52: Jack Conte - Draw the Next Page

Summary

Dialectic Episode 52: Jack Conte – Draw the Next Page

Podcast: Dialectic
Host: Jackson Dahl
Guest: Jack Conte (CEO & co-founder, Patreon; musician with Pomplamoose & Scary Pockets)
Date: July 21, 2026

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Episode Overview

This wide-ranging, deeply personal conversation unpacks the mindsets, stories, and philosophy behind Jack Conte’s creative and entrepreneurial path—from prolific musician (Pomplamoose, Scary Pockets) and content creator, to founder/CEO of Patreon. Host Jackson Dahl explores themes of artistic worth, creative endurance, the tension between art and commerce, leadership, and the future of supporting creators online. The episode is rich in insights for artists, founders, and anyone interested in the mechanics of building both art and impact.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Art, Commerce, and the Creator’s Worth

• From Artist to Founder:
  Jack describes his background as a "YouTuber" and musician with no prior tech experience. He shares how Patreon was sketched at his kitchen table, born out of frustration with the commodification of creators by ad-driven platforms ([00:00], [99:14]).

  Quote:
  “We've been looking at these fucking dashboards on social media companies for 20 years now that tell us you just got 3 million views and that's worth $18 in ad revenue. That's your worth to the world. And I think that's a load of horseshit...We need things that people are deeply proud of.”
  —Jack Conte [00:56]

• On “Selling Out”:
  Jack distinguishes between earning money by making art, and changing what you make for purely commercial reasons.

  Quote:
  “I think selling out is doing something other than making art. If you get paid for your art, that's the opposite of selling out. That's making sure that you're setting up your future so that you can make more art.”
  —Jack Conte [01:10]

2. Endurance and Energy: Managing Output at Scale

• Managing Creative Demands:
  Jack reveals how he juggled 100+ music videos a year (across two bands) with being CEO of Patreon: batching production, leveraging teams, and relying fundamentally on his chief of staff ([04:51]–[09:42]).

  Quote:
  “The power of a team, the output of a team is exponential compared to the output of a person...I do not function without my chief of staff... She is very much like the executive function side of my brain.”
  —Jack Conte [07:14]

• Leaning Into Energy-Positive Work:
  Over time, Jack has optimized his role to focus on high-“spike” areas (his unique strengths), delegating more of his weaknesses.

  Quote:
  “What are my spikes?...I want to spend more time on those things. That is super energy giving for me because that's the stuff where I'm in flow.”
  —Jack Conte [10:30]

• Coping Mechanisms for Overwhelm:
  He shares a highly practical, therapeutic approach: break down negative feelings into discrete problem statements, draft possible solutions, and take action—helping to escape the sense of “burnout” ([13:32]).

  Quote:
  “Usually when I feel really shitty, what it actually is is a compounding set of four or five problems that are all really gnarly hitting at once...I list out those problem statements...do the first three [solutions] for each one...immediately after...I feel so much better. And I'm ready to go again.”
  —Jack Conte [14:33]

3. Narrative, Brand, and Silicon Valley Mindset

• Cultural Divide in Tech:
  Jack believes most of Silicon Valley underestimates the power of brand, creativity, and storytelling, focusing almost solely on product/engineering.

  Quote:
  “My read of the Valley is people undervalue brand and narrative and creativity and storytelling. Things that in my world, where I come from, those are the things. And in Silicon Valley, the main thing is the product.”
  —Jack Conte [47:15]

  He asserts this is why Patreon is “underrated” or even “dismissed” in certain tech circles ([50:49]):

  "I think I have to take accountability for that. Like, my vibe is not very Silicon Valley.… my values, the things that I care about, you know, show up in how the company talks...we very much speak to creators..."
  —Jack Conte [51:14]

4. Art vs. Content & Patronage Through the Ages

• The “Art vs. Content” Continuum:
  Jack offers a working definition, distinguishing art as an emotional transfer and content as commoditized and outcome-driven ([25:49]).

  Quote:
  “Content...its purpose is not necessarily the transference of an emotion...the purpose is some intended outcome...When I think about art, I think about...you end up literally transferring that feeling you had into another person.”
  —Jack Conte [27:25]

• Patronage Throughout History:
  The podcast traces the economics of art from historical patronage (Medici, churches) to 20th-century physical media, to the rise of ad-driven, free internet platforms. Patreon is presented as returning power to creators—but with “democratized” micro-patronage instead of a single wealthy donor ([33:40], [38:03]).

  Quote:
  “Any piece of art in history books was funded basically through patronage. Was funded because somebody was like, I really like what you make. You're cool. Here's a bag of coins, go make more cool stuff.”
  —Jack Conte [33:40]

5. Patreon’s Mission, Membership, and Experimentation

• Shifting from “busking” to Professional Creators:
  Patreon’s approach evolved from a patronage/donation framing to a toolkit for creators to build independent businesses: CRM, one-time digital sales, robust membership systems ([40:20]).

  • Emergence of the “membership” model and paywalled/freemium content as a modern norm, accelerated by podcasting and the pandemic ([41:18]).
  • Strategic focus: “Our primary KPI is dollars sent to creators. That’s not a byproduct... That’s the purpose of the company.” ([57:38])

• Long-Term Trust as Moat:
  Patreon’s “spiritual” advantage is the accumulation of trust by doing right by creators, even at the expensive of short-term revenue ([58:59]).

  Quote:
  “We've done right by creators for 13 years. And that compounds. If you’re going to trust [a platform] with your monthly income stream...you're going to go with the platform that you think is the good guys.”
  —Jack Conte [59:28]

• Why Prioritize Creators?:
  “There needs to be a big powerful Company that has sharp elbows, that muscles its way around, that makes the world better for creators. If such a company...does not exist, things are going to keep getting better for consumers, which is asymmetric…”
  —Jack Conte [55:43]

6. On Leadership & Company Building

• Who is a Good Founder/Leader?
  Jack’s lessons from leading Patreon:

  • Ambition for the mission > ambition for self
  • Reliability (“Do you do what you say you’re going to do?”)
  • The “passion muscle”—falling in love with creating value for others
  • Egoless self-reflection and humility
  • Ability to both “strip down to the studs” and act short-term, with long-term clarity ([65:01]–[70:43])

  Quote:
  "I like working with really ambitious people, but I want that ambition to be aimed at the mission of the company. And when the ambition is aimed at the self, that's on the denominator of the leadership quality equation."
  —Jack Conte [66:05]

• On Stepping Aside:
  Jack is open to someday hiring a “professional CEO” if Patreon’s culture, governance, and values are cemented for the long-term ([63:38]).

7. Creativity, Talent, Process, and Building Fans

• On Talent vs. Obsession:
  Jack argues that “interest” is usually more decisive than innate talent; he describes himself as having started bad at music, but relentlessly obsessed ([74:38]).

  Quote:
  “If you care about something enough. All those things that I just meant, like, I cared about those things. ...I definitely fall in love with a lot of things.”
  —Jack Conte [77:18]

• Pride, Quality, and Frequency:
  Jack feels we have enough “stuff” online; the bar for publishing should be whether you’re “deeply proud” of it. But for making fans—a true connection—authenticity and regular frequency of output are key ([78:29], [79:55]).

  Quote (on making fans):
  “That is when I think about when I become a fan of somebody. ...Fucking Prince. Oh man, Prince is just like, don't like it. Take it or leave it. Fucking go away, right?...That's what I want to be. That's how I want to spend my time on Earth is like, don't like it, go away.”
  —Jack Conte [81:42]

  • Charlies Kaufman’s advice: “Say who you are. Really say it. Say it for the kids who aren't born yet...Say the thing you're ashamed of...and say it.”
    —via Jack Conte [80:44]

• On Community vs. Audience:
  The best creators generate environments where fans connect horizontally (with each other), share common purpose, and take collective action (e.g. charity). Audience is one-way; community is multi-edged ([85:19]).

• Creativity and Intimacy:
  Collaboration and trust (e.g. with his wife) allow for creative risk-taking, producing more honest and impactful work ([97:43]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Draw the Next Page” — On Perseverance and Experimentation:
  “I literally had to say to myself, this isn’t going to work. That’s okay. Draw the next page.”
  —Jack Conte [00:00], [99:48]

• On Art as (Almost) Supernatural:
  “Music to me feels like the closest thing to something supernatural that I’ve ever known...it feels like it comes from somewhere else.”
  —Jack Conte [100:34]

• On Risk & Lucid Dream “Reality Checks”:
  “Anxiety is a risk key for me. It means that I'm gravitating towards something I think is going to go wrong, that is probably not going to go wrong. ...Some people use meditation for that. For me, it was lucid dreaming."
  —Jack Conte [108:28]

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Thematic Timestamps (MM:SS)

• Art vs. Commerce: Self-worth & “Selling Out”: [00:00]–[01:38], [25:49]–[33:20]
• Endurance, Energy, & Creative Output: [03:49]–[10:30], [13:32]–[16:35]
• Practical Coping With Burnout/Overwhelm: [13:32]–[15:36]
• Patreon’s Genesis & Membership Model Evolution: [33:40]–[41:18]
• On Brand/Narrative vs. Product in Tech: [46:44]–[50:49]
• Leadership, Trust, Culture: [63:18]–[70:43]
• Creativity, Community, and Fanbuilding: [74:38]–[88:31]
• Risk, Creativity, Scarcity, and Lucid Dreaming: [104:20]–[109:22]

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Additional Memorable Segments

• Three Types of Artists
  Persona 1: Only art, “don’t bother me.”
  Persona 2: Tolerates the business side.
  Persona 3: Thrives on building an empire, running their own “media company.”
  ([23:32]–[24:43])

• On Parasociality:
  Jack isn’t especially worried about the phenomenon, seeing it as a novel but natural media consequence ([83:43]).

• On the Decline of Collectives & Bands:
  Changing economics and the primacy of the “face” in one-to-many communication have made collectives rare; future: more duos ([91:44]–[95:39]).

• Favorite Filmmakers/Influences:
  Michel Gondry is singled out for inventiveness. Also mentions JJ Abrams and Christopher Nolan ([89:48]–[90:47]).

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Conclusion

Jack Conte’s episode is a masterclass in living at the intersection of passion, process, and persistence. His philosophy—“Draw the next page”—underscores a career built from creative experimentation, resilience in the face of ambiguity, and a deep respect for both the emotional and practical realities of art. The conversation is invaluable for creators, founders, and anyone seeking to build meaning (and a livelihood) in today’s world.

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For more: Visit Dialectic.fm for the full transcript and references.

Transcript

[Jack Conte]

I've never had a tech job. This is the only company I've ever worked at in my life. This is my first job.

[Dialectic Host]

Really?

[Jack Conte]

Yes. My read of the Valley is people undervalue brand and narrative and creativity and storytelling. Things that in my world, where I come from, those are the things. And in Silicon Valley, the main thing is the product. But you can know that the product is a thing and care about narrative and creativity and storytelling and brand. And I think if you don't care about those things, it's very hard to influence culture and to build a brand that people love and to have trust with your customer. Customers. And like, it's very hard to do those things. A lot of those things are a completely different skill set. There's a lot of operators who, like, if it doesn't show up in the P and L, they don't believe that it's real. I think it is possible to make art and also to want to get paid for your art. I think selling out is doing something other than making art. Like, if you get paid for your art, that's the opposite of selling out. That's making sure that you're setting up your future so that you can make more art. And like, I am on a mission in life and in this company to help creative people understand that they have meaning in the world. We've been looking at these fucking dashboards on social media companies for 20 years now that tell us you just got 3 million views and that's worth $18 in ad revenue. That's your worth to the world. And I think that's a load of horseshit. The Internet has enough stuff. We don't need more stuff on the Internet. We need things that people are deeply proud of. I sat down at my kitchen table and I sketched out the idea that became Patreon. And it took about 14 pieces of printer paper I did with a pencil. And I felt so dumb. I'm a fucking YouTuber. What are we going to do? What am I going to do with these drawings? And I literally had to say to myself, this isn't going to work. That's okay. Draw the next page.

