I write that number down next to the day’s date whenever I write in my morning journal.

It’s an easy way to keep life in perspective.

Over the years, whenever I go a while between journal entries, I need to look that number up again.

I feel like it’s always a different site, and I’ve never found one I particularly liked, so yesterday I decided to make one myself.

What day of your life is today?

Find out now @ dayof.life

The combination of these three traits brings us back to a future of bartering in the sense that you will ultimately be able to pay for anything with any of your digital assets, as long as they are of the right value.

In traditional bartering, both sides have to be interested in what the other has to offer, but that is no longer the case.

With crypto, there is a free, instant, and automated "middle man" available for any exchange of goods and services such that both sides do not need to be interested in each other's assets.

The buyer can choose to pay with one thing (or even a combination of things) and the seller can choose to receive something else of equal value at that moment. The necessary exchanges will happen in that moment.

In other words, you can pay for anything with anything.

There's no need for a uniform medium of exchange.

When everything is money, nothing is money.

which is weird because quitting is the opposite of persistence, and i consider persistence to be one of my greatest strengths. so it's sort of ironic. but it can also be reconciled.

persistence is invaluable when you are persisting on the right things but persisting on the wrong things is one of the worst mistakes you can make.

for example, if peter thiel persisted in law he would be a lawyer, not the peter thiel you know. i would be an investment banker.

the hard part is knowing what's right vs. wrong. you can always do some logical analysis, but this is where faith comes in.

this is why "keep going" can be some of the best or worst advice, because it completely depends on the context.

that is true for a lot of the super short-form advice you see on X, it's totally context dependent as to whether it's good or bad.

you have to think for yourself.

I got a drink of water from the fountain. It’s a good working water fountain – nice pressure, strong stream, clean, cold water. You can tell a lot about a town by its water fountains.

My heart rate was coming down from around 185 bpm. The average for the full run was closer to 160 bpm. I’m not rounding in this case. I just can’t remember. And I don’t particularly care to look back at my phone to find out. Because I’m not using my phone right now. And it doesn’t really matter. Actually, it was 169 bpm. I know because I was going to write that I can’t check that information in the limited version of the Runkeeper app on my Apple Watch. But I wasn’t sure if that was true. So I checked. And there it was.

I generally don’t run for speed. I run for pleasure. I think it’s good for me and it makes me feel good. I like running more than lifting. I used to hate running. I’m still trying to figure out how I can learn to like lifting like I like running. No answers as of yet.

The reason my heart rate was higher at the end of the run than on average is because I gunned it a bit for the last half mile or so. I don’t do that all the time. A lot of people do that, but I heard once that the end of an experience has an outsized impact on your memory of that experience, so it’s good to make the end part positive for things you want to remember positively so that you’ll do them some more. In the context of running, if you leave yourself totally gassed by gunning it at the end, you’ll remember it as being a lot harder than it was. Not fun. On the other hand, if you make the end easy, you’ll remember the whole run as easier than it was, even if you were running hard the whole time before that. I’m not sure that any of this is true, but it makes sense, so I’ve kept it in mind for several years. Regardless, I felt like finishing fast today.

I started walking back home along the sidewalk between the parking lot and the woods and I heard some plopping on grass behind my right hip, low to the ground. I turned around to discover that it was a big fluffy bunny responsible for the sound. It wasn’t big in absolute terms. I don’t want to make it seem like some giant freak bunny or something. But it was about as big as any bunny I’ve ever seen, as far as I can recall at least. Its body alone was about the size of an NFL football. You probably are accustomed to throwing smaller footballs. NFL footballs are quite big. It was probably about the length of my elbow to the tip of my middle finger, just in its normal posture. I didn’t really see it stretch or lunge. And it was proportionally big to it’s length. It wasn’t fat or anything, but it certainly wasn’t skinny. Plump would be a fair description. Thick.

In addition to its notable size, I would also say it was an abnormally good looking bunny. Too cute to call a rabbit. I don’t throw around the word “cute” that often. But this was a really plush and fluffy bunny. Clean too. It was honestly a little concerning because it made me think it might be a domesticated bunny lost in the wild. It looked as fresh as a puppy after a grooming. I’ve never had any interest in owning a rabbit, but I would have taken this guy into my house if he wanted, or she. I think it was a he. I’m almost certain it wasn’t a they. But who knows.

Something notable about this experience was that I did not have my phone on me because I have not been keeping my phone on me recently. To be fair, I’ve run without my phone a lot over the last few years, before this new, more general no phone thing. That was the primary reason I started wearing an Apple Watch again. I wanted to be able to go for a run and listen to a podcast without bringing my phone with me. Running with nothing in your pockets is great. Today I didn’t listen to anything actually. I didn’t even bring my headphones. 27 minutes and 6 seconds without any audio entertainment might sort of be regarded as a psycho move these days, but I’ve been doing that a bit more recently. It’s fine. You can hear yourself breathe and watch yourself think. Old school.

Because I did not have my phone on me, I couldn’t take a picture of the hare. There was nothing to do really except hang around or keep moving. I decided to hang around. It was really something to see this bunny. I started about 7 or 8 feet away from it probably. And I watched it eat the tops off clovers. It seemed to be having a grand ole time. I am trying to think of the human equivalent of its situation. I can’t come up with anything great. It was basically just hopping around eating the tops off clovers. It looked like heaven for a rabbit.

I didn’t want to scare it. There was no need for an unnecessary adrenaline rush. But I decided to try to get closer. I crouched down and grabbed a clover with a long stem and threw it about halfway between us. The bunny noted my action. It didn’t seem scared at all so I got closer and reached out with another clover. I forget the exact sequence of events but penultimately I got it to eat one of the clovers that I threw. And, finally, it actually touched the clover that I was holding with its nose. It didn’t actually eat it though. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t a good one.

The nose touch was enough for me so I stood up and started walking away. I was surprised to see it actually followed me for 10 yards or so. Maybe it became fond of me over the course of the five minutes or so that we were hanging out. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. Either way, I circled back to grab another clover to try to feed it again but by the time I turned around it was gone, back in the woods. I was relieved actually because the way I was headed was towards the street and I didn’t want it to follow me towards traffic. It’s better off in the woods.

I posted on Warpcast the other day, “Crazy what happens when you don't have your phone on you and come across something photoworthy. Instead of rushing to pull your phone out to capture the moment in a photo you are unlikely to revisit later, in a way that pales in comparison to the actual experience, you just experience and appreciate the moment itself.”

That was what happened to me today. It was nice, but I got to thinking about where that desire to take a photo comes from, and I think there may be something more to it, for better or worse. There’s some part of it that is just trying to capture the moment, and it doesn’t really work, so it seems kind of dumb. But there’s another part that I think comes from a desire to share the experience with others, and I don’t think that’s so bad or wrong.

I went to a baseball game by myself once and I remember saying how I enjoyed it but it would have been better with friends. I think that’s the case for a lot of experiences, most of them probably, but also not all. To take a picture on my phone could have helped me communicate the experience, but it’s kind of just the fastest and easiest and laziest way to do it. There are other, maybe better, ways to communicate it as well, like storytelling or long-form writing, like this.

