8: Steph Ango - Tools for Amplifying Our Light

Episode summary: Steph Ango aka Kepano (Website, X) is a designer, writer, entrepreneur,and toolmaker, best known as the CEO of Obsidian, a powerful and flexible writing and thinking tool. Steph's education is in biology and industrial design, but he is true multi-hyphenate creative, working across mediums including software, hardware, supply chain and packaging, words, wood, furniture, ink, color schemes, open-source systems, video, podcasts, and more. Above all, he makes tools—deeply opinionated ones—designed to reduce friction for himself and others in the act of creating. Steph joined Obsidian after initially contributing as a fan and enthusiast and impressing its co-founders, Shida Li and Erica Xu.

Under his leadership, Obsidian has grown into one of the most beloved and powerful independent software tools in the world, with millions of users. As a daily user myself, I rely on Obsidian for my research and thinking for this podcast. Before Obsidian, Steph founded Lumi and Inkodye, the former of which was acquired by Narvar. Beyond design, Steph is one of my favorite writers. His concise, sub-500-word essays have shaped my thinking on design, software, learning, agency, constraints, and creativity. While we couldn’t cover all of his ideas in this conversation, we explored many of them in what became my longest conversation to date—one that is packed with wisdom.

I believe these ideas will challenge you in unexpected ways and push you to be more creative, agentic, and optimistic. Transcript for episode 8. Timestamps: Welcome to Dialectic Episode 8 with Steph Ongo, aka Kapano, as he's known on social platforms. He's a designer, writer, entrepreneur, toolmaker, and CEO of Obsidian. Obsidian is one of my favorite products I use every day. It's a robust note-taking and thinking tool that uses bi-directional linking and an extensive plug-in system to become one of the most powerful and extensible tools around. Steph's background is in biology and industrial design, but he's one of the most dynamic and multifaceted creatives and designers I've ever met.

He's worked across software and hardware to supply chain and packaging with a former company called Lumi. He's an amazing writer. He's worked with wood and furniture. He innovated in printing styles with a former company called Incodye. He's created his own custom color schemes and design systems and other forms of web and open source systems. He's made podcasts and videos. He truly is a polymath. And this is one of my favorite conversations I've had so far. More than anything, he sees himself as a toolmaker. And I think you'll see that in our conversation and the way he sees the world and designs for removing friction, making creativity more possible.

We discuss many of his ideas and talk through several of his short essays, which have really pushed my thinking. We talk specifically about design and software, learning and agency, how to use constraints in style. Steph is truly wise. He is so energizing to spend time with, and he is prolific creatively. He's an amazing Twitter follow as well, and I would strongly suggest reading his writing after you've enjoyed the conversation. I believe this conversation pushed me and will hopefully challenge you to be more creative, agentic, and optimistic. Here's Steph. Hey, Rock.

Let's go. I'm really glad to be here with you. I want to start on a theme across your work and writing that seems to be one of the main reasons I experienced you as being very opinionated in a good way. really are thoughtful about constraint, whether that be professionally, creatively, in writing and design. I think this applies to stuff like Obsidian's company structure and some of the ideology and principles behind it, your writing and your brevity, but also, frankly, just across your design thinking. I'm curious why constraint is empowering to you.

Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know when I... started imposing constraints on myself. I feel like constraints just naturally occur from, you know, like if you're writing a tweet, there's so many, there used to be at least so many characters that you could write. Or if you go to my projects page on my website, some of my oldest projects are Winamp skins from like early 2000s or something like that. And we're talking Winamp. two which is before they let you do whatever you want with shapes so you had to like work within a certain number of pixels just to even do a volume slider you you had so little that you could do but yet that's where all the creativity came from and i would look at some people who i thought were amazing winempskin artists back then and i was like how did they figure out how to like put this entire little animation in like you know movement of 12 pixels and and that would fascinate me and i you know i would just like think about that and try to come up with something myself so i think maybe that's where it started like just out of necessity those constraints you know shaped the way that i design things or think about things but then over time i had eras where i had less constraint like you know my my previous startup before obsidian we had We went down the VC path.

We had a lot more money than any other project that I had ever done before. And in a way, I missed having those constraints or the lack of constraint in certain cases let us down decisions that were not as good as if we would have those constraints. And so now I'm always looking for how I can add forceful constraints into my own process. pick good constraints that i think i can live with and i can have fun with and and that becomes a canvas to experiment within yeah it seems like obviously you've done a lot of work in the physical world too but in digital space it's funny you bring up the earlier winning example where digital space video games software all over the place like tons of constraint and basically the last 20 years has been a removal continuous removal of constraint or at least a continuous expansion of what you can do so i find it particularly interesting that some of your clearest forms of constraint are almost like purely fake or imaginary not fake imaginary or self-imposed yeah short writing is a simple example yeah most people i think outside of twitter they're the only the only reason to do writing outside of twitter would be long form and yet you're doing shorter form is that something that requires discipline or is it actually just like oh i know i know the freedom or the i don't know the way it's empowering on the other side that it allows me to show up more consistently yeah well it's definitely self-imposed like but then it's the element of a style basically i think you want things in general to be recognizably you and to become easier and easier for you to do like it can become writing is difficult if you have no constraints like if you know that okay i'm going to try to fit in this idea in 500 words then you know the kinds of things that you're probably not gonna write about a lot of my essays have no reference material like there's just like no footnotes there's no nothing it's just like i'm i'm stating things like this is my opinion and you know Well, when my essays in particular, I'm like writing to a younger version of myself is who I have in mind.

And I'm like, let's imagine that the only thing I can pass on to like this younger version of myself is like X number of words. Like here's the most concise way I can like communicate this across time to this like younger version of myself. So the conciseness comes from the fact that I know that I wouldn't want to read something long. Back then, especially. Probably most of us still. Yeah. One of the cooler things when I was reading a bunch of your, rereading a bunch of your stuff, I was like loading it into a read it later app.

And there's something with the rendering or however it worked where occasionally I would get. presumably what was an older version of one of your older pieces. Oh, okay, yeah. And I could see the culling. Like, I could see little... I removed some words, yeah. It was really cool. I am not... So, see, this is one thing that is kind of weird about my blog is I just will edit old pieces all the time and not... I don't know. I could put, like, last edited or versions or something like that, but I just don't care about the continuity of it.

I am trying to make each one really good. Oftentimes what happens is I'll write a new essay and I try to link very profusely to other essays because they all kind of build up on each other. And when I link, I'm like, oh, I wrote about this and I'm making a link. And then I go to that essay and it's like 10 years old now. And I'm like, damn, this is I could have done this way better. And I'll just most of the time it's just too wordy. And I can I can simplify an idea or there's like this connective tissue that has no.

A lot of the words I remove are just like connective words that they're just. unnecessary they don't actually have any like calories in there and so like i i'm trying to get rid of that and then you know recently at some point when twitter stopped letting you link to things i started putting screenshots of all my essays and i wanted the screenshots to have a certain feel to them so that people when they saw it would think oh hey that's from kapano and they would just instantly notice that it's like it feels Like one of my essays.

So I, you know, came up with this color scheme and the color scheme has basically nine colors. And now I've been using that color scheme for all kinds of stuff lately. I've been like teaching myself piano and I've been using these colors to make these little tools for myself to help me kind of bridge synesthesia with the way my brain works. Like I'm trying to like connect colors to notes so that I can learn them more easily. Amazing. But I have this set of colors. So now it's like, OK, I'm just going to use those colors.

And then by default, it's going to fit into everything else that I did. And so it just becomes a sort of signature. It's a little scary. Like, I remember always wanting to do something like this, but I was afraid that I'd have to stick with something that I would eventually. Something like this being the brevity or the color scheme? Yeah, like the color scheme that that or even like the design of my website or something like that, that it would that the continuity was so important to me. Like I felt like I had to get it right because otherwise then I'm stuck with something that I don't like.

So the same reason that I would it's really hard for myself to imagine myself getting a tattoo because I'm like, I would have to like feel really great about it. And then I've known people who have lots of tattoos and they're like, oh, yeah, this one sucks. It reminds me of a different time or whatever. And I like that notion too. Yeah, that ironic. Yeah, it's an easier, it's easier to relate to your digital self in that way. There's less permanence. The, I think the other thing that's so powerful about having consistent visual language online, but also gravity, all these things that you discussed is in a world where increasingly Think about old Twitter.

Somebody followed you. They were pretty likely to reliably get your content because they opted into it once. Yeah. That's not really how, certainly not how TikTok works. Increasingly, it's not how Twitter works. And yet, you're almost hacking the, like, you're giving people, before we turned the mics on, we were talking about, like, using not your face as an avatar. And there's a similar thing there, which is it's a little mental visual cue for somebody to kind of... Oh, I've seen this before. Oh, I like that guy. Oh, that guy with a little beige face.

He had interesting ideas. Oh, I read a short screenshot essay from him. And that compounds in a way that I think is actually the way to build a following or a brand on the modern internet where every incremental piece of content needs to almost earn its place. Yeah, it's like when someone that I've been following for a long time changes their avatar, it's like they have to start... I'm like... Who are you? Your friend had super long hair and they got a crazy haircut. Yeah. We have to start all over from scratch now.

Yeah. I totally agree with that. Yeah. I mean, you've done the same with your color scheme. I know when I see that little pink circle, I know that's you. But to the tattoo point or whatever, it's like now, if I ever want to change it, am I undoing it? And so this is the other thing I respect about you a lot is you're someone who is so thoughtful about this stuff, but also doesn't default to weight. At least from my vantage point, you're so generative, you're so prolific in how much you create.

I'm curious how you balance that concrete style, very constrained, but also it's just like, I don't know, you put out something today or yesterday about your piano thing. It's just constantly happening. Okay, so, yeah. The thing is, if you look at my website and you look at the timestamps on the essays, There's like one a year. I started my first blog in 2005. So there's a lot of stuff. The oldest one on there now, I think, is 2012. Yeah. At least the oldest one under the linked favorites. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty old, I guess.

But I have some older stuff that I just, you know, I'm calling things over time. There might be some good stuff that has been removed that might deserve to be back on there. Yeah. So there was a long period of time where I basically wrote a blog all by myself, like to myself for like 10 years. So or just no one knew about it. No, just I what I did was I made I made a blog and I had it in like private mode because I wanted to like kind of set up the visual language and start writing.

And I wanted to have like a few good posts before I launched it. And then I just never launched it. So I just wrote. And then I kept writing and then that became like my note taking app in a certain way. Wow. This private blog that I was like writing to no one. But then some, you know, at some point, like a few years ago, I thought, OK, I really should start publishing stuff. And I just had this archive of like 10 years of drafts. And like then I was just like looking at all my drafts and some of them were really good and I still felt good about them.

So. I think a lot of the process is just like planting seeds and waiting for those things to just sort of like reach a certain maturity where I can look back at them a year later, five years later, and I'm like, I still agree with myself. Therefore, I should post this. And by that point, I have like a clear idea of what the thing is. So I do use social networks like Twitter to kind of just like put the messiest stuff up and see if people disagree. And then I get some good kind of friction from that, which I use to kind of catalog, you know, arguments against what I'm saying or try to refine my language.

And that just goes into drafts. And then sometime later. something happens and I'm like, it's time. Like, that idea just came back and I have, like, all the context necessary to just, like, spit it out in a very short burst. Right, right. And so, it's really hard to, like, it's one thing that's nice about getting older. It's really hard to, like, do that. It's very frustrating when you're younger. I had the similar thing with, I wanted, I created this series off a blog post called The blog post was called Buy Wisely.

And it was just basically making the argument that, you know, you should buy more reliable, durable things that will last you for a long time and that the extra cost of it will end up being worthwhile. And so I made a few recommendations of products that fit that description to me. And when I was doing that, I did a bunch of kind of self-research on like things that I've owned for a long time, how many times I've used them, how much did they cost me at the time. and try to understand the, like, cost per use.

And, like, so I did this whole kind of spreadsheet and looked into all of these objects that are still with me. And there's some new things that I've owned for one or two years where I feel really good about, you know, how they will last, but I feel like it's too early to say. So, like, I have to have, like, my rule for anything that I'll share is, like, I'm still using it five years later. Share as in recommend? Yeah. Got it. Yeah, exactly. And so it takes five years. for one new post to be added to that.

And so it's kind of frustrating in some ways. It's a filtration system. Yeah, because I'm like, I have some things that I have incorporated into my life in the last couple of years, but they're not allowed in my constraint system because I haven't had them for five years yet. But it's a really cool blend of a baseline generativeness or generativity around creating things about... liking things, trying things that has maybe its insulation, whatever it is that you need to both keep enough distance from it that you can evaluate it. Maybe not objectively, but a little more objectively, but also have the freedom to create.

I think like even going back a little bit, like the idea of having a private blog or something like that, like I think people get caught on one end of that spectrum a lot. They either are like... sharing constantly sharing everything there's no filter there's not a lot of signal or they're hesitant to share anything and it seems maybe somewhat deliberately and somewhat accidentally you've created an interesting kind of amorphous filtration system that allows for all the good on both ends that the creating like i don't know that they'll like rick rubin create something for yourself and then share it with the world that it's like okay advice but it's hard advice to take and it feels like in some ways you're You're manifesting some of that in a cool way.

And then, by the way, I have experienced this where you go back and read something you didn't think was very good. And you're like, wow, I actually see I see the part that the wisdom there like that is it's one of the other ideas I love of yours that I think about a lot is that is the like audience of selves stadium of past and future use. Yeah. And it's this is sort of like. You creatively negotiating with all of those and working together to kind of like figure out how to get to the best stuff over time.

Gosh, yeah. That idea is basically if you think of yourself as, you know, let's say you live 80 years. I forget what I put in the essay. You had it in days. Yeah. So but if you live 80 years and like each new day is one person, it would fill up a stadium. You know, it'd be. however many 50,000, 60,000 days in that stadium represent 60,000 people. And so your current self, today's self is on stage. You're in the middle of the stadium and all of your past and future selves are sitting in the audience.

