Re-published here on my wiki from YouTube. A conversation with Richard D. Bartlett (Microsolidarity), recorded at Casatilo near Barcelona.
Transcript
Good morning. My name’s Rich. Morning. You’re you’re here with me and Andrew. I’m from the MicroSolidarity Network and we are collecting wisdom on the topic of community organizing.
Right now in the background, you can hear the sound of the forest around me. I’ve just set up a microphone outside so we can be accompanied by the birds. I’m getting a lot of juice and joy out of listening to the sounds of the forest here in Casatilo, our new community center. And as we’ve started a new space here in Spain, I’m reaching out to community organizers that I look up to and respect and asking for advice like how do I not mess it up? That’s like my main topic of interest right now.
Like we’ve got this amazing opportunity, a big 10-bedroom villa 45 minutes outside of Barcelona. And the first year of rent has been covered. We’ve got this enormous opportunity to contribute something amazing to this social scene that I really care about. And it’s also super stressful and I’m losing sleep and yeah, needing to call in the support of like, hey, how do we how do we make this thing work? Um, so I thought a very um brief synopsis from you Andrew about can you give us the elevator pitch on what is fractal?
To some of the basic details so people that are not familiar with Fractal can catch up, but then I’d really love to just like dive into what have been some of the issues that keep you up at wake night and how have you dealt with them and what advice can you give to someone starting a new community space.
Yeah, it’s good to be here. I’m happy to chat about this. It’s like my favorite topic in the world. Fractal is a project that my wife and I started in New York about three years ago inspired by this sort of meta community that all of us were part of on the internet that I just call the network in my head. And I was kind of like, well, I love the network so much and I love talking with all of them, and whenever I see them in person I’m really happy because like the network does events here and there and I would fly out.
And I also have a lot of experience organizing community and having rich friendships. But I haven’t had as many of those now that I’m nomadic because it was the pandemic at the time. And we were kind of traveling around and I was just so sick of traveling. And we were like, “Okay, well, let’s just gather 100 to 1,000 people from the network all in a 5-minute walk from each other for like permanent living, not just an event.” And then we’ll kind of see what happens from there. But I bet really good things would happen. And we did a research project for historical precedent to kind of see who can we learn from, who else has done this before.
And it turned out it’s happened a lot in history that a bunch of people who kind of share values and share ideas and are at the same what I would call like intellectual frontier. You could say avantgarde or something like that, have gathered in one place and really pushed that frontier forward. The frontier of the network in my opinion is something like culture science. And so the goal was kind of like, oh, a lot of people who are relatively interested in culture science. We didn’t know it as that at the time.
We were thinking friendly, ambitious nerds along the lines of what Visa says. We have our own conception of this, I’m sure, but that’s a good reference for people who are wondering. So we’ve been doing that and it’s gone really well. We got the 100 people, we all gathered in a big building and then we had all these people. Like at first you’re kind of like, I’m lonely.
I want people around me. And we got all the people and then we weren’t lonely anymore. We were bored. We had found each other like, “Okay, well, what are we going to do?” So we started a community college. We were teaching tons of classes. We had 30 classes, 300 people.
So clearly there’s this like element of campusness that was really important. And then we weren’t bored anymore because we were teaching all these classes. But what was left was that we were just all doing this stuff as like nonprofit community, like whatever. And all of us were about to have to go back to our day jobs or like trickling out or getting priced out of New York, like all the stuff. So it’s like, okay, like we just we have to be serious now.
You can’t just be bored and having fun and teaching each other. You also have to be part of your society. You have to pay rents and all this stuff. So it’s like okay, let’s do economy. And we’re kind of building out that set of things now, and over time the community has grown quite a lot. But at the core, it’s mostly about this sort of shared set of values, gathering 100 to 1,000 people within a walking distance in a city and thinking kind of how do you build — we call this like a network campus basically.
How can you build like a network campus was the project that Fractal was trying to solve.
And I think the synopsis so far — I haven’t got to visit Fractal yet, but I get to see a lot of the ripples coming out online because I’m part of the same network. And the synopsis seems to be it’s amazing. It’s awesome. Just why is more of this happening? We need to start 100 of these things. That seems to be the theme. And I’m like, I’m sure that’s true, but also I’m sure there’s other stuff happening underneath that, that’s not so public. Yeah, like I said, keeps you up awake at night.
No, it’s amazing. It’s amazing. It’s awesome. It’s hard. It’s challenging obviously, you know, all the things one would expect. And definitely we’ve at every scale and at every level run into social and cultural and economic challenges and have just solved them one by one. So, there’s a lot for us to talk about there for sure.
Yeah. So when I say what keeps you up awake at night, like what’s some of the first things that come to mind is like the big, you know, the core dynamics that really take a lot of energy to manage.
Before I get into that, just one question, which is like, do you want — I could talk a lot about what Fractal does to solve Fractal’s problems. I could also get a bead on Tilo and I could basically figure out where our values differ, where our values are the same, and then I could give like really nice direct advice slash like thoughts on Tilo in comparison to Fractal, which I think would maybe make the conversation richer, but would also make it more just you and I and maybe slightly less podcasty. No, that sounds great.
That sounds great. Okay, I’m just going to go for it then. I’m going to interrogate you for like five minutes. You know, give me unlimited room to ask questions and you could just be like, “Yeah, I don’t know. Obviously, it’s fine.” And then I think I’ll have really good things to say.
So, Tilo on a scale from — actually it doesn’t need to be put on a scale. How hierarchical and centralized with respect to leadership? Pretty hierarchical. So it’s like this is like Rich’s thing. Yeah, it’s Rich and Nat’s thing. It’s my reputation and my financial risk on the line, and we try to operate as collaboratively as possible but it’s very clearly like there’s a centralized risk and therefore there’s a centralized authority that goes with it.
Yep. How spiritual? Obviously like on a scale from decentralized to centralized as well. In other words, like how centralized is the spirituality? In other words, should people be doing the stuff that Rich does when they’re here as well, or that Tilo does, I should say. We can call it — my spirituality is all about pluralism.
So there’s some expectations about what we have in common, but it’s not like you need to be meditating or we have a strong yoga practice or some like coherent story about what are the right values or something like that. Yeah. But we do insist on pluralism, right? So it’s like if you’re really fanatical about your one thing, then you’re not really going to be a good fit. Yep.
Do you want people to be there full-time eventually? No. I want them to be in the neighborhood full-time eventually. And this is that we’re sort of like the first beachhead testing out this area and saying, “Can we make a good life here?” And be some community infrastructure that attracts new people to come in and have a place to land.
