Modern WisdomJack Butcher - Visualising Value & Constant Creativity | Modern Wisdom Podcast 328
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
135 min read · 27,000 words- 0:00 – 0:48
Consistency compounds: the hidden power of daily publishing
- JBJack Butcher
I still don't really understand, like, the potential of the internet. You're always underestimating the power of what you're doing today. If you're being consistent in putting stuff out, you're always underestimating the fractal, 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 the, 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 create one commercial opportunity off the back of that, I just don't think it's possible.
- CWChris Williamson
The British are coming. The British are here.
- JBJack Butcher
They've arrived. We have arrived.
- 0:48 – 2:16
Newborn reality check: losing agency and redefining your day
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah, we have. Was it harder to grow a business to 100 grand a month or to deal with a newborn baby?
- JBJack Butcher
Newborn baby. Hot 10 times over, I think.
- CWChris Williamson
Really?
- JBJack Butcher
Incredible, man. Just, like, everything you take for granted watching even people in the street with babies is like, "Oh, everybody has babies, you know. How difficult can it be?" It's freaking hard.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JBJack Butcher
It's hard.
- CWChris Williamson
What's been the biggest challenge?
- JBJack Butcher
Uh, 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 gonna go. This is not a, "Hey, this is the schedule for today." It's like, you don't make those decisions anymore.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JBJack Butcher
Baby's making those decisions at least for a couple of months, right, at the start. You're, uh, you are on a different set of rules than you had ever imagined you were, would be on beforehand. Um, underestimated that to some degree, but we're, we're at 14 weeks now so we're sort of arriving at, uh... Actually, we're recording this, he broke a record last night, his longest sleep ever, so, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Congratulations.
- JBJack Butcher
... nine hours and two minutes.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JBJack Butcher
So we're getting there, man.
- CWChris Williamson
So you're tracking your baby's sleep? Have you got an Oura Ring on him?
- JBJack Butcher
No, he's got more equipment than you could possibly imagine.
- 2:16 – 6:22
Focus, deep work, and compressed epiphany windows
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) That's cool. So talk to me about lessons, right? You've this sort of one-man band running Visualize Value and all of the other stuff that you do, and then you add fatherhood into the mix. What are some of the lessons that you've learned from that?
- JBJack Butcher
I think, um, 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, create products not services. And those concepts all are incredibly, um, 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, a step back from building those things. So, um, big lessons, one was just how much, how much uninterrupted focus can lead to these like seemingly small things that create big, uh, results down the road. So, um, you know, you could be walking around for four or five hours or sort of just like on the computer messing around, reading something, and then an idea just comes to you. Those periods of time are drastically compressed after you're, you know, in a situation where there's a human being depending on you. And my wife does an incredible job of like holding back the, the tidal wave there. But at the beginning of the process, it was very much a, uh, you know, the, the baby's in the room with you, you get like 90 minutes at a time before stuff kicks off. And, uh, 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, um... You know, the best work is not necessarily, I think Morgan Housel talks about this. It's, uh, 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 epiphanies are drastically compressed. So you feel like at the start there, it's like, "Am I ever gonna get, um, like 90 minutes of clear thought time?" And that's also a product of it being your first baby and you're like, uh, you know, you can't walk two steps away, you're really, um, nervous.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JBJack Butcher
And I've heard these stories about people have their second baby in the hospital and they're just like, "Oh yeah, it'll 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. Is he all right?"
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JBJack Butcher
You need to call somebody. And, uh, you just, you just realize how much like subconscious, like, uh, 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 like leveling out over time has, uh, has been a big adjustment. And also just looking at time in a different way. So it's like if you have an hour, be a lot more intentional with how you use that hour, if you can. You know, and sometimes that's not possible. But, um, yeah, it definitely gives you an instant perspective shift in the short term. And, you know, what am I, what am I, what am I doing? What do I wanna teach somebody? How do you want, like what 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, it's the-... the shift in thinking is kind of profound in every direction. It's hard to even articulate a lot of the, the different mental models that emerge as a result of it.
- CWChris Williamson
It's such a multi-polar, multi-discipline, multimodal 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, right?
- JBJack Butcher
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
Like you synthesize complex ideas (laughs) as a job. That's your, that's your profession.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah. Yeah.
- 6:22 – 8:49
Social media as a noisy infant: fragmentation, habit loops, and false drivers
- CWChris Williamson
And 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 Cal 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-
- JBJack Butcher
Right. Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... constantly crying in the background, constantly permeating the subconscious, just this ambient anxiety that, "Ooh, I might have a notification," or, "Ooh, I need to check whatever's, whatever's happening online."
