You can't necessarily think yourself into the answers. You have to create space for the answers to come to you. You have this amazing introduction. You say the West is dying and we are killing her. The American dream has been replaced by mass package mediocrity porn, encouraging us to revel like happy pigs in our own meekness.
Yo, that rips. You know, all the bestseller books are like, you're messed up. And here's like nonfiction about how you can be less messed up. There's just not that many people who have the courage to reach beyond consensus and go explore new ideas. i'm like cool i'll start watching netflix when i've read the whole of human history riva why does rilke's poetry resonate with you so so deeply
The guy writes about ecstasy. And that was kind of become corrupted now because like in the past, you think about religious ecstasy or spiritual ecstasy, right? In yoga, you have these phrases now, but...
Rilke saw beauty in everything. He describes, he's like, I'm looking at a door, a chair, a flower. I see the ecstasy of everything. He sees in one little thing a representation of all things that are beautiful. And I don't know many writers that can do... notice in such with such subtlety detail that is provoked such beauty so it's like he's not appealing to vast heavens he's just noticing things around you and really looking at them from first principles and saying like how beautiful life is
it's just very moving i think it deeply resonates with some people not with everybody but if you're an ecstatic person then yes well it's funny that you talk about the beauty and subtlety i've been thinking a lot about the word vanilla And people see vanilla as a bad thing, but actually vanilla is very subtle flavor. And I think it speaks to sort of the sensory overload of the modern age where something that does have that subtlety, it's like people don't even have the receptors to appreciate.
how contoured something can be in these very subtle ways. Yeah, I went to an Underworld concert last night. You remember your Underworld? I don't know. I don't know what year. What year was Underworld? 2000s. Okay. They're in the Hackers soundtrack. That's like how they got the most famous. Are they like Nirvana?
No, it's more electronic music. It's kind of a mix between like Prodigy and Radiohead is where I place it. Cool, lovely. When we saw them perform last night and there's like two older guys with no stage, right? But the guys performing have such a vibe.
they hold all your attention just with gentle body movements like he was such an incredible dancer not like a cheesy way electronic music but he held everyone's attention because it was as if the music flowed through him and you compare that to something like katy perry She has like 75 actors waving. It's like Universal Studios in all of her sets, right? Because I think to actually strip that back and have people like Taylor Swift and stuff like this perform songs.
We've lost the ability that people have such a short attention span that they need something so theatrical. And last night, there was such elegance in this guy's performance, I couldn't stop thinking about it. There's like no set, but you just, everybody's like hypnotic. Everyone was so captivated by it. But now everything is just...
shocking because we don't have we don't have good attention span anymore yeah i think this comes back to writing in the way that we don't read things as much repetitively you know like when most people think about reading they think about oh how many books did you read this year reading the news but like
If you think of the Greeks, they memorized poems. It was funny. I was in a Bible study and there's a guy named Jimmy. And Jimmy's understanding of scripture is just like next level from everybody else. And he's a smart guy. But I was like, something's different. I said, Jimmy, like, how do you know the Bible so well? And he goes, you know what I do that no one else does? You know what? He goes, I memorize entire chapters of the Bible.
And when you memorize chapters, it takes a few months, but you really understand how things are structured and you understand the subtleties that almost get revealed to you through repetition. And I was like, ha, there, there's something there. Well, not even just that. I mean, I totally agree. But another thing is that you learn more.
as you get older, which allows you to unlock things in text that you might have missed before. I think we've had this conversation previously, which is that I've already read Atlas Rho like every two years for like 15 years, right? and i look back and i wish that i understood it better as a teenager but you had to have the uh the wisdom and the experiences to unlock the context of the things that she was referring to so
As you get older, if there's books that moved you when you were younger, it's worth going back and rereading them to see what nuggets you couldn't possibly have had comprehension for when you were a little bit more naive. So I do read books.
regularly that uh i've read before because i i have placed in them some value that there are lessons already that i want to learn from and perhaps more that i just haven't discovered yet why is her writing so captivating to you um i think Well, her, and I started reading Robert Palaszczuk, who I also like in the same brand, I remember, she takes philosophy and instead of making it like, here's an argument as to why you shouldn't subscribe to X, she puts the...
characteristics that she values in characters and by doing that you see the embodiment of those characters and their actions in a way that i think is more in you know you can invoke the um a much deeper and richer experience of what those qualities might look like in real life by witnessing them as characters in fiction as opposed to like a very logical like you know matter of fact philosophical treaties so i just think it brings alive the
references of character that if you just read like you know humility or greatness it's you read the word you know what it means but if you describe it in a character and see those actions it becomes much richer and much more alive so she took you know a complicated philosophy and embodied it in in a way that
anybody could resonate with and you see you know your friends and characters right things i said this before like sometimes when people piss me off i'm like they remind me of lily and ridden right like so she gave you that framework like i think understand what she was pointing to in a much deeper way
I'm always amazed at the percentage of people who I admire how they think, I admire how they reason, I admire how they move through the world, how many of them studied philosophy. So what's going on with the disconnect of, oh, philosophy is a useless major. And oh my goodness, there's something so core here that isn't just something that has to do with the actual ideas, but something about how to reason and how to work with ideas and almost configure them like Rubik's cubes or something. Yeah.
i i remember when i applied for my philosophy undergrad and i my you have to i don't need to do this in america but in england you have to write a cover letter that's like to the university saying like why they should recruit you into that program and i opened my
um letter to university college london saying that using bertrand russell's definition of philosophy which is that philosophy is a no man's land between theology and science which i really liked as like an answer right it's like it's asking questions that lots of other
groups are trying to answer the question formation. And the thing that frustrated me about my philosophy degree is that I found just studying the history of the questions less interesting than trying to figure them out. So contemporary academic philosophy becomes like...
can you recite Beacart's questions or, you know, and what I wanted to do was like, okay, well, how do we go about solving this? And I was like, no, no, we leave that to the other realms. So now actually Oxford University in England.
you do philosophy and they really recommend it i don't know if it's compulsory to do it alongside a science so you did a philosophy and physics i mean that would have been my dream course like philosophy and physics like what you ask the questions you go think about them that sounds great
But I was like learning about Descartes and like Cartesian dualism. And I thought to myself, isn't it a bit redundant to study this and not talk to neurologists or psychiatrists, like other people from other fields. So just the history of philosophy, philosophy just being the history of questions isn't as exciting as people.
actually trying to answer those questions. And I think that's very, like, there's not many examples of people doing that now. People are putting forward new ideas. They're just, you know, analyzing previous ones. So when everyone takes a risk, I get really excited. what's going on there you said we're in a creativity recession which is a good little way to phrase that yeah you know it's it's one of these things i think it's hard to unpack there's not like one simple causation i think
The education system has, the Overton window for education has become smaller and smaller to the point where like we're basically taking children and tying them to sort of like adult balls on SSRIs, right? I say docile and delirious drones. drugged into oblivion dishing out adhd pills like halloween candy yes exactly that um so there's one aspect which i think is uh you know people care a lot about freedom and agency and adults without realizing that people lose it as a child
um so that's one direction the other thing is that i think there's a lot of cultural nihilism because there's lots of negative messaging going on in society like we're always close to the world endings of climate change and we're always at the threat of war or something else and in those in that period of keeping people scared also it's like hard to take risks or be creative because you're trying to be protective like you're trying to protect and be defensive you're making this point about
protectionism and how that hurts creativity i think that there's something to a short time horizon and a lack of beauty what is the point of making something beautiful if the world's going to end in 10 years like why would you even take on that challenge 100 right like You changed the concept of time and people's lives and you put in this place this extreme fear. Now, why did people build such beautiful churches 500 years ago?
they had shorter life expectancies than we did, right? Which is crazy. But how people thought of themselves with inside like structures of the church and what eternal means, like there was different reasoning of like, there was lifetime when you were alive and then there was your legacy.
and your legacy was, if not more valuable than your life, because your life was so fragile and people died from sickness and ill health. Now people are really healthy, but they're full of fear, even though they live three times as long as anyone in the 16th century.
But in that culture of fear and thinking that bad things are going to happen, it's like, okay, we're going to move towards hedonism and short-term rewards. Because what's the point of spending... It's crazy now to think of spending 50 years building and building. i mean it probably takes that long in san francisco now anyway the government now makes it but in the past it used to just be so beautiful like that's why it would take such a long time but
You know, it was beyond themselves. Like, you know, I'm going to the Vatican next week. It's not like everyone who worked on these projects was like, well, I need to see it within an ROI of my lifetime. It was building together towards higher purposes. and legacy and divine and something that I talk about in my film, which is like faith. What is faith? And faith is an integrity, I think, to some level of values. It's a personal responsibility to something.
And it's noble. And right now it's also fast. And like you said, like a very short term. very short term. Well, I think the faith thing is deep because at some level, trying to achieve anything great, you can't reason your way into some justification for wanting to do that. It's almost even hard to quantify the outer limits of beauty.
something that is beautiful you just know it's beautiful but you can't be like you can look at the duomo in florence and be like oh that's beautiful i can like explain like the roi economic value like for me so much of What faith has given me in terms of pursuing something beautiful is just like my relationship with God and just trying to please him and having that be my only justification.
and nothing in the material realm as something that's pushing me or driving me. Yeah, well, I unfortunately think you're a very rare case. If there was a lot more of that energy in the world, people would probably make more beautiful things. But to the point of the Duomo in Florence.
so my mom my mother who you know has the crazy researcher gene whatever that i have is currently studying vasari's lives of the artists like an account of like 16th century italian artists and one of the ones she's studying is massaccio And his entire life, pretty much spent like 40, I'm pretty sure it was Mustachio, spent 40 years just making the door of the Duomo of Florence.
