easy to get distracted by, or I don't know your exact story, but you were doing something else as well as building up this podcasting empire that is now six-figure subscribers on YouTube. It wasn't like, hey, I'm Chris and I'm starting this business, I'm

quitting everything else and I'm just going to start my YouTube channel because that would have been you would have, uh, Balsey. Yeah, Balsey, but also like incredibly difficult to monetize from day one, right? That idea that concentrating your efforts until something becomes much easier to point out as an asset to monetize rather than this sprawling beast where you don't really know where the points of leverage are. So, yeah, the rules don't apply the same way to the individual creator as they do the, apply the same way to the individual creator as they do the small business or the big business. And that's people read a lot of books with those rules and follow them and lose the edge that they would have created otherwise, which is the internet has enabled very different type of business to exist and be monetized, then something that needs 15

middle managers to operate. All of the rules are out of the window there. I really wonder, it's got me thinking whether there's an argument to be made that you constrain the upper bound on how much you grow or how many different things you try and do. You have all of these potential opportunities that are going to come to you, but they might arrive before you've finished dominating the core or before you've reached a degree of power law inflection that is high enough that it's unfailable. Now, nothing can add weight to the bottom of this rocket. We're going to the moon, like Jump on Board. And I would guess that most creators, unless you are incredibly disciplined or single-minded

or absolutely adore the thing that you do, will start to see these opportunities coming in and see them as viable business strategies. Well, look, this is what traditional precisely, and then that's when the rocket starts to run out of speed. There could be a way you could imagine a world in which you spent all of your time dealing with customer inquiries about courses and having calls with interesting people that want to just talk about your visuals and little side projects

and this and that and you're there and end up dedicating single digit hours per week or less to the thing that makes you renowned on the internet and the same goes for the podcasts, many all the time speaking to the advertisers or dealing with guests or scheduling or whatever it is. It's like, look, did you make this work when you first started? Yes. What was the thing? Why is the reason that people come to you? What is the very, very core of the product? Because this is the difference, right? When you think about someone like Nike, Nike have shoes, but their shoes really aren't

that much different to an added as per usual, or a Puma parachute, what you're buying are all of the ancillary benefits, right? And the outside of the union. The reverse is true in the creator economy. Everybody's got the extraneous stuff because people can make nice podcast artwork or people can get the same, people can even get the same guests as you. You know, the same guests as you,

they can read the same books that you do and summarize them. What is the thing that you have? What is the UVP that you bring to the market? That's the thing that you need to continue focusing on. Yeah, I was thinking about this idea the other day. And David Perrell, I think labeled this maybe as good as it's ever going to be labeled, the personal monopoly. You have the personal monopoly and then you have the monopoly. So the other idea I was thinking about is you have Amazon and then you have the artisan. These are like the barbell ends of the economy that we're barreling towards is like if you

have a, you know, to quote a, the gnarly Jeff Bezos, your margin is my opportunity, right? There are any business that traffics commodities in any definition is gonna get eaten up by Amazon short of some regulatory body standing in the way. Like, the Amazon hospitals, Amazon, everything versus the three billion media brands that people can start and maybe it's not exclusive to just media, but it's the very small, the media is probably the best example.

The very small media business that is the only way you avoid being a commodity is leaning into something so extremely specific that people can't get anywhere else, whether that's your personality, whether it's the creative output of your process of some kind or it's the way you analyze a company. There's great examples of that all over Twitter. People that do the same thing as the Wall Street Journal in essence, for the uninformedformed observer the Wall Street Journal is going to give you a report on a business and so as Some are like packing McCormick or Mario Gabrielle But people pay hundreds of dollars a year to read Packies analysis because he's funny or like they would like the way he looks at the world

But you can easily get stuck in the middle of that chasm in like, you know, sort of mediocre publishing firm that doesn't really stand out from either of the two. So it feels like maybe I'm so close to it that I feel like it's happening really fast, but it does feel like a trend that is taken hold at this point. Do you suffer with product fatigue? Obviously, you've got these courses that you put out now.

