Jack Butcher - Visualising Value & Constant Creativity | Modern Wisdom Podcast 328

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   I still don't really…

   1. JBJack Butcher0:00

      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.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:44

      The British are coming. The British are here.

   3. JBJack Butcher0:47

      They've arrived. We have arrived.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:48

      (laughs) Yeah, we have. Was it harder to grow a business to 100 grand a month or to deal with a newborn baby?

   5. JBJack Butcher0:58

      Newborn baby. Hot 10 times over, I think.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:01

      Really?

   7. JBJack Butcher1:02

      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.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:12

      (laughs)

   9. JBJack Butcher1:13

      It's hard.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:15

       What's been the biggest challenge?

   11. JBJack Butcher1:17

       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.

   12. CWChris Williamson1:41

       (laughs)

   13. JBJack Butcher1:41

       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-

   14. CWChris Williamson2:05

       Congratulations.

   15. JBJack Butcher2:05

       ... nine hours and two minutes.

   16. CWChris Williamson2:07

       (laughs)

   17. JBJack Butcher2:07

       So we're getting there, man.

   18. CWChris Williamson2:08

       So you're tracking your baby's sleep? Have you got an Oura Ring on him?

   19. JBJack Butcher2:11

       No, he's got more equipment than you could possibly imagine.

   20. CWChris Williamson2:16

       (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?

   21. JBJack Butcher2:30

       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.

   22. CWChris Williamson4:43

       (laughs)

   23. JBJack Butcher4:43

       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?"

   24. CWChris Williamson4:53

       (laughs)

   25. JBJack Butcher4:53

       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.

   26. CWChris Williamson6:01

       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?

   27. JBJack Butcher6:17

       Right.

   28. CWChris Williamson6:17

       Like you synthesize complex ideas (laughs) as a job. That's your, that's your profession.

   29. JBJack Butcher6:21

       Yeah. Yeah.

   30. CWChris Williamson6:22

       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-
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yeah. …

   1. JBJack Butcher15:00

      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?

   2. CWChris Williamson16:39

      Yeah.

   3. JBJack Butcher16:39

      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.

   4. CWChris Williamson16:55

      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-

   5. JBJack Butcher17:13

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson17:13

      ... 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-

   7. JBJack Butcher17:36

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson17:36

      ... 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-

   9. JBJack Butcher17:57

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson17:57

       ... because there's a child in the mix.

   11. JBJack Butcher18:00

       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-

   12. CWChris Williamson18:50

       Did you notice-

   13. JBJack Butcher18:51

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson18:51

       Did you notice drop off then with regards to reach or conversions or whatever with Twitter and with Instagram during that break?

   15. JBJack Butcher19:00

       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-

   16. CWChris Williamson19:18

       Momentum.

   17. JBJack Butcher19:18

       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.

   18. CWChris Williamson20:00

       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-

   19. JBJack Butcher20:11

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson20:11

       ... that's not what you get. You just get to overly magnify the inputs.

   21. JBJack Butcher20:16

       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.

   22. CWChris Williamson20:27

       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.

   23. JBJack Butcher20:37

       Right.

   24. CWChris Williamson20:37

       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-

   25. JBJack Butcher21:00

       Yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson21:01

       ... 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-

   27. JBJack Butcher21:20

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson21:20

       ... true passiveness.

   29. JBJack Butcher21:22

       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.

   30. CWChris Williamson21:51

       Mm-hmm.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think,…

   1. CWChris Williamson30:00

      will come in and punch a hole in the middle of what you were supposed to be the market leader for.

   2. JBJack Butcher30:05

      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-

   3. CWChris Williamson31:37

      Ballsy.

   4. JBJack Butcher31:38

      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.

   5. CWChris Williamson32:33

      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-

   6. JBJack Butcher33:04

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson33:04

      ... 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.

   8. JBJack Butcher33:12

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson33:12

      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-"

   10. JBJack Butcher33:27

       Mm-hmm.

   11. CWChris Williamson33:27

       "... 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-

   12. JBJack Butcher33:41

       Mm-hmm.

   13. CWChris Williamson33:42

       ... and, um, having calls with interesting people that want to just talk about your visuals and little side projects and this, that, and the other, 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 podcast, spending 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?

   14. JBJack Butcher34:08

       Mm-hmm.