Like imagine if you said this to someone now, right? Even carpentry and stuff like that isn't recognized as like a beautiful skill anymore. Like now everything is machine manufactured and it's come from somewhere. Like we don't really value like beautiful words. Imagine saying to someone,
In this present age, the guy spent 40 years just making a door. Everyone's like, what a joker, right? Like, it sounds so far-fetched. There's something so beautiful in that that he was like, I want to get this little thing. I have this little opportunity to deliver beauty.
on something that's gonna last for hundreds if not thousands of years. And I'm gonna put my everything into it. There's a level of formality of like showing up to the craft that we're really missing now because we're surrounded by cheap and short-term things. From furniture to media, everything is cheap and fast.
He spent 40 years making a door and now everyone queues up to go see it because it's so beautiful. Did he not win? I think he won. Yeah. He got what he wanted. I mean, I think you see it writing and how many things are sort of mass produced and clearly. books his business cards and the writing that I think both of us admire. I mean, I know that you walked Nietzsche's trail.
He wasn't trying to make a business card. He wasn't trying to have an ROI. He was like a crazy guy who saw something about the nature of reality and needed to express it. You'd go on these walks and have these crazy ideas and then have this very aphoristic style that was N equals one. And I would also say I heard the story about Zadie Smith. She's just not on the Internet because she doesn't want.
to even hear what her critics think and i just think that that's awesome like i'm just increasingly thinking i'm way too connected like the feedback loop is too fast yeah i i would almost say that the best thing I've ever done in my life was like in the last two years just completely disengaged from the zeitgeist yeah like I I was talking with my boyfriend about this like I haven't we looked at the top 50 grossest grossing films in the last decade
I hadn't seen, I seen like one of them maybe. In terms of TV shows, like from Mad Men to any cultural references, all these things I've heard about, I've never even consumed a second. I've never watched Netflix. Um, I do, I go on Twitter is where I kind of get news, but I even kind of disengaged from that about a year ago. And it puts me in a state of like some fear because like I don't always know exactly what's going on in the world, but I, it will get to me eventually. But I also am so, um,
perplexed by how open people are to just consuming the media that is around them passively. I'm like, I'm very selected what I put inside my mind, right? I'm like, cool, I'll start watching Netflix when I've read the whole of human history. Like, I'd rather read the Odyssey a hundred times than watch Netflix. Like, I am not looking for passive entertainment. And I think that's a...
like a skill or like a, not a defense, but it's like some kind of limit that people are not putting on themselves enough. Like I'm so surprised by how many of my, you know, smart, intellectual friends come home and they just zone out. It's like TV shows. I just can't think of anything worse. Like for me, like it has to have something that like, I'm like, I want, I have so many things I want to learn. Like I don't want to just be entertained. Right.
And I watched the Barbie movie and wrote that review. And I remember watching the Barbie movie and thinking to myself, this would be such an interesting way for me to understand the zeitgeist. So halfway through, I was like, I have no idea what's going on. I'm so confused. I hear people's conversations and I think...
And now that I'm out of the zeitgeist, I can't place all the conversation topics anymore. But it's been great. I think it's a very valuable skill. Something that I've really come to appreciate is just the value of deep reading. And that sounds so trite, but...
Basically, I wrote a piece a few years ago called Against 3X Speed, which was basically a condemnation of this idea of like, I got in the car with somebody and he, you know, sometimes like the car will turn on and then the thing that they were listening to will.
automatically play yeah and he was listening to an audiobook at like 5x speed and i was like dude normally listen to books like this he goes yeah yeah what i do is i've figured out it's better to like listen to it two or three times but then i listened to the entire thing i was like
Dude, that's crazy. And it just gave me so much anxiety. I was like, I'm not gonna do that. And then... back to the philosophy point i had some friends who when i was living in new york they were at columbia and i took uh they invited me to a class and the entire semester was on the like 300 pages of Max Weber like basically all about the the Protestant work ethic and I was like this is interesting I never realized you could go so deep in something yeah and now I've ended up
all the way on the other side of the barbell like the only book that i read is the bible and i just spend every day trying to like understand one little section of the old testament and the new testament and like i read it and then i read uh one study bible the esb and then i read this like biblical theology study bible so i read two study bibles get the etymologies and stuff like that
And then I go, based on that, I journal on what do I need to know? Who do I need to be? What do I need to do? And I do it every day, every day. And then me and my friend Brent, we text each other what we will do. And I've been doing it for like six months and it's changed my life.
more than any other learning habit and it's not even close like it's changed with the love of my heart not just my mind which has been beautiful yeah i i have some friends who've done similar kind of in-depth biblical study and I am so envious that I want to do that. That sounds amazing. And when I first applied to university, I applied to do philosophy and theology because I wanted to study kind of New Testament manuscripts, which is something I've been thinking about for like the last year.
was trying to understand. And you had an amazing tweet. Do you remember when you had a tweet, like, it was like a couple of years ago where you said, it's crazy, like how people don't study or read the Bible, considering in fact it's been around for a really long time. It's had such a huge effect, like regardless of your faith.
yeah like there's this book that for some reason even if you don't think about is shaped human history especially in the west and i was talking to her friend saying she said that her friend her other friends eight-year-old child asked her who jesus christ was and i was like wow that's really crazy to me because like as an eight-year-old like i i mean i went to a christian school so just to far-fetch it's been so out of the zeitgeist people don't know
but uh you know studying these tests like there's a reason they stood the test of time like people found something it's The most red book in the world, like the Bible is, like, maybe people should consider it. Like, it's a thought that that's like a radical position is crazy. Well, it's insane because, you know, if you ask some intellectual, right, you're like, hey, what do you think of Plato? They're like...
And so they haven't read it. They'll be like, oh, I haven't read Plato. And they'll be really embarrassed. Have a read Nietzsche, I'll be really embarrassed. Have a read Kot, be very embarrassed. haven't read the bible and they'll be like proud to have not read the bible i have resisted such dogma i am in the age of reason now and yeah i think that's crazy
The biases around personal life and thinking are really insane. The fact that you can disregard a text that has been so foundational to all of Western thought, even just from a self-explanatory anthropology thing, like why is our culture the way it is?
maybe people should read historical texts. That's why I don't have time for Netflix. Yes, I need to read the Bible intensely. I did actually read the Bible a lot when I was a kid. I didn't come from a Christian family, but I was interested in religious texts.
and i read a bunch of the bible when i was younger and then again when i was in my university degree and i was kind of like shaped shaping myself as an atheist especially during university and like as i got older and changed my views on that i have started to pick up reading religious texts but that's what led me into studying the manuscript so like i've just gone the other way and like now the history of the manuscripts in the bible which has like become a recent obsession
as opposed to like reading the bible it's just like i'm not probably doing the thing that's going to give me any wisdom i'm just finding the conspiracies about the manuscripts but it's so fascinating it's like i don't know more people should be reading it so tell me about those conspiracies
When I was thinking about what I should work on next after the pathogen essay, I wanted to see something very different. And I started thinking about history just as a field. I was like, well, you know... history is one of those weird feels because it sounds so um soft and friendly like oh history but history is kind of like the foundation of propaganda like how people define the past is how people place themselves in the present and
like we all know like the winners often write the victories they go back and like the ultimate power is to be able to like change civilization or kill people or like whatever and also be able to like hide and get them done like the point is everyone wants to look like the good guys so you know if allies and if things different things have been had different in w world war ii like it would have been very different now right in terms of how we think about history
But the question I asked myself was like, okay, let me think of like a book that has been so foundational. And it was around the time when you wrote your tweet as well, because I was reading about my old notes earlier. And I thought to myself, well, if I'm going to study the New Testament, I want to read the oldest New Testament.
And that's how this started, right? I was like, what's the oldest New Testament? And the oldest New Testament, there's lots of fragments of the New Testament, but the oldest claiming New Testament, like entire copy codex, the Codex Sinaiticus.
which was discovered in the late 19th century by a biblical researcher called constantine tischendorf which is meant to be from the fourth century it's meant to be one of constantine's 50 bibles and he sent around to like rediscover like redistribute christianity so it's meant to be one of
constantine's 50 by 50 new testaments and it's written a codex all the other all the other manuscripts were written on scrolls and i started looking into this story the story just got weirder and weirder and it just fascinatingly like i've probably written 80 pages on it so far like i don't even know what it is like i'm like who is going to read my like deep dive of like the new testament manuscript you will i might david will you'll read it so it's okay
But this story is just crazy because Konstantin Tischendorf, the researcher, claims he found the manuscript in Mount Sinai Monastery in Egypt, which is the oldest continuous Christian monastery in the world. He says that he rescued the... oldest bible and oldest new testament copy from monks who are using it as for the fire like throwing into the fire and using it to like bustle the fire now that story is a little weird because
it's a beautiful text it's made on parchment not on papyrus it's very expensive it's got beautiful like manuscript no you know old school monastery would use this as like file paper right
So the story goes a little fishy and then you look into it more and it's like, well, they didn't even burn, even if it was like heretical text, people don't, like Christians and Jews, like they don't burn the text, they bury them. Like think about the Dead Sea Scrolls, think about if it's heretical, you bury it or put it near to a cemetery.
