40: Charles Broskoski - Everything is Personal

I think the hardest thing is like basically knowing yourself. You have to sort of like get to that place first before you can make decisions that are correct. Being creative is about problem solving. Understanding one's own perspective is about finding a way to sort of like put those puzzle pieces together. You're looking at something from this direction. You're looking at something from that direction. Like what's the crossover and how do you sort of like draw something out from those two? I really stand behind that idea that it's just about decision-making, especially in the past. 100 years being an artist is like, it's like about making decisions. That's all it is. You can do infinite things. You have to decide what you're going to do. When someone says taste is a skill, that is annoying because you're talking about something that is personal. It's something that you develop over a long period of time. And I just think taste is synonymous with understanding of one's own self. When you talk about it like a skill, then you put it in this sort of like arena of like competition, you know. Consider the possibility that working with your friends on something. that you think is cool is like the most luxurious possible thing that you can do. The reward is the work that you get to hang out with your friends and make something cool. I have like very distinct memories of being in class, looking at a textbook, like having to be in a certain chapter and just like flipping ahead to a different chapter that I knew would not be covered just because it's like, what's over here? And I think it's part rebellion, but part just like being interested. Welcome to Dialectic episode 40 with Charles Braskowski. Charles is the founder of Arena, which he spent the last near 15 years building alongside a number of collaborators and co-founders. Arena is a platform for Many things, and it's described in many ways, but I think the best and most useful would be a tool for self-directed education. Arena is a place where you can find, discover, connect, explore, and archive your ideas, mix-match them with everyone else's, and it leads to a kind of curiosity and intentionality around attention and the patterns that we find across the things that are meaningful to us.

I talked to Charles extensively about his philosophy behind this kind of education, what goes into what he calls nodal points or the things that change us, the things we discover, whether it be art, information, whatever, that inflect us over the course of our lives and why it's so important to give a deep, open, careful attention to those things. We also talk about his and the team's philosophy for building tools and building arena. and what it's like to build a platform when it feels more like gardening than architecture. Charles's most important idea when it comes to nodal points is that the radar, the through lines, the connections between us and the things we care about are in fact who we are, that our identity is made up of that radar. And so it's actually far less important what these things are so much as it is what we see in them, what we connect to in them. I think this is an amazing way to think about both authenticity, which is a complicated term and idea, as well as taste, which is another complicated term in the zeitgeist. And yet I think Charles's earnest approach to attention and the deep care that goes into it is clearly represented in arena and in how he approaches his writing and discovery and creativity. Finally, we also talk about building independent businesses online and specifically Charles's approach to building what he calls personal businesses. Heavily inspired by the classic film, You've Got Mail, Charles believes that whatever you build should in fact be deeply personal. Whether you're an arena lover or not, I hope this conversation inspires you to have a more open, intentional, careful attention to look to be surprised. to look to find connections across the ideas and the notable points for you, and ultimately to make things based on those inspirations. Before we get into the episode, I'd like to thank Notion. Notion is a creative tool for your life's work that teams, big and small, use to collaborate.

get leverage from AI and agents, and ultimately turn their ideas into action. Notion natively integrates AI and agents into the place where you actually do your work, all of your contacts, your documents, your databases, whatever it might be, and lets you get leverage on top of them thanks to AI. What I like about Notion's approach to AI is that they're not trying to automate the important work, the work that deserves your deep attention. In fact, their hope is that by giving you more leverage, you can focus on them even more deeply. I use Notion to prepare for, synthesize, look for patterns across all of my interviews and conversations with Dialectic, both as I'm scavenging for... scraps and bits and clues, or as Charles might call them, nodal points ahead of the conversations and afterwards as I try to pull out the most important ideas and lessons. If you don't use Notion or haven't tried it in a while, you can check it out at notion.com slash dialectic. And I hope you are inspired to gather your ideas there, look for interesting tidbits and patterns and ultimately to make things. If you do, I hope you share them with me. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend or give it five stars on Spotify, rate it, review it wherever you're listening or watching. And with that, here is my conversation with Charles Briskowski. Charles Briskowski, thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. Did I get that right? Briskowski? Briskowski, yeah. AKA cab. It seems like you're cab to almost everyone. Yeah, Cab is like a nickname I've had my whole life, but it doesn't make sense to say Cab Berskowski because it's my initials. It's like a PHP. Yeah, well, we ATM machine, we do it all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to start with a couple of quotes that are technically about writing, but I think they apply to much of what you are interested in. The first is from Arena. I think... curated by you but at the very least it's in the channel philosophy channel and it's uh lara palmquist uh via nico chilla she says one of the writers essential duties is to gather

to filter and weave fragments, to refract perspectives and form new points of contact. The reader, in turn, acts the widest listening audience, learning from the Surgeoner's song about how to speak of the textures of life. Such is the ongoing collaborative nature of a language we are not born knowing. We cannot express ourselves without first encountering the words of others. As is often remarked, effective writing serves not... as explanation, but imitation, a bowerbird's nest of noticings, calling other minds to take roost. Oof, that's dense. The second one's a little more straightforward, but there's a writer I love, Benjamin Labitude. He wrote a book called When We Cease to Understand the World, among other things. And there's an interview of him talking about his creativity. He says, I don't worry much about the shapes of the stories. It is all about research. I try to find things. To me, finding some other person's phrase is more important than coming up with it myself. It is the part that I enjoy. In that sense, writing has become more akin to walking and picking stuff up off the ground. And one final quote from you in some interview with Sophia Epstein. It's nice to look around. I think it's like the full page quote. So my first question is, what is it? with obviously that context around collecting. What does it mean to be creative? Oh, my God. Man, you're really starting with the... Straight in the deep end. Yeah, yes. What does it mean to be creative? Well, I mean, the thing that you're pointing to, I think, with those quotes and the thing about being creative are maybe the related... but they're slightly different. Um, I think those things are, those things to me are about like understanding one's own perspective, you know, like you sort of like have to understand like where one's own gaze is naturally drawn to, you know, and that

understanding that is sort of like understanding yeah understanding one's own perspective and being creative i think is like making an idiosyncratic combination of those perspectives that you're drawing you know and i think a lot about i mean creativity is such a like weird word now and it's such a loaded word you know and i think it means a lot of different things to different people um to me it's sort of about problem solving um and i think yeah it's like the the the connection that i can draw between those sort of those two statements or those two concepts is like being creative is about problem solving understanding one's own perspective is about finding finding a way to sort of like put those puzzle pieces together. You know, you have like, you're looking at something from this direction. You're looking at something from that direction. Like what's the crossover and like, how do you sort of like draw something out from those two? Almost what's the space in between? Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to ask about creativity. We're going to talk a lot about, I think several things you just implied there. Creativity is an interesting word as you allude to, like it means everything and nothing. And I think I want to talk both about the curiosity learning research side of you and your world and arena and also the thing you alluded to, which is almost what you refer to as nodal points, like what we actually give our attention to. But I want to linger on creativity just for a second. Two other definitions that I thought were interesting that kind of came up in my research. And I'm curious with the backdrop of your answer. The first is from an arena influences channel, I think via Christina Badal. creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it. They just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. And then in another interview, it's actually you, I think you interviewing Yatu. You say both of you seem, both him and Norm, both of you seem like you really understand that creativity has more to do with decision-making.

I think it takes a lot of artists a long time to understand that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The connecting things is a Steve Jobs quote, which is funny. It's like we, we lean on that a lot and it feels like, like the, the thing that he's describing about being like, like feeling guilty about. pointing to something that specifically i'm surprised i didn't recognize it yeah yeah yeah it's a long i mean it's longer yeah yeah but um yeah i always feel guilty pointing to him because it's such a it's like such a thing um yeah and the yachty thing about decision making yeah yeah both of those things are the same are like pointing at the same place i think um the decision making thing this is this is like part of my my like quest to like get more people who would consider themselves creatives to start businesses because i think yeah like like i really stand behind that that idea that it's just about decision making especially now especially like in the past hundred years, being an artist is like, like Duchamp, it's like, it's like about making decisions. That's all it is, you know, and you have, like, you can do infinite things. You have to decide what you're going to do and like, what is the rubric for deciding what to do? Um, so yeah, I mean, the way that Yatu and Norm approach their practice and like how it's sort of like blurs this line between art and business. i think is like a perfect example of like they're just making decisions you know they're like focusing on a topic that they really want to that they like feel the need or like desire to explore and then um like using their own perspective to sort of like chip away at that topic you know and decision making there is just like a it's like a personal it's like a personal thing you know do you know what i mean yes yeah

There's an aspect of it too that is a, the decision making is this like engine that is keeping, maybe there's something else that is the wheel in the metaphor, I guess. But there is something about, again, another word that is sort of challenging now, but agency is like inside of that a little bit. And like the most creative people, certainly the most prolific people to your point are the ones who are like just. Like the engine is going. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think the hardest thing about that is like basically knowing yourself, you know, like, like you have to sort of like get to that place first before you can make decisions that are correct. At least in my opinion. Yeah. I want to come back to that before we do. I think it's worth talking about. What stands out to me across all of these sort of refractions of what Arena is and is for, you guys say the point of how we describe Arena is not to box it in, which is great. But it does seem to kind of continually come back to this theme of self-directed education or learning or curiosity or something. You describe it as Montessori, the reading room at the public library. I went to the New York reading room yesterday. You inspired me. It was really lovely as I was finishing up the prep for this. A couple others that you guys, Carly describes it as research as leisure activity. Damon's a toolkit for assembling new worlds from the scraps of the old, which is awesome. But again, it's coming back to this learning thing. It's specifically a self-directed form of that. Have you always had a desire to be a lifelong learner? I don't know if I would have like put it in those terms, um, maybe prior to Arena, but I was always the type of like reading a different book in class, that kind of thing, you know, or like, yeah, going to the library, checking out my own books and like, yeah, that kind of thing has just always been like an impulse. Was some part of it almost rebellion, at least in that example you gave?

Maybe. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I also remember, I have like very distinct memories of being in class, looking at a textbook, like having to be in a certain chapter and just like flipping ahead to a different chapter that I knew would not be covered just because it's like, like what's over here, you know? And I think, yeah, it's part rebellion, but part just like being interested. Yeah. What? to the extent that's been a common theme um do you have a sense of what causes it what like really feeds that energy in you and what cause it causes it to atrophy to extend it goes in waves yeah yeah it really does go in waves i think that thing um what feeds it i think it's it's a little bit of just making space for it um honestly i find it harder and harder as time goes on because like having a job that's related to using a screen means that like anything that you might be interested in has to compete with every single other thing in the world yes um so that's tricky yeah it's a little bit it's a little bit like you have to set up the conditions well i don't know about you but i have to set up the conditions for myself which means like it's like a little bit ritualistic you know like you have to get up in the morning you have to like not look at your phone right away like it's all these kind of like standard things yes um if by the way i'm not even sure it's real like obviously it's especially relevant or needed with the internet But you go like every writer, it's like Seinfeld's got his like room in his house where he locks himself away and he's got his legal path. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, there's that kind of thing. But then there's also the like connecting to the interest thing. And it's also funny specifically to be working on Arena because I like developed this habit a long time ago of just following any person on Arena who's like remotely active.

