52: Jack Conte - Draw the Next Page

26:47Jack Conte: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 no so the same piece of thing could actually be depending on who's talking about it a hundred percent and and so like this is another reason I don't like that.

27:32Jack Conte: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. I care about 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 on the other end of that influence, it doesn't matter where I get it from.

28:08Jack Conte:So you sort of turns artists into corn or steel. It's like, it doesn't matter. 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 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.

28:46Jack Conte: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 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 there is something I hate to even – I've heard Rick Rubin talk about this and he sort of – 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.

29:34Jack Conte: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 creating value for the world and you want to be compensated for your contributions to society. That's totally legitimate. I don't think that that's some 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.

30:20Maybe it's just what we believe about the artist's intentions, but...

30:24Jack Conte: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 um you know most of planet earth is is engulfed in an economic and financial system yeah um that is the context for art making and like like you can try to separate those as much as possible right and and you can try to say that you're making art in a in a vacuum and there's a lot of people who do a really good job of that but like is like why why i'm like why would you do that like like for me i've this is my problem with the term selling out like i 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 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 um he he says selling out is punk because by the way the only if you're selling out now it means you're probably not an epo baby and you have the 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 a economist and do that you can be a pm and do that you can be a founder and do that um but like i think there are also ways to 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.

32:25Jack Conte:And like, yeah, the reason I'm pushing so hard on this is because so many artists, right, those two thirds 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.

33:06Jack Conte:You're worth way more than that. You're creating so much more value than you're capturing as an artist. And that's a key piece of Patreon's mission. It's 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's so 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 Or God wants it.

34:02Jack Conte:Or the government wants it. 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're 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? And cost of materials, right?

34:39Jack Conte:And so, you know, that created like a hundred years of an infrastructure build out, jewel cases for CDs and cardboard record sleeves and, you know, magnetic tape in VHS tapes. Also worth noting, really good for musicians and filmmakers, not that good for a whole bunch of other mediums. No, exactly. Yeah, yeah. But anybody telling stories with sound or, you know, moving pictures, right? Great, great for those folks. And that's sort of, then over the 1900s, all this industry popped up that was sort of around, like, the distribution and economics of unit sales as a replacement for patronage, as the main, like, economic model for artists, right?

35:21Jack Conte:And so it became CD sales or like tape sales or laser discs or Blu-rays or whatever it is. 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 going to do here is like Napster. And then it was like, well, there should be some type of economics around. This was like iTunes. and then about 10 or 15, no, sorry, like maybe five years into that. And I was like, no, no, ad revenue because sometimes I think of ad revenue as basically like the go-to-market strategy for the web.

36:04I 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.

36:14Jack Conte: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. 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 makes sense for, I shouldn't have to pay a dollar to listen to a song once. Right. Like I'm going to enjoy it the more I listen to it. Like anyway. Free experiences for the end consumer will always beat paid experiences for the end consumer. Straight up. And so that's why the internet kind of got to scale so quickly, right?

36:48Jack Conte:Like 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 bucks to get on, like it probably, I'm not sure we would have 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 their thought of art as like a subcategory of information, right? They were like, information should be free. Information such as art and news. And artists were like, what? 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.

37:43Jack Conte: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 1900, pre-magnetic tape, pre-wax cylinders, pre-Edison cylinders, like, you know, back to bag of coins. You're doing something cool. Is there much history? No worries if you don't know. But is there any serious history of a more democratized or fragmented patronage? because the obvious huge difference is that back then it was a rich guy the midiichi family and governments i i it's funny i i sometimes joke i my podcast is free for all listeners i have one sponsor it's notion their software company they're great they're my patron like quite literally closer to the midiichi than than before obviously the big difference in your world view is like it's not going to be one guy or even two guys or three um 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, there are good parts of that and there are bad parts of that.

38:54So interestingly,

38:56Jack Conte:patronage for us was where the company came from and was the first thesis behind this model that we started building. And also the kind of emotional truth of what Patreon is, right? Right. And narrative truth of what it is. But what we have found, you know, years and not even that far in, we started 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 want to i don't want to 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 a you know five thousand dollars worth of tickets like i'm not gonna like busk on the internet like i'm not doing patronage and um that feedback was like loud and clear and And what we saw was actually like that, the way of thinking about Patreon, that's like a donation.

39:54Jack Conte: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 uh one-time payments which allows like our 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 but the fact that you can buy a single video for eight dollars 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.

40:43Jack Conte: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. 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 COVID with the sort of podcast explosion. Why do you think it was?