So I started doing all this investigative research into the Testament manuscripts. Like, I don't know. I just don't think that version is from the fourth century as it is claimed. So my argument in this is that... this original new testament full manuscript is not actually from the fourth century it's probably been doctored in the 19th that's not to refute christianity that's just one version i think the guy was trying to get glory and say like i found the oldest right but there's a lot of
weird things that happen around religion because at the time religion was politics right so well i think we're actually getting to the core of a lot of your writing and creative process which is you are willing to ask questions that other people are willing to ask and i mean i just think naturally you're just drawn to these super esoteric places it's I mean the way that I think about you and people like you is like if the world of ideas has these
guardrails or like bumpers at a bowling alley like you just kick them over you break them in half and you just keep going you know yeah i well the this essay is like it's like i went in i just thought i'm gonna read the new testament then i thought i'm gonna ask myself What is the oldest New Testament? And then I thought to myself, how do they discover this? And then it's, I don't even go in with like a set plan of what I'm going to write about.
I just wanted to study the New Testament. I haven't even got to study in the New Testament because I've gone so far into the manuscript history of the New Testament. But it's by doing this kind of like free flow research, which people don't really value anymore. It's like, you know, do a PhD program that you have to solve this like little niche question within a scientific paradigm or within a sociological paradigm.
And like, it's just so fun to go in and not have a goal, right? I was like, I'm just going to, I find this area interesting. I'm going to see what gets uncovered. And often, like, no one's really been doing that. So if you just read the story of the Codex Sinai on Wikipedia, like...
It sounds a little fishy, right? Like if you actually go look at it, but how many times have people gone like, well, I'm just going to go look at the primary sources on this, right? And maybe like a couple. I actually found one professor, like his name is Daniel Wallace, is a theologian professor and he runs the center of...
study of new testament manuscripts and like i'm really bonded with him because i think oh you're the person who's found it i've been donating to his manuscript center for a while because like they're the only people doing this research but how fun it's like i feel like um
investigative journalist right but like i don't know what i'm looking for i just keep going until i find stuff and then i just keep poking and keep poking and and it's like i find things i'm like oh hurrah i found something how do you structure life to be able to do this
Well, not well. I go through phases. I don't know if it's the same for you, but for people who write, and I haven't written much for the last year because I've been distracted and working. But when I go through research phases, I pick a... something that i'm studying and i can't do anything else i i like i know everyone says that you should do everything in moderation like write a little bit every day
But I just get fanatical, and I have to study whatever I'm looking at, and I can't think about other things. I become obsessive. When I read my pathogen essay, that was kind of six months of me just only thinking about pathogens for a really long time.
And when I started doing the Christianity, thinking about the manuscripts, I was only thinking about that. And I was like planning my trips to go to Mount Sinai. Like I only want to go on trips that are related to my research. And then something sometimes happens and breaks me out of it, right? Like family thing where I have to work.
And then I have to wait until I have the freedom to get back into that space. And to me, it's my happiest place. I go to my house in Vegas. I sit at my desk. I write. I have all my notes on the wall like I look like a crazy person. And I just go. full in and it's such an energy rush it's like taking amphetamines like i just i'm not on anything but i just get so excited i can't sleep it's like it's like i get manic creative energy and then sometimes it gets tired and it goes away but
I used to, when I was younger, try and force it. I'd be like, why can't it come now? Like, why can't I do it here and then? And I've just learned as I've got older to say like, hey, it comes cyclically. And sometimes you can concentrate on it and sometimes you can't. But don't put pressure on yourself, right? Like, let it just happen when it happens.
And inside that freedom, I think it's easier to get into flow state. This idea of the muses shows up in Greek poetry, shows up in the kind of art that you see in Florence. What do you think the muse is pointing at? repetitive enough that it's pointing at something deep and fundamental about the human condition. Yeah, I don't know.
So what was the etymology of the word genius again? Was there something like there's a genie who like comes and like turns you into a genius? Yes. Yes, that's right, right. It's the same kind of thing. It's like some sort of divine inspiration, some sort of esoteric, special, metaphysical inspiration where you...
deliver the message and it gets kind of given to you like some of my favorite writers and i can't remember which one i was reading recently he said this was like i didn't write this i just like he just channeled through me in one go and when i go back and read my old essays i'm like
How do I know these things? I'm just like, I don't even recognize who I was when I write it. And it's not that we're like, but I think you change mindset. You go into a different state of mind. I think every writer gets like this. I can tell it's in Rilke. When I read Rilke's poetry. I see he gets into that ecstatic curiosity phase. And I know even from the words that he's using, what he's pointing to out of feeling, which is like the ecstasy of aloneness and discovery in detail.
And I think some people feel like some people don't. And when people do know what I'm talking about, they've resonated with me. It's not necessarily a good thing. It's probably like some sort of... I'm sure some psychiatrists would say like we have sort of imbalance. I mean, should we do regimented writing between six and eight in the morning before we go to the gym? And then we should be like drinking a shake, right? But like truth is like everyone has their own writing style.
You shouldn't put pressure on yourself to do any different. I'm 34 now. I'm not going to try and force myself to write every day. It just doesn't work. Well, this is one of the things that has really changed my creative process since becoming a believer. is I now put so much stake in the idea of revelation, right? I mean, the New Testament ends with a literal book of revelation that is revealed to John. And it's just like, this is how the world is going to end. And I have...
very much tweaked my calendar, tweaked my life, given myself free time where I can just sit and just listen to God. And I sometimes feel like God just airdrops me clear ideas. Rick Rubin says the same thing. I think that one of his big contributions to the culture around creativity is he's just like, I'm just tuned into frequencies that are all there and I'm more sensitive to them. And things are just given to me.
And I just know how to listen to the things that are already there. Meanwhile, everybody else is like a bunny on a hamster wheel. Faster, faster, faster. Consume more. Think more. Be more productive. But there's a stillness and a... calmness where things can just be airdropped and become obvious to you yes and i i it um perplexes me how much people don't spend time one alone right like they're always doing something
Like I had this conversation with some friends the other day. I said, how much time a day do you spend thinking? They're like, thinking? What do you mean? I was like, I'm just like sitting and thinking. They're like, no, I'm always doing something. Yeah. And I was like, well, I spend hours every day just thinking. Like I lie in bed, I think about things.
And I try to create space, like a vacuum in my mind, not in a meditation sense, but a space where all the busyness of all my thoughts can come together and solidify or come together in an interesting way.
And I walk, right? Like I walk sometimes eight miles in the morning. And I think in that process of being alone and in nature, I also get into a different state where like there becomes, there's like the synapses fire and I... see new thoughts or like in when i look at a flower this is very real caress but like in i look at a flower i'll see some synergy of flowers of colors in that it'll like synergize some other thought in my mind it's like i'll see something that inspires me to
put two and two together somewhere else like i'm 100 open to that being like a divine different parts of divine revelation um but It's like having the humility to almost say, like, I can't necessarily think myself into the answers. Actually, there's a great quote about this, which I now can't remember. It's like, you can't necessarily think yourself into the answers. You have to create space for the answers to come to you. Amen.
It's like, how many people are alone? Even when they're alone, they're on the phones, right? Like, how many people can actually sit with themselves and be alone for a long period of time? And I think when you can get to that state, like, the thoughts come much more easily. And it takes introspection and maybe reading these old, like...
texts that people don't want to read um but there's a humility there right which is like i have to sit and percolate i mean the the really perverse thing is how much i agree with you and yet how much i've tapped into this like how hard it is even when I'm writing to just like, you know, that moment when you're sitting down and you're working on something and you get stuck and you get stuck, like sometimes I'll just like open Twitter. I'll like check my texts and it's like, why can't I just sit?
and just be with the thought and in order for me to do that i need to like carve out like i need to be super intentional i need to be like in a cabin no internet yeah i because if i have any ability to distract myself i will because it's so easy and it's like so alluring to my senses or something yeah i don't know what it is well it's just short time dopamine rewards right like you get those little dopamine hits from
Even the UX of things are just so designed to please people, right? But yeah, I know it's scary, but it's better in Europe. I think... it's just a cultural thing about um you know media and entertainment being so much bigger here than it is like the cult of celebrity is much worse in america than it is in european countries and also in other european countries there's still more of an appeal to beauty because
It's already there from history. Like you walk around Vienna or Rome or London, there are buildings that surpass the age of America as a country. My school that I went to was built in the 16th century. Like, I mean, it was at its 500th birthday. It's like... very 15th century i can't remember but um if you're surrounded by more beauty you start to kind of uh be grateful for it like when you walk around it you're not like man i wish there were less churches less beautiful things but just
via osmosis of being around beauty i think you respect it more and that this kind of like trashy like cult of celebrity that's so short and transient in america is is a very america it's definitely bad across the west but i travel a lot like my parents my mom is in istanbul my Other friends are in London. It's just so much worse here. One of the things that I feel that we're missing is because of the way that we think about truth in school and...
the importance of logic, like prove what you're saying. We've lost deeper sorts of truths that aren't very careful in how people try to convey them. And like a good example of this is like Gerard. Rene Girard is a super uncareful thinker. He's just sort of throwing stuff out there. Like it's not super empirical, but like his stuff is deep and he's hitting on things that are beyond the realm of reason. And.
