When your work gets big, you'll face trolls, scammers, and legal threats. The speaker breaks down each antagonist's mindset and offers concrete responses: answer haters with kindness, redirect scammers toward legitimate building, and turn lawyers into marketing partners. Build community, treat copying as flattery, and protect your creative work.
Chapters
God forbid you make something successful on the internet. God forbid, right? Because what happens? One, here comes the trolls. Two, here comes all the fakers trying to like steal your shine and market their thing. Here comes the crypto bros that basically want to pump a scam. And do a quick get-rich-quick scheme. And then here comes the army of lawyers from a bunch of people that, you know, get all angry because you've had success. And so we gotta— what do you do about it? Well, we gotta take a look at this from a couple different perspectives. From your perspective as the artist, as the inventor, as the creator, as the person who went through hell just trying to figure out The one teeny kernel that could take off, that could, that could impact a bunch of people in a positive way. You're frustrated and absolutely pissed. It's like, I was having fun, I was creating from the raw essence of the universe, and then here comes all these other entities either trying to like stop it, block it, hate on it, steal it. Yada yada. And just kind of— it's the, it's the gross underbelly of humanity, which makes us as creators, um, just feel like, well, fine, if that's what you want to do, then I'll just dump it. And like, you won't get any more of my genius, you won't get any more of my stuff, and you're just going to be stuck with all this shit out here that you are dealing with every day. So that's the downside. And so that's a small minority. It's a 0.000000001% of the world that is so loud and so intrusive that we should just package them all up and put them on a ship and send them off to sea and say, have fun with one another. Let's take this, break this down from their perspective though, right? So Haters, their perspective is, oh, I've been trying to do this thing for a long time and none of my stuff has ever worked, and so I'm gonna attack you because you're an easy target, and I'm gonna pick out like one or two things that might be messed up about it because, you know, you're only one human being and you haven't had the capability or time or resource or energy to plug every single possible hole. You're not a $4 trillion company. So maybe we should like turn down the expectations there, haters. And also like get back to creating something that like the people in the world like actually want instead of creating stuff that they don't. Or just spend some time like getting happy with who you are and making something that makes you feel good, not for other people. Um, and you know, the other way to handle this, which we've seen recently as well. Is you can just send them some of your product with a nice note and kill them with kindness and, you know, keep those haters hydrated and things like that. So that's the hater side. Crypto bros, you know, trying to do these scammers, quick rug pulls, bots, black hat hackers. Like, honestly, I think it's just fuck off. Like, like, go steal money from somewhere else. Like, build something legitimate. that people actually want. Build something real, right, with strong core values. Try that. Then you don't have to look over your shoulder about who's coming, or like— you're spending just as much time to be a criminal and an asshole as it would take to build something from the right foundations. So go do that. That's a better use of your time, and you'll feel better about it. So I'm sorry, like somebody hurt you at some point or you just don't have enough. Like do it the right way. Do it the right way. And then let's talk about these armies of flesh-eating lawyers from big brands who wanna come in and attack you. Like maybe you should talk to the marketing department. Your marketing department is struggling. Your CMO, your VP of marketing, your head of ad sales, all the agencies that you're hiring. I know that you need to provide value for your firm and throw up a shield and a sword, but your marketing department is killing themselves trying to get any amount of attention on the internet in the world. And guess what? Somebody just made something that might give you attention. Here's a novel idea. Maybe we should talk to them. And do a collab and combine forces and literally take off together. Novel concept. Like, I'm just here to tell you, stop being so single-minded, man. Like, take a step back, be an artist, talk to other people in the rest of your business about, man, maybe we could use this to benefit our company, benefit society, benefit our users. Instead of attacking creators. And then if you're an artist and somebody copies your shit, good, good. That means you had an impact. Good. Copying is the best form of flattery. They loved what you did. Let them remix that shit. You're still the essence. You're still the source. Do it again. Do it again. Now you got a community of people that are helping spread and distribute your shit. Isn't that what everybody wants? You're getting free marketing. You gotta flip your perspective, people. But the one thing I'm pretty confident about is if you start stifling innovation, creativity, you start stifling the planet's artists, the folks that are pushing boundaries, that are like coming up with new stuff, putting it out into the world, you stifle that, your society is dead, man. Like, look around. And I'm not talking about nature. This stuff is perfect. This is genius. We're not gonna mess this up. We'll mess up our spaceship and maybe we won't survive, but the universe is gonna be fine. But the problem is you mess up those few people that are actually like thinking different, creating different, making magic. You mess with them long enough, they're just gonna stop. And then what? No more TV shows, no more social media content. No more cool products, nothing to interact with. Stuff starts breaking, stuff starts falling apart, your trash doesn't get picked up, the water stops running. Take a step back, y'all, and take a real hard look the next time you go attack people that are creating something from a real place of magic and play. That's a, that's a shame mode. So if you're one of those people Build a damn fortress around yourself, get a community of people who are like you, and basically just tell the world to go fuck off, pound sand, and whatever. Like, your flimsy shit where you're dealing on like troll level and you're down in the swamp, we're up here playing in the treehouse. So you can either come up and play in the treehouse with us, otherwise like we're just gonna start separating ourselves from society and you're not gonna get the magic. And, and I'm really concerned about what happens to a planetary society when there's no magic left over, because that's not a place any of us want to live in. So think long and hard about the things you're doing as a troll, as an attacker, as a legal firm, as a brand. Like, maybe think different. Maybe try supporting, adding positive energy behind those people. helping those people. And then you become part of the wave and part of the change, things that are created with good intention, instead of stopping it, attacking it, and blocking it. So that's it. So to all my creators, all my artists out there, like, I got your back. And the people that don't, like, let them hang out in the swamp. They're gonna drown anyways. So shout out Dagobah System.