Had I had my phone on me, I would have taken a picture and shared it with my wife. I would have told her the story and showed her the picture, and that would have been that. But I didn’t have my phone, so I couldn’t do that. Without an easy outlet, my desire to share this experience needed to find a new means to that end. It inspired me to write, and so I did.

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. I don’t have a picture, but this was more than 1,000 words.

I shared online that I was doing this fast and got a few questions to which I responded. Then my friend Phil said he was excited to hear my reflections, so I figured I should write down some reflections. Here goes nothing.

The most important thing I think I have to say about fasting is that I have done a few day+ food fasts in the past and I have always found them to be well worthwhile. As for why, I’m not exactly sure – it’s a combination of things I guess. It provides a nice reset on your diet. It can break any bad eating habits you may have accumulated and allow you to more intentionally start some new ones if you’d like. You can lose some weight pretty quickly, even though you might quickly gain half of it back. You can focus on hydration and develop better habits around drinking sufficient water through the day. Nothing makes me drink more water than when it is the only thing that I am allowed to consume.

Fasting from food for more than a day or two reminds me how it feels to be truly hungry, in a literal sense, but I also think this translates in a figurative sense as well. A lot of people don’t really know what they want a lot of the time, myself included. It may be because they don’t have any strong wants at the time, and that’s fine. Arguably, that’s great — it means you have everything you want. But you can refresh your memory on what it feels like to really want something by starving yourself for a couple of days. By the end, you will really want some food.

By default, a fast provides a change of pace from your typical day-to-day. That, in and of itself, is valuable. People can get a little too caught up in routines. Routines can be great, but once in a while, you might like to change things up a bit. Removing food and/or your phone from your day will force some changes, at least for how you live those days, at least in a couple of ways. Even if there are no secondary impacts, which there probably will be, I did not eat or go on my phone for the last few days. Typically I eat 2-3 times per day and check my phone countless times, spending hours on it. So these days were different. Compared to all the rest of my days in the last several years, these days were outliers. It’s good to experience outliers. And it’s good to step out of your typical day-to-day. It gives you some perspective on things. It allows you to see things with fresh eyes. At least, it does for me. Traveling is another thing that can do that. You may have had the experience of coming home from some travel and seeing things differently in your day-to-day life. It’s a similar phenomenon I think, resulting from the change of scenery, perhaps a change in culture, and the general difference in your days while you were away. I believe change for the sake of change can be valuable. Even intrinsically neutral changes can be positive.

Previously, when I’ve fasted from food, I’ve felt a sense of euphoria for some time. I did not really experience that this time, but it’s happened multiple times before. At a certain point, it feels like your body is really running clean. That has been the case this time. It makes me feel as though food is a burden on your body, and not having to deal with it, your body can really take out the trash. I believe there’s some science for this.

On the other hand, you might have low energy at times if you fast for a while. I only walked for exercise over the last few days but I walked a decent amount for about 90 minutes per day on average. I know that lifting makes me hungrier so I didn’t want to do that, and running to some degree does the same. I didn’t want to make 3 days of not eating harder than it was going to be already. Besides curtailing my usual exercise a bit, my energy for the purpose of working and reading and writing and whatever else I’ve been doing has been perfectly fine. My ability to focus has probably been better than normal, likely from the no phone.

I wrote more about doing a phone fast here but the main takeaways for me were two-fold. First, the day goes by slower. The first day felt a lot slower, but the next two as well. That is a great thing in my book. I would love for life to feel like it is going by slower. If you can make your perception of time slower, you can basically live longer. You might live 20 years less than someone else, but it could feel like twice as long. After a while, I suspect the perceived lengthening of my days by going phone-free would normalize, but more tangibly speaking, it is also saving me hours and hours of time spent on the thing, a lot of which I don’t think is well spent.

Second, I don’t miss it much — my phone, that is. I don’t think I’ll use it tonight, even though I could, and I once again plan to re-examine my use of my phone, deleting my social apps from it, perhaps trying to use it much less often for specific scenarios that involve leaving my place, and maybe also implementing the digital sabbath-like 24 hour no phone period over some stretch of the weekend which I’ve considered doing consistently for probably 7 years now but have only actually done for a few weekends in that time.

Another thing I’ll say on fasting is I think it is nice to do it at an inflection point. It’s good if you have the freedom and control over your time during those days to not have to do anything else, and to be able to do whatever else you want, or nothing. Fasting lends itself well to doing some deep thinking about some of the important things in life, if you want, but I wouldn’t go into the fast with an expectation that you have to do that. It’s good to make the fast itself the only expectation for those days, again, if you can. That makes it as easy as possible. If that’s your only expectation, then all you have to do is not do one or two things —in this case, consume any calories or go on your phone.

I should note that this was the first no food fast where instead of just drinking tap water I had a bottle of topo chico sparkling water everyday. I am generally not one to ask for sparkling when the waiter asks what kind of water you want at a nice restaurant, but it did provide a decent treat each day around dinner time. Next time I would try one of those flavored ones that still has zero calories like a Le Croix. Compared to water, anything sparkling with flavor is pretty exciting.

Lastly, I should have mentioned earlier but fasting is also a great exercise in discipline. And it’s relatively easy because it doesn’t involve doing anything, just not doing something. It’s a lot easier to not do something than to do something because not doing it is technically the default. So if you want to practice discipline, try not doing something. Try fasting – from food, from your phone, from anything that comes to mind. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions and good luck. It’s just about dinner time for me.

Another example like this is carnivores vs. vegans. There are plenty of passionate believers on both sides who believe that their diet is the best. Some people on both sides even have the physical metrics and bloodwork to back up their argument. So what gives? How can opposite approaches each be so incredibly effective?

Perhaps it is because the thing that a person has faith in is of little importance compared to the strength of their faith in that thing. It may sometimes matter less what you believe, and more that you believe.

At least, that’s what I believe.

The People of Farcaster

This podcast scratches two itches which I have had for at least one and three years, respectively. The first was to start a podcast focused purely on the people of Farcaster. I think Farcaster is an interesting network of people which can continue to grow in quantity while retaining some of its early community's common qualities such as civility and curiosity. Ultimately, I believe Farcaster has the potential to become the power law leading, sufficiently decentralized social network of the future. More importantly, I generally enjoy meeting and talking to new people I meet on Farcaster, and I hope to meet many more as a result of starting this podcast.

Walking Recordings

The second itch was to figure out a way to record podcasts while walking outside and still retaining a high enough audio quality so as not to be less than satisfactory for the average podcast listener. I think I finally figured it out. So I plan to record most, if not all, Purple People episodes while walking outside using my Ray-Ban Meta glasses to record. If you are aware of a better walking recording device, let me know what it is. Otherwise, I am as surprised as you are to find that a pair of glasses ended up being the form factor which, after years of sporadically searching, finally seems to have satisfied my criteria for a lightweight, high-quality audio device I can use on the move. Fittingly, I was recommended the glasses by one of my good friends from Farcaster, @phil.

