3522 Why Capitalism Works | Vox Day and Stefan Molyneux
In a world of propagandized education which leaves many unprepared to provide value in the job market - how can young adults break through and achieve success in their lives? Vox Day joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the entrepreneurial mindset, how to accumulate human capital, the basics of providing value in the free market, business pitfalls to avoid and much much more!Vox Day is a multiple-time Hugo Award nominee who writes epic fantasy as well as non-fiction including “SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police” and “Cuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America.”Vox is also a professional game designer and maintains a pair of popular blogs, Vox Popoli and Alpha Game, which averages 3 million pageviews per month.He is the lead designer of next-generation Wikipedia replacement Infogalactic and also runs Castalia House publishing - which just released Mike Cernovich’s new book “MAGA Mindset.”Vox Day's Books: http://www.fdrurl.com/vox-dayVox Day's Blog: http://voxday.blogspot.comCastalia House: http://www.castaliahouse.comInfogalactic: https://infogalactic.comSJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Policehttp://www.fdrurl.com/SJW-Always-LieCuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed Americahttp://www.fdrurl.com/cuckservativeFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
You're going to be doing a lot better after this conversation we're going to have with a good friend, Vox Day, because it is going to tell you how to grab your financial life by the horns and ride off into the dawning sunrise of Financial Plenty.
He is a multiple-time Hugo Award nominee.
Who writes epic fantasy as well as nonfiction, including books I highly recommend, Social Justice Warriors Always Lie, Taking Down the Thought Police, and Cuckservatives, How Conservatives Betrayed America.
We'll put the links to those below.
He is also a professional game designer and maintains a pair of popular blogs, Vox Populi, and Alpha Game, which average 3 million page views per month.
Vox is also a professional game designer and maintains a pair of popular blogs, Vox Populi and Alpha Game, which average 3 million page views per month.
And not just because he puts a brick on his F5 key, those are genuine, real, live flesh people.
He is the lead designer of next-generation Wikipedia replacement InfoGalactic and also runs Castalia House Publishing, which recently released Mike Cernovich's new book, Maga Mindset.
Vox, how are you doing, my friend?
Good to be here always.
So way back in the day when I was a teenager, I had, oh, jobs aplenty.
And I just sort of went through the motions, did stuff.
And I remember I had a job in a hardware store.
And I was just sort of puttering around cleaning things and dusting things and so on.
And the owner came up kind of all red-faced, you know, as owners tend to be when they see somebody not doing something that's economically productive.
And he said, what are you doing?
I said, well, I'm tidying, I'm cleaning, you know, filling up time.
And he says, can you please find something that's going to make me some money?
And that kind of always – and so, you know, basically I went down and started fixing people's screen doors and stuff, which was going to make him some money.
And that was a very sort of important moment for me.
I think I was, I don't know, maybe 13 or 14 years old.
And this idea that you must provide some value economically to people in the world.
Because everyone says, well, I want to make more money.
And of course, the way that you make more money is you help other people make more money or have more fun or have some kind of improvement in their life.
We don't get much of this in education.
And you and I have the experience, I guess, multi-decade experience of being entrepreneurs in a variety of fields.
I, of course, was in the artistic field.
I was in the software entrepreneur field for many years and now doing this philosophy show.
And you, of course, as we talked about in the intro, have done quite a bit.
In fact, I can't believe there's only one of you.
But I wonder if you could talk to people a little bit about the principles...
Thank you.
You have to get people interested in what you want to do in order to have any kind of impact.
There's almost nothing you can do completely alone.
I mean, even Mike and I work at Freedom Aid Radio, but I've got to get people interested in what we're producing in order to have any kind of impact on the world and get donations and so on.
So how do you approach this challenge and how do you analyze value add, both in what you provide and what you receive?
My background is in economics.
And so I come at it from a supply and demand point of view.
You know, there are a few things that people want, there's a few things everyone wants, and then there's literally tens of thousands, possibly millions of Smaller niche markets where only a few people want things.
Now some of those niche markets can still be tremendously lucrative because it's only rich people who want those things.
An example of a niche market is a very expensive wine, a very expensive car line like a Ferrari or something like that.
Those are businesses where companies only make hundreds of a unit and yet they sell them for so much money That an entire business is able to make a living that way.
At the other end is where you supply goods to the lowest common denominator.
That might be budget brand Doritos.
Or like Halloween candy.
Everyone's got to get that, right?
Yeah.
The sort of things that everyone needs.
There, it's a very different game because it's not a game that's about quality.
It's a game that's about quantity.
Yeah, there's a whole range of gradations between the low end and the high end.
And what you have to do is you have to figure out where you fit.
And then you've got all the other complications on top of it, such as what can you do?
What sort of services and goods can you provide?
Can you actually produce them?
In an efficient way that allows you to make money.
I'm going through this right now with one of my kids who likes to bake.
And there is a legitimate opportunity to bake some goods that people are willing to pay for.
But, like I explained, it's not that simple.
First, we have to sit down and map out what everything's going to cost and then find out if If people are willing to pay for more on top of that.
And so this is stuff that I cover in that course that I occasionally teach called Dev Game.
I'm not teaching it right now, but I've done several rounds of this both live and online Dev Game course.
And we actually spend a whole three-hour session on talking about how you figure out whether you can afford the business that you are planning to do.
And the general rule is You want to be able to make a 50% profit margin.
And we don't need to go into it.
Anyone can Google how to calculate it.
It's a very simple calculation.
But the point is that you can't just go out there and say, okay, people want pink wool bunny rabbit toys because even if you can produce them, even if you can create them and you can produce them for $10, if people are only willing to spend $5 on them, Or if they can only afford two bucks, you're not going to sell it.
It's not a viable business.
And so there's more to it than just supply and demand.
You also have to figure out, is it profitable?
And is there enough profit combined with the size of the market that's available?
Because then you've got to start thinking about competitors and that sort of thing.
And so there's this huge range of I've got my first job,
my first real job, working for my father.
They were making cereal ports.
And it cost them a dollar to get these things assembled.
And so one day he said, hey, I think I was 12 years old.
And he said, look, I'd be willing to pay you 50 cents per piece if you would screw these together.
And so he would take me into their office on Saturdays and I would spend all Saturdays Screwing these things together.
And it was really good money.
But the thing is that there was more than I could possibly do.
And so I went to my best friend and said, hey, if you'll screw these things together, I'll pay you 25 cents.
The funniest thing is, he told me, I don't think he realized until two years ago that And just for those of you who are counting, both of these involve 50% profit or double profit.
But anyhow, he didn't hold it against me.
He was actually my business partner, my first computer game company.
But we thought it was the greatest thing ever because we were making more money than we could do at anything, whether it's babysitting, lawn mowing, or anything.
We were making a lot more money that way.
It was a real win for my dad because he cut his assembly costs in half.
Everything is about the opportunity.
I was talking to a friend of mine a couple years ago.
He was the head of a Swiss private bank.
He figured out this deal with a life insurance company and set up all of their investors.
The, what do you call it, the bonus or whatever, the finder's fee that they got for bringing over their investors brought in something ridiculous like $20 million, $25 million in profit that year.
And he got a nice chunk of that and then they got rid of him.
They fired him.
But he wasn't bitter about it at all, which he was a little bit bitter about at first, but later he wasn't bitter at all.
A couple years later, we were talking about it.
I said, you know, why weren't you upset about getting pushed out of that, you know, because you're in that great situation?
And he laughed and he said, look, I was never going to be able to replicate that.
He said, I'm good, but that was a unique situation.
