The Artist-Founder: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About Creativity | Patreon's Jack Conte
In this candid interview, Jack Conte, co‑founder of Patreon, explains how the company’s core purpose is to funnel money to creators, making that metric the primary KPI. He argues that long‑term trust with creators and fans outweighs short‑term revenue, citing examples like Costco’s hot‑dog pricing and Patreon’s take‑rate model that aligns incentives. Conte shares his leadership philosophy, emphasizing ambition aimed at the mission, reliability, and a "passion muscle"—the ability to love what you do deeply. He distinguishes community from audience, describing community as a two‑way, value‑driven relationship that fosters mutual support, charity, and in‑person gatherings. The conversation explores talent versus hard work, the importance of obsession, and how creators can build fan bases through authenticity and frequent, high‑quality output. Conte reflects on his own risk‑aversion, catastrophizing tendencies, and coping mechanisms such as lucid dreaming, framing these as "risk keys" that signal when anxiety is over‑inflated. He discusses the shift from collective artistic groups to individual creators due to one‑to‑many communication and economic pressures, but predicts a future resurgence of duos and collectives as the internet matures. Throughout, he stresses the need for creators to produce work they are proud of, to be vulnerable, and to maintain a long‑term vision for a 100‑year Patreon.
Chapters
I've never had a tech job. This is the only company I've ever worked at in my life. This is my first job.
Really?
Yes. My read of the Valley is people undervalue brand and narrative and creativity and storytelling. Things that in my world, where I come from, those are the things. And in Silicon Valley, the main thing is the product. But you can know that the product is a thing and care about narrative and creativity and storytelling and brand. And I think if you don't care about those things, it's very hard to influence culture and to build a brand that people love and to have trust with your customers. and like, it's very hard to do those things. A lot of those things are a completely different skillset. There's a lot of operators who like, if it doesn't show up on the P&L, they don't believe that it's real. I think it is possible to make art and also to want to get paid for your art. I think selling out is doing something other than making art. Like, if you get paid for your art, that's the opposite of selling out. That's making sure that you're setting up your future so that you can make more art.
Yeah.
And like, I'm on a mission in life and in this company to help creative people understand that they have meaning in the world. We've been looking at these fucking dashboards on social media companies for 20 years now that tell us you just got 3 million views and that's worth $18 in ad revenue. That's your worth to the world. And I think that's a load of horseshit. The internet has enough stuff. We don't need more stuff on the internet. We need things that people are deeply proud of. I sat down at my kitchen table and I sketched out the idea that became Patreon, and it took about 14 pieces of printer paper. I did it with a pencil and I felt so dumb. I'm a fucking YouTuber. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do with these drawings? And I literally had to say to myself, this isn't gonna work. That's okay. Draw the next page.
Welcome to Dialectic, episode 52 with Jack Conte. Jack is the CEO and co-founder of Patreon, and I talked to him about art and business, about his prolific creation himself over the course of the last 20 years on YouTube and in music in his multiple bands, including Pomplamoose and Scary Pockets. And running Patreon and his commitment to building a platform that is first and foremost for creators themselves under the view that people should be able to make a living for their art. One thing that is certainly clear is that Jack deeply loves artists and creators and wants us to live in a world where they can flourish for a very long time. I have a lot of respect for what he has built at Patreon and what he is going to continue to do for years to come. Before the conversation with Jack, I'd like to thank Notion, Dialectic's presenting partner. As I joked to Jack during the episode, Notion is essentially my patron. They are the presenting partner of Dialectic, and they are a huge part of what makes the show possible. Notion's a creative workspace for your life's work that you and your team can use now with AI and agents to have far more leverage on creating whatever it is you've set out to. Notion has become something of an AI-native operating system for you and your team's work. And the critical part of that is because they spent the last 10 years building a platform that houses all of your context and makes it an immediately useful place to have the benefits of AI and agents. They've also natively integrated custom agents, which are little guys who work in your workspace and help you have more time for the important work by automating away the busy work. There's been a number of recent developments in Notion's world. Uh, one of the most exciting is the developer platform and the combination of all the extensibility and workers, which allow you to have cloud-hosted agents that are working on your behalf within your Notion workspace and elsewhere across all of the other software that you use. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic. And now here is my conversation with Patreon's Jack Conte. Jack Conte, thank you for joining me, or thank you for having me, I should say.
Gosh, thanks for being here.
This is a pleasure. We have a mutual friend who really raves about you, and it's an honor to have gotten to kind of dumpster dive the archive and get to chat with you.
Nice, nice.
I wanna start with maybe that last point, which is I knew a bit about, like, I knew you had the band with your wife, and I knew you had made YouTube videos, and you kind of made Patreon for yourself. And like, I guess the idea I had in my head is that like, you were a CEO who kind of liked music and had done some YouTube in the past, which is decidedly not the case. I mean, I'm sure I'm missing some, but I think you've had 4 quite successful YouTube channels, maybe 3. You are, yeah, for lack of a better word, just wildly prolific, even ignoring Patreon. And so I think that speaks to a level of endurance. It speaks to, frankly, just being multi-hyphenate or polymathic. But I'm curious, Across all of these things, including the business, where— how do you sustain your energy?
I don't know the answer to that question.
It—
but I do get asked that a lot because, you know, for Pomplamoose is making 50 music videos a year, Scary Pockets is making 50 music videos a year at the same time. So I was outputting 100 music videos per year and doing Patreon and had, you know, active Instagram presence. And, you know, and also like, it's not like I'm not doing work at Patreon. Like, that is the triple-time job. That is my absolute focus. And those things were like, you know, for me in the cracks. I think the answer to the question, the best I can do is like, I think there's really like a couple things that it came down to for me. One was batching production on the media side.
Mm-hmm.
Um, when I was trying to make everything by myself, And doing one thing at a time. I couldn't get through the, like, the last 5% that was 20% of the work, you know? And so what the system that we ended up setting up is like flying down to LA for a Saturday and a Sunday, 'cause I'm working all week, once a month. So literally one time every 4 weeks, I fly down to LA on Saturday, do a session with Scary Pockets, which is my funk band, record 4 songs in a day. On Sunday, do a session with Pomplamoose, record 4 songs in a day. Both bands are profitable, and so we can hire teams. So we had a post-production crew, audio mixing engineers, mastering, video producers, video editors, full production teams.
Yeah, these aren't hobbies either, which is maybe the craziest part of this.
No, no, it's like a whole operation. We're like, 100 music videos a year is serious. That's serious output. So So yeah, so we had, you know, like, we had this system to sort of like get 8 songs in one weekend. And then the teams would sort of like take those songs and mix and engineer and make videos out of them. And then that got me to the point where I was releasing 2 music videos a week, one with Pockets and one with Pomplamoose, while I'm up here doing the company. And so I don't want to say it's like a, you know, it is a little bit of a magic trick because it's not like I'm in the recording studio every week or every day, which is maybe what it looks like on I mean, I'm here every day, but batch production was like a big thing. And, um, and the idea of like leaning into like everything I learned at Patreon about around working with teams, applying all of that to like Pomplamoose and Scary Pockets, like the power of a team, the output of a team is, you know, um, exponential compared to the output of a person, you know? So really thinking about how to leverage teams and work with teams and build like operations around, um, you know, uh, I don't like the word content, but like around a content pipeline. And then I know this is a highly contested thing in Silicon Valley. There's like 2 camps. I do not function without my chief of staff. And I know that role is like, there's people who are like, ah, if they have a chief of staff, I'm never investing. I literally wouldn't, it wouldn't work. I couldn't do it without my chief of staff. She's the best.
How long have you, this is Nicole?
Yeah, it's Nicole.
How long has she been with you?
8 years.
Wow.
And the first 6 of 'em, she was my EA. And I don't work without her. Like, my life doesn't work. I don't— she is very much like the executive function side of my brain. And I have so much inbound across Slack and Google Docs and Notion and email and Teams and Scary Pockets and Pomplamoose. Like, I cannot operate without an amazing human who's like going through all of that and constantly triaging and making sure that I'm constantly working on just the most important 3 things. Like, she is really good at that. She has full context on my life, on everything. And so that's the other, like, huge unlock for me has been learning to work really effectively with her and finding someone who's as good as her in that role. So yeah, batch production, having an amazing chief of staff. And then there is one other thing which I'm still working on, but it's just like fucking getting used to chaos. It's just like, There's a lot of people who think chaos is a sign of failure or like something not working.
Yeah.
Or like, oh, we've done something wrong. Exactly. We have to fix this chaos. And I'm, I, I'm, I'm, I'm post-chaos. Like, I accept the chaos of life and company building. And like, I, I'm now just at the point where I'm like, that is going to be the baseline is like chaos, disorganization, things changing, schedules changing, priorities changing. Um, and I'm like, I'm getting used to that kind of just being how things are. It's always gonna feel a little stretched. It's always gonna feel a little unwieldy. It's always gonna feel like a little bit too much. But actually, like, I don't know, I've gotten a little bit better at kind of relaxing into that.
That is an amazing, or at least a helpful strategic context for how this all happens. It doesn't explain how you do this for 15 years.
Yeah.
And it's like, obviously you love what you do, although that's like, even that's a cliché. And what does that totally mean? Like, are there parts of this where it's like, I don't know, as an example, maybe performing when you're down in LA with the band isn't like really this generative part of your brain, or maybe generative is the wrong word, but like, it's not like songwriting or something where it's like, it's just actually like purely energy giving. I don't wanna make it about like burnout, 'cause I think that's probably even, Yeah, I hate that word. Yeah, it's not like that.
Yeah.
But like, presumably some of these things are energy positive and some of them are energy negative, and enough of them are energy positive that you're like staying above water or you're just a sicko.