I feel like by trying to justify everything with scientific studies and by not even listening to what's pouring out of your soul and just having the courage to just put that on the page and having editors. who are saying, hey, don't say that, hey, don't say this, fact checkers and all this sort of stuff. We're missing this deeper essence of what truth could be and this revelation of the deepest parts of the human spirit.
And it's even worse than that, like beyond just truth, it's also just like common sense. Like I call this, or I thought this was the Church of Graffs, right? It's like... The Church of Graffs? Yeah, yeah. Graffs in America, but the Church of Graffs. So I wrote this...
long essay well not that long but you know documenting my following of the walking tour of nietzsche like where nietzsche went on his walks and a few weeks after writing this essay there was some like academic study that came out about how like walking was good for you yeah and i'm like manny
how much money and time was spent like making this essay being like we've got an abstract it's like this is the coronary thing between like walking and being good for people i was like it's just common like it's not that it's
i agree that we should question things like i'm not saying that we should you know take everything for granted but the level that like people just know these and we have to do our entire study and subscribe to the church of graphs like yeah just go read mecha like there's a lot of people in history will tell you that walking is good for you right
but we need to prove it with like a scientific team, like study the data. And it's like, it's just so, so there's like walking is good for you. I was like, great. Like, thanks for spending tax payment, paying money on this. Like it's, there's a common sense also that like has been.
bounded in history that's like tradition and wisdom that now we have to empirically prove it's like the you know the uh uh traditions and thoughts have been passed on in generations that we doubt them all now like anything medieval has been completely disregarded
Abbot Chenna, who wrote about medicine in the 11th century, actually discovered germ theory, but no one cared about him because it was like, it was many deep villages, like no one cares. And we're just disregarding entire things that don't fit into the current paradigms. It's just wild.
You know, Occam's razor was, it's now used as like this logical way to prove things. William of Occam was like a 14th century religious monk. Did I not tell you this? Maybe you did. I think I told you this. I don't know. I'm pretty sure I told you this. Maybe. Maybe you tweeted it or something. Everyone takes the Occam's razor and they describe it as the law of parsing, which is the simplest explanation, is the one that we should prefer, right? But...
If you read William Ockham, he was a hardcore theologian who was trying to use logic and other things to justify divine miracles and things like this. His argument wasn't like, The way he's been bastardized now to justify rationality is not what he was saying at all.
And he must be turning in his grave. Like, he was like, no, no, it was a theologian, you suckers. Like, I wasn't telling you. Like, he was trying to point out that the most easy explanation is that it's gone. Right? That was Occam's positioning. Not that, like...
The simplest explanation from the data is correct. He's like, oh, it's probably a divine miracle. But nobody reads William Ockham. He's like a hero of water glows. I actually have a bunch of them in Vegas. Like, they're very dense. But he's a theologian, not a rationalist.
How consciously do you cultivate your taste? Is that something that you're thinking about doing? I mean, you're clearly traveling and you're pretty intentional about where you travel, I would guess. Is that something that you think about?
oh man i feel like i was way more cultured when i was like 11 than i am now what yeah what do you mean i was like i think when you're a kid when you have more freedom to think like i i was obsessed with classical music when i was young and i was wanting to study art and i had all these wild interest and i read lots of different texts and i do either now but i get really focused like now i don't read
broad things that i don't know difference about being in school or not i think as well when you're in school i wish i could go into school now don't you kind of oh it'd be amazing yeah i'm like i want to study biology i mean i don't want to learn state schooling but to have the step with teachers either no no i don't but i just like the ability to go and like learn and i think as a kid i would find lots of things interesting and then you know i'd go to classical concerts on my own as a teenager
And now as an adult, like you just end up having responsibilities, right? And then like your taste, you start to become kind of not hubristic, but you start to define your taste as opposed to when you're younger, like you're more open to like, you don't know what your taste is. You start like learning about everything for the first time.
We were talking about this last night at dinner, so like older people will pretend they know anything about wine, right? They sit there, they open the menu, they're like, I want this, and I was like, you don't know what any of this wine does. You can't read the names telling me about the wine. So we get stuck in our ways when we're older.
so it's not like a conscious thing of me trying to specify my taste but i think as i get older i have less time and i like narrow it down to things i get interested but i try and find ways to, you know, usurp that. Like I went to an oil painting course last year and I can't paint. I'm a writer, not a painter. But I thought if I learned to paint, it might make me think in a different medium that might affect my writing.
You know, I, well, the thing is, is I'm a really terrible painter. So you really didn't do great for my confidence, but it reminded me of something that you and I have spoken about before about like writing being like word paintings.
You're only a painter. We both love pointillism. Pointillism is in the art of many dots, and there's many different colored dots when you go up close, look like nonsense when you come away. It's like a beautiful scene. And there's an analogy there in writing, right, which is that... The kind of writing that I resonate with and other people resonate with is a little less logical and rational. It's a bit more poetic. In that writing, you are creating a...
putting forward a mood, it's much more like a word painting than it is like a argument. And that doesn't strike the heart of everybody, but yeah, no, it's the art, I think. Doing other mediums of communication, expressing yourself, so like obviously valid. You never just sit there and just look at something for an hour unless you're painting it. You almost need to paint it like the motion allows you.
It gives you enough movement to see things differently, but focusing on one object gives you enough stillness to like have the depth. And I think it's the same thing in writing. What the brain likes to do is it sort of likes to skip, right? Like when you're meditating, go from this thing to this thing to this thing.
But when you're writing, you're forced to stay in one topic and you're perpetually frustrated in both activities. But then you look back at it after some time, you're like, I can't believe how deeply I just dissected that.
that was so well said and i think is an argument for people to read rilke was what rilke does is he finds in little pieces that like he will talk about a flower or about something very simple and he really notices fine details and they are like here to me is like the perfect art he captured the art of you know word paintings um but yeah that kind of like can you focus and notice like increase your sensitivity to something so simple
And then it can be quite overwhelming. I don't know if it was like this for you, but like one of the reasons why I can't watch mainstream media or like even really go to a restaurant anymore, but I guess that's like a bad thing to say, but when you get sensitive to things, like when you were in the world of Rilke.
Contemporary society is very overwhelming. Totally. I find it very hard to jump through different minds. My place in LA is like a very old school greenhouse. There's no technology. There's a bunch of books, loads of candles. And sometimes I'll go to like a restaurant in LA. I'm like, I'm like so lost from this. Everything's screaming at you. Yeah. And it's just like, and it's like, everything is loud and yeah. And it's for people who are sensitive, right? Like it makes you become introverted.
And people don't realize that the introversion is not, like people don't think of me as an introvert, but like I get really overly stimulated from going to different things. But there's such beauty in taking those little, like having the ability to take notice of such. Fine details. Totally. So what I do whenever I go to the shopping mall in Austin is I, so I walk into the Neiman Marcus and I go to the different high-end areas. And my favorite high-end brand is Brunello Cuccinelli. Like I just.
love that guy like he's my business hero yeah yeah and you know i'm like dissecting the cashmere and i'm like reading through the book and like the way that his book the texture of the paper is so beautiful
And I probably spent 20, 30 minutes in there just like really noticing the subtlety, like reading the tags and feeling them and all that. And then I instantly went to the... balenciaga section and it was an assault on my senses like i have like a mild grade of trauma from just that sharp transition yeah
Well, it's like, why is everything so loud now? And I was talking about this the other day with friends, but, you know, an interesting kind of corollary data point for society is what are the popular drugs with the young people?
In the 90s and the 2000s, think about rave culture. Think about Wall Street, right? It was like uppers. People were taking coke, they were doing MDMA, they were doing like ecstasy. They were raving and partying and Wall Street was booming and there was dot-com bubble and all that stuff. Now... it's like you look at the drugs that people are doing and it's like alcohol which is depressive so like you know young people are smoking weed which is also you know depressive
People, there's a lot of ketamine going on in society right now. You look at the Google Trends for ketamine, it's way up in different areas of it's being legalized, which is an anesthetic. So you have an anesthetic. alcohol and then if you're not if people aren't doing those they're probably not everyone but a lot of people also on ssris or antipsychotics so you're in this position where everybody is desensitized it's like there's overwhelming things come first and the desensitization come after
Or are people desensitized and then they need the more loud things? That's a really interesting question. That's a great question. It could be the case that things are loud and people are actually way more overwhelmed than they realize so they've lost their sensitivity.
They don't know what's wrong with them, so they take all these depressants, like, depressive drugs. This thing about, like, what drugs people are taking is just very interesting to me. Like, an anesthetic? Like, you're literally trying to turn yourself off from life. Culture is kind of weird now. Yeah, we agree on that. Amen. Well, here's a transition. You have this amazing introduction, and I just want to break it down. You say the West is dying and we are killing her.