It was a unique point in time.
We were in a unique position to take advantage of that in a way that nobody else could.
And so, you know, Opportunity is only there once, and it's only there for a brief period of time.
And if you act on it, then maybe you'll be successful.
But even if you're successful, don't think that it was you.
You're part of it.
It doesn't matter how good you are.
I mean, this show that you're doing, you have huge success, right?
But if you had tried to do this show 10 years ago, 20 years ago, Before things like Skype existed, before the internet allowed for fast video and that sort of thing, it wouldn't matter how hard you worked.
It wouldn't matter how talented you are, because the time was not right.
And so the timing is also a very important element of whatever it is you're doing, because you can't just look at something like Twitter.
Twitter's a simple thing.
It's a dumb thing.
It's very easy to technologically replicate, right?
But people have been trying to replicate Twitter for years, right?
Now, why is Gab and Andrew Torba suddenly finding success?
I mean, they have...
I heard today.
I couldn't believe it.
You know, Gab is a Twitter alternative.
They're allies with InfoGalactic.
We're sort of referring it to as the alt-tech platform.
You know, social media alternatives.
And the thing that is amazing is in the last, like, week, Gab has gone from a waiting list of 80,000 people to a million people.
And now, why are they in such demand?
I mean, I'm on Twitter.
I've got 27,000 followers.
You and I are both on Gab.
I've already got 11,600 followers on Gab.
I mean, within six months, I may not even bother logging onto Twitter because I've got more followers on Gab.
But how come Gab is working and Free Speech and all the other Twitter wannabes?
How come they all are not bringing in that kind of attention?
And the answer is very simple.
Twitter created the opportunity.
Twitter created it by kicking off People like Ricky Vaughn.
I was suspended for a month, so I went on to Gab and a whole bunch of my followers came along.
Milo, of course.
Milo is probably the main reason.
Again, there was a brief opportunity, and Andrew and his partner, E, happened to be in the right place with the right stuff at the right time.
It's not that they're not hard-working and talented.
I mean, Andrew's very sharp.
He's going to be very successful.
And those guys work their butts off.
But that's only part of the equation.
The other equation is they came along at the right time when Twitter was screwing over its users.
And so they just said, hey, we've got an alternative.
It's actually better and more feature-rich in a number of ways.
And suddenly they've got a million people banging on the door trying to get in.
And even if you were to wait for Twitter to start screwing over its users, you'd have to have the whole Trump phenomenon, the Brexit phenomenon, to the point where people can see what's happening.
They see that it's not about protecting free speech.
It's about all this social justice warrior virtue signaling.
And so there was a part of a larger momentum at the same time as there were unforced errors on the part of Twitter.
And of course, you can't predict or control any of that.
Right.
I mean, you know, you and I are benefiting from that, you know.
I always appreciate when you like to ask how my traffic is doing.
We're going to finish this close to hitting 4 million for November.
Back in January, I was hoping to get to 2 million.
I would not have imagined.
People say, oh, it's the election.
Well, I've had the blog for 13 years.
I've been through a few election cycles.
This is not normal.
Oh, it's the new normal.
Yeah, it would be nice.
And so the situation is different, and so it's going to benefit some people.
It's going to harm other people.
I did a post comparing the Google Trends to some of the other SFWA conventional science fiction authors, and it's kind of funny because their interest over time It's just sinking.
Because they're not in tune with the zeitgeist.
They're actually against that.
Whereas you and I were probably back in 2008, we were definitely going against the stream.
Now we've got the benefit of the stream flowing with us, and it's up to us to figure out how to capitalize on that in a way so that we'll be in a stronger position by the time the tide stops, the pendulum starts swinging back.
Like you said, that's not something you can control.
It's just something that you have to be prepared for.
There's something else I think that's important as well, which is I think a lot of Opportunity arises when you have spent years stuffing yourself to the gills with as much human market value as possible.
So, you know, I've been working for decades.
I studied economics and philosophy.
I was at theatre school.
I did half an English degree.
I finished in a history degree, and I have, of course, business experience now.
I just have a lot of value that I've accumulated.
This is not even to just count the stuff that I've read for fun and pleasure.
Now, of course, I've had hundreds upon hundreds of interviews with very smart and intelligent and erudite people.
So there's a huge amount of just stuff yourself to the gills with information, with theories, and practice things.
You know, I was practicing doing speeches about philosophy long before I did this show.
I mean, I didn't sort of come out of the garage and stretch and say, hey, let's take it for a spin.
And I was debating, of course, in my teenage years and all that.
So I think people don't really understand that, okay, you can play a bunch of video games, and they're fun, and I like them as well, but learning Candy Crush is not going to do much to add to your market value, and there's a lot that you can do that can be a lot of fun, which can help We're good to
put a hat on and a shoulders that they can put a jacket on and they're just in the crowd scene.
So you're not going to get paid much for that.
But if you bring something sort of more personal, more of your own, then you're either going to do very well or going to do very badly.
Aiming for the middle and being just like everyone else, you might get a kind of stable income, although that's becoming less certain these days as the middle class decays.
Just read and absorb and talk and challenge yourself and learn how to think and learn how to communicate and learn basics, you know, negotiation skills and self-confidence.
Like, I remember reading a book on negotiation skills when I was in my mid-teens, and it sort of served me very well.
Since then, just keep reading, just keep learning, and develop something unique about yourself.
That won't make you money, but when the opportunities arise, you'll get where you want to go a lot faster, I think.
Well, that's definitely true.
And, you know, I'm kind of relieved to hear you talk about the fact that you practice that way, because...
I think that whenever we have these conversations, I feel kind of like when I'm talking to Milo, it makes me realize that while you guys were practicing elocution and really learning how to present yourselves, I was really polishing up my first time.
I'd just like to point out that, yes, Stefan is much more glib and much more smooth than I am, but I can probably kick his ass when it comes to any first-person shooter.
I'm quite sure that that is the case.
Playing anyone under 40, I just have that disadvantage these days.
Plus, you know, I'm good until I meet someone who's really good and then I'm humbled.
But anyhow, the thing is that the more knowledge you have, the more you're going to be able to recognize opportunity.
You know, I was involved in a very close call.
Back when I was 22.
A lot of people don't realize it, but two of the people that were responsible for bringing 3D graphics, 3D graphic hardware, into the computer game market were Chris Taylor and I. Chris Taylor is the famous designer of a series called Total War.
What am I saying?
Total War, not Total War.
Total Annihilation.
And he also did the Dungeon Siege series.
But he was back working at EA Canada back then.
And I was working at a company that did high-resolution graphics stuff.
And we were talking and he was saying, couldn't we use this stuff to put the games on?
And I said, yeah, we can do 3D and whatever.
And, you know, we did a whole chip and everything, and I won't bore you with the details, but, you know, we were 18 months ahead of NVIDIA. And if it weren't for a chip designer getting a brain tumor and them kind of not losing focus and turning it more into a CAD chip, you know, my dad's company would have been NVIDIA. And I always thought that that was the big missed opportunity.
You know, we saw it, we pursued it, But we didn't really pursue it with enough focus.
And so we ended up losing out to Jensen Huang and NVIDIA. But what I realized only a few years ago was that that was not the biggest opportunity that I missed.
That was not the big billion-dollar company.
Because it suddenly occurred to me that when I was 13, 14 years old, I was spending all my time playing computer games on the Apple.
And then I would go to my dad's company and mess around making high-resolution pictures with these 1024x768, 256-color graphics cards, which were totally unheard of back then.
EGA all the way, baby!