But no, no, no, I have so much. And as I've operated more, I've gotten better at leaning into things that are energy positive for me. Like I would say, like one of the main differences between like me as an early operator and me 13 years in is like I used to be just like, You know, super like growth mindset, like lean into the things that I'm— my weaknesses and like try and make them better and learn and grow. Of course, I still want to do all of that, but I'm— that takes you so far. I can get from a B- to maybe a B+ on a lot of those things in a year or two. And like, I'd rather have somebody else nail those things and delegate that and have somebody do them better and just make sure that we're aligned from a strategic and sort of vision standpoint on a lot of that stuff. And then I'm trying to lean more into the things that I think, like, I'm really good at. Like, what are my spikes? And then I wanna spend more time on those things. And so I've spent a lot more time over the last couple years on a lot of that stuff, and that is super energy-giving for me, right? 'Cause that's the stuff where I'm, like, in flow. I feel like I'm— on a lot of things, I feel like I'm worse than a lot of people. I'm like, ooh, there's another person who's gonna do this way better than me. And then there's a couple things where I'm like, I think I'm one of the few people who can like really crush this. And so I spend a lot of time doing that stuff. I also like love those sessions with the bands. I love performing. I love recording days. Like when I'm in a studio, I don't, like my confidence goes through the roof. Like I feel like I know exactly what to do. And like, it is so much fun. And I make such fast decisions. It's like 100% intuitive. It's just like, I've learned a lot actually from, like, as an operator, from how I show up in a recording studio. Like, there's a lot of that that I'm trying to pull into how I operate here. It's not one-to-one, so you have to be careful pulling too much. But it has been, that has been a lesson for me. And then there's enough of those things such that I, I like have a good, happy life and a fun time. And then when it's not, which is also, there's lots of those moments where I think a lot of people would characterize it as burnout. The reason I don't like that word is because for me, it's a bit like the word death, or like, I don't know, it occupies a space in your brain that is irrecoverable. And I don't think of it like that. So like, whenever I'm like, fuck, I'm done. I've got nothing left. I'm out of gas. This is too, there's too many things. This might sound silly or almost pedantic, but like, I literally sit down at a piece of paper or not a piece of paper, a note on Apple Notes. And I, um, I go, uh, on device, not cloud. I don't want this shit on the cloud, on device. And it's like, what am I feeling right now? I start with that.
Yeah.
And it's like, I'm anxious as fuck. I'm scared. I'm, like, demotivated. Like, I'm, you know, I'm talking about, like, the moments where it's, like, really bad. Like, I had a couple of these, like, maybe twice a year, 3 times a year. It was, like, not very often. You know, this isn't, like, a weekly or monthly thing, but, like, A couple times a year, it's like, fuck, I hate everything. And I literally start with how I'm feeling. I'm like, why am I feeling like that? What are my narratives around that feeling? What is it that I believe to be true that is making me feel that way? And then I list out my narratives. It's like, okay, here's my narratives. I'm like, okay, objectively, how many of those narratives are real? And how many of them are things that I'm assuming?
Yes.
And it's like, okay, actually, I don't know that this one is actually true. Okay, let's cut that one for now. But what are the actual problem statements then that come out of the narratives? And then it's like, I have a set of problem statements. And it's like, okay, now let's prioritize those problem statements. Again, I'm sorry if this sounds pedantic, but it's like—
No, this is exactly what I was asking about.
It's like, okay, here's my 7 problem statements. And what I've found is usually when I feel really shitty, what it actually is is a compounding set of 4 or 5 problems that are all really gnarly hitting at once. That's when I'm like, fuck it, I'm done.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of people would call that burnout. And so when I hit that, I list out those problem statements. I make them really crisp. Like, I get into, like, what is the actual problem? And then this is so silly, but it's so effective. I, like, list out a bunch of potential solutions for each of them, and I do the first 3.
Yeah.
Do the first 3 for each one. Do the first 3 hypotheses that could potentially solve that problem. Sometimes it's as simple as emailing a person. Setting up a phone call. Hey, here's the story in my head. Is this true? Like, what's your experience of this? And like working through something. And like immediately after doing the first 3 things for 4 or 5 problems, I feel so much better. And I'm like ready to go again because like I can see a path.
It's real. Like you've put it on the table and you can look at it. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I've like, If you were to go through my computer, um, probably shouldn't say that. But, you know, you'd see a series of brain dumps over the years, problem statements, and then little solutions to solve each one of them. And then sometimes it takes a couple weeks, sometimes it takes a couple months, um, occasionally it takes a year to get out of a really gnarly problem. Um, but usually within a year, I'm out of the problem. And then there's a new set of problems and I can do another brain dump.
Yeah, it sort of assumes that burnout, or to use the stronger word, death, isn't an option, which is like— I forget exactly how you framed it, but something along the lines of it assumes that like it could just— you could truly run out of gas. And you've adopted an orientation that says like, whatever the lowest point is, like, I will bounce. Like, inevitably I will bounce back. Like, it's almost like a belief thing, I suppose.
1,000%. So I actually don't think our— there's another one of these controversial statements here, but I don't think up to a certain level, your context is really important. Do you have enough food? Are you safe? Do you have shelter? Do you have enough money to get things done in your life? All that kind of stuff. But I don't think— one of the things my wife says, I agree with, I forgot who exactly said this, wherever you go, there you are. So, like, I don't think changing your environment or my job or my contacts or my partner or my house is gonna solve fucking anything. Like, wherever I go, there I am. So, like, I better get fucking good at solving the actual problems. Because the problems that we think— like, when you think about, oh, I'll just change the context.
Yes.
I think 5% of our happiness, at least my happiness, is context. I think the rest of it is brain chemistry and, like, specifics. And then it's like, okay, let me either work on the brain chemistry or let me work on the specifics. And that—
Can you successfully work on brain chemistry?
Yeah. Yeah, and I do. I go to therapy. I mean, I don't know if that changes my actual, like, physiology, But it certainly changes my psychology. And that has a profound impact on my happiness and my ability to kind of keep going.
It's funny, I think on one hand, I agree with you on that wherever you go, there you are. I think environments and contexts matter a lot, but we often blame things that are ultimately about us on the environment. And that's like, if only I was, the grass is greener. And so it's like, yeah, I think environments can be underrated, but not for these internal things, which is really risky. Yeah.
I mean, I'll give you an example. Like, I like doing things. I get, like— I get energy out of, like, publishing work and reaching an audience and building community on the internet.
But those things, by the way, are different. Like, publishing the piece and sitting down in the room by yourself to write it are very—
So different. And I like both. I actually really like—
So you really, like— do you get energy from, like, Jerry Seinfeld talks about writing. He's like, you lock yourself in the room every day and you don't have to write, but you're not allowed to do anything else. And I— maybe it's a distinctive thing of writers, but I feel like so many writers, they, like, love writing the idea and they, like, excruciatingly hate the process of having to sit down.
Yeah.
Do you get energy from the quote-unquote boring things or the drudgery things?
So, um, I've talked to a lot of people who are like, I don't want to write songs, but I want to have written songs.
Yes.
I am the opposite. Really?
I—
like, if I am in front of Ableton Live and, like, crafting up a MIDI bassline and running synths through plugins and reversing a piano and adding a tape loop to it, like, I will literally forget to go to the bathroom. I will forget to eat. Like, I will fucking wake up, like, 6 hours into the process and be like, oh my God, my bladder's about to explode. And then, like, I have to run to the bath— like, I lose myself. I'm gone.
You've got Ableton psychosis. I've heard about Claude Code psychosis, but it's Ableton psychosis.
It's like, it is that for me. It is the most, like, unembodied.
Are there things like that for Patreon? Presumably Patreon is a hugely mission-oriented thing that is largely about the way you're serving the world. And not to say music can't be that too.
Yeah.
So is it a different kind of thing, or are there aspects of it?
So different. And this is my struggle in life, which is, For me, the process, call it the input-level behaviors associated with making music, are the most joyful, wonderful behaviors. They are intrinsically motivating. They're what some people call autotelic, which is like a behavior that you do for the sheer enjoyment of the behavior itself, not for some expected outcome. Like, that is what music-making is for me. And those behaviors just like give me instantaneous Joy, like presence, presence. And sometimes I would even call it like lack of presence. Like, I don't even know I'm there anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just so in the work. Patreon is not that for me. And maybe, I don't know, I've talked to a lot of founders over the years. People say like, do what you're passionate about. And I agree with that. And I get that. The thing for me with Patreon is, The outcome of Patreon is so deeply motivating and inspiring to me. The impact that the company has on people and creators and the world and culture is, it gives me immeasurable meaning in my life.
Maybe even purpose.
Purpose. It feels like the reason I'm on Earth. It feels like the outcome That is like, I can't imagine a more rewarding outcome. And then the day-to-day behaviors are nowhere near as joyful as—
It'd be way more fun to be making music.
That'd be so fun! And so, like, this is my struggle. It's like, I love this set of behaviors. I love that outcome. Man, if I could do that set of behaviors to get this outcome, life would be amazing. But, you know, you're full of choices.
Why For you, and I guess this obviously may be an easy question to answer for some people, but why was it so important, why was it so important, I should say, to make your creative life a business, even like pre-Patreon?
I love the craft of music making. And Creation. I love it. It's just so fun for me. There's another piece of my brain that is the mechanics of system design, business building, whatever you want to call it. That I also love that there are some artists. In fact, we have like three personas of artists that we often talk about at the company. There are some artists. that are like, look, I wanna play guitar and smoke weed and write songs. Don't bother me with anything else. And like, that is a, I, in fact, sometimes I wish I was that type of artist. Because like, man, first of all, those artists make amazing fucking work. And they end up working with, many of them, a team who handles everything. And they just get to like play guitar all day. And that's amazing. Sometimes they get taken advantage of because they're not paying attention.
Almost like the original benefactors of real patronage. Like, the only way that person was alive or surviving 100 years ago was real patronage.
And that is like, that's, that is a category of ours, persona type 1. Then there's a second persona that's like, um, I don't like— yeah, I'll do some other things. And sometimes the administrative work, like, I don't love it, but I'll do it. And like, you know, I don't, I don't hate talking about money, but I don't love talking about money, and I prefer not to, you know. Um, but like, I'll manage my Patreon income, and I'll sell some merch, and like, I'll, you know, run my thing. And like, that's the second category of artists. There is a third category of artists. I forgot what we called them. Empire builder, architect. I don't remember what we called them, but there's a category of artists that's like, I love the business part. Like, the business part lights me up. And it's creative. And it's creative. And I get to design. Like, these artists are like, I'm a media company. They're like, I make media, and like, Oh my God, how do media companies make money? They have an events business. I could have an events business. Oh, they have an exclusive content business. Oh, they're segmenting their freemium media and they're from their premium media and they're thinking about their freemium-premium strategy and how could I do that? And what can I— oh, look how the New York Times grays out a third of the way through the article. What's the video version of that? Maybe I can do that with my videos. Okay, I'll put a call to action, second tweet, blah, blah, blah.
Closer to founders.
It's like, exactly. And there's a lot of artists that think are just like, they dig it. They like that stuff. I have always liked that stuff.
What do you like about it?
I just, it's, I like that it's like, it's so different from the music creation. And again, I like both. I don't, I couldn't, I think I probably like the music creation more, to tell you the truth. But this stuff is really fun for me. What do I like about it? I like that you can, I like that you can make— this stuff is so hard to measure, and it's so hard to know, did I do a good job? And it's so subjective.
Clear feedback loops.
And this one is like, you can just put the things in place and you know if it worked or not. And there's something, like, checklist-y about it that just is like— it just is nice to see progress over time.