Minimum Preparation, Maximum Spontaneity

Beyond the fact that it will be focused on Farcaster people and recorded while I am walking, Purple People will differentiate from Pod of Jake in a few other ways as well. Most significantly, I will intentionally limit my preparation for each episode for the sake of enabling myself to do more of them and seeing what happens when the conversations are maximally spontaneous. Unlike an episode of Pod of Jake for which I might prepare anywhere between a couple of hours and a couple of weeks, I expect to limit my explicit preparation for an episode of Purple People to a maximum of 30 minutes. I am optimistic about how these conversations may differ as a result. I don’t know that they will necessarily be “better”, as if conversations could be judged so objectively anyway, but I do expect that they will be substantially different. I expect the increase in spontaneity to lead the conversations in less expected directions, with my questions coming more purely from a place of curiosity than an intention to drive the conversation in certain directions I have predetermined might be interesting (which, to be fair, still comes from a place of curiosity in the first place).

Other Small Differences

Since I will be walking while recording, I will be recording Purple Purple as an audio-only podcast just as I did for the first 140 episodes of Pod of Jake (since then, I have included video as well for most episodes). I have always preferred recording podcasts audio-only for a number of reasons, so I am excited to return to that simpler format as opposed to forcing the addition of video. Another small difference is that I will not commit to a publishing cadence as I do with Pod of Jake, where I have expected myself to publish an episode every week or two for the last 4 years, and roughly have done so with some exceptions here and there. I want Purple People to feel low pressure and just for fun. So I want to strip out any unfun parts of the process, most notably the various parts of post-production and publishing, which I mostly have minimized for my main podcast already, but will seek to do even moreso for Purple People. I don’t enjoy editing or making clips or doing the kind of overhead-type work that most people consider a prerequisite for getting an episode published. And I don't think it really matters either. So I’ll decide what matters and what doesn’t for myself and I will aim to release the conversations I record as simply and as quickly as possible for anyone who wants to be able to listen to them anytime.

In Closing

I officially decided to start this podcast a week ago. Since then, I have set everything up and recorded a few episodes. My next step is to publish the first one. I could have never predicted all of the good things which have come from starting my original podcast, Pod of Jake. So now, as I start this new podcast, I am excited about the unpredictable potential for Purple People.

If this sounds interesting, you can subscribe to the Purple People podcast on Apple or Spotify.

Thank you for reading, and if you do decide to tune in, thank you for the listening.

Subscribe now

No matter how many people claim they can do it all, I have doubts. Sure, Zuck and Bezos are jacked now. And yes, Steve Jobs seemed to have been a pretty good family man in the end. But these great founders were not how they later became during the years in which they rose to greatness.

I’m not certain of what I am saying, that you can’t become a great founder without some significant sacrifice in fundamental dimensions of life such as health, relationships, and perhaps “happiness”. And it’s a dangerous idea if it’s wrong, because it is limiting upon one’s own idea of what is possible. I hesitate to share it for that reason. But what do I write for if it is not to share what I think?

I share this idea because I am as pragmatic as I am optimistic, and this is a question I have considered for a long time.

I think about it because I want to create something great, but I also want to be a great husband and a great father, and I want to live a long time, and I want to enjoy the ride. In other words, I want it all.

And the optimist in me believes all these things are possible, together in parallel, in a single lifetime. But the pragmatist doubts whether that is true. So the optimist presses forward under the assumption that I can do it all while the pragmatist looks for signs of unavoidable sacrifice.

If sacrifice was required, and you knew that up front, at least you could make a conscious choice. More generally, if you could know what your various paths in life would look like, you could choose. But of course, you can’t. That’s not what life’s about, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

So I move forward, knowing that I do not know, trusting my gut, and doing the best that I can.

The pragmatist started this writing but the optimist finishes. At the end of the day, I still believe it is possible that it is possible to do it all. I have my doubts, but without doubt, there is no place for faith. So that’s what I have. Faith.

I also think there's something to be said for when it's hard to explain the "why" behind what you're doing. That means it's hard to justify in logical terms. So it's unlikely to be something memetic or something you're doing for social proof. You must genuinely want to do the thing.

Working on Base Colors, it's hard to explain both what I do and why I'm doing it. I believe these are positive signs that I'm headed in the right direction, doing the right things for the right reasons. I can't explain why but I'm working as obsessively as ever. Not work really. Play.

Subscribe now

NFTs are collectibles.

You know what collectibles are. Here are 10 familiar examples:

• pokémon cards

• baseball cards

• beanie babies

• vinyl records

• comic books

• watches

• stamps

• coins

• cars

• art

NFTs are a new kind of collectible. More specifically, they are digital collectibles. They may eventually be more than that, but they are at least that, so let’s start there.

Digital collectibles can be valuable.

(just like physical collectibles, even though you can’t touch them)

The examples listed above are all physical collectibles. Digital collectibles are a bit different. Namely, you can touch physical collectibles, but you can’t touch digital collectibles. This confuses people, but it shouldn’t. Just because you can’t touch something doesn’t mean it can’t have value.

Consider domain names (websites) for example. Domain names are sort of like digital collectibles. Google owns a highly valuable collection of domain names including google.com, gmail.com, youtube.com, and others alike. You can’t touch google.com, but it is obviously valuable. You could offer Google $1 million. Google would never sell it to you.

NFTs are digital collectibles.

Today, the most popular term for describing digital collectibles is “NFTs”. One example of an NFT collection is ENS names. ENS names are like domain names, but instead of ending with “.com”, they end with “.eth”, and instead of representing a website, they represent a crypto address. That means you can send digital assets to them. So if Google owned google.eth, you could send cryptocurrency to Google by sending it to google.eth.

ENS names can be valuable, just like domain names. Vitalik Buterin is the creator of Ethereum and one of the most well-known individuals in crypto. Vitalik owns vitalik.eth. You could offer him $1 million for vitalik.eth, and it’s probably not as valuable to him as google.com is to Google, but I don’t think he would sell it to you for $1 million.

Another example of an NFT collection is CryptoPunks. CryptoPunks is a collection of 10,000 NFTs that look like these:

Some collectibles can be really valuable.

Individual NFTs from the CryptoPunks collection have sold for millions of dollars. That might seem silly, but some people really value certain collectibles. This has been true for centuries in the world of physical collectibles, and so far it has held true in the world of digital collectibles as well.

Here are a few examples of physical collectibles that have sold for a lot of money:

And here are a few examples of NFTs that have sold for a lot of money as well:

I could show you countless other examples of each, but you get the point. It is fair to wonder why these collectibles are so valuable. I don’t really understand multi-million dollar stamps myself. But the thing is, it doesn’t matter if I understand it. It is what it is. People have valued baseball cards and stamps for decades and it seems likely that they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Collectibles are status symbols.

We don’t need to understand why all of these different kinds of collectibles are considered valuable in order to understand that they are considered valuable, but we can try. One simple way to think about collectibles is as status symbols. After all, you can’t really do anything with baseball cards or beanie babies besides buy them, hold them, enjoy them, show them off, and sell them. But watches are a bit different. You can do something with a watch. You can wear it and you can tell the time. Watches serve a function, and a useful one at that, but that is not why they are valuable. Rolex watches routinely sell for tens of thousands of dollars, but they don’t tell the time any better than a $50 Timex. They are status symbols. You don’t buy a Rolex to tell the time. You buy a Rolex to show your status.