[Dialectic Host]

Welcome to Dialectic Episode 52 with Jack Conte. Jack is the CEO and co founder of Patreon, and I talked to him about art and business, about his prolific creation himself over the course of the last 20 years on YouTube and in music in his multiple bands including Pomplamoose and Scary Pockets and Running Patreon, and his commitment to building a platform that is first and foremost for creators themselves, under the view that people should be able to make a living for their art. One thing that is certainly clear is that Jack deeply loves artists and creators and wants us to live in a world where they can flourish for a very long time. I have a lot of respect for what he has built at Patreon and what he is going to continue to do for years to come. Before the conversation with Jack, I'd like to thank Notion Dialectic's presenting partner. As I joked to Jack during the episode, Notion is essentially my patron. They are the presenting partner of Dialectic and they are a huge part of what makes the show possible. Notion's a creative workspace for your life's work that you and your team can use now with AI and agents to have far more leverage on creating whatever it is you've set out to. Notion has become something of an AI native operating system for you and your team's work. And the critical part of that is because they spent the last 10 years building a platform that houses all of your context and makes it an immediately useful place to have the benefits of AI and agents. They've also natively integrated custom agents, which are little guys who work in your workspace and help you have more time for the important work by automating away the busy work. There's been a number of recent developments in Notions World. One of the most exciting is the developer platform and the combination of all the extensibility and workers which allow you to have cloud hosted agents that are working on your behalf within your Notion workspace and elsewhere across all of the other software that you use. You can learn [e-mail] dialectic and now here is my conversation with Patreon's Jack Conti. Jack Conte, thank you for joining me. Or thank you for having me, I should say.

[Jack Conte]

Gosh, thanks for being here.

[Dialectic Host]

This is a pleasure. We have a mutual friend who, who really raves about you and it's an honor to have gotten to kind of dumpster dive the archive and get to chat with you.

[Jack Conte]

Nice, nice.

[Dialectic Host]

I want to start with maybe that last point, which is I knew a bit about, like, I knew you had the band with your wife, and I knew you had made YouTube videos and you kind of made Patreon for yourself. And like, I guess the idea in my, I had in my head is that like, you were a CEO who like, kind of liked music and had, like, done some YouTube in the past, which is decidedly not the case. Like, I mean, I'm sure I'm missing some But I think you've had like four quite successful YouTube channels, maybe three. You are, yeah, for lack of a better word, like just wildly prolific, even ignoring Patreon. And so I think that speaks to a level of endurance. It speaks to frankly, just like being multi hyphen or polymathic. But I'm curious across all of these things, including the business where how do you sustain your energy?

[Jack Conte]

I don't know the answer to that question. It. But I do get asked that a lot because for Pomplamoose is making 50 music videos a year. Scary Pockets is making 50 music videos a year at the same time. So I was outputting 100 music videos per year and doing Patreon and had active Instagram presence. And also it's not like I'm not doing work at Patreon. That is the triple time job. That is my absolute focus. And those things were like, for me, in the cracks. I think the answer to the question the best I can do is I think there's really a couple things that it came down to for me. One was batching production on the media side, when I was trying to make everything by myself and doing one thing at a time, I couldn't get through the last 5%. That was 20% of the work. And so the system that we ended up setting up is flying down to LA for a Saturday and a Sunday because I'm working all week, once a month. So literally one time every four weeks. I fly down to LA on Saturday, do a session with Scary Pockets, which is my funk band, record four songs in a day. On Sunday, do a session with Pomplamoose, record four songs in a day. Both bands are profitable and so we can hire teams. So we had a post production crew, audio mixing engineers, mastering video producers, video editors. Like full production.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah, These aren't hobbies either.

[Jack Conte]

No, no.

[Dialectic Host]

The craziest part of this.

[Jack Conte]

No, no, it's like a whole operation. Like we're like, you know, 100 music videos a year is like serious. That's a serious, you know, that's serious output. So. So, yeah, so we had, you know, like we had the system to sort of like get eight songs in one weekend and then the teams would sort of like take those songs and mix and engineer and make videos out of them. And then that got me to the point where I was releasing two music videos a week, one with Pockets and one with Pomp Moose while I'm up here doing the company. And so I don't want to say it's like a You know, it is a little bit of a magic trick because it's not like I'm in the recording studio every week or every day, which is maybe what it looks like online. I mean, I'm here every day. But batch production was like a big thing. And the idea of, like, leaning into, like, everything I learned at Patreon around working with teams, applying all of that to pomplamoose and Scary Pockets, the power of a team, the output of a team is exponential compared to the output of a person. So really thinking about how to leverage teams and work with teams and build operations around. I don't like the word content, but around a content pipeline. And then I know this is a highly contested thing in Silicon Valley, there's two camps. I do not function without my chief of staff. And I know that role is like, there's people who are like, ah, if they have a chief of staff, I'm never investing. I literally wouldn't. It wouldn't work. I couldn't do it without my chief of staff. She's the best.

[Dialectic Host]

How long have you. This is Nicole.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah, it's Nicole.

[Dialectic Host]

How long has she been with you?

[Jack Conte]

Eight years.

[Dialectic Host]

Wow.

[Jack Conte]

And the first six of them, she was my ea and I don't work without her. Like, my life doesn't work. I don't. She is very much like the executive function side of my brain. And I have so much inbound across Slack and Google Docs and Notion and Email and teams and Scary Pockets and Pomplamoose. I cannot operate without an amazing human who's going through all of that and constantly triaging and making sure that I'm constantly working on just the most important three things. Like, she is really good at that. She has full context on my life, on everything. And so that's the other, like, huge unlock for me, has been learning to work really effectively with her and finding someone who's as good as her in that role. So, yeah, batch production, having an amazing chief of staff. And then there is one other thing which I'm still working on, but it's just like fucking getting used to chaos. It's just like, there's a lot of people who think chaos is a sign of failure or something not working or like, oh, we've done something wrong. Exactly. We have to fix this chaos. And I'm post chaos. I accept the chaos of life and company building. And I'm now just at the point where I'm like, that is going to be the baseline is like chaos, disorganization, things changing schedules Changing priorities, changing. Um, and I'm like, I'm getting used to that kind of just being how things are. It's always gonna feel a little stretched. It's always gonna feel a little unwieldy. It's always gonna feel, like, a little bit too much. But actually, like, I don't know, I've gotten a little bit better at kind of relaxing into that.

[Dialectic Host]

That is an amazing or at least a helpful strategic context for how this all happens. It doesn't explain how you do this for 15 years.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

And it's like, obviously you love what you do. Although that's like, even that's a cliche. And what does that totally mean? Like, are there parts of this where it's like. I don't know, as an example, maybe performing when you're down in LA with the band, isn't, like, really this generative part of your brain? Or maybe generative is the wrong word, but, like, it's not like songwriting or something where it's like. It's just actually, like, purely energy giving. I don't. I don't want to make it about, like, burnout, because I think that's probably even.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah, I hate that word.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah.

[Jack Conte]

I don't think of it like that. Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

But, like, presumably some of these things are energy positive and some of them are energy negative, and enough of them are energy positive that you're, like, staying above water or you're just a sicko.

[Jack Conte]

But no, no, no. I have so much. And as I've operated more, I've gotten better at leaning into things that are energy positive. For me, like, I would say, like, one of the main differences between me as an early operator and me 13 years in is, like, I used to be just, like, super growth mindset. Lean into the things that my weaknesses and try and make them better and learn and grow. Of course I still want to do all of that, but that takes you so far. I can get from a B minus to maybe a B plus on a lot of those things in a year or two. And I'd rather have somebody else nail those things and delegate that and have somebody do them better and just make sure that we're aligned from a strategic and vision standpoint on a lot of that stuff. And then I'm trying to lean more into the things that I think I'm really good at. What are my spikes? And then I want to spend more time on those things. And so I've spent a lot more time over the last couple years on a lot of that stuff. And that is super energy giving for me because that's the stuff where I'm in flow. I feel like on a lot of things, I feel like I'm worse than a lot of people. I'm like, ooh, there's another person who's going to do this way better than me. And then there's a couple things where I'm like, I think I'm one of the few people who can really crush this. And so I spend a lot of time doing that stuff. I also love those sessions with the bands. I love performing. I love recording days. When I'm in a studio, my confidence goes through the roof. I feel like I know exactly what to do. And it is so much fun. And I make such fast decisions. It's like 100% intuitive. It's just like I've learned a lot, actually, from as an operator, from how I show up in a recording studio. There's a lot of that that I'm trying to pull into how I operate here. It's not one to one, so you have to be careful pulling too much. But that has been a lesson for me. And then there's enough of those things such that I have a good, happy life and a fun time. And then when it's not, which is also there's lots of those moments where I think a lot of people would characterize it as burnout. The reason I don't like that word is because for me, it's a bit like the word death or like, I don't know, it occupies a space in your brain that is irrecoverable. And I don't think of it like that. So whenever I'm like, fuck, I'm done. I got nothing left. I'm out of gas. There's too many things. This might sound silly or almost pedantic, but I literally sit down on a piece of paper, or not a piece of paper, a note on Apple Notes, and I go, on device, not cloud. I don't want the shit on the cloud. On device. And it's like, what am I feeling right now? I start with that.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah.

[Jack Conte]

And it's like, I'm anxious as fuck. I'm scared. I'm like demotivated. Like, I'm, you know, I'm talking about, like the moments where it's like, really bad. Like, I had a couple of these, like, maybe twice a year, three times a year. It was like, not very often. You know, this isn't like a weekly or monthly thing, but like couple times a year. It's like, fuck, I hate everything, you know? And I literally start with how I'm feeling, and I'm like, why am I feeling like that? Like, what are my narratives around that feeling? What is it that I believe to be true that is making me feel that way? And then I list out my narratives. Like, okay, here's my narratives. I'm like, okay, objectively, how many of those narratives are real? And, like, how many of them are things that I'm assuming, right? And it's like, okay, actually, I don't know that this one is actually true. Okay, let's cut that one for now. But, like, what are the actual problem statements then that come out of the narratives? And then it's like, I have a set of problem statements. And it's like, okay, now let's prioritize those problem statements. Again, I'm sorry if this sounds pedantic,

[Dialectic Host]

but it's like, this is exactly what I was asking about.

[Jack Conte]

It's like, okay, here's my seven problem statements. And what I found is usually when I feel really shitty, what it actually is is a compounding set of four or five problems that are all really gnarly hitting at once. That's when I'm like, fuck it, I'm done. And I think a lot of people would call that burnout. And so when I hit that, I list out those problem statements. I make them really crisp. Like, I, like, get into, like, what is the actual problem? And then. This is so silly, but it's so effective. I, like, list out a bunch of potential solutions for each of them, and I do the first three. Do the first three for each one. Do the first three hypotheses that could potentially solve that problem. Sometimes it's as simple as emailing a person setting up a phone call. Hey, here's the story in my head. Is this true? Like, what's your experience of this? And, like, working through something. And, like, immediately after doing the first three things for four or five problems, I feel so much better. And I'm, like, ready to go again. Because, like, I can see a path.

[Dialectic Host]

It's real. Like, you've put it on the table and you can look at it exactly, right?

[Jack Conte]

Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I've, like, if you were to go through my computer, probably shouldn't say that, but you'd see a series of brain dumps over the years. Problem statements and then little solutions to solve each one of them. And then sometimes it takes a couple weeks, sometimes it takes a couple months. Occasionally it takes a year to get out of a really gnarly problem. But usually within a year, I'm out of the problem and then there's a new set of problems and I can do another brain dump.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah, it sort of assumes that burnout, or to use the stronger word, death, isn't an option, which is like, I forget exactly how you framed it, but something along the lines of it. It assumes that, like, it could just. You could truly run out of gas. And you've adopted an orientation that says, like, whatever the lowest point is, like, I will bounce. Like, inevitably, I will bounce back. Like, it's almost like a belief thing,

[Jack Conte]

I suppose, a thousand percent. So I actually don't think our. There's another one of these controversial statements here. But, like, I don't think up to a certain level, your context is really important. Do you have enough food? Are you safe? Do you have shelter? Do you have enough money to get things done in your life? All that kind of stuff. But, like, I don't think one of the things my wife says I agree with. I forgot who exactly said this. Wherever you go, there you are. So, like, I don't think changing your environment or my job or my contacts or my partner or my house is going to solve fucking anything. Like, wherever I go, there I am. So, like, I better get fucking good at solving the actual problems. Because the problems that we think, like, when you think about, oh, I'll just change the context. I think 5% of our happiness, at least my happiness, is context. I think the rest of it is brain chemistry and, like, specifics. And then it's like, okay, let me either work on the brain chemistry or let me work on the specifics.