What’s like a five year vision? Where’s the part of the network going that you’re part of? Yeah. So in Europe we have the community Santiago which is like a pilgrimage that’s been around for a long time, and I’m sort of envisioning a new camino, a new pilgrimage for especially people that are at a transition point in their life where they need fresh inspiration or they just need to get a dose of meaning or something — that there’s this network of like guest houses, essentially these lodges where you can come to a place like ours and stay here for a couple of weeks and meet a bunch of people, have a bunch of discussions, tune in with some ways of being and some certain topics of interest, and get like a load of inspiration about what’s the next step in my life or what’s most important in the world or who are the people that I need to be doing it with.
And you might spend two weeks with us and then go to the next one which is like 50 miles away and then the next and the next, and you kind of stitch together this pilgrimage. It’s like the step above being a nomad I think is being a pilgrim, like traveling with a certain degree of purpose. So it’s like the geographically dispersed version. And then the local version is just, you know, 10 to 20 of our neighboring properties would be owned by people that are participating in some sense of shared identity.
And I’m much more interested in neighborhoods than communes. You know, it’s like the pluralism thing, like people doing different stuff but in collaboration and mutual care.
Okay. Our projects are very similar and I think I have a good idea of where to go from here. So, what keeps me up at night is like, man, I could answer this question on so many different scales and I’ll try my best to be helpful and refine me.
That we’re living through the greatest golden age ever, but people are acting like we’re living in the worst era ever. Keeps me up like more than almost anything. And really, really, it doesn’t terrify me. Like it’s more exciting than anything, but definitely it’s the thing that I wake up in the morning and I’m like, “Yeah, I need to convince people not through rhetoric, but through just like obvious action that clearly this is just so much opportunity. It’s the best time to be alive.”
And then also at kind of like a maybe more concrete level, what keeps me up at night is the lack of responsibility. Like we need to be responsible. People have to be responsible. And what keeps me up at night is the idea that people would rather think the right thoughts than be responsible for anything, than take the right actions basically, or be virtuous, and or even like would rather say the right things. But it’s like, it’s not just that they say the right things, that doesn’t bother me. If you virtue signal socially, sure, but if you virtue signal to yourself in your own mind, horrifying.
And I think then like at the level of just my specific community, they’re kind of fractively related to that sort of thing. It’s like, oh, what keeps me up at night is that we’re so decentralized that we’ll fall apart and we won’t accomplish anything meaningful. What keeps me up at night is that we will play so much that we never do any work and people won’t be responsible for anything serious and we will fail our children or not have them in the first place. What keeps me up at night is the idea that at the end of the day everyone will get priced out of New York and scattered to the winds and that this is a temporary phase in people’s lives. That people will become too attached to the thing, identify with it, and then cease to do what is uniquely magical that they needed to do in the first place that they were put on earth to do.
So those are some of the high level things. Also like even more specific than that, that sociopaths will come treat everyone badly, take advantage of people. There’s stuff like that. But a lot of that stuff is covered. So we could talk there if we wanted, because if it’s like what keeps me up at night if I was starting over, or like what would keep me up at night for you on your behalf.
I just feel like you’re pretty mature similar to us and you’ve been around the block a few times. So it’s probably closer to those high level things than the low level things. But it’s like, yeah, obviously like grifters are going to come through. I’m scared that you’re not going to be able to pay your rent, that like your business model is bad, that you will accidentally invite some people that are really cool but ultimately unserious and that that creates a kind of like unserious play house where everyone comes to play and then the serious people like slowly, not all at once of course, like self-select out because they’re like, “Oh yeah, there’s always going to be those unserious play people there.” Those would be some of the things, but I suspect you’re thinking about those things a lot as well. Yeah.
Yeah. I want to talk about responsibility because that is what makes me lose sleep, is like okay, I am taking responsibility and I keep stepping up and expanding the scope of what I’m capable of. And I signed up to be stressed out, you know, like that was kind of the game to me. To me to grow and develop and to become the next version of myself involves a bunch of stressful experiences. But I do see a lot of people around me.
No, I see a small number of people who are taking responsibility, like you see people that are running Jess Camp or Vibe Camp or like Fractal. There’s like a small number of people are saying, hey, I’m going to invest in some infrastructure to support the development of this network and these communities. And it feels like a very disproportionate load on a very few shoulders, and I’m wondering about the kind of the energy exchange, like how do you balance the energetic books?
Like I’m motivated to do this for a short time because I’m assuming that pretty soon it becomes self-sustaining and profitable and, you know, I earn a livelihood out of it, and it’s good for my reputation and it’s setting me up for future opportunities, and it’s also investing in this golden age that I want to live in. And so like the vision is very motivating. But in the startup phase that we’re currently at, it’s obvious that we’re putting in more energy than we’re getting back.
Totally. Yeah. I just want to know what has it been like for you to take on responsibility and what’s your explanation for like why people are less up for it?
Right. Yeah, maybe the most important thing I sometimes think that we need is like a bit of a meta point. It’s something that is a goal of mine over the next year to do, but it’s like we need a little bit more of a founder culture in the network. That doesn’t mean that the network needs to be about founders. In fact, I think that would be a bad thing. It’s more like the founders who are in the network need to be good about creating a culture of talking to each other and supporting each other. To that extent, very happy that I’m doing this podcast, and also something that I think Fractal has the resources to support — that’s like another thing I want to be responsible for moving forward.
But because there isn’t that culture I think all of us kind of have our own strategies that we do in silence. I think Fractal does this pretty well but I’m definitely worried about some of these other projects that they won’t be sustaining forever. I’m actually not worried about yours from far away.
So here’s what we do. We basically try to separate non-commercial and commercial projects from each other relatively clearly. I have some language for this. So in my head there are scenes. Scenes have to be non-commercial.
It is non-negotiable. You cannot have a commercialized scene. You try to have a commercialized scene, you’ll geek mob sociopath it into death, which is fine, but then the scene’s dead. And then communities are similar. So communities are groups of people.
There are many communities in the scene, but again, like it’s less bad to commercialize a community. It will die. Like you’ll commercialize it to death, but because the communities exist inside the scene, you could try your best to commercialize a community and then you’ll fail and you’ll be frustrated, but like at the end of the day, you’ll still have the scene. So you can go back to the scene, you could form a new community and it’ll be fine.
So I see people making that mistake and I try to tell them like, “Please don’t make money through community. It’s like not a good way to make money.” And then they’re like, “But I love community, so I want to make my money through community.” And I’m like, “Okay, you can try.”
And then there’s basically like goods and services that you sell to the market. And you can target a niche market. So you can be like, “Okay, my market is people in this scene.” You need to do some math on how much money the people in the scene have and how much they’re willing to pay. And like you needed to just fully do the goods and services math and be like, “Yeah, I’m not making my money through community. I’m making my money by selling some good or service to the market.” And then I call that a project.