41:19Jack Conte:Because podcasting is episodic and the sort of dollars per watch minute to produce podcasts is an amazing ratio for podcasters versus animation, for example. It's like very costly per watch minute. initially was it primarily um fully gated shows or shows that were two-thirds for like josh zitterell 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 is um subscription revenue surpassed their ad revenue it's when the guardian introduced premium and freemium now you know you can't sort 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.

42:02Jack Conte: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 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 five, six years that that's become part to the public consciousness. Maybe there was like flickers of this on Twitch and like other OnlyFans. I don't know when that showed up, but even that, I don't know if it's quite the same psychology.

42:36It's a little different.

42:37Jack Conte:Yeah, there were always, I don't want to 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 it's very hard to make something live that is super engaging versus, like if I'm going to spend half hour watching something, if I front load six 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.

43:26And this is why live streaming, the average streamer streams for six hours. It's actually like a lower bar, longer duration. You're watching it while you work, whatever. Right. Right. That makes sense.

43:36Jack Conte: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 speed and clavicular and the crazy, they have to go to such an end of spectacle. Right. Yeah. Yeah, we don't have to get into that. 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 the big consumer internet companies in the last 15 years, we think of them as technology companies, and they obviously are, but the breakthrough, like obviously they're hosting live video or whatever.

44:24These 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, your fans are telling you to do this. But I'm curious what you've learned about how that actually happens.

44:46Jack Conte: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 going to ask people to pay for something that's free yes on another platform and i was like yeah yeah at least twitch it's on our bot right and it's on youtube and they're like thank you good luck with that didn't you have didn't you raise money pretty quickly um we raised seven hundred thousand dollars um And we got a term sheet for$700 ,000. We ended up raising the ceiling for the round to$2.1 million about three months after launching. Okay. But it wasn't working yet?

45:27No, it was. So it kind of worked right away.

45:30Jack Conte:It worked immediately. 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. where this was one of the 5 ,000 things that kind of worked. And so like there was that product market fit hunting phase. 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. But this was just one of the hundreds of projects that I was working on that took off right away. And so we just leaned in, you know, over the years.

46:11Jack Conte:And 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. Or like, is most of that just being really attentive to what's happening on the platform?

46:41Or are there ways that you can kind of bend things in the direction you want them to?

46:44Jack Conte: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. Straight out of college, 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.

47:17I was an actor.

47:18Jack Conte:I was the voice of a teenage boy. So like I did all, 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 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, just like a lot of, like, just backlash and hatred of tech in the last 10 years. 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.

48:07Jack Conte:Those are the things. It's all you got. And in Silicon Valley, the main thing is the product, which is really true. The main thing is the product. Also, the projects are magic. ChatGVD comes out, you don't need a lot of narrative. You don't need narrative because the product is so, it is incredible. 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 a thing. But you can know that the product is a thing and care about narrative and creativity and storytelling and brand, or you cannot care about those things.

48:46Jack Conte: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 like, 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.

49:22Jack Conte: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.

49:53Jack Conte:It's a waste of time. Like you can't, it's just why do that? But I believe it. And so, yeah, I'm trying to answer your question on 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 understanding brand and narrative and storytelling. And then if you don't have the product to back it up, it won't work. But it's maybe not mechanical 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 in the world, is that in a certain part of Silicon Valley and startup land, Patreon is very underrated.

50:47Perhaps 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 Patreon's quite big and quite successful. So I'm curious.

51:14Jack Conte:Yeah. Why is that?

51:21Jack Conte: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 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 I'm I'm I don't like I don't even think of Silicon Valley people as my people you know 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. 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.

52:13Jack Conte:Sure. And I don't, I don't believe in that. I mean, I understand where that's coming from, but like my values, the things that I care about, show up in how the company talks and how the company messages and what I say and what we all say and how we write our blog posts. And we very much speak to creators. We don't, like I know a lot of companies, Substack included, it's like when they speak, the primary lens is like reaching tech people. How do we like make tech excited about our product? I just, when I'm writing communications to people, I'm 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.

53:04Jack Conte: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 party so I can 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. It's like the stuff that people the media that people author on Substack is about tech, about politics.

53:48Josh and Rachel and these people are not huge on Twitter.

53:50Jack Conte:and like the people on patreon are like they're talking about reckless ben and the lego scandal yeah yeah yeah and like those are my people that's what i want to talk about it ironically it's actually but here's what's weird um patreon is more youtube obviously that's like yeah in in 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 And I think this is actually one of the, do you know the TVVN guys, Josh and Jordy? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know them, but I know of them.