Like my feed is just like nonstop and it's the quality I have to say, like, even if I wasn't being completely biased is still really, really good. So that's an interesting part of it where it's like my job to kind of like look at arena and make sure it's like functioning properly, but also there's like things pulling, like interesting things pulling at my attention when I go on there. And. I also feel like I have to carve out time to like, just use arena myself in like a nice way. Like I would if I wasn't working on it. Yeah. Yeah. It says something that, uh, you imagine any other content platform on the internet, if you got the entire stream. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and it's shockingly not overwhelming, uh, on arena, but I do wonder. what it would be like if I could roll it back a little bit. What's your relationship to the word research or to the act of research? Yeah, I was thinking about this this morning because I was listening or I was reflecting on a show that I watched, which is called Neighbors, which just came out on HBO. Oh, I heard about this. Premiere was recent too, so it must have just come out. Very, very recent, yeah. And one of the Neighbors is sort of like a, like a fortune q anon type person and like the word research get used gets used in that context a lot you know where like if you just if you just do the research like you know what i mean you'll find you like like there's this kind of like um uh yarn on like a corkboard kind of like research thing and when we started we had to qualify the word research in a completely different way which is like is like It's not academic. You know what I mean? And now we have to qualify it like... It's also not... It's like, yeah, yeah. It's pleasurable. You know what I mean? Like it's casual. It's a loaded word in a lot of ways. It's a loaded word. Yeah, yeah. And I think also the way that people do research now, like this sort of started with these note-taking apps, like Rome when that was a thing, and now with ChatGPT and all of these things.

Doing research to a person could mean something different, especially when you're thinking about it on the internet. And I try and say, I'd use the Wikipedia rabbit, following links on a Wikipedia trail as a way to lean into the self-directedness of what we mean by research. Do you feel like you are researching when you're using Arena in your daily life? I don't know what else to call it. I think research is the closest thing, but it's a little bit more like self-directed exploration. Do you spend much time distinguishing between passive learning and active learning? No. I don't think so. Because I think it ends up being the same. It ends up sort of being the same. Does it? No, it feels the same to me, to be honest. That was kind of my sense. And I don't think that would be a conventional view. Really? Wait, describe the... Passive learning and active learning. I mean, part of the implication, or maybe at least part of the connotation might be that passive learning is more likely to be things that like you're doing for fun anyway. or even maybe like quote unquote research and active learning is like i have to learn this thing i mean i'm probably like even even still like too rooted in the traditional like school metaphor yeah i see what you mean no i mean like no they to me those things sound like different modes that one might be in but they don't really sound like the end is all that different or the or the motivation to do the thing is all that different Okay, that might be something we come back to. One other little thread. I think it was also in that Yatu interview. He apparently had danced in high school. And you had made the comparison between skateboarding and dance, both being these things that you kind of have to teach yourself. Yes. Most education, at least youth education, is not that. It's not self-directed or even teaching yourself.

What about, what are you pointing at either inside of skate or dance or in general, like these types of activities? What about them builds that self-directed muscle? For skateboarding in particular, I mean, it's like embarrassing to admit, but I'm 43. I still go skateboard. And the thing that I like about it compared to other forms of physical activity is you really are just deciding at any. given point what you're going to do and it's really based on like it's really based on mood you know and the mood of what you're doing is influenced by so many different things and i mean without like like this is dangerous territory because i could talk about skateboarding for two hours but um one's own mood and sort of I also really hate to use the word taste in this context, but once a taste in skateboarding, like what you're doing is informed by like consuming hours and hours of skate media, you know, like you almost consume more reference for skateboarding than you do the activity. At least that's how it was when I grew up. So you're sort of like skateboarding and dance are both very referential. physical activities because you're sort of like pointing like like every trick has a connotation you know and when you're doing something it's like a certain type of there's like a certain type of skateboarding that you're doing you know and i mean like i'm being reductive a little bit do you think that like um playing guitar has this set of attributes yeah yeah probably yeah because what i'm kind of hearing and maybe i'm forcing it is there's a classic idea that you're trying to sound like so-and-so. And then you end up sounding like yourself. There's maybe, there's a modeling or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You kind of like fake it until you make it a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that relates a little bit to being a beginner, which I think is something that kind of comes up a lot too. There's an interview with Daisy and Francis at Tasteland. You just brought it up. You say, I'm kind of a poser apologist.

Yes. If you notice that you're into something, you have to start somewhere. You have to act like you know more than you do. There is some part of presenting yourself as how you want to be that is not bad, just pushing yourself a little bit outwards. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for bringing up my poser philosophy. I love talking about this. Are posers earnest? Or can they be earnest? Well, I mean, first of all, I don't know if like poser means anything nowadays. I like reflect upon being young and learning how to skateboard and being at the skate park and this like the meme of like your good memories versus your cringe memories. And like the cringe memories are like etched in like marble. Like having these like terrible, embarrassing moments of like asking a older skater like how to do something and um you know like this kind of stuff um i don't think that would happen nowadays i don't know what i'm getting at it's sort of like happen nowadays um because i think like people have Like, it's the same thing why, like, I don't think poser is a thing, you know? I think there used to be some sentiment that, like, one has to pay their dues in any particular activity. And I think that people are much more patient and empathetic towards learning and being a beginner and, like, everyone sort of having their place. I was going to say more like... trying hard is way cooler now trying hard is way cooler now even selling out or whatever yeah yeah i think that's true yeah yeah i think that's true yeah and when i was younger or like the people that i looked up to were like gen x people which like trying it hard is very much not cool um or it's like way more complicated like everything has to be done casually yes yeah it's interesting i i do wonder about the

to the extent you're right in that it is way easier to um be a beginner or be open about being in there there is a maybe maybe the realm where we're more performative or where there's more complexity around it is the internet like yeah it still has this bit where like it's cool to again try hard or sell out or whatever like everybody's in there you do a sponsored post and you're in your buddy's comments being like yeah so sick or whatever but like there it does feel that um i don't know i i think about a place i spent a lot of time twitter like the the the dominant artifice of twitter over the last five to seven years is the dunk yes which is which is kind of like not it's it's kind of like screw you poser yeah that's true yeah and i do think that at least the platform you've you've built like there's something inside of this where you you're trying to say it's okay like yeah yeah yeah i mean i yeah i mean they're very different modes though like even though you would like arena is considered social only because there's some like activity can be public you know but i don't think it's social in the sense of twitter where like the point is to talk to other people you know like like the things that you're interacting with on arena's content and you might interact with a person through content right but on twitter you're just interacting with people basically there's a few thoughts coming to mind one is you have somewhere where you describe um social networks that are about doing an activity yeah as being more You didn't say virtuous, but I think that's kind of the implication. And you may have even been thinking about GitHub, these old GitHub. And so there's something inside of that. I guess I'm interested both in that and this notion that it doesn't have to be. Arena could be a totally private tool. I've used a lot of these types of tools that are much more private. And it seems...

maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's a whole backlog of things that aren't visible to me, but in doing a lot of, you have a lot of Marina channels. Yeah, yeah. Why do that all in public? Is it a default thing? Is it something else? Yeah, it has to do with it's sort of like different modes for me. And I think this is, different people have different approaches to this. For me, for some of my beloved channels, doing them in public has like a little bit of extra pressure that sort of makes me more careful with them whereas if it was in it i mean the public on arena is so slight that it really almost means nothing um like no one is paying attention to what i'm doing really um but i'm not sure that's true but Well, a couple of asterisks. One, you could say it's sort of like if you were publishing on a website, but not under your real name. Like it's out there, but it's not. Like that's kind of what you're implying. But also you're the CEO of this platform. Like in theory, if anyone's going to be looking at anything on Arena, like people are going to be looking at your stuff, no? Maybe, but I think it really sort of like comes across as just like, oh, you know what I mean? Like, I think, I don't think it's like. people aren't analyzing takes in the way that they do on Twitter. You know, the interpersonal dynamics that come up on Twitter don't happen in the same way. Of course, of course. Do you have many private channels? Yes, I probably have like equal private channels. So this is what I'm interested in, which is like to go back to the original theme, which is like, I think the point of this, not the only point of Marina, but certainly the way you seem to be using it. And one of the stated uses is this self-directed education and research. If that is the goal. perhaps it is this thing you've you've picked up which is like it's almost an external pressure like if i know i'm writing something for an audience of one or five um versus a journal it does change the the work so maybe it's kind of like that yeah yeah yeah that's part of it but also i mean the thing that happens on arena um the reason the real rationale to make something public is that

things that you're adding to your channels will if if it's public then other people will add those things to their channels so you sort of like ambiently you get exposed to other things that may or may not have to do with yeah yeah what you're you get kind of as a pipe in exactly and that's the utility of that's the reason why having it be social at all you know yes yes yes and i mean i think and to relate it back to this like comparison to github at least when i first started publishing code to github like doing things open source um i don't know like those things feel scary when you're before you do them and then and then you realize that the feeling of those kinds of platforms where they're where it's like public but having it be public is not the point of it it has like a different quality to it which is like the publicness is a utility to you and to other people yeah and it's a dynamic that's like it's really nice actually once you once you sort of like get a handle on it yeah it had me wondering about like whether this might be more we we've sort of all assumed that like social networks first of all we hardly even have social networks we have whatever like the the Instagram and Twitter aren't social networks. There's something, they're content platforms. Yeah, sure. But like there, and it's definitely closer, somewhere in between Twitter and Arena. But like I was thinking of, there's a platform I like called Letterboxd for movies. Yeah, yeah. And there is something about the fact that it's kind of, or Strava maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is kind of like the single player thing that can then. Yes. And I think there's something there. Yeah. And I think that's why people point to, yeah, Letterboxd, Strava. any kind of platform where there's like there's a there's a primary thing to do thing to do and there's a secondary social part of it yeah like it always ends up being better yeah and it's also easier to make a business around those things than than there are just telling that all of those are subscription businesses yeah yeah yeah yeah and i think i mean also it's why people still like i still see people point to pinterest as being like

one of the last places on the internet you know even though it's like a shopping platform it still feels like that i think to a lot of people hmm that's yeah that's that's a i wonder if that's right for more new things um one other core part of this that maybe blurs between what i think we all talk about around the attention and nodal point stuff but we were talking before we started recording a clear um An essential part of the medium of arena is the channel. And thus, I think one articulation of that would be the pattern. There's a quote from Chris Alexander. He says, at the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects, but by... the people. That's him talking about, I think it's all three books, so Timeless Way and Pattern Language. And so I thought it was an interesting way to start this conversation, which is particularly under the theme of like self-directed learning, there's something about organizing ideas in this way. If you want to take it in a kind of high concept form, you could call it a pattern. If you want to go low concept, you call it a meme or whatever. What is it about these kind of contextual buckets that like are helpful in learning and maybe eventually in making to go back to alexander's point that's a good question well i mean i can only speak to my own experience and my my own way of using arena which is that like the channels that i really have at the forefront i sort of just use them as like a way to filter things that i'm seeing you know yeah it's like a perspective through which to view a certain piece of information like does it belong here or does it not belong here yes and then when it belongs when you when you might sort of like open up the bounds a little bit and say like oh yes this does belong here like come on in and now all of a sudden the bounds

are shaped a little differently and then you can you just have a way of looking at a piece of information or an idea or whatever that feels more personal you know well there's a memory part there's a lot of things happening inside of that thing which is like partially you're you're it's a little bit just like i know where this goes yeah and thus maybe i'll be it'll be easier for me to filter and remember it remember it or whatever to your point there's also you can imagine a channel that you've just created that has three things in it. If you add a fourth thing, it changes a lot. It changes everything. Versus if it has a thousand. Are you typically creating channels or patterns or whatever these things are? Like you read one or come across one thing? Like how do they form? Yeah. It's usually like I've been noticing something or like I've been noticing an idea forming and it has to do with a couple of things. typically the way it starts for me at least is it will start in private it will be a couple of things to start you know what i mean and it needs to be like three or between three and five or something and then once you have that then you have like enough of a frame to like judge other things against right yeah and like now like yeah i have like maybe 10 of these types of channels that like over the years And now I think the bar for me is so high of like what that frame could look like. Like it has to be so, it's not complex, but it's more like nuanced and some kind of combination of being nuanced and new that I haven't made a new one or I haven't had like a new successful one in a while. I suspect my sense is what you just described is actually a phenomenon that happens across. as creative people become more experienced, the benefit is they have more of these, like, again, whether or not they use any of this language or not, even this conception or not, it's easier for them to slot things in. But the weakness might be something along the lines of what you just described, which is that they're more rigid in what their set of patterns are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The bar...