So that’s not a scene. That’s not a community. That’s a project. There are non-commercial projects as well. That’s a commercial project. And scenes are great at forming many communities. Communities can be good at stewarding projects sometimes, but often even better is for some founder in the scene or community to just be like, I’m in charge of the project and my team is in charge, and that person can be hella communal and can distribute burden a lot.
So to get very specific here, Fractal itself is a scene. It’s non-corporate. There’s no corporate entity and there’s no commercial entity. Priya and I created it. We gave it a name. Now, we actually want it to be even further decentralized than the thing that we made, which was very New York specific. And we’re kind of being like, “Ah, yeah, people can like build Fractal Toronto and they can build Fractal LA.” And we’re figuring that out. We’re negotiating it and trying to like make sure that the language is stewarded so it means something and it doesn’t get super diluted. But at the same time, the whole point of the thing was this is just an idea and of course it can spread throughout the network and that’s okay.
Then there’s kind of like Priya and Andrew’s community, like the people that they choose to live their lives with, or tribe or whatever. We actually don’t have a name for this and we’re kind of bad about it. We’ve been like so busy stewarding a community that in some way or a scene that in some ways we’ve neglected to like draw boundaries around a community for ourselves and sometimes Priya and I feel rather lonely. We have core core collaborators. We call that the high council of schemes in our head or sometimes out loud where it’s like, “Oh yeah, there’s like the high council that’s like, oh, this is my friends that I go to when I’m like, guys, like I need help or I’m stressed or hey, come over for dinner or whatever.” It’s like just my closest collaborators.
And then there’s Fractal University. Fractal University is kind of what I would call a community school because it’s a community first. It’s non-commercial as well. If we wanted to kind of make it a school first, so it was about the service of providing education and not so much about the community, then we would probably like make it a corporation and commercialize it. But it’s not even a corporation. It’s just a community of people that teach classes with one another. Individual teachers, their classes, I think to them are sometimes projects and sometimes communities. So teachers can charge what they want. Some teachers charge more than others and have higher polish than others. And there’s a big differential there. We do a curation with respect to the community level which is kind of like, do you have the values of this university? Are you rigorous? Are you going to teach good classes? Are you going to scam your students? Are you going to treat your students well? You know, at the community level.
And then Fractal Tech is a commercial project. It’s a commercial project that I started.
It’s a tech hub. It’s a co-working space, startup accelerator and software engineering boot camp, AI boot camp. And we sell goods and services. We sell the service of co-working membership which we take very seriously. We have employees who make sure that it is a very good service on the market. We sell much more to the general public than our other products or — sorry, like the other projects and communities and stuff that we talked about.
And we’re also like much more startupy, ambitious, moving fast, willing to make sacrifices, invest. Like burning ourselves out on Fractal Tech is totally allowed in the sense that I mean I’m not going to because then you would fail, but it’s not like this is the same way as the community where it will never pay me back, which I don’t think — like it’s just a bad attitude. Like if you go into raising your daughter with like, “Hey, I hope you pay me back later.” Like that’s not a very good relationship to have with your daughter. And I think similarly with your scene or with your community, that’s not a particularly good relationship to have.
But with a project like a startup project, a commercial project, it’s like no, you just like invest as much as you possibly can if you have the resources and you’re not going to burn out because you’re like, I expect this project to pay me back directly. And so anyway, that’s going very well.
But that’s kind of how we have structured — I don’t know if there’s a sub question there, but I’d say we try to encourage people as much as we can and spread the knowledge that you can actually think of all these things as distinct categories and they can still all be overlapping and foundational to each other. It’s not like Fractal Tech is therefore non-communal or whatever. It’s like, no, as far as commercial tech projects go, I think we’re one of the most communal ones in New York, but at the same time, I would sacrifice some amount of community for the sake of the finances. And I would have to draw a line as a founder of that project, whereas like the community would be really pissed if I drew a line there on behalf of the entire community of Fractal or whatever. And they would have a right to be.
And I’m assuming that your precision of language here is not just for your own sake, but it’s also like a service to people in the scene that it’s like, hey, you should have different expectations about different parts of the system because they work differently. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. I’m wondering with all of these things that you’re involved in, you know, like there’s a place that you live and then there’s a tech hub and then there’s a university and then there’s a young family. All of which require you to be taking responsibility, to doing certain kinds of leadership which are extending your scope of concern well beyond yourself. How do you — like you just said you’re not going to burn out, but where do you get the confidence from? Like what’s your strategy for making sure you’re taking good enough care of yourself or that the energy exchange is sustainable?
So, the way I try to describe this is like you have to put first things first and sometimes you can’t. If you can’t, then you can’t and you have to admit to yourself like, “Oh, I’m kind of in over my head and now I need like emergency press the button measures.” I would say the break the glass, like use hammer break glass. It comes out anytime that you didn’t put first things first. And the first thing you should be doing is like messaging every person who you’ve ever done a good deed for and who’s ever done a good deed for you, who ultimately wants you to benefit in this world. And you should be like, I don’t know exactly what to do. Please help me.
And then ideally, it’s a better message than that. But maybe that’s really in like break glass mode. Like you just don’t know. It’s like your mom and your best friends and the network and teapot, and I should message you, Rich. Like, you probably want me to succeed. Like, if I was really messed up, the fact that I’ve never messaged you begging for your help in some ways implies I’m not that close to burning out, because you’re on my list of people who I think would benefit me or like would help me basically if I was really really struggling. And that’s kind of surprising and shows something about the network given that we’ve never talked before.
But anyway, how do I know? It’s like by putting first things first, it sort of means I didn’t always act this way.
I started a startup when I was 21 with my wife and it was a ton of fun and we were kind of traveling around nomadic like I mentioned, and we were building software and we’re both good software engineers so that part was going great. And we had a team and we were making a couple early sales and I just realized I didn’t want to sell this thing at all. And once I realized that I didn’t even really have the right people to ask for help. Like I could ask all the tech people for help but it wasn’t about that for me, because the stuff I was actually thinking about in the shower all day was sort of this like golden age and all the stuff that we’ve talked about so far.
And so we started doing that in addition to the startup, which was a mistake — like we probably should have just realized — and then that started going way better and I started spending so much more of my thought on it, not necessarily my time. And then we were kind of like, okay, the startup, I don’t even want to sell it, I don’t want to talk to people, I don’t like the market that I’m in. So, what am I doing here? And we shut it down, returned the money to investors and started this big community.
