Good morning John.

A lot of people make a fair amount of noise about the number of ideas that emerge from John and Hank and Complexly and DFTBA and Nerdfighteria. This is not untrue, we do indeed have a lot of ideas. Many of them quite good. But while there is a website that keeps track of how long it has been since I have started a new thing, it’s definitely not a website of all the ideas I’ve had. Because most of them get shot down by you.

It’s more like, you convince me that the ideas are not good. And I do the same thing with your ideas. We have a lot of ideas and we spend a lot of time talking about ideas. A lot.

We do it so much that we have developed a kind of shorthand that might make it impossible for someone listening to us talking about our ideas to understand what we’re even talking about. Like I might have an idea, tell you about it, and you would say, “Hank, that’s a fine idea but it’s both a Top Ten and a Walkman so I don’t know why we would do that.” So because I like ideas a lot, and I know other people do as well, and hopefully these frameworks might be useful for someone else, let us pull back the curtain and hope that it will be useful.

Let us start with the Walkman. A Walkman is an idea that has two components that make it a bad idea. First, it is something that is technically difficult and we are not experts in it. Sometimes we will call something a Walkman just because of this condition. Like, it’s a good idea but we are not expert enough to pull it off.

But to be a true Walkman, it also has to be something that will definitely get done by someone else. So if we worked really hard to get the technical expertise or find someone who did, we could come in and do this, but it wouldn’t really increase the speed at which the idea happened, because someone else out there is very likely to implement the idea anyway. The example in the name is here is the Walkman, a big idea that happened when we were kids, that is a portable tape player.

Short hand number 2, you can’t scale a person. This is what you say when an idea is permanently overly reliant on a single person. That makes the idea definitionally long term unsustainable. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, but you have to know this going into it, because a person eventually runs out of hours in the day, or runs out of years in their life. Or more hopefully just runs out of the desire to keep doing that thing forever. It seems trivial, but you would be surprised by how often ideas end up overly reliant on a person, and you need to be accounting for that and working around it.

When we have an idea that is okay, but it gets way better when you give all the profit away to charity, that’s Newman’s Owning it. It’s Newman’s Owned.

This just makes ideas better. It makes everybody involved more interested in the project, because it makes it more interesting. It makes it less like the normal thing that businesses do. And Newman’s Owning is a way to make a Top Ten a good idea.

And a Top Ten is any idea that would be successful but wouldn’t actually add very much value to the world. This is an old one-- It comes from many years ago when we had a week on vlogbrothers where we just did Top 10 lists. And all those videos did like 10 times better than the average vlogbrothers video. But they did not grow the community, they were not interesting, they did not even really teach anybody anything, they were just lists.

And this is not an exhaustive list or anything, but let us end with Emperor of the World ideas. These are ideas that would be really good ideas if, and the if condition is, everyone would just get out of my way. And do what I tell them to do! And agree with me! This actually comes from something that Nerdfighteria’s resident mathematician Daniel Biss said to John once. So it all ties together! Emperor of the world ideas aren’t even really bad ideas, they’re just fantasies.

John, it’s become pretty clear to me why we have been pretty good at having new ideas that are pretty good. Part of it is that we have each other to interrogate each other’s ideas, and we’ve gotten pretty good at that.

But the bigger part of it is, we have something that we understand fairly well, that almost no one else has access to. A fairly large group of interested, passionate, supportive people with really good values. Those people can provide an amazing activation energy for a new idea. But they also provide a constraint. The idea has to be within the values of the community. This keeps us focused not on Top 10s, but on things that actually provide value and are interesting and new and dynamic and weird. And the results have been something that I am extremely proud to have been a part of.

John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.