46: Nicole Seah (Nix) - Loving What is Real

[00:00] Everything that you make, whether it's company, a piece of writing, a podcast, is this amalgamation of your experiences in the world. Grow up, all the things you read, all of the people you've met, it's a collection of these things. Brought into the furnace of something and come out the other side. You really see in this very subtle moment is how a person's entire being has gone into this. Any of these very large, significant companies. You can actually trace back the lineage and the sense of effable feeling that it's come from the founder.

[00:30] or come into friction with one another. I don't know if you've read the short story Borges and I. It's about him and having a separate writer self and then himself circling around each other. And, you know, one wins, but who is it? And there's always these dueling parts of me, which is one of this very serious, intense side and then this more playful light side. So the implication there is that it should be bridged. Is some separation good? Maybe. I don't have answers here. It's through seriousness that you find playfulness.

Think about Miyazaki, right? He hand drew his frames until well into the 70s. There's this one amazing interview where he says, [01:00] I was thinking about how to make the dragon move. And he's like, I actually went to a restaurant and I looked at the eels wriggling around. And I thought, you ever seen an eel move like that? He just has like constitutionally unable to not care. And I think that is what makes this film so light. And you don't have to have this tyranny of one identity. Welcome to Dialectic, episode 46 with Nicole Sayah.

Nicole is a writer, investor. [01:20] and a friend who I've had many wide-ranging generative conversations with, and so I was excited to be able to capture one of them with you here today. Nicole, or Nyx, as you might know her from her writing, writes on Substack at Starting From Nyx, [01:34] and just launched a new project called New Ontologies, where she's profiling founders and early stage teams and the principles and ideas and craft and humanity [01:43] that go into them. [01:44] We talked about beauty, reality and fantasy, writing and ambition, and this tension that we circle through so much of the conversation around, which is striving and seriousness and effort and intensity, and also the ways that...

[01:59] Things can just fall into place when you come to love not just fantasy but reality. [02:05] I hope you enjoy the conversation. And before we get into things, I'd like to thank Notion Dialectics presenting partner. Notion is a creative workspace for your life's work and has dramatically changed in the past couple of years as they've rebuilt the company from the ground up to think about how AI can be used in a way that doesn't just automate away your teammates or automate away the meaningful work, but instead allows you to think from first principles about how you can collaborate with people and with AI to do great work.

The theme behind this for Notion [02:35] together. As Notion has reinvented itself, the team has evolved incredibly too. My friend and former podcast guest Brie Wolfson and her collaborator Camille wrote an amazing piece for Colossus about the inside of Notion and how they're becoming an AI first company. And Notion is growing incredibly fast. I have to imagine that there are a number of dialectic listeners who would be amazing fits for Notion, whether it be on the product side, the go-to-market and sales [03:05] cross-collaboration with AI, and a team that I spent a lot of time with, the storytelling team, as they think about the future of Notion's brand, how Notion can tell amazing stories about people building inside and outside of software across creativity, and how teams, big and small, are thinking together.

[03:20] If you think that might be you and you're interested in working with Notion, please reach out either to them directly or to me at work at com and I'll take a look. It would be a true honor to have some of my audience join the team at Notion and get to collaborate together. Notion is a huge part of what makes dialectic possible. You can also learn more about Notion or check it out if you haven't tried it in a while at com slash dialectic. Thanks again to Notion. And here is my conversation with Nicole Sayah.

[03:49] Nicole Sayah, thank you for joining me. This is a long time coming. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I'm excited for this. We've had many long meandering walks and conversations, so I'm excited to hopefully capture a little bit of that. [04:02] uh, in, in hi-fi. Um, I want to start with beauty. [04:06] I'm going to turn around a line of yours on you. [04:10] How has pursuing beauty rearranged your life? [04:14] Hmm. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote by Iris Murdoch, which says that beauty is a version of unselfing.

And I've always loved that term of basically beauty taking you out of yourself. And I think one part that's interesting. [04:33] One way beauty has rearranged my life is through reading beautiful works of literature. I think just the... [04:39] sentence-by-sentence construction is really... [04:44] gorgeous to me. I read a lot of... [04:47] translation as well. And I think that seeing the choices that the translator makes, but also the choices the author makes in parallel is something I draw a lot of inspiration from. [04:58] I like that. You have a [05:00] amazing piece on kind of like different types of beauty.

And I want to get into the details on that, but I have a couple of excerpts first. [05:08] And you start the point almost in this sort of like, I don't want to say it's a negative orientation, but a complicated orientation to beauty. You say, only later I reflect on the sheer inescapability of my longing for beauty. Most women I know grew up haunted by the beauty myth, torn between acceptance and aspiration. [05:24] All my life, I saw beauty as a form of applied effort. Beauty was rarely a quality one owned intrinsically, rather something one maniacally expended money and time to become.

I think this is also against the backdrop of a trip to soul, which is obviously a very specific place in that world. Then you go on to say, it seems to me there are two predominant types of beauty. A beauty that is solipsistic, oriented around glamour and draws us inward in an ever-turning gyre. And a beauty that lies outside of us, that makes us more generous and open. [05:54] Murdoch reference you were talking about. [05:58] I'm curious how you relate to this sort of like, maybe one cut of this or one interpretation I have is like, there's a type of beauty...