Those are one of the big drivers of revenue for you, but no one's going to buy a course twice, right? Yeah, it's definitely a huge consideration. So also, there's some ethical thing there where a lot of my knowledge is in these two things at this point. So I had the 10 year career and then produce two products that summarize what I learned in 10 years. And I'm still learning between when I published those and now, but those learnings are really modifications to the products that already exist. They're not

brand new things or at least I don't feel comfortable making them into brand new things. And the thing you have to square with that is like the market is just like their attention span is so low. So it's like that stuff is old at this point. And you'll see you know businesses like I won't know any names, right? But some people will put out 25, 30 courses on kind of the same thing, maybe framed a little bit differently, new name, new cover, new guest speaker, in order to just keep the attention of the market, which you can make an argument that this,

like the market makes the decision, like if they buy it, and great. But personally, it just does not fire me up. So I'm always, I'm now like maybe 50-50. So there's product development, there's community stuff that has existed from the first round of visualized value products and then 50% of my time is spent on like what is the next thing? What are the new mediums that I can go and take a massive risk on for six months because I have a parachute and then I can bring that knowledge back to the people that maybe are where I was two, three, four years ago, if we continue to go the knowledge route, there's also just like, this is a whole other rabbit hole, like a lot of Web 3 technologies that I've been introduced to the NFT stuff, like that whole crypto market is fascinating to me right now, which is causing a, like, subcall of learning and trying to figure

out how to dive into that world too. So, yeah, product fatigue is definitely real and the way to, it's just a difficult thing to address. In a world that has like a really, really short attention span, it's very hard to address product fatigue. Unless you're in a publishing business, that's, you know, like your business is a perfect example of this. It's like you do the same thing over and over again. You love doing it. And it always produces new output over time. And in a way, like visualized value gets more diluted the more it produces, if that makes sense. Like some of the things that I really want people to take on board that help me,

you could argue that you do a disservice at a certain point by adding too much. There's only so many ways that you can describe the same concepts, right? And the issue that you have as an individual creator that is completely self-powered, as you are, as opposed to the way that I am, where I get to ride off the back of each person

that I speak to, you have a upper bound on your inspiration level. You have an upper bound on your life experience as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we've talked about this before, but I think it's so fascinating, the difference between a media, the type that I do,

where I get to continuously get extra little turbo boosts and Mario Kart. I just jump on it, it's like, oh, it's a Jordan Peterson turbo boost. No, no, no, it's a Jack Butcher turbo boost. Now it's a Seth Gordon turbo boosts and Mario Kart. I just jump on it, it's like, oh, it's a Jordan Peterson turbo boost. No, no, it's a Jack butcher turbo boost, no, it's a Seth Gordon turbo boost. And all that I need to do is just be a mirror for that energy. I get to take all that they're doing and you kind of just become a bit of a pedestal or a platform. And even if you look to YouTubers, you know, you look to the Ali Abab dolls of the world, they're kind of still doing

that. There's a little bit more distance between them and the person that they're talking about or the concept that they're talking about, but there's more degrees of freedom with regards to how they can communicate those conversations and those topics. But yeah, it really is, there's something that you lose from being a podcast specifically in that it's the least viral of all of the creator industries as far as I can see. If you want to make money fast, podcasting is not the way to go because there's no associated virality with it specifically in audio. But what you do get is insane longevity because you essentially have a bottomless pit of

interesting people to speak to. I'm never going to run out of interesting people to speak to, you know, Rogan's what, 1800 episodes in, still going like an absolute champ. Eight, what, three episodes, four episodes a week sometimes, two episodes in a day sometimes because he can. And because he's got this curiosity that is his driver internally and he gets this extra engine that comes from the other people. Whereas when you are this solo creator, which, you know, you have become a role model, I'm sure for tons and tons of people that think, right, fuck it, I am ditching the shitty job that I do not like.

I don't want to spend my time here anymore. Jack butcher made it happen. I can make it happen, which is awesome. Like that's fantastic, But you are still on the upward curve of that hockey stick. What people haven't yet seen is what it sounds like we're now beginning to encounter, which is, okay, first set of rocket boosters have fallen away. Now how do I apply the second fuel cell to keep me going. Yeah, yes, it's a good analogy. The idea that I think this is an unattributed quote. It's like young people have ideas, old people have money. So you see this transition happen

everywhere. It's like people make money and then they become investors or they have like this feedback loop beneath them where you know you build a network and then you can power the network behind you with you know that have kind of a slight take thing that you you build up or deploying your expertise in the new way. I think these like and Web3 is a good example of this like these. What is Web 3? I have no idea what that is. So I'll do a horrible job explaining it, but essentially the evolution of the Web, the best description I've heard,