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. I, I think, uh, there, you can, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
The problem is over time, you habituate, you just... That myelin gets wrapped so hard in your brain, and it gets wired down so hard that it, it no longer is a conscious decision. It was just a race to the bottom-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... of the brainstem, and now you just type in TW on your, uh, your browser thing before you even know it, (laughs) which everyone's got, right? Everyone's got the, the TW reflex.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah. T, T, in a lot of cases.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JBJack Butcher
We've gotten down to T.
- CWChris Williamson
Have you? Okay, fair enough.
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
So-
- JBJack Butcher
But, but I was g- The, the other, uh, the other thing that makes me think of is, um, 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, right? 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 gonna stop showing up." And it's because it's tapping on so many of those like primal... I, 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 like feasts and famines or like fasts on like social stuff, and the idea that staying stuck in that feedback loop is good for the long-term results of a business is, is, uh, a myth in most cases.
- 8:49 – 12:09
The “don’t change anything” trap and the painful middle of business scaling
- CWChris Williamson
So many people, myself included, struggle to work out what the effective inputs are that are causing the right outputs to occur.
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And my industry, nightlife, right? It is so messy to work at. There's no such thing as direct marketing. There's the brand. Everything you do is branding, right?
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
So you have no idea, why is a night cool? Why is an event cool? No one knows. It just is. They just-
- JBJack Butcher
Just if you know, then it's not cool, right? That's the, that's the inverse thing.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, yeah, exactly. If you know, you don't know. Um, and it's, uh, 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 listers, on online marketing, on physical marketing, on DJs, on bookings, on celebrity PAs, on whatever it is.
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And we always come back to, "I don't know, because I don't know what's-"
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
"... 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."
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, keep doing what you're doing.
- CWChris Williamson
"Keep, con- continue to do the thing that you're doing. Because i- this, this appears to be less broken than it was before. So let's not try and fix it."
- JBJack Butcher
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 to, 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 that 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, uh, yeah, it's, uh, th- that, this whole idea of the, the creator economy or being the, the solo capitalist, all of those traps are, are very, very dangerous and hard to avoid, for sure.
- CWChris Williamson
What else did you learn? Any other things from integrating fatherhood?
- JBJack Butcher
Moms, man. Moms are, are just unbelievable. My wife's resilience is just like, just next level, man. Like you th- I think, uh, somebody told me the other week, they've got a really good friend who was like SEAL Team Six, uh, 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."
- CWChris Williamson
Taps out.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah. And it's like-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JBJack Butcher
... can you even bo- And, and you're the dude in the relationship, it's like you don't have the, like the biological, um, you know, physical stress that, that, um, a mom goes through, and it's just remarkable to watch. And you have a, just a newfound appreciation for your own mom, for everybody else that has raised a 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 are just mercenaries.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Just total killers.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah. (laughs) Yeah.
- 12:09 – 19:00
Time off anxiety, algorithm dependency, and the myth of passive momentum
- CWChris Williamson
What about, what about taking time off, then? So you have this child.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But there's algorithm loops occurring here, there's the fear of being less seen. Did you get anxiety-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... about spending time off?
- JBJack Butcher
So, interestingly enough, like the first few weeks, I was like, I didn't really, I was really focused on the, 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 that hasn't been out for two years and just surface it back up? And that kind of kept the 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, um, like, family time too. And then when the toll sta- or when the, like, sleep deprivation starts to catch up with you, it's like what I was talking about at the beginning of the conversation, where are these original thoughts going to come from, and where is the, like, the window of time to start to, um, you know, when does that start to open up so you can start to produce at the same level you were before? Uh, yeah, you start to think, "Man, am I ever gonna recover, or am I ever gonna get back to that rhythm that I was in before?" And, um, yeah, you start to realize that there's... Uh, it's, it, logically, the risk is low, right? There's, like, 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, a brand under your own name which would, short of, like, nuclear fallout disaster, there's no, uh, 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 hu- of a huge thing is something that you start to get anxious about. It's, uh... 'Cause like you say, the, the, the way your content gets shown, and you work on YouTube, which I think is even more-
- CWChris Williamson
Vicious.
- JBJack Butcher
... brutal than something like a, a Twitter where there is some element of, um, I want to say meritocracy, but if you get the r- if you plug into the right thing at the right time, you can have these outsized results, right? Whereas YouTube is the grinders, like, uh, like, you have to get this many people watching it for this ma- this percent of time over this period, um, of, uh, publishing.