[06:05] as like a target... [06:07] Like to make something more beautiful, make oneself more beautiful, but certainly also... [06:11] effortfully make words more beautiful or a podcast more beautiful, whatever. And then there's a beauty as like perception. [06:18] which is like this just generous orientation towards recognizing the world is beautiful and, [06:23] Um... [06:26] Do you think that those two things are... [06:29] at odds with each other and, and to the extent they're not, or to the extent they, or like, [06:34] Maybe what I'm asking is like, [06:35] how do you think about intentionality in those two forms of beauty?

One, cause the second one, the perception one feels much more like, like, [06:44] I'm not doing anything and the world's just happening to me and I'm perceiving the world as beautiful and the other feels like very effortful and we'll talk more about that and seriousness and so on. But does that distinction make any sense? I'm curious for your perspective. Yeah, it does. But I mean, I think I would say that both are actually quite intentional because the second is more like actually, oh, I'm... [07:01] purposefully paying attention to the world.

And it's a frame of mind where I think a lot about like ordinary magic. And, you know, there's a lot of poets that write about this. And some of my favorite poetry is always like about regular people, regular days. And I think one aspect of beauty is actually noticing the ordinary and watching it [07:22] come alive with a new sheen. [07:24] You know, there's that Simone whale, like attention is the greatest form of prayer. So, [07:29] I think they're both intentional, just maybe different frames. One is very inward oriented and the other is more external, which is I'm.

[07:37] perceiving the world, I'm taking in these inputs, and I'm making something out of that, or I'm [07:42] or I'm anticipating or understanding something different about the world. [07:46] Does it take effort? Does that type of attention take effort? Do you relate to it taking effort? [07:52] I do, yeah. I mean, I do think that, well, sometimes it's like, oh, wow, this mountain range or this thing that I'm looking at, it's just inherently, you know, nature is beautiful. Yes. But I do think that some... [08:05] perception is required, like some perceptual change is required for you to also see the regular world as beautiful.

[08:13] Yeah. [08:13] There's a... [08:15] uh, Nietzsche idea that you get into in the same piece. And it's almost like a, if that's like one form of two types of beauty, there's a different kind of caught on two types of beauty being sort of like easy to perceive and difficult to perceive. Um, and Nietzsche is talking about music and like the way that some things are like really easy to consume or really easy to access. He says, um, [08:36] We need to exercise effort and goodwill in order to endure it in spite of its strangeness.

We are finally recompensed for our goodwill, our patience, reasonableness, and gentleness towards what is unfamiliar. By the unfamiliar slowly throwing off its veil and presenting itself to us as a new ineffable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Love, too, has to be learned. Yeah. [09:05] there's [09:06] Someone else you say tolerates strangeness long enough to be changed by it. [09:12] And I think this is also maybe you in the same piece. You talk about perhaps developing a taste for difficult beauty or the ability to tolerate mental discomfort is one of the most important human skills to have, to consume novel things, to accept boredom and sadness, to be patient, to override the aversion of being changed.

[09:27] And so like, there's this... [09:28] I'm really fascinated by this like [09:32] this tension around something being strange and having to sit with it to the point where the beauty inside of that in it becoming beautiful, we are also changed. [09:43] Like... [09:44] Which I think I've experienced, but it's so non-intuitive. [09:50] Yeah, I mean, I think it's like the frontier of the world coming together and the unfolding that happens between you and the world, which I think we've talked about a bunch. [10:00] you know, there's lots of ways that, for example, Nisha talks about music.

There's another piece by Zadie Smith that I really like called, you know, Attunement, or On Attunement. And it's about how she hears Joni Mitchell's song, California, for the first time. And if you've heard California, it's a little bit of an odd song. It's not, you know, it's not naturally, it's sort of a different register, a different tempo than people maybe were used to or are used to. And she describes, you know, [10:27] a moment underneath a cathedral when she hears a song and it completely flips for her. And it's about context and it's about engagement with the song in a very difficult moment in her life or a moment of reflection.

And I think about that a lot for books and different types of media as well, which is, and even people, right? It's like context matters so much. And I think sometimes [10:57] Maybe you see something or read something once and it doesn't hit then. But I think it requires patience and endurance to actually... [11:05] look at it again, like turn over the stone again and give things second chances. I think I'm a big believer in that. [11:13] That's a romantic idea and a beautiful one, and certainly one that I think most people will connect to.

Maybe it's not quite the same example. I had my own experience of that with Joni where I... [11:21] I already liked Joni, but I had heard Both Sides Now many times. And I just want to walk one day and I fully listened to it for the first time. And I was like, oh, my gosh, this is one of the best things I've ever written, which is a little different than I think the Zadie example where she actually had almost an aversion to it. Like an aversion, yeah. [11:37] I guess my question is like, [11:39] Thank you.

[11:40] We have finite attention. [11:42] Um... [11:44] Maybe the classic example is you read a book or you watch a film and you don't connect with it, and years later you come back. And so time is doing a lot of work there. Perhaps to go back to the point you were making or the point I was making or referencing of yours is that, [11:57] I've changed. How do you know... [12:01] When to like. [12:02] give something more... Assuming that some beauty is not easy... [12:07] How do you know when to persist?

[12:09] When it's challenging. Versus numb or something? Or dual? Yeah, we're sort of neutral. I think the dispassion thing is probably the signal that maybe there's nothing there. But I think if you feel that there's something there and maybe it's uncomfortable. It's abrasive. Yeah, it's abrasive. And you're like, oh, I don't like this at all. [12:30] then maybe return to it because there's some emotional register there that you're not quite aware of. [12:36] Yeah. [12:36] Are there any experiences, maybe art-wise or otherwise, that come to mind where you've had this kind of like switch, almost like this horseshoeing?

