Web3, the History of Decentralization, and How to Succeed in the Creator Economy with Jonathan Hillis (Episode 019)

Jonathan Hillis is the founder of Creator Cabins. It began as a single cabin in the Texas Hill Country, a place for creators to gather together to work on exciting projects ‘IRL’. They’ve since launched a token and formed the Cabin DAO and now they’re expanding into a decentralized city.

Prior to founding $CABIN, Jon was Director of Product, Shoppers, and Marketplace at Instacart, where during the pandemic, he grew their workforce of shoppers 5x.

Jon also recently published an excellent essay on the history of centralization and decentralization cycles in Western Civilization.

We cover all of that and more in this episode. Enjoy!

In this episode we discuss:

Transcript

Jonathan Hillis  

It’s about finding your little corner of the internet to hang out with, if you look at all of the most creative, productive people in history, they almost always were operating within an environment where they were surrounded by other creative people working on interesting stuff, and that sort of thing, whether, you know, it’s, it’s like Florence, or whether it’s Los Alamos, or, you know, wherever you have to find that place for you. And now those places are online. And so I think it’s about being willing to put yourself out there and be vulnerable, but to do it in a way where you’re, you’re doing it as part of a community, and where you’re, you’re finding the other people who want to do and think about and talk about the same things as you. And if you can find those people, and then you can be vulnerable with them. And you know, you can dedicate yourselves collectively to the craft that you’re working on whatever it is, right, whether that’s joining a DAO and participating in in building something, whether that’s finding a community of programmers or podcasters, or writers or whatever, right, it doesn’t matter what as long as it’s something that you’re really excited about, and that you can find a community of other people that are really excited about and you can push each other that that’s how you make the magic on the other side.

Neville Mehra  

I’m Neville Andrew Mehra and this is Never Normal, a show about breaking free from the boring default plan and living life on your terms instead. My guest for this episode is Jonathan Hillis. 

Jon is at the forefront of so many interesting areas in technology. Right now, Jon’s the founder of creator cabins, which started as a single cabin in the Texas Hill Country, a place where creators can gather together to work on exciting projects face to face, they’ve since launched a token and formed the cabin DAO and now they’re expanding into a decentralized city.

We also discuss Jon’s excellent essay on the history of centralization and decentralization cycles and John’s perspective on the gig economy. We cover all of that in more in this episode. John, welcome to never normal.

Jonathan Hillis  

Thanks so much for having me.

Neville Mehra  

I’m going to try to do sort of like Tyler Cowen and skip all the usual kind of preamble Lee introduction, soft questions and just dive right into the the meat of it. You recently published a brief history of decentralized cities and centralized states. And I love that you overlaid that whole narrative on top of the Timeline of communication technologies from like the phonetic alphabet. And obviously Gutenberg and then even, you know, a lot of references to VCs and Jim Barksdale is famous bundling, and unbundling. I totally see that kind of parallel. And I’m curious, you know, I mean, they say history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, I think is the expression. And there are some obvious parallels to the collapse of some previous empires and sort of where we are in the United States. Right now. Ray Dalio has talked a lot about this. It’s the subject of his new book Balaji has gone on record quite a bit talking about things like this. So having just written this history, sort of where do you see us in this cycle? And where do you see all this going next,

Jonathan Hillis  

I love the, you know, the sort of history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes meme. And I think this is a great example of it. So you know, for context, the, for anyone who hasn’t read it, that essay kind of walks through the four widely understood by historian phases of Western civilization, and talks about, you know, this sort of ancient period, which is like, you know, Sumerians Egyptians emergence of agriculture, bank, river valleys, etc, the classical period of Greek city states Roman Empire, the medieval period, you know, Knights, kings, castles, churches, and modern period of sort of the Renaissance, the enlightenment and industrialization. And I was really trying to understand, you know, if there were prior historical examples of decentralized cities, because that’s what I’m most interested in, and what I’m working on right now, it turns out there are turns out in each of these areas, you see this pattern of, you know, some new set of coordination technologies that emerges. And then those coordination technologies, unlocking the ability for small groups of people to work together, and to build, you know, new forms of self governance, that turn into these city like structures that then federate into these networks of city like structures that look a lot like decentralized cities, and then they get, you know, sort of eaten by centralized structures. And so if you think about where your question was, where are we right now, I think historians would generally say we’re in the modern era, and I think I would even posit that maybe we’re right at the train. addition from the modern era to the next era, which, you know, people often talk about as like the information age or something like that. But basically, the idea is that, you know, the combination of computers, the internet and blockchains, it are the coordination and communication technologies that are setting off a new cycle here. And this is coming right, as we get to the point of, you know, sort of the end of the last cycle, which is this classic situation of centralized systems and institutions starting to, you know, outgrow themselves and, you know, reach a state of eventual collapse. And so I think we seem to be, you know, like a very amateur historian here. So I think you have to take everything I say about it, probably with a grain of salt. But it sure seems like we’re at this sort of transition phase between the collapse of the kind of like centralized nation states structure as the primary organizational structure for civilization and the emergence of this new, you know, information age that I believe is heading in the direction and, you know, I’m interested in building in the direction of new decentralized cities,

Neville Mehra  

if I can prod a little bit so I mentioned Ray Dalio and Balaji. I mean, Ray Dalio kind of contrasts, you know, where we are with some previous empires. And he, I mean, he’s almost kind of warning us like, Hey, watch out for a civil war, because it looks an awful lot. Like we’re headed that way. Balaji sort of pits, like the US and China as these two sort of main forces in the world right now. And in a way you could I’m putting words in his mouth, but you could sort of read his argument as like, the US isn’t centralized enough to compete with China, like China is able to just get stuff done. And meanwhile, we’re all arguing with each other and fighting over like identity politics, while they’re, you know, building high speed trains, and new airports and all that kind of stuff. And he sort of predicts that like, there’s this sort of third way of decentralization that could sort of emerge. Do you see that? And you see historical examples of that kind of happening within those places? Or like is, is decentralization a sort of creative, necessary creative destruction? Or is it like this parallel thing that happens?