[Dialectic Host]

Can you successfully work on brain chemistry?

[Jack Conte]

Yeah, yeah. And I do. I go to therapy. I mean, I don't know if that changes my actual, like, physiology, but it certainly changes my psychology. And that has a profound impact on my happiness and my ability to kind of keep going.

[Dialectic Host]

It's funny, I think on one hand I agree with you on that wherever you go, there you are. I think environments in context matter a lot, but we often blame things that are ultimately about us on the environment. And that's like, if only I was. The grass is greener. And so it's like, yeah, I think environments can be underrated, but not for these internal things, which is really risky.

[Jack Conte]

I mean, I'll give you an example. I like doing things. I get energy out of publishing work and reaching an audience and building community on the Internet.

[Dialectic Host]

Those things, by the way, are different. Publishing the piece and sitting down in the room by yourself to write it are very.

[Jack Conte]

So different. And I like both. I actually really like.

[Dialectic Host]

So you really like. Do you get energy from, like, Jerry Seinfeld talks about writing. He's like, you lock yourself in the room every day and you don't have to write, but you're not allowed to do anything else. Maybe it's a distinctive thing of writers, but I feel like so many writers, they like, love writing the idea and they like, excruciatingly hate the process of having to sit down.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

Do you get energy from the quote unquote boring things or the treasury things?

[Jack Conte]

So I've talked to a lot of people who are like, I don't want to write songs, but I want to have written songs. I am the opposite, really. I like, if I am in front of Ableton Live and like crafting up a MIDI bass line and running synths through plugins and reversing a piano and adding a tape loop to like, I. I will literally forget to go to the bathroom, I will forget to eat. Like, I will fucking wake up like six hours into the process and be like, oh, my God, my bladder's about to explode. And then like, I have to run to the bat. Like, I. I lose myself. I'm gone.

[Dialectic Host]

You've got Ableton psychosis. I've heard about Claude Code psychosis, but it's Ableton psychosis.

[Jack Conte]

It's. It like, it, it is that for me, it is. It is the most, like, unembodied.

[Dialectic Host]

Are there things like that for Patreon, presumably? Patreon is a hugely mission oriented thing.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

That is largely about the way you're serving the world and not. Not to say music can't be that too.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

So is it a different kind of thing?

[Jack Conte]

Or are there so different? And this is my struggle in life, which is, for me, the process, call it the input level. Behaviors associated with making music are the most joyful, wonderful behaviors. They are intrinsically motivating. They're what some people call autotelic, which is like a behavior that you do for the sheer enjoyment of the behavior itself, not for some expected outcome. Like, that is what music making is for me. And those behaviors just give me instantaneous joy, like presence. Presence. And sometimes I would even call it lack of presence. Like, I don't even know I'm there anymore. I'm just so in the work. Patreon is not that for me. And maybe, I don't know, I've talked to a lot of founders over the years. People say, like, do Your what you're passionate about. And I agree with that and I get that. The thing for me with Patreon is the outcome of Patreon is so deeply motivating and inspiring to me. The impact that the company has on people and creators and the world and culture, it gives me immeasurable meaning in my life.

[Dialectic Host]

Like even purpose.

[Jack Conte]

Purpose. It feels like the reason I'm on earth. It feels like the outcome that is like I can't imagine a more rewarding outcome. And then the day to day behaviors are nowhere near as joyful as.

[Dialectic Host]

It'd be way more fun to be making music.

[Jack Conte]

That'd be so fun. And so like, this is my struggle. It's like, I love this set of behaviors. I love that outcome. Man, if I could do that set of behaviors to get this outcome, life would be amazing. But you're full of choices.

[Dialectic Host]

Why for you? And I guess this obviously maybe an easy question to answer for some people, but why was it so important? Why was it so important? I should say to make your creative life a business, even like pre Patreon.

[Jack Conte]

I love the craft of music making and creation. I love it. It's just so fun. For me, there's another piece of my brain that is the mechanics of system design, business building, whatever you want to call it. I also love that there are some artists. In fact, we have like three Personas of artists that we often talk about at the company. There are some artists that are like, look, I want to play guitar and smoke weed and write songs. Don't bother me with anything else. And like, that is a. In fact, sometimes I wish I was that type of artist. Yeah. Yeah. Because like, man, first of all, those artists make amazing fucking work. And they end up working with many of them, a team who handles everything and they just get to like play guitar all day. And that's amazing. Sometimes they get taken advantage of because

[Dialectic Host]

they're not almost like the original benefit benefactors of real patronage. Like, the only way that person was alive or surviving 100 years ago is real patronage.

[Jack Conte]

And that is like, that's, that is a category of ours. Persona type one. Then there's a second Persona that's like, I don't, like, yeah, I'll do some other things. And sometimes the administrative work, like, I don't love it, but I'll do it. And like, you know, I don't, I don't hate talking about money, but I don't love talking about money. And I prefer not to. But I'll manage my Patreon income and I'll sell some merch and I'll run my thing. And that's the second category of artists. There is a third category of artists. I forgot what we call them. Empire builder, architect. I don't remember what we call them, but there's a category of artists that's like, I love the business part. Like, the business part lights me up. I love. And it's creative, and I get to design. Like, these artists are like, I'm a media company. They're like, I make media. And like, oh, my God, how do media companies make money? They have an events business. I could have an events business. Oh, they have an exclusive content business. Oh, they're segmenting their freemium media from their premium media, and they're thinking about their freemium premium strategy. And how could I do that? And what can I. Oh, look how the New York Times grays out a third of the way through the article. What's the video version of that? Maybe I can do that with my videos. Okay, I'll put a call to action. You know, second, Twitter, you know, blah, blah, blah.

[Dialectic Host]

Those are the founders.

[Jack Conte]

That's like, exactly. And there's a lot of artists that think are just like. They dig it. They like that stuff. I have always liked that stuff.

[Dialectic Host]

What do you like about it?

[Jack Conte]

I just. It's. It's. I. I like that it's like, it's so different from the music creation. And again, I like both. I don't. I couldn't. I think I probably like the music creation more, to tell you the truth, but I. But this stuff is really fun for me. What do I like about it? I like that you can. I like that you can make. This stuff is so hard to measure, and it's so hard to know, did I do a good job? And it's so subjective.

[Dialectic Host]

Clear feedback loops.

[Jack Conte]

And this one is like, you just put the things in place and you know if it worked or not. And there's something like checklisty about it that just is, like. It just is nice to see progress over time.

[Dialectic Host]

It's also just a different part of your brain, probably.

[Jack Conte]

It's a different piece of your brain.

[Dialectic Host]

Creativity.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I feel. When I'm doing all those things, I feel very whole, you know? Yeah. I feel like I'm being my whole self.

[Dialectic Host]

You talk about media market fit. Maybe the first question here would be like, what is the difference between content and art? Which is obviously, could be a very big question. We don't need to spend all day on it. But rough I think the reason I'm interested in the media market fit thing is on one hand it's really compelling and really interesting. On the other hand, there are maybe things we gain when creative people are really attuned to the market and there are things we lose when creative people are really attuned to the market. Maybe even to your stoner guitarist to founder Spectrum. And so maybe one vantage point or cut on that would be like maybe the gradient between content and art. What aspects are at play there?

[Jack Conte]

Yeah, big, wide gradient, totally non binary distinction. And it's hard to sort of talk about. I'll give you the ends of the spectrum and maybe some things in between and how it is that I think about it. You know, content, I often one way to think about it is its purpose is not necessarily the transference of an emotion to another human that the creator of that piece had. The purpose is some intended outcome that to me I think of as like content. So like for Netflix, of course they call it content because their purpose behind the content is adding new subscribers to the system and increasing revenue. And like, so they think of it as content.

[Dialectic Host]

The artist doesn't or the creator of that film or TV show doesn't necessarily.

[Jack Conte]

No.

[Dialectic Host]

So the same piece of thing could actually be, depending on who's talking about it, 100%.

[Jack Conte]

And so like, this is another reason I don't like that. Like, I don't like the word influencer because I feel like influencer is what that is. The commoditized attribute of an artist that is valuable to corporations. The influence. And so they call that person an influencer because they're like, that's the piece of that person that I care about. I don't care about the rest of them. Yes, I care about the fact their reach. Their reach, that's the commodity. And by the way, it commoditizes artists because I can get influence from there or from there or from there or from there. And as long as there's eyeballs, eyeballs on the other end of that influence, it doesn't matter where I get it from. So you sort of turns artists into corn or steel. It's like it doesn't matter. So content for me is a little bit of that same type of thing. It's more commoditized, it's more outcome oriented. It's more trying to achieve something, there's a goal behind it. Versus, like, when I think about art, I think about. I never remember if it's Tolstoy or Tchaikovsky who basically said art is when the person who's creating the art felt something and wanted to communicate that feeling to another person. And so you end up literally transferring that feeling you had into another person. That is the process of art. And that has always stuck with me because my favorite art is when I finish it and I feel something. And when I feel something that I think maybe that person who made that thing wanted to get me to understand something in a way that was emotional, not logical even. And I'm like, I don't know if that's exactly what they were feeling, but like, they told me something emotionally there. That's my favorite. That's my favorite art in the world. And there is something I hate to even. You know, I've heard Rick Rubin talk about this, and he sort of, you know, he talks about the difference between art and commerce. I think it is possible to make art and also to want to get paid for your art. Like, if you're an artist and you want to be paid for your work, that's not commerce. That's like you feeling like you have value. That's having a sense of self worth. That's recognizing that you're creating value for the world and you want to be compensated for your contributions to society. That's totally legitimate. I don't think like that. That's some, like, pejorative version of art.

[Dialectic Host]

It's challenging because art is. I would certainly agree that art is valuable. I don't know. I think art can sometimes be useful. And I think the more perhaps the challenge, and perhaps why the idea of patronage is so interesting, is that the more entangled the art making gets with the commercial side of it, the fuzzier all of this gets and the incentives and everything else. Maybe it's just what we believe about

[Jack Conte]

the artist's intentions, but so much of it is that.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah.

[Jack Conte]

And also, like, not even what they

[Dialectic Host]

actually are, but what we believe are what they are.

[Jack Conte]

Art is also made, as far as we know, right now, exclusively on planet Earth. And, you know, most of planet Earth is. Is engulfed in an economic and financial system that is the context for art making. And you can try to separate those as much as possible. And you can try to say that you're making art in a vacuum. And there's a lot of people who do a really good job of that. But why? I'm like, why would you do that? For me, this is my problem with the term selling out. I think selling out is doing something other than making art. If you get paid for your art, that's the opposite of selling out. That's making sure that you're setting up your future so that you can make more art.

[Dialectic Host]

It goes back to the endurance point.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah. Creating a sustainable path for yourself to make art is a beautiful thing.

[Dialectic Host]

My friend Trevor McFedries, he did, he says selling out is punk because by the way, the only. If you're selling out now, it means you're probably not an FO baby. And you, the only choice is to actually make your thing is to sell out. Which is funny.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah. I think there are like, there are ways to make money that are really cheesy and, and, and, or dishonest or like smarmy and like, you can be an artist and do that. You can be a economist and do that. You can be a PM and do that. You can be a founder and do that. But like, I think there are also ways to create value as an artist and be compensated for the value that you're creating that are wonderful and pure and reasonable and kind and good for the world. And like, yeah, the reason I'm pushing so hard on this is because so many artists. Right. Those two thirds of artists almost think that like if they make money from their art, it's like evil.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah.