It's also just a different part of your brain, probably.
It's a different piece of your brain.
Different creativity, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And so I feel when I'm doing all those things, I feel very whole, you know? Yeah, I feel like I'm being my whole self.
You talk about media market fit. Maybe the first question here would be like, what is the difference between content and art? Which is obviously could be a very big question. We don't need to spend all day on it, but rough, I think the reason I'm interested in the media market fit thing is on one hand, it's really compelling and really interesting. On the other hand, there are maybe things we gain when creative people are really attuned to the market, and there are things we lose when creative people are really attuned to the market, maybe even to your stoner guitarist to founder spectrum. And so maybe one vantage point or cut on that would be like maybe the gradient between content and art.
Yeah.
Like what aspects are at play there?
Yeah, big, big, big wide gradient, totally non-binary distinction. Like, so, you know, and it's hard to sort of talk about it. I'll give you, I'll give you the ends of the spectrum and maybe some things in between and how it is that I think Yeah. You know, content, I often— one way to think about it is its purpose is not necessarily the transference of an emotion to another human that the creator of that piece had. The purpose is some intended outcome. That to me, I think of as, like, content. So, like, for Netflix, of course they call it content because their purpose behind the content is adding new subscribers to the system and increasing revenue. And, like, so they think of it as content.
The artist doesn't, or the creator of that film or TV show doesn't necessarily.
Nope.
So the same piece of thing could actually be, depending on who's talking about it.
100%. And so, like, this is another reason I don't like that, like, I don't like the word influencer because I feel like influencer is what— that is the commoditized attribute of an artist that is valuable to corporations, the influence. And so they call that person an influencer because they're like, that's the piece of that person that I care about. I don't care about the rest of them.
Yes.
I care about the fact—
Their reach.
Their reach. That's the commodity. And by the way, it commoditizes artists because I can get influence from there or from there or from there or from there. And as long as there's eyeballs eyeballs on the other end of that influence. It doesn't matter where I get it from. So you sort of turn artists into corn or steel. It's like, it doesn't matter.
Yeah.
Um, so content for me is a little bit of that same type of thing. It's more commoditized. It's more outcome-oriented. It's more, um, trying to achieve something. There's a goal behind it versus like when I think about art, I think about, I never remember if it's Tolstoy or Tchaikovsky who basically said art is when the person who's creating the art felt something and wanted to communicate that feeling to another person. And so you end up literally transferring that feeling you had into another person. That is the process of art. And like, that has always stuck with me because my favorite art is when I finish it and I feel something. And when I feel something that I think, Maybe that person who made that thing wanted to get me to understand something in a way that was emotional, not logical even. And I'm like, I don't know if that's exactly what they were feeling, but like, they told me something emotionally there. That's my favorite. That's my favorite art in the world. And, um, and there is something I hate to even, you know, I've heard Rick Rubin talk about this and he sort of You know, he talks about the difference between art and commerce. I think it is possible to make art and also to want to get paid for your art. Like, if you're an artist and you want to be paid for your work, that's not commerce. That's like you feeling like you have value. That's having a sense of self-worth. That's recognizing that you are producing, you're creating value for— the world, and you want to be compensated for your contributions to society. That's totally legitimate. I don't think, like, that that's some, like, pejorative version of art.
It's challenging because art is— I would certainly agree that art is valuable. I don't know. I think art can sometimes be useful. And I think the more— perhaps the challenge, and perhaps why the idea of patronage is so interesting, is that the more entangled the art-making gets with the commercial side of it, the fuzzier all of this gets, and the incentives and everything else. Maybe it's just what we believe about the artist's intentions, but—
So much of it is that.
Yeah.
And also, like—
Not even what they actually are, but what we believe about what they are.
Art is also made, as far as we know right now, exclusively on planet Earth. And, you know, most of planet Earth is is engulfed in an economic and financial system.
Yeah.
That is the context for art-making. And, like, you can try to separate those as much as possible.
Right.
And you can try to say that you're making art in a vacuum. And there's a lot of people who do a really good job of that. But, like, is— like, why— I'm like, why would you do that? Like, for me, this is my problem with the term selling out. Like, I think selling out is doing something other than making art. Like, if you get paid for your art, that's the opposite of selling out. That's making sure that you're setting up your future so that you can make more art.
Right.
That's like—
It goes back to the endurance point.
Yeah. Like, that's like making, like creating a sustainable path for yourself to make art. That's like a beautiful thing.
My friend Trevor McFedries, he did—
Love Trevor.
He says selling out is punk. 'Cause by the way, The only— if you're selling out now, it means you're probably not a nepo baby and your only choice is to actually make your thing is to sell out, which is funny.
Yeah. I think there are, like, there are ways to make money that are really cheesy and, and, and/or dishonest or like smarmy. And like, you can be an artist and do that. You can be an economist and do that. You can be a PM and do that. You can be a founder and do that. But I think there are also ways to create value as an artist and be compensated for the value that you're creating that are wonderful and pure and reasonable and kind and good for the world. And yeah, the reason I'm pushing so hard on this is because so many artists, right? Those 2/3 of artists, almost think that, like, if they make money from their art, it's like evil.
Yeah.
And like, I'm on a mission in life and in this company to help creative people understand that they have meaning in the world. We've been looking at these fucking dashboards on social media companies for 20 years now that tell us, you just got 3 million views and that's worth $18 in ad revenue. That's your worth to the world. And I think that's a load of horseshit. And that shouldn't be the case. And it's gonna take a lot of convincing artists that like, no, no, no, that's the system saying you're worth only that. You're worth way more than that. You're creating so much more value than you're capturing as an artist. And that's like a key piece of Patreon's mission, is just to change how people even think about their own self-worth as artists in the world.
Why are fans paying the artists that they enjoy? Why is that such a— that's obviously not a crazy idea. Like, it's existed for a while, and yet it seems that what you do is not that common. Why are you so bought in on that being a great model for artists?
What I love about this question is, like, so for thousands of years, really, pretty much every piece of great art that we ever have known, Any piece, any piece of art in history books, you know, was funded basically through patronage. Was funded because somebody was like, hmm, I really like what you make. You're cool. Here's a bag of coins. Go make more cool stuff.
Or God wants it or whatever.
Right. Or God wants it. Or the government wants it. Um, then like in the early 1900s, like humanity figured out how to record light onto celluloid paper and record sound onto a wax cylinder. And we were like, oh my God, you can put art on a physical object. And you can ship that physical object to consumers and they will purchase that physical object, not because of the object, the materials, but because of the art that's encoded on the object.
Although I will say, I think the distribution friction and cost made it easy to justify charging for it.
Only the distribution and cost and lack of scarcity, right? Um, and cost of materials, right? And so, you know, that created like 100 years of an infrastructure build out, jewel cases for CDs and cardboard record sleeves and You know, uh, magnetic tape in, you know, VHS tapes.
Also worth noting, really good for musicians and filmmakers, not that good for a whole bunch of other art mediums, right?
No, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah. But anybody telling stories with sound or, or, um, you know, moving pictures, right? Great. Great for, for those folks. And that's sort of, then over the 1900s, there are all these, it was all this industry popped up that was sort of around, uh, like the distribution and economics of unit sales. As a replacement for patronage, for, as the main, like, economic model for artists, right? And so it became CD sales or like, uh, you know, uh, tape sales or LaserDiscs or Blu-rays or whatever it is. Um, and then the internet came around and suddenly the thing that you said made those objects valuable, which was scarcity, disappeared. Pieces of art were infinitely replicable and no longer scarce. And the early experiments with, okay, what are we gonna do here, is like Napster. And then it was like, well, there should be some type of economics around this. It was like iTunes. And then about 10 or 15, no, sorry, like maybe 5 years into that, and it was like, no, no, ad revenue. Because sometimes I think of ad revenue as basically like the go-to-market strategy for the web.
I would argue it's probably the only truly defined and great business model of the internet as it currently stands. You're trying to change that, but it's the only one we really found.
It is the mature one for sure. And the one that started the earliest. I think also humanity is like reckoning with all the problems associated with that model.
But it's the one that's least fighting gravity. Like from a user experience, there are a whole bunch of things structurally about music that actually make sense for I shouldn't have to pay a dollar to listen to a song once, right? Like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna enjoy it the more I listen to it. Like, anyway, anyway.
Free experiences for the end consumer will always beat paid experiences for the end consumer, straight up. Um, and so that's why the internet kind of got to scale so quickly, right? Like, this, this technology was invented and like 20 years later, like billions of us are using it. That's because it was free, right? If it cost everybody $10 to get on, like it probably I'm not sure we would've seen it explode like it did. So it was a great kind of way to get things up and running and to get humanity connected. But I think the early companies that kind of won there thought of art as, like, a subcategory of information, right? They were like, information should be free.
Yes.
Information such as art and news. And artists were like, what? And And so, like, you know, I looked up one day and just felt like this system is not— like, in a day and age of infinite replicability and a lack of scarcity and no more physical objects with your art on it, how are artists going to get paid? And strangely, it sort of initially was like before those objects existed in the first place, back to the Back to 1900, pre-magnetic tape, pre-wax cylinders, pre-Edison cylinders, like, you know, back to bag of coins, you're doing something cool.
Um, is there much history? No, no worries if you don't know, but is there any serious history of a more, um, democratized or fragmented patronage? Because the obvious huge difference is that back then it was a rich guy.
the Medici family and some governments.
I, it's funny, I sometimes joke, my podcast is free for all listeners. I have one sponsor, it's Notion. They're a software company, they're great. They're my patron, like quite literally closer to the Medici than before. Obviously the big difference in your worldview is like, it's not gonna be one guy or even 2 guys or 3, which is, does have like a lot of things that are structurally different, including but not limited to, something I referenced earlier, which is when your core audience and your customer are the same group, it— there are good parts of that and there are bad parts of that.
So interestingly, patronage for us was where the company came from and was the first thesis behind this model.
Yes.
That we started building. And also the kind of emotional truth of what Patreon is, right? Right.
Right.
And narrative truth of what it is. But what we have found, you know, years in, not even that far in, we started working on a different way to think about it. Because what we found is, the truth is like, a lot of artists are like, I don't wanna put out a hat and ask for money. Like, what do you think? Like, I'm reaching millions of people. Like, I'm a badass. I'm going on tour and selling, you know, $5,000 worth of tickets. Like, I'm not gonna, like, busk on the internet. Like, I'm not doing patronage. And that feedback was, like, loud and clear. And what we saw was actually, like, that the way of thinking about Patreon that's like—
It's not a donation.