Jonathan Hillis  

Great questions. I’m less familiar with the recent Dalio book, though I did have a couple people reach out after this essay and suggest I check it out. And also some suggests, I don’t check it out. The Balaji stuff I’m very familiar with, I’ve been attending the lecture series that he’s putting on right now as part of 1729. And, and you have listened to a lot of this Tim Ferriss podcasts, etc. So I think he’s got a lot of interesting stuff to say, you asked a couple questions there. So one was about, like, the historical precedents of where we find ourselves. And I think there’s, you know, basically, like, if you look at the three previous peak centralization precedents, to, you know, nation states, you have like river valley empires, like, like, you know, the Egyptians, you have the Roman Empire, and then you have like, late stage, medieval kingdoms and Catholic churches. And I would argue that, you know, there’s elements of what we’re seeing right now, and what people sometimes refer to, as, you know, late stage capitalism, that are really I would call it not actually late stage capitalism, but more like late stage, nation state centralization, which is a lot less catchy, but I think more accurate. And I think what, you know, sort of the characteristics of that that harken back to each of those previous eras, Ancient Egypt had it sort of state of peak centralization, had a lot of insecure self glorification, that manifested itself in building giant pyramids. And I think there’s definitely some of that, you know, going on in the United States, this sort of like insecure self glorification of like, making America great again, you know, the classic, like late Roman Empire was a wild, wild thing that I would definitely recommend people learn more about if they haven’t, I had no idea like how insane it was. But it basically was a combination of this, like, just mass appeasement of providing Roman Empire citizens with a constant state of, you know, free bread in the form of like, sort of universal basic income of bread and bath houses, and you know, sexual promiscuity and circuses where it was basically just like, murdering people, and that’s all pretty, pretty nuts. And obviously, like a more extreme than anything we’re seeing right now. But I do think we’re starting to see some of the sort of like, massive appeasement of universal basic income, which I think actually, you know, there’s some like good things to be said about universal basic income, but but it at least is an example of like, how democracy can get to the point where it becomes like, hey, let’s just print money and give it to everybody, as well as sort of the crumbling infrastructure that was rampant in in late stage, classical Rome. And then you know, you also see some of the kind of like shedding of moral authority that happened in the late medieval period and was particularly you know, the example there. That’s probably most common is the Catholic Church handing out indulgences and, you know, allowing people to sort of like buy their way to heaven or something like that. And I think, you know, we’ve again, maybe less extreme versions right now, but certainly a fair amount of shedding of moral authority by, you know, the United States on a global stage. So that’s the historical context. And then the other question you had what was about, you know, sort of embodies take that it’s actually maybe that China is sort of the like, peak centralization in the United States is actually more of like a federated structure. So I think that’s fair. And of course, like all of these sort of grand historical narratives, it’s very easy to poke holes in them, or to come up with alternate perspectives, because they are inherently grand historical narratives that like our narratives, their stories, and I think they can be helpful stories. But that doesn’t mean they’re perfectly accurate or work in all cases. In this case, though, I think what we’ve seen with the United States is that it was intended to be a Federalist structure, and that this is actually the same trend you see with, you know, as these decentralized cities emerge, they start to federate, you get the sort of like the the case here would be New England towns that were, you know, spinning off New New England towns, and then federating into Articles of Confederation and ultimately, the Constitution. But then over the past 100 years, there really was a centralization of that. And in the United States, we went, you know, from more of a kind of like state first federated federated structure to, you know, maybe post Civil War, centralization. And again, there’s like, a lot of historical context there that I’m not going to get into, but is important, but like the, I think the Balaji case, that’s particularly interesting here is that centralization peaked, you know, essentially, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And so I think I would actually agree with with Balaji, is take your, I think, the nuances that we he would say, maybe we’ve already seen peak centralization, and that now we are starting to, you know, kind of, in his words, like play the clock backwards towards a more decentralized, decentralized state, and that this is actually like, the way that America makes, it’s like Phoenix emerging from the ashes comeback is that China is continuing on the path of centralization, which is like very effective in the short term, but probably less effective in the long term. And that America actually has an opportunity, particularly in the context of crypto, and particularly in the context of our like, original, you know, Federalist structure to, you know, be a place that that is the home of this next wave of decentralization.

Neville Mehra  

That’s, that’s a bright future. It’s an optimistic take. I like it, I hope it works out that way. I mean, I could sort of see a right if you play that forward, and you add in the kind of crypto narrative, that’s something like America’s advantage is the fact that Wyoming is innovating, you know, with with Dows being treated like LLCs. And Miami is innovating by bringing a lot of the crypto world there and that we’re sort of running these kind of 50 experiments in parallel. And out of that will emerge something better and more maybe robust, or even anti fragile, then a sort of consensus down from the top competitor, whether the people at the top allow that to take place, or they at some point, you know, step in with whether that’s something like SEC regulation, or just like a more heavy hand of government in general and kind of taking back more of that power into into a centralized government. I think time will tell

Jonathan Hillis  

I think that’s exactly the question. And I would even say, it’s not just like a 50 state experiment. But maybe even like a hundreds of cities experiment, you know, obviously, there’s a lot inherent to the US Constitution that sets it up for the ability for states to, you know, in the sort of realm of the 10th Amendment, like, claim their sovereignty in a way that like, is actually relatively in line with the original intent of the Constitution, and, you know, allows for these experiments, but I think what’s going to be more interesting here is actually even just like city city innovation, and, you know, I think you mentioned Miami, which is a prominent example. But I think we’re gonna see this in not only a lot of current states, but in our current cities, but in these like, new emerging concepts of cities. And I think that that type of experimentation has a lot of cultural DNA baked into the United States that that makes it pretty interesting. And frankly, like, you’re right, it’s it’s an optimistic take. But it’s also like, the reality is I’m not sure that in the long run, the federal government really has the like tools or capabilities, and it’s toolkit to continue to be the type of powerful structure that it was in the 20th century. And, you know, there’s like, if you look at, I think, like, an interesting example here from science fiction is is Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash right, which is sort of becoming a classic reemergence of like, oh wow, he really predicted a lot of what’s happening right now and I think some of the stuff are on Burb claves is just starting to kick off though, hopefully, like slightly less of a cyberpunk and slightly more of like a solid punk version of it,

Neville Mehra  

but I’m less dystopian, but yeah, a little less dystopian,

Jonathan Hillis  

hopefully. But there is a funny moment in Snow Crash where they’re like getting on a helicopter, and this dude hops on the helicopter then and they’re like, Who’s this guy? He’s like, Oh, I’m the President of the United States. And they’re like, Okay, cool, whatever man sit in the back. Like, it’s I don’t think it’s like that you would the federal government is going away. But I do think that it’s that it may just become less relevant over time.

Neville Mehra  

That’s actually you handed me a beautiful segue as the founder of creator cabins, which is itself a decentralized city, built by and for creators, obviously, you this is something that you’ve thought a lot about, is your hope that that that is a sort of this is such a nerdy reference, but like I remember when when like new graphics cards would come out, like Nvidia would make these like reference drivers, and then all the various people who use their chipsets in the cards would make like their own version of the drivers or something like that. So is this is this kind of like the standard prototype? I guess, is the word I’m struggling for that you then hope people sort of copy paste into additional cities around the world? And then is there some idea that those federate together? Or how does all that kind of fit together in your mind,