[Jack Conte]

And like I'm on a mission in life and in this company to help creative people understand that they have meaning in the world. We've been looking at these fucking dashboards on social media companies for 20 years now that tell us you just got 3 million views and that's worth $18 in ad revenue. That's your worth to the world. And I think that's a load of horseshit and that shouldn't be the case. And it's going to take a lot of convincing artists that like, no, no, no, that's the system saying you're worth only that you're worth way more than that. You're creating so much more value than you're capturing as an artist. And that's a key piece of Patreon's mission is just to change how people even think about their own self worth as artists in the world.

[Dialectic Host]

Why are fans paying the artists that they enjoy? Why is that such a. That's obviously not a crazy idea. Like it's existed for a while and yet it seems that what you do is not that common. Why, why are you so bought in on that, being a great model for artists?

[Jack Conte]

What's so what I love about this question is like, so for thousands of years, really pretty much every piece of great art that we ever have known. Any piece, any piece of art. In history books was funded basically through patronage. Was funded because somebody was like, I really like what you make. You're cool. Here's a bag of coins, go make more cool stuff.

[Dialectic Host]

Or God wants it or whatever.

[Jack Conte]

Right? Or God wants it or the government wants it. Then in the early 1900s, humanity figured out how to record light onto celluloid paper and record sound onto a wax cylinder. And we were like, oh my God, you can put art on a physical object and you can ship that physical object to consumers and they will purchase that physical object not because of the object, the materials, but because of the art that's encoded on the object.

[Dialectic Host]

Although I will say I think the distribution, friction and cost made it easy to justify charging for it.

[Jack Conte]

Only the distribution and cost and lack of scarcity. Right. And cost of materials. Right. And so, you know, that created like 100 years of an infrastructure build out jewel cases for CDs and cardboard record sleeves and you know, magnetic tape in, you know, vhs.

[Dialectic Host]

Also worth noting, really good for musicians and filmmakers. Not that good for a whole bunch of other art mediums, right?

[Jack Conte]

No, exactly, yeah, yeah, but anybody telling stories with sound or, or you know, moving pictures, Right, Great, great for, for those folks. And that sort of. Then over the 1900s are all these. It was all this industry popped up that was sort of around like the distribution and economics of unit sales as a replacement for patronage as the main economic model for artists. And so it became CD sales or tape sales or laserdiscs or blu rays or whatever it is. And then the Internet came around and suddenly the thing that you said made those objects valuable, which was scarcity, disappeared. Pieces of art were infinitely replicable and no longer scarce. And the early experiments with okay, what are we going to do here? Is like Napster. And then it was like, well, there should be some type of economics around. This was like itunes. And then about 10 or 15. No, no, sorry, like maybe five years into that. And I was like, no, no ad revenue. Because sometimes I think of ad revenue as basically like the go to market strategy for the web.

[Dialectic Host]

I would argue it's probably the only truly defined and great business model of the Internet as it currently stands. You're trying to change that, but it's the only one we really found.

[Jack Conte]

It is the mature one for sure and the one that started the earliest. I think also humanity is reckoning with all the problems associated with that.

[Dialectic Host]

But it's the one that's least fighting gravity from a user experience. There are a whole bunch of things structurally about music that actually makes Sense for I shouldn't have to pay a dollar to listen to a song once, right? Like I'm gonna enjoy it the more I listen to it.

[Jack Conte]

Like, anyway, free experiences for the end consumer will always beat paid experiences for the end consumer straight up. And so that's why the Internet kind of got to scale so quickly, right? Like this technology was invented and like 20 years later, like billions of us are using it. That's because it was free, right? If it cost everybody 10 bucks to get on like it probably I'm not sure we would have seen it explode like it did. So it was a great kind of way to get things up and running and to get humanity connected. But I think the early companies that kind of won there thought of art as like a subcategory of information, right? They were like, information should be free information such as art and news. And artists were like, what? And so like, you know, I looked up one day and just felt like this system is not like in a day and age of infinite replicability and a lack of scarcity and no more physical objects with your art on it, how are artists going to get paid? And strangely, it sort of initially was like before those objects existed in the first place, back to 1900. Pre magnetic tape, pre wax cylinders, pre Edison cylinders, like, you know, back to bag of coins. You're doing something cool.

[Dialectic Host]

Is there a much history? No. No worries if you don't know. But is there any serious history of a more democratized or fragmented patronage? Because the obvious huge difference is that back then it was a rich guy,

[Jack Conte]

the Medici family and some governments.

[Dialectic Host]

It's funny, I sometimes joke. My podcast is free for all listeners. I have one sponsor, it's notion, their software company. They're great. They're my patron, like quite literally closer to the Miichi than before. Obviously the big difference in your worldview is like it's not going to be one guy or even two guys or three, which does have like a lot of things that are structurally different, including but not limited to something I referenced earlier, which is when your core audience and your customer are the same group, there are good parts of that and there are bad parts of that.

[Jack Conte]

So interestingly, patronage for us was where the company came from and was the first thesis behind this model that we started building. And also the kind of emotional truth of what Patreon is, right? And narrative truth of what it is. But what we have found years in, not even that far in, we started working on a different way to think about it. Because what we found is the Truth is, a lot of artists are like, I don't want to put out a hat and ask for money. What do you think? I'm reaching millions of people. I'm a badass. I'm going on tour and selling $5,000 worth of tickets. I'm not going to busk on the Internet. I'm not doing patronage. And that feedback was loud and clear. And what we saw was actually that the way of thinking about Patreon, that's like, it's not a donation. It's not a donation. It's very important that it can't be a donation. And actually, it's not just a positioning thing. It's not just a marketing thing. It's in the product. So we built this CRM that's more about running your business, getting the email address of the fans, building the direct relationship with your audience. We built One Time Payments, which allows artists to transact and sell a piece of digital media or collection of a back catalog of videos.

[Dialectic Host]

I love that. The fact that you can buy single video for $8 or whatever, which is maybe a lot for a video, but, like, I wish I could do that on Netflix or whatever. It's great.

[Jack Conte]

We built a more robust membership system. So we, you know, before Patreon in 2017, you could be a member, but you were a member of a gym. I don't even know if people realize that we were literally. We invented the category of digital creator membership. No one was using that term. You couldn't become a member of a creator. You could, like, become a member of an organization. Yeah, but there was no membership for creators before Patreon started calling it that and building the product. That was membership for creators. And then, you know, during the pandemic, that really took off with podcasters. It started taking off. Membership as a category started taking off even before the pandemic, but it got augmented during COVID with the sort of, you know, podcast explosion.

[Dialectic Host]

Why do you think it was?

[Jack Conte]

Because podcasting is episodic, and the sort of dollars per watch minute to. To produce podcasts is. Is like. That's an amazing ratio for podcasters versus animation, for example, is, like, very costly per per watch.

[Dialectic Host]

Was it prime initially? Was it primarily fully gated shows or shows that were 2/3, like Josh Citarella or whatever, where there's a bonus episode?

[Jack Conte]

This is precisely what changed over the course of the pandemic, because that's when New York Times subscription revenue surpassed their ad revenue. It's when the Guardian introduced premium and freemium. Now, you know, you can't sort. There are no publications who don't have some type of freemium premium. Even like Disney, Netflix, they have the free tier, they have the paid tier. It's kind of in the public consciousness now that if I am a producer of media on the web, some portion of that media should be gated and some portion should be free. And there's a user journey there, there's a fan journey there associated with that free to paid conversion that is like important for artists. And that was not a part of the Internet 10 years ago. That's like new in the last five, six years that that's become part of the public consciousness.

[Dialectic Host]

Maybe there was like flickers of this on Twitch and like other or only fans. I don't know when that showed up, but even that, I don't know if it's quite the same psychology. It's a little different.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah, there were always. I don't say always, but like even in the early days of the web, there were things that you could. That artists were posting that you could pay for. Right. Like I remember in 2011, Pomplamoose, my band was doing paid live webcasts. We had a show and a red curtain and we'd sold tickets.

[Dialectic Host]

Why do you think that hasn't worked more? Is that working at all on Patreon?

[Jack Conte]

I actually think there is a reason. I think it's very hard to make something live that is super engaging versus like if I'm going to spend half hour watching something. If I front load six weeks of work into making a really engaging half hour, it's just so much easier than like doing a bunch of production to make an engaging half hour.

[Dialectic Host]

Totally. Oh, and this is why live streaming, the average streamer streams for six hours is actually like a lower, a lower bar, longer duration. You're watching it while you work, whatever. Right, right. That makes sense.

[Jack Conte]

And what you're streaming is actually something that someone else has produced and spent a long time producing and making excellent games. Right. Like the graphics, the intrigue, the strategy. Like you're watching a game and then what makes it compelling and why you're not just watching a game is because there's an awesome human who's talking about it.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah, yeah. Or even, I mean even speed and clavicular and the crazy. They have to go to such an end of spectacle.

[Jack Conte]

Right to.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah, we don't have to get into that. But. Huh. I may have cut you off, but I think this is a helpful transition, maybe along a similar point, which is one thing I'VE observed is that a lot of things, a lot of the big consumer Internet companies the last 15 years, we think of them as technology companies, and they obviously are. But the breakthrough, like, obviously they're. They're tech hosting live video or whatever, These things are not easy. But if you look at you guys, or even Uber or Airbnb or Twitch or whatever, it's actually like culturally normalizing a behavior and saying, you're allowed to do this. Obviously, I assume some of this is emergent, which is you're having your creators or your fans telling you to do this. But I'm curious what you've learned about how that actually happens.

[Jack Conte]

Slowly. I remember pitching Patreon to investors in 2014, and one of the main pieces of pushback was like, wait, so you guys are gonna ask people to pay for something that's free on another platform? And I was like, yeah, yeah, at

[Dialectic Host]

least Twitch, it's on our bible right now. It's on YouTube.

[Jack Conte]

And they were like, thank you. Good luck with that.

[Dialectic Host]

Didn't you have. Didn't you raise money pretty quickly?

[Jack Conte]

We raised $700,000. We got a term sheet for 700,000. We ended up raising the ceiling for the round to 2.1 million about three months after launching.

[Dialectic Host]

But it was. It wasn't working yet or what?

[Jack Conte]

No, it was.

[Dialectic Host]

So it kind of worked right away.

[Jack Conte]

It worked immediately. And. But so I have to caveat when I say that, because a lot of people are like, oh, my God, that's amazing. But what isn't said there is. I tried 5,000 other things that went absolutely nowhere. This was one of the 5,000 things that kind of. That worked.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah.

[Jack Conte]

And so, like, there was that product market fit hunting phase. I never. I never set out to start a company is the thing. Like, I've never, like, I want to make a company, and that's going to be my life. I never thought that. But this was just one of the hundreds of projects that I was working on that that took off right away. And so we just leaned in, you know, over the years, and that's why I think it's not remarkable that it worked.

[Dialectic Host]

What about. Presumably, you guys have done this multiple times, including, but not limited to the shift from donation to actually, like, you're selling digital goods, basically. Even that is a version of this culturally normalizing something. And at least from my view, you guys have kind of done this. And I would even add, like, new categories on the platform, like being able to actually take hold in the board game world or in the podcast World or whatever. Like is most of that just being really attentive to what's happening on the platform or are there ways that you can kind of bend things in the direction you want them?

[Jack Conte]

Yeah. My take, I come from the world of YouTube. Right. Like I come from the world of artists and creators. I've never had a tech job. I've never worked at another tech company. This is the only company I've ever worked at in my life. This is my first job that I've ever had.

[Dialectic Host]

Really?

[Jack Conte]

Yes. Like this is my first time I've

[Dialectic Host]

ever worked straight out of college music for music and then YouTube.

[Jack Conte]

I worked as a contractor and I taught. I was an SAT tutor, I was a contractor doing in house background music for corporate videos for Google. But I was just composing.

[Dialectic Host]

You did voice some characters on the Sims?