54:24Or John and Jordy, I should say. I think one of the reasons they were 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.

54:31Jack Conte:Yeah. But yeah, anyway, it's A. So this is actually recent with tech on YouTube. Yeah. Tech was not big on YouTube. 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 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 that is the, that was how tech got onto YouTube. But like before that, tech communities didn't really exist on YouTube. It's also just funny, like Silicon Valley is a place that loves people who are out there.

55:08And like very, like don't fit into a box.

55:10Jack Conte:At least that's the stated preference. And you were very that, but anyway, I don't know if we're going to 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.

55:46Jack Conte: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, etc. For us as a company, the way I think about it is like there are so many great products out there that 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. That's great for consumers.

56:24Jack Conte: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 if such a company of 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 if you're always optimizing for because then it's always all you can eat 10 bucks 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.

57:07And 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.

57:17Jack Conte: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 because 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. And so they're like, how are we going to get that DAO? Oh, let's spin up a program where we help creators author posts. For us, the creation of the art is the purpose. And everything is downstream of that. And so it's a different way to think about the world. And it comes down to the company's KPIs, right?

57:58Jack Conte:Like our primary KPIs, dollars sent to creators, right? And so that's what we're thinking about. That's what we're talking about. That's not a byproduct of the company. That's the purpose of the company. You could almost imagine somebody coming in and saying, 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?

58:43Jack Conte:10 % is a big number to put it in a different way. Yeah. This is one of those things that I'm going to have this sort of spiritual answer. And then there's maybe the technical answer. I'm interested in both. I think the real answer is the spiritual answer, which is we've done right by creators for 13 years. and that compounds just like, you know, anything else. And that compounding trust and understanding from the community 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.

59:28Jack Conte:You've earned credit. But 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're going to run your business on a platform, if you're going to 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 going to go with the platform that you think is the good guys. You're going to go with the platform that you trust. Or that the creators you admire trust.

1:00:04Jack Conte: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. 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.

1:00:53Jack Conte:Certainly the creators, certainly the fans. But like, I want Patreon to be a fucking hundred 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 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's awesome. um like costco kept the price of the hot dog at a buck 50 for like decades um and when when costco got down to the point where they couldn't keep it at a dollar 50 anymore um because their suppliers weren't like supplying them at the you know at the right prices anymore losing money they fucking bought a hot dog factory and they they made the acquisition they retooled their whole operation.

1:01:44Jack Conte:They figured out a way to keep the price of the hot dog at$1.50. Like a bunch of people look at it 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. 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 their creators make money. Yeah. Which I think is an important kind of part. It's not just the values. It's also the incentives. A hundred percent. And that, I wish I could say that was strategic and thoughtful.

1:02:19Jack Conte: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 out Libya? What will it take? This is a deep question. I think there's a couple things. Really great governance.

1:02:56Jack Conte:Really great culture and values.

1:03:03Jack Conte:And then a focus on building long-term trust. 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, sure, like that. I don't mean a big gray suit. I mean, find somebody who's really value aligned, who has more marriage experience. You can go make more music, whatever. totally you could be the chairman who goes around and does podcasts more i i have thought about that and i'm i'm um i didn't like in my life i wasn't like i want to be a ceo like that's not my goal in life like i want to solve this problem yeah you know yeah and so uh 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.

1:04:08Jack Conte:The like culture is just this snowball rolling down a mountain at a million miles an hour 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 to benefit from somebody else. Um, I 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 literally those things. I think it's very... 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 a hundred-year company.

1:04:48Jack Conte:Yeah, yeah. In any context, obviously you have more experience in the running Patreon and maybe leading bands sense. What makes a good leader? Oh. Um, 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.

1:05:36Jack Conte: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? um 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 within it's 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 um but sometimes if somebody's really uh strategic um you cannot pick it up or i cannot pick it up for a little while yeah um so so that's one like ambition for the self versus ambition for the for the company for the mission um there's some basics like do you do what you're say you're gonna do like do you do you execute what you promise you deliver what you what you say you're gonna do um and it'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.

1:07:10Jack Conte: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? you 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 um it's like call it obsessed call it passion call it whatever it's like is this a person who gets obsessed with things um that's what i really value about people like hank green he'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.

1:08:02Jack Conte:Another thing is, can you like egolessly self-reflect and do so with like humility?

1:08:17Jack Conte: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 egolously 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 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 like there's some 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, in leaders.