Jonathan Hillis  

you know, so there’s the like, at the emergence of the last cycle of decentralized cities, which had its home in, in like New England towns, there’s, you know, this, this famous John Winthrop speech about a city on the hill, which is essentially what you’re describing, it’s like, let’s make a reference city for this new mode of, you know, democracy. You know, I like to joke that we’re like a city on a side of a hill quite on top of a hill, but we’re like, on the side of one, I think that’s like, a little bit of a self aggrandizing reference, probably. But I do hope that in some sense, what we’re building here is something that other people can look at, and be inspired by, and also, you know, not just in terms of inspiration, but in terms of like very practical, right? Like, we want to create the toolkit and the the playbook, right? So that anybody can can go and make one of these things. And, you know, we’re trying to be very intentional about how we build infrastructure and build cabins and these sorts of things in like, highly repeatable ways so that we can enable other people to kind of pursue this same dream, because I think there are a lot of people out there that want to try something different. They want to, you know, be out in nature. But but with fast internet, which is a new thing that you can do, right, that you couldn’t do even 10 years ago, and kind of live that lifestyle, I think a lot of people dream of like being with, you know, a group of close friends where they’re in our highly walkable space, they’re out in nature, but they’re still connected. And, you know, maybe even can sort of have a rotating cast of people, you know, friends from the internet that are sort of dropping in. And we want to help enable that not only in terms of you know, and to be clear, it’s not a copy paste of what we’re doing here, we want to provide a template. But part of what’s so exciting and cool about these sort of, like decentralized city nodes is that they allow us to rapidly and in parallel experiment with a bunch of different types of organizational structures, governance structures, while sharing some core cultural values, you know, that that allow people to feel a sense of connection across different nodes.

Neville Mehra  

So instead of copy paste, perhaps the better analogy would be fork the code base, right, where there’s parts in common and, and things that you’re innovating on. One of the reasons why I think this is so interesting, and especially your approach is that there have been a lot of efforts in this direction over the years, at least in terms of like just people who want to kind of break free from like a powerful central government. And there’s been things like seasteading, and then there was Sealand. I think the the little, I think was like a defense structure, originally off the coast of England and some maritime law change meant that while it was once inside the UK territorial waters, it was no longer and so somebody claimed it. And it was pirate radio station. And like, there have been these various sort of like half baked attempts at starting a new country. And this is even something I’ve not quite sparred with Balaji on but like, his take on all of this is sort of like, you know, go out and like, grab some unclaimed land and build something. And I sort of wonder and what I’ve pushed back on him and said, you know, couldn’t it be something more like this, like Hanseatic League, where it’s okay, we’ve got these sort of various cities that have kind of opted into these principles, and they may not agree on everything, but there’s a certain core set of like, whether that’s the currency or the certain kind of governance principles that they have in common, and maybe there’s a freedom of movement between those places, or just some mutual recognition. Is that something that you’ve thought about? Do you see this going in that direction? Is that too utopian and idealistic? Yeah,

Jonathan Hillis  

it’s a great question. So yeah, I think, you know, kind of within this movement to try new governance structures, trying to, you know, organizational structures for people. It’s a spectrum and I think you’re right on on some At one side of the spectrum you have like seasteading, or you have. And then like one step, you know, in on the spectrum, you have some of the groups like PreSonus, who were like, Let’s carve out these special economic zones where we get to, like, make our own laws and stuff like that, I would say we’re like further on the other end of the spectrum, which is that, to your point, it’s less about like, I am not like some hardcore libertarian, nor do I think like, cabin members in general tend to be hardcore libertarians, I think what we are is people who want to experiment with new structures and try to, you know, make localized organizations that are a better fit for people’s day to day lives. And I think you can do a lot of that within or adjacent to existing structures. So like, we’re not building walls, and like putting guns on them and trying to like declare sovereignty, at best, what we’re doing is LARPing as a city state, and I think the LARP has a lot of power to it, you know, we have our own, like you said, their native token or currency, you know, we thought passports. So like, I’ll hold up my, this is my cabin passport, it’s, you know, a card with a chip embedded in it with a private key that can hold and FTV says, or whatever, they can be scanned and used to access things. We’re making these things. And, but but we’re treating it as a LARP. Right? Nobody is like saying let’s secede from the United States or whatever country, you know, a note isn’t what we’re saying is like, within the context of these existing systems, let’s play games and explore local governance structures and explore ways of building community and culture and cities. And if you look at the history of this stuff, I think that’s actually much more in line with what works to your point about, you know, these sort of federated leagues of the past, what we tend to see is that when these new, you know, decentralized, cities are emerging, and they are, they’re not saying we have absolute sovereignty, and like that sort of thing, that’s actually tends to be what the centralized organizations do later on, what the decentralized cities tend to do is, you know, you look at like federated cities, states of the classical era, or the sort of like market towns evolving into trade leagues in the medieval era. And they tend to be much more about like, how do we create conditions of economic viability, and, you know, ways for people to improve their standard of living, typically, originally, within the context of the existing structures, you know, we’re in an unincorporated area at our first node here in the Texas Hill Country. And we’re in a situation where like, you know, we the cabin, we built required a single $100, septic and well permit to be filed with the county. And other than that, they didn’t want to know anything about what we were up to, you know, and that’s like a real advantage of being in an unincorporated area of Texas versus say, suburban California. And so, of course, like we talked about with this sort of federated structure of the United States, there’s a whole range of types of local government. And I think there’s a lot of bandwidth to sort of play and explore, you know, within that range that doesn’t require some sort of, like, grand gesture of declaring sovereignty or something. Yeah. And

Neville Mehra  

I think that it’s, it’s a lot less risky to try stuff like that. And it just, it enables sort of more iteration. And it’s, it’s just less of like a crazy move, basically, to do something like that. And then yeah, I mean, it’s almost like a startup in stealth mode, maybe, you know, in a good case scenario, something like what you’re describing just keeps getting propagated and keeps working and iterating. And then all of a sudden, it becomes the new default, at some point in history that’s like, oh, yeah, it just sort of switched when no one was, no one was paying attention. All right, yeah,

Jonathan Hillis  

I think this is the magic of these new coordination tools. And the way that these things evolve, like you said, it would be totally crazy in any of these eras, right? For some group to be like, oh, yeah, this big centralized power, we’re gonna like, Go overthrow them. Like, that’s not how you win this game. The way you win this game is just by providing better outcomes for people, right. And like you said, it’s like a startup. It’s like the classic sort of Clay Christensen disruption theory. Like you don’t sort of attack the big incumbents head on, you just start making, you know, systems and structures and products that are like much better on a specific dimension that people choose to opt into in like a market based way.

Neville Mehra  

So this is exactly the point that I’ve tried to that I’ve tried to make to people when I think about like digital countries and future forms of government and it goes back to your Jim Barksdale bundling, and unbundling and I just think that there’s an opportunity right now to unbundle some of the things that we typically think of as being provided by central governments. I mean, so the super cliched obvious example is Bitcoin, like the US dollar doesn’t have to cease to exist for me to hold Bitcoin in my digital wallet. Both can coexist and I can see a future form of digital, you know, you said LARPing, so I’ll go with that, you know, sort of LARPing as government entity that does things with They’re it’s it’s birth certificates or, or death certificates, marriage certificates, all those kinds of things. Or even you could even get something like not a full fledged court system. But like, you know, two people could make a contract between them and opt into making the jurisdiction of that contract some future organization that has their best interests in mind, that is not like the local government court system, there’s all sorts of things that right now are just sort of like de facto part of government, there’s no real reason why they necessarily need to be part of that, like local government system in the same way that like, we just have this kind of prior that, like governments issue money. But actually, there’s no reason why you can’t just make Bitcoin and not be a government, I think we’re going to start to see a lot of those examples pop up as like parallel systems, basically.