- CWChris Williamson
You're so at the mercy of the algorithm on YouTube, I think more than any other platform.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, and, um, I, I, I started to get that YouTube momentum maybe a year ago, and I, I've not come back to YouTube very seriously because of that, because it's like, "Man, I need to really decide to do it and pursue it properly." Um, but yeah, you start to see it showing up all over the place, and y- yeah, it's, it's just a reframing of... Reframing in general, I think, the, the world is changing in a lot of ways too when you think about that, like, feast, feast and fast mode of creativity, and in the type, li- like, the type of business that I've built, you really can do, like, a month of intense work, do a launch, and then go, go away for three, six months, make something, come back. That's never been how I've operated, but I don't think that that's not an option. So it's kind of... Shaan Puri had this really great, uh, analogy where he'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, sell physical product. There's all these different ways that you can, like, apply this, uh, th- these relationships that you've built at scale, but if you're just used to this, like, muscle repetition that you've been in, you, you'd lose sight of some of those other possible executions. So i- if the, if the situation changes, you have to zoom out a little bit and be like, "Okay, so there's, there's still..." Like, did you see that Tim Urban graphic, the wait but why, the path dependency thing?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JBJack Butcher
It's very, very, uh... 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. It's, it's so interesting, man. 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-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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, uh, 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, on that idea-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... for a second, 'cause I'm, I'm not sure," but you, you are only you, right? And you're holding onto 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-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... because there's a child in the mix.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, and, like, abandoning the, uh, abandoning the thing that works in, in favor of something uncertain.... when you're weighing up the cost of the time you, you know, the time you get back versus the, you know, the momentum that you forgo. And I'm, like, my wife is, uh, it's 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, r- like really solo, is, is, is just probably incredibly intense, and I imagine there are, are very few people that have no form of, like, local feedback loop. There's, like, that's been a huge, huge advantage. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Did you notice-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Did you notice drop off then with regards to reach or conversions or whatever with Twitter and with Instagram during that break?
- 19:00 – 22:31
Leveraged income vs passive income: magnification, not input-free outcomes
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, pre- I mean, you can map it on a graph. It's like we move, we moved house in August of last year as well, and the chart's going like that, and then we move, the month, it just completely tanks, and then it's back up again 'cause you just, um... There's, there's leverage but there isn't, um-
- CWChris Williamson
Momentum.
- JBJack Butcher
There isn't just like imaginary momentum happening, right? You, you can, you can create a leverage result but you're not like... I think that's this myth of passive income that people talk about where it's like, "Oh, I wanna, I wanna build passive income." It's like, you could build 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 k- 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.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... that's not what you get. You just get to overly magnify the inputs.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, and I think if you've, if you've managed to create leveraged income for long enough that you have access to truly passive investments, that is possible, but it's, uh, like, rarified air.
- CWChris Williamson
But it's not, it's not within, it's not within the creator economy. It's not within the things that we're talking about here. David Perell can't do Rite of Passage and not be there. Like, people are there for David Perell.
- JBJack Butcher
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, he t- I, I had a conversation with him the other week, and he was like, "Dude, for two months of the year, twice a year, I, I stop my life. All I do is Rite of Passage." Ali Abdaal with his part-time YouTuber, uh, academy, like, the guy just lives and breathes, and his team now that he's got this huge big fat team 'cause these cohort-based courses are significantly more resource-intensive than a-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... obviously just a buy-in, pay-to-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-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... true passiveness.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, and your, like 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, that's still effort and decision-making, and yeah, judgment at scale rather than just, uh, leverage via some technology like being able to broadcast by video, something like that.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JBJack Butcher
It's like building a team that can keep doing that.
- CWChris Williamson
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 Visualize Value and they presume that, okay, so once I hit inflection point and I get these like 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, n- no-
- JBJack Butcher
No.
- CWChris Williamson
... you just get to magnify the amount of effort versus output, outcome that you get.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah. Yeah, it's, uh, what is it, the Matthew principle?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JBJack Butcher
Like, to, uh, more will be given to those who have gotten-
- CWChris Williamson
Have everything, yeah.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- 22:31 – 24:31
Unseen creator-business challenges: shiny objects, self-promotion, and forgetting you fast
- CWChris Williamson
What are some of the unseen challenges with your type of business? Forget the child. What are some of the things-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... that people wouldn't think or don't see that you face?
- JBJack Butcher
I think you touched on it there. I think it's the, um, the shiny objects is definitely one. So you'll get to a point where it makes very little sense to do, um... Well, it makes a... You really have to be good at identifying what the leveraged things are, and the, and it gets, it gets dicey after a period of time where, um... I'm trying to think of a concrete example here. So building like, building the MVP of a product and getting it out, then getting stuck in like the iterations of that product, for example, is like, I, I don't know the exact phrase, but it's like i- um, 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. Um, I think that, the inability to zoom out and rec-
- CWChris Williamson
It's that perspective.