1:08:58Jack Conte:I found if, if honestly, if somebody doesn't have that, it's very hard for me to work with them. Um, I just, I just lose interest in them. Um, and I, and I lose interest. I lose faith that they can grow and, and learn into what they need to be. Cause Patreon is a very weird business. And one, I think as certainly many others have said, like trajectory can be a a lot more important than kind of like current um level capacity yeah i really like somebody um 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.

1:09:52Jack Conte:Now you can overdo that. And I've seen people on the other end of that spectrum too, me included, where I'm like, got to nail the strategy. 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 three steps forward? So much of company building, especially now um nobody knows what it's going to be like in six months there's a lot of people who say they know what it's going to be like nobody fucking knows um and even if they did i would be unable to tell like who knows who doesn't so like as far as i'm concerned nobody knows so like next 48 hours like let's get the right can you cleanly slice that up right yeah can you exactly like can you take action and generate outcomes consistently yeah yeah um one foot in front of the other.

1:10:44Jack Conte: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. You're like, yeah. Yeah, so having that long-term clarity, but then being hyper-focused on next 48 hours, you know, is a unique sort of bi-dimensional 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?

1:11:25Maybe 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.

1:11:34Jack Conte:Yeah, there are people. More than people, there are attributes of people that I aspire to. I found that if I get too attached to any one individual, I start trying to emulate them. 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 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. And so the way I think of it is like, can I take just that? Go watch a Travis fan edit.

1:12:22Jack Conte:Like, I don't have to take the other things. 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. 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. I'm sure there's a lot of learning from that too.

1:12:59Jack Conte: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 like arranged, performed, mixed, mastered, engineered, published. Yes. Maybe this ties a little bit and we were talking about at the beginning.

1:13:37With that as a backdrop, what are your thoughts on talent? Like innate talent?

1:13:45Jack Conte:In what capacity? Do I believe in innate talent? Do I believe you can get talent by work? Like 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

1:14:01who clearly has some innate things that are remarkable or unusual. And it could just be energy, actually, to go back to our first question. And clearly you have some baseline amount of musical talent. There's always debates over 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? 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?

1:14:38Jack Conte:Yeah. My, my, my instinctual answer to this question, I've maybe I'll, 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 it. 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 seven and how to resolve to the one and then how to modulate to the five.

1:15:23Jack Conte: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, it's a dittalogy workstation. I had a Pro Tools M-Box, you know, 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 go onto your computer.

1:16:03Jack Conte: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.

1:16:39You 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.

1:16:46Jack Conte:Is company building my thing? I felt like I was really bad at that for a really long time. Well, you push 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, there's this strange, interesting essay by this guy, Scott Alexander is 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. My sense is like, if you care about something enough, the baseline, and I don't mean to like, I'm sure your baseline musical talent is more than what you're describing.

1:17:18That's it.

1:17:18Jack Conte:I think you just nailed it. If you care about something enough. All those things that I just met, like I cared about those things. 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 there's plenty of things that I'm really interested in.

1:18:02Jack Conte:Like I definitely fall in love with a lot of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I get obsessed with the process and the behind the scenes. I was one of those kids, you know, watching DVDs. I 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 loved 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 for me, it's very instinctual. That's literally just like, do I love this?

1:18:35Jack Conte:Do I feel really good about this? I think that's an increasingly important 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 um and i'm not interested in putting more stuff on the internet anymore i actually kind of was eight years ago but the internet has hit a point of saturation where anything in that realm for me just now feels almost like wasteful uh for me personally maybe not for other people but But I just am not interested in making something at this point unless I think it's fucking incredible.

1:19:20Jack Conte:Like I want to 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, do you have any advice about making fans? Making fans. Making people fans of you. 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. I went to back to our earlier point.

1:19:59Right.

1:19:59Jack Conte: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. Like, I'm like, you know, or personal brands. I really think it's about, one of my favorite pieces of advice here is Charlie Kaufman. I love Charlie. Yeah, dude, just the best. Like, talk about excellent things. The world needs more things like what he makes. Strange and wonderful. Ugh, just beautiful. Where does that come from in him? He gave a speech. The BAFTA speech? Yes. The best. Oh my God, that talk. You have to offer something. And what he said is say who you are.

1:20:48Jack Conte: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. um and that's really hard to do um because it's it's easy to think you're being authentic but like if you're if you're really saying all of this 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 become a fan of somebody fucking Prince oh man Prince is just like don't like it fucking go away right I'm like oh I love that 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 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 uh this is this is tactical frequency um this can be the intention with quality but um if you publish one thing every three or four years it's very hard to like build a fan base unless it's like a two and a half hour movie then you can publish one thing.