Jonathan Hillis  

Yeah, I agree. And I think that, you know, they take the Bitcoin analogy a little bit further and apply it to some of those other things you were talking about, which are essentially like documentation of people and things. That’s what blockchains are really good, right is a public ledger that’s immutable, that anybody can look at. And and everybody can agree on a source of truth without a centralized entity. And so if you think about ultimately, things like, you know, a lot of like government sources of truth, whether that’s, you know, the sort of things you were talking about, like birth and death certificates, or whether that’s things more like land titles, those things are actually things that are a great fit for blockchains. And my favorite historical example here, you know, Texas history is crazy. And if you look at like the brief period, where Texas was its own country, you know, there was this time where Austin was the capital of Texas, but Sam Houston was the president of Texas, and Sam Houston decided he actually wanted you know, the capital of Texas to be in his his namesake town of Houston. And so he literally just showed up with a bunch of like, armed, you know, dudes at the Austin capitol, and tried to steal all the records and move them to Houston. And this this innkeeper, I think her name was Angelina Eberly. There’s a statue of her outside of the awesome Capitol with a cannon, because she literally like came out at night with and like, got one of the cannons and started firing the president of Texas at the troops, they were trying to steal all the records. And like, this is a perfect example of the type of thing where it’s like, yeah, the government ultimately is like the place where the records are kept. And if you can just steal those things and move them, then you can in some sense, the old the government, and so having blockchains as this way for us to have an immutable shared understanding of the sources of truth of those records, that is not reliant on you know, physical records, being in a location in maybe a slightly less extreme case, like a local courthouse that burns down and suddenly you’ve like, lost all the property records for that county, you know, that that’s a huge opportunity for blockchains. And I would hope that current government structures could could figure that out. But, you know, frankly, given their track record of adopting new technologies, I’m I’m a little skeptic.

Neville Mehra  

Yeah, I wasn’t going to go here but that you’ve provoked me for anyone listening who thinks that this you know, like, this kind of stuff just works pretty well right now, like why? Why do we need innovation, I’m actually sitting in in Valencia in Spain, I got married, we had like the ceremony and the party and everything in Portugal. But for for all these like legal reasons of hassle and paperwork and everything, we decided that that would just be like, that was the only wedding we had that was the real wedding but but the actual legal wedding was like assigning a piece of paper back home in Washington, DC, it was way easier to just, you know, not have to translate Portuguese documents and whatever. But then we go and move to Spain. And so now we need to prove to Spain that we’re married, so I asked the DC government for a copy of my marriage certificate, okay, it took days they were super backed up, sorry, normally, it takes days they were super backed up, it took weeks, but then I have to get an apostille so they mail me a certificate, and they mail it back to a different branch of the government can’t do it in person because of COVID Who then apostilles That document for use internationally. I then sent I left the US by that point, I sent a copy of it to my dad who was in the States who then promptly put it in an envelope and mailed it to me here in Spain, it sat in customs it’s just a document. There’s literally nothing else in there. He didn’t include like a batch of cookies or something. It was just a piece of paper and an envelope. Somehow it sat in customs at Madrid airport for a month and then finally I get this notice in the mail from from the Postal Service here that I have a package waiting for me but I need to pay duty to pick it up. So I go I go to the post office and they charged me something like 20 euros to pick up hilariously crumpled piece of paper that looked like he got run over by a truck in an envelope so that I could then file that with the local government here to prove that we are in fact actually married. So it’s like even today and absolutely bonkers. Yeah, in the 21st century with all the technology that we have, like that’s how this stuff works on a on a global level. And maybe that’s an extreme example, but I also I sold a house in 2020 Not to make this pie life story and I found out just a few weeks ago that the settlement agency you know when you when you sell a piece of property I read the buyers and sellers meet together We did it virtually. But there’s still like an office where all this stuff gets signed, and they, you know, pay all the people who need to be paid and all that. So we did all that I got the money, everything worked. So I thought and I find out I got a tax bill for the property tax for this year. And I’m like, okay, that’s weird. That’s some clerical error I wrote to the tax agency, and they’re like, No, that the house is still in your name. So I sold a house a year and a half ago, the settlement agency cue the You had one job name, never filed the deed with the government. So I legally still own that house. Now, I’m not, you know, a crook. So I’m not going to steal the house back from the guy. But somebody has already paid me hundreds of 1000s of dollars for real property. And there’s no record that says that he owns it. And of course, his bank gave him the mortgage is furious, because, like, they have no secured loan. That is

Jonathan Hillis  

insane. And yeah, I mean, this is something I didn’t realize that this is like, there’s a whole cottage industry of insurance for deeds, like for just proving that you own the thing that you Oh, and it’s like, it’s wild. You know, it’s like, and things happen, right? This is paperwork, this is humans, mistakes are made courthouses burned down, right? My parents live out in another, you know, area of the whole country. And unfortunately, some, you know, not very mentally stable guy just burned down the local courthouse. And they were very fortunate to have a deep clean and restoration process. And so a lot of the records had been moved out. But it’s the sort of thing that it’s like, well, what do you do when just all the records of ownership of everything just disappear, right. And this happens, if you read in history, again, you see this all the time where like, records just got burned, or lost or whatever. And then there’s like, whole industries just dedicated to like proving and having insurance for and keeping, like, alternate, you know, copies of records of things that the government is supposed to have records of, and it’s just a totally wild system that that probably made a whole lot of sense when we didn’t have better ways of doing it. But it’s certainly at least exploring, worth exploring some of these these new technologies that are a pretty great fit for this use case,

Neville Mehra  

I want to I want to pivot from my struggles with with getting documents figured out and just touch briefly on something that you mentioned in passing that you’re in the Texas Hill Country outside Austin and a little bit about the history of Austin. I’ve actually never been I’m ashamed to admit, but I can’t help but notice, it feels like my entire Twitter feed lives in or around Austin, Texas, or is in the process of moving there. Right. I mean, famously, Joe Rogan is out there now. Tim Ferriss moved a few years ago, and I think, you know, it was kind of like early in the wave of like, you know, San Francisco and the Bay Area, moving to Austin, and then a lot of like, just the intellectuals and thinkers from Ryan Holiday to David Parral that Eliasson, there’s a ton of people who I, who I read and follow online are all in or around Austin, like, it feels like it’s almost like what Vienna was 100 years ago? What do you attribute that to what’s going on in Austin? Look, I’m very biased