It's not a donation. It's very important that it can't be a donation. And actually, it's not just a positioning thing. It's not just a marketing thing. It's in the product. So we built this CRM that's more about running your business, getting the email address of the fans, building the direct relationship with your audience. We built one-time payments, which allows like, you know, artists to like transact and like sell a piece of digital media or a collection of a back catalog of videos. I love that.
The fact that you can buy a single video for $8 or whatever, which is maybe a lot for a video, but like, I wish I could do that on Netflix or whatever. It's great.
Um, we built, um, a more robust membership system. So we, you know, before Patreon in 2017, you could be a member, but you were a member of a gym. I don't even know if people realize that. We were literally— we invented the category of digital creator membership. No one was using that term. You couldn't become a member of a creator. You could, like, become a member of an organization.
Yeah.
But there was no membership for creators. Before Patreon started calling it that and building the product that was membership for creators. And then, you know, during the pandemic, that really took off with podcasters. It started taking off, membership as a category started taking off even before the pandemic, but it got augmented during, uh, COVID with those sort of, uh, you know, podcast explosion.
Why do you think that was?
Because podcasting is episodic and, um, the sort of dollars per watch minute to, to produce podcasts is, is like, that's an amazing ratio for podcasters versus animation, for example, is like very costly per, per watch minute created.
Was it, was it initially, was it primarily, um, fully gated shows or shows that were two-thirds for like Josh Sideral or whatever, where there's a bonus episode?
This is precisely what changed over the course of the pandemic, because that's when New York Times's, um, subscription revenue surpassed their ad revenue. It's when The Guardian introduced premium and freemium. Now, you know, you can't sort of, there are no publications who don't have some type of freemium premium, even like Disney, Netflix, they have the free tier, they have the paid tier.
Yeah.
It's kind of in the public consciousness now that if I am a producer of media on the web, some portion of that media should be gated and some portion should be free. And there's a, there's a user journey there. There's a fan journey there associated with that free to paid conversion that is like important for artists. And that was not a part of the internet 10 years ago. That's, like, new in the last 5, 6 years that that's become part of the public consciousness.
Maybe there was, like, flickers of this on Twitch and, like, other— or OnlyFans. I don't know when that showed up, but even that, I don't know if it's quite the same psychology. It's a little different.
Yeah, there were always—
there—
I don't wanna say always, but, like, even in the early days of the web, there were things that you could that artists were posting that you could pay for, right? Like, I remember in 2011, Pomplamoose, my band, was doing paid live webcasts. We had a show and a red curtain and we'd sold tickets.
Why do you think that hasn't worked more? Is that working at all on Patreon?
I actually think there is a reason. I think that, I think it's very hard to make something live that is super engaging. Versus, like, if I'm gonna spend half hour watching something, if I front-load 6 weeks of work into making a really engaging half hour, it's just so much easier than, like, doing a bunch of production to make an engaging half hour.
Totally. Well, and this is why livestreaming, the average streamer streams for 6 hours. It's actually, like, a lower bar, longer duration. You're watching it while you work, whatever. Right, right.
That makes sense. And what you're streaming is actually something that someone else has produced and spent a long time producing and making excellent games, right? Like, the graphics, the intrigue, the strategy, like you're watching a game. And then what makes it compelling and why you're not just watching a game is because there's an awesome human who's talking about it. Yeah. Yeah.
Or even the, I mean, even Speed and Clavicular and the crazy, like, they have to go to such an end of spectacle.
Right.
To, yeah. Yeah. We don't have to get into that, but, um, Huh. I may have cut you off, but I think this is a helpful transition, maybe along a similar point, which is one thing I've observed is that a lot of things, a lot of the big consumer internet companies the last 15 years, we think of them as technology companies, and they obviously are. But the breakthrough, like, obviously they're tech hosting live video or whatever. These things are not easy. But if you look at you guys or even Uber or Airbnb or Twitch or whatever, it's actually like culturally normalizing a behavior and saying like, you're allowed to do this. Obviously, I assume some of this is emergent, which is you're having your creators or your fans are telling you to do this. But I'm curious what you've learned about how that actually happens.
Slowly. I remember pitching Patreon to investors in 2014. And like, one of the main pieces of pushback was like, wait, so you guys are gonna ask people to pay For something that's free on another platform. And I was like, yeah.
Yeah, at least Twitch, it's on our library.
And—
It's on YouTube.
And they were like, thank you, good luck with that.
Didn't you have a— didn't you raise money pretty quickly?
Um, we raised $700,000. Um, we got a term sheet for $700,000. We ended up raising the ceiling for the round to $2.1 million about 3 months after launching. Okay.
But it wasn't working yet, or it was?
No, it was. It was.
Oh, so it kind of worked right away.
It worked immediately. And but so I have to caveat when I say that, because a lot of people are like, oh my God, that's amazing. But what isn't said there is I tried 5,000 other things that went absolutely nowhere. This was one of the 5,000 things that kind of— that worked. And so, like, There was that product market fit hunting phase. I never, I never set out to start a company is the thing. Like, I've never was like, I want to make a company and that's going to be my life. I never thought that. Um, but this was just one of the hundreds of projects that I was working on that, that took off right away. Um, and so we just leaned in, you know, um, over the years. And, um, that's why I think it's not remarkable that it worked.
What about, presumably you guys have done this multiple times, including but not limited to the shift from donation to actually like you're selling digital goods basically. Even that is a version of this, culturally normalizing something. And at least from my view, you guys have kind of done this. And I would even add, like, new categories on the platform, like being able to actually take hold in the board game world or in the podcast world or whatever. Like, is most of that just being really attentive to what's happening on the platform, or are there ways that you can kind of bend things in the direction you want them to?
Yeah, my take, I come from the world of YouTube, right? Like, I come from the world of artists and creators. I've never had a tech job. I've never worked at another tech company. This is the only company I've ever worked at in my life. This is my first job that I've ever had.
Really?
Yes. Like, this is my first time I've ever worked.
So straight out of college, music for however— and music and then YouTube.
I worked as a contractor. I taught, I was an SAT tutor. I was a contractor doing in-house background music for corporate videos for Google, but I was just composing, right?
You did voice some characters on The Sims 2.
I was an actor. I was the voice of a teenage boy. So like, I did all— but But I never, like, went to work at a company every day. So this is my first job. My read after 13 years of working with all kinds of different execs and, you know, and people in Silicon Valley is that I think Silicon Valley largely, and this is maybe one of the reasons I think Silicon Valley often just looks so out of touch with the rest of the world and why there's so much pushback. And honestly, like, just, it's like a lot of, like, just, backlash and hatred of tech in the last 10 years. Um, I think a lot of it is because, like, my read of the Valley is people undervalue brand and narrative and creativity and storytelling and a lot of these things that in my world where I come from, those are the things. Those are the things.
It's all you got.
And like, and in Silicon Valley, like, the main thing is the product. Which is really true. Like, the main thing is the product.
Also, the projects are magic. Half the— ChatGPT comes out, you don't need a lot of narrative.
You don't need narrative because the product is so— it just, it's, it is incredible. Um, and so I don't mean to say the product isn't the thing. At the end of the day, like, 99% of people, their interaction with the company is going to be the product, right? And so the product is the thing, but you can know that the product is the thing and care about narrative and creativity and storytelling and brand. Or you cannot care about those things. And I think if you don't care about those things, it's very hard to influence culture and to build a brand that people love and to have trust with your customers. And it's very hard to do those things. A lot of those things are a completely different skill set. It's a completely different mindset. It's a different way of thinking about the world. Yeah, there's a lot of operators who If it doesn't show up in the P&L, they don't believe that it's real. And then there's some operators who like actually operate from a place of conviction and belief in, hey, this is going to build trust with customers. It's going to be hard to see the incremental impact in the P&L, but I know it's going to build trust with customers and that's going to create loyalty and that's going to improve retention. It's going to improve conversion at every stage of the funnel. And so from a place of belief and conviction, we're going to do that. There's a type of operator that believes that, and there's a type that doesn't. And I think Silicon Valley is, a lot of people here are the type that just don't really believe that for whatever reason. I do. I can't prove it. Can't prove it. I can't, there's no model. We've tried building the attribution frameworks. It's a waste of time. Like, you can't, it's just, why do that? But I believe it. And so, yeah, you, you, the, I'm trying to answer your question around like, changing people's mindsets and mentality and normalizing behaviors, you know, around paying creators for their work. And I think a lot of it is like, is, is understanding brand and narrative and storytelling. And then you, if you don't have the product to back it up, it won't work.
Right. But, but I think it's maybe not mechanical at first. It's like almost emotional or a human problem first.
100%.
It's possible the answer to this question is embedded in part of what you just said, but my sense is, and it could just be my kind of corner of Twitter and the world, is that in a certain part of Silicon Valley and startup land, Patreon is very underrated. Perhaps you feel that. And if so, why?
I would say even dismissed.
Why do you think that is? I would agree. It is, I'll do an on-the-nose example. And I like them, I like the platform. Substack is very in vogue in that world. Patreon is not. Part of that is obviously the content on the platform and who uses it, but it's really interesting to me. And they are— Patreon's quite big and quite successful, so I'm curious.
Yeah. Why is that? Well, let me give you what I think is the real answer. Which is a little painful for me to say, but I think it's the— I think it's a big piece of the truth. I think it's— I think I have to take accountability for that. Like, my vibe is not very Silicon Valley.
Hmm.
I'm— I don't— like, I don't even think of Silicon Valley people as my people. You know, I like, I, I'm the way I talk, like the way I, what I care about, like talking about brand and narrative and marketing. Like it's really in vogue now. I mean, I feel like it's more in vogue to like talk about how you're, you know, cutting your marketing team to invest in engineering. Like, I feel like that's like more tech vibe.
Sure.
And I don't. I don't believe in that. I like I I I I mean I understand where that's coming from, but like my values, the things that I care about, you know, show up in how the company talks and how the company messages and what I say and you know and what we all say and how we write our blog posts and like we very much speak to creators. We don't like I know a lot of companies, Substack included, it's like when they speak they like the primary lens is like reaching tech people. How do we like make tech excited about our product. Um, I just, when I'm writing communications to people, I am not thinking about that at all. I'm not thinking about how do I reach the next, you know, 100 engineers as much as I am thinking about how to build trust with creative people and artists. And so I think just like 13 years of doing that, I think people just, people in Silicon Valley just don't care about us as much. Which is, I think, very— I think that's legit. Why would they care about us? We're not talking to them.
I think there's something to that. I think there is obviously a part of it is that, like, a lot of people in a certain part of Silicon Valley read the types of people who would be more likely to be on Substack than on Patreon. Like, part of it is just like, where is the audience? I think Yeah.
That's a big piece of it too, is like, the stuff that people— the media that people author on Substack is about tech, about politics.