Digital collectibles are no different.

CryptoPunks are status symbols, just like Rolex watches. If you wear a Rolex watch, people will assume you are wealthy and successful. Similarly, if you have a CryptoPunk as your profile picture on Twitter, people will assume you are wealthy and that you were early to appreciate digital art, which might even mean you are smart. CryptoPunks are cool, just like Rolex watches, so some people value them both very highly. It might not make sense to you, just like paying millions of dollars for stamps doesn’t make sense to me, but it makes sense to some people. And you don’t need everyone to value CryptoPunks for CryptoPunks to be extremely valuable. You really only need a few people. The internet connects everyone in the world. If you can find one person who is willing to pay $1 million for your CryptoPunk, then that’s how much you can sell it for. And if you sell it for $1 million, then that’s what it’s worth. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.

The collectibles market is big.

Now, it is worth considering the value of NFTs (digital collectibles) relative to the value of all collectibles (the vast majority of which are physical collectibles) because it makes it seem obvious that the digital collectibles market is going to grow, potentially a lot. Currently, the global collectibles market is estimated to be worth around half a trillion dollars, or $473.81 billion to be precise. The NFT market, on the other hand, is currently estimated to be worth $4.7 billion. That means digital collectibles currently represent just 1% of the total collectibles market.

Digital collectibles are still small.

NFTs are still just a few years old, so while they’re relatively small today, it’s reasonable to say it’s still early. A good analogy could be to compare NFTs today to e-commerce in 2000. Just as NFTs represent 1% of the total collectibles market today, e-commerce represented 1% of the US retail market in 2000. Look at how it has grown since:

Today, e-commerce represents more than 15% of the US retail market. Could NFTs represent 15% of the total collectibles market in 25 years? Neither the US retail market nor the total collectibles market is staying stagnant either, so the digital piece is not just a growing slice of the pie, but a growing slice of a growing pie. In fact, while e-commerce has increased from 1% to 15% of the US retail market, the actual value of e-commerce sales has increased from $5.7 billion in the first quarter of 2000 to $289 billion in the first quarter of 2024. That’s a 50x increase in about 25 years.

Digital collectibles are coming.

I don’t know if digital collectibles are going to represent 15% of the total collectibles market in 25 years, or if the total value of all digital collectibles is going to increase 50x in the next 25 years. I don’t even know if they’ll still be called “NFTs”. All I know is that I will be extremely surprised if the digital collectibles market does not increase significantly both as a percentage of the total collectibles market, and in terms of its total value in the years to come. If you have a good argument for why the digital collectibles market should not represent at least 5% of the total collectibles market or increase at least 10x in value, I would love to hear it. As with most things, I’m open to changing my mind.

Base Colors are next.

I hope this was helpful, and that you now feel you have a decent understanding of NFTs. Now that I have written this, I plan to write about my project specifically in a follow-up post. I believe it is something fundamentally new and interesting, but it is easiest to describe it simply as an NFT project for now. If you are curious to check it out, go to basecolors.com, where you can buy and name colors as digital collectibles. There is only one NFT for every digital color in the world. So there are 16,777,216 colors, but no two people can own the same color, and no two colors can have the same name. We made it easy enough so that anyone should be able to get a color. And if you have any questions, you can email me at jake@basecolors.com and I’ll be more than happy to help. As always, thank you for reading. I appreciate your support.

Subscribe now

In a continued effort to build a sustainable life around doing things I enjoy, and being useful, I am now pleased to announce the launch of Business Counsel. Just as I enjoy talking through people’s problems and helping them navigate life, I very much enjoy discussing people’s businesses and trying to find ways to make them better.

As with Life Advice, it is hard to convince you in advance how or that I can be useful. What I can say is that I am confident that I can help people in life, and in the case of Business Counsel, I am confident that I can help people with their businesses. Moreover, I am confident that 1 hour spent speaking with me on a Life Advice call is well worth the $150 I am currently charging for it, and the 1 hour spent speaking with me on a Business Counsel call is well worth $999, expensable to the business.

I have a background in investment banking (Technology M&A), was Balaji Srinivasan’s right hand man for a couple of years, and have interviewed more than 100 of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world on my podcast, but these credentials are not what make my perspective valuable and useful. What makes my perspective valuable and useful is the combination of everything I have ever done, how I think, and who I am.

This clip from a recent interview with legendary music producer Rick Rubin by 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper resonated with me in relation to how I feel about how I can be helpful.

RR: I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music.

AC: (Laughs) You must know something.

RR: Well I know what I like and what I don’t like. And I’m decisive about what I like and what I don’t like.

AC: So what are you being paid for?

RR: The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.

In a business context, I have a lot of confidence in my sense and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for entrepreneurs. 

So, if you think I may be able to help you with your business, it would make my week if you would book a Business Counsel call here, or share this with a friend: business-counsel.xyz 

If you don’t find the call worthwhile, I will refund you the full amount paid.

As always, thank you for your trust and support. I greatly appreciate it.

Streaks are unique. They are useful because they make continuance the default whereas the opposite of whatever you are doing or not doing to continue the streak might have otherwise been the default. In this case, not drinking caffeinated coffee became my default whereas drinking caffeinated coffee might have otherwise been my default if I did not care about continuing the streak. Exercise is another good example. You might not ordinarily exercise on a day where you are extraordinarily busy, but if you have a 78-day streak going, you are probably going to find a way to make it happen that day, for the sake of the streak. 

Streaks are powerful because they add more relative value to the incremental continuance of the streak than that increment would have held in absolute value on its own were it not for its relevance to the streak. For example, if you miss just 1 day of exercise in a year versus missing 0 days, the difference in the percentage of days you exercised is only 0.27% (1-(364/365)), but if, let’s say, that day occurred halfway through the year, your longest streak of consecutive days exercised is cut by 50% (182/365). In that sense, the impact on the streak is ~200x as large as the impact on the percentage of days you exercised that year (50.00% vs. 0.27%), so if you’re focused on the streak as opposed to the overall hit rate, the impact of missing 1 day is 200x as important.

The psychological power of the streak is extremely useful for some people in certain situations. For example, people recovering from alcoholism or other addictions can benefit greatly from the zero tolerance policy that the outsized importance of extending a streak incentivizes. For those people in those situations, a single exception can be a slippery slope resulting in an extended relapse. It could be argued that that slope is made more slippery by the streak itself and the outsized weight that is placed on its breaking as a result of the outsized weight that is placed on its continuance, but I would give the benefit of the doubt to the idea that sobriety streaks are net positives for addicts overall.

Now, coming back to why I decided to have a caffeinated coffee today, it was mostly for the purpose of breaking my streak which I felt was becoming more important than not drinking coffee actually meant to me. I still believe in everything I wrote about why I quit caffeine more than a year ago. I don’t expect my drinking coffee today to lead to a regular habit of drinking coffee in perpetuity. But basically I know now (and have known for a while) that I can quit coffee any time (the substitute habit of drinking decaf being the key to helping me do that sustainably where I had not as sustainably done it in the past). I don’t need to never have another coffee again. 