[12:45] Yeah, there's actually a really great example. I took art history in college and I [12:52] My art teacher, she was just, I mean, a fabulous professor, but she was very moved by art to the point where she would cry in the middle of our lectures. It was great. Like, I was so energized by it, first of all. But there was this one, you know, structure. Is it a big class? It's a small class, like a seminar. But there's this big structure called Donald Judd's Boxes in Marfa. And it's just like a row of boxes in the fields of like a waste, like a barren land.

[13:22] basically. And she started like bawling her eyes on in the center of class and [13:26] For a long time, I didn't understand it. You know, I was kind of shocked by that reaction. [13:33] Or almost like it's like, come on. Like, are you really? But when I... [13:39] There was like a moment where I looked at some photos of those boxes and there's some, the sun was setting, the light was reflecting off of it. I read the backstory of, you know, why did Donald Judd kind of put those boxes there?

It's about like man-made versus artificial and all these interesting dualities. And I thought there was just so much more texture there that I didn't pick up the first time. And so it... [14:00] changed my mind, first of all, to see someone have a really emotional reaction to it. And I also think that's why we... [14:07] enjoy friends' recommendations or we trust people to show us what also hits for them. [14:16] Maybe you can kind of adjust your view that way as well. [14:19] I wonder about this because... [14:21] And it relates to something else we'll talk about, but [14:24] I know a movie you like a lot is The Boy and the Heron.

[14:27] And it's a good example of a phenomenon that I've had many times, which is I'll experience something. The first time I saw it, I think I saw it, uh, the dub maybe, um, uh, [14:38] So which is maybe a slightly different experience, although Robert Pattinson was really going for it as the bird. [14:43] And I was like, I love Miyazaki, but I really don't know what was going on there. And then I read this amazing review by David Ehrlich, who's a film critic, and then I watched The Wind Rises.

[14:53] And so like... [14:54] I guess the point I'm trying to illustrate is I got to... [14:59] without additional context from other people, I may have watched The Boy and the Heron years later and connected it. But instead, I watched the sub two weeks after reading this review and a few other things, and then I really connected to it and really loved it. And I had this complicated relationship, where I'm like, am I cheating? Is the fact that I needed somebody else's additional context, I needed somebody to show me how to see [15:18] Mmm.

[15:19] I wonder how you relate... Versus there's maybe a... [15:24] When it happens on your own, whether it's on a long time horizon or just from a [15:28] I don't know, you're going to stand in front of a painting for 10 minutes until you cry, or whatever, it's more earned? Am I just in my head about that? Well, I don't think, I don't know, I don't really think about a sort of instinct as anything earned. I think it's earned to also spend time and engage. I mean, honestly, engaging could mean, oh, staring at something for 10 minutes, or it can mean talking to people.

I think of attention much more as a communal thing, or, um, [15:55] Learning is a communal thing. And I think, you know, for a long time, I thought of it as a very hyper individualistic thing. [16:02] endeavor. And now I'm much more open to the fact that, oh, hey, when I want to understand something, or I want to learn a new concept, it's always through community. It's always through hyperlocal experiences of that thing. So I would say I think that's also earned. Maybe I'm like clinging to some sense of like needing originality or something.

Right. Yeah. [16:23] Hmm. [16:24] Or even... [16:26] To go back to your communal idea, it would feel more valid, dare I use that word, to like... [16:33] I'm going to talk with a few of my friends who all saw... [16:35] The Boy and the Heron. But if I outsource an opinion from a professional, very serious person, critic, it again feels... Maybe a better way of asking this question would be... [16:47] When you're doing this communally, how do you maintain sort of a sense of... [16:52] your own interiority, your own sense of self or ideas versus the risk maybe of like, [16:59] Um...

[17:00] anything you consume quickly trying to like, [17:03] make your, you're thinking on that very relational is you, you don't get this aspect of sort of sitting, like going through something on your own. Like, do you have a relationship to maybe it's, maybe you're oscillating, which is you're going to go, I don't know, use a simple example. Like you, you read a novel or you read a book. [17:21] and then you spend some time thinking about it, and then you go to the book club, and then you journal. It does feel that some amount of

[17:28] Maybe that's what I'm trying to understand or work through is like you want some of the relational and you want some of the isolated. Yeah. Yeah. [17:33] and you don't want to overly rotate to one, and maybe I'm wondering about how those two things blur together. [17:40] Right. Well, I mean, the danger point is if you actually don't feel anything toward a particular person, [17:45] piece of work. But because everyone tells you you should feel something, you've like, sort of labeled it as meaningful. Whereas, you know, [17:54] if you come to that thing and you still feel something and you've also talked to a bunch of other people, I think that's still a genuine appreciation of the work.

[18:01] Yeah, it reminds me of, I talked to Celine Wynn, who I think you know, or at least have read, and it reminds me of how she talks about Proust, which is like, a different cut on this would be like, you don't have to like this for some arbitrary reason that you're supposed to like it. But also somebody like Celine being like, this is fun and gossipy or whatever, might be a portal in for your own. Yeah, it's a really, I really love the idea that attention is actually just like about doing, like, well, I almost said doing the work, putting in the time.