Right, exactly.
The thing is, back then, there were three standards, or four standards, CGA, EGA, VGA, and then artist.
And we were artists.
We were the high resolution.
And at no point did I ever make the connection that, hey, I could take these computer games that I love to play and put them on these high resolution graphics.
I mean, it's a simple thought.
Now, I don't blame my dad and all the engineers who are busy doing this high-end CAD stuff, working with NASA and whoever else, for not thinking about that.
But I never...
The switch never flipped.
I was the only one who was messing with both things at the time.
We could have owned the early computer game market and had the base hardware platform for all computer games if I had simply seen that connection.
So that was the big mess.
But not all opportunities are that big.
What the experiences that you're talking about, what the preparation that you're talking about, what the reading and the learning from people and maybe helping people who can mentor you and all that sort of thing, what that teaches you is how to recognize opportunities.
And it also teaches you how to evaluate the opportunities so that you can go, okay, yeah, that's a nice idea, but It's limited.
Whereas you look at another opportunity and you see, hey, this could really work.
I'll give you an example with Castelli House right now.
In fact, tonight we just published one e-book just before we hooked up.
I just got the proofs for two print books that we're going to be publishing tomorrow.
But more importantly, We just got an agreement with a hugely successful author who wants to publish with us.
Think about it.
Why would somebody who sells millions of books want to publish with a small internet publisher that's only been around for two years?
Well, the reason is pretty simple.
Again, it's a unique opportunity.
A lot of these big authors are e-book publishers.
They sell millions and millions of e-books.
People have probably heard of Amanda Hawking.
She was one of them.
Q Howey was another.
Well, the thing is, they can't work with the mainstream publishers.
They can't work with the big guys because the big guys want their e-book sales.
Now, they can't really self-publish their own stuff very well because the only way they can publish their own stuff is either going with CreateSpace or Which is largely, you know, basically it's just paperbacks, they're crappy quality, and they're limited to Amazon.
Or there's a new Barnes& Noble program that I think they might do hardcovers too, but again, you're just in the Barnes& Noble system.
But we're a proper full-scale publisher.
We've got, you know, full global distribution and all that sort of thing.
Plus, we're small.
We're not greedy.
So while with most authors, we publish, you know, we publish normal, we publish the e-book, we publish the audio book, we do all that.
Well, these guys, they don't need that.
They're never going to give up their selling their millions of e-books, right?
But they're also missing out on a smaller print market.
Now, it wouldn't make sense for someone like me, because I sell maybe 15,000 copies of something, right?
So it wouldn't make sense for me to, if I was the author, to go and Do some sort of deal where they just do the print books because the print books is just a fraction of the total 15,000, right?
But if you're talking about somebody who sells millions of books or hundreds of thousands of books, suddenly you're kind of going, hmm, we could actually offer them a deal where they get to keep all their e-books and we'll just do the print.
We'll get them in all the bookstores.
We'll get them everywhere from India to Germany and that sort of thing.
And suddenly, that's a win-win.
Again, it's something that's a window.
It's a brief moment in time.
Eventually, Amazon's going to have a better service, or the mainstream publishers are going to realize that they can't be greedy and take all the money away from the big authors with their e-books.
Who knows?
It's going to change.
We know it's going to change.
But at the moment, We happen to be in a unique position where we can provide these very successful authors with the kind of service, the ideal situation, what they want, that will give them the maximum amount of money.
But you have to be in a position where you can take advantage of that.
And even though you're in a position to take advantage of it, you have to see it.
When we started Castalia, we weren't planning to do print at all.
At that time, print sales were such a small percentage of the total sales compared to e-book, we didn't even bother.
I think we did one John C. Wright book in hardcover just basically because it's a great book and it was really more of a, you know, I wanted to have a copy.
But now we're in this bizarre position of our print sales, even though only one-third of our books are in print, our print sales are bigger than our e-book sales.
And our e-book sales are growing.
Bigger defined how?
In revenue.
Right, right, okay.
So I think in terms of unit sales, the e-books might be just a little bit ahead.
But in terms of revenue, the print sales have overtaken it because our e-book sales are almost all through Amazon.
Our print sales are, some of them are through Amazon, but a lot of them are through little bookstores and All the different chains.
They're in Australia.
They're in Germany.
I think I even saw a sale this month in India, which kind of surprised me.
You have to combine both the delivering value and doing it in a profitable manner and also doing it at the right time, making sure that what you're doing is timely.
And, you know, if you happen to hit on all those things, you know, then you can sometimes succeed very quickly.
Other times, you know, you slave away for 10 years, you feel like you're not getting anywhere.
And then all of a sudden, boom, your traffic doubles or your sales triple or whatever.
And then people are all saying that you're an overnight success because they've never heard of you.
And you've been doing it for 15 years.
Katy Perry was writing songs when she was 12.
I mean, it doesn't just happen.
I don't know.
Huey Lewis did like 10 years of playing big bars and stuff like that until they hit it big.
And I think the opportunities that arise, arise for me at least, out of sort of two main inevitable human tendencies.
And number one is...
It's comfort or contentment or just habit.
And number two is greed, right?
So in terms of what I do, well, the mainstream media got comfortable basically just serving the Democrat Party and serving the leftists and just attacking and getting lazy.
They kind of gave up on investigative journalism because it's expensive and there's legal ramifications.
And so basically they're like, oh, the government would hand you a piece of paper and you'd say, okay, well, that's what the government said.
So I guess I'll rework it and throw it out there and And then if anybody, you know, I find disagrees with, I'm not going to actually go and figure out their arguments and rebut them in intelligent ways.
I'm just going to smear them and dig up dirt on them.
So they got that business model.
And, you know, that business model worked for quite a long time.
So they got kind of comfortable.
They got set in their ways.
And then everybody who's part of that mindset, they float up to the top and they dictate the organization.
They hire in their own image.
And this is all perfectly natural.
It's perfectly inevitable.
And then they get greedy.
It's like the CDs, right?
CDs were cheaper to produce than LPs, but they charged more, and people got so annoyed that eventually Napster got people's attention and they didn't feel any sense of loyalty.
They felt it to the bands, but not to the record labels who have savagely taken down at least one of them in Freddie Mercury's Death on Two Legs song, but...
So you get this business model that works for you, you get complacent, you lose your edge, and you get greedy, so you start overcharging and you feel like the resource is never going to run out.
And then what happens, of course, is the internet comes along and more energetic, more skeptical people come along and they just start taking your audience.
And people don't take it very seriously at the beginning.
They say, oh, well, you know, those people want that.
And then what happens is they start taking more and more of your audience and then, oh, look, ad block comes in.
And now you can't even make much money off your online ads.
And then what happens is you begin to change, but you change too late to retain the credibility of anybody who's kind of on the fence because you're clearly only changing as a result of market competition, not out of any renewed sense of integrity or anything like that.
So I think always be on the lookout.
You can build something and you look at this giant monolith called the mainstream media.
Like, I have more subscribers than Fox, right?
And it just seems like, well, how could you possibly have anything that can make a dent on that?
But if you're just patient and keep doing excellent work, just rely on the fact that, you know, the dinosaurs' age and the mammals' age comes due.
And when you're ready for that and you have the experience, you can really seize a moment that you create through persistence and through just the erosion of intelligent things being done by your competitors.
Well, what you're talking about is disruption.
And, you know, it's a concept that, you know, I've been reading books related to it for the last, I don't know, 20, 25 years or so.
And the thing that's ironic is in most big companies that are being disrupted, they know it's happening.
They can see it.
They can often see it coming.