I believe in moderation and balance. While I still believe it is best for me personally to not be a daily or even weekly coffee drinker forever, I suspect that the occasional cup of coffee may be beneficial, even marginally, to my life as a whole. It is for similar reasons that I don’t expect to ever entirely give up alcohol even though I have generally trended towards drinking less of it over the last several years. Just like coffee, I don’t believe it is best for me personally be drinking alcohol daily (obviously) or even weekly forever, but I do believe the occasional scotch or tequila on the rocks can be beneficial to my life as a whole.

It’s funny. When I first quit coffee, I had the occasional cravings that one would expect. Even several months after, I would have an infrequent temptation – a Sunday morning on a rare vacation on a beautiful summer day with a fresh pot of coffee in the kitchen, made for the house. Most of those days I would quell the craving with a decaf. But today was not one of those days where I had a big craving or temptation. Part of the reason I felt good about breaking the streak was because I did not feel that craving or temptation. I wasn’t giving into anything. I wasn’t losing the streak. I was breaking it, intentionally, on my own terms, because it just wasn’t that big of a deal. I felt like the streak was starting to over-inflate the importance of a zero-tolerance policy towards coffee in my life. So I decided to break the streak. 

I enjoyed my first coffee in a long time. And I was pleased to confirm that both the taste and the ritual were indistinguishable from drinking a decaf. The difference is strictly confined to the feeling and the buzz of consuming caffeine itself. And I’m not going to lie, that made this blog post a little extra nice to write.

Subscribe now

There were five underlined parts across two chapters that I wanted to share here – for myself to remember, and for you to read – because they ring true to my experience in life so far. Here they are:

“You learn to trust yourself – in the universe, with the universe, as a unique channel to a higher wisdom.”

“trust in the process”

“This isn’t a matter of blind belief in yourself. It’s a matter of experimental faith.”

“Faith is rewarded, perhaps even more than talent or ability.”

“Over time, as you complete more projects, this faith in experimentation grows. You’re able to hold high expectations, move forward with patience, and trust the mystery unfolding before you. With the understanding that the process will get you where you’re going. Wherever that reveals itself to be. And the magical nature of the unfolding never ceases to take our breath away.”

Subscribe now

Information is infinite. But what about value? Crypto enables the definition of value where it was not previously defined. It increases the percentage of all existing value in the world that is made quantifiable and tradable. It also facilitates the creation of new value by materially decreasing the friction inherent in value creation.

So what does this mean for legacy industries where value creation is much more difficult, for companies with market caps based on multiples of hard-earned profits from “real-world” business activities? The normalized use of revenue multiples (as opposed to earnings multiples) for valuing technology companies already moved us one step away from the tangible and towards a more abstract understanding of value. Dot-com boom era multiples based on non-financial, attention-based metrics like clicks perhaps previewed an even further abstraction more representative of what’s to come. Could crypto’s impact on value do to traditional companies what the internet’s impact on information did to traditional media? 

The nature of value is evolving and it is hard to wrap your head around because it hasn’t really happened yet.

It’s still just starting.

Subscribe now

That’s something I’ve been telling myself lately. So what exactly does that mean?

Well, the second part “let people get it where they go” is similar to the common advice to “meet customers where they are.” Meeting customers where they are is about appealing to them in the places where they are already spending their time online, though it applies offline in the physical world as well. You’re not trying to get them to go to a new place. You’re simply meeting them where they are. I’m aligned with this strategy, mostly.

But if you change the word “customers” to “people”, the saying “meet people where they are” is understood to have a different meaning. Meeting people where they are is about compromise. It’s not about meeting people where they are in a literal sense in terms of the digital place or website or channel where they already spend some time. It’s about meeting them where they are in terms of their tastes and preferences and desires. This, I am not aligned with.

That’s where the first part of my first sentence comes in — “create what you want”. That’s what I want to do — to create what I want. That might seem obvious, that I want to do what I want. But a lot of people actually don’t do what they want. Why not? Because they prioritize their want to do what the customer wants. They want to meet people where they are. I want to create what I want and let people get it where they go. There’s a difference. It seems like a nuanced difference, but it’s not. It changes everything you do because you are doing it unapologetically for you, not for some customer, imaginary or otherwise.

This difference in approaches changes both what you do and how you do it. That makes sense because it all stems from this fundamental difference in why you’re doing it — for you, because it’s what you want to do. For me, I like blogging and podcasting, to a lesser degree tweeting, and more recently have been making some digital art. With all of these things, I do what I want. I write about whatever I want. I don’t restrain myself to a particular subject or niche that I recognize could more effectively build an audience. The same is true for podcasting — no niche. I just talk to whoever I want about whatever I want. I also produce the podcast the way that I want. That means minimal editing, post-production, marketing, and all that. I tweet what I want and I make the digital art that I want. And I do all of this pseudonymously, even though I know I would probably have a larger following if I showed my face and shared my name. Both build trust and likability, but pseudonymity is my preferred approach for operating on the internet. So that’s the general overview on what I do and how I do it. Now how about where I share it?

For a long time, I posted my blogs on a Wordpress website, my podcasts on Apple and Spotify, and I tweeted on Twitter, as one does. More recently, I’ve made an effort to meet people where they are practically, but not preferentially — to “let people get it where they go” but not to “meet people where they are”, if you can recall the difference as I described it. Logistically, this means I am sharing my blogs, podcasts, tweets, and digital art on multiple platforms, which is normal in some contexts, but unusual in others. For example, it is normal to publish podcasts across Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and more, and I publish mine there as well as elsewhere and on my podcast website. It is less usual to publish blogs in multiple places, but that is what I have started to do in an effort to let people read my writing wherever they go, wherever they are, wherever they like. 

For years, I resisted moving from my Wordpress website to Substack because I felt Substack was for newsletters and what I write is not a newsletter. But this stubbornness, while grounded in fact, was preventing people from being able to serendipitously stumble upon my writing, as the internet is inclined to enable. Substacks are much more easily discoverable than Wordpress websites because people who like to read people’s writing are already on Substack where Wordpress does not have a comparable network effect. So I switched to Substack earlier this year, but not to Substack only. Now, when I write, I publish on Substack and Paragraph, a Substack-like website for people interested in crypto and web3. On Substack, supporters can choose to do a paid subscription to support my work (though everything I write is available to free subscribers all the same). On Paragraph, supporters can collect my blog posts by minting them onchain (for crypto people). They can do that for free except for the platform fee of .000777 ETH (~$2.71). A little less than half of that goes to me. In addition to Substack and Paragraph, I sometimes take a screenshot of the full blog post and publish it on Twitter and/or Warpcast as a “screenshot essay”. I’ll also share the Paragraph post on Warpcast as what I call an “inframe onchain essay” or “IOE” (don’t worry if you have no idea what I’m talking about here). For those who don't know Warpcast, it is roughly a Twitter-like social network for crypto people with crypto elements involved. I generally try to cross-post my tweets there as casts and vice versa, except for when the content of the tweet or cast is less relevant on the other platform, which has increasingly become the case for some of the more crypto-native content I have been posting on Warpcast.

