A companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is the organised part, edited and cleaned up with AI.
You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.
Hey you.
This is the episode where we finally have intro music, which Justin built on his handpan the night before we recorded, and which exists because of a couple on TikTok who read children’s books to their six-month-old while the dad beatboxes on a shelf, knuckles for percussion and the flat of his hand for bass. He listened to the baby videos, borrowed the pattern, played it over and over for twenty minutes until fifteen usable seconds came out, put his own chord progression on top, and sent it to me. That is the whole episode in one anecdote, and everything below is just more of it. This one is for you if there is something you have been meaning to make for years and you have been waiting to feel qualified.
The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)
The tools are digital crayons and almost nobody has picked them up yet. Something shifted around last December when the models converged and the thing built for engineers and the thing built for business people became the same thing, and what that actually means is that people who have never made anything can now find out what they would make.
The seed matters more than the middleman. It does not bother us that AI sits between the idea and the object, because what decides whether the result is any good is where it came from and what is trying to come out, and a machine cannot supply either of those for you.
Being underutilised is what makes you miserable, not being busy. When you are not using what you have, you ruminate, you drift back into the past, you get stuck in the ugly loops, and when you take on something that asks for your whole self there is no time left over for any of that.
Your responsibilities protect your art. You cannot ask your creativity to pay your rent, so you do whatever keeps you fed and housed and you let the art stay free of that weight, which is what Rick Rubin and Elizabeth Gilbert have both been saying for years, and it is the most generous possible reading of having a day job.
You cannot become anything, you can become the greatest version of who you already are. Neither of us is going to be president or drive in Formula One, and once you stop measuring yourself against the whole field of human possibility you can put everything into the narrow room where you actually belong.
AI is the largest mirror we have ever built. It hands you a blank space and a great deal of capability and then the only question left is what you want, which turns out to be the thing most of us have spent our lives avoiding.
It started with a Substack header
I needed a better watermark, which I would never have thought about if Justin had not mentioned it, so I made one, and then I made cards, and then I fed my own doodles in to build the frames around them, and the cards came out well enough that Justin’s first response was to tell me to sell them on Etsy as Christmas cards. Then he wanted his own card, in 8-bit, with a wolf dog going on a journey, and one card became twenty-two, and then he remembered Playing Chess with Dragons, the children’s book he started writing thirty years ago, and by the end of that morning the cards had become pages and the book had become an app, because the App Store is a faster way to find out whether anyone wants a thing than printing it. This is how every good week goes with us. One of us shows the other something, the other one immediately wants his own version of it, and neither of us is doing it to win.
The portfolio career
One of our members raised this phrase after the town hall and asked for a weekly session on it, and we both love it. The shape of it is that you stop needing a single job title and instead hold a spread of things you have made, a few of which earn, some of which are passion projects, some of which belong to somebody else entirely, and together they describe you in a way a role never could. The condition is that you have to start from the inside, because a portfolio assembled out of whatever the tools suggest will look exactly like everybody else’s portfolio assembled the same way. That is also why the underutilised feeling matters so much here. The cure is movement and making, going outside, seeing people, putting energy through yourself into something, because when that stops you get what we ended up calling creative constipation, and no amount of good advice clears it from the inside.
If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.
Eleven Dunbar is a curated membership community of dreamers, builders, and founders: a place to play, connect, and grow together. A place to find your voice, find your people, and create the impossible, without doing it all alone.
Our home is Elfen Town, a cozy virtual town that is open around the clock. Members drop in at any hour to work side by side, play without an agenda, and have the kind of conversations where you can be your actual self.
Beyond the town there are live gatherings, in-person meet-ups, and people who notice when you go quiet.
The community is capped at 150.
Who am I, one week later
We both stumbled over this question last episode and I have been chewing on it since, and where I landed is that I do know the answer, I just cannot fit it in a sentence. It lives as a feeling, and you would understand it perfectly well if you asked me about particular things and heard why I see them as I do, which words are too coarse to carry directly. That is an awkward thing to say out loud on a podcast, and it is also the reason knowing yourself comes before every other step of making anything. Justin has meditated twenty-five minutes every morning for a week now, which came partly from a Rick Rubin interview where Rubin told the host that his wife already does this daily and asked him what exactly he was waiting for, and I have been telling Justin the same thing for considerably longer than Rick Rubin has.
Kids inviting other kids to play
The guild Justin belonged to in Final Fantasy XIV had five hundred members on paper and eight or ten who showed up every single day for years, and those eight still do not know each other’s real names or faces, and are closer than most people are to their colleagues. What we are building takes that and adds the part they are missing, which is that here you have met, you have applied and been interviewed, you know exactly who you are talking to. People go looking for this because they want connection, and reading it as loneliness is lazy. Then Justin said the thing that stopped the conversation, that we are members zero and double zero and all we are really doing is being kids inviting other kids to play, which is more accurate than anything either of us has written on the website.
The invitation
Find the thing you have been circling for years, the book or the game or the song or the small stupid object, and make the ugliest possible version of it this week with whatever tool is closest to your hand. And if you are stuck, go and ask somebody you trust what they are building right now, because half of everything in this episode exists because one of us went first.
Justin and Gerhard
P.S. We are on TikTok now and we have one follower, user6823434 or thereabouts, and Justin dedicated the end of the episode to him. Sir, whoever you are, we see you, and you are currently holding up our entire distribution strategy on your own.