Mm-hmm. [18:31] Yeah, I love Celine's work and I think an important part about what she's doing is like sort of expanding the market. [18:39] for literature through her perception and her, you know, [18:45] her sharing her perspective on things. And I do think that's very powerful to go back to what we're saying, which is like, okay, maybe you do need someone to guide you. And there's nothing wrong with being guided sometimes as well. Right. I think I take away a lot of the, I don't have any shame to like where I come to things, how I

[19:02] get to things. It's always, how do I feel about this thing at the end of the day? And have I learned something along the way about myself, about the world? And I think that's a much more honest and meaningful way to come at it. There's also like less ownership. There's so much less ownership and less pressure, you know? Yeah. It kind of comes back to this idea that like... [19:20] the most beautiful things. What I love about that early idea is that, [19:24] It actually relates a little bit. I talked with Henry Carlson about introspection.

And he has this Nick Cave example. And he basically talks about pushing ourselves to introspect with yourself as the subject, not as the object. [19:35] And it feels like beauty is something similar, which is not like... [19:38] who am I or how can I be beautiful or how can I like, it's just like, what am I noticing? And when you take that orientation, part of what I'm sensing in a lot of your answers is just this like very outwardly directed, [19:49] orientation. [19:51] that thus is less concerned about whether it's your idea or somebody else's idea or any of these things.

Yeah, exactly. [19:58] I like that. [19:59] So there's maybe a related idea to beauty, which is... [20:05] you write about fantasy and reality. [20:08] - Mm. [20:08] Um, [20:10] and maybe the ways that we cling to fantasy when in fact reality is actually like far more rich or real or beautiful. A couple of quick excerpts. [20:20] But the characters that have captured my heart the most always chose to return to or see reality for how it was. And love the deeply flawed human world because it was real, not contrived, not airless or soundless or unbruised.

It was real and had violence and rapture and bodies that aged and buildings that crumbled. But by that same hand, fervor, courage and human striving. And then a couple other ideas. [20:50] That what lasts, what feels right, looks nothing like what I first imagined or dreamed about. There are no more fantasies to cling on to. There is no past, no backward place for my longings. Only forward into the night, led by the beacon of beauty. Which is a really, really sweet sentiment. [21:07] Um... [21:08] Maybe a really almost sillily open-ended question, but how have you learned to love what is real?

[21:14] Hmm. Yeah, it's such a such a great question. And I think I was referring to a lot of different novels in that in that writing about one of my favorite sort of character arcs is like young man kind of, you know, goes for glory and and and victory and goes and embarks on this insane quest. [21:44] and live reality. And I'm always really interested in that inflection where you see something and you think it's real, but you realize it's a mirage. Or it wasn't what you hoped for. It wasn't what you hoped for.

[22:03] are not coming true, but I can actually chart a new path and actually opens you up to new, um, [22:10] aperture of thinking. I think in particular, when I think about that novel or these sets of novels, I think, [22:20] Fiction is always a really interesting, very extreme version of reality, which is... [22:28] Maybe we don't go on the quest, right? We don't go on this insane quest to Wild West and all these things. But we do go on these little quests and we hope and we dream for things.

And there's some really fundamental truth to the fact that we don't always get what we want. Yes. Um... [22:43] - The texture of the story is deeply real. - Exactly, yeah, exactly. And the other thing is when I think about everything that I love and care about, whether it's, you know, a beautiful piece of work or it's a person, it's always actually the moments where they chafe against the edge of reality that I realize that they're human and they're flawed and I'm also human and flawed. And that makes it deeply relatable.

[23:10] And, and so when I reflect on everything that's happened in my life, all of the actually really good moments unfolded in ways that I didn't anticipate for, didn't plan for and, and [23:23] maybe didn't even have the imagination for, which, you know, I think is really beautiful. [23:29] How do you know when you're actually encountering reality? [23:33] Like, um... [23:34] Much of modern life... [23:38] We sort of live like a bubble-wrapped existence in some sense, at least in terms of reality, in terms of stake. We don't face death very often.

It's a very extreme example. [23:48] and [23:48] Obviously, there are times in life where you really get slapped in the face. You have something you desperately want and you don't get it or you lose or whatever. You have the job you want. Like... [23:58] But I think in a lot of the cases it's like a little more subtle. [24:01] Mm. [24:02] Does that feel true to you or does it feel like you're kind of, or maybe it's only true in hindsight. Like I definitely find like, [24:08] There are, again, there are the glass shattering moments, but a lot of time it's like I realize like a year later or something.

Yeah, I think they're both. I think it's both. I mean, I think there are moments where you're just really shell shocked or you're there's moments where you're really let down by something, someone or you just didn't get that. You didn't get the thing you wanted. [24:29] where it's only with time passing that you kind of reflect back and be like, okay, I didn't get what I wanted, but I got something far better. Um, [24:37] I think having that mindset is important. [24:42] Prior to the past four years, I think I had a very rigid mindset of, or I'm a big planning personality.

Prior to the... [24:49] Until four years ago. Yeah, maybe four or five years ago. Whenever I started writing. Writing publicly. Writing publicly. I had a very big planning personality. [24:59] process is actually me learning how to not plan for things and be surprised by the unexpected. [25:07] Is that, I was going to ask, like, what is your strategy of... [25:10] introducing more reality? Is it that? Is it just not planning? Because that's almost a passive openness to reality. But maybe there's probably another orientation. It's like, how do I... I don't know, it's the Henrik line, make contact with reality.

Yeah, make contact with the world and make it yield something. Yeah, how do you do that? [25:44] Perhaps there was some truth in them. Perhaps there was something I have yet to learn and have to incorporate into the work to make it better. [25:53] And so having sort of an intellectual honesty as well is really important. Well, and that often relies on... [26:00] Like you have to externalize it to [26:02] be totally intellectually honest sometimes. Yes. Like it's very hard to realize... [26:08] You're in the fantasy world. Right. It's not good thinking alone, you know.