Lastly, I am starting to make more of an effort to publish all of my content onchain — blogs, podcasts, art, or otherwise. I am posting my podcasts on pods.media where people can mint them just like my blog posts on Paragraph (for free with the small fee of which a share goes to me). In addition to posting my blogs on Paragraph, which puts them onchain, I am planning to start publishing those blogs as screenshot essays onchain via Zora, the same place I am publishing my digital art, for people who might prefer that to the Paragraph posts, or stumble upon it on Zora where they might not otherwise have found it on Paragraph.

So why am I doing all of this? It’s more useful to start with the opposite question — why not? The main reasons why I would not to do this would be if it added a material amount of time to my processes — especially if it added so much logistical work that it discouraged me from doing the actual thing — writing, podcasting, etc.. But the fact is it doesn’t. So long as I setup a system where I can pop open a folder of bookmarks titled “Publish Blog” or “Publish Podcast”, it’s just copying and pasting across a few different websites and filling in some simple information fields that are pretty much the same across all of them. For tweeting and casting, it’s as simple as copying and pasting a tweet from Twitter and casting it on Warpcast or vice versa. There are even some apps that can be used to do this automatically, in one click, though I’m not using them because it hasn’t made sense for me to cross-post in every case, and the manual approach has emerged for me organically and been easy enough. The other reason not to do this would be if it in any way compromised my work — that is, what I do or how or why I do it — but, again, it doesn’t. I’m not meeting people where they are. I’m creating what I want and letting people get it where they go.

In closing, if you want to follow some of my work, and you don’t know where to start because of all of the different channels I’ve mentioned, don’t worry about it. The whole point is that I am going to do what I do and you can just continue to do what you do and, if I’m doing it right, you’ll see me there. Just look for the blue dot.

Subscribe now

Gorillas are roughly 10 times stronger than humans. If power was purely a product of physical strength, we would have a silverback in the White House, instead of a whitehair. I’m kidding… But seriously, if strength superseded everything, monkeys might be running the world making movies called Planet of the Humans. Obviously, that is not the case.

It is not the case because, despite our relatively weak bodies, we have extraordinarily strong minds. We are smarter than monkeys and lions and tigers and bears. Most of us are even smarter than dolphins, and dolphins are very smart. Our human intelligence has allowed us to solve problems, plan for the future, and develop increasingly more impressive tools and technologies, from fire and wheels to iPhones and spaceships. That is why we run this planet — not because we are stronger than some other animals, but because we are smarter than all other animals. Our minds are our special strength as a species.

I believe it is generally beneficial to double and triple down on one’s strengths rather than trying to improve upon every weakness. In baseball, if you are one of the top 10 hitters in the world, but you are really bad at fielding, you should not spend 90% of your time working on your fielding and just 10% on your hitting. You should continue to work on your hitting to see how great you can get and either spend the minimum amount of time on your fielding that gets you to the point where you can at least get by, or just sign to play for a team where you can DH (the designated hitter (“DH”) only has to hit — they don’t have to play the field).

There is a lot of obsession with physical fitness optimization these days. People like Andrew Huberman and Bryan Johnson are treated like deities by their countless followers. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve learned and employed some useful tips from Huberman, and I’m a fan of his podcast, and I respect Johnson’s goal to live an unprecedentedly long and healthy life, even if I don’t love or agree with all of his rhetoric. Interviewing people working to slow and reverse aging has always been a big part of my podcast, ever since my very first episode with Aubrey de Grey, a pioneer in the space who wrote the book Ending Aging. I would love to live healthfully to age 120+. That said, I am not “all in” on these guys or their methods. It’s all a little much for me. I’m all for developing technologies, novel drugs, and therapies that promise the potential to help us live longer, healthier lives, but I am skeptical that the difference between operating at a B+ fitness level and an A+ fitness level will move the needle much in terms of how I feel on a daily basis or how long and healthy a life I live.

It’s not like its takes 85 units of time and effort to score an 85% on your fitness and only 14 more units to score a 99%. The difference between 85% and 99% requires more like 10x as much time and effort, including a whole host of sacrifices which I’m not very interested in making (i.e. never having another slice of pizza, being a general pain to hang out with, spending hours every day in the gym, and depriving oneself of many of the simple joys in life due to a zero tolerance policy on a lot of things that are more or less harmless in moderation). Not only don’t I want to make such an extreme effort, I actually don’t think it’s the smartest approach. Everything you do has an opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of spending so much time focused on your fitness may be not spending as much time with friends and family, or working, or doing things for fun. Another opportunity cost of spending so much time physically training is spending far less time mentally training — learning, reading, writing, communicating, working, building, etc..

To over-focus on physical fitness, to some degree, is to spend an exorbitant amount of time on something we are unexceptional at as a species. It is to work on our weakness rather than doubling and tripling down on our greatest strength. I am all for physical fitness to the extent that it makes me feel better on a daily basis and gives me a materially higher probability of living a longer and healthier life, no question, but I am not for piling as much time and effort as I possibly can into my physical fitness. I’d much rather use and continue to improve upon my greatest strength, my mind.

Subscribe now

For most people, a few things might come to mind. You might quit your job, travel more, read more, or finally make time for the gym. But for most people, it is hard to say all of the ways in which they would spend their days differently if they won the lottery today. I think the honest answer for a lot of people is that, in addition to whatever else comes to mind, they would spend a lot more time figuring out how they want to spend their time. Figuring out is different than thinking about. It involves active experimentation — in other words, trying things. There are lots of things that can take weeks, months, or even years to effectively experiment with.

I’m not a millionaire (yet), let alone a billionaire (yet), but already, in my 20s, I have been able to give myself 2-3 years of cumulative time and space to follow my interests, try things, and figure out how I’d want to spend my days, independent of financial considerations. I have learned that I like writing, podcasting, investing, coaching basketball, spending time with friends and family, traveling and seasonal living, doing life advice calls, reading, running and lifting, golfing, walking while talking, and a bunch of other things. All of these are elements of how I would spend my days if I won the lottery, and I’ve been fortunate to spend a lot of time doing all of these things in my times of free time so far.

Subscribe now

During these times, in which I have given myself tremendous freedom of time, it has been hard to completely ignore any considerations around money given that I do not have nearly enough to sustain myself and my eventual family for the rest of my life. That said, I worked hard over multiple multi-year periods and saved and invested well enough to feel good giving myself permission not to worry about money for months at a time. I still end up worrying about it from time to time during those times, and it may influence my decisions around how to spend my time to some degree, but I largely try not to let it do so.

I want to know what I would do if I could do anything I wanted to, because I believe that, for the most part, I can. Perhaps ignorantly, I believe that if I keep doing whatever I want to do, if I keep trying things and seeing what I’m best at doing and what I like doing best, the money problem will eventually and sustainably solve itself. Until then, I’m happy to “sell my time” from time to time, whether that means working a job or running my own business or something else, so long as it seems like a worthwhile experience.