Jonathan Hillis  

here. I was born and raised in Austin and grew up there spent the first 18 years of my life there, and then left for about a decade and just came back recently spent most of that decade in the Bay Area. And I think a couple things are happening. First of all, you know, there’s the obvious stuff, which is just like COVID, broke the dam of San Francisco being the sort of like technology hub. And suddenly there was this, you know, Nash equilibrium of exit from San Francisco and people are trying to figure out where to go next. And, you know, I think the winners of that were certainly New York City and LA and Miami, but you know, also Austin, and Austin’s the one on that list for you like those other places are all like very big cities. You know, Austin, is a little smaller. Why is it on the list? Austin has a couple principles that I think make it a really good fit for the type of people that you just described to are moving there in mass. And by the way, it is true, it’s not just your Twitter feed, it’s been pretty incredible over the last year or two, you know, go to so many different gatherings, parties, dinners, events, with like, large groups of super interesting internet intellectuals, many of whom don’t know each other. Like it’s not just like, there’s one group of people hanging out. It’s like lots of different pockets, you know, of people with, you know, different flavors of cool, interesting stuff going on. And I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that Austin, has been growing at a consistent rate since the 1850s. And so Austin’s been growing at about 8% annually for you know, over 150 years now. And so it is a place of constant change, and a place of constant growth, and pretty much always has been and so you know, as a result, I think the platelet culture of it is very different from the culture of, for instance, San Francisco, which is like, in many ways, pretty anti growth. And Austin has gotten and we’re starting to see some like unfortunate trends and in the opposite direction, but I think generally Austin has been pretty good at incorporating new people and you know, growing the culture, I also think, you know, it’s just like a pretty ideal place in terms of like, Keep Austin weird. has always been the slogan. There’s a lot of like live music and artists and, you know, I view Austin as kind of the independent online creator capital. If you think about, you know, those other cities and sort of what piece of San Francisco they ended up with, you know, New York ended up with, like the FinTech and, you know, decentralized finance stuff is probably probably like most there, Miami ended up with, like, I don’t know, the kids with lamb Lambos or something like that. It’s sort of part of tech that I don’t personally really identify with, you know, la maybe ended up with like, fashion and like, whatever high culture piece, and I think Austin ended up with all the parts that I identify with, with just like the, the independent online creators, the independent thinkers, you know, all those sort of people, you you just mentioned to our people who I also follow in and enjoy talking with and respect. And so yeah, I think that that is something that’s been very cool to watch. And I think is like a pretty natural fit for this place,

Neville Mehra  

sort of prod you a little bit again, and say, you’ve got what I think of as somewhat of a contrarian view, maybe maybe we’ll unpack this and realize it’s not but there seems to be like an emerging consensus that says remote work is great. Obviously, I’ve been a fan anyone any regular listeners know, I’ve been a fan for a long time. But there’s this emerging consensus that says remote work is great. If you’ve already got the say, a job or at least a network, look, if you’ve established yourself in some community or in some way, and now you can just like reap all the lifestyle benefits of being remote like move to a city that’s cheaper or better in some way. You’re just not constrained. Like you, you already have the Wall Street job and the Wall Street salary, but you’re not stuck paying the Manhattan rents, right? Like that seems to be the thing. But if you’re early in your career, if you don’t know anybody yet, if you haven’t established yourself, you don’t have a network, then it’s sort of like people are saying remote is kind of like almost like handcuffs for you. Because it stops you from being able to make those connections and just kind of piecing together different bits of your work. I almost feel like you’re saying the opposite that like the place to meet people is on Twitter and in discord rooms. But when it comes to actually doing the work, once you found your tribe or whatever you should get together in a cabin and like, do some kind of a sprint towards working on a project because meatspace is the higher bandwidth than the real world. Do I have your take? Right? And if so, what’s everybody else getting wrong?

Jonathan Hillis  

That’s a fantastic question. And I hadn’t really considered that as being a contrarian view. But when you frame it that way, I think you’re right. It’s definitely different than the mainstream take. Yes. So if you look into like dating apps are probably the best example of this. There’s no more highly motivated group of people, you know, searching for connections with other people, then the dating pool, and what we’ve seen over the past decade, you can find like insane charts on this where basically like, and it’s no surprise, right, we’ve all like experienced this with our friends who are dating, or maybe dating ourselves, we’ve gone from this world where you you met people at church or you know, work or whatever these like IRL situations, all of that has just totally fallen off the cliff. And the one thing that’s just completely taken over as the primary way people meet is online on dating apps. And then of course, they get together IRL and spend time together. And the reason for that is because the pool of people on the internet is so much bigger than the pool of people who you’re ever going to be in the same place with in person. And the filtering mechanisms are so much better. It’s not just like, you show up to a party. And you, you know, like, I don’t know, how you decide at a party who to talk to basically like, you know, some combination of like, who’s not talking to other people and like, who’s standing near you, and like, you know, whatever other factors that are totally irrelevant, you know, your ability to connect with a person, whereas on the internet, it’s a huge pool. And then you can really find your specific corner of that world where, where you really resonate with people, you know, whether that’s a subreddit, or discord or corner of Twitter that you hang out in, you can really find people who you resonate with, and then you can get together with them in real life. And I think that’s a much smarter way to build deep connections. You know, that said, I also don’t believe that like, you should spend all of your working time IRL with people I think you can do probably 80 90% of it remote and asynchronously. But the really important part is that 10% Where you do get together you know, you have high bandwidth reality to build connections and trust and relationships and have like deep meaningful conversations that are much harder to do on on Zoom and I think the liminal time and space of of being together IRL unlocks you know the type of conversations that you’re just never going to schedule time for and like hop on a call for so you know, I think people talk a lot about there’s like in person Maxis there’s remote Maxis I’m certainly neither of those. I’m more of like believer in happy medium, but I think what people get wrong about hybrid is, you know, the like standard definition of like hybrid work right now is like two days a week in the office three days a week get home, that is just as limiting, you have to be in one place if you’re going to be getting together every week with the people. And then you also have this problem of like doing a meeting where you know, some people are in the office and some people are remote is just like the worst of all worlds. And so the version of hybrid that I think makes the most sense is for the vast majority of time you go live wherever you want, you do whatever you want remote, asynchronous, but then you get together everybody in the same place for a week or two weeks. And you have that like really important in person experience a couple times a year. Yeah, I’m

Neville Mehra  

100% with you on that. And I think that the the companies have been doing remote well and have been doing it for a long time and have been successful, like automatic and buffer and others, even before COVID. And everything else necessitated this and it became normal, like, they’d already sort of figured that out that this works really well, we can hire from anywhere in the world, we’re working 24 hours a day, because people are in their own time zones, you get all these benefits, but there’s still something to be said even even though they’d figured out that part of the culture early on, like, there’s still something to be said, for getting everybody together and just having FaceTime, you know, there’s the social benefit of it. But then also the obviously the work benefit of it, where there’s like, you’re not just getting the work done, but you’re maybe inventing the next big thing, or whatever it is. And maybe some of this comes down to like as far as which one of these visions is right, maybe some of it comes down to my old favorite question of like, what you’re optimizing for, right, and maybe the people who are kind of saying the opposite view that like oh, for your network, and everything else, it’s better to have had a career first, maybe they’re just sort of thinking more within like a particular company or something like that. And if you’re hanging out in weird corners of the internet, then it’s a totally different, it’s just a totally different game that you’re playing, you’re not trying to sort of become the boss’s favorite, you know, by by showing up in person and then taking that remote. It’s more about finding the people that share your your weird particular interests, or who value your creativity or something like that.

