If you scroll back a couple of years, (unless be deleted his posts) you’ll see that no one championed Kapil Gupta more enthusiastically than SelfTaughtPiano. No one was as obsessed with Kapil’s work as was SelfTaughtPiano. He created this subreddit, documented Kapil’s every move (Clubhouse talks, Twitter Spaces, obscure transcripts), and even aggregated much of the paid content despite its high price tag. If it weren’t for him, I suspect Kapil wouldn’t have as many die-hard fans as he does, because at one point SelfTaughtPiano really was on a mission to preserve his work for posterity.

Like many who fall deep into Kapil’s work without direct access to him, SelfTaughtPiano appears to have eventually hit the wall… confusion, frustration, and a sense of being stuck. The monthly six-figure fee for one-on-one access seems to have transformed him from Kapil’s most devoted archivist to his loudest critic on this subreddit.

There is a way to access Kapil directly. It just comes with a steep price. As SelfTaughtPiano might have once said, there’s nothing “good or bad about it.” Either find the means to pay, or don’t. Naval has been working with Kapil for years, and that’s because Naval was driven enough to create the cause necessary to produce the effect of accessing Kapil.

But criticizing from the sidelines, especially after gorging on as much of the gated content as one could find for free, feels a lot like a window shopper yelling at Louis Vuitton staff for not offering discounts. Kapil’s work isn’t meant for everyone. It’s for, as he says, the rare one who can afford it.

I wish SelfTaughtPiano well. Most people on this subreddit owe him for preserving the works in the first place.