We're proud to destroy our own freedoms and repackage failure as democratic progress. We champion our rolling out of red tape, the bureaucratic creep that strangles the nation's liberty. that american dream has been replaced by mass packaged mediocrity porn encouraging us to revel like happy pigs in our own meekness yo that rips yeah that was i like that saying what's behind that
To your point of revelation, I didn't sit down and plan that essay. It was during lockdowns. It was COVID. I was looking out my window at a world that had gone shut down and people were protesting. And I wrote that essay in one go. It's emotional. It's because I think the reason why I can write like that is that I'm writing about something that I genuinely care about. You can tell how much I care from what I'm thinking about. It's like...
I hadn't loosely thought about this. I was mad, right? And in that madness, I thought, how can I express it? I was like, I'm not going to protest. I was like, I'm going to write it. And again, everyone has, people have different mediums, but in that medium, it just took out, came out of me as like a pouring of my heart where I was like, what is happening to society? Why are we okay with this level of mediocrity? And I think.
If you can get to that point where you care so much, the writing comes very naturally. It's not like I had to think about the words or looked at the cinnamons or like one of thesaurus.com. It's like... I felt it so intensely that it became like poetry to me because it came from my heart. Like I was just like, man, I am so mad and upset about the state of society. I'm just going to say it.
And then when I read it off, I was like, oh, it's a little edgy. Like, maybe I should tone it down a bit. And I was like, nah, I should put out exactly how my heart wanted this to be. But yeah, I love that essay. The core thing that you're saying there is just letting yourself feel that. rather than rejecting it, right? Like we have something in society right now. Anger is bad. Vengeance is bad. Rage is bad. And like taking those emotions and just throwing them on the page, letting them loose.
It's like spewing a cannon out of your soul. Like I'm all for that. But I don't think most people allow themselves to feel that emotion. And so they read a paragraph like this and they're like, how did you repackage that and all this sort of stuff? No, that's just like. It was like a volcanic eruption. Yeah, I'm just not desensitizing myself. The real core is, I'm not drinking too much, I'm not on a bunch of drugs, and I'm not on SSRIs. And I feel like when you get to a very neutral state of...
And living is hard. It's like a good phrase I tell myself is that you've got to experience the lows to experience the highs, right? I'd rather oscillate than plateau. I'd rather feel how...
In the hardness of life, you can also then appreciate later the beauty, right? Like, I was really upset when my father died. I thought to myself, like, maybe I should take some meds and not grieve so much. I was like, no, I should feel this. I was like, this is an important lesson for me to understand and for me to feel.
by not being desensitized, like, these emotions come. But if you desensitize yourself, like, it might be much nearer to the surface than most people if they, like, let it happen, if they realize that, like, maybe they're over-professionalizing. And people love authenticity. This is a trade-off, right?
People think to themselves, they have to fit into the Overton window. They have to be professional. But what people are really missing in society, which is valued by a lot of others, is authenticity. You can't read that essay and be like, she doesn't mean it. I'm clearly authentic, right?
I have strong views about politics. I mean them very deeply and I express them in emotional ways. And I wish more people would allow themselves to get there and have that freedom to take risks, to like feel that emotion. Like, freak Bukowski. I read The Tropic of Cancer the other day. You read Trump and it's like, it goes from extreme explicitness. It's like a train of thought of like a man. Like even if you read F. Scott Fitzgerald, like.
Zelda Fitzgerald. She was in and out of asylums, writing things like revenge to her husband. It was so much drama. There is such ups and downs in these writing. Read Bukowski, man. It's like you read contemporary poems now and it's like, you must be kind, blah, blah, blah, says tree to house. I'm just like, what is going on? Like, you can't feel the emotion. You can't read Bukowski and think he's method acting. He's not method acting. You know he feels it.
But I can't read contemporary. I don't read modern books anymore. I don't believe. It doesn't feel authentic to me anymore. What did you do differently writing for the film when you made Every Angel is Terrifying? What did you do when you made that?
How did film allow you to tap into emotions, and how did you think about writing differently? I didn't start that with the plan of it becoming a film. What happened was that I got asked to speak at the URBIT conference in Miami, and I hadn't made slides even the day before.
It was just like classic me, hadn't made any slides. But I care about certain things, right? And I don't need, like this, I don't need to overly prep. So I, myself and my friend, all I did was write bullet points of what I wanted to say on each slide. I made the slides. I gave the presentation. I'd seen the slides like an hour before, and I delivered this speech. But Mike Ma designed this? Yeah, Mike did it. Mike is amazing. Mike is, I think, the most talented.
Both were a great writer and also an extremely talented artist. Talk about someone who writes from the heart, authentic. Rasmid Architecture is a crazy book. Yes, it is definitely crazy. But he, in my mind, combines like the...
the philosophy and freedom and self-sovereignty of someone like Ayn Rand with, like, um, Bret Easton Ellis in, like, the 90s. Like, Bret Easton Ellis, like, when they wrote American Psycho, it was also, like, an edgy book, right? Like, it glorifies violence, all this kind of stuff, but... It's fiction. Mark Marr is also writing fiction, but he's such a, it's so nice to read someone that's so free. Like there's no over-the-window respect there. And in that, like it's, it's like a, yeah, but.
And Mike and I worked on the slides, like he also worked on the content because we have the same often crossover and philosophical views. And then that speech, which I delivered just in one go, having not practiced, went really well. Like it had like a stunning image. People were very happy. Like it moved people. And then we thought to ourselves, like, oh, maybe this is a message that we should package. And the video that we made is just the speech cut down.
We didn't rewrite it. We took the recording of the speech. We cut up a lot of the stuff that was referencing to crypto because it's very specific to that audience. And we just left the philosophy and the history, but it wasn't written as a video.
And actually, I found it really uncomfortable. There's something much more personal about putting things in your own voice. And then, as you probably know, putting it on the internet, then like hiding behind writing, right? Like, I like to hide behind writing. I see words. I see the distance between myself and the words, right?
to do a voiceover and even a speech is not and even sitting here is not what i how i feel comfortable so i can't watch that video like i know that video people really liked like i've had some people say it really moved them and made them rethink their life choices and all this kind of stuff which i love
But I can't, I can't, like, as a writer, I really struggle to hear it. So it wasn't written as a speech. It wasn't written as a video. It was written as a speech. But yes, I'm proud of it. I hope more people watch it and it resonates with people. But yeah, it was... it was definitely not a normal experience i mean i loved it like the and i'm not just saying that like i liked it so much that i had to go make my own short film that was like
okay inspired by this what is it that i would add to the conversation and how would i date davidify this yeah and i felt like that video that you made tapped into a dark energy that i feel a little bit that i hadn't really seen expressed but then i wanted to when i made you were made for more than this i wanted to start with that and then do what i like to do which is provide like a very concrete cheerier solution for
If you're stuck in this world, you're trapped in your job, and you want to make something more of yourself, then you go right on the internet and through that freedom meeting influence. And I wrote, I remember writing. carve the path that only you can carve live the life that only you can live write the essay that only you can write and for me a sentence like that could have only come out in a video script i would have never written that oh interesting
because of the poetry or something. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we wanted to do follow-up videos. Like, I wanted to do more ones about crypto. But the cool thing, actually, about making video and turning writing into that format is that people don't have attention span to read. Like we're saying, media is very cheap and very fast right now. To get people to read long essays is not as captivating as people hearing it and having moving images.
And I think it's actually, it's, I mean, you know, we both, like we just used stock, we just used footage that we got from other places on the internet. It's not like I had to go around with a film, like I didn't have to do all this, right? Like me and Mai just sat and we just...
looked for not directly the imagery of what we were saying. It's not like I needed that. It's just something that picked up. It's like the word painting again. What feeling does this send us in Vogue and what is the corollary imagery? And to make that word painting be real in a film.
is a beautiful prop to like experience it it made me really value like having good video editing skills i was like damn you can make beautiful art this way and i would love to make more like i definitely want to make more things like that because i think it just resonates
much more strongly with a much with a younger and a much more broader audience in writing because people aren't reading like a book consumption is down people are reading short form like even a long essay about like what you should do with your life or how you should think about it
it's just not as captivating i think as a video so i'm i think we both have to just keep doing them i'm afraid yeah why are there more people like you in the world like you just just even doing this podcast like it's so Fun to hear how generative and how distinct your ideas are and like You're you're there's just not that many people who have the freedom and I think
the courage to reach beyond consensus and find, go explore new ideas. Oh, I feel that's sad, and I hope more people will go and do fun research, but, um... Yeah, I don't know. I guess it's like, do you want to live a conventional path or not? It's not even that. It's like, do you have the... I didn't grow up with normal parents, like a normal life. I didn't really ever understand what normal...
you know things were but people are so censored to kind of stay within these guardrails right you refer like to what their career path is what they should think about what their relationship should be like and like everything is up for reconsideration right like I've learned about science. I've learned about history. I've learned about all these things.
I don't know. I hope more people can be more curious. Like, there's a whole world to learn out there. Like, I find it so... I wish I could never... My dream situation, my transhumanist future, my transhumanist dream is I never need to sleep. I can just be in front of a computer. I know this sounds ridiculous, but be by computer in my books all day and just read. It is so fun to just go. The whole human knowledge is out there for you to discover and to...
rethink about applies to everything. It's like every solution to every problem has been written about in like different industries and different fields. It's just sort of been blended together. It's like, it's so cool. Like, I don't know, I get excited. And yeah, I think.