So there's like baby you, like you're this like a one day old version of you all the way to like 80, 90 year old you. And they're all sitting. And I don't know, in my... I don't know how they're seated. I think they're at random, but I've talked about this with other people and they're like, oh yeah, in my mind stadium, they're all sitting in like chronological order. So there's like a baby section. There's an old me section. I like that. You can imagine looking to the part of the stadium.

I'm appealing to my five-year-old self in this moment, all 360 of them. Yeah, and I think that's, yeah, basically. anything I've ever really tried to create was for a version of myself. And that makes it a lot easier in a way because the more I've gone in that direction, the more I find that people actually respond to it, like other people respond to it. The point that you're referencing about this piano thing, I have a real problem trying to learn musical notation. It doesn't make sense to the way my brain works.

I want to get good at sight reading. And for some reason, the musical notation is something that really is problematic to me. So I'm trying to figure out solutions to help me with that. And I've been posting some ideas and then other people are like, oh, yeah, that's cool. Like, you know, that that would help me. People are also in the same situation that I am or they're teachers and they're trying to teach students how to sight read. And they're like, oh, I could use this with my students. And I don't know.

I mean, this is like not, this is just a trope at this point, but it's like, yeah, make something that you would enjoy. And then other people, you know yourself well and you're unique, but then a lot of people have the same problem that you have. So if you understand that problem well, then other people will probably enjoy whatever solution you come up with. Yeah. The making something for yourself, I think is it. an obviously empowering constraint maybe what's so powerful about the way you talk about it is by orienting it around past selves or future selves there's like a separation that allows you to sometimes it's like oh make something what do you mean what is yes I almost have back to the idea of being able to go back to something you wrote in the past and reduce it and make it even more clear.

It's almost like the older, wiser version of yourself going to that young self who was energetic and had the idea and had so much to say about it but didn't quite have the words. You can almost imagine that person, the older you, putting your hand on the shoulder and saying, here, let me help you word this. It's a really beautiful metaphor that I think is... still anchored around that constraint of the audience of one is this pretty common idea yeah but it's a cool tweak on it that i think is is cool it's helpful and also the thing is that you know people people ask this question like what piece of advice would you give to your younger self or something like that it sounds so grandiose but like some of my things are just like this is the kind of shaver you should buy like it's or this is like the it's like so basic and i went through a bunch of pain to learn this for you yeah and it's not It's not that grandiose.

It's like this is how you should meal prep or something like that if you want to not be hungry at 1 m. on a work day. These are not really big problems of society. They're just kind of things that helped me becoming an adult, learning how to be me. I don't know. But often the writing from other people that we all find so useful ends up being kind of shaped like that. Yeah, it's just really, really basic stuff sometimes. On the topic of removal, you wrote a piece I liked a lot about when you talked about the invisible.

Removal is often invisible. It's like people cleaning up a beach. Right. And it made me think of the Steve Jobs idea about focus isn't about just choosing what to work on. It's about saying no to a thousand good ideas. So you can work on that. things that are really, really important. And whether it be, again, going back to an old piece and you're figuring out how to shorten it by 25 words to make it more clear or in design and product and building the business, how do you say no? I struggle with this in writing as an example, even maybe in editing podcasts and all the other things I do and how I spend my time.

How do you say no to the good stuff so you can... Spend your time on the really good stuff, especially someone who's so prolific. Yeah, so the idea of what can we remove is it's just a question that hopefully is useful for a group or for yourself when you're working on something. It's just remind yourself to ask that question. What can I remove? What can we remove? What's like not contributing to the thing? And oftentimes, you know, when you're writing an essay or you're building an app or you're working on something, some of the prior like first draft stuff ends up sticking and staying into the final thing.

And so that's one of the things that I like about giving myself like a long pause before I publish is that then I can see, oh, yeah, that was just like. this weird old cruft that was there from like an early version and like you get kind of stuck keeping it around because you're just in a flow and you have like a memory of your past self from an hour ago when you started writing this essay. Like it still makes sense. You needed it to get there almost. Yeah, you needed it to get there.

And so you have this. Yeah. I mean, it's like, again, classic wisdom from from writers like I forget what it's like. Kill your darlings or something like that. It's like, you know, it's a it's a classic thing. But that having that gap where you come back to something with fresh eyes and you're like, oh, that's so obviously like unnecessary. I was holding on to this. Yeah. Or a year ago or whatever. Yeah. And so there's there's a part of it is one tool that you have is. the ability to just, like, come back to it the next day or, you know, a year from now?

Is it actually urgent? You know, maybe you're working on a... You're doing some work and you can't... That's not how they work. You have a job to do. You have to ship something tomorrow. So we have this all the time with Obsidian. You know, we're working on a new release of Obsidian every... you know every few months we have like a big new release and so it there's always a point every single release has it where it's like do we want to add this other feature bug fixer thing or do we want to ship what we have and an earlier version of myself like in my younger days would always choose like let's make it as good as possible and then ship it but now I'm always just like let's ship something and cut everything that we can cut so that it's good enough to ship on this particular day and once you change your mindset to like i know that i want to put it out there tomorrow or in a week or a month it just forces you to trim anything that you know that's not necessary so that's another tool that you can you just it's another form of constraint like one constraint is a time-based constraint just wait a year and see how you feel about it Another constraint is just tell yourself, I got to put it out tomorrow.

Yeah. So therefore, I got to cut everything. Yeah. But that like zigzagging between those two ends of the spectrum is actually, you know, a very common thing that I do. It's like tacking. Tacking is like how you move against the wind in a boat. Oh, huh. Like if you're trying to go straight against the wind in a boat, you have to basically zigzag your way. So you go all the way, you know, 45 degrees left and then you go 45 degrees right. And you're making like forward progress, but you're doing it in his exact fashion.

And you're like bouncing back and forth between left brain, right brain, long term, short term, you know, you know, maximalist, minimalist. Most of us are stuck in the middle. Being pulled on both sides all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Only there's this quote. I'm like this comes up all the time with my my partner. This quote from S. Eliot, which is only those who are willing to go too far can possibly find out how far one can go. And so it's just like, let's remove everything. Let's add everything. Let's like, let's just see what happens like for science.

And, and, and then you're like, actually half of this stuff was not necessary. So, and it kind of depersonalizes the, you know, your attachment to whatever you're, you're doing. And I think that was like fundamentally the point about that, that what can we remove essay was like. we get attached to the things that we can see but like when you come to a to a beach that's totally you know pristine you don't know who was there before like picking up all the trash right and if you're walking around that beach and you see a piece of trash you should pick it up so that the next person has the ability to like enjoy a pristine beach but they will never know that you were like they will not they will just enjoy the pristine beach.

Right, yeah. It's not even that they're not thinking about who cleaned it up. They're probably not even thinking about the fact that it had trapped. The reason, and maybe there are other metaphors that are better examples, sometimes interior design or whatever. It's like, it's actually what's not there that makes the space so great. And so it's this subversion or this, yeah, wow, that's powerful. The last constraint-related idea that I wanted to ask about is, you've written extensively about, which would be, highly principled, if not ideological approach to making software and building a company with Obsidian.

This, I think probably the most famous instance of this that you continue to write about in different forms is file over app. This idea that we should have plain text, usable data in files independent of the tool. I'm curious, just very practically, maybe we talked about some of this, but like how does having a philosophically driven approach affect the day-to-day building and also how does it affect you over the long term? Maybe something as simple as how often we can ship an update and what goes into an update. Is it easier to remove stuff because of the principles?

Is it harder to remove stuff? Is it harder to add stuff? Okay, so there's really two totally separate topics here. One topic is file over app, which is really a political statement and it's like I think that this is societally important, like civilizationally important. It's like a rejection of like how big tech and a lot of companies are built in the software ecosystem these days or have been for a long time. So that's kind of like a more, it does then become a constraint within what we do at Obsidian. And like we try to respect that constraint.

We wrote a manifesto that is very short, very simple, that has five things that we're focusing on. And those are the constraints that we use. And they're pretty simple things. One is we want to stay independent. We want to be 100% user supported. So all of our funding comes directly from our users. We don't have investors. And we don't want to grow the size of the team. So that kind of is just like... a value that has to do with independence. And part of the reasons that particular set of values, that's one of them.

There's privacy. There's durability of the files. You can go to md slash about and you can read the whole thing. But a lot of those came from the founders of Obsidian, Shida and Erica, who for some reason were naturally just like genius about like the values and other things came from my personal experiences having gone through the process of building companies every possible way you can i i did a kickstarter campaign we went my co-founder went on shark tank at one point we raised money through vcu i've done all the different ways that you can raise money and build companies and i just like the kind of like Ocean's Eleven model, the best.

It's just like it's the most fun to have like a very small team where you just I love making stuff myself. I don't really enjoy being a manager. I've done it in the past a lot. And but I just want to be designing and coding and writing and interacting with the users directly. And that's just what I like. Other people might really enjoy working in a big company or being a manager or other things. It's not like a prescription for. for everyone. It's just the way that we enjoy building Obsidian.

And yeah, it has a lot of limitations. We, you know, in the previous company that I ran, Lumi, whenever we had a problem, it was like, who can we hire who is like an expert on this problem? And we'll go find the best person, hire them, and then like empower them to solve this problem. Now, if we have this problem, like hiring is off the table. We basically don't hire. We have seven people full time. We've kind of given ourselves a buffer like in our, you know, kind of internal. It's not listed specifically in the manifesto, but it's like an internal limit of like 10 to 12 people that we don't want to grow past.

Like currently we're seven, seven and a half or something like that because we have some people working part time. But yeah, like we just if the problem comes up and we have to either figure out how to solve it ourselves or we just decide it's not a problem. We want to solve it all. So that, you know, happens all the time. We can't parallel process on 20 different things at the same time. We can only do like one or two things at the same, like at once. You know, companies are these amazing kind of like symbiotic, like super intelligent like organisms that are capable of doing really complicated things.

You know, Amazon has like a million people working there, you know, so they can do like so many things at the same time. I don't want to run Amazon. I just want to have fun building stuff. And so I think having an understanding and shunning this sort of like, having an understanding of yourself and being, you know, brave enough to, like brave as sounds, to just reject like this, like, sales pitch that is often given. Maybe even a default in certain worlds or contexts. That you have to raise money or you have to do things this or that way.

You should just do what feels right to you. And it's still possible to be very ambitious within that framework. Like Obsidian probably, I don't, we actually know how many users we have, but we probably have like three or four million users and we're seven people and like that's pretty crazy. It's definitely possible to do something like that. Within that, Especially on the ambition note, even the set of constraints and ideals you just talked about, some of them are more political. Some of them are about how you and the co-founders want to live your lives and run the company.

Some of them are enabling from a truly like a principled standpoint. Right. As an example, I think the file over app piece and particularly digital archival, the idea that our data is actually usable in not only 10 years, but 50 years, 100 years. That is something that is almost mission driven, right? Right. How does that balance? And maybe this is a false. Maybe this isn't actually in contradiction or isn't mutually exclusive. But you could imagine a world where the mission is weakened or getting to the mission on the timeline or at the scale you hope to is weakened by the fact that you guys don't want to manage people is a overly simple example.

Yeah. And there's a world where. 20 years from now or 50 years from now, the world is different. Maybe I'm assigning too much credit or ambition or whatever, but like these are maybe some of them are more just theoretical, but some of them could actually be very practical things where your core principled constraints end up running up against each other. And maybe, yeah, you don't need to raise $100 million in venture capital, but having 20 people could help Obsidian get much more materially or much more quickly to its mission. Yeah, so you're saying file over app is this big idea that could have more influence in the world if there were more people working on it.

I don't know that. No, no, I think that's definitely a fair point. It's probably true to some extent. I think that... I don't know. I would argue that even as seven people... building this thing that is kind of like an example of what we mean by file over app has had more impact than if we had had like a million people working on it. Because what we've seen over the last couple years is the biggest companies like Microsoft just put out like basically a new tool that like converts like all these old file like Word and PDF and every kind of file format that is not that is proprietary and not open.

to, you know, open format Markdown. They're doing it, I think, mainly because it's the best way to ingest like a whole bunch of data into like AI. Yeah, but. Pretty surreal though for you guys. Yeah, it was cool. It was cool. And we, and there's, I can think of about like 10 different startups that have started based on file over app. And they're like, we're doing file over app for accounting. We're doing file over app for this or that. And they're like, it's like almost like a. you know, requests for startups that YC does.

It's just like, sometimes I'll post on social media. It's like, we need a file over app of this category. And then people are like, oh, I should go build that. You know, there's people doing CAD file over app. People are doing, you know, video. They're taking that and expanding in other directions. And if we thought of file over app as like a proprietary idea that only, you know, we should be the ones focusing on. it would be less powerful. It's better for everyone to have, if the idea is powerful enough and it's, you know, and enough people agree with it, they can just go take that and run with it and build in their area.

And now it becomes like there's a shared ownership of that idea. And I think that's in a way more powerful than trying to do it all ourselves. But it requires us to be, to like give it away and be communicative about like, hey, everyone can do this. Maybe even more simple than that or more foundational might just be the most important part of anyone's work is like staying in the game. And on some level, you are doing it in a way that allows you to do it. Not to mention, if you were managing a bunch of people, maybe you wouldn't have had time to write file over app.

Back when I was doing Lumia, I didn't have time to write because I was managing people. It's funny. It's like I'm... still probably one of the like top Obsidian users like I use Obsidian all the time and I love using it and so like I am I'm if I'm not working on it I'm using it probably like actively at least an hour a day but I have it open constantly in the background so I'm like bouncing back and forth and sometimes I'll just literally spend five six hours eight hours in a single day just writing in there I write my essays in there I publish from there I work on

like my side projects, like this piano thing we were talking about, a lot of my planning, or sometimes I'll be building plugins. I think if someone who is a user of Obsidian were looking at the way that I spend my time in a day, they would be like, you could be spending more of your time building Obsidian instead of using Obsidian. Some people are like, where's this bug fix that I've requested two years ago? Or where's this feature? You know, you're spending too much time using Obsidian and not building Obsidian.

