By Jay Topp
Hey friend,
It has long been my great obsession, where the lines blur between business, art, and philosophy.
Art: the pursuit of self-created and self-defined meaning.
Philosophy: the love of wisdom. The burning desire to understand life and my experience within it.
Business: the vehicle for independence and sovereignty. Where a man becomes the master of his own life, the author of his own destiny, by serving the market in fair exchange.
The sweetest concoction of the three creates great wealth, and something beyond it. Your business becomes a vehicle that propels you through life itself.
A vehicle that makes you a student of reality, of nature (the market) itself.
A vehicle where you meet your economic needs for survival, and then your existential needs, the ones that live at the border of essence and expression.
I believe the future of expert businesses, and businesses in general, will be run by philosophers and artists.
And truly, the greatest always have been.
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The founder-artists
Steve Jobs is the purest definition of it. He audited calligraphy classes with no practical purpose, dropped acid, wandered India, studied Zen. Every one of those "useless" pursuits ended up inside the Macintosh. He ran a philosophy with a supply chain. Products as arguments about how life should be lived.
Ettore Bugatti came from a family of painters and furniture makers. He signed his engines the way a sculptor signs bronze, because to him the car was an art object that happened to move. A century later his name still means the same thing: beauty as engineering.
Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid and the man Jobs called his hero, said explicitly that he wanted to build a company standing at the intersection of art and science. The instant photograph was an idea about human experience before it was a technical achievement: the moment and the memory of it should never be separated.
Peter Thiel is a philosophy graduate whose entire investing framework comes from one philosopher, René Girard, and his theory of mimetic desire. Why humans copy each other's wants. Why competition destroys value. Why you should build a monopoly of one. Philosophy converted directly into billions.
There is a pattern here. The founder who thinks deeply about what humans actually are will always out-position the founder who studies conversion tactics.
But if that's correct... if the past and the future both show that the greatest entrepreneurs were philosophers and artists... why do most of the philosophers and artists we know live in a state of victimhood?
Why don't most expert businesses feel like they get to operate daily as artists and philosophers?
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The starving artist is a modern invention
Here's what nobody tells the resentful artist: the tradition was never anti-commercial.
Michelangelo died one of the richest men in Rome and negotiated with popes like a contractor, because he was one. Rubens ran a workshop with dozens of trained hands producing at scale. He was, functionally, an agency owner. Shakespeare held equity in the Globe. The plays were the front-end offer, the ticket revenue was the business. Dürer mastered printmaking for one reason: distribution. One image, infinite copies, sold across all of Europe.
The commercial artist IS the tradition.
The starving artist, the misunderstood genius too pure for the market, is a recent invention. Barely two hundred years old, a leftover of Romanticism. And it has done more damage to artists than any patron, publisher, or algorithm ever has, because it hands them a story where poverty is proof of purity and the market is the enemy of the soul.
I watched it up close. I never fell into it myself, wealth was always too high a value for me, but I had friends the whole way through: artists, musicians, filmmakers. Genuinely talented people, living inside a story that guaranteed they'd stay broke and call it integrity.
The market is where the soul gets tested.
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My own path here
I got into entrepreneurship out of curiosity and necessity. But I quickly realised that being an entrepreneur is a deeply existential thing, because you are constantly in pursuit of truth.
And truth was always my obsession. I grew up inside Christianity, where the highest value is truth, and eventually that value cannibalises Christianity itself. My faith didn't survive. My pursuit of truth did. It just needed a new vehicle.
At 18 I left home and went straight to Jerusalem. I've spent the last eight years travelling the world in search of my own alternative education, my own great spiritual adventure. No university. No credentials. Just the raw pursuit.
That journey is the whole reason I ended up working in expert businesses. Along the way I kept meeting these great coaches, teachers, guides. People who had genuinely transformed themselves and could transform others, and who struggled to reach anyone.
And when I looked at how the business and marketing space presented itself... it was soulless. Ugly. Uninspiring. For me it simply wasn't a possibility to show up to the world that way. The philosophy and the art were never a brand strategy. There was no other way for me to do it.
So understand this first: I'm describing a way of being that happens to be the most profitable positioning available.
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The market is a mirror
Here's the part that keeps this from becoming a fantasy.