[Jack Conte]

I was an actor, I was in voice of a teenage boy. So I did all. But I never went to work at a company every day. So this is my first job. My read after 13 years of working with all kinds of different execs and people in Silicon Valley, is that I think Silicon Valley largely, this is maybe one of the reasons I think Silicon Valley often just looks so out of touch with the rest of the world and why there's so much pushback and honestly just a lot of just backlash and hatred of tech in the last 10 years. I think a lot of it is because my read of the Valley is people undervalue brand and narrative and creativity and storytelling and a lot of these things that in my world, where I come from, those are the things. Those are the things.

[Dialectic Host]

That's all you got.

[Jack Conte]

And, and in Silicon Valley, like the main thing is the product, which is really true. Like the main thing is the product.

[Dialectic Host]

Also the projects are magic. Half the chatgpt comes out. You don't need a lot of narrative.

[Jack Conte]

You don't need narrative because the product is so, it just, it's, it is incredible.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah.

[Jack Conte]

And so I don't mean to say the product isn't the thing. At the end of the day, like 99% of people, their interaction with the company is going to be the product. Right. And so the product is a thing. But you can know that the product is a thing and care about narrative and creativity and storytelling and brand or you cannot care about those things. And I think if you don't care about those things, it's very hard to influence culture and to build a brand that people love and to have trust with your customers. It's very hard to do those things. A lot of those things are a completely different skill set. It's a completely different mindset. It's a different way of thinking, thinking about the world. Yeah. There's a lot of operators who, if it doesn't show up in the P and L, they don't believe that it's real. And then there's some operators who actually operate from a place of conviction and belief in, hey, this is going to build trust with customers. It's going to be hard to see the incremental impact in the P and L, but I know it's going to build trust with customers and that's going to create loyalty and that's going to improve retention, it's going to improve conversion at every stage of the funnel. And so from a place of belief and conviction, we're going to do that. There's a type of operator that believes that and there's a type that doesn't. And I think Silicon Valley is. A lot of people here are the type that just don't really believe that for whatever reason I do. I can't prove it. Can't prove it. There's no model. We've tried building the attribution frameworks. It's a waste of time. It's just, why do that? But. But I believe it. And so, yeah, I'm trying to answer your question on changing people's mindsets and mentality and normalizing behaviors around paying creators for their work. And I think a lot of it is understanding brand and narrative and storytelling. And then if you don't have the product to back it up, it won't work.

[Dialectic Host]

But it's maybe not mechanical at first. It's like most emotional or a human problem first, 100%. It's possible the answer to this question is embedded in part of what you just said, but my sense is, and it could just be my kind of corner of Twitter in the world, is that in a certain part of Silicon Valley, in startup land, Patreon is very underrated. Perhaps you feel that, and if so, why.

[Jack Conte]

I would say, even dismissed.

[Dialectic Host]

Why do you think that is? I would agree it is. I'll do it on the nose example. And I like them. I like the platform. Substack is very in vogue in that world. Patreon is not. Part of that is obviously the content on the platform and who uses it. But it's really interesting to me and they are. Patreon's quite big, quite successful. So I'm curious.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah. Why is that? Well, let me give you what I think is the real Answer, which is a little painful for me to say, but I think it's the. I think it's a big piece of the truth. I think I have to take accountability for that. Like, my vibe is not very Silicon Valley. I don't even think of Silicon Valley people as my people. The way I talk what I care about, talking about brand and narrative and marketing, it's really super in vogue now. I mean, I feel like it's more in vogue to talk about how you're cutting your marketing team to invest in engineering. Like, I feel like that's, like, more tech vibe, and I don't believe in that. I mean, I understand where that's coming from, but, like, my values, the things that I care about, you know, show up in how the company talks and how the company messages and what I say and, you know, and what we all say and how we write our blog posts. And, like, we very much speak to creators we don't like. I know a lot of companies, substack included, when they speak. The primary lens is reaching tech people. How do we make tech excited about our product? When I'm writing communications to people, I'm not thinking about that at all. I'm not thinking about how do I reach the next hundred engineers as much as I am thinking about how to build trust with creative people and artists. And so I think just like, 13 years of doing that. I think people, just people in Silicon Valley just don't care about us as much, which is, I think, very. I think that's legit. Why would they care about us? We're not talking to them.

[Dialectic Host]

I think there's something to that. I think there is obviously a part of it is that, like, a lot of people in a certain part of Silicon Valley read the types of people who would be more likely to be on Substack than on Patreon. Like, part of it is just like. Whereas the audience, I think, yeah, that's

[Jack Conte]

a big piece of it, too. Is like, the stuff that people. The media, that people author on Substack

[Dialectic Host]

is about tech, about politics, Josh and Rachel. And these people are not huge on Twitter.

[Jack Conte]

Like, the people on Patreon are like, they're talking about reckless Ben and the Lego scandal from last year. And, like, those are my people. That's what I want to talk about.

[Dialectic Host]

Ironically. It's actually. But here's what's weird. Patreon is more YouTube. Obviously, that's like, yeah, in, in, in. And there isn't this with YouTube. Maybe just because YouTube's so colossal and so Big. Although maybe, maybe it's also true that the average technology oriented person or startup person, I think this is what actually one of the. Do you know the TVPN guys? Josh and Jordan?

[Jack Conte]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know them, but I know of them.

[Dialectic Host]

Or John and Jordy, I should say. I think one of the reasons they were so successful is they took a whole bunch of ideas that were like really well trained on the other parts of the Internet and brought them to Twitter. Yeah, but yeah, anyway, it's a.

[Jack Conte]

So this is, this is actually recent with tech on YouTube. Yeah, tech was not big, right?

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah. Now Founders fund is playing mafia on YouTube.

[Jack Conte]

But I mean, honestly, like, I think that the pivotal moment was all in. Right. Which, which was more of a podcast. But it's like the podcast was the entry point into YouTube and then podcasts exploded in tech and now everybody has a podcast. And, and that is the. That was how tech got onto YouTube. Yeah, but like before that tech communities didn't really exist on YouTube.

[Dialectic Host]

It's also just funny. Silicon Valley is a place that loves people who are out there and don't fit into a box. At least that's the stated preference. And you were very that. But anyway, I don't know if we're going to fully litigate it, but I always thought that was funny. I'm sure there are other examples, but there aren't a ton of easy ones of platforms and big products that really, really ruthlessly prioritize creators over the rest of the audience. What has that. And that's not to say you don't clearly you guys value Patreon viewers, consumers, fans, whatever, patrons. What has that kind of orientation or principle? How has that shaped the company over, particularly over the long run?

[Jack Conte]

It is the shape of the company. We, of course we value fans. We have to value fans. If we don't value fans, we can't truly be a creator first company because creators first priority is their fans. So we must value fans. And we have to build the systems and processes and tools and products to help creators reward their fans, think of their fans, prioritize their fans, et cetera. For us as a company, the way I think about it is like there are so many great products out there that are an awesome deal for consumers. There's a lot of big muscly companies that push their weight around and get the consumer what they need to do that's great for consumers. We have a lot of options, there's a lot of competition. But there needs to be a big powerful Company that has sharp elbows, that muscles its way around, that makes the world better for creators. If such a company, if such a system does not exist, things are going to keep getting better for consumers, which is asymmetric. That drives things. That makes things worse. For if you're always optimizing for. Because then it's always all you can eat 10 bucks a month, you get as much art as you want. That's not a good economic model for creative people.

[Dialectic Host]

I think that the reason this has been challenging for people to see, even creators, is that most of these other aggregator style platforms promise creators audience, which is like the ultimate scarcity. And thus it feels like that's obvious. If you want creators, you need to give them audience, which actually means catering to the consumer. And you've kind of inverted that in a way that wasn't obvious.

[Jack Conte]

We've totally inverted it. It makes it very hard for some people when they get here to think about it from the creator lens because they're used to thinking about it from the consumer lens. Any UGC company, they think of it as like that is a means to the end, which is driving Dao, which creates ad revenue.

[Dialectic Host]

Yes.

[Jack Conte]

And so they're like, how are we going to get that Dao? Let's spin up a program where we help creators author posts and for us the creation of the art is the purpose and everything is downstream of that. And so it's a different way to think about the world. And it comes down to the company's KPIs. Right. Like our primary KPI is dollars sent to creators. Right. And so that's what we're thinking about. That's what we're talking about. That's not a byproduct of the company. That's the purpose of the company.

[Dialectic Host]

It almost. You can almost imagine somebody coming in and saying maybe there have been examples of this. We're going to charge half of Patreon's take rate. But in the end their, their core incentive is to grow audience. And so it gets. Maybe to put it a different way. Why do you think perhaps, I mean philosophically. I'm sure it is that commitment. Why do you think Patreon has remained so sticky both for creators but also for fan and patron cohorts? This is 10% is a big number. To put it in a different way.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah, this is one of those things that I'm going to have this sort of spiritual answer and then there's maybe the technical answer.

[Dialectic Host]

I'm interested in both.

[Jack Conte]

I think the real answer is the spiritual Answer which is we've done right by creators for 13 years. And that compounds just like anything else. And that compounding trust and understanding from the community has built a lot of goodwill. I'm not saying we don't have detractors. Of course we have detractors. It usually has to do with content policy stuff. When we make a really difficult content policy decision, a lot of people get

[Dialectic Host]

angry at the credit you've earned credit.

[Jack Conte]

But we've done right by creative people. Like people think of Patreon as the. A lot of people think of Patreon as the good guys. Certainly a lot of artists and creative people think of Patreon as the good guys. If you're going to run your business on a platform, if you're going to trust that platform with your revenue, with your monthly income stream, with the main thing that you use to build a life yourself, to pay your mortgage, you're going to go with the platform that you think is the good guys. You're going to go with the platform

[Dialectic Host]

that you trust or that the creators you admire. Trust.

[Jack Conte]

So what does that mean tactically? It means that we make long term decisions founded on trust. I think just more often than other companies do. We don't trade that for a lot. And I'm saying we don't ever have to make decisions where we trade trust. There's sometimes we have to deprecate a product and that's really hard for the market. And so we have to build mitigation plans and like, okay, we do all those things. But we will often make trades where we trade short term revenue for long term trust with our creators and fans. We make those trades all the time. I believe those trades are in the best long term interest of Patreon's mission and even the shareholders, certainly the creators, certainly the fans. But I want Patreon to be a fucking hundred year company. I want us to be around, I want us to be fighting for creative people 100 years from now after I'm dead. And I think you can't get there unless you really care about long term trust. And I think about some of my favorite companies. I know everybody tech is all hot and bothered about Costco. So I'll be one of the people who's hot and bothered about Costco. I think Costco's awesome. Like Costco kept the price of the hot dog at a buck fifty for like decades. And when, when Costco got down to the point where they couldn't keep it at $1.50 anymore because their suppliers weren't like supplying them at the, you know, at the right prices anymore.

[Dialectic Host]

Losing money.

[Jack Conte]

They fucking bought a hot dog factory and they, they made the acquisition, they retooled their whole operation. They, they figured out a way to keep the price of the hot dog at $1.50. Like a bunch of people look at that and say like that's a terrible business decision. But Costco's like, we believe that people trusting us is the most important thing. We believe our customers are fiduciaries.

[Dialectic Host]

Right. And it's aligned with their critically for Patreon. That's all nice. And it's aligned because you have chosen a business model that makes money when your creators make money.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

Which I think is an important kind of part.

[Jack Conte]

It's not just the values, it's also the incentives 100%. And that, I wish I could say that was strategic and thoughtful. I think it was just accidental, but maybe there was some intuitive element of that. But yes, having a take rate model means that all we have to do is help creators make more money. And if we do that, then we make more money. So that business and people incentive means that we don't have to kind of choose between us and creators.

[Dialectic Host]

What will actually make Patreon outlive you? What will it take?

[Jack Conte]

This is a deep question. I think there's a couple things. Really great governance, really great culture and values. And then a focus on building long term trust. Trust, values, culture, governance. If you nail those things, I think a company can last a long, long time.

[Dialectic Host]

To maybe invert the question, why are you still the right person to run Patreon now? Hire a professional CEO. And by the way, sure. Like that. I don't mean a big gray suit. I mean find somebody who's really value aligned, who's has more managed experience. You can go make more music, whatever.

[Jack Conte]

Totally.

[Dialectic Host]

You could be the chairman who goes around, does podcasts more.