- JBJack Butcher
... cognize what the le- what the true points of leverage are, I think maybe the biggest takeaway is the, the idea of s- of self-promotion, so I think this is another thing in the, that could be extracted from that graph, is like past a certain point, you think that everybody's out there doing your w- promotion work for you, right? Everybody's out there talking about your stuff, and hey, like, 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, the world, a world that moves at the speed of the internet will forget about you in 15 minutes if you don't keep showing up.
- 24:31 – 34:53
Protecting the core engine: explore vs exploit without replacing the work
- CWChris Williamson
So, how do you maintain this sense of perspective? You have certain things, a s- 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 object syndrome?
- JBJack Butcher
It's a hard one. I think there is some weird responsibility to allocate a certain amount of time to pursuing shiny objects, I've discovered in the last, like, six months or so. So, um, there are certain things that are tra- are changing at a macro level that you want to stay, um, plugged into, essentially. But the perspective I think that's helpful is just understanding what the, like, what the engine is, and for me that's, like, producing the visuals. For you that would be, like, recording the, and publishing the interviews, and sometimes in pursuit of those, 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. Um, none of it is a replacement, and I think where we lose perspective is when we start to think of it as a replacement for doing the work itself. So, that's constantly ... How I find perspective and, um, like, reset that is, like, "Okay, none of this would have happened if I didn't show up and make these images and post them every day." Right? 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, like, 10 ideas that are resonating with you, get in front of the computer, turn them into visuals, post them. And then, like, 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, you know, the catalyst that's gonna bring the opportunities to you. And I think we can sort of lose perspective that that's the input that's, that's generating those outputs down the road, and that This Is Pointless graph is, is essentially trying to illustrate that. Like, I could not have possibly predicted ... The Naval book is a great example, right? The, like, starting to post these images of ideas that Naval has published as a way to find these tiny consulting gigs to get people to pay me to, like, design a landing page for him. Nine months later, there's a, like, I have a 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, uh, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
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, 'cause I can't manage 500 members of staff that are all guest listing for us."
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
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 E-Myth, where there's a lady that has a bakery and she wants to build a bakery factory or something, and then-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... three years later, she goes in to have a look at the people making the, the bakery stuff, the loaves of bread, and she do- she, 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, um, recording the pre-roll intros. Like, that's what generates the majority of the revenue.
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
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 product's 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.
- JBJack Butcher
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
And focusing on the core and staying as lean as possible, I mean, it's an a- i- i- it's an argument for just uncomplicating the entire business process to have e- a single product, one thing, perhaps, or one channel, you know?
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And I think, um, Anthony Pompliano's done this quite well in that he did one network at a time. He's like, "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."
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And I think he's now about to start podcasting or something like that. So-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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.
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think, uh, it's osmosis. It's like, oh, serious businesses or proper businesses do this. Like, I need more SKUs. I need, like, more channels. I need ... It's like reading a BuzzFeed article on how to be a good marketer, right? It's like, "Do this on Facebook, and do that on Twitter, and do ..." It's like-... 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, the ability to turn an idea into a visual is not something that is only commercially viable or monetizable through a Twitter account. It's, like, a thing that you can do for people and on a one-to-one basis. So you have this, like, 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, um... Or, I, I don't, I don't know your exact story, but you were doing something else as well as building up this podcasting empire that is now, you know, 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Ballsy.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, ballsy, but also, like, incredibly difficult to monetize from day one, right? That idea that concentrating your efforts until something becomes much easier to point at as an asset to monetize rather than this, like, sprawling beast where you don't really know where the, the points of leverage are. So it's... Yeah, the rules, the rules don't apply the, the same way to the individual creator as they do the, you know, the small business or the big business, and that's... People read a lot of books, uh, with those rules in them and, and follow them and lose the edge that they would have created otherwise, which is, um... You know, the internet has enabled a very different type of business to exist and be monetized than something that needs 15 middle managers to operate.
- CWChris Williamson
All of the rules are out of the window there. I really wonder, it's got me thinking whether there's a, 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 an, a, a degree of power law inflection that is high enough that it's-
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... it's unfailable now. Nothing, nothing can add weight to the bottom of this rocket. We're, we're going to the moon. Like, jump on board.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And, um, 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. "Oh, look, this is-"
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
"... this is what traditional..." Precisely, and then that's when the rocket starts to run out of speed. There could be a way... You, you could imagine a world in which you spent all of your time dealing with customer inquiries about courses-
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- 34:53 – 37:09
Personal monopoly and the barbell economy: Amazon vs the artisan
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, I, uh, was thinking about this idea the other day, and David Perell, I think, labeled this maybe as good as it's ever gonna 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? Uh, 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 Amazon Hospitals, Amazon everything, versus the, you know, three billion media brands that people can start, and maybe it's not exclusive to just media, but it's like the very small, um... Well, media is probably the best example. The ve- 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, like, your personality, whether it's, like, the creative output of your process of some kind or it's y- the way you an-a- the way you analyze a company. Um, there's great examples of, of that all over Twitter, of people that-... do the same thing as the Wall Street Journal in es- in essence, right? If, uh, the uninformed observer, the Wall Street Journal is going to give you a report on a business, and so is someone like Packy McCormick or Mario Gabriele, but people pay hundreds of dollars a year to read, uh, Packy's analysis 'cause he's funny or, like, they like the way he looks at the world. Um, but you can easily get stuck in the middle of that chasm in, like, a 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, that has taken hold at this point.