Josh and Rachael and these people are not huge on Twitter.
And like, the people on Patreon are like, they're talking about Reckless Ben and the Lego scandal from last year. And like, those are my people. That's what I want to talk about.
And ironically, it's actually— but see, here's what's weird. Um, Patreon is more YouTube, obviously. That's like a— yeah. In, in, in sort of— and there isn't this with YouTube, maybe just because YouTube's so colossal and so big. Although maybe, maybe it's also true that the average technology-oriented person or startup person— I think this is actually one of the— do you know the TVPN guys, Josh and Jordy?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know them, but I know of them.
Uh, or John and Jordy, I should say. Uh, I think one of the reasons they were so successful is they took a whole bunch of ideas that were like really well trained on the other parts of the internet and brought them to Twitter.
Yeah.
But yeah, anyway, it's a—
so this is, this is actually recent with tech on YouTube.
Yeah.
Tech was not big on YouTube.
Right. Yeah. Now Founders Fund is playing Mafia on YouTube.
But I mean, honestly, like, I think that the pivotal moment was All In, right? Which, which was more of a podcast, but it was like the podcast was the entry point into YouTube and then podcasts exploded in tech and now everybody has a podcast. And, and that is the— that was how tech got onto YouTube. Yeah. But like before that, Tech, like, tech communities didn't really exist on YouTube. Yeah.
It's also just funny, like, Silicon Valley is a place that loves people who are out there. And, like, very, like, don't fit into a box. At least that's the stated preference. And you were very that. But anyway, I don't know if we're gonna fully litigate it, but I always thought that was funny. I'm sure there are other examples, but there aren't a ton of easy ones of platforms and big products that really, really ruthlessly prioritize creators over the rest of the audience. What has that— and that's not to say you don't— clearly you guys value Patreon viewers, consumers, fans, whatever, patrons. What has that kind of orientation or principle— how has that shaped the company over, particularly over the long run?
It is the shape of the company. Um, we, of course, we value fans. We have to value fans. If we don't value fans, we can't truly be a creator-first company because creators' first priority is their fans. So we must value fans and we have to build the systems and processes and tools and products to help creators reward their fans, think of their fans, prioritize their fans, et cetera. For us as a company, the way I think about it is like, there are so many great products out there that like are an awesome deal for consumers. There's a lot of big muscly companies that push their weight around and get the consumer what they need.
Right.
That's great for consumers. We have a lot of options. There's a lot of competition. But there needs to be a big, powerful company that has sharp elbows, that muscles its way around, that makes the world better for creators. If such a company, if such a system does not exist, things are going to keep getting better for consumers, which is asymmetric.
Yep.
That drives things, that makes things worse for creators. If you're always optimizing for consumers, then it's always all you can eat, $10 a month, you get as much art as you want. That's not a good economic model for creative people.
I think that the reason this has been challenging for people to see, even creators, is that most of these other aggregator-style platforms promise creators audience, which is like the ultimate scarcity. And so it feels like that's obvious. If you want creators, you need to give them audience, which actually means catering to the consumer. And you've kind of inverted that in a way that wasn't obvious.
We've totally inverted it. It makes it very hard for some people when they get here to think about it from the creator lens, 'cause they're used to thinking about it from the consumer lens. Any UGC company, they think of it as like, that is a means to the end, which is driving DAO, which creates ad revenue.
Yes.
And so they're like, how are we gonna get that DAO? Oh, let's spin up a program where we help creators author posts. And for us, the creation of the art is the purpose. Like, and, and like, and everything is downstream of that. And so it's, it's a different way to think about the world. And it comes down to the company's like KPIs, right? Like our, our primary KPI is dollars sent to creators, right? And so like, that's what we're thinking about. That's what we're talking about. Like, that's not a byproduct of the company. That's the purpose of the company.
It almost, you could almost imagine somebody coming in and saying, And maybe there have been examples of this. We're going to charge half of Patreon's take rate. But in the end, their core incentive is to grow audience. And so it gets— maybe to put it a different way, why do you think perhaps— I mean, philosophically, I'm sure it is that commitment. Why do you think Patreon has remained so sticky, both for creators, but also for fan and patron cohorts?
Um, this is, this is one of those things.
10% is a big number, to put it in a different way.
Yeah, this is one of those things that I, I, I'm going to have this sort of spiritual answer, and then there's maybe the, the, you know, technical answer.
Great, I'm interested in both.
Um, I think the real answer is the spiritual answer, which is, um, we've done right by creators for 13 years. And that compounds just like, you know, anything else. Um, and that, that compounding trust and understanding from the community, um, has built a lot of goodwill. I'm not saying we don't have detractors. Of course we have detractors. It usually has to do with content policy stuff. When we make a really difficult content policy decision, a lot of people get angry at the company.
But you've earned credit.
But we've, we've done right by creative people. Like people think of Patreon as the— a lot of people think of Patreon as the good guys. Certainly a lot of artists and creative people think of Patreon as the good guys. If you are gonna run your business on a platform, if you're gonna trust that platform with your revenue, with your monthly income stream, with the main thing that you use to build a life for yourself, to pay your mortgage, you're gonna go with the platform that you, that you think is the good guys. You're gonna go with the platform that you trust.
Or that the creators you admire trust. Right.
And so, what does that mean tactically? It means that we make long-term decisions founded on trust, I think, just more often than other companies do. We don't trade that for a lot. And I'm saying we don't, ever have to make decisions where we trade trust. There's sometimes we have to deprecate a product and that's really hard for the market. And so we have to build mitigation plans and like, okay, we do all those things. But like, we will often make trades where we trade short-term revenue for long-term trust with our creators and fans. We make those trades all the time. I believe those trades are in the best long-term interest of Patreon's mission and even the shareholders. Certainly the creators, certainly the fans. Um, but like, I want Patreon to be a fucking 100-year company. You know, I want us to be around. I want us to be fighting for creative people 100 years from now after I'm dead. And I think you can't get there unless you really care about long-term trust. And I think about some of my favorite companies. I know everybody in tech is all hot and bothered about Costco. So I'll be one of the people who's hot and bothered about Costco. I think Costco is awesome. Like, Costco kept the price of the hot dog at $1.50 for, like, decades. And when Costco got down to the point where they couldn't keep it at $1.50 anymore, because their suppliers weren't, like, supplying them at the, you know, at the right prices anymore—
They were losing money.
They fucking bought a hot dog factory, and they made the acquisition, they retooled their whole operation, they figured out a way to keep the price of the hot dog at $1.50. Like, a bunch of people look at that and say, like, that's a terrible business decision. But Costco's like, we believe that people trusting us is the most important thing. We believe our customers are fiduciaries.
Right, right. And it's aligned with their— critically for Patreon, it's like, that's all nice. And it's aligned because you have chosen a business model that makes money when your creators make money.
Yeah.
Which I think is an important kind of part. It's not just the values, it's also the incentives.
100%. And that, I wish I could say that was strategic and thoughtful. I think it was just accidental, but maybe there was some intuitive element of that. But yes, having a take rate model means that all we have to do is help creators make more money. And if we do that, then we make more money. So that, like, business and people incentive means that we don't have to kind of choose, you know, between us and creators.
What will actually make Patreon outlive you? What will it take?
Oof, this is a deep question. Um, I think there's a couple things. Really great governance. Um, really great culture and values. Um, and then a focus on building long-term trust. Um, trust, values, culture, governance. If you nail those things, I think a company can last a long, long time.
To maybe invert the question, why are you still the right person to run Patreon now? Hire a professional CEO. And by the way, you sure like that. I don't mean a big gray suit. I mean, find somebody who's really value-aligned, who's has more management experience. You can go make more music, whatever.
Totally.
You could be the chairman who goes around, does podcasts more.
I have thought about that, and I'm, I'm, I didn't, like, in my life, I wasn't like, ah, I wanna be a CEO. Like, that's not my goal in life. Like, I wanna solve this problem.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
And so right now, I think I'm the right person to solve this problem. Um, and I think, I think it's also possible that there will come a moment where I'm like, okay, all of the long-term things are in place. The, like, culture is just this snowball rolling down a mountain at a million miles an hour. It has so much momentum. The governance is all in place. Like, like, all the pieces are there. And, like, honestly, the company doesn't need me anymore, benefit from somebody else. Um, I'm not, like, against that. Um, I don't think we're there yet, but like, uh, how will I know we're there? I mean, culture, governance, like it's just, it's literally those, those things. I mean, I think it's very like, I'm pushing to, I'm pushing to make that happen.
Yeah. Yeah.
Not because I don't want the gig anymore, but because I want Patreon to be under your company. Yeah. Yeah.
Um, in any context, obviously you have, you have, um, more experience in the running Patreon and maybe leading bands sense, what makes a good leader?
Oh, boy. Hard lessons over the years here. A lot of pain. I don't know that I'm ready to raise my hand and like offer leadership advice to the world on a public podcast. Like, I think there's a lot of things that I've learned and that I'm a lot better at now. I think there's a lot of things I'm still growing and like, and want to get better at. But I have worked with a lot of leaders who I think are really amazing, and I have worked with leaders who I don't trust as much. And maybe I can offer some lessons from that lens. One is like, who is the ambition for? Is it for the self, or is it for the mission of the company? I like working with really ambitious people, but I want that ambition to be aimed at the mission of the company. And when the ambition is aimed at the self, that's on the denominator of the leadership quality equation.
Is that usually clear?
It's gotten faster and faster for me to pick up on, to the point where I can start to pick it up in the interview process now. Where is the ambition coming from? But sometimes if somebody's really strategic, you cannot pick it up, or I cannot pick it up for a little while.
Yeah.
So that's one, like ambition for the self versus ambition for the company, for the mission. There's some basics, like, Do you do what you say you're going to do? Like, do you, do you execute what you promise? Do you deliver what you, what you say you're going to do? Um, that's like reliability, um, dependability, those sorts of things. Like, not everybody's got that. Um, that's huge.
And somehow also like the busiest and most effective people in the world are also the most reliable. Totally not a coincidence, right?
There's some really important things to me that I think are important. One is like, do you have the passion muscle? And what I mean by that is like, did you fucking love something before you got to Patreon? Can you fall in love with your customer? Can you go to the ends of the earth to serve someone else, to create value?