Jonathan Hillis  

I think that’s exactly the right distinction. And I think this is where we’re gonna see Dows really shine in the next decade, right is like, like you said, it makes a lot of sense to want to spend the first couple years of your career IRL if you’re trying to like ingratiate yourself to some boss. But if you’re just if you’re trying to build reputation within a network, then you can actually do that much better in the context of things like doubts.

Neville Mehra  

So let’s talk about that transition, not just Dows. But more generally, just going from sort of like the corporate world to whether it’s a creative economy, or Dows, or web three and all of that, but just moving from like a traditional, stable corporate job. So you left Instacart was about a year ago now. Yeah, almost exactly a year ago. And what kind of made it finally the right time to leave? What caused you to leave? And what I mean, I’ve seen the stuff that you’ve done since then, but I don’t know if that’s exactly it. Did you leave to build creator cabins and do the things you’re doing now? Or what was the what was going on in your mind there that made at the right time,

Jonathan Hillis  

there was a point in 2019, where I was pretty burnt out on my work. And my boss at the time, they would hon, our chief product officer just sort of looked at me and said, Hey, man, like you need to go take a month off, I hadn’t taken a vacation in a long time. He’s like, You need to just take a month off and go sit on a beach somewhere. And like, think about what you want to do with your life, which was totally the right advice. And I was very grateful for him doing that. And I basically I did like the next week, I flew, you know, somewhat stereotypically to like a remote island off of the southwestern coast of Thailand, and just hung out there and, you know, did some like designing your life exercises and wrote a bunch of like possible five year paths for myself and really thought about what I wanted to do and, and, you know, one of the things that came out of that process was the seeds of what I’m doing now. And I went back and, you know, actually, when I was in a position where I really needed to, like plan out my exit from the company, because I was was sort of deeply involved in some core stuff. And so planned it all out was like ready to I had my scheduled leave day, it was the first week of May of 2020. The like first week of February, I started telling my team I was gonna leave and you know, then of course, COVID happened. And all of a sudden, my role at Instacart I lead the shoppers and marketplace teams. And so suddenly, we needed half a million new Instacart shoppers overnight, to deal with all of the demand. And so it was not going to be an ideal time for me to walk away. So I agreed to stay on for six more months and, you know, sort of saw through the early phases of our pandemic response and I was really proud of of the work that the team did and the work that shoppers did during that period, but then, you know, ultimately knew that I was going to leave and So started exploring, you know, the what had interested me most at Instacart was the role of the gig economy in creating new types of autonomous, you know, relatively independent work for people. And some of that, you know, didn’t play out exactly how I hoped it would in the context of web two platforms. But I think the underlying idea was that, you know, in the 70s, there was this guy named Ronald Coase, who wrote this piece called the nature of the firm, where it ended up winning a Nobel Prize. And he was talking about, like, idea that like, companies shouldn’t actually exist, if you just take economic theory, first principles, like companies don’t make sense. And so he was like, why do companies exist? Well, they exist because of transaction costs, because it’s too hard for everybody to be a contractor and just work with each other. Because you have to, like, deal with all the paperwork, basically. And what the gig economy, you know, unlocked for me was this realization that software dramatically lowers the transaction costs of people working together. And you can, you know, when you lower those barriers, you get structures that don’t look like companies. And the first examples of that were these these web two gig economy companies. But that same principle, I realized was going to start applying to knowledge workers. And the way I wasn’t sure exactly how that was going to play out. But I got super interested in the greater economy and starting to understand how knowledge workers were becoming more independent, and autonomous, and then started exploring crypto stuff. And, you know, ended up being starting this thing called the Creator Co Op, which was this group of independent online creators wanted to go build a cabin in the woods, that was like, the actual plan for a posted stuckart. Everything else was just kind of like for fun. And I was like, I’m just gonna go, I’m burnt out, I’m gonna go build a cabin in the woods with my wife, and we’re just going to hang out, and I’m going to, like, get away from it all for a while, I failed miserably at that. I mean, we built the cabin, but I did not stop doing things. And so we brought out the Creator, Co Op group. And, you know, we’re sitting around a campfire one night and decided to take some of these principles we were talking about, about kind of the future organizations and cooperation and independent online workers, and turn that into a Dow, which became cabin, the Dow, and, you know, originally the idea was just like, let’s provide a space, a limited time and space for independent online creators to come together and a residency program for that. And I think what we’ve seen is that, you know, the emergent process of creating place for knowledge workers and independent online creators to come together and think about these things, has led to something much bigger than than what we anticipated

Neville Mehra  

started with a cabinet. And now we’re talking about like, Should nation states still exist? Do they have a place in our modern world?

Jonathan Hillis  

Exactly, exactly. Funny. I like I did not, you know, I couldn’t have predicted this. Again, I’m not some like hardcore libertarian guy. I don’t think anybody else that’s part of the cabin network would describe themselves that way. We’re just, you know, independent online creators who are kind of out on the edges and the frontier of this stuff. And we’re starting to poke into some really interesting big questions.

Neville Mehra  

Yeah, I mean, you can you can also look at it as sort of like this generation of us that grew up sort of experimenting with permission lessly, with bits has moved on to Adams, right, where we were all absolutely thinking about the gig economy. I mean, this is a question I wrestle with myself in the sense of so you were in a funny position at Instacart. As I think about it, in the sense that you were working for like a big VC backed company, as an employee making gig economy work possible for lots of people. I think you said you 5x The number of shoppers that you had, who I presume are all gig economy workers, probably 1099, maybe, depending on the local regulations there. Is this sort of debate like is, is this freedom for the worker is the gig economy something where it’s like, the utopian view is like, you know, you can sort of turn on and turn off work when you want to write something like Uber or Instacart. Makes work elastic. You know, if I was a driver, whatever, 50 years ago, and I wanted to go visit my family in my home country, I need to ask for vacation and plan all the stuff. Whereas now it’s like, oh, you know, I want to go out tonight, I need some more money. Okay, I’ll drive a few extra shifts. Oh, next week, I want to go visit my family. Okay, I won’t log into the app. And it’s like, there’s this sort of perfect view of it. And then there’s the the counterpoint, which is you used to be able to get a job with a salary and benefits and maybe even a pension. And now it’s like, you’re only as good as like, you know, that last fare that last gig that you did that last trip that was, you know, $5 in your pocket or something like that, where do you sort of come down on this or both right or what’s, how do you? How do you kind of look at that?