But the internal political pressures of the company are such that That it is absolutely impossible for them to do anything about it.
I've talked to, and it's not just the political processes, it's also sometimes the structural and even legal impediments.
Like, for example, we have plans, we actually have a system that's working now, and we've got it working in two games, that allows us to sell our e-books inside the games.
So you can, you know, the same way that instead of buying virtual goods, we've created real digital goods And so, you know, this could be music, this could be anything digital, but at the moment it's e-books.
In fact, Castalia House was only started as a way of delivering these books inside the games.
You know, I'm a game designer more than I'm a publisher.
And so we designed the system, we got it working, and I talked to a friend of mine who is a vice publisher at one of the big five.
Somebody I've known, you know, basically since I first published my first novel.
And, you know, he said, oh, this is fantastic.
I love this.
This is great.
I said, well, you know, we'd love to work with you.
You know, could you give us your books?
Give us your e-books and we'll sell them and we can work out the deal or whatever.
And he said, yeah, let me get back to you.
This would be great.
And he called me up and he was all bummed.
I said, well, you know, what's the matter?
He said, we can't do it.
I said, well, you know, you're the top dog.
Who can tell you you can't do it?
He said, no, you don't understand.
Our contracts with our distributors legally block us from doing this sort of thing because the lawyers determined that the way that we're handling it would be legally looked upon as a coupon somehow.
I'm not going to pretend to understand that, but basically...
Their distributors would be able to prevent them from doing that because of legacy stuff that literally dates back to the 1940s.
That's how long they've been around.
In any big organization that's been around for a while, there's just this whole level of cruft, of rust and corrosion and old legacy rules that prevent them from doing what they want to do.
All the games suddenly start selling books through them.
And I believe very firmly that we're just the first one to do it.
I think that you're going to see all kinds of this stuff soon, if you're not seeing it already.
But you will not see the big publishers on those distribution systems any more than you see them on Kindle Unlimited.
If you notice, if you go to Kindle Unlimited, there's not a single book from any of the big five on there.
Because the nature of their contracts and stuff are such that they cannot sign those deals with Amazon.
We probably sell maybe somewhere between 7% and 9% of our books through Kindle Unlimited.
It's very big.
Frankly, I'm a little bit They should compensate it more.
But it's worth it, especially because we tend to publish longer books, and so it's kind of a wash for us whether we sell a regular e-book or a Kim one limited.
But publishing is not only a zero-sum game, it's a negative-sum game.
The overall market is shrinking.
And so every dollar you take away from the big publishers, they're losing like $1.05.
And so something like Kindle Unlimited that comes along where people can basically do the equivalent of a buffet all you can eat in a month, download whatever you want for free, and we'll just charge you a little, we'll compensate for how much you read and whatnot.
All of that is territory that's been permanently carved off from the mainstream publishers, from the major publishers.
And so they'll never recover from it.
They will never, ever get those markets back.
Because they can't.
And so they have been successfully disrupted by Amazon, by the self-publishers, and by the independent publishers.
And you're disrupting the mainstream media because you're doing it in a different way.
Obviously, the mainstream media could do what you're doing.
They've got...
Well, to be fair, this set, I mean, seriously, I got to patent this.
I mean, unless you actually want to live inside a ping pong ball, there's just no way you're going to recreate this set.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, it is true.
You have to marvel at the way that you have demonstrated to all and sundry that all the fancy, splashy graphics are just totally unnecessary.
You know, with a face that's basically half a cartoon, I really don't need a set.
I'm waiting to get that rabbit eyeball thing just going straight out through the lens.
But that's the thing, is that it wouldn't occur to them to stick a camera in somebody's face and just let them talk for two hours You know, they would think, no, no, we need to do jump cuts and we need to have CGI and we need to have a theme song and all this sort of thing.
But that's not why people watch the news.
I find it annoying, you know, where they have like the scrolling, and then they have someone talking saying something important, and then they have to switch to a video and so on.
Like my audience is, one of our biggest segments is sort of 25 to 34.
And of course, in a network, they'd say, oh, those people are going to short attention spans, you got to give them lots of fancy schmancy stuff.
And it's like, no, if the if the information is quality enough, the presentation is engaging enough.
Yes, you know, people say we should change the set.
It's like, no, because I like the challenge of having to keep people's attention with no visuals.
Whatsoever.
I mean, what a challenge that is.
A bare stage, me and some information.
And if I can keep people's attention that way, great.
If I start messing around with other stuff, I know exactly what will happen is I'll get lazy.
Oh, well, you know, it's going to be all some flashy stuff.
So, yeah, they could, but it would be very tough.
They'd have all the wrong ideas, and they'd think that if you make a more complicated set, you're doing something other than degrading the presentation skills of the presenter.
Right.
And every market is different.
I mean, what works for you and what works for PewDiePie or whatever his name is, is very, very different.
And I experimented a little bit with doing some video podcasting thing, and I just realized it's not for me.
I don't have your...
I neither have your...
You have a sense of decorum and reserve and self-respect that probably doesn't allow you to engage in the rubber-faced antics that I use, but go on.
That and I can't construct a simple sentence that flows to save my life unless I'm writing it.
But, you know, it's one of those things where you just have to realize what it is you do and what it is your audience wants, and you're delivering things.
What the Fox News and the CNN and all of those people can't.
The disruption thing is really interesting.
Andrew from Gab and I were talking, he came on Brainstorm.
It's kind of funny.
I invited him to come on for the introduction of InfoGalactic.
I was just thinking, come on in.
We'll talk a little bit about it.
We'll talk about Gab.
We'll pitch it to our guys and whatever.
I thought he would go.
Then we'd talk about What we were there for.
We stayed for the whole two hours.
That's always good.
One of the things that we said is we're going to Fox News the fuckers.
The whole idea of alt tech is fundamentally disruption.
Now, his disruption is different than yours in that his disruption is wholly based on Twitter's need to control people.
And so he's using that as the angle in to do it.
With Wikipedia, we're disrupting them the same way, but we're also disrupting them through superior technology.
Because Wikipedia is, you know, 1995 technology held together with chewing gum and rubber bands.
And so we're replacing the entire MediaWiki engine And, you know, it's going to have significance that will go way beyond Wikipedia because of all the wiki companies like State Farm Insurance and stuff that have these huge, you know, 10 million page internal corporate wikis.
You know, we'll be able to offer them something that will be a lot better.
You know, but disruption is the key when you're dealing with existing markets.
You know, you have to look at what are they doing?
What can I do better?
Why would someone want to watch Stefan instead of Fox or CNN? Because you provide superior intellectual content.
That's why.
I would be willing to bet that if we IQ tested everybody who is listening to this particular podcast or videocast or whatever you call it, there's no chance That the average IQ would be lower than the audiences for CNBC or for Fox or CNN. Because the people here are here for the abstract stuff.
They're here for the information.
They're not just looking to be, you know, filled in on the current events that we've decided are okay for you to know.
Well, and I never anticipate that I'm speaking to anybody less intelligent than I am when I'm talking to the audience.
I never pander down.
I never dumb it down.
You know, occasionally I'll go through the basics, of course, like we all need.
That's not a matter of intelligence, just of experience.
But a lack of pandering, I think, is really important.
But a lack of pandering, I think, is really important.
I've always struggled to resist the problem of being captured by your audience.
I've always struggled to resist the problem of being captured by your audience.
You know, like you tell people what they want to hear, they love you until you don't.
You know, like you tell people what they want to hear, they love you until you don't, and then they don't love you.
And then they don't love you.