Right. [26:13] Back to the boy and the heron. You so well... [26:16] You make such an excellent point. That's what that film is about, basically. The dreamland is pretty appealing. It's almost like, why are you leaving? I think it's really easy to lull myself into... [26:33] believing my fantasies. [26:35] Unless I'm forced, like... [26:38] And I don't know, one example is I've been fortunate to have friends who are like, [26:41] smack you across the face. [26:46] There's a, you alluded to it earlier, there's a David White quote I think we both quite like a lot.

He says, whatever human being desires for themselves will not come about exactly as they first imagined it or first laid it out in their minds. What always happens to the meaning between what you desire from your world [27:00] and what the world desires of you. [27:02] It's this frontier where you overhear yourself and you overhear the world. [27:06] Maybe this relates to the notion you were pointing out of... [27:09] I think it's changed maybe four or five years ago with the writing, but, uh, [27:13] You had said it's important, referencing that, I think.

It's important to overhear the world rather than narrate it in advance. And there's an element of the planning thing about that. [27:24] Again, this is back to the more subtle part of it. [27:28] Um... [27:30] What does it feel like to like overhear the world? [27:32] Yeah, well, maybe this is a naive or innocent point of view, but I do see the world as sort of benevolent. And sort of narrating it internally in your head actually closes you off to any sort of external information or external redirection or any sort of feedback.

And I think it's always dangerous when you close yourself off to feedback or you live in like a sealed chamber. [28:02] talk to people, and even when you're getting bad feedback, it's actually kind of benevolent. Like, people are telling you, you know, that something's not registering, something's not working, and... [28:14] Yeah, I remember this moment in art class. I used to paint a lot. We can talk about that. But before I wrote, and I used to paint acrylics, and my art teacher came up behind me and [28:25] I was like, oh, you know, this painting, it could be so much richer and deeper if you had these different, if you added these different colors to it.

And I was like, great, let me just try it out. And the art teacher came to me later and said, you're the least defensive person ever. [28:41] I've met. Like you just are like ready to try things out. And I'm not sure if it's going to work out, but. [28:47] you were ready to put new colors on the painting. And I always think about that line of like putting new colors on the painting as a framework. [28:55] which I think to view the world. Are you that way with things outside of painting?

[29:00] Or with writing? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Huh. What do you think that does that come from that experience? Like what were you? Have you always been like that? [29:08] Yeah, maybe it's a sense of egolessness. It's not necessarily true that I have no ego, but I think everyone does if we're honest to ourselves. But I think trying the best to be... [29:22] So egoless in the pursuit of beauty or in pursuit of craft, I think, is very important. And you have to balance that with sort of your opinionation about what you should be doing as well, of course.

Yeah. [29:35] There are some aspect of like, okay, don't take yourself too seriously sometimes. [29:40] Yeah. [29:41] As I was doing a prep for this, I was finding myself kind of continuing to swing on this pendulum. And I think this is starting to get at it, which is... [29:48] What you just said... [29:50] Thank you. [29:52] has this lightness and this almost like Zen-like quality of just like, go back to like the reality is better than fantasy and I should just be really, really open to it and I should be loose and egoless.

And yet you are, [30:06] are a person who, and certainly someone who writes about intensity and deep effort and seriousness. There's a bit where you say... [30:16] Uh, beauty is effort. Effort is monstrous and ugly, but it also is the source of everything beautiful in this world. And then somewhere else in writing and in life, you need to gnaw on the bone. This kind of goes back to the reality thing, meaning get under the skin, get into the crevices. Writing has become bloodless and fake, but people create the real. And so,

[30:34] Am I making up this tension? No, there's definitely a tension. [30:39] But, like, you're, like, that story about the painter, like, that would, people who don't know you very well would be like, wow, Nicola must just be, like, so, like, la-di-da, kind of, like, very vibes-based, like... [30:51] Um... [30:52] and we'll talk more about this later, but in some sense, you have a creative life. [30:56] primarily in writing, that is probably a little bit more that way. But still, you write about [31:01] Timothee Chalamet and intensity and seriousness. And then you have a...

[31:03] Professional life is an investor that's much harder. Maybe it's hard and soft. [31:09] Yeah, those two things seem so at odds. Yeah, well, I think that you put it really well, which is I have multiple identities. And the reason why they feel at odds is because sometimes those identities conflict or come into friction with one another. I don't know if you read the short story Borges and I. [31:27] No. Borges is an Argentinian writer. I think you'd really like his short story. And it's about him and having a separate writer self and then himself.

And they're sort of like circling around each other. And one wins, but who is it? Wow. And I don't know. I read that and I really related because there is these two parts. And there's always these dueling parts of me, which is one of this very serious, intense side and then this more playful, light side. [31:57] disambiguating those identities has been really helpful to get at that, to separate out that tension as well. [32:03] Are you taking that on from almost like a persona sense? Yeah. [32:08] I don't know, people talk about, when I'm writing, I'll take on a persona, or when I'm performing, I'll take on a persona.

When I'm at work, do you feel that duality in your... [32:15] when you're at work versus when you're writing versus when you're in your, the rest of your life or is it a little bit subtler? I do feel the distinction. Yeah. And it's something I'm, I'm working to bridge. [32:26] And so the implication there is that it should be bridged. Like, is some separation good? Maybe. I mean, maybe. I don't have answers here. But yeah, I do think that there is, maybe you can successfully have them separate. And my personal endeavor is to bridge them slightly more.