As we've discussed before, the problem starts much more young. Curiosity is beaten out of you. It's cool, right? It's really, you're not meant to ask questions. You're meant to be obedient. If you're not obedient, then you're in trouble.
So we have a problem, which is that while adults like this, it's like only if you can get through the system. I don't think it's deaf. I don't think it's people's individual agency fault. It's like the whole system's against you to stop you being extremely curious. Totally.
And that's really sad. And I hope more people just push past that just for themselves and for their children. I mean, I love this quote from you. I dream of many different careers, many different lives, many different loves, many different renewals of myself.
As if I was an immortal being who was able to experiment and explore across an endless timeline. Right. It's like, everyone says you should live as if you'll die tomorrow. It's like James Dean quote, right? Live as if you'll... live as if you'll die tomorrow dream as if you'll live forever i don't know anything exactly something like that yeah but is it cooler to live as if you'll live forever because if you live as if you're gonna like you plan your life like i'm gonna live on average
85 years or whatever it's probably way less than america now it's probably like 30 but um whatever the current life expectancy is in the us um
If you tell yourself you have this pipeline, you're like, well, I'm going to have one career. I'm going to have one relationship that's meaningful, blah, blah. If you were going to live, if you were immortal, there's a great book actually by Alan Harrington called The Immortalist, where he just talks about what society would look like if you got rid of mortality.
I'm not campaigning for poor or against. It's just an interesting thought experiment, regardless of your use of longevity. If you live forever, you wouldn't have one job, right? You would probably do different things and experience stuff. And there's some level where it's like,
I want to try all the flavors of life. Like, my first company was a toy store, right? It's so far-fetched from what I've been doing in the last 10 years, but it was probably some of the happiest years of my life. Kids came into this shop every day. We sold them toys. We told them about entrepreneurship. I ran a philosophy class called Petite Plato's. It was so cute. Petite Plato's? Yeah. What was that? It was a philosophy school for kids.
We're not in the back of our toy shop. That is awesome. Some of those kids are like still my friends. Like there was one girl, she's got Hermione. She's now studying philosophy and theology at university like I was. And she came to see me in America. She's like 21 now.
and like you don't realize until you try different completely different fields and completely different worlds and completely different cultures about like the beauty and the things you can learn like i find it's crazy that some people just have lived in the same place their entire lives now i went back to my high school reunion
And everyone was like still dating each other. And I was like, wait, what? I was like, there's a whole world out there. How's the chance that you've all found the best people in this one moment of your life? And I just want to experience, oh, maybe it is the case that, you know, you found the best thing when you were eight, right?
But I want to experience this. I want to live in Tokyo. I want to be a bus driver. There's so many things I want to do. I would love to be a criminal detective. I'm not going to probably have the time, but I'm going to go study them. Why not? Imagine just thinking about technology my entire life.
I obviously love technology. It's my most focused on interest because technology to me is pragmatic philosophy. Like it takes philosophical questions and it answers them. But yeah, I want to do everything. Like I, that's why I care about longevity. It's like, I just selfishly want more time to like go do more fun things. Like people aren't having fun and life is so fun. Like I have a great time.
What is it that you see in reading that other people are missing? Because like when most people think of reading, they think, oh, that's a boring activity. Meanwhile, you're like, my ideal vibe is sitting in a room with unlimited books and I just get to like bathe in the wisdom of great scholars.
Well, I think that people just also don't disregard books if they don't like them. It's like, don't force yourself to read books if you don't like it. Everyone's like, well, I don't really like this book, but I can't read it. I'm like, well, stop reading it. I don't like reading it. I'm like, maybe that's, you're not finding the right books, right?
I was like, I don't know what my interests are like from the start, but I just start digging around and I look over here and I look over here and I'm like, ooh, that sounds interesting over there. But I might end up, I told you I went to go read the New Testament. And I ended up reading about New Testament manuscripts. Right. That wasn't set out, but I just followed my own curiosity. The people should just re-flow. It's like...
Don't read what your friends are telling you to read or what the New York Times bestseller is telling you to read. Oh, definitely not that one. Cool. You know, all the bestseller books are like how to be more productive. It's all nonfiction about how to, like, you're messed up. And here's like nonfiction about how you can be less messed up, which is a weird cultural, again, perverse thing going around that we all need to be fixed.
But it's like, go find things that resonate with you, right? And like, don't be embarrassed by it, right? Like who, I don't know how many people was like reading Roka. I gave a copy of his poetry. Like poetry is like a little cringe now in modern society. Like people aren't like going, reading poetry.
I give copies of Domino Elegies to most of my friends, and a lot of them were really grateful. They're like, you know what? I've never actually read poetry. Like, not as an adult. Like, I was in school, and I really resonated with this. It's like, go try it. Like, go pick up a poetry book. You might...
be surprised. I feel like there's a thread that you've been pulling on for a few years now about scenes that we're missing about consciousness. You have this crazy story about when your aunt died or something. Yeah. Yeah, I, I. yeah i i two my family members have died and like around the time the exactly they've died like i've had panic attacks like i've never had i've never had like a panic attack i'm a super anxious person which they died and right before you had a panic attack
they died in turkey my cousin and my aunt different times and both those times was in the middle of the night in u.s time and i woke up in the night and had a panic attack And the first time I didn't think of anything, the next morning I woke up and they were like, oh, your cousin died from a heart attack. And I was like, whoa, that's crazy. I woke up in the night and I thought I was having a heart attack. The second time I was with my aunt. And there could be normal explanations for this.
But as I become more humble, right? So like science doesn't have the answer. And just to clarify how much science doesn't have the answer, in science, like everyone's like physics and the standard model, like all this stuff. 95% of all observable reality is just labeled as dark matter that we don't understand. Like, could you not have a situation where people should be more humble than that? It's like all observable reality is 5% of what we can see.
The whole rest of it, what we call dark matter, is just an unknown thing that like scientists can't figure out. So, okay, well, maybe we should be very humble that we don't understand how things work. And I used to find all this like spirituality, energy stuff like kind of weird. I was like, I don't want to like turn 30 and do the thing where everyone does. I was like, I've gone to Ayahuasca and like now I like talk to a plant. But at the same time, like as you get older, if you're sensitive.
you start to realize that like there are some things like aren't explanatory and i'm not making the cases necessarily about my panic attacks you know they can be explained away but if you're sensitive you start to notice that there's a there's like magic there's like some you can tap into
it's not magic in the way that people think of it but it's like serendipity and like synchronicity and like there's something where it's like very it's my boyfriend it's always like you we call it sometimes we call it prop guy it's like
You know, he's been touched by God. It's like, there's a very unlikely chance of these exact things can happen. And they worked in certain ways. And in that humility, I thought a lot about consciousness. And in post-alignment thinking, everyone was like, consciousness is following neurons, and the neurons fly, and that's how things work.
And maybe consciousness is non-localized and it's everywhere. And we tap into it. And like, you know, Persik has this argument that you can, like even rocks have some sort of level of preferences, like the things are working towards. And I've just become humble that I don't have the answer. It's not only saying I know what consciousness is.
I'm just saying that I'm not fully bought in to the current paradigm and questioning it is like total heresy. I tweeted once about the, you know, I read an article saying like, or I said something wrong, like I, you know, started to doubt materialism, right? Like I was like, yeah.
consciousness seems a little weird like i i think we should all be a little humble about it every ai engineer in like the world went oh my gosh look at this silicon bubbly vc who doesn't believe in consciousness and i was like no i'm just
asking questions that you can't prove we don't have a proof of what consciousness is so to be able to be that arrogant about it shows these like dogmats right there's like a certain post alignment dogmatic view of consciousness that you're not allowed to question
Which I think is also a problem with how people are building AI. They're like, we're just going to build this language calculator and it'll become conscious. You don't even know what conscious means, right? But this is just a problem with personality and thought, which is something that we've thought about for a long time. Yeah, I think it was in 19...
I want to say 1945, but that year strikes me that might be off because that was right after the war. But there's a guy named C.P. Snow who wrote a book called The Two Cultures. And what he was trying to get at, not a book essay, what he's trying to get at in this piece is like... We're now dividing the humanities from STEM. And he was basically like raising the red flag saying, this is not good. And I think that you can see.
how specialized everything has become and how much we're missing because of that. Like Einstein died with a book from like an Indian mystic right next to him on his bed. Marshall McLuhan, who was like a crazy media theorist, everyone's like, wow, he knew so much about that. He was like obsessed with Catholicism. He was like a Christian scholar for years. And you just see this over and over and over. I mean, the classic example, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs goes out and...
does you know circles around buddhism and does the typography like that's sort of the cliche example but there's something here about we've gone so much into specialization that we've sort of separated either you can be this logic person who works from the head
Or this humanities person who works from the heart, but you have to choose. Yeah. And there's so much that we're missing by creating this wall between them. It's just also extremely arrogant, right? Because like the scientific charge of broths, right? You know, like...
Think about the current narrative around AI. So we, people who've never thought about thinking, never thought about thinking, we're engineers. We've thought about how to build things from the ground up using code. There's been a lot of... philosophical thought on what is like what it talks like justify a belief that's the field of epistemology right through like what it means to like define agency and you have all these ai researchers now who are like we've built this code and
We've anthropomorphized it in such a way that this language calculator is going to become conscious. I'm like, these are very loaded terms. These are very loaded terms that you haven't introspected on a lot.
