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EP19 - Unproductive Knowledge

· 2 min read
david len
david len
Serial entrepreneur. Always maximizing shareholder value.

Here's how I have a thousand subscribers who pay me $500 a month for my private newsletter.

Every day, I stream complex trading strategies on my terminal.

I also have Claude Code running 10 different agents. All querying prices from Yahoo Finance.

There's like 10 different lines in my charts.

Ichimoku clouds, Boku no pico bands, Jujutsu kaizen VWAP, Honkai Star Railgun patterns.

They think they are a monkey if they dont get it. So talking about liquidity, Futanari inflation.

I dont think they understand

They think they're buying financial alpha. They are actually buying a very expensive sedative.

They spend hours every week consuming my "growth hacks", "market analysis", "AI proomps"

They learn the 10 mistakes every founder makes. They memorize the 7 secrets to 10x returns.

The information is so compelling it paralyzes them.

A customer who gets rich from my advice might unsubscribe.

A customer trapped in a loop of learning, forever preparing for a game he's too scared to play?

He is a customer for life.

My genius wasn't building a system to make them rich.

Here's me in my garage, and I love knowledge.

Context​

Stop reading and start doing. This is what every newletters business fear.

Anecdotally, every business owner I know NEVER hires anyone with a masters degree. It is an anti-signal as it implies they are:

  • credentialist
  • don't understand how money works
  • conformist
  • education subsidized by family or government borrowings.

Going to college and speaking to people doing masters, the curricular standards is way lower than an undergraduate.

Everyone who seen it, or has been there would agree it's a waste of time and money.

Some of them justifies that as "networking" like how MBA is an elite hangout place -- you pay to join an expensive club of important people.

The quality of those relationships is not worth it. Many of these people are insulated from risks and any business owner who makes their money in an honest way would know.

It only works if your career is an extension of a debt-financed industry (finance, banking, consulting, admin, law, real estate).