And the goal was like, we’re just doing it out of love to build the thing that we want to build. At some point — we couldn’t have planned for it to pay us back. Kind of like what I was saying earlier. And that was actually a good thing. It’s kind of like when you choose to start a family or whatever. It’s like yes, I was taking responsibility for it, but I was also saying like I’m choosing everything and it’s all volunteer and so I could quit at any time.
Also, I’m never going to make — like part of our goal with Fractal itself and Fractal University to some extent as well, all the scene and community projects, it’s true on the one hand that these projects shouldn’t be commercial because people aren’t going to want to be monetized. On the other hand, that means you are not an employee. So you can’t give yourself to these projects in the way that an employee would give themselves to a commercial project because you don’t have obligations to these people in my opinion. No, for — at the scene level, especially at the scene level, you do not ever ever ever have obligations to a scene. Period. There just isn’t a single one. A scene does not have obligations. I believe — that’s just my terminology there.
If you joined a church, you might have obligations to that church. And I would call a church like a community in this parlance. It’s a big one of course. And then if you joined like any sort of institution that you joined, you might have obligations to even like a community — your community, you might have some minor obligations to. Hopefully they’re not big. If they are really big, I would like — that community probably is a little bit unsustainable because you can’t expect too much from your members without giving them freedom. And yeah, then you have to be really careful then with respect to these commercial projects.
So once you have all that, it’s kind of like, well what am I going to burn out on? I’m going to burn out on my responsibilities like you’re saying, and I have so few to these broad things and yet I have so much love and support from them. So I on the one hand have almost no real responsibilities. I just have things that I do out of love and joy for my scene and my community which brings a bunch of goodwill. And then whenever I am burning out on my projects, the ones where I do have responsibilities and I do have jobs and if I don’t do them, something goes wrong, if I’m like struggling, I go to all these places where I’ve been like gardening just for fun and I’m like, please help me friends of the forest or whatever, and they come.
And so when we were doing Fractal Tech, we hosted this thing. It was called a barn raising. We had like the whole community together and they helped us launch the business and they helped us market and they called their friends. We had people doing sales on our behalf. We had people selling memberships. We had people telling people about the boot camp, posting about us online. We had some person write a press release. And we kind of had core organizers from the high council who were all suborganizing large like maybe five to 10 person teams at that barn raising event, and it was kind of like a full 12-hour day of like, okay, what can 60 or 70 people do in a day to help a business get launched.
That was very easy to organize. People had a blast. They loved it. They were like, oh, thank you for hosting this. You’ve contributed back to the scene by like showing us that you can host this type of event and by having it be fun. Somebody from the community brought, you know — because part of the goal of the council that was organizing this event was like, well, how do we make sure that this event is joyful to the people who come, and so that is a way of giving back as well.
So there’s something there. The other thing is you just can’t be doing — like let’s say I was trying to do a financial project but I was like, oh man, this really is going to be tight, like the margins are low and it’s not going to pencil very easily. I would just have alarm bells ringing in my head that’s sort of like, well, who did I expect to pay me back or something. You know, like, it’s not — I can’t expect the world to pay me back for the responsibilities that I’ve chosen.
And similarly with my daughter, I of course have these safety nets that I think of in my head. So I think if I fail at everything I will go back home to my parents and cry. And I’ll just do that for as long as I need to because I have very good parents. Like, thank God for that. You know, it’s a total blessing to have really, really good parents because I would go and my daughter would be there and they’d take care of my daughter and they’d take care of me and my mom would cook me breakfast and everything would be good in the world or something even though I would be torn up.
You can see how these things — it kind of seems like I’m in a lot of places, but you can see how these things kind of layer on each other. It’s like, oh, at the base layer, I can take on a lot of responsibility because if I fail at everything and I become a failure, I can go to my parents and they will rehabilitate me and I can fail. I won’t fail because I have a scene that will support me if I am failing. I even have the high council of people who will come to me and notice that I’m failing without me even asking their help and proactively be like, “Hey dude, we noticed that you’re failing. Like, what are you doing?” And then I have the community that I’ve built around Fractal Tech who I can go to for help. And then I have the network that I’m part of where I can message these people for help. And then I have the project itself and I have my team and we have, you know, we pay each other financially and we have employment and all this stuff, but we’re also a team.
And so we talk to each other. We make sure we solve the problems. We don’t take on anything if we don’t think we can solve it on our own with the resources available to us. But we can always bite off a little bit more than we can chew because we have like these stacked layers of support that feel like you get superpowers basically. And that’s why it’s called Fractal, right?
Yes. Exactly. It’s not about you being some superhuman who has just extraordinary courage or extraordinary agency, but that you have — you do have exceptional networks and like you’re entangled in these collective identities that really are giving you superhuman strength. It’s really interesting what you said at the start about — it sounded like, oh gosh, I just wish people would take more responsibility. And now that we hear more about how you’ve actually factored that into your life, it’s like you’re doing a lot of, yeah, like I said, like kind of energetic economics or accounting to make sure that the love that you have for the project, like the enthusiasm you have for the work, the support that you have for when things get tough is much much greater than the potential cost of taking that responsibility.
And so because you’ve got all those things in abundance, it’s yeah, I can take on this thing and this thing and this thing. And it certainly indicates to me like why more people are not taking on more responsibility, because they feel impoverished in those different domains.
Right. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So the core idea of Fractal is like, can we spread the support networks themselves. And of course to spread the support networks themselves you’re going to need some amount of economy because otherwise how are you going to build institutions? How are you going to pay rent? And of course, in order to spread the support networks, you’re going to need relationships and marriages and families because without families, how are you going to have stability? And of course, we’re going to need friendships because without friendships, what are we even doing in the first place?
And you know, it’s like you need everything. And that’s part of also why it’s called Fractal, is like you can’t — we live in ecosystems. Like we can only build ecosystems. There’s nothing else that can be built. You can try to build something that’s not an ecosystem, but then you’re just probably relying on some secret ecosystem that you didn’t factor in. And factoring it in will make you more powerful. Yeah. Because you’ll be able to notice it. So the only thing we can do if we want to build from scratch or from whole cloth is not like design some company. You have to design a whole ecosystem, a whole society or whatever. And you get to like both choose where you’re going to rely on the ones that you’re already in and where you’re going to build new technologies as well. And so anyway, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I think the other thing I just want to articulate mostly for my own sake, something I noticed that’s different about Fractal than what we’re doing at Tilo. Especially with the co-living side of Fractal, everyone who’s joined is paying their own rent. Yeah. And so there’s like — they’re not adding to the expense side of the accounting. Whereas with this place, I just leveraged my reputation to take a loan to pay for the rent for the first year. And it’s that specific obligation that I said I would pay those people back. Like that’s the major sort of one thing that stresses me out or is going to like have a big impact on the dynamics in the group, it’s that.