- 37:09 – 43:06
Product fatigue and attention scarcity: resisting the ‘endless course’ treadmill
- CWChris Williamson
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 you need to ... No one's going to buy a course twice, right?
- JBJack Butcher
Y- yeah, it's definitely a ... it's, uh, 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, like, I had the ten-year career and then produced two products that summarized what I learned in ten 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 get ... 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 name 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, um, in order to just keep the attention of the market which, you know, you can make an argument that that's, like, the market makes the decision, like, if they buy it, then great. Uh, but personally, like, uh, that just does not fire me up. So I'm always ... I'm now, like, maybe 50/50, so there's product development, there's, like, community stuff that has existed from the first round of Visualize Value products, and then 50% of my time is spent on, like, what is the next thing? What are the new mediums that, uh, 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 people that maybe are where I was two, three, four years ago if we continue to go the knowledge route. Um, there's also just, like, this is a whole other rabbit hole. Like, a lot of Web3 technologies that I've been introduced to, the NFT stuff, like, that whole crypto market is fascinating to me right now which is, uh, causing a, like, cycle of learning and, uh, trying to figure out how to, 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, Visualize Value gets more diluted the more it produces, if that makes sense.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JBJack Butcher
Like some of the, some of the things that I really want people to take on board that help me, like, there's y- You could argue that you do a disservice at a certain point by adding too much.
- CWChris Williamson
There's only so many-
- JBJack Butcher
Um.
- CWChris Williamson
... ways that you can describe the same concepts, right? And the-
- JBJack Butcher
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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.
- JBJack Butcher
Yep, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And we've talked about this before, but I think it's so fascinating, the difference between a, uh, a media the type that I do where I get to continuously get extra little turbo boosts on Mario Kart. I just jump on it. It's like, "Oh, it's a Jordan Peterson turbo boost."
- JBJack Butcher
Right, right.
- CWChris Williamson
"Oh, no, it's a Jack Butcher turbo boost. Now it's a Seth Godin 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 Abdals 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-
- JBJack Butcher
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... and, and those topics. Um, but yeah, it really is ... There's something that you lose from being a, uh, a podcaster specifically in that it's the least viral of all of the creator industries as far as I can see. Like, if you want to make money fast, podcasting is not the way to go because it just-
- JBJack Butcher
Right. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
There's no associated virality with it, specifically not on 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-
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... Rogan's, what, 1,800 episodes in, still going like an absolute champ. Eight-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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-... uh, uh, become a role model, I'm sure, for tons and tons of people to think, "Right, fuck it. I am ditching this 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?"
- 43:06 – 47:27
Second booster stage: Web3/NFTs and economic links as new creative infrastructure
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah. Yes. It's a good analogy. The, uh, idea that, um... 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, a thing that you, uh, you built up or are deploying your expertise in a new way. Uh, I think these, like... And Web3 is a good example of this, like these-
- CWChris Williamson
What is Web3?
- JBJack Butcher
Um...
- CWChris Williamson
I have no idea what it is.
- JBJack Butcher
So, so I'll do a horrible job explaining it, but essentially the, 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 inf- You publish information, you can link informat- you can link from one article to another, from one institution to another, ed- universities use Web 1.0. Web 2.0 is social links, so it's, hey, um, I... Twitter, Facebook, like, I know Chris, I met Chris, we've built a relationship that way, I've published a bunch of podcasts. And then Web 3.0 is economic links, so it's like experimenting with new ways to incentivize people to create. So, there's, like, decentralized organizations being incorporated where you 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, um, that is just creating a bunch of, like, crazy new ways to do things online. So, NFTs is, like, the, you know, the most... I think the, 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, um, all of the, like, monetization structures that YouTube, for example, have taken I don't know what percent now, probably something crazy, but they give you a ton of distribution, so it makes sense as, as a logical argument as to why they take some of that. But, um, this new ecosystem that is being built I think is, uh, is playing into that idea of, like, one plus one equals three in some cases. So, like, where I end up after booster, set of boosters one falls off might 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 gonna enter into an agreement with them where I want X percent of the sales of this book," and then, um, we get into some mutually incentivized... Not to say you couldn't do that without crypto, but it just makes it easier, and, um, even digital access to this content can be, uh... You know, you could monetize it and, and get rewarded for it. So, it still feels to me like there's gonna be a huge power law, um, a, 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, um, there's some really interesting technology being developed to, uh, just change some incentive structures in, in building creative work on the internet. And I am not an expert by any means. I would love to send some links for anybody that wants to read about it, 'cause there's a lot of people smarter than me that have written about it, and, uh, yeah, we'll see where it goes.