Jonathan Hillis  

Yeah, I mean, I think almost necessarily, they both have elements of truth to them. You know, when I was getting started at an Insta card, and in Kenyan sort of web two gig economy. I was and I think all of us were very optimistic about what it was going to allow for people to do. And I think we were very excited. About and when we talk to shoppers, they did a tremendous amount of user research with the team. And those were the things shoppers really talked about was the autonomy, the independence, the flexibility, the ability to earn money, almost instantly without someone, you know, deciding when they could work a shift or deciding you know, whether or not they could have the job like it was really put a lot of power in the hands of individuals. And that was something we were really excited about. And that was why I was so attracted, particularly to the shopper side of the platform, and the opportunity to build software for gig workers. Now, of course, as you said, as the gig economy grew, and as these things played out, you know, I think it was easy, in retrospect, to look back and think, yeah, we were probably a little bit overly optimistic about some of these outcomes. And, and didn’t anticipate some of the downsides that emerged. And part of what you know, really drew me to web three was the fact that it provides a lot of good solutions to the problems that ended up, you know, becoming issues in the context of gig work and web two. So I think the hope now with with web three is that you can solve some of these problems by providing higher degrees of ownership and governance. And, you know, the ability for people who are impacted by the decisions of the networks to have a say, in those networks more directly, which I think was the thing that was really missing in the context of these web two platforms. Now, that said, I think it’s also a good opportunity for us to learn from past mistakes, and really think critically about how web three is going to evolve. Because I tend to be perhaps a little bit of a techno optimist and a believer that, you know, these things can create really positive new outcomes for people. But as we saw in web two, as I personally saw, I didn’t fully anticipate some of the negative consequences of that. And so I don’t know that I have great answers here. But I do know that we all probably need to be spending more time not just thinking about the optimistic case for how this stuff evolves, but also the ways that it can go wrong. Yeah,

Neville Mehra  

to that point, there was a really good or thought provoking anyway, piece from from Moxie Marlinspike, the signal creator on I’m sure you read it on, like the potential pitfalls of web three, I’ll call it I won’t necessarily take all the concerns, you know, straight at face value. But I think there’s Yeah, I think right now, what we’re seeing are a lot of people who are aping in to the sort of web three narrative. And yes, like the the theoretical ideal of let’s say, like an Uber that’s owned collectively by the drivers, and the passengers who own some tokens, perhaps in proportion to like their usage of the system, or the amount they drive or something like that, so that all the outcomes are aligned. Sounds great. But we’re not quite there yet. I would say,

Jonathan Hillis  

No, we’re certainly not there. And I don’t think you can judge the values and vision of web three entirely by the current state. I think it’s I’m glad that you know, he wrote that article. And I think it’s, it’s good that people are providing well structured, thoughtful, intentional critiques, I think we need more of that right now from people who are really diving in like he did, you know, trying things out in web three, and then coming back and saying, Hey, this doesn’t quite align with the principles and the values. But I also think like, You got to cut early technologies, some slack for not being the full realization of the long term goals, because it these are hard things that are going to take time,

Neville Mehra  

we’ve been sort of moving, jumping around a lot. But one thing that we’ve been sort of, kind of mushing together is this idea of like, the creator economy, the gig economy and just sort of like entrepreneurship more generally, and wanting like, you know, to create stuff, start companies, I used to see, like those sort of distinct things. I mean, going back whatever, 10 or 15 years or something, there was, you know, the idea of someone who was starting a startup was probably a coder. And then there was like a blogger or someone like that, who was just like, you know, writing articles on WordPress and trying to get people to read them. Something that sort of flipped in my mind over the years is the idea that like those are actually maybe on on the same continuum of people who are creating content online, and people who are ultimately building businesses. I mentioned David Parral. In passing, he’s a good example of somebody who built a big Twitter following built a big following with his essays and writing online and now teaches people to write online and has sort of much grander visions for what his company rite of passage could become. It sounds to me like you’ve probably thought even more about that with the way that I’ve heard you talk about creator cabins and just kind of the way you’re thinking about web three and ownership and everything in general. So I’m curious, do you see that as like a sort of continuum with the idea of like creating content online and ultimately building and owning a business? Or am I oversimplifying? I

Jonathan Hillis  

think that’s spot on. I’m really glad you brought up, David because, you know, rite of passage was was actually I went through the, you know, rite of passage course. And that was where I met a lot of the folks who ended up being a part of the Creator Co Op, which was sort of the precursor to cabin And so had no idea that’s really Yeah, fantastic community, you know, I’ve had the chance to spend some time with David and just have a tremendous amount of respect for what he’s building and have met a lot of wonderful humans through through that community. So I that really resonates. You know, I think that Balaji has also talked a little bit about this that like, the kind of future dynamic duo of a startup is like one founder, who’s a programmer and one founder who’s like, basically content creator, because so much of like, building a company and a brand right now is about storytelling. And if you look at Calvin, for instance, as a dowel, you know, are are sort of like two biggest and most active guilds are the media Guild and the product guild. And I think like, that’s a really important combination of kind of like building the story and the narrative and also building the products. It’s funny, I had forgotten to you mentioned that there was sort of this dynamic, if you go back 10 years ago, of people feeling like these were two very different things like starting a company and being like an indie creator, where like different things were like, if you really think about it, it’s pretty clear that they’re the same thing. They’re like somebody, you know, going out on their own and trying to build an independent business. And I actually have to bring this full circle for one of the essays I wrote for David Burrell’s write a passage course, I wrote an essay called Six economies of online creators. And I think there’s actually a spectrum here, where if you’re trying to make $100,000 per year on the internet, you know, there’s sort of like six orders of magnitude of ways you can do that you can make $1 per year from 100,000 people, you know, which is sort of like the influencer economy adds micro payments, etc. You can make $10 per year from 10,000 people, right, which is sort of the gig economy, ebooks drop shipping transactional gigs, you can make $100 per year from 1000 people, the fan economy, right, and this is sort of the classic Kevin Kelly 1000, true fans, patrons subscription, newsletter content, etc. You can make $1,000 per year from 100 people, the passion economy, you know, in Legion, STURMS, things like online courses, coaching tutoring that we’ve really seen emerge over the past few years. And then you can make, you know, $10,000 a year from 10 people is sort of like in the economy where you’re starting to get into like early stage startups or independent, you know, niche SAS can indie consulting, or you can make, you know, $10,000 a year from one person, which is just a job. And so I think that like these things are much more on a spectrum than then maybe people used to talk about or

Neville Mehra  

I think that that’s an amazing take. I think it’s maybe it’s just me, but I’m inclined to say that’s probably under realized out in the world. So far, the idea that all of those things are on that continuum, and that the skills that you need to build a large business these days more and more look like the skills that you need to build an online audience, because how else are you going to get noticed in the sort of media environment that we’re in the last question I have for you? Yep. Okay.