Yeah. Let me tell you a little about where I was a year ago. Because we’d be having a very different conversation actually when you originally reached out to me. I had just signed a lease for 14,000 a month. I just figured — I did some math on the business that my co-founder and I could run with each other. Yeah.
I just had conviction and I knew if I failed, I could pay the security deposit. I had that much money to pay the security deposit. And we’re like, okay, well, if we ever get all the way down to security deposit, we just pay the security deposit, get out of the loan, and we are failures and it’s fine. So, you know, it’s not like we’re taking on an infinite amount of risk. We were taking on an amount of risk that we calculated, but still, I didn’t have the money to keep going.
So, what were we going to do? We hosted the barn raising and all this stuff. At the same time, my daughter was about to be born. Like, she was already due actually. But I think maybe a blessing in disguise. She came late, which gave me more time to build the business before she came.
And so in my kind of framework, this is what I would call a project or company or whatever, you know, you call these things, and it’s separate from the community in the sense that if I failed at this project and I lost the money and I had to pay back the security deposit, I luckily do think I wouldn’t have to go all the way back to my parents. I think I would fail at the project and my community would still be there and they’d be like, nice try. You know, they’d be a little bit disappointed because — yeah, because you’re making big promises and you’re relying on reputation and all that stuff, but it would be okay.
Anyway, that is to say, I know exactly what you mean. I was distraught, horribly stressed. It was the hardest year of my life by far. I was having so much fun every day. I was like addicted to it. Because I had all the support I needed, you know, like my family came. My wife is amazing. My daughter is just the perfect girl.
I couldn’t imagine a better companion. And my co-founder just is like a rock. Like total — takes responsibility for everything. Never makes an excuse. Stays up late if he has to, works hard if he has to. Like there’s nothing he won’t do. And I’m in some ways the same way. But I think without him would have been less so. So he made me like — I think I’m more of a mirror and he’s more of a rock. And so around him like we’re just so anchored and responsible.
So it was kind of like, oh, failure is not possible because we’ll just do the amount of work required not to fail, or something is like the way it felt. Even though of course I had sleepless nights because of my daughter and, you know, there’s all these things and I was like stressed and cranky, and my wife had a gaping wound and had to recover, you know, all this stuff. And I just think, yeah, there’s a sense in which like where you are now — in other words, if you’re not in the green, you’re not like really comfy, feeling, oh man, this is good. Like we’re excited because we only just got there. It’s been — luckily, and this is fast. Businesses take two or three years typically. Like three I think is average. But one year is fast.
And now I’m finally — like still really stressed because I’m not out of responsibilities. It’s not like I’ve completely automated myself in my business or delegated myself. But I think I’ll get there in six months genuinely. And I’m confident that the amount of work I’m doing every day is going down. And so I’m like, you know, I can say, oh, it’s so easy on this side. Where I was when I was in your position was sort of like every day was about how I can ask for help from a new person in a new way and not feel weird about it. And it always paid off. It always paid off every time. And somebody can really —
Just say that again. Can you just say exactly that again? Yeah. Just ask for help from new people in new ways every day. It will always pay off. I just need to hear that again and again. It’s gonna have to be my mantra for the next few months, I think.
Like, Rich, it’s insane that you haven’t asked me for help already. And of course, it makes sense. It makes sense in some ways because we’re far away and we hadn’t chatted, and you messaged me a year ago and I, you know, I didn’t respond back, or whatever. But also, like, whatever update you need to make to be like, all the people at Fractal are rooting for me from far away, and like all of them would have helped individually, not just Andrew, but like almost anyone in the scene if I had just asked, and they will help me now if I asked. It’s like make the update and probably then extend that update to like whatever other parts of the network that you’re not currently thinking about.
Yeah. Like it could have been a message that’s like, “Hey, I launched this thing.” It could have been like an insane message. You could have been like, “I launched this thing and I really need five people to come in five days, like tomorrow. Do you know anyone?” And I would have helped with that message even though that’s kind of like a big ask or whatever, just cuz you’re doing a bunch of work. You’re taking on a bunch of responsibility and like I see it and I want you to succeed at that. And I think from far away you also kind of maintain a persona of doing very well and being very responsible and having things under control. And I know — and I think I do the same thing. And I know what that means is people don’t think to reach out.
Yeah. So I had to learn, like, people aren’t going to reach out to me. I have to reach out to them. This is a real paradox for me to manage and it’s not straightforward. Yeah, I think it’s important to be confident and to have conviction, and partly to persuade people about the golden age, and partly so that we can keep attracting more investment of all, you know, every different kind of investment, to say like this is good. It’s a good life. It’s what we need to be doing. We know how to — we can solve problems.
We got this. Like that sense of conviction is really important to me. And also it’s only going to work if we get a lot of help. And there’s a balance to be struck between conviction and vulnerability. And it’s a kind of — it’s not at all obvious how to find that balance.
And I’m like just starting to navigate, you know, like I wrote some stuff recently about like, hey, this is an amazing, beautiful opportunity and it’s not going to be an overnight success and we need people to come through. I do want to ask immediately for anyone that’s watching, from now until July 27th, we have got some spare rooms. It’s an amazing house, beautiful forest, lovely people will be around. If you want to come and spend a week with us, drop me a line on Twitter, or fill in the form at ltilo.casa. We would love to see anyone that’s interested in this kind of podcast. You’re the right kind of person to come. It’ll be great.
Yeah, you should 100% come. And also like one of the action items for us after we finish recording is like, send me whatever I need so that I can message my favorite people at Fractal or put it in kind of like our internal community chats and stuff and people can apply. But yeah, I suspect you’re — were you ever in like the tech startup world at all?
A little bit. Like we did a tech startup in a very anarchist open source kind of way. Yeah. Were you ever in SF surrounded by people who were not doing the thing in the anarchist open source way at all?
So one thing you learn being in SF and being in New York is sort of like the path to success is 0% what you imagine when you come up with it in your head after reading fiction books about heroes succeeding. It’s like that is not in the real world even remotely what it looks like. I mean, it feels that way. The beautiful thing about the hero’s journey is that it does in many ways match what you feel. And also, if you read the books, you notice how much help people get. It’s just like for them, the help is easy because it’s their companions helping them. Yeah. So, you could be like, “Okay, well, have better more magical companions,” but also easier said than done. And you probably already have a lot of better magical companions. And probably what you need is more like an entire society of people who are backing you.