And so staying true to what it is that it's important to you, what it is that – and I sort of – for me, it's sort of ethical stuff, integrity, moral stuff.
It's not necessarily that case with other things.
It could be an artistic vision for a video game.
It could be an artistic vision for a book.
It could be any number of things.
But staying true to your particular vision is really important because then you will only attract the audience or the customers who love your process, not your conclusions, right?
Who love the form of what you're doing, not the content.
And that way you're free.
Like I was like, political action bad.
And then I was like, political action good.
And I didn't lie about it and say, well, I never said that before.
And I didn't pretend I hadn't.
I was like, here's why I'm changing my approach.
And here's why.
Here's the new information and so on.
Most people came along and they gave me the benefit of the doubt, listened to the arguments and so on.
You can't love anyone that you are beholden to, that you're really dependent on and whose approval you are emotionally or financially dependent on because you need the freedom to be yourself in order to love and be loved.
I really want to love my audience, and I do love my audience.
The way that I do that is to always treat them as intelligent as I am and to make sure that I never, ever pander because that would give them too much control over me for me to maintain integrity or to just love the audience as a whole.
I think that's one of the things that comes across.
That's an entrepreneurial thing.
I think that some of the great entrepreneurs have it.
You know that they're passionate.
About their fan base, the fanboys that are called in Apple or whatever.
The leaders were very keen on bringing the best out of a sense of love, I think.
And that's something that's kind of goopy, but I think it's really, really important in maintaining a healthy relationship with your audience.
Well, there's two factors.
I can't say that I... Treat my audience as intelligent as I am because that's just not statistically possible.
Well, you're better at math than I am, I think, with the econ training.
But the thing I don't do is I don't dumb it down.
In fact, there was some complaints about this recently, and it was kind of funny because not only do I not dumb it down, but I don't suffer what I consider to be If you're tall, you're tall.
You're not bragging if you're tall.
You're just tall.
Exactly.
It was kind of funny because somebody had said, I really think that you would reach so many more people if you would just be nicer when people ask you questions.
I said, well, I try to be nice when people are asking questions, but if you're asking a stupid question, I don't even know how to answer it.
Because, you know, if your whole question is predicated on the fact that you're confusing two terms that have completely different meanings, I can't correct you without making it obvious that you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Supremacy in existence.
Why are you even talking to me?
You know, I mean, just read it.
And so what was kind of funny was that this, of course, spurred a big discussion.
And we now have three different English translations of the 16 points of the alt-right.
Because we have, you know, what I originally put, and then we've got all these different foreign language translations.
But then...
Somebody decided we should do a dumbed-down version that he thought would be more appropriate for everybody.
And so he came up with the alt-right, what it is.
What it is, yo.
Exactly.
And it's hilarious.
Sorry, I just had to throw that in.
It basically says exactly the same thing.
It just puts it in very simplistic terms.
And then somebody came back and said, well, I really think that that's just, like, shooting a little too low.
And so he came out with...
So basically we have the SD0 version, we have the SD1 version, and then we've got the original version.
And so, you know, obviously referring to standard deviations.
And what's funny about it is that you can literally see why it would be...
It might be tough for somebody to understand the more complicated versions, even though it's something that anyone who can read is capable of understanding.
It's not like the concepts are difficult.
But when you do phrase things in a different way, some people just have a difficult time following it.
And so it's good to do this.
That being said, I'm never going to do that myself.
There is a fundamental...
I'm interested in moving forward.
I'm interested in figuring out new things.
If I'm spending all my time explaining stuff to people, then I'm not doing what I love to do and I'm not doing what I'm really wired to do.
In fact, the people who are the most popular, especially when it comes to things like science and technology, are the popularizers.
Richard Dawkins was not and has never been anywhere near the forefront of Of biological science.
But he's the famous scientist that you think of when you think of biology and evolution, because he's the one who's the popularizer.
And so there's a, you know, to me, there's a great opportunity for people to, you know, to translate things.
You mentioned Mike Cernovich's new book, Maga Mindset.
And, you know, he and I were talking, and, you know, he outsells me easy.
I mean, he sells probably...
Three times more books than I do.
And we were talking about that, and I said, Mike, I don't understand why your books sell so much more than mine do.
And he just laughed at me and said, Hey, look, it's all where you hit the sweet spot.
There's more of my readers than there are your readers.
And Mike's a really smart guy.
He just has the gift of communicating with a very broad spectrum of people.
I think sometimes people underestimate him.
In fact, they underestimate Donald Trump the same way.
Donald Trump is a very smart guy.
guy.
He went to Wharton School of Business.
He's a genius.
I say this repeatedly, and people are like, "No, he's not." It's like, "Look it up.
Look at his scores to get into business school.
He's in the genius category." You tell me somebody who wanders into a field where other people have spent decades, 17 other people, and he wins.
And then he wins the Electoral College.
This is his first time out as a politician, and he won the biggest prize in the political world.
Don't tell me he's not a genius.
I mean, he could have done anything.
I don't get to wander off the street onto the Olympics and get a gold.
You know, I mean, the guy is a genius.
Agree or disagree, you've got to give him props for that.
And the genius is, he appears as a buffoon to his enemies.
That's the true genius of Donald Trump.
Because if you appear like a buffoon to your enemies, guess what?
They're going to underestimate you, and then you win.
But it's not only that.
It's that he has the ability...
A very unusual ability to communicate with people who are much less intelligent than he is.
They say that there's a...
They call it the communications gap.
And the idea is that it's very difficult for people who are separated by more than two standard deviations, which is about 30 IQ points.
It's very difficult for them to meaningfully communicate beyond the simple basic stuff.
Donald Trump clearly has that ability.
Now, I don't know if it is a refined ability or a natural ability.
It's probably a combination of the two.
But, you know, to me, it's really remarkable when I see his tweets.
And, you know, he's got that style that we all imitate now, you know.
So-and-so did this that was bad.
Sad, you know, or whatever.
I mean, yeah, you can understand why the chattering classes, you know, who tend to be They tend to have at least high verbal IQs.
They can't believe they're losing to this guy because the guy communicates in a way that they have learned to have contempt for.
And they don't realize that it's the information content that matters, not the package, not the way you phrase it.
They're mistaking the medium for the message, but Trump has this ability to deliver fairly It's sophisticated ideas in very, very simple terms that anyone can understand.
But that is the egolessness, I think, of the entrepreneur that a lot of people don't understand.
Maybe they've had bad bosses when they were younger and they think that people become entrepreneurs because they want to be your own boss.
Turns out I'm kind of an asshole to work for because, you know, I drive myself too hard sometimes.
And so there is an egolessness.
Donald Trump, of course, you know, very intelligent guy, very well-educated, very experienced.
I mean, he could use all the $20 words he wants and not even bat an eye.
And then some people would say, wow, he's really smart.
I'm really intimidated, I guess.
But that's not what he wants to do.
The supreme confidence is to hide your own abilities, right?
It's the old thing that the better you are at kung fu, the more you walk away from fights, right?
And so when I see somebody who's really smart, who has the capacity to communicate in the common parlance, Well, good lord alive, that was Shakespeare's gig.
I mean, Shakespeare, the first 20 rows were like guys who just came off whitewashing a Tudor cottage or something, right?
So, I mean, his appeal to the low and the high was one of the foundations of his success.
I mean, common people loved going to a Shakespeare play, and they worshipped the guy in many ways.
So, this egolessness, you have to figure out Because it's all about customer loyalty, right?
To find a new customer costs like 10 times more than to keep an existing customer.