[Jack Conte]

I have thought about that and I didn't like in my life I wasn't like, I want to be a CEO. Like that's not my goal in life. Like I want to solve this problem, you know. And so right now I think I'm the right person to solve this problem. And I think it's also possible that there will come a moment where I'm like, okay, all of the long term things are in place. The culture is just this snowball rolling down a mountain at a million miles an hour. It has so much momentum. The governance is all in place, all the pieces are there. And honestly, the company doesn't need me anymore, benefit from somebody else. I'm not against that. I don't think we're there yet. But how will I know we're there? I mean, culture, governance, it's literally those things. I think it's. I'm pushing to make that happen, not because I don't want the gig anymore, but because I want the Patreon to be under your company. You want the rest of the world? Yeah, yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

In any context, obviously, you have more experience in the running Patreon and maybe leading bands. Sense what makes a good leader.

[Jack Conte]

Oh, Boy. Hard lessons over the years here. A lot of pain. I don't know that I'm ready to raise my hand and offer leadership advice to the world on a public podcast. I think there's a lot of things that I've learned and that I'm a lot better at now. I think there's a lot of things I'm still growing and. And want to get better at. But I have worked with a lot of leaders who I think are really amazing, and I have worked with leaders who I don't trust as much. And maybe I can offer some lessons from that lens. One is like, who is the ambition for. Is it for the self or is it for the mission of the company? I like working with really ambitious people, but I want that ambition to be aimed at the mission of the company. And when the ambition is aimed at the self, that's on the denominator of the leadership quality equation.

[Dialectic Host]

Is that usually clear?

[Jack Conte]

It's gotten faster and faster for me to pick up on to the point where I can start to pick it up in the interview process. Now, where is the ambition coming from? But sometimes if somebody's really strategic, you cannot pick it up, or I cannot pick it up for a little while. So that's one. Like, ambition for the self versus ambition for the company, for the mission. There's some basics, like, do you do what you say you're gonna do? Like, do you. Do you execute what you promise you deliver what you. What you say you're gonna do? That's like reliability, dependability, those sorts of things. Like, not everybody's got that. That's huge.

[Dialectic Host]

And somehow also, like, the busiest and most effective people in the world are also the most reliable. Totally not a coincidence, right?

[Jack Conte]

There's some. There's some really important things to me that I think are important. One is like, do you have the passion muscle? And what I mean by that is like, did you fucking love something before you got to Patreon? Can you fall in love with your customer? Can you go to the ends of the earth to serve someone else? To create value?

[Dialectic Host]

Does that passion need to be outside of yourself?

[Jack Conte]

Yeah, yeah. Same thing as like the ambition. It's like, is, is there something external that you just, you can fall in love with? It's like, call it obsess, call it passion, call it whatever. It's like, is this a person who gets obsessed with things? That's what I really value about people like Hank Green, who's like one of my favorite people in the world. It's just like, dude can get obsessed about so many things. I think it makes him really special. Another thing is, can you egolessly self reflect and do so with humility? That's maybe not important for a lot of other companies, founders, operators, maybe it is in some capacity. For me, it's really important. I really want to see a leader who can not only self reflect egolessly and be like, ah, I didn't do this well, I'm sorry about that. I want to make sure that doesn't happen again and not like with a bunch of guilt and shame, but like with like a, huh, Like I'm puppeting this meat sack that did this thing and this meat sack has now learned that thing and it's going to do better next time. Like there's some like, like objective ability to do that that some folks have that I think is almost just like

[Dialectic Host]

a commitment to growth.

[Jack Conte]

Totally. And I really like to see that in leaders. I found honestly, if somebody doesn't have that, it's very hard for me to work with them. I just lose interest in them and I lose faith that they can grow and learn into what they need to be. Because Patreon is a very weird business.

[Dialectic Host]

And one I think is, as certainly many others have said, like trajectory can be a lot more important than kind of like current

[Jack Conte]

level capacity. Yeah, I really like somebody we were talking about Chris earlier. Like, I like somebody who strips their thinking down to the studs and really tries to deeply understand the unique nature of any context that they're in before just gunning it on solutions. Now you can overdo that. And I've seen people on the other end of that spectrum too, me included, where I'm like, gotta nail the strategy, can't take action yet, haven't gotten the strategy in place. Versus some of the operators I've grown to really love are like, next 48 hours, what are we doing? Next 24 hours, what are the next three steps forward? So much of company building, especially now, nobody knows what it's going to be like in six months. There's a lot of people who say they know what it's going to be like. Nobody fucking knows. And even if they did, I would be unable to tell like who knows and who doesn't. So as far as I'm concerned, nobody knows. So next 48 hours, let's get the right.

[Dialectic Host]

But can you cleanly slice that up right?

[Jack Conte]

Yeah, exactly. Can you take action and generate outcomes consistently?

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah.

[Jack Conte]

One foot in front of the other and man, that's been really fun for me. I think if you have the clarity over the long term, it affords you the ability to be super focused on execution. If you don't have the clarity over the long term, then actually execution, you end up kind of switching directions all the time. Yeah. So having that long term clarity but then being hyper focused on the next 48 hours is a unique sort of bi dimensional skill There you mentioned Hank and Chris Pack.

[Dialectic Host]

Are there, whether them or otherwise. Like, are there people who have been particularly influential on you via mentorship or whatever else as a leader, maybe, especially given that you're kind of out of the traditional Silicon Valley distribution and maybe there have been Silicon Valley founders who've been very helpful too.

[Jack Conte]

But yeah, there are people more than people. There are attributes of people that I aspire to. I found that if I get too attached to any one individual, I start trying to emulate them and that is terrible. I can get into a lot of trouble really quickly by like over falling in love with a single individual leader. Let me like think of an example. I like. I don't like everything about Travis Kalanick, but I have seen and heard so many stories about his level of ambition for the mission and that's really inspiring to me. And so the way I think about it is, can I take just go

[Dialectic Host]

watch a Travis fan edit?

[Jack Conte]

I don't have to take the other things. But by the way, I do the same thing with songs. When I'm listening to a song, like, I'm able to be like, you know, I really like that lyric or I like this synthesizer or man, that kick drum just punches through the mix. Or like, you know, that groove, like the spacing between the hi hats and where the snare hits is like, I want to take that for my next song. I may not like the whole song.

[Dialectic Host]

The more youthful person is just going to copy the song or cover the

[Jack Conte]

song totally, which I did plenty of in the early days. And it was very hard.

[Dialectic Host]

Sure, there's a lot of learning from that too, yeah. A couple things on creativity. Yeah. What are your thoughts? I'm thinking of sort of the. I think you said somewhere you've performed or composed 900 to 1,000 songs roughly. Maybe not composed.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

So a lot of time in the studio.

[Jack Conte]

Yes, a lot of time. I think we've published probably around that. Between Pockets and Pomplamoose and Me, we've probably published somewhere around that many songs. Not all that we wrote. A lot of them are covers, but, like arranged, performed, mixed, mastered, engineered, published. Yes.

[Dialectic Host]

Maybe this ties a little bit in what you're talking about at the beginning. With that as a backdrop. What are your thoughts on talent? Like, innate talent.

[Jack Conte]

In what capacity do I believe in innate talent? Do I believe you can get talent by work? Like, what's your. What do you mean when you're thinking about talent?

[Dialectic Host]

I guess I'm interested in this idea that you are, like, a very prolific person who clearly has some innate things that are remarkable or unusual. And it could just be energy, actually, to go back to our first question, and clearly you have some baseline amount of musical talent. There's always debates over what made the Beatles the Beatles. Was it the mix of it? Was it John and Paul's innate songwriting ability? Was it all those years in Hamburg? And so I guess my question is about, like, maybe a way to ask this question would be, like, say you're excited about something. Is excitement enough? Is reps enough? Or do you actually have to really be honest with yourself about what you are and what the world is?

[Jack Conte]

Yeah. My instinctual answer to this question, maybe I'll figure it out as I'm talking through it, is I'm not. At least for me, I've never felt talented. I've never felt like that's just. I just got that. Like, that's just embedded in me. I've seen that maybe in other people. Like, my wife can just. She can literally sing classical music. She can just write, invent classical music off the top of it. Key changes, modulations. She can just invent. It's unbelievable. I cannot do that. I need to learn theory and learn what chord goes to the B7 and how to resolve to the 1 and then how to modulate to the 5. I have to literally think my way into those things and learn all those things, even arranging and recording. I was so bad at making music all through grade school and high school. Terrible. I was terrible. I have records of it. I suck. I remember being in a record, like, my first time when I learned that there was recording technology. There's a thing called a Dodge. It's a digital audio workstation. I had a Pro Tools mBox. It was a successor to the Digi 03 and the mBox. You could plug your guitar into the mBox and you could record guitar and it would go onto your computer. This is like early 2000s, and I just thought this was the coolest thing in the world. And I was playing guitar.

[Dialectic Host]

I.

[Jack Conte]

On my computer, I had recorded drums and I was playing guitar, and I listened back to it and I thought the MBOX was broken. I was like, oh, there's something with the latency, like, that's wrong. That's not what. And then I kept digging in and kept trying again and kept zooming in and looking. I was like, oh, my God, I fucking suck.

[Dialectic Host]

I just suck that guitar.

[Jack Conte]

I'm so bad. So, like, I don't know that I believe.

[Dialectic Host]

Have there ever been things where you're just like, this isn't my thing? Because from what I can tell, you did this with animation, you did this with filmmaking, you did this with company building. Like, you seem to just be a wildly persistent person.

[Jack Conte]

Is company building my thing? I felt like I was really bad at that for a really long time.

[Dialectic Host]

Well, you pushed through. I mean, I don't know. I don't know how good you were then and how good you are now, but clearly you have. There's this strange, interesting essay by this guy. Scott Alexander is, like, rationalist blogger, and he has this essay called the Lottery of Fascinations. And his idea is that you, like, draw a lottery stick when you're born of, like, do you love math or not? And, like, whatever the things you're really obsessed with. And, like, my sense is, like, if you care about something enough, the baseline. And I don't mean to, like, I'm sure your baseline musical talent is more than what you're describing.

[Jack Conte]

That's it. I think you just nailed it. If you care about something enough. All those things that I just meant, like, I cared about those things. There are some. There's like, a type of human that I've met. Our CFO is like, this, like, watching him build an Excel model. I don't know that I will. No. In fact, I'm quite confident I will never be able to do what he does with Excel and Engineering, and I won't be able to do that now. You could say, like, well, really, couldn't you spend the time and learn it? I actually don't think I'm interested enough.

[Dialectic Host]

Yes. And that's usually the Bottleneck more so than ability.

[Jack Conte]

So. But. But there's plenty of things that I'm really interested in. Like, I definitely fall in love with a lot of things.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jack Conte]

And I get obsessed with the process and the behind the scenes. I was one of those kids, you know, watching DVDs. I always watch the behind the scenes. I wanted to see how they made the movie, you know, and so, like, with filmmaking or with music or audio engineering or any of those things, like, I love the process. I wanted to learn how to do it.

[Dialectic Host]

There was a phrase somewhere you said, am I proud of what I made? How do you think about answering that question on a kind of continuing basis?

[Jack Conte]

So for me, it's very instinctual. That's literally just like, do I love this? Do I feel really good about this? I think that's an increasingly important question because at this point, the Internet has enough stuff. We don't need more stuff on the Internet. We need things that people are deeply proud of.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah.

[Jack Conte]

And I'm not interested in putting more stuff on the Internet anymore. I actually kind of was eight years ago. But the Internet has hit a point of saturation where anything in that realm for me just now feels almost like wasteful. For me personally, maybe not for other people, but I just am not interested in making something at this point unless I think it's fucking incredible. Like I want to make something unbelievably great and cool. And if it's not that, I just don't find myself wanting to, I'm just not interested anymore.

[Dialectic Host]

Maybe the same answer. But speaking of your business and what you empower creators to do you have any advice about making fans?

[Jack Conte]

Making fans?

[Dialectic Host]

Making people fans of you.

[Jack Conte]

Oh, oh, yes. Like building an audience. Building a fan base.