[32:45] Hmm. [32:46] Thank you. [32:46] Yeah, I think maybe... [32:48] not to try to attempt to answer my own question, but it does seem that both aspects of that for you [32:54] the playfulness and lightness and the, [32:57] intensity. [32:59] kind of are about loving what is real. [33:02] Like they're different. [33:04] Cuts on that, maybe? But they both are in service of that, it seems. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think there's... [33:11] There are a bunch of books by the German author Hermann Hesse. [33:16] I love and all his books are about duality.

If you read any of them, like Siddhartha, Glassbeard Dream, and Narcissus and Goldwyn. Narcissus and Goldwyn is probably the most relevant here, but it's about these two monks. One of them is very aesthetic and lives in the tower and becomes this really, you know, intellectual and teacher, professor of sorts. And the other is sort of this, you know, man of the world. [33:42] goes into the world, engages in acts of sensuality and violence and all of these sort of raw things. [33:50] And at the end of the novel, they come back together and have a conversation.

[33:53] And really, when I left that, when I read that novel, I was like, wow, like, this is us, like, this is everyone else. [34:00] This is me, first of all, and this is everyone I've ever known, which is there's one part of you that's in the tower and there's one part of you in the world. [34:07] And you're constantly dealing with between the two. Yes. And he doesn't pass any judgment as well. It's not like, oh, one is better than the other, but one is each is its own integral nature.

And you have to fulfill your integral nature. [34:23] Maybe that's a non-answer, but... I love that answer. I'm probably stretching it, but it reminds me a little bit of My Dinner with Andre, if you've ever seen that film. I haven't. It's not quite the same, but it's a similar element of sort of duality and not... [34:37] It really doesn't seem that the director is... [34:40] taking too much of an opinion, which is maybe the critical part. [34:43] Yeah. And that certainly describes Siddhartha too. Um, [34:48] On the seriousness, kind of like effort, commitment thing...

[34:53] You have a bit where you say, when you meet someone with devotion and care for their craft, they have thinner barriers between their soul and the external world. Their soul shines lightly on the surface of their being. [35:04] Again, I know I'm hitting this over and over again, but that duality is there again, which is like, [35:10] That's kind of a surprising description of a very serious person. Their soul shines lightly on the surface of their being. I think in that piece you're referencing Chalamet. This was a year ago or so when he was doing it.

And I both agree with you, but it seems so... When you think of a seriousness, it's like... [35:29] Yeah. Well, maybe my thesis is that maybe my thesis is my unspoken thesis is that it is through seriousness that you find playfulness or there is through seriousness that you find this level of, I guess, skating through the world. You know, like if you think about Miyazaki, right, I write about Miyazaki a lot and I care a lot about his work and he's a great inspiration to me. [35:59] available and there's this one amazing interview where he says like I was thinking about how to make the dragon move.

[36:06] And he's like, I actually went to a restaurant and I looked at the eels wriggling around and I thought... [36:11] You ever seen an eel move like that? It's amazing. And he's just constitutionally unable to not care. And I think that is what makes his film so light and beautiful. And when you watch a Miyazaki film, [36:25] It's got all these dualities inside of them, too. Right. There's all these children who have to grow up too early. There are these like wars and famines and fires and, you know, lost children and the like.

But at the end of the movie, you come away feeling like, oh, that was a beautiful, playful, light movie. [36:43] expression of art. So I think maybe my [36:48] Maybe my thought is that there can be both. There always is both. [36:51] Thank you. [36:51] Thank you. [36:53] I think you're really... I've been wrestling with this a little bit, and it's come up in conversations where it's like... [36:58] where we had this moment maybe that circled around the figure skater, Alyssa Liu, and the whole thing was like, [37:07] It's like...

[37:08] Having, like, the intense person gets crushed by the person who's having fun. It's like Novak Djokovic. I like hitting the tennis ball. There's all these stories. I was just talking to Nick Thompson about this. [37:18] ultra runner uh killian jernay i think and he's like everybody's pissed because he's just having a blast out there right yeah [37:24] and [37:25] This also relates to like find the thing that feels like play to you that feels like work to everyone else. And I've had this conversation with a bunch of people in real life who are kind of like, but like how much of it should be like play?

Should it be 20%? Should it be 60%? Do other people who it feels like a play to a hundred percent. And then meanwhile, may it's not true for all creatives, but certainly writers, you talk to writers, every writer's like, I hate writing, but also it's so excruciatingly meaningful. And so I'm like, [37:49] I really struggle with this is like, should it feel easier or should it feel intense and hard? Yeah. [37:54] And I think... [37:56] I think your answer is... [37:58] My sense is, to go back to Alyssa Liu, my sense is Alyssa...

[38:02] is someone who is deeply serious. 100%. That doesn't mean it's toxic, but it also doesn't mean it's like, [38:09] All loosey-goosey, easy all the time. Right. But the expression of it is playful. Yes. Right? When you see her on ice, she's just clearly having so much fun. Maybe I'm projecting onto her. But also because she's done the work. She put in the work. Because she's done the work. And so then on ice, she can sort of relax in some ways because her body and her muscle memory is carrying her through that...