We don't even know what those definitions mean. We don't have a collective definition of even what the word intelligence means. There's no single answer of what intelligence means. There's something that a spider can do when it creates a web that's intelligent, that's going towards a preference and a goal.
We get bees and ants. Exactly. There's like murmuration and buzz. There's many different types of intelligence to have the arrogance to say, if we can make it resemble our intelligence in this way, like to build these kind of very smart, very...
human-sounding, you know, language calculators, because we can see ourselves in it, that is primary form of intelligence. Like, I think something that's way more scary from an existential risk point of view is synthetic biology. Well, actually trying to... build biological intelligence, right? How do we build organisms from non-organic matter? That to me is a little bit more like we should be thinking about that.
As opposed to like, if we just keep adding thousands more training inputs to this giant language calculator, it's going to walk out the screen and kill us. When it comes from this arrogance, right, of like, everything is logical.
And we're in such a great paradigm of science that we figured out what consciousness is thinking. It's like, no, we have. It's like, we don't have a definition of what the goal even is. We don't even know what intelligence is. That we're somehow going to get there, even though we don't really know what the goal is. So yeah, the Arab, the current...
hubris and stem to disregard the humanities have been thinking about these questions for a long period of time like it's just it was just saving much more time and people were talking to each other like
I mean, a lot of machine learning examples come from behaviorism. They used to in the past, like looking at like Pavlov's models and trying to understand like how you do reward functions. That was some of the beginning basis of machine learning. And then it kind of separated out and became much, much more about code.
and not even looking at mimetic behaviors and intelligent animals. It's like this divorce, like you say, like, I mean, how much is that slowing down progress, this extreme arrogance between both camps, right? Like, everyone needs to take a massive familiarity pill. Yeah.
As you think of the writing that you've read, how do you think handwriting to the typewriter to the keyboard changes the shape of thought? Oh, it's such a good one. It's something I've been thinking about for a while because I wanted to get a really good knee fountain pen.
I was like, I need a really good fountain pen. But yeah, it's divorcing you from it. When you write with a pen, this is why I've been trying to reunite with, because in my school, I was probably not the same in the US, but I went to a very old school.
Between four and 18, I had to only use, I was only allowed to use a fountain pen. Is that happening in America? No. No, I didn't. Okay. So everything that I wrote from four to 18 had to be, if it was a school like law, like we had to write a fountain pen.
And then when you're writing, it becomes like a somatic experience, right? Like your handwriting is part of the art, how you do cursive, how you phrase your letters. Look at Islamic calligraphy. I know, and like medieval manuscripts. And there was a... There's a formality. The thing I love when I go look at these old historical texts, including the New Testament manuscripts, is that how they display the words was also part of the total whole of the writing. Yes. Right?
They wanted it to be beautiful. If you read Abbottena's Kind of Medicine, which is an 11th century medical textbook, right? It has beautiful calligraphy. Try to imagine like a medical textbook now, like having the same, but it was a formality of like...
I am doing something. It's a legacy. Like, I'm showing up, right? It's the same thing about, like, why does everyone in LA walk around in a sports bra, right? Because, like, nobody feels this need to, like, dress up and, you know, make an effort. We've lost the respect for humanity. It's cringe to try.
right like it's cringe to try now everything's been reduced to but i read everything on a kindle like i admit like i take a kindle around with me sometimes but they still drive me mad because like i feel like divorced from the reading experience and maybe because i'm just too old but like you know writing was meant to be was an art form and now it's really not an art form it's like mass market paperback or hardback it's like how do we bring back beautiful books like think about like um
William Morris did the Canterbury Tales. Have you seen these books? Oh, it's just so beautiful. It was like 19th century revival of medieval texts with beautiful calligraphy and drawing. But nobody respects it anymore, right? They want it as fast and as quick as possible.
But it's a shame. I think we're going to get some return of this. We've gone too far. And now some people are making beautiful books again. They've gone so far that people are like, wait, actually, we liked some of the pretty stuff. But yeah, I want to go back to handwriting with a pen for this exact reason, which is that I want to show up.
to it. And I think there's some level where when I type on a computer, it's divorcing me from the formality of my own thoughts. Plus you can't delete it, which is something that you and I spoke about, right? Like a typewriter is also great for this. Like when you write and edit, you get rid of things and you lose sometimes things that were very good. It's like jazz. It's like jazz. Yeah, like jazz flows and then you roll with the mistakes. Yes, exactly. When you're typing, the mistakes...
Delete, delete, delete. And so you lose the mistakes. Yeah. And sometimes the mistakes, when you go back and realize they weren't mistakes. Right? The mistake, creativity, is sometimes recognizing the best mistakes that you've made and actually building on them. Totally. So, you know, I...
i think we're going to start saying like i hope that there's and you start to see like even the fact that the videos that we've made have been have resonated with people that i think there's a slight backlash towards the over indexing on technology for everything i switch my 19 year old the other day who like has his own
history like essay competition he's wearing beautiful books and doing i was like okay like maybe there's a hope in the younger generation being like i don't want to be like those guys they're all on tiktok and like we don't want to be like our older brothers and sisters i'm hopeful Well, it's funny because we were talking last night about these super high-end cars, like higher-end than Lamborghini and Ferrari. Yeah. And the designer, who's the head designer, he draws by hand.
before he brings them into autocad and i was talking to another designer and he was in his mid-70s and i i really respected the guy i was like hey you know when you look at stuff on pinterest stuff on instagram like what do you think is the fundamental problem
And he sort of stops and he thinks, and he goes, that people don't design by hand anymore. When you design by hand and you have the ink that moves through, you have a texture, you have sort of this lack of perfection. Now he's like... when people design something they start with templates they start with things that they can copy and paste they start within these invisible constraints that limit their thinking from the very beginning
And what's great about handwriting when you're writing, but in particular with modern design, when you have a pen, there's a boundlessness. You're only constrained by the eight and a half by 11 page itself. I think you see it in writing too. Like the idea of the spirit has died. Like how often...
do most people think of the spirit? Like, does this piece of writing, is it spirited? Is it alive? And I think you see the same thing in houses. It was funny because my friend sent me a Zoom screenshot with all these people on this grid and people just working at their houses.
Every single one of the screenshots had bare white walls. Yeah. There were like 12 people in the screenshot, all white walls. I'm like, where is the spirit? Where is the distinctiveness? Where is the personality? How are we?
stripping the world of life time and time again. And I think you see it writing, but it's hard to see there. But you can see the residue of this dilution of the human spirit in architecture, in painting, in aesthetics. And I'm just like... what is happening i know and i i so much more even a contrast if you spend time in europe compared to the us right which is that the us has become hyper minimal it's almost like egalitarian it's almost aesthetic right which is that
It's embarrassing or to be ostentatious or to have any kind of, you know, outburst of creativity. And to make an effort is just cringe. Like it's cringe to look like you care and you try. You want to look like you don't care. which is like the Balenciaga like Vetements thing you talk about earlier. It's like, we literally put young people in trash bags and charge $900. And it's like, you're just showing how much you don't get, right?
And you're paying a lot for it. So it's like, I'm rich and I don't care. Which is like the main message of fashion right now. Which is weird. Look at the 90s. Like when we were dressing up, look at the supermodels they looked up to. It's like there was a different kind of like prestige. Like there was a meritocracy. This is...
Back to the point, why don't people like it? Well, beauty, Plato's quote, beauty is a natural superiority. It plays to meritocracy. Like there is some objective standards of beauty. People want to not say it, but there's, when people go to the dentist, they all want more symmetrical teeth. They're not like, you know, I want one tooth this way and one tooth this way.
There are objective values of beauty. There is symmetry. There is complexity. There is elegance, mathematical elegance. You can see in a mathematical formula also represented in a flower. And that flower has a symmetry that is... based on math and art and so many things and now like people just kind of like disregard all of these things it's like there's no such thing we don't want to have superiority things call me best everything must be the same
And this is what Nietzsche spoke so heavily about. This is his last man argument, right? Which is that the last man wants to be like everybody else, right? And the madman who is just trying to like be an individualistic person. And that's why like everyone hates Ayn Rand so much.
Why do people hate Iran so much? It's like a nice Russian woman who like, people should listen to her talks on America. She has this talk on American businessmen, which I listened to the other day. And she's just saying like,
They should be great. People should look up to them. They should be the models of society that people want to embody their characters' values. Everyone's like, she's awful. And I'm like, what? You want to have shitty leaders? I think it's good if they have virtuous qualities. But this perverse and extremely dominant view that any kind of meritocracy is bad works against our entire aspirations as humans in progress. There are natural hierarchies. Denying them is denying science.
There's natural hierarchy. Some things are more beautiful than others. Like, we should celebrate it. Like, I don't care that I'm not the world's best painter, but I love going and seeing Monet's painting. I'm not like, damn that guy, stop painting, right? Like, it's crazy.
It's like, it's fine. It's not my skill, but now everyone has to be equal in this egalitarian world. There's no space for beauty. What do you get from spending time in Istanbul? What's that scene, Guillermo? What do I get? Well... I learned a lot about why I don't want to live, how countries should not be dysfunctional, right? It's like an extremely dysfunctional country. But Istanbul, have you been to Istanbul? No.