1:22:46Unless it's a robot music video.

1:22:46Jack Conte:Unless it's a robot music video. Like, 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 touch point 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, um, you know, build, build community with, build an audience with.

1:23:21Jack Conte: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, uh, the, 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?

1:24:02Jack Conte: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. And our product. I mean, 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. Now, millions of people are practicing one-to-many communication. I think some element of that new paradigm is going to include feeling personally close to someone that you're not personally close to.

1:24:51Jack Conte:And it's going to be one of those weird externalities that we're going to have to figure out how to deal with. But 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. 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.

1:25:24What 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?

1:25:42Jack Conte: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 then, and by the way, a lot of people use the word audience community interchangeably. And I think there are some creators who actually build community like Rhett and Link, Mythical, Hank Green, Vlogbrothers. And so what does that mean? Like, it's actually, I don't think it's rocket science. I think there are tactical differences.

1:26:21Jack Conte: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 um now the creator doesn't make any money from that but it's like it gives people a sense of um maneuvering toward a bigger purpose that's like a really nice feeling of spiritual community Also collective effort, like all, yeah, yeah, yeah. Momentum, right. Another example is like places where people can individually support each other.

1:27:01Jack Conte: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, 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. And in community, there's edges between the individual fans. That's hard to do. That's really hard to do. You have to be cooking. You got to be creating the conditions for that as a creator. Yeah, you can't actually fully engineer it.

1:27:37You have to create the space where it can happen. Right.

1:27:40Jack Conte: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.

1:27:54Jack Conte: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 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 of building real community um do you think you'll ever make a film like a proper film why do you ask that the 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 i think of my even though i've never made a movie i think my my uh like spike skill set is filmmaking i think that's what i that's what i love the most i think i'm uh i like enjoy a lot um i really want to make a movie someday i i don't know if i ever will um 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 a push a boulder up a hill for 10 years but I know what you mean I mean I guess doing anything totally new is a different 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.

1:29:45Jack Conte:I mean, that's my passion in life. I enjoyed the reference to, I don't know how to pronounce it, Dogman 95 and Von Traer. Are there any filmmakers who've been especially influential? The usual suspects. Michel Gondry, probably the most. Really? Yeah. His music videos. Those ones with Bjork and the White Stripes. And 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 michelle gondry um god i love jj abrams like just like raw like storytelling selling horsepower?

1:30:34Yeah.

1:30:35Jack Conte:That dude is up there, you know? Christopher Nolan. These are going to be uninteresting answers. It's the usual suspects. Yeah. Cool.

1:30:47This 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 than I spent, I was telling you before, I spent some time building this brand, and 100 Thieves, and part of what we were trying to do is create like a label, like a new, and you go back throughout history, whether it be bands and labels and 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.

1:31:24It 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. You're saying swinging back to the collective,

1:31:47Jack Conte:to the group, to the band. Things like bands or labels or whatever. Again, you have... It just seems so hard... It's so much easier to build Mr. Beast than it is to build a brand or a label or a band or whatever? We've seen it, and I don't know how many bands there are. I guess there's a couple of bands in music now, but. I have so much to say about this. I think there's two things underlying this. Well, there's a million things underlying it, but it's just two 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.

1:32:27Jack Conte:Like the YouTube thumbnail. Like who is the person? And that's the person I who's the front man. 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 um 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 um that's not just because people stopped loving orchestras which i don't think is true people love orchestras um it's the amazing you know timbral sounds and combinations and like people still love you know the score of harry potter and john williams like we still like culture culturally we love orchestras why is it well it's because there's an economist william baumo 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 i was just watching a video about a day in the life making a day of 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's 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 lot is there are examples you know where 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 um very soon is at least the duo um which is like you're a little biased but that's okay i i think we're gonna see like um 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 um yeah not everybody's gonna be mkbhd like you probably want two people in most of those dynamics i i think we're gonna see that that's cool um a couple of just miscellaneous things before we wrap up why do you love revolver so much um i love it because because it broke the pattern i love it because it was outside of the public zeitgeist um 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 and they did drum loops on tomorrow never knows and they ran their vocals through a leslie 122 and um and they did all kinds of things that you couldn't do live so you're never going to replicate that record live and in fact they stopped touring after that because they were like the record is the thing not the live and who knows maybe it actually went the other way maybe they made revolver because they wanted to stop touring.