[38:28] Peace. [38:29] Yeah. [38:30] Yeah, I mean, we could talk about this all day. The challenge, I guess, is like, I don't know if you've seen, have you seen Miyazaki and the Heron, the documentary they most recently made? And it's, I'm sure it's like any of them, like, [38:40] He's amazing. There's a line in there where he's like, "If we don't create, there is nothing." But [38:47] I don't think he's having fun. Like, he is deeply burdened. [38:51] And so I think people usually swing to one way or the other.

And that's like the thing that my sense is you were right. I think Alyssa Liu on the ice for the Olympic gold was really, truly like living it present in it. Maybe that's specific to a performer or whatever. [39:07] And yet... [39:09] I think she did the work on the interim. Maybe it's just getting to the point where you're able to put in all this intensity and then let yourself... [39:17] Like drop, drop the weights. [39:20] Yes, exactly. Well, it's there's this Joan Didion. I read the Joan Didion collected interviews last week.

And one of the lines I saved in there was salvation comes from extreme and doomed commitments. And it's a banger. It's such a banger. But also like, you know, when and she's asked later, there's an interview where that line is said. And later the interviewer is like, oh, so you think it's a doomed commitment? She said, no, I think it's salvation. [39:47] She was talking about her marriage, right? Marriage, children, and writing. And so she's like, no, I think that's salvation, actually. But it's both. But it's both. It's both, right?

It's a commitment. It's also salvation. [40:00] You were referencing that same bit, and you say, I've always related deeply to a romantic ethic. For a while, writing was a sort of long-haul dread, a seasickness that wouldn't abate even when I reached land. [40:11] Do you still feel that way? [40:13] I... [40:14] I go in waves. I go in waves. I'm sure you feel that way too, but there are moments where writing just feels effortless and easy, and there are moments where I know that, oh, I have to dig and excavate something.

[40:29] And it's going to require some level of concentration and effort. I'm currently writing a piece about Robert Caro and sort of power broker and also his process. And something I really admire, but I actually have to do the reading, which is, you know, man, it's a slog. But it's really meaningful. [40:53] Yeah. [40:53] Yeah, you have a... There's an old piece you wrote, I think quite old, about peaks and troughs. And I forget the specific phrasing you're using, but you're talking about it sort of just like, yeah, like I...

[41:06] my first guest ever, the podcast, Jason Louie, he says, confidence in the memory is success. And I think there's an element of that. It's like knowing, I gotta do this log again, but I've been here before. I know what's good on the other side, which maybe makes it a little easier as you progress. Oh, yeah, totally. Do you find that [41:21] the amount of slug [41:23] is pretty constant or is it, are you getting lighter? Like, is it getting more and more easy? [41:28] over time. [41:28] It's getting easier to accept.

Right. It's the paradigm. Yeah. [41:40] Oh, it's funny. It's really funny. Um, [41:45] Thank you. [41:46] How has... [41:48] Again, very much on the same note. But how has, on the note of doomed commitments, like how has commitment... [41:55] to yourself, [41:56] to your writing. [41:57] Um... [41:59] Maybe on the note of sort of making yourself proud, like... [42:03] How have you used, actually, maybe a specific... [42:06] kind of silly reference that maybe captured what I'm getting at is, is, uh, you'd reference Murakami on his routine. And he says, the repetition itself becomes the important thing.

It's a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. [42:21] Maybe it's a simple question about habits. Maybe it's a deeper question along the lines of what you're getting at, but how have you... You're someone who has... [42:27] You don't write professionally. [42:29] at least currently. [42:31] and you have a deep, deep [42:33] commitment to it without some kind of super, like you don't have, you don't write daily necessarily, you don't write weekly. And yet you seem to have a real commitment to that. [42:41] How does that happen?

Is that, did it start with more scaffolding and now it's lighter? Yeah. [42:45] Does it still have a lot of scaffolding? [42:47] Yeah, I think it's part of my identity now. And I think that's how all change happens, where you integrate it into part of yourself or part of your identity. It's interesting because I've been writing online publicly for four years now. But I've been writing since I was maybe like 10 years old. And in lots of embarrassing outlets. You know, I was like, what, Pad, Blogspot, WordPress, Wix, like all of these weird Tumblr.

You know, I was on all these weird Internet sites, like writing things. [43:17] all these things. And so it's sort of a continuation of that younger child in me that was always writing. And I also wrote a pretty big poetry portfolio and thought poetry was the craft. And I still think that there are some poetic sensibilities in the writing, but they're not so condensed in form. But it is sort of a, how do you develop good faith, right, in other people? You develop good faith by trusting that another person is going to say what they're going to do [43:47] time and do the thing to the best of their ability.

And I think that really applies to yourself, which is how do you have good faith in yourself is that you actually do the thing you're going to say you say you're going to do. I think that's been a big, you know, [44:01] contributor to... [44:03] continuing the writing because I've told myself I'm going to show up here and [44:08] I don't want to let myself down the way I wouldn't want to let a friend down. Do you have a relation to yourself with... [44:15] with most things, with only writing, with some things, [44:21] Multiple things.

[44:23] Writing creativity, I'm quite serious about writing. [44:26] work as well as an investor. I'm also quite serious about fitness. So... [44:32] Maybe those three, yeah. [44:33] Creatively, you reference poetry in painting both. [44:36] are those kind of like moons circling the sun of writing? Or do things kind of come and go? Like, did you ever have that commitment level with painting or other things? [44:44] I tried. I think that there's only one really, maybe this is, you know... [44:50] Maybe it's not true because there's been a lot of artists who are multidisciplinary.