[Dialectic Host]

But specifically, audience feels a little loose. Like, I don't mean an audience, I mean fans.

[Jack Conte]

I know what she means. Yeah, yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

The people who would pay for a Patreon.

[Jack Conte]

Right.

[Dialectic Host]

And granted there's a transaction there. Back to our earlier point.

[Jack Conte]

Right. I do have advice. I think there's a lot of. Let me give you some tactical stuff and I'll give you some high level stuff. Everybody talks about being authentic. I'm like. Or personal brands. I really think it's about. One of my favorite pieces of advice here is Charlie Kaufman. I love Charlie, dude. Just the best talk about excellent things. The world needs more things like what he makes.

[Dialectic Host]

Strange and wonderful.

[Jack Conte]

Just beautiful. Where does that come from in him? He gave a speech, the BAFTA speech.

[Dialectic Host]

Yes, the best. Oh, my God, that talk you have to offer something.

[Jack Conte]

And what he said is, say who you are. Really say it. Say it for the kids who aren't born yet, who won't be born for 500 years. Say the thing you're ashamed of. Say the thing that you think is so awful about yourself that you don't want anyone in the world to know it and say it. And that's really hard to do because it's easy to think you're being authentic. But like, if you're, if you're really saying all of this, and I don't mean oversharing, I don't mean saying everything about yourself, but like sort of being true, being true to who you are. I think there's like, that is when I think about when I become a fan of somebody. Fucking Prince. Oh man, Prince is just like, don't like it.

[Dialectic Host]

Take it or leave it.

[Jack Conte]

Fucking go away, right? I'm like, ugh, I love that. That's what I want to be. That's how I want to spend my time on Earth is like, don't like it, Go away. And a lot of people don't like it.

[Dialectic Host]

But like, but the people who like it, oh man, great. Love it.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah. That is so hard to do. And I think that's probably the most important thing. By the way, creators are fucking amazing at this. Companies are terrible at it. Companies are so risk averse that they can't say who they are in all of their flaws, in all of their idiocy, in all of their, like, they can't do it. They want to look too cool for the world. That's one thing. Another thing is this is, this is tactical frequency. This can be in tension with quality. But if you publish one thing every three or four years, it's very hard to like build a fan base. Unless it's like a two and a half hour movie. Then you can publish one thing.

[Dialectic Host]

Unless it's a robot music video.

[Jack Conte]

Unless it's a robot music video. Like, if you think about the people you love in your life, they're people you talk with and hang with and have interactions with a lot. It's very hard to develop that deep personal relationship with somebody if you don't have some touch point with them. And so I think that's one of the reasons episodic media has gotten so popular over the last decade is because people have realized that's a really great way to build a strong relationship with your audience. So like saying who you are, building an episodic or I don't want to say episodic. But like frequently communicating with the people that you're trying to build community with, build an audience with. And then the last thing is just like, again, I think it is so important to be proud of the things that you're making. If you don't want to consume the stuff that you're making, it's hard to want other people to consume it too.

[Dialectic Host]

On the middle note, do you worry at all about what you could call the broad bucket of parasociality?

[Jack Conte]

Why am I less worried about that? I do think it's a real thing. I don't know what the solution is to that. I have a parasocial relationship as a fan with many creators.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah. Although there can be different flavors of it, which maybe is part of the answer. Right.

[Jack Conte]

It doesn't. I don't find that it negatively affects me as a fan. I literally have dreams about creators that I follow. I'm talking to them and asking them what they think about the world in our product. I mean, that's like kind of crazy. Yeah, it is. But like, you know, there is a thing that humanity is doing now that it's never done before, which is like the art of one to many communication. Like, that was not a thing 25 years ago. Like it was reserved to a very tiny portion of the populace. And now millions of people are practicing one to many communication. I think some element of, of that new paradigm is going to include feeling personally close to someone that you're not personally close to. And it's going to be one of those weird externalities that we're going to have to figure out how to deal with. But I don't know. For some reason it doesn't bug me as a fan. And so I just spend less time thinking about it. I do spend time thinking about it in the context of Patreon. How to build safe systems. Investing in trust and safety, Investing in content policy. Giving creators control of their communities, allowing creators to have an extra layer of moderation on top of Patreon's baseline content policy. Like, all those things are important.

[Dialectic Host]

What is, Forgive the very vague question, but it's such a blurry word. What does community. Mean? And what does great community look like? And obviously there's so many abstractions of this. There's community at the Patreon level, there's community at an individual fan level. But what is, what do you think people are aspirationally getting at when they use that word?

[Jack Conte]

The distinction I draw here is between community and audience. Audience I think of as like a one way transfer I show up to the concert, I ingest the show and I leave. It's like this broadcasting.

[Dialectic Host]

Like watching a concert in a suite or a box.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah. It's like it's the broadcast and then. And by the way, a lot of people use the word audience and community interchangeably. And I think there are some creators who actually build community. Like Rhett and Link. Mythical Hank Green.

[Dialectic Host]

Right.

[Jack Conte]

Flog brothers. And so what does that mean? I don't think it's rocket science. I think there are tactical differences and it comes from a place of values. And so what are those things? Interactions that are for the benefit of the audience and non monetary and just like fun. Like a lot of creators who are great community builders, every year they'll do something for charity. Right. Now the creator doesn't make any money from that. But it's like it gives people a sense of maneuvering toward a bigger purpose. That's like a really nice feeling of spiritual community.

[Dialectic Host]

So collective effort, like all. Yeah, momentum. Right.

[Jack Conte]

Another example is like places where people can individually support each other. So like in the vlogbrothers, like those community members meet up in bars and have drinks together and hang out together without the vlogbrothers, without John and Hank being there.

[Dialectic Host]

The horizontal part of the fandom without the vertical. Right, right.

[Jack Conte]

The connections between the fans.

[Dialectic Host]

My dad and I both like the

[Jack Conte]

Yankees at the concert. It's creator to me is the only edge. And in community there's edges between the individual fans.

[Dialectic Host]

That's hard to do.

[Jack Conte]

That's really hard to do. You have to be cooking. You gotta be creating the conditions for that as a creator. Right?

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah. You can't actually fully engineer it. You have to create the space where it can happen. Right.

[Jack Conte]

And then I think it also has to come from a. Like there has to be like real values and purpose behind it. Right. Like with the vlogbrothers, they're building this children's hospital in Sierra Leone. What an amazing effort. It's been years in the making. It's been millions and millions of dollars that the community has raised to do this. It's been frequent updates from John and Hank to the community about Sierra Leone. And everybody has this feeling of shared purpose. We're all in this together. So there's like, there's actual things that make it that make a real difference there. Another one is in person, like a lot of creators are leaning into in person. I think it's going to be huge over the next few years. Like that's a big piece of building Real community.

[Dialectic Host]

Do you think you'll ever make a film? Like a proper film?

[Jack Conte]

Why do you ask that?

[Dialectic Host]

That was the most clear thing to me in. I didn't watch that much of your old YouTube. But you are as much a filmmaker as you are a musician, in my opinion.

[Jack Conte]

That's so funny. I think of my. Even though I've never made a movie, I think my Spike skill set is filmmaking. I think that's what I love the most. I think I enjoy it a lot. I really want to make a movie someday. I don't know if I ever will, but I really want to.

[Dialectic Host]

You're capable of running a company for 15 years and making 100 videos. You don't seem to be someone who is limited by your desire to. When you desire to make something, it seems to happen. So there's.

[Jack Conte]

Boy, it doesn't feel like that. It feels like I push a boulder up a Hill for 10 years, but I know what you mean. Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

I mean, I guess doing anything totally new.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

Is a different. But anyway, there's a nudge in that direction if you need one. I think it's very clear on the page.

[Jack Conte]

Oh, man, I want to make a movie so bad. I love movies. I mean, that's my passion in life.

[Dialectic Host]

I enjoyed the reference to. I don't know how to pronounce it. Dogma 95 and Von Traer. Are there any filmmakers who've been especially influential?

[Jack Conte]

The usual suspects. Michel Gondry, probably the most.

[Dialectic Host]

Really?

[Jack Conte]

Yeah. His music videos. Those ones with Bjork and the White Stripes and. Yeah, I mean those. Like his use of the camera to tell stories. Never seen anybody who can think like that. Talk about first principles. He's just like, how does a shutter work? Great. Let's make that the music video. You know, so.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah.

[Jack Conte]

Michel Gondry. God, I love J.J. abrams. Like, just like raw storytelling. Horsepower. That dude is up there, you know, Christopher Nolan. These are going to be uninteresting answers. It's the usual suspects. Yeah. Cool.

[Dialectic Host]

This could be a whole can of worms. We don't need to spend a ton of time on it, but. But we live in the era of the individual. There are so many great parts of that. The creator economy, all this stuff. I'm probably a little biased. And then I spent. I was telling you before, I spent some time building this brand. 100 Thieves. And part of what we were trying to do is create like a label, like a new. And there are. You go back throughout history, whether it be bands and labels and music, to in many Ways what like curation and magazines and newspapers were able to do this idea that there is a collective that can introduce new voices, that the group can be bigger than the individual. It seems like that's going away. Like there are a few bands. I'm stoked on Geese, although I candidly, I prefer Cameron Winter, which is maybe illustrative of the point. Do you have any sense on if there's any world where the pendulum could swing back? It just feels like there are too many things in the. Again, better individuals than Mr. Billy Gordy or whatever. Like.

[Jack Conte]

But you're saying swinging back to the collective, to the group, to the band,

[Dialectic Host]

things like bands or labels or whatever. Like again you have. It just seems so hard. It's so much easier to build Mr. Beast than it is to build a brand or a label or a band or whatever this is. We've seen it and I don't know how many bands there are. I guess there's a couple bands in music now.

[Jack Conte]

But I have so much to say about that. I think there's two things underlying this. Well, there's a million things underlying, but it's just two big things that come to mind for me. The first is one to many communication. It turns out the face is a key piece of building a successful channel. Like the YouTube thumbnail. Like who is the person and that's the person who's the front man, right? And that's been like. That's like tried and true. That's honestly why it's been like more difficult for companies to break into YouTube and social media initially than it was for creators. Because there was no face and unless you had a face, you couldn't do it. There's a second reason which is the economics of creation. The best example of this I think is like the orchestra. You know, every number one in the mid-40s, every number one hit was recorded by an orchestra. It's like a 40 to 50 piece band. In 2006, fast forward 70 years later, zero of the number ones are recorded by an orchestra. That's not just because people stopped loving orchestras, which I don't think is true. People love orchestras. It's the amazing timbrel sounds and combinations. And people still love the score of Harry Potter and John Williams. Culturally we love orchestras. Why is it? Well, it's because there's an economist, William Baumel, who talked about this. The cost of output per unit time to create the thing for an orchestra that is through the roof. Yes, but it doesn't. Their language around this is almost Awful. It's disgusting. It's like you can't squeeze margin out of a string quartet. I hate that way of thinking about it. There is a capitalist truth under that that makes my blood boil and that makes my skin crawl. That is kind of sad for me about what's happened to the orchestra over the last 70 years.

[Dialectic Host]

I was just watching a video about A Day in the Life, making it A Day of the Life, and they got like, half of an orchestra. That was the best they could do, and they doubled it up. Part of this is also just like, you're trying to make the thing.

[Jack Conte]

You're trying to make the thing. But I think that's a big piece of why it swung to the individual, not the collective.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah.

[Jack Conte]

Like, one YouTube channel isn't even enough to feed an individual at this point, you know, on ad revenue.

[Dialectic Host]

But at the end of the power

[Jack Conte]

lot is there are examples, you know, where. Where it is. And the thing I'm excited about is I think as the Internet matures and as the business models of the Internet start maturing as well, there will be more revenue saturation there, which will allow collectives to thrive in addition to individuals. One thing I think we are going to start seeing very soon is at least the duo, which is like, you're

[Dialectic Host]

a little biased, but that's okay.