The market is the most honest critic you will ever face. It doesn't care about your credentials, your feelings, or your self-image. Every offer, every ad, every launch is feedback about the gap between who you think you are and what you can actually deliver.
And the market taught me something specific. It loves art, philosophy, and expression, but its most pressing desire is to get results. Clients. Outcomes. Transformation it can measure.
That's the discipline of the founder-artist. You stay oriented toward the market's real demands, and you let the philosophy and the art carry the message further than anyone else can carry it. Expression in service of the market.
This is why business is a philosophical practice as much as an economic one. Journaling never argues back. Reality does. Your business forces a confrontation with truth that introspection alone never will.
That's what I mean when I say your business is a vehicle and a mirror.
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The sequence
So why do most artists and philosophers fail in the market? I see three reasons. All have remedies.
1. They run the sequence backwards.
They want to express themselves. But expression is the last step, not the first.
Here's the sequence the artist-philosopher must follow to become wildly profitable:
Deeper self-understanding → stronger convictions → more original ideas → clearer expression → greater differentiation → stronger demand → better economics.
Let me show you the chain in my own life.
The self-understanding came from the journey. Eight years of exploring life beyond the limited values of my hometown, beyond the default settings of the West, toward something more universal. That gave me convictions nobody could shake, because they weren't borrowed. Those convictions produced ideas about business and marketing that weren't in circulation, while everyone else in the space was regurgitating the same recycled playbooks.
And the economics at the end of the chain are real. In my own advertising I'm fully expressive. My home, my art, my travels are the canvas on which I talk about business. And in one of the most notoriously competitive, expensive spaces to advertise in, our cost per acquisition has never been a problem. Some of the cheapest in the space.
Differentiation is economics.
Now watch what happens when someone skips the sequence. They express "freely" and "authentically" and it falls flat. The expression is theirs, it's real, but it comes from no deep understanding of the market it's meant to serve. It's disconnected from reality, so reality gives them nothing back. Then they blame the market and retreat into victimhood, when the actual problem was sequencing.
Understanding first. Expression last. It's a constant journey of refinement.
2. No systems.
Most experts are world-class in their field and complete beginners at building and scaling a profitable online business. Direct response marketing, funnel economics, high-ticket sales, offer creation, LTV optimisation, ascension ecosystems... those skills took me a decade of obsession to build. Most experts will lose interest long before then. Fair enough. It was never their calling.
I got obsessed with it precisely so they don't have to. So the expert can stay an expert, the philosopher can philosophise, the artist can make the work, while the machine underneath is handled.
That's why I built realbook.art.
3. Fantasy land.
The aspiring coach or early-stage founder has consumed years of content selling them the sovereign creator dream. Laptop open, freedom everywhere, easy. They carry a one-sided fantasy of the path, because that's how marketing works: it sells the destination and hides the road.
Here's the road. You are betting against consensus. You are walking into the unknown, where there is less certainty, on the strength of your own convictions. It is a becoming. A Sisyphean struggle, an endless stretching. The founder-artist path is the meaningful one precisely because it is not the easy one, haha.
They were sold a one-sided existence. The remedy is simple: want the whole thing. The struggle is the path.
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Why now
You could say it's because of AI. And that's part of it. The systems and distribution that took me a decade to build are collapsing in cost and complexity, which means the artist-philosopher no longer needs to spend ten years becoming a marketer before the world can hear them.
But I think something deeper is moving underneath.
As the world goes further online, the market is developing a hunger it can't quite name. You can see the surface of it in the craving for physical experiences, for the real, for the human. Beneath that sits the actual desire: meaning. Self-created meaning. Which is precisely what art and philosophy are, and have always been.
Commodity information is now free and infinite. What can't be commoditised is a soul with a point of view. A founder whose business is the living expression of a genuine search for truth. For the first time since the old patronage systems collapsed, the artist-philosopher has a direct economic path to the people who need them. No gatekeepers. No permission.
So friend, the future of expert-led founder businesses is large and exciting.
For the students and audiences, who finally get depth instead of recycled tactics... but more so for the individuals who go on this great journey. Who use their business as a vehicle and a mirror, to create great philosophy, art, and wealth.
The sharing of wisdom is always profitable…
jay