- CWChris Williamson
Send them over. I'll put it in the, the show notes below. One of the things we've talked about today a lot is, been 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.
- 47:27 – 55:49
The ‘This is pointless’ phase: embarrassment, invisible audiences, and proof-of-work
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Pretty much everyone has theirs as well. Can you take us back to before you hit the inflection point, where you were at the, "This is pointless," bit of the visualized-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... value graph? Can you remember the sort of thoughts that you had around then?
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, I think if we talk about it s- sp- in the specific context of an internet business, this is before you really understand the, the power of network effects, is how I can now, like, retroactively look at it. So, you're only experiencing the downside of network effects at the beginning. Like, you're embarrassed to publish stuff. Like, your mo- I've got screenshots of the stuff I was posting on Facebook three years ago and my mum 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, "What the hell are you doing now? Like, uh, you quit your job and now all I see you doing is, like, posting, uh... Like, are you a motivational speaker?" Someone asked me once. I was like, "No, no, I'm a... (laughs) I'm working on a, a design agency." And they're like, "Oh, right. Cool, good luck."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JBJack Butcher
And it was just, like- it was, it was freaking brutal, 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. Um, 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... Um, this is actually a link that I'll send. It's this thesis that someone wrote about, uh, branding, where you think about... I think George Mack 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. Like, your mum has a different version of you than your significant other than, like, the person who reads your tweets, than whoever else, right? 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 those, like... of, of all of those individual, like, ideas 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JBJack Butcher
So-
- CWChris Williamson
Like, it's low, it's seen as low status, right?
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, so that, breaking that, I, I have no idea when that inflection point comes, but it, it... In, you know, in people that are having this conversation, it did come at a certain point. And, um, 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, the early payoffs of stuff like that were private conversations that people would reach out to me. They wouldn't interact with the stuff. Like, "Hey, Jack, I, I like what you're doing. Can you expl- 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Who inspired you?
- JBJack Butcher
Um, so Seth Godin's books I read in maybe 2017, The Dip. Um, when did This is Marketing come out? I think that was a bit later, but, um, 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, he seems to have done all right for himself." I know, like, 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, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
So were you-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... at this, 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-hoc rationalized?
- JBJack Butcher
Mm. No, I, I think I had the... At the time, I think I was experiencing it at the time. Um, and I really didn't get it. Um, I had lunch with someone on Sunday who runs a business that has a, I don't know, 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. 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 putting 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 the, just the notion that you did something for 12 months consistently, if nobody interacts with it... I c- 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 if nobody's interacting with this stuff, you know what I'm capable of because you've seen me do it every single day. So, like, at the very least, someone might bring me into their business to help, uh, to help them achieve that result, whether it's
- CWChris Williamson
Dude, Jim-
- JBJack Butcher
... editing the video, or-
- CWChris Williamson
... O'Shaughnessy on the 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-
- JBJack Butcher
Yep, yep.
- CWChris Williamson
... "That's my guy. That's proof of work."
- JBJack Butcher
Spot on.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. 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, um-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... here's an interesting stat 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 podcasters ever?
- JBJack Butcher
1%, right? Yeah. Just crazy, man. I don't think people can understand that. Like, that is crazy. Um, yeah. And just, yeah, the to- you're in the top 1% and you've, um, 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 gonna be different, but 21 is like, it's not, it's not 17 episodes different, it's like an order of magnitude more compelling, convincing, and I think that, that is, you know, you talk about Matthew Principle, you talk about anything that's like your 1,001st image isn't like a plus one, it's a plus, like, 150.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- JBJack Butcher
It's just a, it's a different beast.
- 55:49 – 1:02:52
Sustaining inflection points: trust your instinct, move fast, and keep the payload constant
- CWChris Williamson
Let's say that someone makes it happen then, or 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?
- JBJack Butcher
You know, 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, it's all, like, informat- information that's being fed to you in some way. Um, I'm, 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. It's like, "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're all like, "Man, we did that so fast. That can't be right, right? That can't be the, that 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, it's the collective 30 years of experience between all of you that produced that first result, but you, for whatever reason, your, you know, your gut needs proof from your mind that it was right, so you have to go and pursue these, like, 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, uh, an instinct that allowed you to create that result in the first place, like-
- CWChris Williamson
The inflection point's there for a reason, right? The hockey sticks-
- JBJack Butcher
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
... happen for something.