Yeah, the bar raises, I think. And it doesn't necessarily raise in terms of grandiosity, but it's something more subtle than that. I mean, I will say, I think that the last couple of ones that I've had that have been successful just end up turning into essays. Right. the collection of things sort of happened first or i noticed that i'm saying the same ideas to people um like like a couple of the same ideas over and over and that means i'm thinking about something and then there are other things in the world that remind me of that thing that i'm thinking of and it's the the life cycle at least in recent times for me has been that the frames come up and then it sort of shortly turns into an essay and then yeah well this would be one of the strongest cases for this type of thinking um is maybe it goes back to the christopher alexander quote um i suspect that makes it way easier to actually make the essay write the essay definitely it's like i have an organizing frame it's kind of like yeah otherwise you're just gathering scraps and it's like you haven't done the work to connect all the dots yeah yeah yeah definitely for me yeah and I mean, obviously writing and collecting references are two very different things. I find collecting references to be infinitely pleasurable and writing to be excruciating. Well, maybe that's a form of passive and active learning. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Having the sort of like bar of you can't just have these things be like sort of peasantly. uh opaque and like pointing to something mysterious like blob yeah yeah right yeah yeah there's a line i love which is um writing is high resolution thought yeah or or another one actually comes from um paul graham the y-combinator guy he says writing turns your ideas from vague to bad yeah yeah but there is yeah there there is some kind of like and obviously writing isn't the only form but there's there's something very fun and generative about one and very kind of like

It's almost compression. Yeah. It's like taking all those. Yeah. Yeah. It's the decision-making thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One other quote that maybe really said, you had said the things that do well in arena tend to be prismatic. They do well with a lot of different perspectives and you can put your own perspective into it. Maybe this relates more into the social side. I'm curious, have you ever had an experience where you've really seriously adopted somebody else's pattern or channel? into how you kind of think or create or you're adding a lot to or whatever oh yeah yeah yeah definitely yeah there are patterns that come up on arena not necessarily in terms of like how it like what kind of conceptual frame to draw around a set of references but just patterns of using it and sort of like an open-ended way like um someone started this like inbox pattern of just like making an open channel calling it an inbox and saying like or like this is a guest book like come sign my guest book almost like a user like a ui kind of thing yeah yeah yeah someone else started this thing of like pre-pending your channel titles with a symbol so that they're grouped together in the index stuff like that like i definitely adopt from other people yeah are there ways that you found that seeing a world in these types of buckets can be limiting That's a good question. I'm like embarrassed to say no, I do not think that they can be limiting. I think it's, for me, it feels very productive to have a sort of like set of constraints. And I find the constraints that Arena has to be extremely productive. Like I think that myself and other people who I work with Arena on. I'll sort of like use it the same way. And I really like, I don't know how to put it. Like, it's really hard at this point to imagine a different mode of working that is not like arena, not like using arena. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You've grown, you've evolved around this certain type of scaffolding. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like deep in, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, for better or worse. There probably are some limitations, but also it's been really empowered. Like you've been augmented by this kind of way of doing things. One last little bit on this, which is, I guess the implication if you're gathering all these things is that you might eventually look through them. Different ways people have described, I think Damon Zucconi said it's effectively just building a personal archive. Maybe this was you archiving the casual web. Two other quotes I really liked. One from the Describe Arena at a Party channel. Everything not saved will be lost, which comes from the Nintendo quit screen message, which is so good. And then this other Wikipedia term, I can't remember what channel it was on, but it's Sundoku. which is acquiring reading materials, but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them, Japanese. I think that last bit actually really has the implication I wanted to pull out, which is how often do you really dumpster dive the archives? Maybe this goes back to the writing versus just, it's really fun to just pick up shiny objects all the time. Going back through the archives certainly doesn't necessarily mean to be turning it into an essay, but it is a little bit of a different mode. And so I'm curious how you relate to that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like I said, I have these channels that I sort of like treat in a more special way than my other ones. And I go back through those all the time. Almost like they're a gallery or something. Maybe that's not quite the right connotation. Something like that. Yeah, yeah. They're slightly more solidified or... crystallized yeah yeah yeah or there's there's just something about the the frame that i find like continually attractive and um at this point having gone back and looked at them so much it feels like all of that stuff is mine like oh you know it well you've traced those grooves almost yeah yeah

but also like the things there are like i'm responsible not like like it's not like someone else it's like all i've had they've been in my house long enough yeah yeah yeah exactly um yeah but then some of the other things like like are new This is not a commercial for our new app, but the new app has a widget on it. And so hooking up some of my very gigantic channels to that, channels that might be more like, I'm throwing a link in here to read later. Sometimes I'll get to them and sometimes I don't. But having them just continually come up is also just a nice way of... I think part of our job as people... who are maintaining and building arena is figuring out thoughtful ways of resurfacing that stuff without being too didactic about it yes well and there's someone who used a lot of tools from delicious all like there is a temptation i i'm i'm curious and i like dopamine from new information so i just i'm doing the sundoku thing but yeah Yeah. They're diminishing returns. No, diminishing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I have like, I have a real problem buying books. Like I have way too many books. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about nodal points. Yeah. There's so many kind of different ways to take this, but maybe a place to start. Two quotes, one that's maybe just energetically sets the tone. It's a tweet from Ted Nelson. Oh, great. All caps. There is too much to say and it goes in all directions. This is not just a slogan, but my most fundamental belief. And then I quote from you in this excellent piece you wrote that I think if any people are going to go read anything, maybe this or one other that we'll come to later, but you have a piece called Here for the Wrong Reasons in which you describe normal points. And you're going to say, when you encounter a piece of life-changing information, no matter how large the change part is, you are simultaneously discovering and creating yourself, becoming incrementally more complete. Your perspective is made up of a meandering line through these points. Learning, or maybe some precursor to learning, is a lot about developing the intuition to recognize when something you find in the world is going to be a nodal point for you. There's a lot there.

Maybe the first place to start would be like, what is life-changing information? What are you getting at when you say that? I don't know. I feel like it's different for everyone. Do you feel like you can point to an early piece of life-changing information? There's a really important part of the piece, perhaps, that anchors this, I think, or at least sets the tone around it, which is you're describing kind of these... Borges and hell.com and skateboarding, like you're describing. And so I think that with that tone, certainly, I think maybe somewhere else you describe it as something that causes an inflection. And so I, at the very least with regard to art, I think it's easy to think about what were the things that kind of helped me develop that intuition you're, you're describing. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah. Like I, like I also said in the piece, I tend to like, um my weakness is nostalgia you know and this is like a family a family weakness like my whole family is uh afflicted with this but i think about early books you know and wonder whether or not like the book formed the inclination or like the inclination was there and i recognized it in the book yeah and those that that's kind of like the thing that i think i'm trying to point out with this thing which other which other people do as well and um yeah so the life changing part is like i i think it's about that recognition you know what i mean like it's it's about just sort of understanding like this thing is made for me or i'm made for this thing or me and this thing share a strong connection and like i said before i think the hardest thing about like being creative is just understanding yourself you know so the change part is sort of about this like understanding that understanding yourself understanding your own perspective you know yeah and whether or not the perspective is made when you encounter the thing or if it was already there you know it's a quantum question uh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah they're um they're sort of artifacts that

where you had that experience of feeling, like of realizing that there really are things out there that feel like they were made for you. Yes. Yeah. Maybe a part of this then, on this never-ending kind of path towards completeness or cohesiveness, you describe somewhere else in that piece. like it's sort of like these things are contributing as a piece of a very large puzzle, at least considered in retrospect. Maybe I answered the question in how I asked that, but like, do you aspire to completeness or, or towards some kind of fullness? No, no. I think that this is like never ending ideally, you know, because I think. Is it increasing? Like is the picture dialing in resolution? Yeah, it's dialing in resolution. That's a good metaphor. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. But I don't think there's like a... Perfect. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Well, there's a Kevin Kelly line I like where he says the goal of life is to become yourself by the time you're on your deathbed. Yeah, exactly. Which is maybe... Exactly, yeah. But it's asymptotically approaching a limit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another kind of key frame or key idea you use in the piece is this idea of radar. and you're pulling from desire lines. But effectively, I think the critical point here is that it's a verb, not a noun in terms of how we relate to these things that are these objects of our attention, more active than static reference. One other piece, you're describing desire lines, which are these, the classic image of the... the walkway, and then there's an additional path made through the grass that shows where people actually wanted to go. And you described desire lines is a path made by walking. So there's an active orientation here. Yeah. Why is that active part, maybe to tie it back to anything that we enjoy, why is that active recognition, the agency inside of it, why is that so critical?

I think it's so critical because it feels increasingly rare, you know, like it's really hard to feel a connection to that, to one's own radar, you know? And I think there's so many things that diminish one's own ability to have a connection to your own radar. So, yeah. And just maybe to define it, since I'm pulling from these ideas, a radar, radar is, The reason you care about a quote unquote nodal point. Sure. Yeah. A nodal point being one of these things that change is inflection. Right. This, the recognition of the thing, like the thing belongs to me or, or like me and the thing have this relationship, some kind of relationship, like that recognition is what I'm calling. Yeah. Radar. It's attention basically. Yeah. But again, an active attention. It's an active attention. I can assume many, many things for which there's no radar happening. Yes, 100%. To go back to your point. Yeah, I think the radar's ability becomes dulled over time, you know, with a lot of exposure to information. That's one part of it. But the other part of it is, I mean, it's like literally gigantic corporations, business models. to try and hijack the radar without being too like social networking about it like yeah that's what it you know what i mean that's what it is yeah yes and um the there's like a it's a diffuse attention maybe versus a highly active attention um yeah i mean like the way that i was describing earlier this like um this sort of like ritualistic thing of like getting into the mode of wanting to sort of like explore ideas or let your intuition guide you or something like that um like the the stage has to be pretty clear in my opinion um or or or at least for me yeah and so like it really means that like one should like

not have a lot of a thing not have a lot of things like pulling at you um that's kind of about diffuse it's like yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah totally yeah yeah which is i mean it's a hard like you have to actively i mean one part of it is having active attention or active radar but you have to actively try to set the conditions for yourself yeah it's it's this kind of like like the the magnitude or something of our attention i mean i guess it's not like i'm trying to think about the ways to distinguish this i could be incredibly engaged with something that i don't have this relationship to um part of that's just a medium like if i go see a film versus i'm scrolling my phone um like i i guess maybe part of my question is like how much of this is about reflecting on it or something like like I suspect there were things that you just happened to come across that you actually had very little intentionality towards. And they like blew you. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you have to, I think, I think the thing that I'm sort of trying to point out is like. Like you have to be in the mode where it's possible to recognize it or it's possible to be blown away by the thing. And there's different types of being blown away. You know, like one can be blown away just by like the pure artistry of a film or something like that. And you might not have this sort of like personal connection that I'm trying to illustrate or articulate. but the the personal connection thing i think is like you really have to you know what i mean like there's a certain mode and it's a it's a fleeting kind of mode also you know like perhaps what you're implying at at some level is that actually um regardless of what the object is i need to be in a certain state yeah yeah like you have to be ready for that thing yeah yeah There's another piece of this, which is obviously we've been talking around it, but like you, you go on to kind of explicitly talk about how this ties into identity. You say the radar, your radar is you, not the things you focus on, but the orientation, the internal rule set, your magnetism towards things, the natural intuition that you've had your whole life. Forgive me if this is a little too esoteric, but like maybe this is a distinction between