And anyway, my point being that the sorts of things I learned after — like I was a naive engineer and I was kind of like, oh, it’s about building good things. People love good things and I like making things better. I really really like making things better and people value me based on how better I can make it, which was true. They were hiring me to be an engineer. Like they interviewed me and valued me and paid me based on my ability to make things better.
So then when I switched to being a founder, I thought, well, it’s about making things better. That’s what it’s about. That’s 100% not true at all. Actually, it’s not even remotely true. It’s just 100% purely about people supporting you. Like, yeah, because you’re making money off of the market. It’s not like you make money off of make things better. That’s what an engineer does. An engineer gets paid a salary to make things better. And the better they make it, the more their boss who’s paying close attention and is like very much managing them is like, “Okay, yeah, you’re making that better,” if they’re a good boss.
But in the founder journey, you have no boss. There is no person who’s measuring whether you’re making it better or paying attention to whether you’re making it better, who cares if you’re making it better. And you can’t expect the broader society to be paying attention and caring and like giving you rewards for making things better. Instead, the broader society will only do what you ask them to do. So, you have to just like go and be like, “Will you pay for my thing?” And then they might just be like, “No.” But you just have to ask over and over. You have to ask 10,000 times, a 100 thousand times. Like, “Will you pay for my thing? Will you pay for my thing? Will you pay for my thing?” Now, maybe you don’t want to ask in that way because you find that you’re like, “Oh, that’s not how I want to ask.” Maybe it’s like, “I am inviting you to join my thing. Joining my thing costs this amount of money, but it’s beautiful and I’m really proud of my thing.” You can ask that way, but again, you have to ask a 100,000 times. You can’t ask once and then expect the public to keep up with you.
And so, the founders that I saw succeed, completely irrelevant to the quality of product they made. Completely irrelevant to whether they were ethical or unethical. I saw ethical founders succeed. I saw unethical founders succeed. Totally irrelevant. The only thing that was relevant was, did they get the right people in the room often for dinner, literally, like often physically in the room where it happens. And did they ask them the right — like not the right question, the right request, you know? So it’s like the successful founders would get people like heads of state of foreign countries in the room with them and then they would be like, will you pay me $10 million to develop this product because it will benefit your country? And then they would be like, do you have anything? They’re like, “No, but that’s actually better because I’m going to develop it just for you.” Or something, you know?
And it’s like, “Oh, man. Like, you nailed it. You got the right person in the room and you asked them for 10 million.” And then the person probably said no. But then you did it again next week. And you could see how kind of the quality of the product is irrelevant here, because it’s actually so much harder to get the head of state in the room and to ask them for $10 million than to build a good product for people who are already good at building good products. Yeah.
Yeah. Anyway, I want to take a bit of a detour. Yeah. Because my mind was wandering to a conversation I had recently with someone who is on this pilgrimage, who has been to a lot of different community spaces. And he was telling me about the last place that he’s just been to and he’s like, the place is awesome. They’ve kind of cracked it, but the problem is in the early phase they were too open with their invitation. They weren’t selective enough about who came and so there’s a bunch of people who feel really bought into this community who just, as it were, are not on the vibe. You know, like, like you were saying, they’re not serious. They just want to party, or they’re not super high integrity, you know, like women don’t feel completely safe around them. Like, whatever, they’re not exactly sociopaths, but they’re people that lower the average psychological safety in the room and lower the average emotional intelligence in the room.
And this is one of the core dynamics that for me is essential, that we’re cultivating trustworthy community that people know they can come here because they’re going to find a good balance between transformation and safety. And that we’re achieving that balance by being really discerning about who’s invited to come and stay here. Yeah. I just wondered what you’ve done about the sociopath problem, about filtering, about kind of doubling down on the qualities that you want to see more of and steering away from the ones that feel like they take you off mission.
Yeah. So, I love the network. I love it. The network is fundamentally inclusive. That is one of the things that is beautiful about the network. It’s one of the values of the network. This misleads people who start projects, sub communities and sub scenes into thinking that inclusivity is good. Inclusivity is not good. Inclusivity is inclusivity. It just is what it is. It has these incredible beautiful properties of inclusion. I mean to make, you know, you get like diversity and these are really cool values to play with. And also, like the moment — and in fact, by the way, the network values being able to talk to — because it’s on the internet. The network’s on the internet. People mistake it and then think physical things should be like on the internet. It’s like, the network’s on the internet.
So the network values being able to talk to and converse with people that make women sexually uncomfortable, for instance. And that sounds hard to admit, but I think that’s a good thing. And you can say, “Oh, Andrew, you’re an apologist or something.” It’s like, “No, like they’re on the internet. They can’t hurt me, you know?” And yeah, maybe I’m giving them some attention or whatever. And if I think they’re truly despicable, I’ll block them on the internet, but there has to be some path to redemption. And people being thousands of miles away from me and talking to me over cables that are like buried underneath the ocean is a pretty decent path to redemption in my opinion. It is totally fine.
Now, if somebody comes to Fractal, even one party, one time, and makes one person uncomfortable, one time, I’m immediately talking to them. And if they don’t have a good explanation, I’m immediately disinviting them to everything I ever post permanently. These are just not comparable things. And I think you’ve kind of — I’ve seen some of your tweets, like I think you’ve stumbled upon similar beliefs in a sense, but it’s like, I just can’t believe that this person stayed at a community that kept people who made people uncomfortable around. And I think that’s just such an anti value for an in-person community.
I mean, these people need to be — and it’s not about the rest of their lives. They can go back to their parents. Like they can reflect on this. They can go back to the internet. They can redeem themselves by talking to me from far away. But you can’t be at my house and you can’t be in my space if you make somebody deeply uncomfortable even one time and I’m in charge and I talk to you and I talk to the person and I really believe it was your fault and that you’re unapologetic or whatever.
You know, you can give people as many chances as you want. You can give people as much redemption chances as you want. But if your ultimate judgment as the hierarchical leader of this space — or, and by the way, it doesn’t need to be a hierarchical leader. Let’s say you had a council that governed the space. If the council’s judgment was yes, this person did what they were — like, “Yes, this person actually makes things worse.” They just — and it doesn’t, you don’t need justification. You could just — you could not even do anything else. You could be like, “Guys, we’re just voting. Do they make it worse or better? You have two options. Worse or better?” You know, vote yes for worse. And if it’s a majority of people, vote worse. Immediate ban. Just yeah.
Ban. Yeah. Anyway, that’s my opinion and it might be unpopular, but I just think in-person communities are totally different from online communities.
So what about the gray area though? That’s okay. It’s not about someone being creepy. It’s like you said about people not being serious enough. Yeah. And it wouldn’t be bad. It would be — yeah. You make things better in a way, but you’re also steering us in a direction we don’t want to go.