That's kind of what people are saying in a certain way, not in those words necessarily. But I don't think I would be building Obsidian if I wasn't using it. To me, like actually, the company is secondary to my personal goals of actually using the tool that I want. The reason I'm making it is so that I can use it, not the other way around. And if I wasn't using it, then Obsidian, the tool wouldn't be as good as it is. So it's like, yeah, that's a powerful paradox in a way.

And that's something that I didn't enjoy as much working on my previous startup, which was like we were a B2B, you know, supply chain tool. And by the thing that we were making, we were not using ourselves. And because we couldn't, we were busy building the software that, you know, was like a manufacturing and logistics platform. I think that going back to the earlier topic of like building something for yourself. If you really care about that, you have to make sure that it remains true even as the thing grows. It's really hard.

It's really hard to keep working on it. Just think about any startup that you use their product. How many of them are actually using the thing that they make all the time? Well, they probably started out using it or they had that problem. Presumably you guys had that problem with Boomi. It's almost a craft in and of itself to... set things up in a way and maintain them in a way that allows for you to keep playing the game you want to play well and you have to have the stamina again everything I'm saying is not a prescription it's just this is what I enjoy doing if you enjoy like if your whole life is like enjoying

making things for others and being in service of others. Like there's amazing, you know, entire professions and things that are all about that. And that is amazing. I think that if you're interested in building something that you want to use and you also imagine yourself doing this for a long time, which is not a prescription whatsoever. Lots of great companies get built and then they get sold and then people move on. I often wish that I could I've often had ideas of like writing books or comic books or making movies and like the allure of that is so appealing because like you make a movie it's done and then you make another movie you do a new thing and it's over you work on it for three years but yeah but you know you work yeah you work on it for three years or five years or ten years but then then you're done with it and like that artifact is complete but software is never complete it's like always evolving you know It can't be because there's no firm ground to stand on.

The operating system is changing. Everything's changing under your feet. So if you're someone who really likes that idea of being able to move from one thing to the next, then maybe software is not the right category for you. It's ironic given how much faster it is than other mediums, but I think that's right. Yeah. I was at Sundance this weekend, and there's something you could see. or maybe i'm projecting but there's the sense of the filmmakers are doing the q a there's there is this crazy level of like whoa it's out it's done maybe there's still work to do but like i the last five years have all come and software is a totally if not inverted shape a very different shape that theoretically you could work on obsidian for 50 more years yeah i guess so i mean i think it's weird because i'm pretty sure like software is going to be different the like in a major way we might not be using computers in the same way that we do today certainly many of the like I don't know if we're going to have JavaScript and CSS and like the way that we build apps yeah like the way that we build things change a lot or there's so many things it's so unpredictable you know what might happen we're all just going to be connected into the

to the supercomputer. Well, that's the unique thing about software, too, is people were making movies 100 years ago. Yeah, who's going to be typing with their fingers into a thing 50 years from now. Or even what is the oldest, like, computer or piece of software that anyone uses? Yeah. It isn't heavily, heavily abstracted. Yeah. Huh. Okay. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about design. You are, again, I said you were prolific earlier, and I really enjoy your writing, but I think from a design standpoint, that's kind of more what I meant, just given that.

When it comes to showing up with a strong point of view in many different forms, even just chatting with you and hearing more about other things you've spent time on, you bring a design-focused approach and a really strong point of view to most of the ways you show up in the world. So as a super basic kind of initial question, what makes for good design? Wow. And if you want to take a second part, what has made you a better designer? I mean, constraints is what... Makes design great. Gosh, this is a topic I've thought a lot about, but I haven't written that much about.

And so I feel like my thoughts are not as organized as they could be. You know, the way that I thought that I was going to become a biologist when I when I was going through high school, I really focused my studies on physics, chemistry and biology and decided I wanted to become a biologist and that I was going to like. specifically become a zoologist or evolutionary biologist, and then I spent some time, that's what I went to school in college for. Then at some point I realized, like, I had been doing a lot of artsy stuff on the side.

I had been making winempskins, I had been painting, photographing things. You know, I kind of dabbled with every medium at some point, just as a hobby. And I realized I kind of discovered design like late because I think I was 20 or something. I was in China. I was at a Muji store in Singapore. And I was like, wait a minute, someone has decided what the diameter of this pencil should be. Like it just sort of like dawned on me all of a sudden that people had been making these decisions about all the objects that are around me.

Did creative things become more serious when you thought about it as design? Well, I just had never really thought about design as a profession. I always kind of just had been messing around. I didn't realize that it was people's full-time job to do this kind of thing. And this was like 2005, I want to say. And suddenly it was like Neo and the Matrix. I was just looking at everything all around me. I was like, whoa, someone made that decision and that decision and this material and that diameter. And I was like...

I could do that. I have opinions about what diameter something should be. And so then I decided to shift and try to become an industrial designer. I lived in the Netherlands and I worked at an industrial design firm there. I went back to school and studied industrial design. And then I met my good friend, Jesse, who became my co-founder for 13 years across two different companies. And we turned you know, the things that we were passionate about in industrial design into software and like, how do we actually help other people manufacture things?

I'm skipping a lot of steps, but, you know, all along the way, it was exposure to having this other lens on the world where you look at things first from a biological standpoint, you know, where I'm like, I have the choice to either study what nature has created and surrounds us with or like study what humans have created and The human path seemed more appealing because I could actually contribute something as opposed to just like studying something that was already made. Right. I mean, in theory, I could have gone down like the genetics route or something.

Maybe there's a hybrid of those two or like wetware or something like that. But, you know, I thought it would be more interesting to kind of apply my own process of natural selection to like objects and interfaces and things like that. Cool. And then just by coincidence. This, you know, when I shifted into design, that's when the iPhone launched. And it was like, you know, just a total game changer in terms of what you could do with UI. And like the touchscreen was so powerful because it really created that connection between physical and the physical hardware and the software.

Like you could literally make buttons that you can touch in EYs. So that was really exciting and kind of pushed me down that software path. Along the way, I took classes in typography and woodworking and UI and studied things just by going to the view source or inspector. So I've just always had this curiosity about how things are made, how they look, why they look the way they do, what is the structure of things. I've had just a lot of curiosity. And then you kind of start to see... patterns more you see patterns in nature and you're like oh it's again the question of constraints like how do you know Fibonacci sequence type of stuff like you look at how plants grow and how they work and they're all like working within these constraints so I don't know if I'm answering your question but like the ultimately the things that make a system feel appealing to use ergonomic, intuitive, understandable, beautiful, they tend to find a way to distill what this thing is for into something that is easy to understand.

And the things that are easy to understand tend to somehow be simple or understandable. And so that's the thing that I'm always searching for is how to make something understandable. And what's extraneous? What can be removed? It's almost like if you reverse that story, you would have a strong case for why so much of great design is so obvious, intuitive, or even invisible. It's almost the two versions of you. It's the first version of you that just is appreciating the world. Great design almost puts people back in the matrix. And they don't have to wonder about the way things are.

That's true. Yeah. Ignorance is bliss, as Cypher said. Yeah. I mean, it reminds me of, you know, my high school biology professor. Shout out to Mr. Billiot. You know, he was the first to teach me the idea of like use it or lose it in nature, which is just like, I mean, it takes nature millions of years to like get rid of something like a tailbone or, you know, appendix or whatever it is. But. Nature has this kind of way through evolution of shedding unnecessary things and kind of like being evolutionary fitness, like being fit to its environment.

So what is necessary for a product, a physical product, a software product to be fit to its environment? It has to be efficient at what it does. And the efficiency in that. in a way is what creates beauty. I love looking at like machinery because machinery is so, it's not trying to be beautiful necessarily, but it kind of becomes beautiful just by, you know, the form follows the function, like the function of the thing needs to, it needs to do a certain thing. And so it has to look a certain way.

And through that, there's a certain kind of beauty that you, that we recognize that is not that different from from nature. And maybe I come from a more like modernist design tendency, a more minimalistic, less maximalist. I think that aspect, I appreciate it when I see it, but I have a really hard time practicing it. Like if you go to Europe and you go to like the art like ancient architecture or like Renaissance and it's like so so yeah it's so beautiful and so complex and so ornate I have no ability to do something like that it's really hard for me to design things that have like a decorative aspect to them and I'm not sure if that's like just because I was trained and like the world around me because I grew up in the era of like mass production and everything is kind of designed to be very streamlined or if it's natural to I don't know if it's like nature or nurture the kind of like tendency towards minimalism that I have but I can appreciate the beauty in complex things but I also am always searching for like the most pure version of whatever it is I'm building well you've mostly maybe not mostly you spent a lot of time working on tools which could

be one reason for at least a lot of your design manifesting with an emphasis towards function. What makes a good tool? My favorite definition of a tool is it's something that converts what you can do into what you want to do. So a hammer is a perfect example. You have what you want to do is put a nail into a wall or a piece of wood or something. And what you have is a hand and you have to convert what your arms can do into a point of hard steel that will just like drive that nail into the wall.

And once you see tools in that particular way, it's like it opens your eyes to what is a car? Or what is a computer? A computer, like why is a computer the shape that it is? It's like... all these keys why did the keys exist because we've got fingers like if we didn't have fingers like a computer would look different and and so then you start to look all around you and everything is made out of like is is handles and ergonomics and that translates just as much in in the software world we have eyes we can speak we can like these are the things that we have at our disposals this is what humans can do this is what a tool that's designed for a human to use what shape it should have and so the best tools conform to us as much as possible and allow us to do something that we want to do and the edge of tool making is always what are some new things that we want to do that we never thought of doing before what are the what are some new capabilities in like the way that we can make tools that you know like for example right now AI and LLMs is so fascinating because it's a new substrate for us to create tools that are really interesting.

Humans are not very good at reading 7 million books in every language. We're not really that good at that. But we have desires. We want to make a new piece of software. Take all of the knowledge from the internet. Every bug that's ever been reported to Stack Overflow is, you know, in an LLM. And so you can, like, ride on that, like, giant sandworm or whatever and take it into the direction that you want it to go. And so a tool can be made out of that. But then there's also the needs.

A lot of our needs as human beings have not changed at all for thousands of years. We still need... a comfortable place to sit, a comfortable utensil to put food into our mouth. Like we have these things that haven't changed very much. Like the needs are pretty much exactly the same as they've always been. How do we satisfy that need in the fittest way possible given what we're able to create today? Obviously in the physical world, that explanation is really easy to apply. In much of digital space and software, we've created all kinds of tools for doing things, creating things, consuming things.

You work on a thinking tool. Some people use this phrase tools for thought, which I think has some baggage with it. But that harkens back to this classic bicycle for the mind idea around computers. I think people are bringing that up again now with LLMs. But in some sense, it's a little more abstracted than... Even something like, hey, I want to consume a book in a shorter period of time, or I want to create a video, or I want to whatever. So many of the other things we do with software.

In some sense, the ultimate thinking tool, the pen and the notebook, hasn't necessarily evolved that much. And I would at least put Obsidian and tools like it in a bucket of, yeah, use it sort of to store things. But you were describing this earlier. The most interesting thing about Obsidian is... I'm using it to think. Right. Which feels like it's this more amorphous, or at least, if not novel, it's a little different than most of the ways people experience using computers and, frankly, most other tools. Hmm. Okay. Well, people have had ways to scribble things onto things for thousands of years, and I think that Obsidian doesn't necessarily have to do anything fancier than that to be useful.

you know, going back to our needs haven't necessarily changed. The question that I ask myself is how can Obsidian allow you to think about things in a way that you could not through paper, pen and paper? Like one of the things that is really core to Obsidian is just that notion of a link, which has been around for decades. And that's how Wikipedia works. You know, you can go down a rabbit hole. What if you could create your own rabbit holes? It's really hard to do that with pen and paper because the just notion of clicking on a link on paper, like if you've ever read a book that has like a lot of footnotes or has a lot of references, like flipping pages is not a very, it doesn't work really well.

Or it's hard to be in, it's especially hard to be in a flow or a... The ergonomics of that just slow you down. It's just slow, and your brain can move so much faster. I think the most important thing about Obsidian is just being able to click links and connect things with links. It's that simple. All of the extra stuff, everything else is on top of that foundation of just being able to link an idea to another idea. Then I think what, you know, Shida and Erica came up with around the plugin architecture is genius because it allows the core of the app to stay like relatively simple.

And we have millions of users. Every user has a different set of plugins. Like just the multiplication of that is just like there's more different configurations of Obsidian in the world than like atoms in the universe or something like that. Like it's like. The way that people use Obsidian is so different from one person to the next. And so that kind of plugin architecture allows for that without us having to build a zillion features. And it's also how we're able to stay small because we rely a lot on the community to build all those different other extensions on top of the tool.

And the way other people's brains function, I do think we're kind of in a... moment in time right now where we're starting to discover more about you know neurodiversity and like understanding that hey I have synesthesia I have aphantasia like I my the way my brain works is probably different from yours and different from somebody else's and I can use like obsidian is about malleability it's about shaping the tool around your brain rather than the other way around a lot of tools like ask you to shape your brain around it it's weird because it's like we're very opinionated about the fact that it should be so unopinionated.

It's like we're very opinionated about the fact that you have to be able to customize every aspect of it because your brain is going to be different. And maybe your brain is going to be different from someone else's brain, but it also might be different from your brain a year ago. And you're evolving to learn new things. And in my own use of Obsidian, my use of it has grown a lot. in complexity over time because I started to feel more comfortable with, you know, different ideas. Like there's this idea called Evergreen Notes that I think Adam Matushak was the person who came up with that term.

And I wrote a piece on it, an essay about that, which is just kind of forming like a meme for yourself of an idea inside of your notes. So you take a whole concept and you somehow distill it to a short phrase or word. that allows you to build on it. And that's something that's really, you know, it's possible to do in book form, but it's really nice to have this like set of Legos that you can play with where you take a whole concept and that's what's powerful about like memes or jokes or inside jokes that you have with friends or something like that.