And Donald Trump, of course, wants to keep his existing customers.
He doesn't want to alienate them with uselessly complex terms.
He just wants to communicate simply and directly to them to keep their loyalty.
So once you have your customers, of course, as an entrepreneur, the real challenge is to keep them.
And people want the customers to stay loyal to them, but in order to do that, you must be loyal to your customers.
Like, I remember when I was first starting, I said, you know, two things, a bunch of things, but the two that sort of pop up in this context is, I'm never going to tell people what to do.
A philosophy show should never be about taking orders.
I'm an anarchist, for God's sake.
I give people orders.
Rules, yes.
Rulers, no.
So I'm never going to tell people what to do.
And with only one exception in the entire history of the show, I have kept to that rule.
And the second is I'm never going to take I don't know as an answer when someone damn well knows something.
Right?
So if somebody, I say, do you love your mother?
They say, I don't know.
It's like, no, you do.
You know one way or the other because, you know, you just have that experience.
So not telling people what to do and not taking ignorance or false ignorance as an answer shows, I think, a lot of respect for people's integrity.
Being loyal to the best in your customers will, in turn, make them loyal to you.
And you end up with this virtuous cycle where you're both bringing out the best in each other.
And I think that's certainly what I've achieved.
To me, the single most important thing for all of my activities is the blog.
All of the stuff, the guys I'm working with, the volunteers, the people who buy the books, the people who help out, they're all from the blog.
The blog is the engine that drives everything.
For me, it's very important to always post.
I don't think I've missed a single day of posting in years.
I think I usually post between four and five times a day now.
It's not always interesting.
It's not always brilliant.
Sometimes it's just a link to something I think is interesting.
But there's always something there.
They know that if they come to VP, there will be content there.
The other thing is that over time...
Because of the comment system.
And I didn't want a comment system.
The whole reason for the blog was basically to cut down on the email that I was getting from my columns.
And somebody really pushed me to start a blog and they convinced me because they said, hey, you can answer, instead of doing a mail column, you can answer all the questions on the blog one time.
I was like, oh, that's a good point.
And then they convinced me to do the comment thing.
And it's been really remarkable because through the comment system, I got the chance to get to know A lot of my readers.
Not all of them.
Most people never comment.
There's a lot of people who might just comment occasionally.
But for every person who reads or comments, there's like 20 or 30 who don't.
But that's where the community started to form.
And then some people come from the community.
But then you start developing these relationships.
And some of my most important allies are The groups of my readers, like the VFM, the Vile Faceless Minions, there's 525 of them that are sworn to mindlessly obey their Dark Lord.
And then there's the Dread Ilk, who are not sworn to mindlessly obey me, but they show up.
It was kind of funny.
Andrew from Gab, he specifically...
He invited all of them.
He went on Brainstorm and said, he's like, I love the VFM. Please come and support us too.
And they were so excited to be recognized and to realize that they were valued, not just by me, but by others.
And he gave them, they got to skip the line, so they all got to go jump right into Gab.
And they're all very active on Gab.
It's not uncommon that VFM or Dread Elk will be trending on Gab just because they've gotten into a discussion or a fight or whatever.
And I love those guys.
I mean, I can't even talk about most of what they do because, well, they do things that maybe the social media giants might not like.
This is why people generally don't mess, we don't have any of the trolling problems and fake review problems and all that kind of stuff that most people do.
The last time somebody left a fake review on one of my books, I put it out to the VFM and they had his name, employer, university, phone number and everything in 57 minutes.
So I called him up at his work and said, Hey, would you mind taking that review down?
Because I don't really appreciate it.
And I'm not sure that you're looking at the time stamp on this.
You probably shouldn't have been leaving fake reviews about my books when you were at work.
You know, it was gone.
I mean, that's the kind of stuff that this brave new world that we're in.
It's very important to have allies.
It's very important to have supporters.
But you can't have any of that If you're not loyal to them in return.
So for example, we've had marriages, we've had kids, we've had probably as many as 15 people have their jobs.
Like basically, if somebody in the Dread Elk has a job opening, they'll email me, and then I'll post it on the blog.
And then they can go, anybody who wants to respond to it can go through me.
And suddenly they have an in, There's a level of trust that is involved.
I got this great email back from one guy.
He said, the candidate you sent us through the Dread Elk was so high quality that the guy that was supposed to hire him didn't want to hire him because he was pretty sure that the guy was going to take his job.
Yeah.
But they worked it out, so it was good.
But loyalty is so important.
Whether you're talking about between the entrepreneur and his customers, whether you're talking about a social media figure and his supporters, it has to go both ways.
The biggest mistake that you can make as a blogger or as a videocaster or anything is to...
Assume that you're more important than they are.
Because you're not.
You might be a figurehead.
You might be a symbol.
Whatever it is.
But they are what make you a person who is not just shouting out into the empty void.
And it's always important to remember that and to never think, I'm too big for you.
I'm too important for you.
I don't have time for you.
You know, make this time.
Yeah, if you think an entrepreneur is about being in charge, think again.
You just have more masters that you're serving and that can be very beneficial.
Now, I just wanted to touch on networking and then we'll just sort of give tips to people just starting out.
I always resisted networking.
I hated networking because it felt fake.
You know, it felt eager.
But, well, I know I'm going to pretend to have small talk with you because I think you can provide me a benefit.
In the business world, I could never get behind it.
The friends that I've made through this show, like yourself and others, I guess you could say we're networking, but it doesn't feel like it.
We're just having enjoyable conversations.
So my experience has been network with people that you like, because if you don't like them, or you don't get along, or if it's too nakedly sort of For my benefit, then it's just not going to work out.
But when it comes to the start, someone's got a young man, woman out there.
They've got a great idea.
They're hungry to get going.
They don't have a lot of resources.
They don't have a lot of contacts.
My argument is just whatever you want to build, build it.
Just build it, even if it's a prototype, even if it's a theory, even if it's just a draft.
Whatever you're going to do, build it.
If you want to write something, write it.
If you've got an idea for a software application, write it.
Learn how to build a working model.
Anything like that.
And if you don't have any entree into the world of business, then ask around.
Ask whoever's got a pipeline to someone.
Usually, usually, you can get 20 minutes from someone if you're persistent enough.
And that's the persistence is all about the entrepreneur stuff.
Like, I've actually had people suggest for six months repetitively and repeatedly that I do a show.
And finally, I'm like...
You know what?
You're right.
I'm going to do a show on that.
And they're not escalating.
They're not like, why haven't you done my show on the Dakota pipeline?
They're just persistent.
And I'm like, okay, it reminds me.
It reminds me.
And then eventually I'm like, okay, I've got some time.
I'll go look into it.
So patience and persistence.
Have something to show to people.
Build it like it's real.
How you make something real is you pretend for long enough that it's real, and it's real.
It didn't work with me when I was younger with Elle McFederson, but it does work in the entrepreneurial space, right?
Build your business plan, figure out your cash flow, because in the entrepreneurial world, cash flow is king.
You've got to be able to meet your bills.
And so build it like it's real.
Learn how to build a business plan.
Learn how to work a spreadsheet.
Learn how to code, at least to the point where you can build a prototype.
Whatever it is you're going to do, build it like it's real.
And that way, when you walk into someone's office, you're going with as much potential preparation as you can possibly achieve on your own.
Because if somebody just walks into my office when I was an entrepreneur, sat down and said, I've got an idea for X. And they didn't have anything to show me.
Then I'm like, well, you don't really take it that seriously.
It's not a yearning-burning passion.