we are what we love and like we literally are our love yeah does that make any sense yeah yeah yeah yeah no that's that that's also part of trying to figure this out it's like Yes, it's not the things. It's not the collection of things. It's like the fact that you recognize the thing. Where my mind went thinking about this was almost like you can imagine a sort of youthful, like a teenager who really has attached their identity to the music they're into or whatever. And it's like they haven't quite made this jump yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're like, who are you? Well, I have all of these songs. Yeah, I'm super into hardcore or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Why do you think it's tempting to do that, at least for young people? Like, why do you think it's so tempting to map our identity not to the radar, but to the objects? That's a really good question. I have no idea. I have no idea. But I think like... maybe it's because there's a preciousness about the objects yeah when i think when you first when you first see those things that feel very special to you like you think it must be the thing right right it's not me it's that like that thing is special you know i think it takes a really long time to understand that like in the way that that teenagers might describe like a band or a song or something you know this sort of like cliche thing of like you gotta listen like it's the it's the best thing in the world i mean and it's not yeah right you'll change your life yeah um but it's not actually like like this is like a certain thing for a certain person at a certain time period like like there's there's conditions at play it relates i think to another thing you go on to kind of think about in discussing the piece which is well actually it's rooted in this notion of like there might be rocks i haven't turned over almost like what if there are no little points that are going to change my inflection points that are going to totally change my life that i haven't discovered yeah if there were one soulmate out there for me and i haven't found them or whatever like and what you kind of go on to let me see if i maybe maybe i have it yeah what gives me anxiety is if there's a notable point out there that i will never come across what if the one is a piece of information that i will never get a chance to give my attention to and then damon

uh zucconi kind of reframes it as like we actually have things shaped holes in us yeah and what where my mind went and i think this ties back to the teenager thing who hasn't learned this yet and it creates an abundance maybe which is like my love is abundant and i can find things to give it to and it's actually not regretful about how he articulated that the thing shaped holes i think like i'm very sorry damon um that we're bringing this back up um but yeah yeah yeah it goes back to the thing of like it's a verb not a noun like yeah like like the like the thing that you're pointing towards could be anything and no one can really tell you what that thing is you know like like Yeah. I tend to also think about like the way that I use arena or the way that I like go through a used bookstore with this sort of like thrift store mentality. You know what I mean? Like, like a person could go into a thrift store and maybe buy anything and put in the right context. That thing was the right thing to buy, you know, and same thing on arena. Like there's no telling. Like quality is sort of like, it's not like a, I don't know how to try and quite articulate what I'm trying to say, but like, like quality is sort of not like on a binary scale. It's like, there's, there's this all encompass thing, way at which one can approach a thing. Yes. in the same way like again like not to like over reference duchamp but like just like taking a thing out of a situation and putting it into a different context like like that can be done with anything yeah the shadiest jpeg that you see you can like take that and like find something meaningful from it if it's like coming from the right yeah if you're open yeah if you're open to it there's a um

Annie Albers quote, materials metaphor, students worry about choosing their way. I always tell them you can go anywhere from anywhere. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And that's the kind of thing that I mean, like, gives me comfort and anxiety at the same time, you know, because it really foregrounds agency and one's own perspective and highlights this thing of like, like the most important thing is like knowing yourself, you know? Yes. It's the only thing. Yes. One other piece of this that kind of had me thinking about, you can kind of be curious in a truly open-ended way without much discretion. You say, I feel like I have to constantly remind myself of the things I'm actually interested in. Sometimes I wonder if there's a problem with being too curious. That is when you feel like you're interested in everything. While we do want to cultivate a curiosity, we also think about encouraging more sustained deep thinking. Put another way, like overly, overly simplified, like curiosity and adoration are not the same or deep attention are not the same. Yeah. And so I wonder about that with like one view just says like, if there really are infinite nodal points and it is about my disposition, I mean, like maybe, maybe that's the answer, but like, I should just be like, like looking at as many things as possible and just like waiting to see, like, whereas I think what you're implying here and what I, what I, what feels maybe more resonant to me, especially if it is about my disposition and not the thing is that I should be looking more carefully at fewer things. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's something like that. But I don't think there's like a one sized solution. I don't know if I believe that. I mean, I'm like, as you're talking, I'm sort of thinking about the mode in which a person is going down, like everyone goes down and finds themselves going down a Wikipedia hole. You know, it's like the purest, the like purest.

reason to believe that like hyperlinking was like a good decision you know um it's like it's like fulfilling that that dream yeah but i don't think that that sometimes one can find like a thing that's important in that kind of activity but i don't always think that like just going down a wikipedia hole is like It's much better than just sort of letting your feed take you, but it doesn't mean... It's a step towards the right direction, but it's not always an indication that this is going to yield good results or good life-changing information. It sort of, I think, goes a little bit back to the passive versus active. TikTok is full passive learning, and then... I don't know, like doing extremely hard research in the stacks. And like, yeah, maybe the point is to sort of oscillate there and catch yourself if you're just doing the, maybe this brings up an interesting question. It's like, should this always feel fun or easy? I don't think it's like, yeah, it's something, I wouldn't call it like fun or easy, but it's related. to those things like it's downhill like um no i don't think it necessarily needs to feel downhill i think it needs to feel um like engaging is not the same thing as fun you know yeah i'm pulling this thread and i'm like i'm kind of locked in yeah yeah yeah yeah that's a nice place to be and i think yeah like i just said like i don't think that that's that's like an indication of something it's not an indication of like yeah the gold is there but like having that kind of practice i think is like useful for getting towards what i'm talking about just being able to have an sort of like radar or an attention like a radar or an attention span that's like that feels more tuned for like lack of a better word tuned feels like a good word

I want to briefly broach the topic of taste, which you already alluded to being messy. As a quote, people often think about making work as if the person on the other side will have no choice but to enjoy it if the work is good enough. But it's nice to think about the practice of viewing or consuming as an art form in itself. I think this is kind of getting at something we already talked about a little bit. But it is interesting. Because it sort of does feel like sometimes there is work that is good enough, like a work that is so like, I don't know, I'm thinking like, on one hand, there is stuff I have engaged with that I guess I was, my act of viewing or consuming was an art form in itself and that it took a lot of work. And there are other things where like, I watched Casablanca for the first time recently. And like, it didn't take, like there wasn't, there wasn't much effort required. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not really sure what my question is. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard also to, like, in this particular time period, in the past three days, when we find ourselves in, like, Taste Wars 10 or whatever. It's just literally a sequel to a sequel to a sequel. Yeah. I tend to think that there is a distinction between objectively or like nearly objectively good things, you know, versus things that feel specific to a person. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's something different there. And I think one is just like being able to recognize and appreciate what a person has done. And another thing is like recognizing that like this person is talking about something that you feel like you've been thinking about for your whole life, but haven't been able to articulate. Yeah. And I think like, like I hate now to use the word taste, but I think that if I were to try and like, like really hone in on a definition that I thought was correct or, um, describe the quality.

people that I know who I think have the best taste in the world, it's more towards the second relationship, which is just like... It's a self-knowledge, right? It's a self-knowledge. It's the thing you keep coming back to. One of the next things I had, and I think it really connects, you had reflected on having Corey Archangel as your professor, I think, in college. and describing this kind of experience in class you say the first part of class was everyone talking through some links they found on the internet people would bring in things that may not seem interesting at first but corey was amazing at parsing out why something might be interesting it showed you it's important to think deeply about why you like what you like first of all like i think a really wonderful and kind of generous thing like what do you think made him good at that to what extent did you learn about even being able to do that for yourself from from him he like i mean i don't want to like uh overstate it and embarrass him but like i think he played a large part in that kind of practice or or looking at things with that sort of perspective of like Kind of like it's a game, you know, that like taking something out of context, like whatever the thing is, a piece of media content or whatever, and like placing it here and having it kind of be like a reflection on you. And that as like a move was like just like a different way of relating to things that I had never. I feel like I had experience, but he took it to a different level, in my opinion. I remember him. I was his first studio assistant after college, and he very generously took me around to see art shows. His studio was in Chelsea.

And we would like go on a lunch break and then just be like, OK, like, let's just go look at shows. And he would just like show me around and like talk about how he was like looking at things and like why something might be interesting and maybe like what the context around something might be. Like he was also very young at the time and like also sort of trying to understand this for himself, but being sort of like open source about. how he was coming to an understanding and i remember him talking about like oh yeah like you know this like person can just put a you know like a mop in a gallery and it's like and you're just like rolling your eyes but then you think about like where he's come where this person's coming from you know just this kind of thing of like relating to me in like a human way um this sort of like gestural, conceptual art way of relating to things in the world. It sounds both like properly critical, but also like very personal. Yes, that's a really nice way to put it. Which is, I think something we tend to forget in the conversation about all these things. Like I just want to, the taste thing again is sort of silly, but like I always like to bring up like taste is kind of like, it's like a product of eating food. It's like, what do I actually like? We're talking about it as like we're going around pointing at all these dishes that we haven't tried being like, this is the good one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's why, I mean, like we should not get into this, but like the conversation around this is annoying because, I mean, when someone says taste is a skill, that is annoying because you're talking about something that is... personal you know it's something that you develop over a long period of time and and it's to me yeah again like i just think this is taste is synonymous with like an understanding of one's own self and um when you talk about it like a skill then you put it in this sort of like arena of like competition you know and like like people are comparing one's own taste to another one's um which like

doesn't really make any sense it's like saying i'm like better than you because i like like this like to your point is like like i like this hot dog you don't like this hot dog like i'm better than you is insane when you put it like that it's both insane and also like totally plausible like people we do that um i want to come back to the competitiveness but one last thing on this briefly um I think this was in that same taste land interview. You said, there's no single thing that could convince me that someone has good taste. It's the composite. And I think the implication here is that, or at least one implication is that it takes time to evaluate both somebody else, but also ourselves in taste. And so I guess like as one kind of final piece in this, or maybe to not use that word, like this, why is duration? and, and, and almost like reference to yourself over the course of time. So important in this self-knowledge as you kind of grow through it. Yeah. Well, so I think, I mean, part of this class that, uh, you were talking about with Cory Archangel, like, like we were using delicious and delicious was just this, what basically the way it worked is you would send. links to delicious instead of saving them to a bookmarks bar so you would look back and see this sort of like trajectory of like oh i was thinking about this thing like this thing was important enough for me to save and then like a week later like i can sort of draw the connections between these two things and so i think the duration is like it's about a sort of like ongoing conversation that you're having with yourself and yeah i mean when you bring up this like there's not one single thing that could convince me that a person has good taste like i think about someone who i think has like the best taste in the world who i know is chris charan who was our original designer who's also like the designer for cahill and a musician and just like has impeccable taste and highly idiosyncratic i don't know like if this is still a thing i mean i have to like air out his taste for a second but like