It's incredible because it's a place where the East meets the West, right? It's half European, and it's Middle Eastern, and there's Islamic, and there's European. Like, half is literally Europe, and, you know, I cross... from my hotel in Europe to my mom's house on the Asian side every day by boat. So I literally cross across the continent. Oh, that's cool. And you just start to realize, like, I mean, the Ottoman Empire is also really cool. Like, the history of Istanbul is...
incredible. We just listened to the Fall of Civilizations podcast on the Byzantine Empire. Really good, highly recommend. But it's just, there's a lot of legacy and a lot of history there and you can't help but be humbled. And also to experience different faiths. I'm not Muslim.
some of my family members of Muslim, but to hear the calls of prayer five times a day, or how many times a day, really stops me to pause and reflect. It dices up my days. It reminds me of what it must have been like in the medieval period when you had church, like you had the, you know, matins and like the, and the...
That's how the clocks were. It comes from the church, right? They were definitely at the time where they had bells. Yep. So in an Islamic country like Turkey, and to have a different way of breaking up the day, hearing things, hearing this kind of stuff. It just reminds you that, like, there isn't just one way of living. In America, everyone's, like, obsessed with clock time. In Istanbul, you hear the five-course of prayer, and that separates your day, and it causes you to reflect.
it's just a it's a beautiful place it's a beautiful place to visit it's not a beautiful place to live because it gets very frustrating but just the history that like the old osman palaces they're just they're like the 16th century it's been what would be equivalent of billion dollars like
They really were obsessed with detail. There's no, like, they're definitely maximalists. You know, this is interesting. Like, the obsession with detail, the maximalists, like, that's one thing I love going for in my writing. Like, my favorite part of the editing process is looking at what I've written and basically...
trying to like add vibrancy to individual words and sentences and try to create like i'm such a maximalist i just love to like for me the peak of writing and visual aesthetics is like how do i make things maximalist while still retaining their coherence and while still retaining a sense of elegance. What I'm always teetering on the edge of is maximalism, but it sometimes gets confusing and now it gets messy and stuff like that. And I'm always trying to find that balance.
And I just feel like the soul... at least like the expressive part of ourselves like we want to show maximalism we want to show like the depths the contours of our personality and like minimalism is a suppression of all that to come back to the drugs that you were talking about Yeah, and I really, if people know what empirical evidence is the case, just look at every expensive house for sale in Los Angeles right now. They look exactly the same. And it's just so crazy. Like, look at the...
Wealth of the Past at the William Randolph Hearst. Look at Hearst Castle. Hearst Castle. Incredible. It's insane. Yeah. And, you know, he wasn't even just like a newspaper magnate. Like, he collected antiques like J.P. Morgan. His library. His library is... My favorite place. It is such a stunning homage to books. He has...
you know, leaders in the printed printing press, like, on the walls. Even just, like, the balconies, like, the decoration on the balcony in that place and, like, the color of the mahogany is gorgeous. And, like, he was an industrialist. Like, people think he was a banker, right? Like, obviously, it's JP Morgan.
But if you go look at his library and then look at the, he collected medieval manuscripts. He actually, I think, died on like an archaeological dig. Like he went, he himself went to archaeological quests. It's like these people in the passing through read people's diaries.
They didn't just do one thing. They had all of these varied interests because education wasn't so siloed and it wasn't so fixed that you were meant to do one thing at the end of it. It's like the great industrialists of our ages, the Hearst, the J.P. Morgans. were very interesting characters. We've had a lot of, like what he was saying about people being interested in esoteric philosophy and like Steve Jobs, for example. But like, no, like everyone just lives with these very narrow views.
I'm so inspired by the JP Morgans of this world. They cared about these things. They realized that it was important to learn from the past, learn from history. He obviously loved books. He can't go into that place. It's like a book church. And then you go to Italy, right? And I remember hearing all this stuff around geopolitical risk a year and a half ago. And I was in Rome. And everyone in Rome was drinking red wine and eating pizza. They weren't talking about like...
older countries have seen many phases of revolutions and countries come and go and like, well, America is still so new. And there's some level, like we have to say how it is and we have to keep everyone subdued and like keep them within the system. But yeah, I think if you could change.
A really weird way to increase cultural South efficacy in America is just to make it harder for litigation. And I think you'd stop seeing so many warning signs and people would relax in that period of breathing and stillness. they would find more creativity. Am I hallucinating or did you do a Federalist paper rabbit hole?
i did yeah yeah i didn't do that yeah and would you pick up about the writing style of the forefathers of america um that they were very deep philosophical people like not like any politician now You read the federalist papers and the anti-federalist papers, which are also interesting. And if anyone interested in like early American life founding history, I did a fellowship at the Claremont Institute. And the Claremont Institute is unbelievable. It was like 10 days and...
Orange County, where all we did was sit with scholars and learn the Ferris Papers and the Constitution. Even more fun for me, because I'm not from this country, so I learned it from scratch, right? I didn't learn about this in school. We just learned about Henry VIII.
So I learned all this stuff and I was like, wow, like there was a lot of book print to this, right? Like they were, they thought about things. Like all you did was actually printed, the Federalist Papers were printed in newspapers as debates, right? Like it was like Federalist Paper and then, you know, the response to that.
And it was very thoughtful. And it was pro-liberty. And it was grounded in values. And it was very well considered. And you compare that to political discourse now. Like, I watched the midterms. Like, I was way too involved with thinking about politics in 2020.
Last few years I've disengaged. I was like, I don't understand what's happening. But I watched the midterm. I was like, people can't even string a sentence. And that's fine. Like everyone's like, well, it's fine. They don't make any sense. If you read the Federalist Capers, it's extremely humble that these people cared. They really, really cared.
and it made me respect america a lot more of like what his founding history was and why it was so based and rooted in liberty i was like man i wish more americans like i'm surprised how few actual americans study the federalist papers like i'm english and i've studied the forest papers but they haven't
But I think it kind of goes against the grain of contemporary education to go back and read that stuff because you can see what the decline is, right? Like really, like this doesn't even make sense. Like it does make sense, just very erudite. So it was very humbling to read it and it gave me a lot of respect. american political founding and the minds that came to it it was it was very fun last question if you were to design a curriculum about teaching writing what
wedge into writing education would you have? I would guess it wouldn't be around spelling and grammar. I was like, is that a diss on the fact that I'm pretty bad at spelling and grammar? No.
It's like, how do you know? I'm just like, you're going to have a, I'm terrible at it too. My sentence is always just too long. Like that was like my thing. Like I, it's a train of thought for me. So like I always just write, then I'm like, this sentence is like seven paragraphs. It's just one train of thought. But you have to be free, right?
We're injecting as well. I just think people aren't studying the classical text enough. I feel very fortunate now as a person in my 30s that I went to a very old school in England where we got taught Latin in Greek. By default, we got taught Latin. And we studied classical Roman texts. We had to. It wasn't like a choice, right? Like here in America, like you can maybe learn that if you pick it up. And if you read Euripides or like poetry, if you read the...
Odyssey, right? Which I'm sure you have, or the Aeneid. In that, which is, on my mind, the next level of foundational books after the Bible, right? It's like, go read other stuff that's been around for a long time. Euripides and these other great writers, including Homer, did something very similar to Ayn Rand. They took characteristics and qualities of what they think humans should be like or not be like and put them in characters. Euripides is similar as Shakespeare does the same thing.
it's makes it's irrelevant in any era that you read it you use the same thing like She loves him. He loves that. She's not being noble, traitor-y. The context has changed, but human drive hasn't changed. We still have the same drives. We just find different solutions. And to go read Euripides in probably the same way that you are doing with the Bible, it's like...
You go back and you realize like, oh, everyone's had the same questions and we're thinking about the same time. From a writing perspective, I think it gives you humility, right? It's like, I'm not living in the...
greatest moment of human intellect, right? Like there's things for me to learn from the past. There's things for me to appreciate about the present. And in that humility, I find my voice, right? Like it's like a respect for that. And I just don't think people are reading old enough texts enough. They're not.
Going back, it's seen as, like, boring. I'm like, damn, that's lost it for 2,000 years for a reason. Yeah, it was funny. We went out to dinner last night. We're in downtown LA, and it was about a 10-minute walk downtown, and it literally felt like a scene of I Am Legend. I felt like if I had been there an hour later, we walked at sunset. like we had walked an hour and a half later, we would have been murdered. I mean, there was no one on the streets. It's totally dead.
We're driving back from dinner after, and the driver's like, I cannot believe what has happened to this place. There's no life on these streets. And he drops us off, and there's this beautiful lobby. It must have been built. 19... 1920, between 1920, 1928, just has that almost like deco exterior, but then also like that art nouveau life and vibrancy to it, like that detail.
And I just look at it like, wow, that is magnificent. And then you just sort of look at the streets and like the paint is chipped and there's no care to the outside. And just the juxtaposition between what you have inside. something that was built 110 years ago and the outside like these decrepit sad lifeless streets i was just like what and i'm like if that's not a motif for what's happening right now yeah with the decline of the creative spirit i don't know what is
Yeah. Drum roll. End of podcast. That's how you should end it. That's totally amazing. Exactly. I totally agree. Yes. That was a blast. That was a blast. Thank you. That was fun.