the shortest description I've heard, Web 1.0 is information links, right? So it's you publish information, you can link information, you can link from one article to another, from one institution to another, universities used Web 1.0, web 2.0 is social links,

so it's a Twitter, Facebook, like I know Chris, I met Chris, we built a relationship that way, I've published a bunch of podcasts, and then web 3.0 is economic links, so it's like taking the, experimenting with new ways to incentivize people to create. So there's like decentralized organizations being incorporated where you'd have, you

know, people working on a project in 15 different countries, they raise money from everywhere. And then they give back a portion of what they earn on the first round of their project to everybody that backed it. So it's kind of just stripping away some of the formality of building businesses. And that is just creating a bunch of crazy new ways to do things online. So NFTs is like the most, I think the shortest leap for people to understand what web 3.0 is

like how does a digital artist start to collect revenue for their work, but the, the nuances that you can achieve with a smart contract are far beyond like selling a piece of physical art. So it could be 15 people make this piece of art. And then they all split the proceeds. And then as this thing gets licensed and used in other places, there's a contract that pays them royalties. So all of the like monetization structures that YouTube, for example, are taken, I don't know what percent now, probably something crazy, but they give you a ton of distributions. So it makes sense as a logical argument as to why they take some of that. But this new ecosystem that is being built, I think, is playing into that

idea of like one plus one equals three in some cases. So like where I end up after a set of boosters one falls off might be, be oh this person is publishing a book that is That would really benefit from having these their ideas visualized for example So I'm going to enter into an agreement with them where I want X percent of the sales of this book and then And we get into some mutually incentivized not to say you couldn't do that without crypto, but it just makes it easier. And even digital access to this content can be, you know, you can monetize it and get rewarded for it. So it still feels to me like there's going to be a huge power law, a huge power law distribution among the people that make it to one side of the curve and don't as in everything else.

But there's some really interesting technology being developed to just change some incentive structures in building creative work on the internet. And I'm not an expert by any means. I would love to send some links for anybody that wants to read about it because there's a lot of people smart of the me that have written about it and we'll see where it goes. Send them over, I'll put it in the show notes below. One of the things we've talked about today a lot is being this sort of power law and this inflection point graph and most people have some form of real world example of this hockey

stick of returns. I have mine, you have yours, pretty much everyone has theirs as well. Can you take us back to before you hit the inflection point where you were at that this is pointless bit of the visualized value graph? Can you remember the sort of thoughts that you had around then? Yeah, I think if we talk about it in the specific context of an internet business, this is before you really understand the power of network effects is how I can now retroactively look at it. So, you're only experiencing the downside of network effects at the beginning, like you're embarrassed to publish stuff. I, I've got screenshots of the stuff

I was posting on Facebook three years ago, and my mom is the only person who's interacting with it. And you look back at that now, you're like, why am I put, like I would go out and meet people and they're like, how are you doing now? Like, you quit your job, and now all I see you doing is like posting,

like are you a motivational speaker? So I'm not asking you once. I was like, no, no, I'm working on a design agency. And I'm like, all right, cool. Good luck. And it was just like, it was for a combrual man. It's like you publish this stuff and nobody interacts with it. But now in hindsight, it's like one, it thickens your skin, which is a totally different conversation. But two, there's this network effect happening that you can't even fathom. Like, there are people that won't even interact with the stuff you're doing, but they're consuming

it. Right? Like, if you, this is actually a link that I'll send. This is thesis that someone wrote about branding, where you think about, I think George Mac wrote about this in his email recently where he says, there's a different version of you that exists inside everybody's head that you've ever met.

Your mom has a different version of you than your significant other than like the person who reads your tweets than whoever else. There's all these different abstractions of you. And I think when you're at the, this is pointless phase. You are creating those abstractions, but you can't really fathom the long-term consequences of all of those individual ideas that you're planting,

or all of those connections that you're planting or all of those like connections that you're making because somebody has probably got a name for this but there's like a social cost to interacting with your content when it's not popular so it's seen as low status right? Yeah so that breaking that I have no idea when that inflection point comes, but in people that are having this conversation, it did come at a certain point. And the other part of it for me was the cost associated with like a few people not really understanding what I was doing was lower to me than having time and economic freedom. Right? So that was the, everything's a trade off and that was what I was trading was like being misunderstood for like rolling the dice at that point at being free. So the early payoffs of