I don't know if it's still a thing for him, but he's like, was for a long period of time obsessed with Tom Cruise. And I'm like thinking about that versus like every other thing that he likes, like it makes sense, you know, but when you just take that one thing, it like sounds. Like, like, it's like, it's not evidence. You know what I mean? Like, like the, like the, the trajectory is that it's almost like a, to extend the food metaphor, it's almost like a dish. Like there's some, this ingredient in the context of all these other ingredients is quite interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When you say he has great taste, one other kind of, you even. admitted at the time you like you didn't love this framing it was sort of like this person's world is complete and maybe what you're getting at is like there it was more cohesive the resolution is dialed like is that what you mean what when you say he had great taste what do you specifically mean it's so like it's at once refined but it's also so specific to him and his personality and when you see the connection in a person with like Those two qualities going hand in hand. That can be really active. Right. A self-knowing that can be really active, but also like works in the world in a sort of like particular gestalt that like couldn't really be replicated by someone else. Yeah. Yeah. I like that a lot. You briefly referenced the kind of competitive nature of taste. The other kind of big idea you're working through in that piece here for the wrong reasons is this. what you, I think frame is like competitive realities. And there's a articulation you have where you're talking about like thinking the incentive is for us to all think of ourselves as brands and think of information or content as like a resource to, to use in this way. You go on to make an amazing bachelor reference with, with here for fame, not, not love. And you say, Someone whose interests are more strategic than personally intuitive. A person whose interests accumulate with an awareness of how they will reflect back onto them. A person who follows nodal points, not from an innate desire, but from the expectation of some kind of reward, social or otherwise. There isn't a clean way to get around the idea that personal expression is always at least in part performative. Expression is partly fun because it's performative. And so like those two together,

the first is this total cynicism you heard from fame not for love the second quote i should have made clear it was distinguished like those are intention a little bit like yeah uh your your platform like arena itself is actually a great example of this where it's like it it seems to be sort of resisting that you're trying to have it resist the perils of the first part but also all taste is a little performative a little bit like even if even to ourselves yeah um and so i guess i'm curious how you like square those two things like what amount of performativeness is tolerated is it about a self-awareness about performativeness yeah i think it's about i think it's about motivations and expectations you know and when it's like i mean like these are like very These are like my own rules now that I'm just like coming up with. But I think that in my mind, doing it in public and having it be performative and just being confident with like... I want to say joy, you know, like finding joy in a thing, showing off a thing with joy, not expecting someone to look upon—the whole motivation can't be, like, I'm showing off and— you should look at me as someone with good taste. Or even I want a specific reaction. Yeah, you can't basically want any kind of reaction at all in this worldview of standards. Is joy performative, though? Like, real joy, I would argue, probably isn't very performative. It's enthusiastic. It's not internal. Yes. It's like this rare combination of being able to... like show the thing with love and do it in public, um, without expectation, which I think is extremely hard and maybe almost naive at this point to expect. A child could do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's on the, on the kind of broader theme of, of competition. And I think you alluded this earlier, two more quotes.

Social media has largely made permanent a world of individual realities, but it also underpinned that world with the perspective that the larger structure holding everything together is competition. In order for your reality to be the most real, it has to win. And then a second quote, you have to think of content or information as a resource. And doing so means that in some ways you're producing or consuming in order to cultivate a position rather than treating content as something out there to be curious about, to be fascinated by, or to love. The last part, obviously, I think is the thing hanging over all this and like this authentic taste, whatever. Like, I guess what I was thinking about a little bit is like, this idea that in order for your reality to be the most real, it has to win. Like artists and you, and I don't, maybe we'll get to this. I don't know if you still consider yourself an artist, but like a part of that is actually being opinionated. In fact, I know you're quite opinionated about software and how you make software. And so on one hand, like great artists are sometimes just like, loving or whatever the joy thing but oftentimes they're saying something yeah they're actually trying to have their reality win yeah and maybe this gets back to the same tension we were just discussing around performance yeah but like maybe it depends on the context maybe it depends if you're just in this sort of enthusiastic learning period versus constructing something yeah yeah i mean i think like a i mean really good example like it's just top of mind i'm making an excuse to bring up taste wars 10 but like a really good example is seeing the different ways that this is sort of like playing out yeah on twitter yeah and uh people taking one side against this sort of like taste is a skill thing other people taking other sides it's like it feels like people are trying to align themselves properly and that the goal

is not so i mean whatever this this conversation is annoying for a lot of different reasons but like like one of the reasons it's annoying is that it feels like the goal in the end is to like end up on the winning side of this yes you know and and to feel honestly in this case to feel better about one's own like position yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah which is like a problem with twitter in itself but like but like the other part of it is Well, it's the sort of thing of talking about the thing you're doing rather than doing the thing. And when you talk about taste, then you're talking about the idea of loving something and not actually putting your attention towards the thing or whatever. But I think in relationship to that, maybe when I was going to shows, to art shows in New York more regularly, experiencing a show... feeling like it was successful, like something ineffable was communicated to me, and not really feeling like that was so much of a competition but more of an ongoing conversation. This is sort of a long way of saying that the motivation towards these things plays a large part in how the tone of that thing goes. If one is doing these things to dunk on someone to like end up in the right spot so that they will be in a better spot later on that's different than like i've been thinking about this thing for a really long time like i'm gonna articulate this in the best way i care about the response but in a way that is less about my ego perhaps i mean it's a it's a delicate thing but it's a delicate thing because it's it always comes into play but i think like like You care about, I think in one mode, you care about the response because you want the conversation to keep going. Because you love the conversation so much that you want things to be generative. And you want to add to the conversation so that someone else can add to that, you know? The other is to signal. The other is to signal, yeah. And they're like percentages of everything and every way of dealing with this, obviously. Obviously, so much of this is...

is about attention um and i think really what the piece is about loving attention right i was also thinking there was some some kind of brief line you just said we have to pick which things we give our attention to we there's a finiteness about human attention and it's hard not to think about that in the context of of like this other form of intelligence where we've created which which the whole actually the whole feature and bug of it is that it has infinite attention basically yeah there's this quote you have about it about it that prompted something for me which is If you're really focusing on the moment, on something you love, on something in the world that feels like it's made for you, you can't be thinking about how it will benefit you or how it will reflect back on you. We were just talking about this. These two modes are at odds with each other. True attention requires that you don't view something in the world through the lens of what can this thing do for me? And I have a couple of questions on this, but my first is, can you fake it till you make it on this front? Meaning like, can you actually, Can you be a poser around it and then end up loving it? Yeah, yeah, yes, I totally believe that. That's why I'm a poser, apologies. Because I think, like, if you find yourself wanting so hard to associate yourself with an idea, then that means something. There's some radar happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you're willing to sort of, like, be vulnerable to, like, maintain that position. Like that's also very important, you know? Okay, cool. The other part of this is at Rude, it's like, I think actually this whole thing we just spent the last five, 10 minutes kind of talking about is like, is it inward looking or outward looking in a way? There's, you have this thing about like the common advice is to do more things for yourself, not for other people. And you kind of like invert it and you say like, actually, we should point our attention out into the world. How like understanding what connects you to the world, your radar, what draws you in, you have to pay attention, pay attention, but you're paying attention to it. It almost reminded me of like, I don't know if you ever listened to or read the David Foster Wallace, this is water speech. And like, that's really his core contention is like, he's got this line about you can be trapped alone at the center of a school sized kingdom, worshiping.

some kind of thing for yourself or you can turn your attention outwards yeah um and that was where where i kind of found myself going is almost like a possible resolution for this is just like making your attention more generous and some like generous is a maybe that's a question like like how how does one cultivate that that generosity of attention that external outward facing attention yeah right The thing that I learned from Corey, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, is one could find anything interesting if you look at it long enough or from the right direction. And I think the sort of generosity of attention is around that. Not like you have to give in completely to this idea that... I could look at this forever, you know, like you can't, like that's unproductive, but you can like open up the aperture a little bit to, to be able to like, I mean, what I was saying to you before we started talking, the thing that I really miss about being in New York is just like having random conversations with people on the street. And that activity sort of reminds me of this, like. anything can be interesting, you know, because you can really, I found that you could really quickly get into that mode with someone where you're both, you both might be looking at the same thing and sort of trying to like, you know, make a little joke or something, or like look at it from a funny angle as a way of relating to each other. And you're sort of like very quickly seeing something from someone else's perspective. Um, so yeah, I think it's about this, like, It's a being, it's about being empathetic to perspectives and like understanding that one can look at anything from a million different directions and find a way in, find like a personal way in. It's a form of kind of like looking with some amount of humility or something like that, or, or some, or even like, um, it's not quite the, like I'm searching for some kind of language or like, it's not quite intentionless.

But it's like a looking with a willingness to be surprised or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, the thing that I'm talking about in this piece or like the activity that I'm annoyed by is like, like there's another way of looking, which is just like, like, how can this thing benefit me? You know what I mean? Like, yes. Like, like I want that object, like that will make me look good. Like that is like. a really damaging mode um to sort of like have as your rubric for looking at things in the world in my opinion yeah what am i going to get from this yeah what am i going to get from this it's um it's almost a looking without needing anything yeah yeah yeah i appreciate you indulging me on i the attention thing i interviewed um you you referenced in um in one of the in the channel for that post um nadia asparova's book antimemetics and i had a similar conversation with her and it's the attention thing has just continued to come there's something metaphysical about it and it feels very sort of um it's like the one scarcity left yeah yeah it gets so quickly metaphysical which is why it's like i'm like whatever i can like be that person for a second but like when you start talking about it i don't it's not it's not like bullshit you know what i mean like there is no end to the amount of attention that you can pay yeah yeah it's not yeah that's real yeah yeah yeah i want to talk a little bit about maybe a grab bag of things i would broadly describe as like design um i think like tool making sort of maybe a form of like gardening that you do like in shaping mainly arena first On maybe a little bit of a thread we were on, there's an interview with you in the Creative Independent back in 2017. And you say, before when I was working on my solo show as an artist, I was thinking about what it means to be generous as an artist. At the time, I thought it was about being really personal or really open.

to the point of being diaristic or sharing images of me and my family. Towards the end of making that show, I decided, no, it's actually about tools. It's actually removing myself entirely and making things for other people to do stuff. I decided making tools is the nicest thing you can do as an artist. So Arena still feels like a natural extension of where I was going. Arena has changed the way I think. I continue to think about things the same way I would as if I were making art, but I just don't make art. what maybe i mean that was a long time ago like what what what is so generous about making tools and basically maybe more broadly i'm i don't want to get too in the weeds of what we were talking about just now but like what it what is general what makes an artist generous yeah yeah that's that i mean that question is that's super personal i mean I don't mean, like, I won't answer it. I mean, like, it's specific to the person and how they define that kind of thing. But for me, that's the sort of, like, next logical conclusion in this, like, conversation that I was creating with myself and, like, the work that I was making at the time. The thing that's generous about making tools is that, like... You're sort of like trying to optimize for reinterpretation, I think. At least that's how I would approach making tools. Like these things should be used in different ways. And because like I think about tools in the... in the realm of software, I tend to like want to play with this, um, on the spectrum of open-endedness and sort of like rigid and intentional. Right. Oh, you could argue that's generous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, yeah, there's, there's, there's parts of, there's other parts of it too, which is that like, like what I would want.