In the long run, I’d like to continue trying different things and figuring out more and more how I would like to spend my time if I won the lottery. I don’t think the difference between how I spend my time and how I would spend it if I won the lottery needs to be nearly as large as most people assume. I hope to continue experimenting for months or years at a time, and to spend my time more or less however I want during those times, increasingly figuring out how I would spend my time if I won the lottery. And then I want to spend most of my time that way anyway, without having to win the lottery first.

Subscribe now

Every weekday, I would sit down to write, and I would edit a bit as I went, just as I am doing now. I might also give it a full read through once I was done, and make a few changes as I did. But I did not belabor the thing. The initial rationale was purely practical. First of all, I had committed indefinitely to a weekdaily publishing cadence, so there was no putting a piece away and revisiting it another day — no sleeping on it and reviewing it with a pair of fresh eyes in the morning. I didn’t have some big backlog of written pieces waiting to be published. For the most part, I wrote every weekday, and I published what I wrote that same day. The second reason I didn’t edit much was that I had roughly no subscribers, no followers, no audience of any kind. I was writing without expectations that anyone would read what I wrote anytime soon, so who cares? I had the desire to write, and again, that includes a fair bit of editing as one goes, but I did not have the desire to edit much after the fact. So that was that. It was write and publish. Just write and publish. One piece out. Onto the next.

Later, when I started my podcast, I applied some of the same principles in regards to editing, and as a result I did not do much of it. For podcasting, I had even further support for this approach. First, Joe Rogan’s podcast is mostly unedited and he has the most popular podcast in the world, so why should I edit? Second, I personally prefer less edited podcasts over the ones that cut out every single pause and filler word and even full segments of the conversation. To me, that feels over-“optimized” and unnatural — plus, a well-timed pause can hold a lot of value in a conversation. Without hearing a conversation as it was, a lot of context can be lost, and a big part of the value of podcasts compared to shorter-form content like tweets or tiktoks is that it provides that context — so why edit it out? Last but not least, and perhaps most importantly, moreso than editing writing, I really dislike editing audio or video. Whereas editing writing feels skillful, editing audio or video, at least in the context of editing a podcast, for me feels like a completely commoditized skill, a robot task, and a waste of my time. 

I feared that, if I made editing a material part of my recurring podcasting process required for every episode, I would end up quitting podcasting all together sooner than later because a large part of the process felt dreadful for me. Why spend time on a recurring basis doing something I don’t enjoy when it is not even clear that it will improve the quality or potential popularity of the podcast (i.e. Joe Rogan), and it may actually make it worse for some people’s preferences (i.e. my own)? So I made the decision to do minimal viable editing — a cut at the beginning, a cut at the end, and only editing anything in the middle that stood out as something that obviously should be edited out, like pausing the conversation to fix a problem with our audio connection, or a dog barking and interrupting the conversation, things like that.

In both writing and podcasting, I believe editing is a counterforce against publishing. In other words, the more you edit, the less you’ll publish, and vice versa. You’re only going to spend so much time on either writing or podcasting as activities overall, and the higher percentage of that time you spend editing, the less time you’ll spend writing, or thinking of new ideas, or finding and sending invites to new podcast guests, or preparing for the conversations. Plus, it’s possible that, like podcasting, over-editing writing can be more harmful than helpful past a certain point, and so the same argument holds as to why one should not waste one’s time on it.

While I have held strong on this principle in podcasting, I lost it a bit with writing. As I gained a small following, knowing that some people would be reading my writing stopped me from feeling as free to publish with minimal viable editing. Somewhere along the way, I lost the feeling that I had nothing to lose.

So this is my public commitment, not to publishing on a particular cadence again, but to publishing with less time dedicated to editing in general. That might seem easier in that it requires less time but it is hard in that you need to sum up the courage to post something you haven’t painstakingly scrubbed for anything that might be poorly written, make you seem stupid, or be otherwise bad. It helps to remind myself of something else I wrote: Nobody Cares.

In closing, I should say that this does not mean I am going to start posting garbage. In fact, I believe most of the best writing of my life was published during those initial 6 months of mostly posting with very little editing. When I know I’m not going to edit much after, I tend to be a bit more thoughtful as I am writing, in a way that is helpful to keeping things cleaner as I go, and I also edit as I go, but in a way that still feels like a part of the “writing” more than explicit editing. The primary thing I want to do less of is the after-editing. For this one, I’m just finishing doing a full read through. It took more time and I made more edits than I would have liked to, but just like anything, writing and publishing with minimal viable editing is a practice. It’s a muscle I haven’t exercised in a while, and I’ve built some “bad habits” of spending substantial time editing, and not feeling as free to press “publish”. I’m hoping to start changing that.

I doubt you’ll notice a difference from all this — only that hopefully I’ll be publishing more writing more often. You might find a few more typos. Then you might tell me, and I might fix it. So be it. The fact is that I don’t love editing and I don’t love reading my own writing right after I write it, just as I don’t love listening to my own podcast episodes right after I record them. I enjoy writing and I enjoy preparing for and recording podcasts. That’s it. More generally, I just love creating things and putting them out into the world. I believe focusing on the parts of the creative process that I enjoy is the best way to ensure that I will keep creating and sharing for a long time, so that is what I plan to do.

I have not compromised on this “interestedness” criteria at all but naturally I am more interested in some guests than others and I have found that, the more interested I am, the more interesting the conversation tends to be. That has been enough to support my hypothesis without having to actually run the experiment of having someone on as a guest who I am not genuinely interested in. That’s not an experiment that I am interested in running. 

This may sound like an obvious criteria. Why would I invite a guest to come on the podcast if I am not genuinely interested in having a conversation with them? Well, there is at least one obvious reason which is that, even if I am not all that interested in them, other people are, and so it could be a conversation which many people might listen to. I imagine there are a ton of podcasters who don’t really consider their interest in a person as a criteria at all. They might start with a completely different question such as “Does this guest fit the niche that my podcast is about.” For me, if I am not interested, I am not interested. It’s a non-negotiable criteria, and it’s as simple as that.

For these first few years of podcasting, I have also had a second criteria on which I have seldom compromised. That is a prominence criteria. Once I’ve identified a guest I’m genuinely interested in, I secondarily consider whether they are above some subjective prominence threshold where a lot of people like me would be familiar with them. It is important to emphasize that this prominence threshold is subjective and specific to me and people interested in the kinds of things that I am interested in. If I show my podcast guest list to a stranger, they are likely to only recognize about one name — Mark Cuban, or maybe a handful. If I show it to someone who is into crypto, they might recognize several or even a few dozen. But if I show it to someone who really has a lot of overlapping interests with me, they may recognize more than half of the people I’ve had on my podcast to date. It is from their perspective that I think about this prominence threshold.

My logic was always that, in order to build a large audience over time, I needed to maintain a certain prominence threshold among my guests so that when the right types of people come across my podcast they will be inclined to listen and subscribe because they recognize a lot of people who they like, respect, and/or admire on my guest list. Additionally, if I did a good job I figured prominent guests would share our episode with their relatively large audiences and some percentage of that audience would listen and some percentage of those who listen would continue to listen to more episodes of my podcast and become a part of my audience. 