stuff like that were private conversations that people reach out to me. They wouldn't interact with the stuff like, Hey Jack, I like what you're doing. You need to explain to me how you might like approach something for my business in this vein. And it's, you know, it's hundreds of reps before you get a conversation like that. And it's because you believe somebody that's done it in front of you, like I didn't do this out of nowhere, like I saw people doing it, I listened to people that were doing it. So Seth Godin's books, I read in maybe 2017, the dip, when did this is marketing come out? I think that was a bit later,

but I read a lot of his stuff. And I was like, you know what? This guy's like, maybe my favorite, like, my favorite writer. And he seems to have done all right for himself. I know I'm not on that level by any means. Like I can't articulate ideas the way he could. And, but you know what? The, maybe there's just a few,

like shifts in perspective along the way where it's like, I only need 10 people to believe in me to have like a six-figure consulting business. So, do I keep posting stuff on Facebook for a few more months and try and get a few more clients? Or do I go back to work at a job? And so at this point, were you conscious, were you cognizant of that perspective? Had you sat down with yourself beforehand and said, some people are not going to get this,

this is a trade-off, which is worthwhile, how much of this is being post-talk rationalized? to get this, this is a trade-off which is worthwhile. How much of this is being post-talk rationalized? No, I think I had the time. I think I was experiencing it at the time. And I really didn't get it. I had lunch with someone on Sunday who runs a business that has a, kind of, four million email subscribers. And they were like, yeah, you know, I still don't really understand, like, the potential of the internet. It's like, just crazy, man, yeah, you know, I still don't really understand like the potential of the internet. It's like just crazy, man. Like you're always behind the puck, right? You're always underestimating the power of what you're doing today. If you're being consistent and put on stuff out, you're always underestimating the just fractal, like crazy effects that show up months and months or years later in some cases.

And I think this is another idea that I've always struggled to articulate, but just the notion that you did something for 12 months consistently, if nobody interacts with it, I would honestly challenge anybody on the planet. If you did something every day for 365 days, like some creative exercise and posted it, if you couldn't like create like one commercial opportunity off the back of that, I just don't think it's possible. Like just the very, like the fact that,

you know, this is like proof of work and the concept of a CV taken to a new level. The idea that, hey, even nobody's interacting with this stuff, you know what I'm capable of because you see me do it every single day. So like, at the very least, someone might bring me into their business to help them achieve that result, whether it's... Jim Oshornasi. Jim Oshornasi on the show show the other day, he said,

he hired some new guy who's maybe from Bangladesh or India or something, didn't need to see his CV, he just followed him on Twitter for nine months, looked at what he was putting out on Twitter and thought, yeah, that's my guy, that's proof of work. I can't remember who it was that said, the top nine images on your Instagram grid are the new CV. Yeah, well, it's not actually all that far off. And here's an interesting start talking about the consistency thing. So 90% of podcasts that are launched

don't make it past episode three. And of the 10% that make it past episode three, 90% don't make it past episode 20. So simply by producing 21 podcasts, you're in the top percentile of all podcasts as ever. One percent, right? Yeah. Just crazy, man. I don't think people can understand that. Like that is crazy. Yeah. And just, yeah, you're in the top 1% and you've already like started to create effects that you are, you know, unaware of at that point. Like three podcast episodes, you could make the argument that six months time nothing's going to be different. But 21 is like, it's not 17 episodes different. It's like an order of magnitude, more compelling, convincing. And I think that is, you know,

talk about Matthew Principle, you talk about anything that's like your thousand and first image isn't like a plus one. It's a plus, they're 150, yeah. It's just a different beast. Let's say that someone makes it happen, they know they start to make it happen, they start to feel that hockey stick kick in. How do you have a strategy for sustaining power laws and keeping inflection points going? Yeah, I think this is a, it's kind of non-tangible advice, but it's like you've honed your gut to the point where you can get there.

Then I think it, some of it comes back to like trusting your instinct. So like that point in time where I'm producing stuff and no one's interacting with it, it's all like information that's being fed to you in some way. I'm working on a project right now with a few guys and we had an idea, we went from like idea in a discord channel to execution in like two hours. So here's the idea, something like mock this up, do that, do that, do that. And you get, you arrive at this place and it's three people I really trust. And we all like, man, we did that so fast, I can't be right, right? I can't be the answer. Like,