Does that passion need to be outside of yourself?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Same thing as, like, the ambition. It's like, is there something external that you just, you can fall in love with? It's like, call it obsessed, call it passion, call it whatever. It's like, is this a person who gets obsessed with things? That's what I really value about people like Hank Green, who's, like, one of my favorite people in the world. It's just like, dude can get obsessed about so many things. I think it makes him really special. Another thing is, can you like egolessly self-reflect and do so with like humility? That's maybe not important for a lot of other companies, founders, operators. Maybe it is in some capacity. For me, it's really important. I really want to see a leader. who can not only, like, self-reflect egolessly and be like, ah, I didn't do this well. I'm sorry about that. I want to make sure that doesn't happen again. Um, and not like with a bunch of guilt and shame, but like with like a, huh, like I'm puppeting this meat sack that did this thing and this meat sack has now learned that thing and it's going to do better next time. Um, like there's some like, like objective ability to do that that some folks have that I think is—
Almost just like a commitment to growth.
Totally. And I really like to see that in leaders. I found, honestly, if somebody doesn't have that, it's very hard for me to work with them. I just lose interest in them. And I lose interest, I lose faith that they can grow and learn into what they need to be. 'Cause Patreon is a very weird business.
And one I think is certainly many others have said, like, trajectory can be a lot more important than kind of like current level.
Capacity.
Yeah.
I really like somebody— we were talking about Chris earlier— like, I like somebody who strips their thinking down to the studs and really tries to deeply understand the unique nature of any context that they're in. before just, like, gunning it on solutions.
Yeah.
Now, you can overdo that. And I've seen people on the other end of that spectrum too, me included, where I'm like, gotta nail the strategy. Let's— can't take action yet. Haven't gotten the strategy in place. Versus, like, some of the operators I've grown to really love are like, next 48 hours, what are we doing? Next 24 hours, like, what are the next 3 steps forward? So much of company building, especially now, Nobody knows what it's gonna be like in 6 months. There's a lot of people who say they know what it's gonna be like. Nobody fucking knows. And even if they did, I would be unable to tell, like, who knows and who doesn't. So, like, as far as I'm concerned, nobody knows. So, like, next 48 hours, like, let's get the right things in place.
But can you cleanly slice that up, right?
Yeah, exactly. Like, can you take action and generate outcomes consistently?
Yeah.
One foot in front of the other. And man, that's been really fun for me. I think if you have the clarity over the long term, it affords you the ability to be super focused on execution. If you don't have the clarity over the long term, then actually execution, you end up kind of switching directions all the time.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, so having that long-term clarity, but then being hyper-focused on the next 48 hours, you know, is, is a, is a unique sort of bidimensional skill there.
You mentioned Hank and Chris Peck. Are there, whether them or otherwise, like, are there people who have been particularly influential on you via mentorship or whatever else as a leader? Maybe especially given that you're kind of out of the traditional Silicon Valley distribution. And maybe there have been Silicon Valley founders who have been very helpful too.
But yeah, there are, there are people More than people, there are attributes of people that I aspire to. I've found that if I get too attached to any one individual, I start trying to emulate them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that is terrible. I can get into a lot of trouble really quickly by like over-falling in love with a single individual leader. Let me like think of an example. I like, I don't like everything about Travis Kalanick, but I have seen and heard so many stories about his level of ambition for the mission, and that's really inspiring to me.
Yeah.
And so the way I think about it is like, can I— can I take just that?
Go watch a Travis fan edit.
Like, like, I don't have to take the other things, but like—
Yeah.
And by the way, I do the same thing with songs. When I'm listening to a song, like, I'm able to be like, you know, I really like that lyric, or I like this synthesizer, or man, that kick drum just punches through the mix, or like, you know, that groove, like the spacing between the hi-hats and where the snare hits is like, I want to take that for my next song. I may not like the whole song.
The more youthful person is just going to copy the song or cover the song.
Totally. Which I did plenty of in the early days, and it was very hard.
Sure, there's a lot of learning from that too.
Yeah.
A couple things on creativity.
Yeah.
What are your thoughts? I'm thinking of sort of the— I think you said somewhere you've performed or composed 900 to 1,000 songs, roughly? Maybe not composed.
Yeah, so—
A lot of time in the studio.
Yes, a lot of time. I think we've published probably around that between Pockets and Pomplamoose and me. We've probably published somewhere around that many songs. Not all that we wrote. A lot of them are covers, but arranged, performed, mixed, mastered, engineered, published. Yes.
Maybe this ties a little bit in what we were talking about at the beginning. With that as a backdrop, what are your thoughts on talent? Like innate talent?
In what capacity? Do I believe in innate talent? Do I believe you can get talent by work? Like what's your— What do you mean when you're thinking about talent?
I guess I'm interested in this idea that you are like a very prolific person who's been, who clearly has like some innate things that are remarkable or unusual. And it could just be energy, actually, to go back to our first question. And like, clearly you have some baseline amount of musical talent. There's always debates over like, what made the Beatles the Beatles? Was it the mix of it? Was it John and Paul's innate songwriting ability? Was it all those years in Hamburg? Like, and so I guess my question is about, like, maybe a way to ask this question would be like, say you're excited about something. Is excitement enough? Is reps enough? Or do you actually have to really be honest with yourself about what you are and what the world is?
Yeah. My instinctual answer to this question, maybe I'll figure it out as I'm talking through it, is I'm not sure, at least for me, I've never felt talented. I've never felt like I— like, that's just— I just got that. Like, that's just embedded in me. I've seen that maybe in other people. Like, my wife can just— she can literally sing classical music. She can just write, invent classical music off the top of her head. Key changes, modulations. She can just invent. It's unbelievable. I cannot do that. I need to learn theory and learn what chord goes to the flat 7 and how to resolve to the, you know, 1, and then how to modulate to the 5. Like, I have to literally think my way into those things and learn all those things. Even arranging and recording, like, I was so bad at making music all through, like, grade school and high school. Terrible. I was terrible. I have records of it. Like, I sucked. I remember being in a record, like my first time when I learned that there was recording technology, you know, there's a thing called a DAW, a digital audio workstation. I had a Pro Tools M-Box, you know, Digi, it was a successor to the Digio 03. And the M-Box, you know, you could plug your guitar into the M-Box and you could record guitar and it would go onto your computer. This is like early 2000s. And I just thought this was the coolest thing in the world. And I was like playing guitar. on my computer. I had recorded drums and I was playing guitar, and I listened back to it, and I thought the M-Box was broken. I was like, oh, there's something with the latency. Like, that's wrong. That's not what— and then I kept digging in and kept trying it again and kept zooming in and looking. I was like, oh my God, I fucking suck at guitar. I'm so bad. So, like, I don't know that I believe—
Have there ever been things where you're just like, this isn't my thing? Because from what I can tell, you have— we've done this. You did this with animation. You did this with filmmaking. You did this with company building. Like, you seem to just be a wildly persistent person.
Is company building my thing? I felt like I was really bad at that for a really long time.
Well, you pushed through. I mean, I don't know. I don't know how good you were then and how good you are now, but clearly you have. There's this strange, interesting essay by this guy, Scott Alexander. He's like rationalist blogger. And he has this essay called The Lottery of Fascinations. And his idea is that you like draw a lottery stick when you're born of like, do you love math or not? And, like, whatever the things you're really obsessed with.
Right.
And, like, my sense is, like, if you care about something enough, it'll— the baseline— and I don't mean to— like, I'm sure your baseline musical talent is more than what you're describing.
That's it. I think you just nailed it. If you care about something enough.
Yeah.
All those things that I just met, like, I cared about those things. There are some— there's, like, a type of human that I've met. Our CFO is like this. Like, watching him build an Excel model, like, I don't know that I will— no, in fact, I'm quite confident I will never be able to do what he does with Excel and engineering, and I won't be able to do that. Now, you could say, like, well, really? Like, couldn't you spend the time and learn it? I actually don't think I'm interested enough.
Yes, and that's usually the bottleneck more so than ability.
So, but, but there's plenty of things that I'm really interested in. Like, I definitely fall in love with a lot of things.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I get obsessed with the process and the behind the scenes. I was one of those kids, you know, watching, uh, DVDs that always watched the behind the scenes. I wanted to see how they made the movie, you know? And so like with filmmaking or with music or audio engineering or any of those things, like I love the process. I wanted to learn how to do it.
There was a phrase somewhere you said, am I proud of what I made? How do you think about answering that question on a kind of continuing basis?
So it's, for me, it's very instinctual. That's literally just like, do I love this? Do I feel really good about this? I think that's an increasingly important, like, question because at this point, the internet has enough stuff. We don't need more stuff on the internet. We need things that people are deeply proud of.
Yeah.
And I'm not interested in putting more stuff on the internet anymore. I actually kind of was 8 years ago, but the internet has hit a point of saturation where anything in that realm for me just now feels almost, like, wasteful. For me personally, maybe not for other people, but I just am not interested in making something at this point unless I think it's fucking incredible. Like, I wanna make something unbelievably great and cool. And if it's not that, I just don't find myself wanting to, I'm just not interested anymore.
Maybe the same answer, but speaking of your business and what you empower creators to do, how, do you have any advice about making fans?
Making fans?
Making people fans of you?
Oh, oh, yes. Like building an audience, building a fan base.
But specifically, audience feels a little loose. Like, I don't mean an audience. I mean fans.
I know what you mean. Yeah, yeah.
The people who would pay for a Patreon.
Right.
And granted, there's a transaction there, back to our earlier point.
Right. I do have advice. I think there's a lot of, let me give you some tactical stuff and I'll give you some high-level stuff. Everybody talks about being authentic. I, you know, or personal brands. Um, I really think it's about one of my favorite pieces of advice here is, is, um, uh, Charlie Kaufman. And, uh, dude, just the best. Like, talk about excellent things. The world needs more things like what he makes.
Strange and wonderful.
Oh, just beautiful. Where does that come from in him? Um, he gave a speech.
The BAFTA speech?
Yes. Oh my God, that talk.
You have to offer some— offer something.
And what he said is, say who you are. Really say it. Say it for the kids who aren't born yet, who won't be born for 500 years. Say the thing you're ashamed of. Say the thing that you think is so awful about yourself that you don't want anyone in the world to know it. and say it. And that's really hard to do because it's easy to think you're being authentic, but, like, if you're really saying all of the— and I don't mean oversharing, I don't mean saying everything about yourself, but, like—
Sort of being true.
Being true to who you are, I think there's, like, that is— When I think about when I'm a— when I become a fan of somebody, fucking Prince. Oh man, Prince is just like, don't like it?
Take it or leave it.
Fucking go away. Right? I'm like, oh, I love that.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what I want to be. That's how I want to spend my time on Earth is like, don't like it? Go away. And a lot of people don't like it, but like—
But the people who like it, oh man.
Great.
I love it.