But I do think if you actually want to get really good at one particular medium, it benefits you to spend more time in that medium. And painting is just a very long time. [45:05] You need a lot of patients to paint a lot. [45:08] I mean, you need a lot of patience to write a lot, too. Yeah. So writing and painting, it's just like, okay, then I have time for nothing else in my life. Right. [45:18] You also, you wrote a recent piece, um... [45:21] kind of referencing this Michael Nielsen idea and this idea of [45:25] One of the questions I was thinking of as you were speaking is like, [45:29] Thank you.

[45:30] The good thing about commitments and good faith is that at some point it stops being like a habit or something or something you're really trying to do and it starts to become an identity. I am someone who writes. [45:39] In this... [45:40] kind of piece in the, in the, in the, I think in some of what Michael's referencing, he's talking about sort of like the lightness of identity of a writer. Um, [45:48] Thank you. [45:49] You say, when you free yourself from what Nielsen calls the tyranny of writing as primary identity, you can be free to choose for yourself what kind of writing you want to do and surface your other multiple identities, scientist, researcher, investor, designer, founder.

And then you say, instead, I chose the word sustaining creative aliveness because creative aliveness is the process of discovery, collection, synthesis, and then finally expression. [46:08] And so it's funny, like, [46:10] it seems like you do really have a deep [46:12] identity level commitment to being a writer, or being someone who writes maybe. And yet, it seems, maybe even now, and we'll talk about it in a little bit, like, [46:22] as your kind of creative and professional lives are converging a little bit as you're like writing is sort of this deep identity thing.

And it's this tool. Maybe, maybe the broader point here that I think you, you also get at is like, [46:36] Many people silo their creative lives and their professional lives. And writing maybe more so than painting is easier to do. [46:45] bring into other worlds. [46:48] But... [46:51] Yeah, it seems like you're holding this writing thing really, really firmly, but you're also not... [47:00] needing to [47:01] that it define who you, like the person you are, it's like, it's still a tool. [47:05] - Maybe the point that we keep circling back to is that, [47:10] I feel that it's fine to have multiple identities, and writing can be one of those identities, and in service of all these other identities.

And you don't have to have this... [47:18] maybe as Michael Nielsen says, tyranny of one identity. I think when you silo yourself into one particular identity, be it, you know, maybe it's an investor, maybe it's a writer, whatever, then you actually close yourself off to all these other things that you're interested in. And it's actually fine to be, you know, multifaceted and multi-identity person. And, um, [47:39] And it's okay for that to be slightly illegible as well. [47:43] Hmm. [47:46] Hmm. [47:47] Do you think that we can form new identities or are we just like – is it more like –

[47:53] I'm [47:54] Harvesting or inventing? [47:58] That's a great question. Man, I don't know. I think it's harvesting. [48:03] Yeah. I think it's harvesting. I think things show up early. You know, I think things show up early. But we maybe neglect that you don't water that or whatever. Yeah, you don't water it. Right. I'm sure that there's a life in which I could have become a painter. [48:15] But... [48:16] I chose not to become a painter. [48:19] Does that life feel... [48:21] Totally gone. Lost to you? [48:23] No, I think at some point maybe I'll harvest that identity.

Yeah. It'll be another one in my little box. Yeah, maybe that's an elegant sort of model for much of what we've been discussing, which is like there are all these sort of like seeds and things in your garden. Yeah. And you can like spend all your time, you can like... [48:38] build a big wall in the middle of the garden. You can just spend your time over here. You can kind of have two kind of core parts of the garden, [48:45] Um, you can go back to things and then maybe in the, in the sort of fullness of time and maturity, you eventually you like look around and you realize it's just one card.

Yeah. I like that a lot. Yeah. Um, yeah, I, I appreciate you checking me on the, on the, I, I, clearly I'm, I'm, [49:02] I'm trying to force everything into one jumble instinctively or otherwise. [49:09] You... [49:11] maybe to talk about bringing things together, uh, [49:14] very recently, just yesterday, two days ago, launched the beginning of a new project, which I think is cool to see [49:22] at least an aspect of two parts of your identity come together, which is this, like, one, on one hand, like, historically a lot of your writing is, like, more poetic and personal and for a long time was even synonymous.

And then you have this other life, which is, like, someone who's deeply committed to, like, [49:39] on one hand, like technology startups, but I think really like, [49:42] Dreamer is building really impressive big things. You say, I enjoy the work I do with early students software because it's all about telling ambitious stories of technology, failure, reconstruction, and where fantasy confronts reality markets whilst casting a romantic hope for the future. [49:57] This is beautiful. I'd love to just hear about what... [50:01] what New Ontologies is, where it came from. We can talk a little bit about Ando II in a minute, but what is behind this, and how has it felt to find this bridging in parts of your life?

[50:13] Yeah, well, in sort of the [50:16] tagline of Neo-Ampologies, the website, the tagline is, how do we have... [50:22] how do we talk more ambitiously about the future? And when I was reflecting on that tagline or reflecting on what this project is, I thought about it as... [50:31] How do we access ambition at different scales? And on one scale, and one way to talk about ambition is this really large moonshot vision of the future. How do we make reality malleable to our inventions? How do we, you know, that quote, which is like, the world is just a museum of passion projects.

How do we make those projects come to life? Yes. But... [50:50] I am just as interested in that aspect as I am the more... [50:55] individual aspect of it, which is what's our personal locus of possibility and how do we expand it? And so I think where you see these things add up together is... [51:08] "Wow, okay, I wanna talk about the ambitious future." But I also care about the ambitious future in a smaller way, in a more local way, in a more community-oriented way. I want people to...