let's go and explore a bunch of other stuff and we'll come back in 10 days and it's like, no, the first thing was the right thing because it's not two hours of work, right? It's the collective 30 years of experience between all of you that produced that first result. But you, for whatever reason, your gut needs proof from your mind that it was right, so you have to go and pursue these ridiculous angles and then you end up back at the place you began. So I think when you've gotten to any inflection point, understanding that there's some intangible, you have some intangible ability,

or you have an instinct that allowed you to create that result in the first place. Inflection points there for a reason, right? The hockey sticks happen for something. So your ability to like lean into your instinct and keep like even if it feels at times like you're, I don't know, abandoning the set of rules that got you, you know, there's plenty of people that said that,

like, well, got you, what got you here, won't get you there. It's the second set of boosters falling off or whatever you analogy want to use. I like that one, But the idea that especially if it's like all of the examples we're talking about is a network effect, right? And you have a huge number of people paying attention to what you're doing. It's is then trusting your instinct and going back to those people with the newest iteration of your instinct, get

feedback from them. And then if you're right, you just keep going. To continue the space shuttle analogy going, even if the booster rockets do get added on, the payload remains the same. Right. Right. You know, it's still the same astronauts that are at the front, or it's still the same payload that's being delivered into space.

It's just how am I going to propel this now. So many of the things that I think we've talked about today are around this weird combination of self-confidence, sort of trust in what you are, the intangibles, the source code of all of the different experiences that have kind of just made something that you have, that you offer the market, that maybe is a little bit difficult to define. Having faith in that consistency, the importance of consistency, because without consistency you can't iterate, and consistency is basically just shots at goal, the more shots at goal you take, the more goal that you potentially go into score.

And then there's this sort of beautiful, this beautiful perspective that you need to be able to see the extraneous stuff, to be able to observe all of the different opportunities, but not get bogged down in the opportunities. And yeah, I, um, it's like the essentialism thing, right? Like what is the vital few areas of contribution that will make them vast amount of difference? 80% of the effort that you put in will, 80% of the results that you will get will come from 20% of the, of the inputs. But a lot of the time we can flip that around and we start wasting so much time getting distracted with the new opportunities or getting distracted with the idea that there does need to be something different or changed, losing faith in what it is that we do, stopping being consistent because we've got so many other different projects

coming in and different opportunities that we start to slow down. And the beauty that you have with the leverage is that one good idea, iterated consistently, is essentially an endless gold mine. It literally is a bottomless pit of opportunities. And yeah, as you said, I need new ideas, I need to keep things fresh. But there is a core to what it is that you offer the market and continuing to stay with that is important and this somewhere in between all of this is the X factor, right? It's the right amount of variety. The right amount of explore and the right amount of exploit that you have between them. I need a little bit of new, but I need to stay the same. I need to observe the new stuff that's coming out and add on the things that work,

but I also need to not get distracted by shiny things. And this is, I think it's Carl Newport that talks about this again. He says that the best business people in the world are essentially complex, hard to replicate decision engines. That's all that they are. They have tons and tons of intangibles and input data, and they are able to let the old style accounting machines that feed out a piece of paper, and they'll just feed out one number, and that

number is what you're supposed to do next. And I think that trusting your gut and allowing that to come through gets rid of a lot of the noise, a lot of people that get into online business and create their economies as well, We're so cerebral, we're so pulled along by the raw horsepower that we have cognitively that you think, right, I'm just going to think my way out of this problem. Yeah. But especially as time goes on, perhaps thinking your way into a solution at the beginning is a good idea. But as time goes on, you have so much embodied understanding of the stuff that you're doing. I'm sure that you get this when you create certain pieces of your work, you'll feel like

it's good. It'll be sensed somewhere in you. I get that with podcasts. I just know like, dude, that was like a dance or like a football match or a beautiful MMA fight or something like that. It was amazing. Why? I don't know. I don't fucking know, okay?

But I know that it was. And that trusting your gut, especially as the experience continues to go, focusing on simplicity, focusing on the things, the core of the very, very business, and then keeping that perspective. I think that's such a powerful message. business and then keeping that perspective, I think that that's such a powerful message.