   15. CWChris Williamson34:08

       Why is, what 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 Adidas pair of shoe or a Puma pair of shoe. What you're buying are all of the ancillary benefits, right? On the outside of the onion. The reverse is true in the creator economy. Everybody's got the extraneous stuff because people can make nice podcast artwork or people can-

   16. JBJack Butcher34:37

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson34:37

       ... get the same... People can even get the same guests as you. You can have the same guests as you-

   18. JBJack Butcher34:41

       Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

   19. CWChris Williamson34:42

       ... 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.

   20. JBJack Butcher34:53

       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.

   21. CWChris Williamson37:09

       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?

   22. JBJack Butcher37:21

       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.

   23. CWChris Williamson40:10

       Mm.

   24. JBJack Butcher40:10

       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.

   25. CWChris Williamson40:27

       There's only so many-

   26. JBJack Butcher40:27

       Um.

   27. CWChris Williamson40:27

       ... ways that you can describe the same concepts, right? And the-

   28. JBJack Butcher40:32

       Yes.

   29. CWChris Williamson40:32

       ... 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.

   30. JBJack Butcher40:49

       Yep, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Send them over. I'll…

   1. JBJack Butcher45:00

      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.

   2. CWChris Williamson47:09

      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.

   3. JBJack Butcher47:27

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson47:27

      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-

   5. JBJack Butcher47:38

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson47:39

      ... value graph? Can you remember the sort of thoughts that you had around then?

   7. JBJack Butcher47:43

      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."

   8. CWChris Williamson48:32

      (laughs)

   9. JBJack Butcher48:32

      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.

   10. CWChris Williamson49:54

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JBJack Butcher49:54

       So-

   12. CWChris Williamson49:55

       Like, it's low, it's seen as low status, right?

   13. JBJack Butcher49:57

       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.

   14. CWChris Williamson51:08

       Who inspired you?

   15. JBJack Butcher51:10

       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-

   16. CWChris Williamson52:09

       So were you-

   17. JBJack Butcher52:09

       Yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson52:10

       ... 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?

   19. JBJack Butcher52:26

       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

   20. CWChris Williamson54:02

       Dude, Jim-

   21. JBJack Butcher54:03

       ... editing the video, or-

   22. CWChris Williamson54:03

       ... 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-

   23. JBJack Butcher54:17

       Yep, yep.

   24. CWChris Williamson54:18

       ... "That's my guy. That's proof of work."

   25. JBJack Butcher54:19

       Spot on.

   26. CWChris Williamson54:19

       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-

   27. JBJack Butcher54:30

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson54:30

       ... 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?

   29. JBJack Butcher54:54

       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.

   30. CWChris Williamson55:46

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. CWChris Williamson1:00:00

      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-

   2. JBJack Butcher1:00:11

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:00:11

      ... 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-

   4. JBJack Butcher1:00:35

      Mm-hmm.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:00:35

      ... 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-

   6. JBJack Butcher1:00:56

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:00:56

      ... 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.

   8. JBJack Butcher1:01:16

      Mm-hmm.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:01:17

      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-

   10. JBJack Butcher1:01:28

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:01:28

       ... feed out one number, and that number is what you're supposed to do next. And I-

   12. JBJack Butcher1:01:33

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson1:01:33

       ... 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."

   14. JBJack Butcher1:01:53

       Yeah, yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:01:54

       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-

   16. JBJack Butcher1:02:17

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson1:02:17

       ... 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?

   18. JBJack Butcher1:02:30

       Yeah. Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson1:02:30

       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.

   20. JBJack Butcher1:02:48

       Yeah, it's worked so far.

   21. CWChris Williamson1:02:52

       What is the price that you have to pay to be Jack Butcher?

   22. JBJack Butcher1:02:59

       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?

   23. CWChris Williamson1:03:16

       (laughs)

   24. JBJack Butcher1:03:16

       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.

   25. CWChris Williamson1:05:29

       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-"

   26. JBJack Butcher1:06:08

       Yeah, right.

   27. CWChris Williamson1:06:08

       ... "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-

   28. JBJack Butcher1:06:26

       Yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson1:06:26

       ... 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-

   30. JBJack Butcher1:06:44

       (laughs) Yeah.
6. 1:15:00 – 1:16:52

   Man, awesome. It's been…

   1. JBJack Butcher1:15:00

      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.

   2. CWChris Williamson1:16:20

      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?

   3. JBJack Butcher1:16:27

      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.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:16:34

      Jack Butcher, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, thank you so much.

   5. JBJack Butcher1:16:37

      Mate, thanks. It was a pleasure.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:16:39

      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