Therefore, why should I take it seriously if you're not taking it seriously?
Dig in.
Make it as real as you can.
Take it as far as you can possibly take it on your own.
And that way, that...
This concentrated passion bric-a-brac that you can bring into someone's office is going to show them exactly how enthusiastic you are about it.
And that's really important.
Anybody who's going to invest time or energy into helping you achieve your dream has to really believe that you're insane.
Like, they have to really believe that you're completely insane about it.
You know, that famous reality distortion field that Steve Jobs was reported to have.
Like, you've got to be completely mental.
Like, nobody can understand why this is so interesting to you.
But they're fascinated that it is.
And that's my relationship with philosophy.
And, of course, if I said, oh, I want to do a philosophy show, and a lot of people go, philosophy show?
Who listens to that?
How many people went to the last philosophy conference?
Oh, 80?
Okay, well, forget it, right?
But if you just have this mad passion, it just kind of sweeps people along.
But you have to bring tangible material things to your very first meeting or your very first phone call.
Because if you haven't, nobody's going to get you...
They'll invest in you if you're already in significant motion.
And you don't need any money to do that.
But they won't get you started.
And a lot of people just have an idea, want other people to get them started.
And that's not how it works, at least in my experience.
No, that's true.
And it makes me think of two things.
The first thing is that...
I lost my train of thought.
I'll go to the second thing.
Oh, the first thing is in terms of...
Doing something, having a portfolio, whatever.
I hire a lot of artists.
We need artists for video games and we need artists for book covers.
So I'm always on the lookout for artists.
If anybody watching this is a good artist, go ahead and email me a link to your portfolio.
I'll be happy to take a look at it.
But that's the key.
You would be shocked at how many artists contact me and then I say, let me see your portfolio.
And Right.
And, I mean, I just stopped paying attention immediately because, you know, when I wanted to write, when I wanted to become a writer, I had, you know, short stories up the wazoo.
I had half-finished novels lying here and there.
If somebody wanted to say, can I see something that you've written?
Beep, beep, beep.
Back out the track, right?
Yeah.
Here's a whole bunch of stuff.
You know, when people say...
Hey, can I look at one of your game designs?
I've got probably 15 complete or semi-complete game designs that have never been developed, some of which will never be developed, but that I wrote because that's what I do.
I mean, if you're a game designer, you design things, not necessarily just because someone's paying you to.
I mean, I'm working on a three-letter professional sports league game right now.
You know, but that's, but that's not, but I'm also doing this, I'm still working on this, you know, tabletop strategy game.
Nobody's paying me for that, because it's what I'd like to do.
But, so that's the one thing, is do something.
Like, whatever it is, and if you don't have enough passion to do it, trust me, you're not going to do it When people are paying you, you'll find some excuse not to get it done and you'll do a crappy job.
The other thing is that people, especially experienced people, look for passion.
You hear the investment bankers talk about it all the time.
And then, of course, what's always just ghastly is the entrepreneurs trying to talk about how they're very passionate.
It's especially painful When they're talking about, you know, some, like, accounting software, I'm just really passionate about making sure that the numbers all calculate correct.
You know, just something that's ridiculous like that.
But to be fair, you can genuinely be passionate about accounting software.
And it looks insane to anybody who's not into that, but that's what you want to...
You can.
I completely understand how people would be that anal about it, but you don't want to try and fake it.
Right, no.
It's never the guy who actually is passionate about it.
It's always the guy who's been hired to sell it.
And they always say we, because you know perfectly well that this guy doesn't actually know anything about it.
It's just horrendous, and I always feel bad for them.
But real passion is something that they look for.
My first game company was called Fenris Wolf, and our big hit was a game called Rebel Moon Rising.
And we did really well with that because Intel distributed 6 million copies of it and we got paid for every unit.
So that worked out really nicely.
But what was interesting about it to me was they actually signed contracts with 15 different game companies.
The guys who did Unreal, Epic were one of them.
Papyrus, who did IndyCar Racing.
Ubisoft.
And then us.
All these companies that were being covered by the media, by the game media, and then five guys living in a place we call the digital ghetto that had more bongs than computers.
And so at one point, I thought we were toast because they sent 13 people out to visit us.
We had eight people total.
They come in and half our guys are asleep.
But they're sleeping at the office and that denotes passion.
Oh, it gets better.
They walk in and one of the programmers has left Bongzilla, which is literally a four and a half foot giant scientific beaker that's been turned into a bong in the middle of the living room where the vice president and some of the guys are walking in.
And I hear one of the guys say to the other one, so what do you think the over-under on bongs in this place is?
So we're, you know, I'm thinking we have no chance, you know, we have no chance of getting the contract or anything.
But the meeting goes great.
They love our demo.
The guy at Intel, everybody had to have a champion.
And our champion is like, you know, super stoked, thumbs up, you know, calls me back.
Yeah, you're on the list.
You're go, we'll send you the contract, all this sort of thing.
Okay, fine.
We'll go six months later to the end of the contract.
It turns out that we were one of only two companies that finished the game on time.
All the big guys, the professional guys, all that sort of stuff, none of them made it.
And he calls me up and he's just practically giddy.
And he said, I'm just so proud of you guys.
I'm so happy.
I knew you'd do it.
And I said, you know, I don't mean to...
I said, you're more excited than I am.
What's up?
He said, yeah, we had a pot.
We all threw in a thousand bucks.
And only the guys whose game shipped divided it up.
He said, no, two of you guys did.
He said, I made $7,500 off you guys.
And...
And I said, well, why on earth did you bet on us?
And he said, well, you know, he said, I got to tell you, one of the other guys told me that he thought I had the best chance of winning because, he said, you can tell these guys live it.
They literally do not leave this house.
They work or sleep 24-7.
And it was true.
We worked every single day.
From the moment that that project was green-lighted until the day we delivered the gold master.
And for Intel, they don't hold up their chip shipments because the game is not pretty.
It's a drop-dead date.
And so that passion is something that more experienced people can detect.
It's not something that you can fake.
And that's why it's very important for you to pick something that you can do effortlessly.
I don't know how you do what you do.
You always have this You're always full of questions.
You're always informed and that sort of thing.
I mean, we talked about people say, oh, it'd be great if Vox came on more often.
Vox needs a month to recover from this.
But it's your passion, and that's why you're so good at it.
Right.
And this is something I sort of want to put out to just people who listen and who watch.
Because whenever you have any kind of public presence, there's lots of people around who want to help you.
And send you the resume.
Hey, how can I help you?
And that is...
I love my listeners, so I love them enough to tell the truth.
But it's annoying because what you're doing is you're asking someone else to figure out where your skill set fits into what their needs are and then assign something to you and see if you do it.
And look, there are lots of unreliable people in this world.
And you want to differentiate yourself from them.
And people don't have time to...
To try and figure out how anonymous people are going to do on particular complex tasks.
If you want to help me, for instance, okay, find some project you're really passionate about and send me a completed presentation with sources.
Maybe I'll like it, maybe I won't, and if it doesn't work, send me another one.
I'm not saying people should or shouldn't do this, but if you really are keen on helping, the people who want to help, like that old story, the person from Porlock, like...
The people who want to help who just take up your time by saying, well, how can I help you?
And then here's my resume and blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, no, you're actually taking time away from me doing anything because you have to recognize there are very few competent people in the world.
There are times when I think it's like 30 people hold the entire civilization aloft with getting competent things done.
You need to differentiate yourself from the run of the mill people who are much more promise and much less delivery.
And the way you do that is again, show up wherever you're going to show up with as much work done as you could possibly get done before meeting that person.