Yeah, it's worked so far. What is the price that you have to pay to be Jack Butcher? I think anybody obsessed with anything is hard to turn off. I think that's the crazy thing about operating in a leveraged environment as well, is you can always be doing 100 times better. I'm like, you don't come home from work and you're like, day's done. I could have used a different word in that sentence and the result would have been like, two X. So I think the price is just constantly critiquing your behavior in a healthy way. Hopefully, you can definitely get into dicey scenarios where you don't balance your health properly with what you're doing on

the business side, but without that, I don't know if the result is as possible. It's a healthy obsession, I hope. What else is there? It's also the like, I'm sure you go back to your first interviews and you're like, you just cringe at some of the stuff you said, like it's just, it even three months ago and you're like, man, what a donkey. Like I just did that poorly now with the information I have acquired since then. I think yeah, there's like self examination and just recognizing that you're basically never going to get it right. And if you're, if you're, there's a great quote by Ira Glass, he talks about taste. It's like the reason creative people get into

the pursuits they get into is because they have great taste. But as your craft evolves, your taste is always going to outpace your craft. So you're going to look at your stuff and like, that sucks, man. But like, if you're improving, that's why, right? It's like it's this unattainable goal you're always chasing. And just to fall in love with the fact that the goalpost is moving, as opposed to scoring, I think that's the key. And everybody deals with it differently, or people have different levels of ability to do that. But slowly you get better at recognizing that it's just a sequence of today's and the goalposts

is always going to move. There's a story about the Buddha and one of his most famous quotes which his life is suffering and the word that they have for suffering is duke but some scholars contests that duke doesn't translate to suffering, it translates to unsatisfactoriness. Life is unsatisfactoriness. And this relates to how we are evolved, that there is built into the substrate of our being, a degree of unsatisfactoriness.

Every experience that you have will be tarnished just slightly. We're anticipatory beings. We imagine this amazing thing. And then we get there and there's we should have had it blended instead of a iced mojito or there's a little bit of sand between my toes or I wish that I'd gone for the medium well steak instead of the medium rare steak even though it's almost perfect there's always something because that's how it's built in and this duke bias as I call it as soon as you realize that is a feature of life, not a bug.

There isn't something wrong with the situation. The situation is always going to have something wrong with it. As soon as you realize that, from a creator's side, which I'd never even thought of before, the podcast that you produce is always going to be a little bit more shit than the podcast that you could have produced Yeah, exactly like there's answers I've given on this conversation I'm like subconscious track like you sound like an idiot while I'm giving the answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah Like yeah, we'll do another one in a couple of weeks time and I maybe I'll answer a little differently. Yeah, there's just fascinating

Yeah, a fascinating thing that I think also has been confirmed through the symptoms of building a network where you get introduced to people who are just like you admire at a ridiculous level and then they tell you stuff and you're like, what? You're just human as well. Yeah, you're just struggling with the same stuff. Dude, listen to Sam Harris' On Lex Friedman's show, right? Like Lex is crushing it in the podcast space. I think he's fully filled the void

that Rogan's left on YouTube and congrats to him. Sam Harris, now that John Peterson's been ticked off the list, like Harris is next on there for me as sort of dream guests. And Lex says precisely what you've just said there. Now this is a guy who does 12 hours, a 12 hours issue of deep work every single day, self-produces his own podcast, terrifying IQ, blah, blah, all this stuff.

And he says exactly the same thing that he's berating himself during the podcast for a thing that he's saying, as he's saying it, on the podcast. And he's chast saying as he's saying it on the podcast and he's Chastising himself for how stupid and dumb. I've just said this thing to Sam Harris. What a fucking idiot like that's how his inner monologue works and To concede that no matter how much better you get no matter how many more capacities you gain as you said, the yardstick for where you're supposed to get to is always going to be out of reach of where you do

because it is a feature, not a bug, that dookabias. There's a, I think it's an Oscar's speech, Matthew McConaughey, have you seen that one? So who's your hero? He said me in 10 years, I think he says. And he's like, he's gonna be my hero in 10 years, me in 10 years. That's just a great model to think every day is some feedback loop that's going to put you in a better position tomorrow. That's essentially the game. I think a community is really important for this. I can't think of any

examples now, but you could imagine a creator perhaps who didn't necessarily have as much direct audience feedback as you do and fortunately as I do. This is the important thing. And you know, to everyone that's listening, I've taken this on board as a creator, understanding what I really appreciate from people that consume my content. The friction now from me hearing something or seeing something that's good on the internet and congratulating the person that created it has essentially dropped to zero. Someone that I don't know, someone that's got basically no followers, someone that's got

a million followers, I'll happily send an email to Lex Friedman's old text Michael Malis and say, you're dude, if you speak to Lex, tell them about this. It doesn't fucking matter, but on the off chance that it does reach that person or whatever, someone that you do know that's great, that's just launched in your business, those bits of feedback that congratulations

or that reinforcement about them doing something good is worth a hundred thousand plays. In its worth of 100,000 plays. And it's worth of 10,000 subscribers. That is a big, big impact on, so if you love what your favorite creators do, my advice is to tell them, because if you don't, you risk them running out of gas and no longer producing the thing that you love from them.