It would still be immediate action. It’s always action. So, like you get the leaders in the room. Let’s say it’s one leader. So, it’s really easy. You get the leaders in the room in your head and you’re like, “Worse or better? If worse — if worse for any reason whatsoever, it can be creepiness, it could be unseriousness, it could be silliness, it could be like whatever, if worse.” And because at the end of the day, you have to trust yourself as a leader. You have to either build the team that you need. If really the governance structure is that you’re the leader, you have to build the team that you need, build the council you need or whatever, but you have to trust your judgment. And if you judge worse, then — like the community is the product in this case. Like the community is the thing that’s being maintained and you’re not going to get anywhere interesting if you don’t make things better.
So if somebody is making things worse and you don’t have a conversation with them about how they’re doing that, why they’re doing that, whatever, then you are failing as a leader and the whole community suffers. And I think — that doesn’t necessarily mean — like look, I can tell you Fractal is Fractal for a reason and this is one of the reasons. So you have big inclusive projects and you have little exclusive projects and you have all of them living in the same society on top of each other. So nobody feels so bad if they get disinvited to one of the projects because that doesn’t mean you’re immediately disinvited from everything everywhere. You know, obviously you could commit an egregious crime in which case maybe, but like Fractal University is incredibly inclusive and open to the public. It’s a community college. It’s classes. Like it is a great great way to enter into Fractal.
But again, I’m just way more strict on this stuff than most people. I’d say like it is an immediate conversation for me. And what’s funny is I’m getting better at it. Like I used to be borderline as I was building community, and then I started building higher and higher stakes projects within Fractal. And I just started realizing how much better things went when I had immediate conversations because the people know. That’s the worst part. The worst part is like every time I’ve confronted somebody about it, every time they’ve been like, I know, I get this feedback a lot or whatever, or I know I’ve gotten this feedback before, and I’m like, “Well, here’s what we’re going to do about it. Either you’re going to change or I’m not going to invite you back.” And you don’t have to change, but you do if you want to be invited back. And then they might say like, “I hate you.” And I’m like, that’s never happened to me, by the way, ever. But, you know, that’s the thing you’re always afraid of. Like, “I hate you and I’m going to talk bad about you on the internet” or something. It’s like okay, you know.
Yeah, we had just the first glimmers, you know, nothing dramatic, but there was a guy who — I don’t, obviously I don’t want to go too much into the detail, but like of course, I think — I don’t even know how to describe it. I think he was more forward with his like sexual attraction than someone else wanted, you know? And I don’t think he was predatory. I don’t think he crossed any lines, but he was just like enthusiastically attracted to someone in a way that someone was just like, ugh, I don’t want to hear about it. And I intervened immediately and said like, this is how it works around here. It’s called Women and Children First, and like I’m going to prioritize women feeling at ease over men’s freedom. And while I’d stand by that statement, like, he was disappointed in me. He was like, I thought you were more kind of grown up than that and that you could give us, you know, equal footing and it would all be treated with equality. And so it’s like he hates me now, but I let him down in a way.
So let me — yeah, I can actually respond to this. I would not have had the conversation that way necessarily, although I think that’s a perfectly fine way to start it. And maybe the rest of what I’m talking about did happen. But I would be like, look, it’s not just about women and children first. It’s about the fact that you made this person uncomfortable. That shouldn’t happen. Like I know you think that maybe is just a risk of sexual attraction or whatever, but that’s just not true. Like the men that I know, the gentlemen that I know, do not make women feel uncomfortable. And I know this woman, and I know that she wouldn’t complain if it was innocuous. I know that about her. And I know that about you, and I know that about her and I know that about men in general or whatever, and you can disagree with my judgment here, but these are the facts as I see them and I have to make a judgment call. The judgment call I’ve made is that you did carry like in some way childish or immature sexual response. And I’m just not interested in immaturity. I want mature people, you know.
And like yeah, that’s even harsher. It’s like, oh, it’s not about a policy. It’s about you. It’s about you because you’re not mature enough for me. But that’s the truth, you know. Like, I just — and you — like, I’m hamming it up a little bit over this call because I don’t know this individual person. If I thought that giving that feedback would break them, I would never give it. So you have to always draw the line of like, what is the most true thing I can say without crossing the line into cruelty given how they’re going to interpret my words or whatever. But the policies and etiquette by the way are great because they give you this fallback, like if the person starts to deny reality or they start to deny the truth as you see it. Yeah. You can always just go back to the etiquette and be like, okay, well fine, maybe you don’t see it the way I see it, but like the etiquette is women and children first. Like here’s, this is what it is. But if you can get through to them with the truest thing, I find that goes so much better than — cuz like, what if he walks away from this experience? By the way, this isn’t me critiquing you. I think you did fine.
But what if he walks away from this experience being like, “Yeah, some spaces are men first and some spaces are women first and I just need to go be in the men’s first spaces.” It’s like, well, that’s not actually the right thing for him to take away. The right thing for him to take away is like, damn, I make women feel uncomfortable. And like that’s a me problem and I can probably go fix that and somebody should tell me how. Or I should go research how. Maybe somebody doesn’t have to tell me or whatever.
But yeah. Yeah. And I mean I want to be clear as well, like, I didn’t do a great job on this one and luckily it was like a small enough infraction that like a safe to fail place to practice, and we’re going to be having more conversations and I’m like looking forward to updating on it. But it’s like, I’m just anticipating that you get higher and higher stakes conflicts like this the longer you’re in the game. And like I just want — yeah, I want part of our reputation to be this, that people know how seriously we take this and that like this is going to be — yeah. There’s just a degree of hostility.
Yeah. A beautiful thing about Fractal is that I’m surrounded by so many really great leaders, and because they’re with me every day and I talk to them every day because we’re so close to each other, I get to see how they do things. So asking for help, I learned from Tyler also.
He’s insane. He’s actually insane. So occasionally I’ll be with him and I’ll be like, “Tyler, I feel like Fractal Tech could be doing more like talking to founders.” And he’s like, “Oh, okay.” And then like before I even complete the sentence, he has tweeted, “Andrew from Fractal Tech wants to talk to more founders. Are there any founders who would like to talk to him in New York City?” And like the tweet’s already sent and he messaged like three of his big group chats. And like, Tyler, you can’t just ask people for help like that. And he’s like, “Why not?” You know, they like it. People like being asked for help. It’s beautiful.