Um, I'm— yeah, that is so hard to do. And I think that's probably the most important thing. By the way, creators are fucking amazing at this. Companies are terrible at it. Companies are so risk-averse that they can't say who they are in all of their flaws, in all of their idiocy, in all of their— like, they can't, they can't do it. Um, they want to look too cool for the world. Um, that's one thing. Another thing is, um, This is tactical frequency. This can be in tension with quality, but if you publish one thing every 3 or 4 years, it's very hard to build a fan base unless it's like a 2.5-hour movie. Then you can publish one thing a year.
Unless it's a robot music video.
Unless it's a robot music video. If you, if you think about the people you love in your life, they're people you talk with and hang with and have interactions with a lot. It's very hard to develop that deep personal relationship with somebody if you don't have some touchpoint with them. And so I think that's one of the reasons episodic media has gotten so popular over the last decade is because people have realized that's a really great way to build a strong relationship with your audience. So like saying who you are, building an episodic— or I don't want to say episodic, but like frequently communicating with the people that you're trying to you know, build community with, build an audience with. And then the last thing is just like, again, I think it is so important to be proud of the things that you're making. Like, if you don't want to consume the stuff that you're making, it's hard to want other people to consume it too.
On the middle note, do you worry at all about what you could call the broad bucket of parasociality?
Why am I less worried about that? I do think it's a real thing. I don't know what the solution is to that. I have a parasocial relationship as a fan with many creators.
Yeah. Although there can be different flavors of it, which maybe is part of the answer, right?
It doesn't, I don't find that it negatively affects me as a fan. I literally have dreams about creators that I follow. I'm talking to them and asking them what they think about the world.
In our product. I'm just kidding.
I mean, that's like— That's like kind of crazy. Yeah, it is. But, like, you know, there is a thing that humanity is doing now that it's never done before, which is like the art of one-to-many communication. Like, that was not a thing 25 years ago. Like, it was reserved to a very tiny portion of the populace. And now millions of people are practicing one-to-many communication. I think some element of of that new paradigm is going to include feeling personally close to someone that you're not personally close to. Um, and it's going to be one of those, like, weird externalities that we're going to have to figure out how to deal with. But I, I don't know, for some reason it doesn't bug me as a fan. And so I just spend less time thinking about it. I do spend time thinking about it in the context of Patreon.
Yeah.
How to build safe systems, investing in trust and safety, investing in content policy. Giving creators control of their communities, allowing creators to have an extra layer of moderation on top of Patreon's baseline content policy. Like, all those things are important.
What is, forgive the very vague question, but it's such a blurry word. What does community mean? And like, what does great community like look like? And obviously there's so many abstractions of this. There's community at the Patreon level, there's community at an individual fan level, but like, what is, What do you think people are aspirationally getting at when they use that word?
The distinction I draw here is between community and audience. Audience, I think of as like a one-way transfer. I show up to the concert, I ingest the show, and I leave. It's like this broadcasting—
Like watching a concert in a suite or a box.
Yeah, it's like, it's the broadcast. And, and by the way, a lot of people use the word audience and community interchangeably. And I think there are some creators who actually build community, like Rhett and Link, Mythical, Hank Green, Vlogbrothers. Hank Green, right. Um, and so what does that mean? Like, it's actually, I don't think it's rocket science. I think there are tactical differences. Um, and it comes from a place of values. And so what are those things? Um, interactions that are for the benefit of the audience and non-monetary and just, like, fun. Like, a lot of creators who are great community builders, every year they'll do something for charity, right? Now, the creator doesn't make any money from that, but it's like, it gives people a sense of maneuvering toward a bigger purpose. That's, like, a really nice feeling of spiritual community.
Also a collective effort, like all the— yeah, yeah, momentum, right?
Another example is, like, places where people can individually support each other. So, like, in the Vlogbrothers, like, those community members meet up in bars and have drinks together and hang out together without the Vlogbrothers— without John and Hank being there.
The horizontal part of the fandom without the vertical. Right, right.
The connections between the fans.
My dad and I both like the Yankees.
At the concert, it's creator to me is the only edge.
Yes. Yes.
And in community, there's edges between the individual fans. Mm-hmm.
That's hard to do.
That's really hard to do. You have to be cooking. You gotta be creating the conditions for that as a creator. Right.
Yeah, you can't actually fully engineer it. You have to create the space where it can happen, right.
Hmm. And then I think it also has to come from a— like, there has to be, like, real values and purpose behind it, right? Like, with the Vlogbrothers, they're building this children's hospital in Sierra Leone.
Yeah.
What an amazing effort. It's been, like, you know, years in the making. It's been millions and millions of dollars that the community has raised to do this. It's been frequent updates from John and Hank to the community about Sierra Leone. And everybody has this feeling of shared purpose. We're all in this together. So there's, like— there's actual things that make it that make a real difference there. Another one is in-person. Like, a lot of creators are leaning into in-person. I think it's going to be huge over the next few years. Like, that's a big piece of building real community.
Do you think you'll ever make a film? Like a proper film?
Why do you ask that?
That was the most clear thing to me in— I didn't watch that much of your old YouTube, but you are as much a filmmaker as you are a musician, in my opinion.
That's so funny. I think of my— even though I've never made a movie, I think my, like, spike skill set is filmmaking. I think that's what I love the most. I think I'm— I, like, enjoy it a lot. I really want to make a movie someday. I don't know if I ever will, but I really want to.
You're capable of Running a company for 15 years and making 100 videos, you don't seem to be someone who is limited by your desire to— when you desire to make something, it seems to happen. So there's—
Boy, it doesn't feel like that. It feels like I push a boulder up a hill for 10 years. But I know what you mean.
Yeah. I mean, I guess doing anything totally new is different. But anyway, there's a nudge in that direction if you need one. I think it's very clear on the page.
Oh man, I want to make a movie so bad. I love movies. I mean, that's my passion in life.
I enjoyed the reference to— I don't know how to pronounce it— Dogme 95 and von Trier. Are there any filmmakers who've been especially influential?
The usual suspects. Michel Gondry, probably the most.
Really?
Yeah. His music videos, um, those ones with Björk and the White Stripes. And, um, yeah, I mean, those, like, his use of the camera to tell stories. Never seen anybody who can think like that.
Yeah.
Um, talk about first principles. He's just like, how does a shutter work? Great. Let's make that the music video, you know? Um, so yeah, Michel Gondry. Um, God, I love J.J. Abrams. Like, just like raw, like storytelling horsepower.
Yeah.
That dude is up there, you know? Christopher Nolan. These are gonna be uninteresting answers. It's the usual suspects. Yeah.
Cool. This could be a whole can of worms. We don't need to spend a ton of time on it, but we live in the era of the individual. There are so many great parts of that, the creator economy, all this stuff. I'm probably a little biased in that I spent— I was telling you before, I spent some time building this brand, 100 Thieves, and part of what we were trying to do is create like a label, like a new— and there are— you go back throughout history, whether it be bands and labels in music to, in many ways, what like curation and magazines and newspapers were able to do. This idea that there is a collective that can introduce new voices, that the group can be bigger than the individual. It seems like that's going away. Like, there are a few bands— I'm stoked on Geese, although I candidly, I prefer Cameron Winter, which is maybe illustrative of the point. Do you have any sense on if there's any world where the pendulum could swing back? It just feels like there are too many things in the— and again, better individuals than Mr. Billy Gordy or whatever, like, but—
You're saying swinging back to the collective, to the group, to the band?
Things like bands or labels or whatever. Like, again, you have It just seems so hard. It's so much easier to build MrBeast than it is to build a brand or a label or a band or whatever. This is, we've seen it. I mean, I don't know how many bands there are. I guess there's a couple bands in music now, but.
I have so much to say about this. I think there's 2 things underlying this. Well, there's a million things underlying, but it's just 2 big things that come to mind for me. The first is, one-to-many communication, it turns out the face is a key piece of building a successful channel. The YouTube thumbnail. Like the YouTube thumbnail, like who is the person? And that's the person that I, who's the frontman, right? And that's been like, that's like tried and true. That's honestly why it's been like more difficult for companies to break into YouTube and social media initially than it was for creators, because there was no face. And unless you had a face, You couldn't do it. There's a second reason, which is the economics of creation. The best example of this, I think, is like the orchestra. You know, every number one in the mid-'40s, every number one hit was recorded by an orchestra. It's like a 40 to 50 piece band. You know, in 2006, you know, fast forward 70 years later, zero of the number ones are recorded by an orchestra. That's not just because people stopped loving orchestras, which I don't think is true. People love orchestras. It's amazing timbral sounds and combinations, and people still love the score of Harry Potter and John Williams. Culturally, we love orchestras. Why is it? Well, it's because there's an economist, William Baumol, who talked about this. It's like the cost of output per unit time To create the thing. Like, for an orchestra, that is through the roof.
Yes.
But, like, it doesn't— their language around this is almost awful. It's disgusting. It's like, you can't squeeze margin out of a string quartet. I hate that way of thinking about it. There is a capitalist truth under that that makes my blood boil and that makes my skin crawl that is kind of sad for me about, like, what's happened to the orchestra. Over the last 70 years.
It's also— I was just watching a video about A Day in the Life, making A Day in the Life, and they got, like, half of an orchestra. That was the best they could do, and they doubled it up. Like, part of this is also just like you're trying to make the thing.
You're trying to make the thing. But I think that's a big piece of why it swung to the individual, not the collective.
Yeah.
Like, one YouTube channel isn't even enough to feed an individual at this point, you know, on ad revenue.
But at the end of the power law, it is.
There are examples, you know, where it is. And the thing I'm excited about is I think as the internet matures and as the business models of the internet start maturing as well, there will be more revenue saturation there, which will allow collectives to thrive in addition to individuals. One thing I think we are going to start seeing very soon is at least the duo, which is like—
You're a little biased, but that's okay.
I think we're gonna see, like, let's put it this way. Video creation is now the number one lever for any media company.
Yep. Yep.
If you make media, making videos, making compelling videos is like the most, it's the biggest lever for your company, for your duo, for your art, for your whatever. So the person who does the thing and then the person who makes the videos, I think those people are going to come together and that will be a new type of duo. Yeah.
Yeah. Not everybody's going to be MKBHD. Like, you probably want 2 people in most of those dynamics.
I think we're going to see that.
That's cool. Hmm. A couple of just miscellaneous things before we wrap up. Why do you love Revolver so much?
I love it because Because it broke the pattern. I love it because it was outside of the public zeitgeist. And what I mean by that is literally, like, before that, the way people recorded music and thought about recording music was trying to emulate the sound of a band playing live.
Yeah, yeah.
And the Beatles were like, no, This is a different thing than live. And so they reversed sounds and they did drum loops on Tomorrow Never Knows, and they ran their vocals through a Leslie 122, and they did all kinds of things that you couldn't do live. So you're never gonna replicate that record live. And in fact, they stopped touring after that because they were like, the record is the thing, not the live thing.
