Hi Crowd!
for some reason The Algorithm presented me with this post earlier today with this snip from an interview with Naval Ravikant where he’s talking about his schedule, or rather his lack of one.
“I read a blog post by Marc Andreessen where he said don’t keep a schedule. And I took that to heart. So I deleted my calendar and I don’t keep a schedule…
My wife knows not to ever book or schedule me for anything. I’m not expected to go to couples dinners. I’m not expected to go to birthdays. I’m not expected to go to weddings…”
I watched it a few times because on each watch it gets dumber for a different reason. He admits that this requires some level of “success” but doesn’t seem to recognize that it has any impact on anyone around him. What an amazing coincidence that he just accidentally wandered into this podcast studio when they happened to be planning to do an interview. And that the the guest seat was empty? What luck! So he just plopped down and started talking I guess?
I somehow doubt it. So that was scheduled, and he kept to it, and if for some reason he forgot or decided not to show up the people who were expecting him would be out time/money/etc but who fucking cares right? It’s one thing to have ‘fuck you’ money, it’s another thing to have ‘fuck everyone’ money. Why would anyone ever try to schedule something with him or that depends on him knowing this? Imagine having a meeting with the guy who doesn’t schedule anything and blows off anything he doesn’t remember without worrying about it? No thanks.
I don’t know why that grabbed me the way it did. I hate being inconvenienced by other people and try really hard not to do that to anyone myself. It’s it’s just shitty and disrespectful of other people’s time. So maybe it’s this clever self-amusement bragging at the assumption that everyone else will just chase him around and deal with it that bugged me, or maybe it’s bullshit and the intent was just to get people to talk about it and I fell for it.
Somewhat related, I had a few conversations with people after my last post about people who still write things on their own websites rather than relying on newsletter platforms or whatever and there’s perhaps a similar “I expect you to come to me” kind of thing. Maybe. Though I think it’s more defensible because the dream of the web was embedded with independence and autonomy and the whole point of putting something on your own website isn’t to make people come to you so much as preventing someone else from taking it down. Which is more or less true depending on various things, but I think it’s notably different. Some people were like “I just gave up and moved to substack, that’s were everyone goes to read things anyway.” Which may also be more or less true but also got me thinking about why a lot of people won’t use Substack and also how people who would usually avoid things like that happily use Substack because again, that’s where the people are reading things.
All this is to say that there’s several thousand people who “subscribe” to this, untold numbers (or number) of people who don’t subscribe but just follow a link on social media and read it, and so I wondered how many people actually read this? According to WordPress which may or may not be reliable, I’ll just say the server autoblocks about 100x as many bot attacks a day as there are actual readers. What even is an actual reader in 2026? I just don’t trust any metrics about web traffic anymore. I do appreciate the single digits of real humans who read all the way to the end though. Maybe I’m slowly working towards pulling the typewriter out of storage and sending future newsletters in an envelope with a stamp.