And then on the feedback one for me, I was much more tentative. I was much more afraid to tell people that they’re the problem versus it being like some general principle or whatever. And then I saw my friend Daniel who runs Maximum New York. It’s a class on politics. And so because it’s a class on politics, and politics in order to do it well, you need very strict etiquette. And if you don’t have very strict etiquette, it just falls apart, man. Like, it’s literally the domain of social rule making, how we make the rules. And so people will lie and they will cheat and they will steal and they will manipulate each other emotionally. They will do anything in order to make the rules, in order to be the person who gets to make the rules. And so of course, if you’re going to teach in this domain, you need very strict etiquette. Otherwise, you know, it just falls apart if people just make up their own.
And so he’ll, you know, he’ll be hosting events and he’ll overhear somebody in a conversation kind of far away like boxing somebody in maybe. And this is like even unrelated to politics, just like boxing them in socially and just being a little bit like — like let’s say you’re like a slightly socially uncouth man and you’re kind of big and you’re like — I mean, just bigger than the person you’re talking to. Even if you’re like 5’9” or whatever, but let’s say you’re 6 foot and you’re also socially awkward and maybe you’re like a little bit like unshaven or something and you’re kind of just like, “Oh yeah, well, what do you think about this?” And the other person clearly doesn’t really want to be there talking to you. Daniel will immediately notice from across the room. He’ll go up to the person. He’ll be like, “Hey, can we have a moment? Can we talk?” Immediately in the moment, and he’ll take them outside and he’ll be like, “Look, I noticed this in the etiquette. We just don’t talk to people like that. I think you didn’t mean anything wrong by it. I think you didn’t even notice, but what if you just take a break from coming to my events for a little while, and you can shoot me a message if you want to come back in the future for something.” And then he just asked the person to leave immediately. That’s crazy.
Wow. It’s crazy. But then when you see it happen, you’re like, that person’s so thankful. Like the person who needed to be protected in that situation. And yeah, protected from what? Protected from like a slightly uncomfortable conversation. Do we really need somebody to do that? It’s like, well, if you’re serious, then yes, because if you’re trying to do serious politics with people, you don’t have time to waste on a bunch of unproductive conversations that you don’t know how to get yourself out of because, you know, we’re all going to die. So, it’s not necessarily that Daniel’s saying this person shouldn’t exist in society. He’s just saying like, “Hey, here at my event where we’re trying to do serious politics and do serious work, but it’s also an inclusive event, which means it’s open to the public. I can’t have members of the public being all weird and having bad etiquette because if you do, then we don’t make any progress.” And so I learned that from him, that like just confronting the situation in the moment is the best even though it’s scary.
Do you have time for one more question? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just want to know — as an organizer, as a host, what do you wish that guests knew? I can give you an example. So, like I had some people who have been talking on Twitter about — I’ve been projecting or guessing that the organizing team behind Jess Camp and Vibe Camp are pretty stressed about low ticket sales. And I’m like, I don’t think these organizations are going to continue if it’s always this stressful, and so I’ve been trying to encourage people to just like be better guests. And someone showed up in the comments saying like, “Ah, I understand there’s a lot of logistics. Maybe I could help with the logistics.” And I’m like, “No, you misunderstand. Like we’re organizers. Logistics is easy. The hard thing is we need you to book your tickets, like buy the products we’re selling because that is the thing that keeps the game turning.” And it’s just like, people don’t really understand what’s the hard bit and what’s the easy bit and like where do you really need their action.
Totally. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Yeah. So, let’s say like somebody is good willed. What do I wish they knew? So, it’s like a helpful person. Yeah. People always come to me so often. They’ll be like, “How do I help?” I’m like, well, first of all, I can answer that question, but I’m often like, come to my events or something. You know, it’s like I feel like they’re very disappointed. They’re like, no, I want to be on the team. And it’s like, no, the team bit happens later, but you know, you can really help by coming to the events.
So, I know what you mean. It’s something like I wish people knew that I wanted them to succeed at their own projects more than I want them to help me with mine. I will do the work of getting the people to help me with my projects. I will make the ask. I will find you. I will DM you. Like if I want you to help me, I will ask. Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tell me. Like, totally, of course. Yeah. I want people to tell me the truth always. But that’s not the number one critical thing. The number one critical thing is sort of like, don’t help me with my projects if you know the thing that you should be working on. Just like go work on it, please. And ask me for help instead. So the reverse is actually way better for me, of like, you go do your project and then ask me for help and then take my feedback or don’t, but then, you know, respond to my feedback. That is just so helpful to Fractal and to the Fractal mission, because like more people self-actualize, more people take responsibility, we have more institutions. We have more leaders. And that’s really what we need in order to succeed, is just as many independent nodes as possible replicating a responsible culture.
Sign me up. Let’s go. I mean, you’re in the network. Yeah, easy. I would love to — generally we just got to think about how we can get Fractal collaborating with Tilo more. I think it’ll be on my mind certainly.
Yeah. Great. Like I said, I imagine there’s a pilgrimage, and just as soon as I get my visa sorted, I’m going to come over and stink up your couch. And get to know people to come and stay. And like, I actually think we’re probably going to put quite a lot of energy into stitching together these different houses and making sure that people know there’s a place for you. Like there’s a next step on the journey and that like, yeah, there’s a kind of index of go to these different houses because they have these different vibes or these different focal points or topics.
So, is there actually land around you available for purchase a little? So, we’re in a national park, so it’s pretty hard, but I went for a walk on the weekend and found the first for sale sign. It’s like not huge. It’s like 10,000 square meters of land, like six-bedroom house for like 200 grand in the mountains forest. It’s really nice. Someone should reach out to me and buy that house. But, yeah. So, it’s not going to be easy. And this is part of the testing. This is part of the hypothesis is like, is there land available? Is the local community like welcoming of us? Like, are we — yeah. Are we going to freak them out too much? We’re still figuring that out. But certainly a bunch of the people that have got involved early are coming with the attitude of like, is this a place I can raise my kids? And that’s part of the project. That’s so cool. That’s fantastic.
Yeah. Anything else you think we should put on the podcast? I just feel like there’s about 78 more of these conversations that we need to have. So, I’m just putting it — by the way, just down anytime. This was delightful. I also think you ask great questions, and I suspect there’s just like more practical stuff we could get into on the level of like, this is what my spreadsheet looks like. What does your spreadsheet look like? You know, like — oh, save that for the second date, dude. Right, right, right. Yeah.
Yeah. It’s been a great pleasure. Is there anything else you want to leave the listeners with? Enormous audience of between 12 and 14 people. Go visit Rich’s place and support him and support other organizers, not by offering them to volunteer because you’re poor, but by making money and then buying their products. Correct. Amen. I love my poor friends. I love you. I love you so much. And you should also offer to volunteer, of course. Don’t just not do that. Don’t be silent, but you know, go get rich and help Rich. Get rich. Amen.