And who knows, maybe it actually went the other way. Maybe they made Revolver because they wanted to stop touring.
That's also possible.
Necessity is the mother of invention. It's interesting because I think you're right. And everyone always makes this point with Sgt. Pepper.
But they did it way before that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I just think it's interesting that you picked the— as far as I understand, maybe a little on Rubber Soul, but as far as I understand, that was the album where it really started to happen.
Yeah. If you listen to Revolver, you can imagine fucking kids just tripping in the '60s being like, what is this? You know, Rubber Soul kind of sounds like you're watching a band play live.
Yeah.
It's a little bit more of that. It's great songs.
It's inventive songwriting, right.
But like Revolver, sonically, from a timbre perspective, from a sonics perspective, there was so much invention there. And for me, it defined recorded music. Yeah.
How does creativity evolve or change or deepen with intimacy?
Hmm. Well, my firsthand experience of this with my wife, It makes it harder and better. Because I think to do what Charlie Kaufman was talking about, like, say the thing you're afraid to say, if there isn't that intimacy there, it's very hard to say that with someone else.
Mm-hmm.
Whereas if you have that trust and intimacy, you can, like, go out on the edge. You can expand the Overton window. You can step outside of the comfort zone more easily. And that ends up being the stuff that really resonates with other people because they're like, Oh, no one's ever said that before. No one's ever had the balls to say that before. No one's ever admitted that about themselves. And that can be, like, really exciting and attractive to hear or listen to or, you know, watch an artist engage in.
Yeah, maybe there's a kind of safety in that dynamic that allows you to do something riskier. Yes. I like to ask people— we talk about things we regret. I like to ask people what they're most glad that they did.
Hmm.
Ooh.
I've never thought about that question before. What am I most glad that I did? Okay. Self-serving answer, but I'll give it anyway. After I finished my Robot music video, where I knew I was gonna get paid less than $200 in ad revenue, And I was feeling really depressed.
By the way, I think it's up on the shelf. There it is. I think that's, yeah, the DVD.
That's it. I sat down at my kitchen table and I sketched out the idea that I wanted for my own personal website, which became Patreon. And it took about 14 pieces of printer paper. I did it with a pencil on a Sunday afternoon at about 3:00 PM. And I finished in about 2 and a half hours, 3 hours, 14 pieces of paper. And I felt so dumb sketching this shit out. I was like, this is so fucking stupid.
They're gonna say the exact opposite. That's awesome.
I was like—
Like, I felt like a genius.
I'm a fucking YouTuber! What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do with these drawings? These stupid fucking drawings. And I literally had to say to myself, this isn't gonna work, That's okay. I said it out loud. I was repeating it. It was like a mantra or something. This isn't gonna work. That's okay. Draw the next page. I'm really glad I did that. I thought the chance of that turning into anything was idiotic.
There's probably a lesson there.
Yeah.
What do you think you love so much about music?
Okay, I'm gonna get woo-woo. I don't know how the world works. I don't know how consciousness works. I don't know how— I'm not— I don't— I grew up Jewish, but I don't go to, you know, synagogue or anything like that. Music to me feels like the closest thing to something supernatural that I've ever known in my life. It feels beyond physics to me. And, like, I think most things are physics. Like, I'm— I'm—
You're on that side of the aisle.
Like, I'm— I think it's mostly physics. I'm not a UFO person. You know, I'm like, I'm skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Like, I'm— and then there's something about music that feels like it comes from some— somewhere else. Something that I— something that isn't physical spacetime. I don't know how to describe it. It's— It feels in the same realm as consciousness to me. Consciousness is another one of those things where I'm like, I don't understand the physics. Obviously nobody does. It feels aphysical. And music feels like it's in that space. And so for me, that's just like a very interesting place to play in. That's like a fun, intriguing—
Uncharted territory.
Yeah, it's fun.
You gave this amazing, amazing talk at South by Southwest this year, and there's a part of it where you're getting quite emotional talking about the synthesizer and the orchestras and talkies and silent films and the transition that we may be going through now.
Yeah.
You also talked about using Midjourney for the first time a couple years ago and feeling like when you discovered a camera as a kid, like the— one of the points you make in that talk is like holding 2 opposing ideas at once. I would strongly recommend people listen to the whole thing. It's really amazing. I think one of the salient points you make is that there's no happily ever after. There's no endpoint. It's this continuous wave.
Mm-hmm.
When you feel, this is a little bit related to what we talked about at the top, but on the note of there never being a happily ever after, when you feel like the road is running out, Especially creatively. Like, what keeps— what keeps it burning?
I've had that feeling so many times now. I think the real answer is I've just been duped by it before.
Ah!
And I don't want to be Charlie Brown again.
Yeah.
I've felt like I'm at the end of my rope and all is lost. And I'm depressed and I'm unmotivated. And I'm— I don't see a path. And then I have a snack and realize I was low blood sugar. And then I feel better. And that might sound stupid, but it's like, I don't know what it's like for other people. For me, emotions have this profound way of convincing me Of their permanence.
Especially negative emotions. The positive ones were like, oh, that's just euphoria. Negative ones, this is real.
Like, that's what's underneath everything. And this is the new steady state. And so I don't know. I just, like, know that that's— I've been duped so many times. I'm just— I don't wanna be duped again. Yeah, I'm outside of it.
Yeah. One last question, which is, In that same talk, you're talking about how a creator, a friend of yours, makes the point that art is scarcity, which I think is a beautiful frame. You then reference one of my favorite films, Sing Street, which is an underrated banger.
So good.
To quote the older brother in Sing Street, rock and roll is a risk. You risk being ridiculed.
Yeah.
How— it's a similar question, I suppose, to the last one, but how do you remind yourself to take risk?
Oh, it's so hard. It's so hard. I'm so naturally risk-averse. And that really makes me pissed.
Yeah.
Companies are also so stupidly risk-averse.
The world is risk-averse. We are super under-calibrated on risk.
Oh, so, and I know this about myself. Like, I catastrophize. And I was listening to your interview with Chris Sacca. recently. And, like, one of the things he says about, like, great founders, he's like, man, great founders, he's like, they never even consider the downsides. They only think about the upsides. And I was like, I guess I'm not a great founder. Like, I, I, like, my natural state, I know, like, my, my meter is calibrated way off on risk. And so, um, I have to just, like, Zoom out, remind myself that, like, hey, I'm catastrophizing. There is a 1% chance of this thing that I'm nervous about happening, about that actually happening. And how do I remind myself to do that? Okay, this is a quick story, but it's gonna be worth it.
Please.
I got super into lucid dreaming a couple years ago. Lucid dreaming is the fucking best. If you're not— if you don't do lucid dreaming, it is Transformative.
We're gonna need, like, a Reddit post or a blog post or something to link to.
I made a film about it.
Okay.
And 'cause Natalie and I tried it together for a month, we documented the whole process. It's beautiful, life-changing. There's a concept in lucid dreaming, which is like, how do you know that you're dreaming? Because part of lucid dreaming is recognizing that you're dreaming, and then, quote unquote, waking up in a dream. That's the moment of lucidity. And there's this strange thing that happens. It feels a lot like this right now. And then you go, I'm dreaming. And then you can literally lift off the chair and float out the ceiling and go explore San Francisco in flight. Like, it's fucking incredible. And it's this real. It's just the most beautiful thing.
I did it one time, and I jumped up and started to fly for half a second, and I freaked out and woke up.
This is the problem. So there's actually a way There are lots of techniques to keep yourself asleep. But there's— so this challenge of how do you know that you're dreaming, and how do you remind yourself to wake up when you're dreaming? So there's a thing that you can do called a— what is it called? Awake check? A sleep check? And you perform a series of actions. And then, like, can I push my finger through my palm?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do my hands—
Yeah, reality checks.
Like, reality checks. That's what it is. Do my hands have 6 fingers or 5 fingers? If I hold my breath, can I still breathe?
Yeah.
Which turns out if you hold your breath in a dream, if you go underwater, you can still breathe.
And you're checking— you have to kind of check yourself all the time in real life, right?
When you're practicing lucid dreaming in your waking life, you're constantly doing those checks all day.
Okay.
And then all day. It's really weird. 'Cause you have to actually do it.
People around the office were like, yeah, Jack's kind of lost it. It freaks people out.
It really does. Okay, so sorry, let me cut to the chase here, which is there is a thing that you can— that you get to called a dream key. And a dream key is when I see— when this pattern happens, there's a high probability that I'm dreaming. And if you get good at identifying your dream keys, then you get really good at waking up inside a dream.
Wow.
And so, like, for my dream keys, one was being at my childhood home. Another was being with my mother, who's gone. And, like, those were dream keys for me. And the same is true with risk aversion. Anxiety is a risk key for me. it means that I'm gravitating towards something I think is gonna go wrong that is probably not gonna go wrong. And so, like, I've tried to get really good at embedding those keys into my life. I'm not gonna pretend like I'm an expert at it, but, like, some people use meditation for that. For me, it was lucid dreaming. It's like, what are my keys in life that are demonstrations that there's a pattern occurring that is a negative pattern that I want to— Like get rid of.
It's a reminder to see the water.
Totally.
Remember, Jack, that's all I got.
Awesome. This was great. Thank you for the questions.
Thank you again for listening or watching my conversation with Jack. If you want to learn more, linked references, transcript, all of that is available at dialectic.fm/jack-conte. C-O-N-T-E. And thank you again to Notion for presenting Dialectic and being My patron of sorts. If you're a longtime Notion user who hasn't checked out the recent AI features, the amount of leverage you can get in doing whatever it is that you create is pretty remarkable. For me, that means scouring the internet for various things I may not have found on my own as I prepare for my guests— articles, old podcasts, random trivia, strange loose threads. And I don't want to automate the prep process. I want to manually sift through things and, um, trace grooves so that I am most prepared to have a deep conversation with my guests. But being able to have Notion agents running around, making sure that I don't overlook any loose ends, um, for interesting things that could show up on them is tremendously powerful. And then on the other side of the conversation, being able to have Notion AI help me synthesize the transcript. Uh, make sure I haven't missed potential lessons that I can identify for you all, or even just being able to list out all of the various things that were linked in the episode is simple but really remarkably helpful. And again, the goal for me is to be able to focus as much of my time immersing myself in the minds of my guests and then having a conversation with them that I'm proud to share with all of you. Thanks again to Notion. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic. And thank you to you for listening or watching. The most helpful thing you can do is to share the episode with a friend, but you can also rate it, like it, review, uh, subscribe or follow wherever you're watching. That's all I got for you. Thanks again, and I will see you next time.
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