- JBJack Butcher
So your ability to, like, lean into your instinct and k- 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, there's plenty of people that said that. Like, what got, what get you, what got you here won't get you there. It's the second set of boosters falling off, or whatever you, analogy you want to use. I like that one a lot. But the idea that, especially if it's like, all of the examples we're talking about is, uh, network effects, right? And you have a huge number of people paying attention to what you're doing. It's then, like, trusting your instinct and going back to those people with, like, the newest iteration of your instinct, get feedback from them, and then if you were right-
- CWChris Williamson
Go again. Yeah, but-
- JBJack Butcher
... you just keep going.
- CWChris Williamson
... to continue the space shuttle analogy going, even if the booster rockets do get added on, the payload remains the same.
- JBJack Butcher
Right, right.
- CWChris Williamson
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, 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, the, 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 goals that you're potentially going to 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 the vast amount of difference? 80% of the effort that you put in will, or 80% of the results that you will get will come from 20% of the, of the input. 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-
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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, um, the beauty that you have with leverage is that one good idea, iterated consistently, is essentially an endless gold mine. It's, it literally is a bottomless pit-
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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 amount, right- right amount of explore and the right amount of exploit-
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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, um... I think it's Cal Newport that talks about this again, he says that the best business people in the world are essentially complex, hard-to-replicate decision engines.
- JBJack Butcher
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
That's all that they are. They have tons and tons of intangibles and input data, and they are able to... like their old-style accounting machines that feed out a piece of paper (trills) and they'll just-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... feed out one number, and that number is what you're supposed to do next. And I-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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 creator 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 gonna think my way out of this problem."
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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. You almo- I'm sure that you get this when you create certain pieces of your work, you'll feel like it's good. You'll, you'll... it'll be sensed somewhere-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... in you. I get that with podcasts, I just know, like, "Dude, that was like a dance, or like a, uh, uh, like a, a football match or a beautiful MMA fight or something like that. It was, it was amazing." Why? Well, I don't know. I don't fucking know, okay?
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I just... 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 that's such a powerful message.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, it's worked so far.
- 1:02:52 – 1:10:22
The price of being a creator: obsession, unsatisfactoriness, and moving goalposts
- CWChris Williamson
What is the price that you have to pay to be Jack Butcher?
- JBJack Butcher
Uh... I think, anybody obsessed with anything is get- is hard to turn off. I think that's the, um... The crazy thing about operating in a leveraged environment as well is you can always be doing 100 times better, right?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JBJack Butcher
It's like you don't come home from work and you're like, "Day's done." You know, it's like, "I could've used a different word in that sentence," and the result would've been ten- like, you know, 2X. So I think it's... the price is like... is just constantly critiquing your behavior in, you know, in a healthy way, hopefully. You can definitely get into dicey scenarios where you don't, um... you know, you don't balance your health properly with what you're doing on the business side. But without that, I don't know if... I don't know if the result is as possible. It's, um, a healthy obsession, I hope. Um, what else is there? It's, 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, even three months ago, and you're like, "Man, what a donkey. Like, I just, I just did that poorly now with the information I have acquired since then." Um, I think, yeah, this, like, self-examination and, uh, just recognizing that you're basically never gonna get it right. And if you're, if you're... There's a great quote by Ira Glass, he talks about taste. He's like, "The reason creative people get into the pursuits they get into is 'cause they have great taste." But as your craft evolves, your taste is always gonna outpace your craft, so you're gonna look at your stuff and you're like, "That sucks, man." But like, i- 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, with the fact that the goalpost is moving as opposed to, like, scoring, I think that's the... that's the key. And everybody deals with it differently or people have different levels of, uh, ability to do that, um, but slowly you get better at recognizing that it's just a sequence of todays and the goalpost is always gonna move.
- CWChris Williamson
There's a story about the Buddha and one of his most famous quotes, which is, "Life is suffering." And the word that they have for suffering is Dukkha, but some scholars contest that Dukkha 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've had it blended instead of a iced mojito," or, "There's a little bit of sand-"
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, right.
- CWChris Williamson
... "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 Dukkha bias, as I call it, as soon as you realize that is a feature of life, not a bug-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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, the podcast that you produce is always going to be a little bit more shit than the podcast-
- JBJack Butcher
(laughs) Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... that you could've produced.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, exactly. Like, there's answers I've given on this conversation and I'm like subconscious track, like, "You sound like an idiot-"
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JBJack Butcher
... while I'm giving the answer.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. (laughs)
- JBJack Butcher
... like, yeah, I'll do another one in a couple of weeks' time and, uh, maybe I'll answer a little differently.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JBJack Butcher
And it's just, uh, fascinating... Yeah. A f- 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JBJack Butcher
... and then they tell you stuff and you're like, "What?" Like-
- CWChris Williamson
You're just human as well.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, you're just the same... You're just struggling with the same stuff. Um.