from a tool is sort of like what i try and do with arena um so i'm like trying to be generous to like a person who might share my same perspective is arena art no no i don't think so um no but i do think that um yeah everyone that we employ at arena has uh artistic or creative background and i think it's yeah this is like i tend to think that it's harder to learn how to make creative decisions in business than it is to sort of like learn the practical parts of running a business um so it's not art but i i like treating decision making within the context of running a business as a creative act and if i'm to infer correctly your your sort of baseline implication is easier to teach creative people business than teach business people that's what i think but i'm sure a ton of people would disagree with me yeah um on the note of design specifically uh you reference this 37 signals old blog post about making opinionated software and i think it's them they say the best software takes sides yeah um and then this is you we tend to approach the problems we solve from a cultural perspective rather than a purely technological one and maybe those two ideas aren't exactly related but they felt related to me but i'd be curious for you to actually explain that that specifically the distinction of And maybe with the lens of taking sides, like what is it, what does it mean to approach something? One very simplistic reading would be it's like, it's not mechanical. It's not the bare metal. It's actually this like much more soft amorphous sort of human thing. Yeah. I mean, I think that, like I said, I mean, like I've said a lot, like I use arena.

myself like as a person and so uh what i mean by like we take we take we try and like approach things from a cultural perspective is like an understanding of like what we would want as people who use the software what we're seeing our community like the people the other people around us who are using arena what we're seeing how they're how they're using it what they're coming up against what's frustrating them there's those things which maybe is like a little bit more like that's table stakes but i think there is something to be said about it actually being a sort of like rare case when one is making software that you are the you know what i mean like a lot of people are making these things as like like they're trying to make smart business decisions And having smart business decisions not be the number one reason why we do things and more like, how is this going to add to the conversation? How will this change the dynamics of what people are doing on Arena? Because we're using it ourselves and we don't want the quality to dilute. So that being the number one thing is, I think, sort of what I mean by that. Are you conflating business and technology? there i think so a little bit i mean yeah like like i also can't say that we like don't make strictly technical decisions because we spend like a ton of time uh just trying to make things super fast right but there is a meta thing here which is like technology wants something i think often we think of technology as being sort of value neutral it's not yeah and so maybe that's the other force that's pushing up against this which is like what is the platform yeah well yeah there's what is the platform one but there's also like like we have things i mean to to what i was just saying like the things that we're opinionated about are like it should be super fast like faster than is reasonable yeah and it should be very minimal it shouldn't have too much of a feeling like content should come through way more than arena as an interface comes through and we think about those things

just as qualities in themselves but also like what kinds of like behavior feelings do those qualities and gender and so in that sense there are cultural decisions i was gonna say they're almost like taste decisions well i mean the weird thing about like like uh Like being opinionated like that is it can sound like taste or, and it can also sound like being principled or like having morals or something, but it really is just like, yeah. having an experience of using software over the lives of our of our entire lives understanding the things that we think are like well done and trying to like emulate and like push past those qualities as much as possible yep yep on this note of like what the platform is going to be or wants to be the way you talk about it often feels more like the classic kind of gardening bottom up versus versus top down You say, it often feels like Arena itself has its own needs and desires, that Arena has its own personal intuition, and that we, you and I, are figuring out what it wants to be together. We try to listen to how we all talk about Arena, pay attention to how it changes to the platform, bring about new needs and ideas, and recognize the times when we, you and I, have strong urges to do something on Arena but can't. These are the times when we know how to make Arena more complete. that goes back to so much of what you just said the principal stuff like but i'm so interested in like like almost like embodying like the feeling like what literally maybe you can give an example like what is happening when there's something you guys want to do and that you can't that like crosses that thread because because by the way i suspect there have been times when given that you are pretty principled there are things you feel like you kind of want to do maybe you charles want to do that aren't right

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll give you like a counter example to this, which is coming up in my head as you're asking this question. The thing that people have brought up the most in terms of a feature request over the lifespan of Arena is like, I want to be able to see my channels and other people's channels in graph view. Like, I want to see this thing, like a, like a nodal map and like, We've definitely, I mean, people have explored it with our API. We've explored it. We keep coming back to this like conclusion that it's just a novelty and it doesn't actually provide anything like useful. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, and it's a, and it's a thing that feels like it would be valuable in some way, but actually like doesn't deliver in the way that at least. from the way that we're using arena it doesn't deliver in the way that you think it's going to deliver almost like the arena doesn't want that yeah yeah i mean yeah and that's and like unfortunately or unfortunately like that's our particular take um but it's also one of the reasons why we're like we're opinionated that like arena should always have an api um and that is like it's feeling more and more like a radical position because like the things that live on arena there there's no algorithm it's people doing this and that's super rare you know like people are categorizing information you know and like they're doing it because what a waste of time well i mean yeah no it's it's just yeah it's it's a wild thing to think about um and i think that that It is just inherently valuable, but at the same time, we do believe that there are interpretations of what arena can and should do that someone should have the ability to enact if they want to. It's almost two spiritual aspects of the platform that are kind of at odds, but you're allowing them to exist in slight tension. Yeah, I think so. I know Ted Nelson has been very influential.

Two ideas from him. One, mediums are infinitely harder to create than media. And two, recognizing parallelism as an essential part of thought, which I think is obviously very, very central for his work, but I think it's at the very least influential to you. Also, one other line from you, the key is that Arena isn't doing the work for me at all. it's just an environment that is oriented to this type of activity yeah which is almost getting at the medium idea a little bit yeah like i'm curious what's been most important in creating that environment you talk about quite literally a i would call arena medium yeah um and why why is whether it's literally parallelism as ted describes it or just bi-directional um linking like why that's been so important to create this type of environment that produces what you want I mean, to put it in way dumber terms, I think what we're trying to get at is what are the optimal conditions to get at the kind of content that we want? In order for that content to come in, one has to... have the quality of being fascinated with something you know yeah so so the parallelism or like the structures of arena like even the positions that we take as a business like saying like no algorithms ever like one way to think about it one very real way to think about it is like these are the conditions that have to exist in order for like the good content to come through it's a it's um a very strict constraint in some sense yeah or prompt yeah yeah yeah yeah but but like because it has this sort of like a little bit of a learning curve like a like it has an open-endedness that feels ungenerous at first that's it's a threshold it's a threshold yeah yeah one idea that comes up a lot is

And maybe you're pointing at different things. I even have a few interpretations, but is this idea of space? One place you say, I don't always want to be augmented. I want space in my software, which is maybe capturing the real kind of essence of it. And then you go on, it's just a bunch of people recognizing that it's really hard to think when you're attached to the internet all the time, which is really poignant. And then finally, in this piece you have on bone dialogue. It's a longer one you say. It's so easy to treat technology as though it can prescribe a solution to a particular problem. Software developers build complex workflows, create new methods for faster communication, and tune information delivery to an individual level. But what humans really need is much more simple time and space to think and process. There are, I think, actually, like two kind of core. articulations of space that um fit arena one is the one i was just describing with all those quotes which is like almost like negative space or something um a gap um the other is actually like spatial interfaces yeah um both are clearly very deeply seated in how you design this product um i'm curious why one to the extent they ever interact and two like why you particularly on the negative space one like why you kind of keep seemingly coming back to that maybe it's just a personal thing um maybe it's about that threshold yeah i mean like like also part of what i'm trying to point out with that is like like it's about what we do but it's also like what we don't do so like not like deciding not to do these like graph things or like be too heavy on animation or design an interface that looks too slick in one particular direction is another form of space. It's like letting the person's content intention or whatever, all that stuff come through more than what we're doing. It's a really fine line to us, I think, that like

Like it should look good, but also not really like too much of anything. And that's a hard, it's like a really hard thing to pull off, but like that's what we aspire to. It's a good transition. One of my favorite things I read of yours is actually this blog post on Arial, your new typeface, which is A-R-E-A-L, misspelling of the proper Arial. A few ideas that I actually think... plays so well into what you just said about space. First is Johannes Breyer at Dynamo who designed the font or he and his team. He says, he's talking about Ariel, it's a system font. So at another stage, it also became a kind of non-choice for a certain type of graphic designer who didn't want to make a point of choosing a cool or new font. But of course, choosing to go with the default is also a choice. Part of what you were just saying. The question became, if we want to make a font for Arena, but they already have the perfect font, How can we update Arena's identity with a meaningful gesture? And finally, the hope is that you can't really spot a difference. Looking at Ariel and Ariel should feel like refreshing a browser page. It's the same, but it isn't. Even references this woman, Kristen Sue Lucas, who refreshed by changing her legal name from Kristen Sue Lucas to Kristen Sue Lucas. Kind of insane. Maybe I'll just read one last quote from you. This was in that interview. When we made this interface change, our desire was to be as default as we could so that Arena wouldn't get in the way of the content. In other words, we wanted Arena to look good, but to fade into the background as much as possible. Great design fading into the background is a little oxymoronic, right? Or it's a little paradoxical. In theory, all... design should sort of like it's it's such a delicate thing to have design not show up yeah um it's hard for me even reading this like the the aerial thing like i both know that it actually was functionally better for you guys but it almost reads as performance art or something yeah yeah i mean i yeah like

It is, but it's not. The new Arial, by the way, I did a presentation a couple days ago in a class, and I realized that the computer that I was showing it on did not have Arial or Arial, and I could tell the difference immediately because the kerning on Arial is so fucked up. So when you look at new Arial versus old Arial, like... Like it's minor, but there is like a real... So maybe the essence of that great design fading into the background is not that it's unnoticeable, but it might have to be pointed out for you to notice. Like you should feel the benefits without noticing them. Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. You should feel the benefits without noticing them. Only in actually looking at the old version would you notice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And now there's no way to look at... I mean, I guess you could just modify the CSS on a new arena and see the difference. Yeah, it wasn't purely gestural. Like, yeah, it has like a real utility, but it's at this sort of like, like Arial, the font to us, the original Arial, the Microsoft Arial was nearly perfect. And Johannes and Fabiola, who worked on Ariel, our Ariel, made it 100% complete. So to us, that's so satisfying. And I think it's just part of this contextual whole that makes it very special and beautiful without it looking like too much of anything. How do you conceivably justify something like that, given that you have very constrained resources? I mean... honestly it was a partnership between both of us so it was just like a fun thing that we both got to work on together um we don't have the same kind of relationship with dynamo that like a huge startup might have you know it's like like johannes and i are friends yeah and by the way it's also time but like the answer i think also can be that you wanted to and that you wanted to do something for the community yeah yeah yeah yeah i think johannes is like like

approaches Dinamo in the same way that we approach Arena, which is that we love working on it and we find it endlessly interesting. And he loves the collaborations that we try and do now are just people that we want to work on things with because it's fun. You know what I mean? And because we share a similar way of looking at the world. My last two kind of... sections go together, which are about effectively building businesses, specifically building independent businesses and software businesses. I think you alluded to this briefly earlier, but you are clearly an advocate for creative people starting businesses. A few lines from you, and particularly with the notion that maybe they're unlikely to do so. a very limited conception of the type of person who starts a business, especially tech businesses. When I talk to artists, young creative people, I always recommend starting a business. And finally, arena itself is what drives me to be entrepreneurial in order to make it more resilient. You wrote somewhere that you felt complicated about your first commercial art show. And yet you have a seemingly very healthy commercial relationship with this project. Maybe it's... as you said earlier, maybe it's cause it's not art, but, uh, there's some other part too, where you, you were talking about like, businesses are great. Like people like patronage, but like patronage, you have to answer to a very specific person. Like you're almost talking about like the commercial part of it being, it's like freeing container. And so I'm curious about like, in this spectrum between you could make a case that arena itself has patronage actually it's business model of patronage but in the spectrum between patronage and business in terms of like a fuel to do something creative or do something important how you think about what a business is and what it allows for and like why it's so like what what is drawing what is driving you to want to persuade more and more creative people to adopt this kind of fuel or shape well i mean there's a couple of reasons