Subscribe now

I have always had a long-term goal to have less prominent people on the podcast so that I can do my small part to help them get discovered and become more prominent in their own right. I concluded that I could not effectively do that if I did not first build a sufficiently sized stage on which to spotlight them, metaphorically speaking. I figured I could start with a high prominence threshold and lower it gradually over time as the audience grew. Even from the beginning, I have had less prominent people on the podcast here and there because I feel like I have some amount of “budget” to spend (in a sense) on these lower prominence guests without materially compromising my ability to hold a high prominence average and continue to build the podcast audience as I’ve describe. But something somewhat expected has happened, or hasn’t happened I suppose is more accurate. 

My podcast audience has not grown that much in its few years despite all of my above logic, as sound as it may seem. It’s not that no one is listening — I get between a few hundred and several thousand listeners on every episode, with the median listenership being closer to the bottom end of that range. But this size was achieved fairly early in my first year of podcasting and has not meaningfully grown much since then for whatever the reason may be. Fortunately, I have never sought to make my podcast a full-time thing nor felt the need to make it monetizable as quickly as possible or anything like that. I often tell people that if I was doing it for the audience size or the money I would have stopped a long time ago. But I haven’t. I’ve kept going, sometimes more consistently than others, but mostly releasing episodes every week or two for the better part of the last 3 years.

I still believe in everything I have written above, but I am writing this to draw a sort of line in the sand beyond which I intend to deprioritize my prominence threshold a bit. More accurately, I have already started doing this. I have realized that I do not really care about building a huge audience. It would be certainly be nice and preferable, all else equal, but it is not in the top few reasons why I do what I do, and it never has been. What I really care about is having interesting conversations with interesting people and sharing those conversations freely with the world, so that anyone with an internet connection can listen. That has been my real purpose for the podcast all along. 

I will continue to have prominent guests because prominent people tend to be a bit more interesting. They are somewhat extraordinary by default, given their prominence, and I tend to be interested in extraordinary people. But I am going to continue leaning in on inviting more guests on the podcast who are not yet as prominent as perhaps my average guest has been to date, especially when I am most interested in having a conversation with that particular person. 

In the long run, I would still love to be able to bring more attention to less prominent people whom I find interesting, and the bigger my audience is, the more effectively I will be able to do that. But I have realized that my audience is sufficiently large to bring some attention already. Moreover, the quality of my audience is extremely high, and many of my listeners are quite prominent in their own right. I am regularly shocked by the caliber of people who I learn are listening to my podcast. And I have come to believe that it might be just as (if not more) valuable for an under-discovered guest I have on the podcast to be discovered by one person, if that person is the right person, compared to one thousand people by whom the value of being discovered is not as great for one reason or another. 

In lowering my prominence bar a bit, I expect to be able to raise my interestedness bar even further than it has already been, and I am excited to see what results from that change in my criterial philosophy. I am also aware that sometimes it is right around the point when you stop looking for something that you find it, so perhaps deprioritizing guest prominence as a means towards the end of attracting a large audience will be exactly the thing that ends up attracting a large audience. I’m not counting on it, but we’ll see.

I’ve already made many trade-offs at the expense of building a large audience (remaining pseudonymous, refusing to constrain myself to a particular niche, etc.), so this is nothing new in that sense. And you might not even notice a difference. I still expect to have many prominent guests because my weighting of that criteria will not go from second priority to not caring about it at all, and because I am very interested in a lot of very prominent people. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast to date, I am confident you will continue to enjoy the podcast in the future. And if new people are less inclined to listen as a result of a lower average prominence as it pertains to all the awesome people on my guest list, that’s ok with me.

Subscribe now

Still, sometimes problems can become a bit overwhelming. There is a point beyond which they become detrimental. It is fine to be anxious, sad, nervous, or fearful, but too much of these negative emotions for too long can make for a pretty miserable life. That’s not what anyone wants. It feels better to feel positive. To take a positive perspective is a choice, but circumstances can make that choice a bit easier or more difficult. If you have are stuck in a negative loop of thinking or feeling overly anxious, depressed, or fearful, it can be hard to effectively flip your perspective to be more positive. But I have discovered a trick.

You may or may not be familiar with the power law or the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. It states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes, but often these numbers are even more extreme. For example, there are more than 2 million cryptocurrencies but just 2 of them (Bitcoin and Ethereum) comprise two-thirds of the total value of all of them. The remaining 1,999,998 combined are only half as large. This sort of phenomenon, to varying degrees, is true in a lot of areas in life. It’s useful to keep an eye out for it.

I’ve noticed it applied to the things I think about as well, and that the same is true for most people. Let me offer an example. Let’s say you are feeling super down about things and have been feeling that way all week. You’re depressed, you’re anxious, and you feel stuck in this negative loop of seemingly endless fears and bad feeling and negative thoughts. It feels like the list of thing you’re worried about is never-ending. Everyone has problems, but you have more. At least, that’s how you are feeling right now. The most important thing to do in this situation is to try to identify the one, two, or three things that are most bothering you. In my experience, and in discussing with others, I find that those 1-3 things typically account for at least two-thirds and sometimes up to 90%+ of what’s the matter. It feels like it’s an endless list of things because you are stuck in a negative loop going from the first problem to the second problem to the third problem and back to the first problem in an infinite loop, and every problem feels new and different when it resurfaces, sometimes in a slightly different form than its prior surfacings. There may also be smaller problems that insert themselves in the loop and distract from the fact that there are only 1-3 problems which together represent the (vast) majority of your problems. 

Usually, once you recognize that you do not have a million problems and you only have 1-3 that are really bothering you, that alone should make you feel better. You can then seek to address those problems head on. If you’re three biggest problems are that you’re lonely, you hate where you live, and you are not feeling fulfilled in your job, in that order, you can call your landlord to see if you can terminate your lease so that you can move to a new town or city (let’s assume you work remotely and this is totally doable with work). You can be living somewhere new as early as next month, and you’ll feel better well before that because you’re actively addressing one of your biggest problems. To solve your loneliness problem, maybe you commit to calling one friend or family member every 2-3 days, or force yourself to go out of your comfort zone and join some club or attend some activity, or maybe you decide to get a dog. This is all hypothetical and the solutions will be highly personal depending on an individual’s situation, but you get the gist. If this person can improve their loneliness and place of living problems within a month, and further thereafter, their third-priority problem of not feeling fulfilled in their job probably won’t be enough to make them as miserable as they were when they felt like they had an endless list of problems. Now they are left with just one big one, and they can repeat the process of addressing this top priority issue head on, to clear way for lower priority problems or new problems to fill in their stead.

A normal amount of problems is normal and should not prevent a person from feeling positive and happy and good about life. It’s the temporary times of overwhelmingly negative feelings that can feel hard to escape. When you’re in one of those temporary times, remember the power law. Identify the top 1-3 problems. Address those problems head on. That’s how you can escape a negative loop. At least, that’s how I do, and I’ve talked to others who have had success with this too.