If there's one more hair's breadth of labor you can put in before meeting that person, Then do that before you meet that person.
But don't show up like a beanbag waiting to say, well, where should I go?
People in motion won't have time if you're not already in motion.
And I think that's really important.
Because if you do that, you will differentiate yourself literally from 999 out of 1,000 people who are out there.
And the more you're differentiated, the easier you are to get behind that.
Well, I'm going to disagree slightly with that.
I mean, everything that you've said is true.
And there are a lot of people who don't really know what they want to do, don't know what they can do, or maybe, or worse, they want to get something out of you.
I thought that was really useful, what Cernovich said, which is, if you want me to do something for you, if you want to talk to me about doing something for you, I damn well better see a review of one of my books on your site or whatever, because why would I do anything for you if you just want to use me?
So at least when people are saying, hey, can I help you and stuff, that is the right question.
It's the right question to be asking.
Rather, it's the right attitude to have.
Like I said, all the stuff that we're doing at Castelia and at InfoGalactic, It is all happening because of people who have come forward and said, I want to help.
Now, what I will say is that that's usually not out of the blue.
It's usually in response.
Like, for example, I have a need right now.
If anyone listening is big into computer games and wants to write up 10 questions about that game for a quiz game that we're doing, I got a list of games that we need questions for.
So, you know, help us out.
You'll get a credit on the game.
But, you know, it is important to understand that every bit of help requires a bit of management, a bit of targeting.
And so it's very difficult sometimes to juggle between, I'm doing this, you know, are you actually helping, or are you actually taking up more time than it would take me just to do it myself?
And so, One of the guys who has actually become one of our most important people at Castalia, he's a volunteer.
And he started off just doing one thing and he proved he was competent and we just kept throwing more stuff at him.
And he was telling some of the people who have volunteered for Infogalactic that one thing that they need to get used to is, I'm not going to stand around patting them on the head and telling them what to do.
He said, It's a little bit alarming because he said, Vox is just going to throw a bunch of stuff in your lap and say, hop to it, talk to you next week.
If I was going to actually do proper oversight, I would do nothing myself.
You spend all your time doing that, so you have to make a choice.
What I do is I always look for the most self-motivated, most intelligent people That I can find.
I test them.
I've noticed Trump does that too.
He always tests people.
And then if they pass the test, then you just keep dumping more on them as much as they're comfortable with.
And what you end up with very often is a very, very high-performance team.
In fact, one thing I thought was interesting, and this is something to keep in mind with regards to volunteers, I was interviewed at a computer game company that was extremely successful on its first attempt.
They came out with a game and they were bringing in $100 million a year by their third year, I think it was.
Sorry, I'm just making a note here to revise my business plan because that's a good thing to aim for.
Okay, go ahead.
But they...
It's actually kind of annoying because they had talked to me about You know, working for them.
And so I said, fine.
They knew that I was remote.
I was not going to work on site.
But they said, well, you need to come in and go through the whole interview process.
So that's fine.
So I flew in.
I spent the entire day doing interviews with practically everybody in the company, it seemed like.
And these were sharp people.
I mean, really smart people.
Even, like, the person whose job it was to keep the coffee going was smart.
And it was interesting, though, because it didn't work out because they offered me the job, but they wanted me to move on site.
And I was just like, I don't want to learn yet another language, so no.
But the thing that was so interesting was, so I knew what their interview process was, and it was good.
I mean, it was the most thorough interview I've ever been through.
Not only that, but they made everybody, including me, Take a test.
Which for art is fine.
I'm a designer.
Wait, what kind of test?
I had to do a design test.
They basically said, here's a game idea we kicked around.
Give us a design for it.
And I was so pissed off about it because I thought that they should just take one of my existing games and, you know, I'd give them the design docs for it and they could see what the design doc and then the final product, you know.
But they wanted the test.
And so I was so irritated because this is before they sprang the, oh, you have to move here thing.
But I was so irritated with it that I actually turned in a 55-page document.
I mean, it was very complete.
So much so that Some of their guys were complaining that they didn't have the time to read the entire thing and review it.
It was just basically my way of saying, look, I'm not happy about this.
And I can do this.
Again, notice that when you're talking about passion, you're talking about performance.
That was a complete game design, 55 pages written in a week.
You've got to be good to do it, especially if it's going to be a good design.
So anyhow, it didn't work out.
But I knew that their process was insane.
And all the people that were good.
But here's what I thought was fascinating.
We've stayed in contact on and off over the years.
And they have not had another successful game developed.
They've tried to develop four different games, I think, maybe five.
They've had at least two other teams that I know of.
And their one good team is still the original people with no training, no clue, nothing but passion and desire.
And that is the one team that can still get stuff done.
Their highly trained, highly recruited, highly vetted teams do not perform anywhere nearly as well as that original group that was developing Without getting paid, developing for free.
So that's why I think you need to be careful about not actively looking for volunteers because I think that the very highest quality people are going to be in that volunteer crowd.
When you actually start hiring, for example with Castelia, we're not at the point yet where we can You know, hire full-time employees and whatnot.
But when we do, the people that we will hire will be our volunteers because we know that there's no one that is going to be able to perform the way that these guys do.
I mean, we know nobody can because we know what we're doing.
You know, we've published nearly 75 books in two and a half years.
So we're publishing at a rate of a publishing house that's much bigger than we are.
And we're only able to do that because our volunteers are so high performance.
They love what they do.
I mean, I don't understand why somebody might enjoy laying out the interior of a book.
Okay, that's my idea.
It almost looks insane if you don't have the passion.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I have to tap out of their conversations because the publisher and the production editor will literally spend 45 minutes discussing the ideal margin on the outside of the page.
And I'm thinking, my gosh, if it takes 45 minutes of that, imagine when they start talking about the footer.
We could be here all day.
Don't even get me started on that.
But the thing is that that shows up.
This one individual we have to work with, I won't mention any names or anything, but they're very, very picky.
Very, very, very picky.
About everything.
I remember being surprised when We sent a pair of our hardcovers over and they came back and said, oh, these are gorgeous.
And my jaw dropped because I was bracing for the long litany of flaws and problems and what we should have done and all this sort of thing.
And I called the production editor up and I said, you know, you guys are amazing because this person didn't complain.
This is the first conversation I've ever had with this person where they didn't spend the first five minutes telling me what was wrong.
But that's what that level of interest and that level of passion, that level of commitment to quality allows you to accomplish.
The more you focus on...
The more closely you're able to focus on whatever it is you're doing, whether it's art, whether it's code, Whether it's design, the better it's going to be.
And that's where you really start to separate the professionals from the amateurs, the high quality from the run-of-the-mill.
And the more that you can set yourself up as high quality, the more that people are going to be interested in it.
And that is a mania that has to be sustained through the largely irrational process of becoming wed to excellence in a field you're not getting paid for but hope to someday.
So I hope this has been helpful for people.
Voxday, of course, is an entrepreneur in many different fields and knows whereof he speaks.
So I'll take your advice about the volunteers with gratitude.
I just wanted to remind people, social justice warriors always lie, taking down the thought police.
And Cuxervative, How Conservatives Betrayed America, two great books, which we'll put links to below.
And, of course, we'll put links to Vox Populi, Alpha Game, Info Galactic.
And, of course, if you can be patient while you go through the queue of acceptance gap, which is a great replacement for Twitter, now with free speech.
So thanks so much, of course, Foxdale.
Always a great pleasure.
I'm sure we'll talk again soon, but thanks so much for sharing your thoughts today.