You can just say one word and like suddenly- So much information is packed inside of that. Yeah, so much. And so you can create those memes just for yourself inside of Obsidian and like the meme can- Of course, it can be something funny or powerful in some way, but it can also just be a shortcut to like a group of ideas that only you've had. A lot of people in the Obsidian community like to do world building. They're playing RPG games. They're like writing books. They're creating like their own little universes for various purposes.

And they are coming up with ideas that are like completely native to that universe that they're creating. Doesn't make sense to anybody else. It's like a whole bunch of Christopher Alexander, like little pattern worlds. And so that concept, you know, maybe allows you to have some more complex thoughts because you're able to more quickly kind of take a whole concept, mix it with this other concept and now like form like a bigger concept out of those. And what can the, you know, can the tool give you enough of those like basic building blocks so that you can take your thinking anywhere you like?

Right. Yeah, it seems it's this beautiful idea in practice, building a tool that is ergonomic enough and affordable enough and simple enough for anyone to get started on almost like the beginning, first level of video game that can then you talked about the plugin architecture a little bit, but that can then go as wide and as rich and as complex as this tool is like probably like one of the hardest design problems conceivable. Yeah. And I think we're, you know, we're not. making obsidian intuitive enough for newbies like i think that's something that we still have a lot of work to do on is is making it you know the first level of the video game more more it's a ferrari engine that you can bolt things on top yeah make it easier to adopt at the early stage and then you know the infinite depth is always going to be there because of the of of the plugin architecture and also lms and software are easier to create exactly yeah you might you might be able to, we're getting to a place now where you might be able to create a plugin that like for just yourself, like probably in like the next year, there'll be like a really good way for you to just like make a plugin.

It's just for, for you. And it does whatever the task. Hey computer, can you help me? I want to be able to do this. Okay. Yeah. And that, and that's really, that's really cool. But we also have to be able to take someone who's completely new to this idea of. this kind of tool and like do a little bit of hand holding in the beginning so that's definitely an area that i'm thinking about a lot one of my favorite things you've ever written is a post called in good hands which is maybe like the coolest way to frame maybe i wouldn't have always put it in the design bucket although obviously i think there's a lot of design inside it and it's this idea of omakase it's like hey trust me give me a little bit of freedom here or trust here to take you somewhere

And in many ways, I think it describes it very least the essence of what I experienced good design to be. Yeah. Which is this, again, it's almost becoming invisible and I'm not having to worry about all the details and all these little things. With that in mind, as maybe an overarching principle, obviously it could apply to a specific experience or serving someone tea, but I think it could also apply to building products or designing products. How do you implicitly communicate that kind of care? or that kind of trust. Yeah. Well, when I, that was one of the essays that just like came out all at once really quickly.

And the, and it's a little different from most of my essays because it's written from the perspective of the consumer. Like this is what I look for. It's not a prescription of what to do. It's please world feed me these kinds of things. Yeah. And it is, um, I think a feeling that everyone has recognized, like you, you watch a movie or you go to a restaurant and you, you sit down and like a minute in, you're like, this is going to be a good movie. I can tell already. Like, I know, like I, I, the, whether you have the vocabulary to express it or not, you know, if you haven't been to film school or whatever, like you may not know, but you feel like that the, the way that it's shot, the way the acting is the, The attention to detail is like coming together in a way that makes you feel like the person who made this or the people who made this really cared.

At its best, it's nonverbal. It's like I actually can't describe what makes this so great. Yeah, exactly. And I think almost by definition, anyone who's like listening to this is probably going to be like trying to make things in this particular way. Where it doesn't happen is oftentimes in this factory environment where if you work at a large company and you're tasked with solving this particular thing, you're in a factory that makes products, that invents new things. And so your project is to... grow the number of users or improve the retention or whatever and that's probably not going to lead towards a thing that makes you feel in good hands like when I think about the movies that I love like not a lot of them come from that like factory style of like recipe yeah of making big you know, Marvel movies or something like that.

Like maybe some of those early MCU movies were kind of in good hands because you felt like there's some people who are real comic book nerds who like they were so passionate because they'd been reading the comics their whole life and they wanted to make a really great comic book movie. But then once it had been turned into a formula, you kind of start to lose that feeling. And so fundamentally, I think the best way is to really care. to just if you and you can feel your yourself as the creator stop caring about things sometimes and that's like a very uh hard feeling yeah oh man and when you stop caring about something there's no chance that you're gonna like make something that makes someone feel anything that's falling out of love in a way yeah if you're not in love with the thing that you're making how is anyone gonna love it so it's hard to fake that like it kind of You have to be patient and choose things that you want to work on that you really have the attention span and curiosity to put that amount of attention to detail because you care so much about it because you would want that thing to be that particular way.

And then the decisions that you make don't really make sense from a... allocation of resources. It doesn't make financial sense. It doesn't make sense for you to be spending so much time obsessing about this particular detail, but you have to in your soul because you know that it would give you pleasure if you were on the other side of that. You're painting the back of the cabinet. You know it's there. You wouldn't be able to sleep at night if you knew that the back of the cabinet was not completed. I don't know how to find that, really.

I don't know how to tell tell someone you know to do that and maybe the thing that you're doing is not uh gonna be a huge commercial success because the thing that you are you really care about and are super geeky and have infinite patience and attention to detail for is not necessarily something that like a million other people care about um and so that that can be hard to hear sometimes so i i don't know it's a little bit of the advice to create for yourself right like it's Maybe it won't, but also the world's pretty big and the internet's pretty big.

Like it turns out that if you really love, maybe part of this is that the love has to come first and then you can't necessarily control how wide that reach might be. If you care, I mean, the recipe for success in almost anything is to just care more than someone else. Like in my, that's my way of going about it. There's other ways. You can make it cheaper. You can make it at a bigger scale. There's a lot of other ways to be successful. But my favorite way of building things is just to care the most out of anybody.

I know that I can really, really care about all the details of this particular thing. And then there is, okay, you can care a lot, but then you have to have the craftsmanship. Okay, like someone, you know, you see... Again, movies are a great example. You can see great filmmakers evolve over their career and see... If you go to old Ghibli films and you go to the newest Ghibli film, you can see how Miyazaki's... The detail work is so much better. The way that they're using color and the animation is so much smoother.

They have more time to be able to spend on all these details. You can see the vision that he might have had earlier in his career come to fruition in your earlier attempts. may not have the same level of craftsmanship because you're still learning the technical skill to be able to accomplish your vision. And that is also frustrating because sometimes you're like, man, I really wish I could do this. For example, I'm learning how to play piano and I suck at it. I've been working on it for a little over a year.

And my partner is an amazing pianist. She's literally a genius since... You know, like she was started playing piano when she was like four years old and she's just brilliant. And so I can see like how frustrating it can be for her to like teach me these like really basic things. But she's also a great teacher. But I'm like, like the stuff that she was doing at four years old, I'm struggling with right now. And so it's like so frustrating because I have aphantasia, which means I can't see like pictures in my mind visually, but I.

for some reason i can hear music extremely well like it's like i'm listening to an ipod or something in my head like if i if i just want to play a song i can just like play it close my eyes i'm like listening to a whole song it's great but i can't see images for for whatever reason and i have like music in my head and i want to be able to like express it but i can't like my fingers will not do the things that i that i can think of the interface yeah and i can whistle i can You know, I'm not a great singer, but I can hum.

And so I'm at that place. But I feel like I've been having a bit of a breakthrough in the past few months where I'm starting to use a different skill set, which I have, which is like making products and tools. And I'm trying to use that skill set to train myself, to like create my own approach to learning that is going to work for me. Because I've tried every app that's out there. and it's not working for me. I have a great teacher at home, but she's not full-time. She also can't see totally inside your brain.

Yeah, and so I'm trying to kind of get to this place where eventually I'd like to be able to recreate the music that's in my head and play it on a piano. Sounds like a bicycle for the mind, by the way. Yeah. I don't know what it is for the mind, but it's a thing for my mind. The whole thing about the bicycle is it turns the human from one of the least locomotively efficient creatures to the most. So much of the example you just gave expresses what is so wonderful, one, about design in general and tools, but two, what at least excites me so much about where technology might go.

There's this, literally exactly what you described, there's this Ira Glass. Right. Quote about when your taste and your abilities don't line up. And I think that this is maybe inspired by games, but there's this really empowering idea of where this guy T. Nguyen, he talks about how game designers sculpt agency by aligning the player's goals and their abilities. Yes. And so in some sense, how many people have had the experience that you describe with piano in countless ways? And yeah, we've made tools somewhat. the internet and software and technology are really powerful they've done a lot of cool things but maybe the surface area of allowing us to have more agency in all kinds of ways to do things we haven't maybe been able to do or haven't even considered trying right especially when by the way software is free and really fast to make like that feels like just such an amazing opportunity and kind of like unlock and in huge and like to allow the person the Maybe the dream would be that you can sit down at a piano and have the same comfort that your partner does, despite, one, the natural affordances of the piano not meeting you where you were, at least initially, and not having that history.

That feels like a dream. Well, there is... in uh in the matrix they have this you know technology where they can just like download knowledge into your brain and you're like i know piano and you suddenly i'm like just like that happens like okay i'm just imagining a future where like that exists or there's an you know and like somehow my brain gets downloaded with like piano knowledge or there's another um you know universe where instead of my brain becoming you know downloading all how to be a concert pianist the piano downloads my brain and it's like the piano is like oh i can see your thoughts now i can hear the music that you can hear um that's another world but then probably neither of those things is going to happen yeah and what's going to happen is another essay which is pain is information which is like the pain of having to go through like and learning anything is painful and i mean pain in like a very

vague or broad sense like it like requires work and it requires you to reshape your brain and so I'm going through that process right now but I know that I have enough stamina for this particular problem like piano I care enough about piano that I know even if it takes me [redacted address] where I can do what I'm imagining right now I have enough stamina that it's gonna like I'm willing to power through that pain yeah um and that is something that again it's like do you care enough about this that you're gonna go through the pain of like becoming a craftsperson in whatever it is that you want to put give the feeling of being in good hands to someone yes that's that's what being a designer is i think on some level right Yeah, but everyone's a designer.

I'm like Ratatouille on this. Everyone can be a chef. But sure, I guess my point would be I agree. It's just that most people aren't going to take it quite as far in their willingness to design their life around them to get to what they want. Their willingness. You know what else is interesting is I love what you said about just caring more. In some sense, that's a beautiful other side of the coin of this pain point, which is to say, When you care more, sometimes you're willing to go through more pain.

In fact, that's what allows you to go through more pain, to get through more information and eventually get to the point where the pain isn't there and you can do it. Well, once you accept that learning anything is going to have pain, then the pain becomes less bad because you're like, oh, pain, I'm learning. Like if you associate pain with learning, then it... then you can also see when you're having pain that is just like repetitive like you're literally banging your head against the wall or you're putting through yourself not all pain is good you know like if you keep having the same situation happening to you over and over like you need to experience new pains like you need to go and like even though I feel so far away from my goal when it comes to piano I do see that like

I'm a million times better than I was a year ago. And like there's certain things that I understand now about piano and playing and following along and to songs that, you know, playing by ear. There's so many things both in terms of just like the vocabulary of it and the muscle memory and so many details where I'm so much better than I was a year ago. That makes me feel like, okay, I know that I can keep working on this and I care enough about it that it's worthwhile for me.

I think maybe that's the, that's the thing to emphasize is like, you know, if you're trying to make something that will elicit that feeling, you have to, you have to keep working on the, on the craftsmanship of it. And in order to get to the place where it's really going to feel that way, you have to have enough curiosity or passion to keep going. you either just really admire from a design standpoint or that specifically have kind of given you that feeling of being in good hands? I was just thinking about some of my favorite experiences from last year.

Some of my favorite movies, I really liked Perfect Days. I love that movie. That was a great movie. I really liked Challengers. I thought the music was so amazing. Those two were really quite a pair. I know, very different. I liked, ooh, Tempopo. I just watched that this year too. Tempopo instantly shot up to top five favorite movie of all time for me. And Tempopo is kind of about being in good hands. It's this 1985 movie about this lady who wants to have a really good ramen shop. And it's so goofy.

The actors in it are all like a superstar cast. It's a Japanese movie. It's so good. You know, and then I had a lot of great sushi in the past year. And there's a few like omakase places. I like really took the omakase thing seriously. And I was like, I got to find some really good, you know, an acquaintance of mine like started a like Michelin star like sushi place. And like that kind of put me down this like path of exploring other interesting sushi places. And literally to the point where the next project I'm working on is basically.

building a sushi restaurant inside of my house where I'm going to then literally then I'm going to because I love cooking for people and so I want to like cook in omakase style for my friends and like make them feel in good hands from that perspective yeah I mean that goes into like a whole other side of yeah have you ever had anything where you're like I probably couldn't do that oh yeah all the time because From the outside, it sort of just seems like you don't have enough. Like there's infinite possibilities, just there's not enough time.

Well, that's also true. But the two are not mutually exclusive. Yeah. I mean, I really like when all the senses can be engaged in an experience. So restaurants are great for that. And, you know, movies to some extent, although like, you know, smell and taste are not usually as like evoked in that medium. It's why on my website there's like essays, recipes. I'm working on the music side. I've got my color scheme. Sweet sound effects. Yeah, so basically where I'm projecting like 20, 30 years from now is that all these things are interacting with each other.

There's like touch, taste, sound, sight. And somehow mind is like in there too. And like all these things are kind of intersecting with each other. And it's like really like synesthetic. How do I, how do I let other people see the world the way I see it in this like very synesthetic way? And it's like, I can't think of something more fun than that. It's so fun. And there's not really a medium for that that I can think of aside from like software and restaurants and like homes. connecting all these different things to each other but the fun of it to me is like how can we make these things cohesive with each other totally i mean maybe maybe some neural link type things in there too what i love so much about that is it's one of the patterns of my my life the last year has just been i find myself increasingly pursuing and chasing like quality of attention increasingly feeling like attention is like the only thing and i want deeper attention whether that be

how present i am or how long i'm doing one thing whatever and it seems that engaging multiple senses especially engaging all the senses is a really great path or proxy to that i and this is why it's like when you see a really great creator that you love you're like i would love what would it be like if uh you know christopher nolan had a restaurant like yeah like it's like what like how would it work And now that we have these, you know, AI tools, you see, like, what if this film director made this other property?