1:36:48Jack Conte: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. I just think it's interesting that you pick 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.

1:37:22It's great songs. It's an inventive song, right? Right.

1:37:24Jack Conte: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? well my firsthand experience of this with my wife um it makes it harder and better um 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 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 to watch an artist engage in.

1:38:30Yeah. 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.

1:38:45Jack Conte:Hmm. Oh, I've never thought about that question before. What am I most glad that I did? Okay. uh self-serving answer but i'll give it anyway uh after i finished my robot music video where i knew i was going to get paid less than 200 bucks um in ad revenue and i was feeling really depressed by the way i think it's up on the shelf there it is yeah the dvd that's it um i sat down at my kitchen table and i sketched out the idea that i wanted for my own personal website which became patreon um and it took about 14 pieces of printer paper i did with a pencil on a sunday afternoon at about 3 p.m and i finished in about two and a half hours three 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 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 was like a mantra or something this isn't gonna work that's okay draw the next page um i'm really glad i did that uh i thought the chance of that of that turning into anything was idiotic.

1:40:21There's probably a lesson there.

1:40:23Jack Conte:Yeah. What do you think you love so much about music?

1:40:34Jack Conte:Okay, I'm going to get woo-woo.

1:40:43Jack Conte:I don't know how the world works. I don't know how consciousness works. I grew up Jewish, but I don't go to 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 I think most things are physics. Like I'm... We're going that side of the aisle. 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. And then there's something about music that feels like it comes from somewhere else. Something that isn't physical space time.

1:41:38Jack Conte:I don't know how to describe it. 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 um it feels a physical uh and music feels like it's it's in that in that space and um so so for me that's just like a very interesting place to play in you know that's like a fun intriguing uncharted territory yeah it's fun uh you gave this amazing amazing talk at South by Southwest this year. Um, and there's a part of it where you're getting quite emotional talking about, uh, the synthesizer and the orchestras and talkies and silent films and the transition that we may be going through now.

1:42:26Um, you also talked about using mid journey for the first time a couple of years ago and feeling like when you discovered a camera as a kid, like the, one of the points you make that talk is like holding two opposing ideas at once. Um, I would, 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 like end point. It's this continuous wave. 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 it burning?

1:43:14Jack Conte: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 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 um and so i don't know i just like know that that's that's i've been duped so many times i'm just i don't want to be duped again yeah uh one last question which is in the same talk you're talking about how a creator a friend of yours makes the point art that art is scarcity um which i think is a beautiful frame um you then referenced one of my favorite films, Sing Street, which is an underrated banger.

1:44:37So 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, the last one, but how do you remind yourself to take risk?

1:44:50Jack Conte: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're super undercalibrated. Oh, so. And I know this about myself. Like I catastrophize. And I was listening to your interview with Chris Saka 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 like my natural state. I know like my meter is calibrated way off on risk.

1:45:38Jack Conte:And so 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 going to be worth it. I got super into lucid dreaming a couple of years ago. Lucid dreaming is the fucking best. If you're not, if you don't do lucid dreaming, it is transforming. We're going to need like a Reddit post or a blog post or something to link to. I made a film about it. And because Natalie and I tried it together for a month, we documented the whole process.

1:46:19Jack Conte: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 a 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.

1:47:03Jack Conte:This is the problem. So there's actually a way, there are lots of techniques to keep yourself asleep. But 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? A wake 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 six fingers or five 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.

1:47:46Jack Conte: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 because you have to actually do it. People around the office are like, yeah, Jack's kind of lost it. It really does. Okay. So sorry. Let me cut to the chase here, which is there is a thing that you get to called a dream key. And a dream key is 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.

1:48:28Jack Conte:And so like for my dream keys one was being at my childhood home and other is being with my mother who's gone. And like those were dream keys for me. And the same is true with risk aversion.

1:48:45Jack Conte:Anxiety is a risk key for me. it means that I'm gravitating towards something I think is going to go wrong that is probably not going to go wrong and so like I've tried to get really good at embedding those keys into my life I'm not I'm not going to 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 that are demonstrations that there's a pattern occurring that is a negative pattern that I want to like can't rid us. It's a reminder to see the water. Totally. Jack, that's all I got. Awesome. This was great.

1:49:24Jack Conte:Thank you for the top 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 slash Jack dash Conti, 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.

1:50:03Articles, 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 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 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, 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.

1:50:46And 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 slash 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, subscribe or follow wherever you're watching. that's all I got for you thanks again and I will see you next time