- CWChris Williamson
Dude, listen to-
- JBJack Butcher
It's just-
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, s- Sam Harris is on Lex Fridman'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 Jordan Peterson's been ticked off the list, like, Harris is next on there for me as s- sort of dream guests. And Lex says precisely what you've just said there. You know, this is a guy who does 12 hours or 12 hours-ish of deep work every single day, self-produces his own podcast, terrifying IQ, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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.
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- 1:10:22 – 1:16:52
What drives Jack now: curiosity, family priorities, and the creator economy’s future
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- JBJack Butcher
Uh, I think getting into a situation where you can pursue your curiosity with a higher degree of conviction is a, is... Like, that's a nice feedback loop to get into. So, um, the project I was talking about before where we th- there's four of us and we made this thing in a couple of hours, years ago, I wouldn't have, uh, I wouldn't have gotten myself into a situation like that, 'cause it's like maniacal focus on the, you know, 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, um, equally prioritizes doing things that are gonna help people I've never met and spending a bunch of time with family? And then the second part is, like, just by continuing to pursue your curiosity, you're, 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 is like, "I don't even know what it is I want or what situation I wanna be in, but if I keep doing this thing that I'm good at, stuff that I never could have possibly imagined is just gonna pop up." So... And that, that's... We go back to the this is pointless thing, it's like knowing that back then, I knew it by osmosis, 'cause I listen to podcasts and read people's words that have experienced it, but that, um... Yeah, just, just, uh, trusting the fact that that is gonna stay true if you stay true to the process is, uh, is definitely a driving force.
- CWChris Williamson
Having faith in your future self like that, Matthew McConaughey said it on his Oscars 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're fairly highly asset sort of leveraged up here."
- JBJack Butcher
Right, right.
- CWChris Williamson
"There's a lot of your net worth in depreciating vehicles that have got four wheels."
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And he says, "It doesn't matter. Future Andrew will pay for it."... and his self-confidence that whatever the situation is that he will always get it sorted moving forward. Uh, I, I mean, his virtues aren't pathological, which is also admirable but not-
- JBJack Butcher
Right, right, right.
- CWChris Williamson
... necessarily scalable or replicable.
- JBJack Butcher
Not, not for everyone.
- CWChris Williamson
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." You know, "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?
- JBJack Butcher
Yeah, 100%. I think it's, uh, I think it's like a huge transformational shift. Like the people that would've asked me those questions three years ago like, "Oh, what are you doing? You're a mot- an motivational speaker?" Now I run into them and they'll be like, "How do I build a, how do I build, like, an online business?" Or, "How do I start to, like, put myself out there online in a way that's gonna create opportunity for more people?" It's, it feels like there's been a seismic shift. I think, um, COVID last year, that's just... It may have been debatable a year ago but now it's not. Right? It's like you are, 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... Creator economy is just such a, I mean, it's such a broad term and what I think it really means is, is like, you know, people participating in something with skin in the game online. That, that feels to me like a, a fairly broad but accurate description of what we're talking about. And, yeah, there's... Like, Jim O'Shaughnessy is a great example. Uh, like that guy that got hired for his podcast was because he was out there putting his work out and, um, there's... Like, he didn't do that to get a job on Jim O'Shaughnessy's podcast, right? He just h- 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 will start to pursue it, the more like, the more of a positive sum game this becomes and, uh, yeah, you could go down a rabbit hole about what the eventual, like, spread of resources looks like as a result of that. And I think all the platforms and things make a lot of those decisions and, like how people get rewarded for what they do, but I do not think it's going anywhere. Uh, to the extent I would say, um, like universal basic income at some point is a, is a, uh, inevitability because of, like, the amount of efficiency that will be achieved on the, like, on a commercial scale by any commodity business. And then, like, we'll have a huge shift to, you know, people needing to fill their days with stuff. You either create content or you consume content. That's gonna be a, that's gonna be the divide.
- CWChris Williamson
Man, awesome. It's been a long time coming. I'm very glad that I've got you on. Uh, people who want to check out your stuff, where should they go?
- JBJack Butcher
Uh, Twitter is the best place to start, so Jack Butcher and Visualise Value on Twitter, and then you can find everything else from there.
- CWChris Williamson
Jack Butcher, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, thank you so much.
- JBJack Butcher
Mate, thanks. It was a pleasure.
- CWChris Williamson
Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few months. And don't forget to subscribe. It makes me very happy indeed. Peace.
Episode duration: 1:16:57
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Transcript of episode MmImNqiZJV8