[Jack Conte]

I think we're going to see, like, let's put it this way. Video creation is now the number one lever for any media company. If you make media, making videos, making compelling videos is like the most. It's the biggest lever for your company, for your duo, for your art, for your whatever. So the person who does the thing and then the person who makes the videos, I think those people are going to come together and that will be a new type of duo. Yeah, yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

Not everybody's going to be mkbhd. Like, you probably want two people in most of those dynamics.

[Jack Conte]

I think we're going to see that.

[Dialectic Host]

That's cool. A couple of just miscellaneous things before we wrap up. Why do you love Revolver so much?

[Jack Conte]

I love it because. Because it broke the pattern. I love it because it was outside of the public Zeitgeist. And what I mean by that is literally, like, before that, the way people recorded music and thought about recording music was trying to emulate the sound of a band playing live.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jack Conte]

And the Beatles were like, no, this is a different thing than live. And so they reversed sounds and they did drum loops on Tomorrow Never Knows, and they ran their vocals through a Leslie 122 and they did all kinds of things that you couldn't do live, so you're never gonna replicate that record live. And in fact, they stopped touring after that because they were like, the record is the thing, not the live.

[Dialectic Host]

And who knows, maybe it actually went the other way. Maybe they made Revolver because they wanted to stop touring.

[Jack Conte]

That's also possible.

[Dialectic Host]

Necessity is the mother invention. It's interesting because I think you're right and everyone always makes this point with

[Jack Conte]

sergeant Pepper, but they did it way before that.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I just think it's interesting that you pick the. As far as I understand, maybe a little on Rubber Soul, but as far as I understand, that was the album where it really started to happen.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah. If you listen to Revolver, you can imagine fucking kids just tripping in the 60s being like, what is this Rubber Soul? Kind of sounds like you're watching a band play live. Yeah, it's a little bit more of that.

[Dialectic Host]

It's great songs, it's inventive song. Right.

[Jack Conte]

But like Revolver, sonically, from a timbre perspective, from a sonic's perspective, there was so much invention there. And for me, it defined recorded music. Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

How does creativity evolve or change or deepen with intimacy?

[Jack Conte]

Well, my firsthand experience of this with my wife, it makes it harder and better because I think to do what Charlie Kaufman was talking about, like, say the thing you're afraid to say, if there isn't that intimacy there, it's very hard to say that with someone else. Whereas if you have that trust and intimacy, you can go out on the edge, you can expand the Overton window, you can step outside of the comfort zone more easily. And that ends up being the stuff that really resonates with other people because they're like, oh, no one's ever said that before. No one's ever had the balls to say that before. No one's ever admitted that about themselves. And that can be really exciting and attractive to hear or listen to or watch an artist engage in.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah, maybe there's a kind of safety in that dynamic that allows you to do something riskier.

[Jack Conte]

Yes.

[Dialectic Host]

I like to ask people, we talk about things we regret. I like to ask people what they're most glad that they did.

[Jack Conte]

Mm. Oh, I've never thought about that question before. What am I most glad that I did? Okay, self serving answer, but I'll give it anyway. After I finished my robot music video, where I knew I was going to get paid less than 200 bucks in ad revenue and I was feeling really

[Dialectic Host]

depressed, by the way, I think it's up on the shelf. I think that's the dvd.

[Jack Conte]

That's it. I sat down at my kitchen table and I sketched out the idea that I wanted for my own personal website, which became Patreon. And it took about 14 pieces of printer paper I did with a pencil on a Sunday afternoon at about 3pm and I finished in about two and a half hours. Three hours, 14 pieces of paper. And I felt so dumb sketching this out. I was like, this is so stupid.

[Dialectic Host]

They're going to say the exact opposite. That's awesome. I was like, I felt like a genius.

[Jack Conte]

I'm a fucking YouTuber. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do with these drawings? These stupid fucking drawings. And I literally had to say to myself, this isn't gonna work. That's okay. I said it out loud. I was repeating it. It was like a mantra or something. This isn't gonna work. That's okay. Draw the next page. I'm really glad I did that. I thought the chance of the. That. Of that turning into anything was idiotic.

[Dialectic Host]

There's probably less than there.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

What do you think you love so much about music?

[Jack Conte]

Okay, I'm going to get. Woo. Woo. I. I don't know how the world works. I don't know how consciousness works. I don't know how. I grew up Jewish, but I don't go to synagogue or anything like that. Music to me feels like the closest thing to something supernatural that I've ever known in my life. It feels beyond physics to me. And I think most things are physics.

[Dialectic Host]

You're on that side of the aisle.

[Jack Conte]

I think it's mostly physics. I'm not a UFO person. I'm like, I'm skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And then there's something about music that feels like it comes from some. Somewhere else. Something that I. Something that isn't physical. Space, time, I don't know how to describe, feels in the same realm as consciousness. To me, consciousness is another one of those things where I'm like, I don't understand the physics. Obviously. Nobody does. It feels aphysical and music feels like it's in that space. So for me, that's just a very interesting place to play in. You know, that's like a fun, intriguing, uncharted territory. Yeah, it's fun.

[Dialectic Host]

You gave this amazing, amazing talk at south by Southwest this year, and there's a part of it where you're getting quite emotional, talking about the synthesizer and the orchestras and talkies and silent films and the transition that we may be going through now.

[Jack Conte]

Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

You also talked about using Midjourney for the first time a couple years ago and feeling like when you discovered a camera as a kid. One of the points you make in that talk is like holding two opposing ideas at once. I would strongly recommend people listen to the whole thing. It's really amazing. I think one of the salient points you make is that there's no happily ever after. There's no endpoint. It's this continuous wave. When you feel this is a little bit related to what we talked about at the top. But on the note of there never being happily ever after, when you feel like the road is running out, especially creatively, like, what keeps it burning?

[Jack Conte]

I've had that feeling so many times now. I think the real answer is I've just been duped by it before and I don't want to be Charlie Brown again.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah.

[Jack Conte]

I've felt like I matched at the end of my rope and all is lost and I'm depressed and I'm unmotivated and I don't see a path. And then I have a snack and realize I was low blood sugar and then I feel better. And that might sound stupid, but it's like, I don't know what it's like for other people. For me, emotions have this profound way of convincing me of their permanence.

[Dialectic Host]

Especially negative emotions. The positive ones were like, oh, that's just euphoria. Negative ones, this is real.

[Jack Conte]

Like that's what's underneath everything. And this is the new steady state. And. And so I don't know. I just like, know that that's. That's. I've been duped so many times. I'm just. I don't want to be duped again. Yeah.

[Dialectic Host]

One last question, which is in that same talk, you're talking about how a creator, a friend of yours, makes the point that art is scarcity, which I think is a beautiful frame. You then reference one of my favorite films, Sing street, which is an underrated banger. So good. To quote the older brother in Sync, Street Rock and roll is a risk. You risk being ridiculed. How? It's a similar question, I suppose the last one. But how do you remind yourself to take risk?

[Jack Conte]

Oh, it's so hard. It's so hard. I'm so naturally risk averse. And that really makes me pissed. Companies are also so stupidly risk averse.

[Dialectic Host]

The world is risk averse. We're super under calibrated.

[Jack Conte]

Oh, so. And I know this about myself. Like, I catastrophize And I was listening to your interview with Chris Sacca recently, and, like, one of the things he says about, like, great founders, he's like, man, great founders, he's like, they never even consider the downsides. They only think about the upsides. And I was like, I guess I'm not a great founder. Like, I like my natural state. I know, like, my meter is calibrated, way off on risk. And so I have to just, like, zoom out, remind myself that, like, hey, I'm. I'm catastrophizing. There is a 1% chance of this thing that I'm nervous about happening, about that actually happening. And how do I remind myself to do that? Okay, this is a quick story, but it's going to be worth it. I got super into lucid dreaming a couple years ago. Lucid dreaming is the fucking best if you're not. If you don't do lucid dreaming, it is transforming.

[Dialectic Host]

We're gonna need, like a Reddit post or a blog post or something to link to.

[Jack Conte]

I made a film about it because Natalie and I tried it together for a month. We documented the whole process. It's beautiful. Life changing. There's a concept in lucid dreaming, which is like, how do you know that you're dreaming? Because part of lucid dreaming is recognizing that you're dreaming and then quote, unquote, waking up in a dream. That's the moment of lucidity. And there's this strange thing that happens. It feels a lot like this right now. And then you go, I'm dreaming. And then you can literally lift off the chair and float out the ceiling and go explore San Francisco in flight. Like, it's fucking incredible. And it's this real. It's just the most beautiful thing ever.

[Dialectic Host]

I did it one time and I jumped up and started to fly for half a second, and I freaked out and woke up.

[Jack Conte]

This is the problem. So there's actually a way to. There are lots of techniques to keep yourself asleep. So this challenge of how do you know that you're dreaming? And how do you remind yourself to wake up when you're dreaming? So there's a thing that you can do called a. What is it called? Awake check? A sleep check. And you perform a series of actions. And then. Can I push my finger through my palm?

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jack Conte]

Do my hands.

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah, Reality checks.

[Jack Conte]

Like, reality checks. That's what it is. Do my hands have six fingers or five fingers? If I hold my breath, can I still breathe?

[Dialectic Host]

Yeah.

[Jack Conte]

Which turns out if you hold your breath in a In a dream, if you go underwater, you can still breathe.

[Dialectic Host]

You're checking. You have to kind of check yourself all the time in real life, right.

[Jack Conte]

When you're practicing lucid dreaming in your. In your waking life, you're constantly doing those checks all day.

[Dialectic Host]

Okay.

[Jack Conte]

And then all day, it's really weird because you have to actually do it.

[Dialectic Host]

People around the office are like, yeah, Jackson freaks. People lost it.

[Jack Conte]

It really does. Okay, so sorry, let me cut to the chase here, which is there is a thing that you can, that you get to called a dream key. And a dream key is when I see when, when this pattern happens, there's a high probability that I'm dreaming. And if you get good at identifying your dream keys, then you get really good at waking up inside a dream.

[Dialectic Host]

Wow.

[Jack Conte]

And so, like, for my dream keys, one was being at my childhood home, another is being with my mother, who's gone. And like, those were dream keys for me. And the same is true with risk aversion. Anxiety is a risk key for me. It means that I'm gravitating towards something I think is going to go wrong, that is probably not going to go wrong. And so, like, I've tried to get really good at embedding those keys into my life. I'm not going to pretend like I'm an expert at it, but, like, some people use meditation for that. For me, it was lucid dreaming. It's like, what are my keys in life that are demonstrations? That there's a pattern occurring that is a negative pattern that I want to, like, get rid of.

[Dialectic Host]

It's a reminder to see the water.

[Jack Conte]

Remember Jack.

[Dialectic Host]

That's all I got.

[Jack Conte]

Awesome.

[Dialectic Host]

This was great.

[Jack Conte]

Thank you for the thoughtful questions.

[Dialectic Host]

Thank you again for listening or watching my conversation with Jack. If you want to learn more, linked references, transcript, all of that is available at Dialectic fm. Jack Conti C O N T E. And thank you again to Notion for presenting Dialectic and being my patron of sorts. If you're a longtime Notion user who hasn't checked out the recent AI features, the amount of leverage you can get in doing whatever it is that you create is pretty remarkable. For me, that means scouring the Internet for various things I may not have found on my own. As I prepare for my guests articles, old podcast, random trivia, strange loose threads. And I don't want to automate the prep process. I want to manually sift through things and trace grooves so that I am most prepared to have a deep conversation with my guests. But being able to have notion agents running around making sure that I don't overlook any loose ends for interesting things that could show up on them is tremendously powerful. And then on the other side of the conversation, being able to have Notion AI help me synthesize the transcript, make sure I haven't missed potential lessons that I can identify for you all. Or even just being able to list out all of the various things that were linked in the episode is simple but really remarkably helpful. And again, the goal for me is to be able to focus as much of my time immersing myself in the minds of my guests and then having a conversation with them that I'm proud to share with all of you. Thanks again to Notion. You can learn [e-mail] Dialectic and thank you to you for listening or watching. The most helpful thing you can do is to share the episode with a friend, but you can also rate it like it, review, subscribe or follow wherever you're watching. That's all I got for you. Thanks again and I will see you next time.