Jonathan Hillis  

And by the way, on that note, yeah, just to dive into that a tiny bit more. You know, this also ties into a lot of the stuff we were talking about with, like network states, right in in sort of biologies terminology, which is that if you want to build not just a company, but also maybe country, or at least a LARP, as one, it’s the same principle, it makes a lot more sense to build the audience online, to build the community online to build the connections online. And then to start to take that stuff into the real world, whether that’s building a business or you know, building a nation state, it’s the same principle you wanna, you want to sort of manifest that stuff. First, in terms of the story and the online community.

Neville Mehra  

That’s amazing that you said that because I have a goal, I was just going over my like annual review for last year and setting goals for this year. And I have a sort of persistent sticky goal, which is to build an audience. And on one hand, it sort of feels kind of like, like a vain and superficial goal. But But I have a note to myself like, no, don’t think of it that way. Because everything else you want to do, including building a digital country stems from this, like, this is the one thing that unlocks everything else, this is the most like, high leverage thing to achieve. From my list of goals beyond just as the sort of personal health and wellness and kind of spiritual things and family things like among achievements. Everything else stems from this because yeah, whether you just want to get your ideas in the world or build a big company or even raise capital, if that’s the way you want to go or disrupt the existing world order. They all start from having people who are interested in your ideas and listening to you or just, you know, having an audience online.

Jonathan Hillis  

Yeah. On that note, I want to maybe talk about something kind of personal there, which is like I really struggled with that even a year ago when I left Instacart I think I probably had something like 300 Twitter followers, and you know, I didn’t see myself as the type of person who was going to do that in frankly, even I had the feeling of like, Oh, it feels like a little Griffie or surely or, you know, whatever. A lot of these things, I think people often have hang ups about to like, go out and you know, do a lot of tweeting or whatever. And I think I came to the same realization you came to, which was that like, this is actually the only way to accomplish my goals. And so I need to take it seriously. And I need to get good at it. And I had a bit of a mental reframe, which hopefully might be helpful for some people, which is like, if you treat it not as like just shilling but as like truly building in public and you know, sharing your journey in a way that can provide value to other people, then I think it really reframes the conversation. And so what I started doing was like, literally, as you know, we were building the first cabin, I just started tweeting about it, right. I was like, Okay, I’m like hauling stones out of the side of this hill to build a fire pit, you know, today, and like, the whole day, actually, I started with a twitter poll, like, what what should I built, like, build a fire pit? I was like, okay, cool, I’m gonna do that. And I’m gonna, like, tweet pictures of it, and like, whatever, you know, and then, you know, we were like, pouring the foundation for the cabin. And I like was up at 3am with the crew pouring the cap, you know, the cabin Foundation. And I was just like, live tweeting it and talking about how I thought that like structures of construction contractors related to the gig economy, you know, and then that turned into an essay and like, I just think you have to be willing to, you know, reframe it from from like, Oh, I’m out here, like, what, who am I kind of like, sharing my random thoughts with the world to like, Hey, I’m building something. And I’m just going to put that out in the world. And, you know, try to create opportunities for other people to engage with what I’m trying to build and create and and let them like, be a part of the journey as well. I

Neville Mehra  

love that. And I would just to build on top of what you’re saying, what you’re describing is something that I’m honestly not a huge fan of his I haven’t always listened to his stuff. But Gary Vee Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this idea of like documenting, right? Rather than we think of creating content, you think of like, Oh, back in school, I wrote this essay, and I’ve got to have this giant epiphany. But what you’re describing, at least with the cabin was something different, where you’re just basically saying, Hey, this is what I’m doing. And it’s easy to be cynical about that and make fun of like, you know, everybody sharing their lunch on social media, or whatever. But that’s actually the more authentic and interesting thing, coming up with some pithy summary that you know, of like a hot take, or whatever can be funny can be interesting can help you build an audience, but like, what you’re describing actually helps people connect with you more authentically. And it’s easy for me to sit here and say that, but when it comes time to actually, you know, be vulnerable, and show the behind the scenes, not the perfect finish, I’ve already polished it thing that I’ve been working on for years, but like, you know, hey, this is, this is my shitty little thing I’m working on right now. And it’s not done yet. But hey, I’m showing it to the world. Anyway, that’s the hard part. But that’s what works.

Jonathan Hillis  

It is it is. But the magic here, like the cool thing about this that happens is you start sharing it and other people show up with their own ideas, right and with their own feedback. And suddenly, you build that into your creative process. And so it’s not just like, it actually works a lot better if you don’t just like go off in a dark room and polish the thing and then put it out in the world and like expect people to see your genius. But if you you know, take the time to share the rough draft, share the ideas, share what you’re working on, what you’ll find is that other people will come out of the woodwork, and they’ll have their own thoughts and ideas and things to contribute. They’ll point you towards resources you didn’t know about, they’ll show up and help you build this. And that’s a pretty magical experience. Like

Neville Mehra  

there’s the famous software’s eating the world. I feel like this is almost Agile is eating the world, like like waterfall is dead, not only project management with everything, it’s just you’ve just got to put it out there and let people beat it up or tell you why they wouldn’t use it or whatever it is, and then see, you know, the last question I had for you is going to be for advice for listeners, for people, whether they’re, let’s say some someone listening is, you know, 25, early in their career of sitting in a would be corporate office job probably working from home right now. And they want you know, that freedom and independence, I was going to say, you know, where would you steer them towards that you’ve got all these web three opportunities, you’ve got creating content online, and you’ve got the sort of more technical chops coding in the like, I feel like we sort of answered that a little bit. But I’ll give you the last word. Just any advice for people who are listening to this and just want to have that kind of more independent online creator career?

Jonathan Hillis  

You know, I think the most important part is what we just talked about being vulnerable, putting yourself out there building in public, but there’s there’s more to it than that. Right? I think it’s it’s about finding your little corner of the internet to hang out with. If you look at all of the most creative, productive people in history, they almost always were operating within an environment where they were surrounded by other creative people working on interesting stuff and that sort of thing. Whether you know, it’s, it’s like Florence or whether it’s Los Alamos or or, you know, wherever you have to find that place for you. And now those places are online. And so I think it’s about being willing to put yourself out there and be vulnerable. But to do it in a way where you’re you’re doing it as part of a community, and where you’re, you’re finding the other people who want to do and think about and talk about the same things as you. And if you can find those people, and then you can be vulnerable with them. And you know, you can dedicate yourselves collectively to the craft that you’re working on whatever it is, right, whether that’s joining a Dao and participating in, in building something, whether that’s finding a community of programmers or podcasters, or writers or whatever, right, it doesn’t matter what as long as it’s something that you’re really excited about. And that you can find a community of other people that are really excited about and you can push each other that that’s how you make the magic on the internet.

Neville Mehra  

I love it. That’s a perfect place to leave it. John, thank you so much for your time today. Yeah,

Jonathan Hillis  

thank you. This was a tremendously fun conversation. I really appreciate it.