Like, someone made, like, a... Wes Anderson or something? Yeah, like, there's the, like, let's take, like, style transfer between, you know, movies or something. It's like, okay. Or a Studio Ghibli Pokemon. Yeah, there was... There was, like, Star Wars, like, Wes Anderson. And that's, like, so fascinating of an idea that maybe we could get there at some point where, like, I just want to go inside of some, like, different people's brains and see what it feels like to be, like, completely enveloped by that person. That is a great way to describe, I think, how you at least are starting to show up online.

It's really cool. It is starting to become more of a world. So I'm excited to see it in 20 years. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But that is like I forget who said this. Someone had a good essay about this. It was like basically everyone should be like creating their own cinematic universe. It's like, what is the what is the Jackson cinematic universe? Like, what does it feel like? And I had this unwritten draft of an essay, which was back in my Lumi days. felt that my title was chief cohesion officer or cohesiveness officer.

It was like, what is, I feel like sometimes companies need that person, which is kind of the role of the CEO, but it could be also a taste thing. And you're the chief cohesiveness officer of your life and like of your output as a human being. And your job is to make these things kind of feel harmonious across the different mediums that you're working in well and you're choosing to use your language you're choosing with relatively scarce resources at least in terms of time which things you're going to really care about yeah and then by the way being able to do that and bring them together that's an amazing a really empowering blueprint for creativity i think last year um There was two experiences that I had, one, like, shortly after another.

One is I saw this band, French band Justice. I don't know if you know them. They have a really incredible live experience. Yeah, yeah. And there, so that was one, and then this other one was an exhibit by this Icelandic artist called Olafer Eliasson. He does kind of installations that have a lot to do with, like, prisms and mirrors and colors. Oh, cool. Yeah, like large scale installations. The Justice thing is so cool because they've been following in the mold of Daft Punk in terms of how they release albums. So like they'll release one album and then they do the live version.

And like for the first one, you know, it's just remixing their first album. But then the second one, it's like take the first two albums and mash them up together. Then they, you know, created a third album and then they did their live album, which is mash up the three. previous albums and now they're on to their fourth or fifth I forget right I think they've released four studio albums so their latest you know show is like how do we mash up these four albums and everything is like an ingredient in this like mega soup and like if you're someone who knows all four albums really well it's kind of mind-blowing because you're like oh my god they're like taking the beat from this song and putting the lyrics from that song and then the melody is from a third song And like you're like experiencing this and it's like, wow, I'm really inside of the brain of these two guys.

And on top of that, they're like doing a lot of amazing like light show visuals. And I went to in New York. The visuals were unbelievable. Yeah. And I just it really made me feel like another way to do what we're talking about is to give to keep giving yourself future ingredients or like the like future remixes of your thing that you're making right now. So if you think of the thing that you're making right now as a future ingredient, then you're, you're like, it also tends to push you towards simplicity of the ingredient because like you want the ingredient to be useful for remixing.

So like, for example, the colors, color palette that I created for myself is like, here's a red color that I like and it goes well with this blue and this green. Later, I'm going to make it. piano thing and I'm going to reuse those colors. And it's like, it does inform how much composability. Composability is like a word from software where you kind of want to make each piece functional and useful when combined with other pieces. And that composability is like a, I think it's one of the best ways to think about creating more complex experiences over time.

The Olafur Eliasson exhibit was a similar thing where he's done a lot of work with prisms and mirrors and different things and you can see um in his work like the evolution of his it's kind of hard to describe but it's you know it's kind of like kaleidoscopes like large-scale kaleidoscopes large-scale mirror installations and and you can see how the pieces are kind of interchangeable and modular but he like is living inside of this like palette of materials that he can work with which is like mirrors and lenses and colors and stuff like that and so I think that's another way to go about doing what we're talking about like and you can do that kind of with anything it could be with words so we're talking about memes like your own self memes are our future ingredients for yourself to have like thoughts that you can compose together flavors you know ingredients that you like to work with in the kitchen sounds like It could really be anything.

It could be an ingredient into something that you'll make in the future. Yeah, there are little bridges across that whole arena of selves. Yeah, exactly. And it provides the coherence that... The cohesiveness, yeah. Excuse me, the cohesiveness exactly that so many people are... It's always interesting. As someone who's spent lots of time zigzagging, I have my own relationship to through lines and people are always... People struggle to understand where you've gone before and where you will go. I love the just example, too, because it's the way to have the old and the new, especially in music.

It's such a classic example. Oh, I like the new album or the old album. Why aren't they doing the old stuff? I'm giving you a little bit of a reference to where you were and where you wanted, but I'm also going to take you where I want to take you, and there's connectivity there. Yeah, I've been working on this essay for a long time. It's like one of these that's in the draft state. I'm going to have to come back to it in like five years. But I haven't figured out what the title is, but it's something like how to time travel.

And it's like basically instructions for how to time travel. Because one of the most powerful things that you can do, I think, is like create milestones for your future self to be able to go back in time to. creating those like sense memories for me is is a really useful way of doing it like places and flavors and sounds like the reason those come up for me is because I enjoy having a certain type of sensory experience in a specific place with a specific person so that in the future I can like recreate that just by bringing those like flavors back into the thing and then I'm like oh I'm back at that place so like I can go back in time to a place just by combining those like feelings with each other i haven't it's like still in this kind of uh nebulous state this essay but it's like about controlling the grain of your life like the texture of your life so that you can by planting these like milestones you can like speed up time slow down time go back in time yeah yeah just by like the way that you plant these these like sensory markers in your life I suspect if we are able to make real progress on time travel in the way you're describing or broadly, it will involve all of the senses, to your earlier point.

Yeah, I mean, my method of time travel is not like getting into a time machine. It's more like getting into a time machine in your mind. Sure, but I mean, there's lots of research on how the olfactory, the smells, but if I really wanted to immerse myself in the memory of an experience at the very least... I would not just visualize it. I would not just have the sounds. And maybe the point is that the more you stack senses, the more immersion you have. For sure. Yeah. And I don't know if at some point we're going to neural link this thing and it's just going to plug in and you'll be able to go wherever you want.

But yeah, there is something about that, the kind of multi-sensory, the power of that as a way to anchor time and space. Okay. Changing gears a little bit, but on the note of time, we talked about file over app. One of your more, I think, important ideas that we briefly touched on is this notion that most software and most of the information we collect today is ephemeral, or at least likely to be ephemeral. Obviously, the world has a rich history of archival, and then we have also a rich history of losing things.

But in theory, much of human culture and society is encoded from hieroglyphs to... Books and architecture, all these things. And yet now we're having this digital existence. We have very little digital permanence. A couple of ideas I wanted to read of yours that I think convey this well. One is the ideas hieroglyphs convey are far more important than the type of chisel that we use to carve them. To read something written on paper, all you need is eyeballs. And then finally, if you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s.

or the 2160s, it's important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s. And so obviously one empowering idea here is this notion of tools that use Lindy formats, file over app, plain text, whatever. Are there other ways you can design for digital durability or for digital permanence? Or even products or tools that could become more self-sustaining or repairing? Yeah, I mean, the Lindy effect definitely rules in this respect because the older the format, the more likely it is to still be around in the future. And so if you want to have more permanence, then use a format that has been in use for a long time and is still in use today.

Then you're maximizing the chance. I had this... a point before i started working on obsidian full-time where i was thinking like this would be a fun hardware project like actually make a computer that can like last for a thousand years like what if you know you could make a hardware device that was robust enough in every like was resilient enough and in every respect in terms of like the types of materials that you would use the connections wouldn't get dilapidated over time like that this could literally be an artifact that someone could dig up out of the ground in a thousand years and like make some sense of you know you'd probably contrast to my one-year-old iPhone yeah you were like it wouldn't it wouldn't have a lightning port on it probably or like how would you get data in and out of the thing like would it like would it have like it it started like raising all kinds of interesting questions about like what is the what is the time frame that we possibly could like think about here Or is this all like not relevant and we should just, you know, use analog formats for like our most important stuff?

Like should, is it still useful to print things out on paper if you really, or some other medium, if you really want to preserve it? And not everything deserves to be, you know, preserved for a thousand years. I certainly think, I mean, I have like a hundred thousand photos on my, iPhone, nobody cares about 99.999% of them. So I think that question is a little hard to answer in the present time. Like what of what we are seeing right now deserves to still be around a thousand years from now. It's like a very difficult question to answer because we don't know what the world will be like at that time.

What about even 15 years from now? Yeah. Well, I mean, there's things that you can do. The point I was trying to make in file over app is that currently the predominant way that things are stored is like in the cloud, in a database, on a service that you have no direct access to, that you're relying on those providers to still be around, that you have to have an internet connection to be able to access those. So, you know, if you... If you lose your internet connection for whatever reason or you're on a flight or something like that, do you still have access to that data?

Who controls that data in terms of, you know, can they train their LLMs on it? What kind of privacy do you have? Who else can read it? Is it securely encrypted? All those types of questions come about. And a lot of that has to do with the types of apps that you're using. And the ecosystem, the software ecosystem is really geared towards kind of... selling back access to your own data. That's what you're feeding a service, data, and then it's selling you access to that data that you fed into it.

And we have sort of accepted that that is the deal, but it doesn't have to be that way. And that's what Obsidian is trying to prove in terms of giving you control over your own data and making sure that any data that is like, Being synced between your devices is always completely encrypted in such a way that it's private to you, and we can't read it, we can't train on it, we can't do anything. It's your data. Those files, like Obsidian doesn't store things in a big database in the cloud.

It is all stored on your devices across multiple devices, and we just facilitate syncing the data between those devices. You can apply that idea to any other kind of medium of information that you're trying to preserve over time. And if Obsidian goes out of business, if the tool becomes not useful for you for some reason, you don't want to use Obsidian anymore, you still have your data. If somehow the app gets deleted off your machine, all your data is still there. It's always in your control. Yeah, it's the inverted relationship to your point about selling back the data.

Most products or apps we use are portals to our information. It should be the inverse. It should be, I have my information. Now let me decide what I want to do with it. Yeah, what can I do with it? And so I think, yeah, we're just not living in that world broadly. But when we see, I think this is a more, there's a great book, Tools for Conviviality, that I would definitely recommend everyone. who's listening to this read, that I think explains this problem really well by Ivan Illich. And we live in a time where right now there's like six, seven huge corporations that control all of software.

And it's possible, and especially with how easy it is to create software now, to kind of have a more homegrown approach. I talk about... What is the like, this is a different essay, which is quality software deserves your heart and cash, which is what is the difference between like a jar of, you know, mass produced jelly that's like filled with corn syrup that you buy at the grocery store and one that you make at home or that you buy at the farmer's market from someone who really cares and is, you know, putting you in their good hands.

You know, when you're buying from. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, you're like buying industrial scale software that is like loaded with high fructose corn syrup. It's like loaded with privacy invasive trackers. It's loaded with proprietary file formats. It is trying to make things at large scale at the cheapest possible price to maximize profit margins. And it's not designed to be caring for you as a human being. And because it's now possible to make... Obsidian, we could not be a seven-person company without the tool set that exists today. There's been so much work over the past 30 years getting us to the point where a seven company can serve millions of people.

But it's almost like the world hasn't caught up to the fact that that's possible now. And that's very empowering to startups, people who want to make a new tool. And it should be also very empowering to, you know, individual people, consumers, users, whatever you want to call yourself. Like those options are now available to you and they're getting really good. And so you have the choice of using those tools that are designed with more care and more principles. It's a good explanation of why, too, that healthcare analogy, or excuse me, like food analogy you use hasn't necessarily materialized in digital space yet or software space yet would be that.

It would just be really hard to actually make handmade jam equivalently. The other interesting idea that comes out of this, I think, is you've written about Wabi Sabi. It's an idea I really love too. It captures both imperfection and repair as well as ephemerality. The other downstream effect of this would be that you actually could have software that, to maybe the point we talked about earlier, you patch and mod and tweak. because you have the ability to or because it's really cheap or fast or otherwise right that is a little more diy that at least to me could be one reason why people or or even speaking of ephemerality like the notion of spinning up a piece of software for a job that only you are going to do let alone a job that only you are going to do once right would have been previously inconceivable that maybe we are entering that world obsidian feels like a pretty cool In order for that to be maximally useful, I think you would want a foundation of a tool like Obsidian rather than similar to, I don't know, if you never cook, it's not that interesting to use homemade or organically sourced, high quality, high care goods.

You might as well go to the best food restaurant anyway. And so it's almost like a divergence of paths. I think... Sometimes when I talk about these things, I feel like I'm just like shouting into the ether and like nobody cares about this. Like, you know, there's there's other there's a lot of examples where, you know, in the past we had cars that were serviceable, like anyone could like open the hood of a car and like look at the carburetor and like you could like literally unscrew every part. And now we have these kind of assemblies that are factory produced that are getting simpler and simpler over time, less and less repairable over time.

but maybe they're cheaper to buy. It's much less expensive if you can buy a mass-produced thing that works well and is reliable. That also exists. It's not a Luddite kind of mindset. It's not like we should reject everything that is... We shouldn't try necessarily to be completely self-sufficient. There's a purpose to society. There's a purpose to... having specialization. So the intent is not to say like you should be completely self-sufficient and everything you use should be like ground up, you know, like artisanal. Mom and pop. Yeah. But, you know, there's something where I think we've come to a place where the entire software, you know, big tech ecosystem is driving towards.

confusing people into thinking that things should be free. And you're sort of overlooking the fact that the reason they're free is because why are these products free if Google is worth $2 trillion? And where does that revenue come from? Also, why is McDonald's cheaper than healthier food? Yeah, exactly. So I think that for some reason, even though tools like software like if you think about the amount of value that it provides in your life the amount of time it might save you doing a particular task might be worth you know tens or hundreds of hours we still feel very uh you know uncomfortable about spending more than two dollars on an app and like it's like why is that i don't know exactly why there's some kind of digital physical physics thing yeah that i think is partially people are getting over but yeah i it's it's again it goes back to this notion of a change in disposition to to this stuff and and part of it for a while the only way to have really good software at scale for a low cost or for free would be to have some of these more traditional bigger models you you started to get it something that i'd love to talk more about because i think it's one of the most timely and important things you've written about which is a post you wrote called don't delegate understanding i'd like to read just a an excerpt of that that I think is helpful for the audience.