Co-signed. Duplicated. What drives you now? You've reached some degrees of financial success that I imagine previously would have perhaps only been a dream to you. What drives you now? I think getting into a situation where you can pursue your curiosity with a higher degree of conviction is like that's a nice feedback loop to get into. So the project I was talking about before, where there's four of us and we made this thing in a couple of hours. Years ago, I wouldn't have I wouldn't have gotten myself into a situation like that because it's like maniacal focus on the engine that is creating the free time to do stuff like that.

So it's definitely, there's two sides of it. One is the family time. So how do I build a business and a life that is like equally, equally prioritizes doing things that are going to help people I've never met and just spending a bunch of time with family. And then the second part is like just by continuing to pursue your curiosity, you, you, I have proof for this now that opportunities that I never knew existed will show up. So it's just like, that is the inherent drive, the thing that you have to come back and remind yourself, it's like, I don't even know what it is I want or what situation I want to be in. But if I keep

doing this thing that I'm good at, stuff that I never could have possibly imagined is just going to pop up. So and that, that's, we go back to this, this is pointless thing, it's like knowing that back then. I knew it by Osmosis because I listened to podcasts and read people's words that have experienced it, but that, yeah, just trusting the fact that that is going to stay true, if you stay true to the process, is definitely a driving force. Having faith in your future self, like that Matthew McConaughey said it on his Oscar's speech, and I've got a buddy who likes to buy fast cars and spend a lot of money. And whenever he gets asked, dude, you know, you fairly highly

asset sort of leveraged up here. There's a lot of your net worth in depreciating vehicles that have got four wheels and he says it doesn't matter, future andru will pay for it and his self-confidence that whatever the situation is that he will always get it sorted moving forward. I mean, his verge is on pathological, which is also admirable, but not necessarily scalable or replicable. Yeah, exactly. It's not something that everyone can do immediately. But having faith that the small amount of success or the large amount of success that you've had has been due to something innate in you that isn't there in the market already and going, okay, well, let's go. Let's drill down and see just how long I can ride this until the wheels do come off or

how far I can fly this rocket ship until I do run out of boosters. Because I don't know, I mean, do you ever see an end for the creator economy here? Is it we're talking decades of time here, right? Yeah, 100%. I think it's, I think it's like a huge transformational shift. Like the people that would have asked me those questions three years ago, like, oh, what you do in your emotional speaker.

Now I run into them, they'll be like, how do I build a, how do I build like an online business? So how do I start to like put myself out there online in a way that's gonna, it feels like there's been a seismic shift, I think COVID last year, that's just, it may have been debatable a year ago, but now it's not right. So like your identity is at the very least 50% online

and 50% offline, maybe that wasn't true before, but now it is. And I think everybody, create your economy is just such a broad term. And what I think it really means is, like, people participating in something with skin in the game online, that feels to me like a fairly broad but accurate description of what we're talking about. And yeah, the like Jim O'Shaunesys a great example. It like that guy that got hired for his podcast was because he's out there putting his workout and this, like he didn't do that to get a job on Jim O'Shawnessy's podcast, right? He just happened to have one because he was doing this online for a period of time.

I think the more evidence that builds up in pop culture for things like that, happening the more people start to shoot it, the more, like, more of a positive some game this becomes, and you could go down a rabbit hole about what the eventual spread of resources looks like as a result of that. I think all the platforms and things make a lot of those decisions and how people get rewarded for what they do, but I do not think it's going anywhere. To the extent, I would say universal basic income at some point is a inevitability because of the amount of efficiency that will be achieved on a commercial scale by any commodity business, and then on a commercial scale by any commodity business, and then we'll have a huge shift to people needing to fill their days with stuff.

You either create content or you consume content. That's gonna be the divide. Man, awesome. It's been a long time coming in very glad that I've got you on. People wanna check out your stuff, where should they go? Twitter is the best place to start. So Jack Butcher and Visualize Value on Twitter and then you can find everything else from there. Jack Butcher, ladies and gentlemen, dude, thank you so much.

Mate, thanks, it was a pleasure. you