For software in particular, I just think the internet, the web would be infinitely more interesting and healthy if there were just different takes towards what making a business online is. And especially businesses like ours that have this sort of cultural or social component. I don't think that the ways in which... we think of being social online represent all the ways that one could be social online. And I don't think it's, I don't think it's like this particular type of, um, way of funding software businesses that is going to find all of those ways of, uh, meaning like the venture capital industrial complex. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So my, my, maybe I should let you finish, but the obvious critique here would be that like, the reason we don't have more of these is we don't have the business models for them. Yeah. yeah yeah yeah and that's what i mean about like creative decision making and i don't think that like arena's business model is by any means creative um but i think it's i do think like subscriptions in our case is a business model that is really It's really symbiotic with how we want to work on Arena because we're providing an environment. And the question is just like, do you find this environment valuable enough to like help us continue, maintain and build it? Yes. And so the relationship is like so simple that it is almost radical at this point. Yeah. You know? Yeah. You said somewhere you're the only social media or social network that its users pay it. yeah yeah yeah and i mean that's not maybe that's not like entirely true but it's i mean it's definitely the only social network where the like relationship between the people who make it and the people who use it are is really understandable yes you know it's very straightforward it's like it's like almost dumb um but i think that there are much more

interesting ways of figuring out like different setups for that and ways that people who are using software and people who are making software can be more aligned. Yeah. To borrow a frame from my friend, Chris, it's like business model product fit in this context is actually quite rare. I think another piece of this, to be honest, is your business model isn't that creative, but you have something else that's rare, which is a whole lot of patience. Yeah. yeah yeah yeah i mean part of the other thing that is radical about arena is just that we keep continuing to do it you know that there's like a there's a commitment to it and it's also why i try and sort of like illustrate this um relationship that we have as like people who are using the product like we're like in the same we're like in the same place as people who don't work on arena yes like like we're right there and if something frustrates a person who's using it, it probably frustrates us too. I thought it was cool to look over on the note of patience. There's one line where you're like, success as a business relies on people who love Arena enough to pay for it. So getting to 400 paying customers was a big deal for us. Then you're like, now that we're about $70,000 in revenue, you're now at 18,000 paying users. Yeah, it's going to be 20,000 pretty soon. 20,000, over $100,000 in revenue. Has it gotten easier or harder to be patient? Much easier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think for the longest time when we had to do other things to just like functionally exist, like do freelance projects or work other jobs or that kind of thing. Yeah. It's just, it's just exhausting. Now I feel like, like we've reached. Like, like this is the ultimate goal to be able to work on arena all the time is like, that's like the bag, you know? And, and so like continuing that is like, or, or making that like stronger is like, uh, yeah, we're motivated to do that. You're coming up on your 15 year anniversary this year. Yeah. Uh, a quote I really loved. Uh, one question that is still hard to answer after 10 years of.

Working on Arena is what's the long-term vision? This is difficult for a few reasons. One reason is that we have to calibrate our definition of long-term with the person who is asking the question. Arena is a lifelong project. Our ideal outcome as a company is not becoming the next Facebook, God forbid. It's becoming the next Nishiyama Onsen pronunciation or Kionkan, a hot spring hotel in Japan and one of the world's oldest businesses around 705 AD. You were going to say the slow blade, quoting Dune, the slow blade penetrates the shield. I do think it's worth considering slowness as a strength. What an amazing, I mean, amazing to imagine a business that old, but especially amazing when you think about a digital software thing in that way. I guess my question is like, beyond just being patient and being intentional, what has or what will make arena more anti-fragile for the chance of lasting another 15 years or beyond yeah i mean yeah lasting another 15 years is one thing i think lasting past us retiring is like a different thing um and i think a thing that arena has going for it in that regard is it's like almost nothing you know like like as a piece of software it's like extremely on i mean it's complex but it's like like compared to other things it's like not that complicated and i think it has a sort of structure that could be remade in different forms very easily so it's mo it's like i don't know i i sort of go back and forth about this but i think that one part of its strength is that like it's a software but it's also an orientation. And the orientation is like something that can manifest in different ways. It's funny you say that. One of the thoughts, I didn't do the research, but my expectation is that on a sudden, like, it probably hasn't been the building. It probably hasn't, I don't even know it's in the land. But there's some threat. And I think when you think about that, that durable of a timeframe, you're probably making, there's some asterisks, but.

there's some there's some thread yeah yeah yeah yeah and i think that that the orientation of uh like something as simple as just like this is a piece of software that the people who are making it like are deeply committed to and use as individuals and feel and feel like they need as like a as like a part of them you know um yeah the other businesses that i sort of like look to in part for inspiration have this sort of same quality and feel to me like they could also have this kind of like um they gesture towards longevity you know can you give a couple examples well like i'm not like the hugest obsidian user or like i'm not like a complex obsidian user but i like appreciate like that as like another manifestation of an orientation that is sort of manifest in a piece of software and how those two things play back and forth you know my last kind of primary section that obviously relates is um about a awesome piece you wrote recently about personal business um and a natural kind of thread of of building independent businesses a slug of quotes from you that i think Maybe set the tone. When I started running Arena with friends 14 years ago, it often felt like having such a personal stake in what we were doing would be a liability. Today, it's often perceived as an asset. I'm not especially pro-capitalism, but I am pro-doing something really hard that you care about desperately and unabashedly. You alluded to this earlier, but I wouldn't be running a business if it weren't for Arena. It's a very personal business, meaning... that it is something I want to see in the world. It is a tool that I would personally be devastated if it were to not exist. And finally, I've never wanted to walk away, even when we ran out of money. I think it's the coolest thing on the internet. I don't know what else I would do. Maybe you got at this slightly, but can you make your case for more people starting these types of personal businesses? Oh, man. Maybe especially digital or software ones? Yeah.

I think that if you're the type of person that feels critical of the way that social interaction happens online or your relationship to information is compromised, there are probably like a billion people who fit this qualification. It's easier than ever to create software. It's like cheaper than ever, you know, like people can figure out ways of like playing around with this stuff and feeling the sort of like right shapes and orientations of things. And I think it's a very important. It's a very important place to experiment in because it's ridiculous that there's just like a single type of person making this type of software. What I was going to say is like, I actually think there's a huge, especially in the last six months, cloud code, whatever. Like the way what's happening is the disposition towards making software is like, oh my gosh, you can just do things. Yes. Perhaps the implication there is that. you're saying that's generally one type of person. Because what I was going to say is that it sort of feels like, if anything, the disposition has been like, maybe the good aspect of it is there's a lightness, the negative aspect. It definitely doesn't feel like the way you talk about a personal business. It's not heavy and meaningful and caring. It's like, just throw stuff out. No, no. I mean to say that the resources are available if you feel like you can be opinionated about these types of things and you can sort of start to shape. your opinionatedness easier than you might have done so earlier. Like learning HTML, learning PHP, like my process for like learning how to write software took a really, really long time. And that time, like, like one doesn't have to spend that amount of time now in the sort of same way. I mean, like there's a limit to what I'm saying, I think, because I don't totally believe that you could.

do these things at a scale that would be meaningful just yet um give it four more months of clod who knows yeah but i mean um but i do think that like yeah i think i think there are a lot of like young people a lot of people with like weird and opinionated ways of uh how they want to interact with with the world and with each other and figuring out like more interesting ways of manifesting those behaviors online. Yeah, it feels important. I like, that's a long way of saying like, I think the drive and motivation has to come first. The feeling like that something should exist that doesn't already exist and that you can maybe, there's a way for you to try and articulate that. Perhaps there's a group of people who have that. The thing that they don't have that in short supply, they have the technical ability in short supply or whatever. It goes back to your earlier point around that maybe more creative people should start, but they're unlikely to. But that is the thing that perhaps the software world has been slightly lacking is people who have that kind of set of perspective to approach it from a new, we've had a lot of people approach it from a specific kind of way. Yes. Yes. A lot of people are approaching it from a specific kind of way, but also like the expectation that making a software business will follow, uh, like in the best case, a particular time scale and trajectory, you know, and that these things will ultimately cease to exist, like making something with the idea that like the point is to cash out at some point, you know, or, or even like. I don't know your history of the arena. I don't know if I have all the details, but it wasn't, you were kind of eating glass for a little while. You definitely weren't working on it full time. Yeah. You can hardly like, and so, but I think that goes back to being personal, which is like, I need this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I mean, I can think of people who are like doing this kind of thing and, um, like also in this phase of figuring out how to make it their like full time thing or, or their life's work, you know? Um,

and it feels super positive you know yeah i don't i don't know how to like it's it's an interesting thing to try and pitch because um well okay i'll say the other thing consider the possibility that working with your friends on something that you think is cool is like the most luxurious possible thing that you can do you know independent of the reward yeah yeah yeah no the reward is the work the like that you get to hang out with your friends and make something cool like that's that's the reward and figuring out a way to keep doing that is like like that's the challenge but yeah that's the challenge but it's easy to do once you like start experiencing it i like that yeah Maybe just to wade a little further in the waters of a template for this, you were talking about the approach. You say, offer product services and or experiences that are both high quality and idiosyncratic, the type of business that both sustains and is sustained by a community. Again, getting at that business model product fit thing a little bit, but I'm curious what you think about the shape of businesses or products or customers that do tend to... What is it about that relationship that is productive for these types of businesses, whether it be something like arena or the local, whatever, grocery store or bookstore or whatever? Is it intimacy? Well, I think it's that, yeah, it's something about intimacy, but it's also about infrastructure. It's like providing a thing, a place, um armature for like other activity to happen within and that someone can rely on that it can become theirs yeah yeah it can become theirs but like but like there's a there's um a dependability that comes over like a long period of time i was texting you about this yesterday one of the in this uh this time it's personal arena channel you have this just incredible

SoftBank deck from 2010 where Masa is like hardcore brain blasting, vision questing. He has a slide about happiness and happiness is about being touched, touched by seeing, touched by interactions, love, learning, playing. He has this thing where he's talking about when you get lost, look into the far distance whenever you get lost. And this is how SoftBank is going to go from his 30-year vision to his 300-year vision. And one of the things he texted me is we need that Masa back. And so what this prompted for me is like, maybe all founder-led businesses are personal? And if so, do people just sort of forget why they're here? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, part of it, I think, has to do with the sort of typical way that most large software businesses are funded and the expectations of growth. I think it's hard to maintain. I mean, the way that they're funded, the expectation is an exit, like in some form. It's not really typical that like a company might get investment and pay dividends or something over time. I think that for me, this is related to sort of like another question that sometimes comes up when... someone on arena is sort of like feeling that it's like getting a little bit bigger. And the question is like, like, do you think arena can get too big? Or do you think it's like quality will diminish as it grows? And my answer for that is usually that like, it can, it can grow really big, it just has to do it slowly enough. And like, the issue is mostly the sort of like timescale expectations of a business more so than it is like that it's getting super right right yeah right yeah maybe that aspizes applies especially to a community or social yeah yeah yeah yeah but it probably i mean probably some like broad analogy around all growing living things like things