I think it's the intro. You say, there is a parasite. I see it everywhere. It consumes your health and wealth. It preys on ignorance and it's easy to catch. It's so common you may not even notice you have it. The parasite has a simple and attractive proposition. Let me take care of this hard thing for you. Trust me, I know better. Instead of understanding it yourself. You choose to give the parasite control over your health, education, money, housing, business, identity, data, infrastructure, climate, justice, even your beliefs. I thought it would be interesting to include a paragraph from the oldest blog post on your website, which is called Chaos Agents.

I think, interestingly enough, you were on a similar theme, 15, 13 years ago, which is a world where knowledge is captured and categorized, interpreted by the masses, almost instantaneously digested, regurgitated, masticated, ruminated, and immediately available to access pre-chewed. And so I think you're getting at like basically the dominant intellectual epidemic of our time. This world of tribalism, socialized truth. fast information. There's this book called Non Things by Byung Chul Han. He has this line where he's like, we don't have time to linger anymore. Right. There's maybe people out there who would push back on aspects of this and I would encourage people to read your full post, but I think most people hear this and would agree.

They would agree both that you're right, but also would agree that it's happening to them. And so maybe my question would be, How do you fight back? How do you find the time? How do you actually block out the noise and seek signal? In some sense, how do you even have the energy for it? I think most people's experience is not that they don't believe you or even that they're totally ignorant to this, although maybe it's partly that. It's just that there's so much and there's so much to do. And by the way, the Google software is cheap or is free and the McDonald's is cheap.

So I'm curious, maybe just personally, but hopefully it generalizes in some way. How do you start to push back against this parasite, as you call it? Well, last year I bought a house for the first time. And that was such an enlightening experience on this because there are so many points in the process of buying a house and owning a house where there's like so many parasites. It's like every aspect of it that I feel like this is probably one of the few essays that has a very like negative. tone i i try not to write in a negative way but i i feel like i must have been upset about something that made me write it in that particular way like even hearing you read it back i was like man that is very negative but it's off though i don't think it's wrong yeah i i think there's something about that and you know when you're when you're i mean whether you own or rent you face situations where there's a leak in your roof there's uh you know your uh drain is backed up your electrical uh system has a problem you know one of your switches like these were all real problems that happened to me in the last year like you you run into all of these issues because a house is a living system it's like it has has power coming into it it has gas it has electricity or it has water and all of these things can go wrong And when you face that problem, unless you have experience with this for some reason, you're trusting an expert to come and take a look at the problem and be like, well, I've been an electrician for 20 years and here's the problem.

Or if you read, by the way, you're probably, hey, landlord, I'm not even going to think about the specificity of the problem. Can you solve it? Make it go away. Yeah. And in the moment, the thing is, you're trying to solve a problem, which is like, My furnace is broken and I'm cold. I need heat in the place. Like you're back down to like level one of Maslow's Pyramid. And so person comes and looks at your furnace or your HVAC system or whatever and is like, well, here's the problem, the coil or whatever.

And oftentimes they won't even go into the explanation. They'll just sort of like give you a high level overview and then they'll be like, okay, it's like $500 or something. And I think. One thing that I try to do whenever that happens is like I really I like to be spend time with those people and like like watch them work. And because I'm actually curious, like I want to know how this stuff works. Like I want to understand how like I have a, you know, a furnace in the house and I want to know like I had never really thought about how a furnace works.

And like I'm just trying to learn the parts of it and in like literally how it functions and what. going wrong and so that when the person tells me that this part is broken or this kind of this fan is not working anymore because it's like reached a certain you know age where this type of part fails then like I'm really understanding what they're talking about and now I can make a choice like and sometimes I've made the choice of you know it turns out that I can find the instructions on YouTube and repair this part myself I can just order it online And now this thing that like seemed completely inconceivable to me, which I had no idea, like I had never looked on the inside of my furnace before.

You know, a week later, I have like this part from that came off of the internet and I have a YouTube video that's five minutes long and I'm like doing my own, you know, repair in the furnace. Same with, you know, the toilet valve is not working. Like home ownership like challenges you with so many of these things. do the kind of thing that I'm talking about. And sometimes you're like, OK, well, this is a problem that like I even after looking at the YouTube video or whatever, I'm still like not confident in my abilities.

I don't want to electrocute myself. I'm going to rely on someone who has been doing this. But at least in a society you have. Yeah. You can rely on it. Yeah. But at least I know what I'm paying for as opposed to just like, you know, here's like like now the problem is maybe solved or maybe not. I don't know. But, you know, maybe it's solved for two weeks and then it's going to break down again. I need to understand what the problem is. And the thing is, I think most people who are like homeowners do go through the same process that I just described.

But then we don't do it when it comes to our education or our health care or other things where we're just always just trusting your accountant or your whoever it is to be doing the right thing as opposed to trying to understand how it works. And maybe you can come up with a much. cheaper approach or maybe you can solve the problem a different way or maybe you can avoid the problem entirely because the thing is once you're educated about it you can you can make those decisions if you're not educating yourself about it you're allowing these like predatory systems to like live on top of you and extract your your money and your time your resources because there's entire

industries that are just really good at doing that like they're just like their job is to extract dollars out of people who don't know what they're doing right and you know I just faced this problem over and over again um in in different ways and now I'm just trying to be more conscientious about when I'm letting go and I'm doing it you know like okay this is a place where I don't know what I don't know and You know, even after some cursory, like trying to learn about it, now I know that I'm not interested in getting, you know, a full education on how to become an electrician.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right now. I know what I'm buying. Yes. You're not letting the map become the territory. Patrick Collison, I think, talked about how just like visiting a city. Yes. Totally changes your relationship to it. In some sense, like it's obvious, but literally like having a. Another example of this would be like the first time I rode my bike around LA in a meaningful way and covered a lot of ground. It created a connectivity of the city that I hadn't gotten from driving. Sure, yeah. Following turn-by-turn nav. Yes. And in a broader or more meta sense, what you're really describing, I think, is the compounding in, frankly, both directions that happens with agency.

There's either gaining agency or losing agency. Yeah. My friend Jason has this thing. It's like confidence is the memory of success. And I think you're, frankly, so much of this conversation and so much of how you live, but this example is the kernel of it. Your default is to, hey, I'm capable. Right. I'm smart. I can like, I should probably learn how this works at a very basic level. And then I can decide if I want to go deeper or hire somebody or whatever. And I think the more any of us opt out of that.

the more likely we are to opt out of it the next time. And that's how you gradually, you gain the parasite, you lose your agency. What's the point of being alive? Like, I mean, I, like, like this gets into like a really cosmic stuff because it's like, the, the world is so complex and like that complexity is so beautiful. The fact that a person is like literally just an electrician and like all day, every day, like that's their, their living and breathing, understanding how, houses are you know and places are electrified and like I just think that's amazing and so I'm curious about it and like when I'm dead I probably won't have time to think about electricians this is the time to think about electricians I want to find out what they're all about and what how what makes them tick and why the world is really rich yeah there's so many fun things and you end up like learning so much and like it might inform another part of your life in a way that is totally unexpected Yeah, there's this old quote where it lists all these things that a man should be able to do.

Oh, yeah, I love that one. And it ends with specialization is for insects. Yes, it's a great quote. Another theme about your life that I think ties into what we were just talking about is a theme of investment. At least it ties in around compounding, I feel, which is to say you invest in tools, you invest in style. You obviously talk about this with the products and the Buy Wisely stuff. And you seem to have almost a, not necessarily purely commercial, but... investing oriented or attuned to what investment means across your life so i'm curious what you've learned about investing time and money hmm yeah i guess i'd say most people have a really short time horizon and i have i try to have the longest possible time horizon i can in both directions like we've been talking about it in the scheme of like thousands of years both going like looking back and forward Like how do we, you know, we're talking about hieroglyphics and we're talking about, you know, needs that people have had for thousands of years in the past, like listening to music and feeding themselves and, you know, sitting on a chair.

And we're talking about how, what will people remember of what we are doing right now in a thousand years from now? Obviously, you know, your lifespan is short in that, but I think that having a very long-term view of everything. You know, unless you intentionally are choosing to have a short-term view and say, like, I'm choosing to, like, make this decision, you know, right now and I only care about it for the next one day, that's fine. But I think there's almost never a case where thinking about the impacts of that decision for the next 10 or 30 years really harms things that much.

So I try to do that. I try to think how have people been doing this particular thing for a long time and what is likely to last for a long time. Right. And then it makes certain kinds of decisions a lot easier. Like, do I want to spend more time with this person? Do I see myself like every hour that I spend, you know, with you is an hour where like, I don't know where you and I's relationship will go 10 years from now. I don't know where we will be.

But I feel like, you know, I haven't done any podcasts for a year and this is the first one that I'm doing because for whatever reason, I get the feeling that, you know, we might, there's a commonality here that the feeling I have is that it's worth investing my time in. And I can't really pinpoint it, but I know that in the past, I've had this feeling before with other people and I've trusted that and now I'm trusting it again. I am not a very money-driven person, I guess. I'm driven by, I guess, people having an interest in what I create, being useful, I suppose, is a motivation for me, more so than money.

I'm motivated by having a lot of creative control over the things that I do, more so than... the scale of them, if that makes sense. Like, I really learned that the hard way. Like, I feel like it's just, that's also why the team is small out of Sydney. I care way more about having, like, that fine-grained, like, what some would call micromanaging is no longer micromanaging if there's no one to manage. It's just doing the thing. And I prefer to do it than micromanage someone who's trying to do it with my, like, you know.

breathing down their neck the whole time yeah so so i think that the kinds of things that i like to invest in are having i feel so selfish talking about these things like it's so interesting because like this conversation has really been about like selfishness in a certain way and i think most people should be more selfish um because like this is this is the great thing about emergence like like society's democracy things work because people are making the reason you can drive down the street at or down the freeway at 100 miles an hour and like not crash into someone is because everyone is being selfish like nobody wants to crash into each other and like it's marvelous like you that you like are driving so quickly past someone who's equally driving at like the same speed in the opposite direction and like the number of car crashes are so few And that's completely driven by self-interest.

And so I think that people probably would make better decisions by having a long-term, like a more selfish long-term view of what they're going to want 10 or [redacted address], that speaks to selfishness in the stadium of selves sense. Yeah. Because I think people are selfish. But they are selfish in a way that is Jackson, the Jackson of today is the ruler of the arena and screw everybody else. Yeah. And then on top of that, I think the other thing that's interesting to me is it made me think of is people, most people experience the world as sort of like out in.

So they are selfish, but it's all about what the world is convincing them of what they should want. And I find that actually people like you, in some ways we've been speaking, like it's originating with you. But actually, like the world, it's in out and the world gets to benefit. That is like, honestly, I might shed a tear. Like, you know, there was a time like, you know, 10, 12 years ago where I was like really depressed and I was like really struggling with these things. I didn't feel like I had the skills to do what I wanted.

I was kind of stuck in a place doing work that I didn't enjoy. And there was a point where I saw this quote by Stanley Kubrick, which I can send to you. I can't kind of explain it or like read it, like memorize the whole thing. But the kind of nugget is, however vast the darkness, we must supply our own light is like the conclusion, which is like he's talking about the universe is uncaring. It's sort of an agnostic view of the universe, which is like space, nature, things are happening whether you like it or not.

And cosmically, existentially, we might never understand why we're here, what the meaning of anything is. And that's pretty depressing. It's kind of nihilistic in a way. But if you do exactly what you were saying and think about taking care of this little flame that's inside of you and focusing on making that radiate out towards the rest of the world, then you can... that's something you can control. You can't control how people are going to feel, whether you're going to have a job tomorrow, how the world is going to change. You don't have much control over those things, but you can control this little light inside of you and try to take care of it and try to figure out what it is, what it's interested in, and kind of let it grow.

And if you try to learn about that, uh thing inside of you it will teach you about what you should invest in because you have interests you have passions you can't explain them but there's things that make you curious and if you just like let that curiosity you know grow and you go down that weird rabbit hole maybe it'll lead to nothing but maybe it will be a like milestone that like A year from now, you'll be like, oh, I remember reading that thing about that thing. And now it makes sense to me.

An older, wiser you gets it. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Maybe it's the, you know, it's retro causality. It's the future, like talking to you in the present and like pushing you down that path. So I guess what I'm saying about investment is. I'm not here to like recommend any like stocks or something like that. Like I'm like, you know, it's like. I actually found that I did make some wise stock picking decisions based on the things that I cared about that had to do with like, oh, you know, I've been really curious about this thing.

And I think that I I'd like to see more of that in the world. And I don't really care whether this makes money really in the long term. But I know that this like little candle light inside of me seems really passionate about that idea. And so I'm going to like. I see other people who are kindred spirits and I would like our, you know, our flames to be in harmony with each other. And so like, let's, let's try to just do that. And then you'll, maybe, maybe something will happen.

Yeah. You've written just one double click on this. You've written about choosing problems. Oh yeah. You, I so agree with everything you just said, but you also care about a lot of things and you're really capable. I don't care about that many things. Okay, okay. Well, within that, like, you at least could work on a lot of things in lots of different mediums and disciplines. How, maybe since you wrote that piece, I'm curious, are there any revisions on either the advice you gave and or just, like, you chose to work on Obsidian with a really meaningful amount of your time.

You have this line, actually, specifically, I think is... People work on things that aren't important. The problem you should solve is the biggest problem you are capable of solving. Boy, this is an old essay. I don't even know if I agree with myself. I have to reread that one. I haven't read it in a while. But I think what I was trying to say, I think the essay is solving problem finding or something like that, which is like, you know, how do we get good at finding good problems to work on?

And I think it comes down to the same thing. that I've been describing, like, I started making this little tool to help me learn piano. And the reason I did that is because I spent a whole bunch of time playing piano and it was really frustrating. I think we don't get taught that following those rabbit holes is actually the way that you find interesting problems to solve. If anything, we get taught implicitly to stop once we have that friction. Yeah. And so you... I think there's this constant process of finding new rabbit holes that I enjoy.

But the things that I care about, there's not that many, really. I know this is one thing that I figured out about myself, that once I kind of started to figure that this was important to me, it helped me have an understanding of what I should do, which is I like making tools. So I figured out that I like making tools at a pretty early stage. And now... I'm just living life, sitting on furniture, trying to make music, trying to make food, trying to be a good partner, trying to think about ideas, trying to read books, trying to do the same things as humans have been doing for thousands of years.

And my unique ability in the world is somehow noticing where there's friction and making a tool that reduces that friction. And I'm pretty good at doing that. And so now when I go down a rabbit hole, I'm not necessarily thinking, wow, this could be a great opportunity to make a tool. Most of the time, I'm just trying to do the thing that I'm trying to do. And then I'm like, oh, wait a minute. This could be a tool. But for other people, you know, that's my little like flame inside is like, what tool can I make for myself to help me solve this problem?

And maybe other people will find that useful. But for other people, it's something totally different. And I don't know what that is for whoever's listening to this, but that's the thing to nurture. You have this, a little bit still on the investment theme, you have this essay, nibble and your appetite will grow. Oh, yeah. Which feels a bit like what you were just describing. It's this French phrase that I'm surely going to butcher, but la petite vient en mangeant. La petite vient en mangeant. Thank you. Appetite comes when you eat.

And yeah, to me, this feels like maybe the seed, this idea that perhaps the inspiration we need is on the other side of starting or going down that rabbit hole. Yeah, man, this is. This is something that I can't wait to learn about when, if hopefully someday I have kids, which is just, you know, a lot of my friends have had kids recently and. hanging out like I've been hanging out with a lot of babies and it's like so fun to see them like experience the world for the first time and like everything is new like we get so jaded like somehow connecting back to that like childlike feeling inside of you of that's why I was like electricians what do I like what do I not know about electricians like like I like just having that connection to that like childlike version of yourself where everything seems new

and interesting potentially. Maybe that's just how I am, but I think that there's value in like exercising that muscle of curiosity because the only thing you need is that initial spark of curiosity. And so what Nibble and Your Appetite Will Grow is talking about is just if you see something that you're curious about, just go nibble at it and see if it's enjoyable to you and then just and you'll if it is you'll your appetite will grow so that could apply to anything exercise is a really good one like there's another um essay that's related that I wrote about just I forget what the title of it was but It's about showing up in the smallest way possible, right?

Yeah, like lower the bar as much as possible. One push-up. Dude, just do one push-up, right? It's amazing how one push-up, once you're on the ground prone, assuming you have the ability, it's really hard to only do one push-up. And I think this is like a very classic New Year's resolutions. People are coming up with all these new goals for themselves, and they're like, I'm going to run a marathon. I'm going to do this or that. And it's like... The way that you start from having done nothing to running a marathon is somehow you've got to run one step.

And the activation energy, if you can lower that activation energy somehow, is the most important thing. So if you can just literally do one push-up, one sprint down the driveway, one whatever it is, and you do that every single day, then... eventually you'll be like i've been doing one push-up i honestly no one could do one push-up every day for 30 days that no like that would be remarkable if someone actually managed to do only one push-up a day for 30 days yeah like within three days you're gonna be like this is stupid i can do five push-ups also you get to feel compounding this is the this is the one question i had is like where where have you compounded most

Clearly the curiosity and frankly like the meta nature of this. So yeah, one question I would have would just be where have you compounded most? Where have you compounded most? I'm actually curious. How would you answer this question? I'm not sure how deliberate it's been. There's something about people and... How I like, it's hard for me to discern or separate this question from the like, what is the, where do you get your energy? What's the, what's your like Novak Djokovic, like tennis ball you like to hit? Yeah. But I, and so I think it's, it's less deliberate, but I think because it's something that I find so energizing, I have probably compounded something around.

pushing people and and and like getting deeper into like how they work like the mechanics of how they work i'm sure there are other things too i'm pretty attuned to media and products and things that like are cool and interesting like i'm pretty attuned to like my taste around those things but again i don't know if i i don't relate to being someone who is like and maybe the implicit in my question for you is like what is a skill You compounded a lot, but that wasn't the question, by the way.

And I think to the earlier point, like compounding can very much be about a disposition. In some sense, it's almost like, where is the strongest link of the stadium of use? One thing that I couldn't have expected to be so powerful, even though it felt so important at the time, was writing the Obsidian Manifesto because it actually felt... really easy to write it was just five things and then what it did in turn is we only have one or two meetings per year at obsidian like i have no meetings my schedule if you look at my calendar there's zero meetings like uh i have you know like dentist appointment in a month i've got you know we have we have our one uh we call them destination meetings um we have it coming up

next week okay so you know we'll spend like five days hanging out uh and we don't actually really talk that much about work stuff it's mostly a way to to hang out with people because everyone on the obsidian team lives in a different place so we we rarely get a chance to to hang out and just kind of get a feel for what people's personalities and everything are like so there are two aspects to that uh one well maybe three one was i feel total confidence that i could like disappear for six months and the team would do this almost exactly the same thing as if i if i'm around because crazy feeling big thing yeah it's so great because the manifesto and everyone who's you know working on obsidian like is really passionate about those those values and so you know it's like hey we're gonna launch this new feature like we launched a feature last year year about or i guess it was almost two years ago now uh the canvas feature and it was It's like, we know that we're focused on open file formats and there is no such thing as like an open file format for Canvas.

And so it became like a no brainer that we had to create our own format and just open source it and let other people build on it. And I think that there's like these decision points that come almost with every project where it's like, should we build it this way or should we build it that way? If there's an option to make the thing malleable, and there's an option to make it not malleable, we're always going to pick the malleable one. So it's like this decision framework that helps everyone on the team just continue rowing in the same direction.

I don't have to do anything. Everyone's just working on it together. So it has removed a whole bunch of decisions that we didn't have to make because everyone knows what the obsidian way of doing the thing is. It has completely given me freedom in my time because I don't have any meetings. And it has, you know, multiplied my contributions to the world because now lots of people are taking that manifesto and like basically, you know, running with it. They're like, okay, we want to share that same kind of set of values at our company.

We want to do file over app with our startup. We want to, you know, these are good principles. Like they're not, anyone can take them. Like they're not specific to Obsidian. They're just like a way of building that anyone can run with. And so, you know, from a... leverage or you know multiplying compounding value in the world that that simple act of saying this is what our principles are and what we believe in like has had like million x like return you know what's interesting is in when i asked the question i had a thing in my mind even when i answered it i had a thing in my mind around effectively like where am i showing up most consistently which obviously can lead to compounding and i've experienced that i'm sure you have too but You actually answer it in a more important way, which is to tie it back to finance.

It isn't about necessarily investing money every day. It's about putting money in a market so it can compound, so it can multiply. And what's cool about the example you gave is actually it was one decision, probably more than a little bit of time, a lot of time thinking about it, but ultimately one decision to write and put something out that you've just gotten to. reap the rewards of in some sense for a long time and that is a cool thing about you know there are a few things podcasts are one writing software where you make it once and then like goes out and works people can read it infinite amount of times you don't have to like that that is something that is you know the concept of being able to make money while you sleep like if you're if the only way that you make money or get value or like somehow you know earn something earn wealth in the world is by selling your time or some version of that like the only way that you get you will never compound you cannot compound by like selling an hour of your time i mean you compound in the sense that maybe along the way you build some kind of like abstractions and tools and uh stuff but but basically things like you know writing or sharing these artifacts whether they be artistic or again, like software is a great example because you can make it once and then a million people can download it at no extra cost.

Those types of things are really powerful. Or I mean, you know, we, my previous company was like completely in the world of bits and it was like, what are the compounding effects? We figured out, you know, factories are like compounding machines. They figure out how to like make something at scale. And then yes, of course they have like, material costs that we don't have in the software world but they have a machine that can like spit out you know a million of something and so you want to figure out how to build like these like a little machine where once you build it once like infinity like number of times that thing can be used on the exact opposite end of the spectrum meaning the lowest sort of efficiency thing possible uh you you've written about caloric energy and why it's precious oh yeah You say electric energy gives us the freedom to choose how we use caloric energy because caloric energy is precious.

This notion that increasingly we're automating everything else. Electric energy for a long time was doing a lot of things that we might need to do physically. And now we're getting to a point where even cognitive things are powered by electric energy. In a world, maybe we're not that close to it, maybe we are, where we actually have most of the... yeah quote-unquote work done for us yeah what types of caloric energy do you find most precious or beautiful well okay so first of all that is one of my favorite essays that I ever wrote and I think it's like one of the least popular ones nobody cares about that essay same with there's another one called Earth is becoming sentient it's on my list like those two crazy those two essays I think are like everyone's always like all right file over app guy like give me another banger with whatever software blah blah blah and I'm like it's so you know like my actual like that like file over app was another essay that I wrote like that was not a like draft that had been sitting around in my like archives for a long time it was like one day some like troll account like came at me with some like dumb thing and I was like you'll see I wrote that essay.

I think I was really mad and I wrote it up in like an hour and published it. And that's like by far the most read essay that I've written. It's so funny. Like you can't control anything. But then these other ones that I've been thinking about for like decades that are really at the core of like the things that I care about are not at all resonating for whatever reason. And the weird thing is last week I was reading Samuel Butler. Have you read? Do you know this? Erewhon, like this book from the 1800s about the book of the machines is like a chapter within a book he wrote called Erewhon.

And it is like literally almost word for word, those two essays. And like I was reading this and I was like, it was both amazing and sad. It was so weird because I was like, this person figured out the exact same things that I was writing about, but except like 180 years ago. You know, the point of... caloric energy is precious was just saying how you know with the industrial revolution we figured out how to take like what muscles can do and turn them into machines and now we're doing the same with intelligence like we're taking things that are very tedious to do with our mind and allowing a computer to do it which means like a computer doesn't have to eat food you know it can just think about stuff using electrical energy so the calories that we eat can be servicing more interesting needs.

And this guy, Samuel Butler, is writing about this almost exactly the same way. He uses the same analogies about horses and oxes. He uses the same analogy about blood from the other one. And I was like, I don't know how this happened, but it was so cool. I felt so connected to this person as I was reading that part of the book. But he was looking at such primitive examples by comparison. He's like, When we want to like measure something precisely, we rely on rulers and like his like examples of technology are like rulers.

Like, whereas, you know, like I'm trying to talk, I'm talking about servers and all these different things. It's so interesting. But anyway, I'm not answering your question. I think the point about that article is that we're constantly. allowing ourselves to delegate efforts that were previously like required our own, you know, manual labor. And I still love to, I like to slice vegetables and make my own stew, you know, like, and I'm choosing to use my caloric energy to do that. Even though I could buy a ready-made meal, I could, you know, I could do everything.

I could let, you know, I could, I could pay for any part of like making a meal, but I, probably cook 90% of all my meals and I love putting in my caloric energy to make my own calories. But I don't think that's necessarily what everyone should do. The point of the article is about the freedom that it provides and to think about what are the things that you actually don't really care about that you could be delegating. And the number of things that you could be delegating are It's kind of like the antithesis of the parasite point.

It's sort of saying, I mean, for me right now, I've been learning. I've put out more side projects than ever before, mostly because I don't really care about the quality of the code with that, and I'm just using the new AI stuff so much. And I have a really good sense of what I want. out of the the tool like these like random little piano things and I I've gotten pretty good at leveraging those those tools to write code and it does like the output is what I want and so I can focus on about the thing what I want to do is learn how to play piano and and use my caloric energy to move my little fingers around so that I make music right and but by the way you would have also had to previously spend a whole bunch of caloric energy if you wanted to share that with others in a way that they could use right and now perhaps the the beautiful thing is that you can still do that and spend far less time on on the mechanics of it yeah to do what i like this these some of these little tools that i made i would have had to spend like probably at least a year or two like learning how to code midi controller or something like that so that i can plug in like the usb into my like computer to my to my yamaha keyboard that's cool i i read that piece it's funny you mentioned that it's underrated I think I read it a while ago and didn't really think about it, and then it started to find a foothold in my mind, and I started to think about it more and more and more.

The other piece you mentioned in the theme, perhaps, of where we're going and the way that we are building a new kind of intelligence is you call it the sentient earth, or why earth is becoming sentient. It's a bit long-winded, but I thought it would be worth reading a few excerpts of this. although I think people should read the whole thing. You say, Earth is not a vehicle but a body, the body of a planet-sized being that is developing senses and intelligence, a will, and even the ability to reproduce. We are cells building this body and maintaining it.

The Earth's mind is emerging, mind in quotations, and then invert the theocentric view that artificial intelligence is the coming of a god, a superintelligence inside the machine. Rather, humans are inside the superintelligence. We are inside the Earth-sized machine. This supercomplex, superintelligent superorganism will not try to destroy us for the same reason that no human wants to destroy their own blood. And then there's one more bit of it in another excerpt from your essay, that really old one on chaos that I thought were interesting to pair together, especially in this moment where there's lots of question about...

what it is that we're doing and whether or not we should be building this and whether it's going to be good for the world or bad for the world or what it means to be human. And I was curious to pair them together. The last paragraph from Earth is Becoming Sentient, you say, Earth has inherited what all living things share, the elan vital, I'm sure I'm pronouncing it wrong, vital, the will to live, the abhorrence of vacuum. Earth is imbued with the desire to spread. And we are watching it undergo its first mitosis.