It's not good to grow too fast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny. It makes me think of, I once met with somebody at LVMH and they were talking about how like, it's actually bad if any of their brands grow, it's like more than 15% year over year or something or 25%. Wow. Because it's sort of like, when you're in the business of 100 year brands, you don't want a 200% year. No. That's actually showing that something's wrong or you've totally mismanaged supply and demand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's inspiring. Yeah, yeah, it was cool. It was cool. I have just a few more kind of miscellaneous things. I thought I would ask this before we got here, but what do you think of the word authenticity? Oh, yeah. Yeah, this was coming up during that, like, here for the wrong reasons essay. I think I'm a bit of, in the same way that I'm like a poser apologist, I'm like a bit of an authenticity apologist. Just in that, I sort of believe that, like, one could fully understand themselves, like I was saying before, you know. And, like, that to me is synonymous with authenticity. You know what I mean? The fact that you believe it is possible? Or at the very least is worth approaching? Well... I mean, authenticity is possible because it's possible to understand, to get better at understanding oneself. Yes. In fact, you almost, it's like, I must be an optimist. Like, yeah. Yeah. I can't remember where I found this. It's generally a good idea to try to apply metaphors to places where they don't quite fit. I think that's from you. I said that? I think so. It's possible I got it from some other channel. but it felt representative of something that is happening inside of Arena. Yeah, yeah. And the patterns. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, that's the thing that I was talking about earlier, which is it's just useful to try and look at something with a frame of mind that it could be interesting. So it's like applying a gaze to something that might not be there implicitly. Right, ready to see. Ready to see what might be there. Yeah, yeah. You have a piece about it.

and i didn't get to like fully deep deep dive that the david bohm and bohm dialogue stuff but i'm curious what what you think we can all learn from what either stood out to you in that or the research you've done or what you think he was getting at in dialogue that was really unique yeah i mean yeah super long it's a super big topic but he was a very classically trained quantum physicist who sort of had this long trajectory towards simplifying what his overarching interest or message was where it went from hard physics to like thinking and thought and what that meant and so he wrote this book called on dialogue which is all about this like sort of like a proposal for a practice which is like a bunch of people sit in a in a circle um you try and have a you essentially try and have a generative conversation and every the point is that everyone is supposed to add on to what the other another person is saying and then the place that you sort of get to ideally is that um everyone is sharing a thought and you're sort of like looking at it you're all looking at it and it's like out there and you can sort of start to like like view it from different angles and i have to say like laurel schwulst and i did organize one bomb bomb dialogue uh once and it was like super it was really incredible how is it different from hanging out with 10 people there's like an intentionality and setting ness to it that uh changes things and like what we did what you're supposed to do is sort of like lay out these like um very simple rules which i don't remember off the top of my head but it's essentially like like you can't

change topics you have to add on to things and you end up talking about talking and you talk about thinking and it like it gets it's structured and generative it's not so structured it's very open-ended um it's structured only in that like maybe focused focused yeah yeah focused but like one one comment that i have um that i really remember is someone describing it as like the cartoon where uh it's like a train and it's putting the track uh ahead of itself while it's going that way and yeah yeah yeah and you know when you have like a good conversation that's like that's how it feels but when you have that good conversation stretched out to like 10 people it's super interesting ah so the number it's critically i think it's part of it that there's like a like a uh yeah a number of people that that are that that do it that's that's the thing yeah yeah i'm excited to learn more yeah um you said you could talk for two and a half hours about it earlier what else have you learned from skateboarding well i think like skateboarding like art has a snobbiness to it that can feel like being um principled that is actually um something that's slightly different i'm trying to figure i'm trying to think of like which one of these like stupid rules that skateboarding has like like there's there's a person who um describes the middle of the board as the forbidden 14 as it's like the 14 inches that one should not slide okay like like you can't do a board slide but you can do nose and tail slides like one should not do any slides that involve the middle of the board that's the forbidden 14. so there's like all these sort of like random made-up rules that are like principles for like what is like correct or right you know and there are though they are all arbitrary

you know like like they're all just made up by people but it's like but it comes across as some kind of like it's also funny in a sport or an activity that is so like punk in so many ways and so not about the rules yeah yeah yeah when i think when systems like that are are entirely open-ended that's that's the sort of like rules that people make up and it's the same sort of like framing that happens on arena where someone's just like like this is now a guest book This is an open channel that is a guest book. Like I'm calling a guest book and this is how you interact with it. And so there's these behaviors that emerge when like a system is open-ended like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't talk about it, but I was enjoying, you have a rules are rules channel that I was enjoying perusing across. It's fun. The freedom that comes from certain types of arbitrary constraints. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas you listed him as. Is it one of those kind of like key kind of early, some like ex-girlfriend's friend introduced you? I'm just curious if there was anything that really stood out. Well, yeah. I mean, Library of Babel is just like a short story that's just has obvious connections to not just Arena, but like people thinking about hypertext and all that. Do you know this one? I haven't read it. Oh, wow. Yeah, super short. You can read it tonight. It's basically about a library that is infinite in all directions. And there's a certain, every book has a certain number of characters. And there are librarians who wander this library looking for a book that has like a phrase that, like any kind of phrase at all, because it's every permutation of like all these. So most of the time you're going into a room and you're opening a book. And it's just nonsense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's kind of like the monkeys. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's exactly like that. So sometimes you'll go into a room and find like a single phrase that is like, you know, the right phrase at the right time kind of thing. Will you have any chance of bringing back directions to last visitor.com? Yeah, I should do that. But I don't know if it's possible anymore. Yeah, so directions. Yeah. Directions to last visitor was.

you it was a website that you would go to and uh it would geolocate you and give you google maps directions to the person who visited the website before you pulling automatically pulling their like latitude data yeah yeah yeah and right it and that is also kind of like the reaction that most people had out of it like that it was some sort of like privacy uh violation but the point that i was sort of coming to it from was like removing myself outside of the equation and letting two people make this connection without me you know what i mean yeah yeah yeah you have uh i believe the delaware c-corp name for arena is when it changed yeah yeah why was that moment so meaningful um we um that comes from a from a william gibson uh so in uh He has a trilogy of books called The Bridge Trilogy, and it's sort of like this post-apocalyptic situation that the apocalypse moment is never really fully described, but it's called When It Changed. And in the early days of Arena, there were sort of like multiple eras where we were forming and reforming this. corporation and when we finally like got control of it ourselves we called it when it changed just as like uh yeah any like association that we can make like yeah we've had like a million way william gibson where our first mobile app was called case like we always try yeah if there's any consistent naming scheme that comes from gibson stuff uh on the arena influence channel influences channel there is a tree that owns itself You know what this is? Yeah, yeah. Why is that meaningful to you? I believe now it's the son of the tree that owns itself. Yeah, I didn't put that in there, but now that I'm thinking about it, yeah, John Michael Boling put that in there, and that's like a...

I don't even know if that's an artwork. It's just like a situation that exists that he has always referenced as a major thing. And I think he's pointing to something. He was actually pointing to something really early that I think we're pointing to now, which is just that somehow this thing should have a life of its own that should exist outside of the people who... made it you know yeah for people who don't know this is a tree that apparently somehow legally owns the small area around it that is on yeah also apparently called a jackson oak so i will take oh nice um just a few more things uh there's an interview with kell i'm forgetting her last name um you were asked what are the things you'd like to do in your life that are doable i'm gonna read the list Switchback. Number one, switchback tail shove, which I Googled is sick. So sick. Number two, nollie crooked grind. Number three, pivot fakie. Number four, read in search of lost time. The top four alone was already really great. Number five, kiretsu, which I think I looked up, but I don't know what it is. Six, pass on arena to future employees. And seven, run a small use bookstore. Any reflections, any additions, any updates on this list? yeah no that was very a very recent list and yeah i was trying to think of things that are like infinitely doable and i think in my like like skate one there's like a limit to how long one can skateboard for i'm like very much i'm like essentially past that limit but like brian johnson's gonna figure it out for you yeah thank you brian johnson um you get metallic limbs or whatever um yeah those are like those are like doable tricks that are also like within this weird um this weird sort of like rubik for what i consider to be tasteful skateboarding yeah the the kiretsu is um kiretsu is a thing that

that Japanese businesses did at one point where they, um, like two sort of like complimentary businesses would buy shares of each other or exchange shares to sort of like solidify, uh, uh, harmonious relationship. Um, and we also sort of like imagine a future world where, um, arena sort of like has this relationship to other people, other people's businesses that we sort of like take inspiration. Yeah. Almost marrying them together. Yeah. Yeah. I brought it up before we started recording, but one of your longtime channels is the secret agent. It remains quite secret and mysterious, but I'm curious if you can impart any insight for the rest of us on what's going on in there, that pattern. Yeah, that's like... I know exactly what seeded that, which is there was a toy when I was a kid called... spy tools and it was just like it was like a black light and like a little alarm system and like a fingerprinting kit and all of this stuff and i like loved the look of it i can like still imagine the logo um but i think the thing that is interesting about that to me now apart from these sort of like like literal secret agents is what part mystery plays in making like a concept or an idea attractive and like what the sort of like level of mystery that something has to have that makes it sort of like compelling yeah i was thinking of my i had i had a walkie talkie watches at one point yeah yeah yeah yeah you said i like every age more than the last any advice making that more likely that's like that's a little bit of a manifest like i'm trying to manifest that idea that sentiment in myself like i do like every age more than the last um but sometimes it's like hard to like every age more than less but i i don't know when i think about like this sort of i like having had a really long relationship um i mean in the context of this conversation to like something like arena to have like

a project that i feel like i can work on for the rest of my life um having that like time span to me is like super special and i i realize how lucky i am and we are to be able to have that so like yeah the benefit of experience like i do see a lot of value in that you're deep in the compounding yeah yeah yeah yeah this is a quote from the arena influences channel What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life? That's Foucault. How do you make sense of what art is? Yeah, I think it's funny to be like, this is what we talked about before. But I do think it is about this sort of like being able to make decisions that are creative. And what is creative is like, from my perspective, most personal. So any kind of decision making could be creative if it's like coming from this particularly personal place. yeah uh one more thing should probably come as no surprise in the film you've got mail uh joe tom hanks's character is telling uh meg ryan's character uh what's your name um kathleen kelly kathleen that it isn't personal yeah to which she replies i'm so sick of everyone saying that that just means it wasn't personal to you but it was personal to me It was personal to a lot of people. What's so wrong with being personal anyway? Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal. How do you try to remember to keep things personal? Well, for Arena at this point, it's like, that's, I don't have to try. It's automatic. I have to try not to make everything personal, basically.

Yeah. If I try and imagine a world where arena didn't exist and I would be compelled to make another business, like how I would tune that relationship. Yeah, I think setting up a scenario where you are the person who's using the thing is the only way to do that. And it has to be something that you're sufficiently opinionated about. And probably invested in. Invested in, opinionated about, yeah, all of those things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's all I got. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks again for listening or watching. And I'd like to thank Notion, Dialectics, presenting partner one more time. As I mentioned at the top of the episode, Notion is a tool that allows you to have leverage across the work. the ideas, the writing, whatever it might be that is most important to doing what you do. And the way they think about AI and agents is all about giving you more leverage to focus on the things that really matter to allow you to have deeper attention on the real work. Meanwhile, you can delegate to notions AI and agents for all of the incremental work, the busy work, the synthesis, whatever it might be. I found it's even helpful to have Notion AI just give me a second set of eyes as I'm trying to parse through all of the most important ideas in my research or after the fact as I review my conversations. You can check out Notion at notion.com slash dialectic, and you can learn all about all of the ways Notion has evolved in recent years in terms of giving you more leverage, particularly with AI and agents. You can find all the links and full transcript for this episode at dialectic.fm slash cab or C-A-B. That's dialectic.fm slash cab where I'll have a transcript, all the links, all of the platforms the episode's available on and more. And once again, thank you so much to Notion for presenting Dialectic and thank you to you for listening and making it all possible. I hope you're inspired and I hope you give your attention more deeply and more generously.

I'll see you next time.