With rockets, we are giving Earth spores so it may reproduce. And then from the chaos bit. Decision-making becomes relegated to algorithms, but agents of chaos and pioneers are constantly being born. Our free will is relegated not because of an omnipotent power or universal order, but because of a system we ourselves created that reinforces the very course we have set. Our identities are constantly being funneled towards understandability, and yet something in us is unpredictable. Not because of entropy or serendipity, but because of a bug, a malfunction, a short circuit that our brain always seems to find, a fuse that gets blown.

We challenge the predictions, and that chaotic force unbalances any possible calculation, even those calculations that attempt to correct for our unpredictability. cannot fully understand the rhyme or reason of this odd gene. The fact that it can't seem to be codified is what keeps us from truly falling into the singularity. I don't have a specific question here, but I thought it was really, you wrote the Earth piece obviously recently in light of how much has changed. You wrote this other piece 13 years ago. And both of those ideas, to me, paint a...

not necessarily too prescriptive, but optimistic and in some sense like deeply human, maybe human's the wrong word, but deeply inspiring picture of where we might be going, that there's something inside, there's something natural or something innate to how life is shaping the universe for itself. Yeah. amidst all this doom and gloom that we're going to get zapped or that we're going to build a God who we're going to, any of these possibilities, there's something in that. I don't know. Is there a connection there for you? Is there anything hearing that back that comes up?

I haven't read that old essay from those years ago in a long time. So it's interesting because that one was a stream of consciousness. I wrote that essay all in one go and it wasn't even an essay. It was just like a note from my archive somewhere. Whereas the one from recently, I spent a lot of time thinking about. And I do think it, in a way, it comes back to the point about selfishness that I was making, which is that I'm a big believer in the concept of emergence, which is just like complex systems come from like simple things doing simple things within a simple set of rules, like your blood cells.

you know, are governed by relatively simple rules and they're like just doing a function in your body. And I have never met someone who was like, I wish I didn't have blood or blood cells. And when I hear people talk about their fears of AI and like super intelligence and all this kind of stuff, I'm like, why would this thing want to destroy the thing that is taking care of it? Like we're literally inside of this thing, kind of maintaining it, taking care of it. Literally connecting the wires together that make it possible for this thing to even have thoughts to begin with.

We're inside of this system. We're the blood. We are governed by relatively simple rules, whether we, you know, find that dissatisfactory or what. But like we don't have like our rules are not that complex. You know, human beings have like relatively, you know, like we've been saying this kind of rhyme throughout this conversation is like our needs haven't changed that much. We're just, you know, trying to live life. eat food, reproduce, maybe find some meaning along the way, and build tools, make stuff, try to kind of continue this process of complexity that nature is seeming to be pointing towards.

And so within a system that is emergent, it relies on all of the individuals within that system to kind of act in a... selfish way, which is okay. The Alain Vital that I keep pronouncing. Yeah, Alain Vital is like the idea of this like French philosopher, Bergson, which I never actually read his whole deal, but it's just kind of the idea of why do things seem to have this like natural kind of impetus of life? Why do things like want to be alive? Why do they move forward? Why does nature seem to, like, you know, why when you back a dog into a corner, it, like, attacks you?

Like, what is the reason that living things have to live? Whereas, like, a machine, you use your computer, you turn it off, like, the computer doesn't care. It's, like, been turned off. It's fine. Whereas, like, humans and nature and things, like, have this, like, striving nature to them. And we're kind of, like, imbuing the earth with striving. Like we're creating this like system that is like wanting to strive. And weirdly, like capitalism is kind of like a kind of equivalent to natural selection in the sense that it is like coming back to that duality of like, should I have pursued biology or should I have pursued design?

Industrial design is like living within or UI design is living within a capitalistic framework, whereas. you know, nature is living within the natural selection framework, but both are governed by a similar thing, which is like the weak will die, you know, and that only the strong will like continue to evolve and like spread. So like the reason we all have iPhones is because like evolutionarily within the capitalist system, they were fit and they like forced themselves to reproduce. Yes, yes. And so I'm very optimistic about this because I think that I think humans are essential in the complexification of nature like right now because we're like the blood cells and I'm okay being a blood cell.

Like I think that's the part that people are not happy about. It's like the constant, you know, Galileo type moment where people are just always feeling like they're the most important thing in the world and that like computers or like these Terminator type scenarios or whatever. I don't know. I think it's kind of boring. It's just like very... us being stuck in some kind of... We're stuck in our part of the ladder. We're only able to think about the next thing as an adversary on our level or something. And literally at the same scale, like physical scale.

Yes, yes, yes. We don't care about blood cells or ants or anything that's small because they're small. But if the thing that is coming about is the size of a planet and it's interacting with other planet-sized things... It just like is existing at a scale that we don't really understand and we don't like relate to. But it doesn't mean we're insignificant. No. I mean, do you think blood cells are insignificant or like mitochondria? Like the mitochondria is like one of the most successful things that's ever been invented. It's like amazing.

And nobody, not any creature in the universe wants to or like on Earth wants to not have mitochondria. Yeah. So I think it's very optimistic for humans because we're essential to. this like complexification of nature and we will probably keep going. And I don't have too many fears about our self-destruction. Have you read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch? No, but I have listened to quite a few of his podcasts. Yeah, I think he's fascinating. He has, I haven't read the whole book, but in one of the first chapters, he has this section that is just so on point with everything you're saying, which is...

He talks about these two kind of core ideas that have defined the Enlightenment or this post-scientific revolution. One, that man is insignificant. It's the Stephen Hawking idea that we're trivial beings on a trivial rock and vast universe. Right. And the other is the spaceship Earth. The idea that we so fortuitously happen to be on this planet that in a vacuum happened to be hospitable to us in a cold, dark, inhospitable universe. And Deutsch's point is actually you would be better off believing the exact opposite of those two ideas. And in fact, we are significant.

We have explanations that are able to describe what is happening on galaxies so far away from us. And two, and more importantly, the Earth has been shaped by life and by us to be our home. He's like, I'm writing this from Oxford, England. If it weren't for technology, I would die in eight hours from frostbite. There are very few fossils of old people. 99% of species are gone. The replacement rate on species going extinct is barely over zero. And yet, and so actually we are a critical part. We shouldn't just be grateful to go back to nature to the way it was.

We are a critical part of shaping this habitat we have. It feels like a really cool parallel and matching shape to your idea. Definitely. Yeah, I really like his definition of explanations. I think that that is something that I really retained. And actually, I think it was influential from my essay about being concise. It's back to that idea of meme-ifying your ideas even within your own mind. Yeah, the Spaceship Earth idea, that's from Buckminster Fuller. And I heard about that. He was very influential to me when I was like first studying design.

And when I, when I heard that, that was like a, like a mind worm that like, it's just like, I could never unhear the phrase spaceship earth. And, but the more I thought about it, that's why I came up with the word thinking earth. It's like spaceship and implies that it's like a vehicle, like we're a vessel that's empty. That's my, well, I'm open to different interpretations of the word vehicle, but like spaceship is like, You know, we're either on the spaceship or in the spaceship. We're like traveling with the spaceship.

How did the spaceship come about? And I think what you're saying that resonates with the kind of like thinking Earth is more like. Yeah, it's not a vehicle, but a body. It is like, OK, we have. You know, we're growing on top of it like a moss or something like that. And like we are like shaping it. We're digging holes into it. We're like. starting to put out spores around it like this thing that was just barren rock is like you know a moldy piece of cheese in your fridge like you like you find this thing and you're like oh god this thing is like alive now and and you know you zoom out and like it looks like a petri dish that is like starting to grow with stuff on it and it will spread because like that's that's the nature abhors a vacuum kind of idea it wants to spread and we're like literally building the spores to spread it everywhere.

And I think that's great. I think that there should be trillions of humans in the universe. Yes, there will be more suffering, but there will also be so much more joy in the universe if there are more people all over the place. So much more light. Yeah. And I mean humans or living things in general. I think there should be more living things out there. We're about to wrap up. One of my final questions. I have this really old essay where you have a professor who quoted Bob Dylan. Oh, yeah.

Not busy being born is busy dying. Oh, yeah. It reminded me there's this book called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, this novel I really enjoyed. And in that, there's a line that somebody says, it isn't a sadness but a joy that we don't do the same thing for the length of our lives. And we've talked about this. In some ways, this might be a reiteration of a question. that I've already asked, but you've done so many different things and you continue to be prolific. There's one other line in there. You say you should be continuously running from the pack of ravenous dogs while dropping a trail of fresh meat behind you.

You're connoting this idea of just like continuing to reach out into the unknown. You're teaching along the way. You're talking to those past selves. The question that came to me in thinking about this is what And maybe it's similar to the compounding question, but what do you think is most important to hold on to? Hmm. You know, I think I wrote that essay. It was, yeah, it's pretty old. It was, I was working on this product at the time. Too long to explain, but basically it was like a physical product.

We were so ruthlessly copied. Like, you know, a company basically just like completely ripped us off and everything that I had been working on for years was ripped off and I felt so frustrated. And then I really changed my outlook on it. I just kind of like went through that pain as information process. And I've been the stuff that I've done over the years has been copied so many more times since then. It's a nice reminder of just not I don't feel bad about that. at all like i did back then in fact i kind of try to make things easy for people to copy i've open sourced a lot more of my stuff over the years even old stuff that wasn't started open source i ended up like sharing completely it's like that idea of like dropping meat behind you like like is a compelling force to basically like push you forward because like yes just keep giving everything away is a mechanism to force my own curiosity.

Keep being born. Yeah, because I don't want to rest on my alluras. I don't want to stay stuck in my old place. So if I just keep feeding these ravenous dogs behind me, then that's going to force me to keep running. And if I stop doing that, then I'm like not... Maybe I won't have enough will to keep running. Yeah, maybe that's the constant. Okay, my last question for you is that... You just got engaged pretty recently. Congratulations. Thanks. What have you learned about love and yourself from your partner? God.

I wrote an essay about love like a year ago, and now I've learned so much more about love recently. I'm like, I got to edit that. It's interesting. We have, I think, a mutual friend, Nadia Ekbal, and her partner, Delian, Asparuva. They got married. And they have a like interesting podcast. I've been meaning to listen, listen to it. But the only thing I remember is this like quote because I haven't listened to the podcast. It's just like being in jail. Yeah. And I was like, I heard that she was like a marriage is like, you know, being in a jail that you chose or something like that.

That's the only thing that I heard. And I was like, wow, you know, like I'm about to get married. And I'm like, it doesn't really match my experience of a relationship where I. And so I haven't listened to the conversation and maybe she meant something like maybe they just like clip that bit out podcast as a teaser. But I kind of feel like to me, love and finding someone in your life is something that is one of the most freeing feelings I've ever had in my life where I could see how, you know, like the kind of.

commitment to someone could feel like it's like closing other avenues other people that you might spend time with to me it's been incredibly freeing in the sense that in the in one essay i wrote about love i i was describing it as like having a safety net that allows you to do something that is more scary than you could have otherwise done if you have someone in your life that And I mean, love can be expressed in many ways. Maybe that person is someone in your family. I think someone who is like a romantic partner has a view, a more full picture of you than probably anyone else in your life.

And if you find someone who's really great for you, they give you this feeling of always having a safe space that you can come back to even if you... make mistakes even if you are going through pain like they're a person who can challenge you to go and find those like edges and trust that like they'll catch you uh and that that is like a really really beautiful feeling that i had never experienced um until i met my partner uh so that that really changed my life and I have no advice on how to do that.

People would have always asked me about this when it came to like, how did you find your co-founder? Like when I was working on Lumi back in the day, and even now at the city, I don't know how. I think it's just luck. I have no idea how to... You know when you find it. Yeah. Yeah, I guess the only advice is just to have high standards and to keep yourself to that standard because... And to not settle, I suppose. Well, you care a lot and you show up in the world in very specific ways, which I think helps.

Yeah, but maybe that's not how we found each other. But, you know, it could be. You know, I think that definitely helps to kind of increase increasing your surface area as a human being that like people can find out about you in some way. is very powerful because it's created a lot of new relationships, like non-romantic ones for me. And I could see how for some people it would create a new romantic relationship if people have access to you and can find out about you from the outside. Yeah, I wish I had better advice on that.

I didn't ask for advice on that. No, I know. It's an interesting thing because it's come up a lot recently among some of the... I mean, I'll take advice, but I don't know. No, well, yeah. It's come up a lot because I think we're in such a weird time when it comes to love and all of those things, the kind of dating apps and how do people meet each other, touching grass, all these types of things. We're child-rearing. There's all these weird subjects that are kind of like, I think we're in a malaise societally in terms of how do we find each other and connect on these things that...

a really like deeply animal and the more we transcend ourselves as beings the harder it is to like be connected to what makes us like human which is we're animals right yeah but maybe more than any of that the first thing you said like what what can you want in a party you want someone who sort of like gives you freedom shine right like who can sort of protect that flame yeah that's like the that's like the the most beautiful part of love, I think. Yeah, that is the kind of thing that you know it when you feel it, is like, I guess, I did have that essay, Product Market Fit.

I don't know if you know that one. It's something like, if you don't know whether you have product market fit, then you probably don't yet. Love is a little bit like product market fit. You know it when you have it. There's our soundbite. This was really, really fun. We went way over. Thank you for being so generous with your time and your wisdom. And I expect this will be quite energizing for many people. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Hey, Jackson again. Before I leave you, a couple of quick notes.

One, if you're enjoying Dialectic, I'd really appreciate a rating on Spotify or a rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or a thumbs up on YouTube. The podcast is new and every little bit helps. You can also subscribe or follow on any of those platforms if you haven't found them. I'm posting the videos on Twitter and YouTube as well as the audio. If you'd like to stay up to date on future episodes, you can subscribe on all podcast platforms as well as YouTube. And Dialectic is also on Twitter and Instagram. We also have a Telegram channel that I've linked to in the description and you can find the full transcript for episodes on my website and also linked in the description.

If you have notes on the show, feedback, or even guest ideas, I'm all ears. You can email me at pod at com or message me on social platforms. Thanks again for listening. It means a whole lot. See you next time.