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

16:17Nix:Maybe I'm like clinging to some sense of like needing originality or something.

16:20Nicole Seah:Right, yeah.

16:23Nix:Hmm. Or even to go back to your communal idea, Like it would feel more valid, dare I use that word to like, I'm going to talk with a few of my friends who all saw The Boy and the Heron. But if I like outsource an opinion from a professional, very serious person, critic, it like, again, feels maybe, maybe, maybe a better way of asking this question would be when you're doing this communally, how do you maintain sort of a sense of your own interior or your own sense of self or ideas versus the risk maybe of like, um, anything you consume quickly trying to like, uh, make your, your thinking on that very relational is you, you don't get this aspect of sort of sitting, like going through something on your own.

17:13Nix:Like, do you have a relationship to maybe it's, maybe you're oscillating, which is you're going to go, I don't know, use a simple example. Like you, you read a novel or you read a book and then you spend some time thinking about and then you go to the book club and then you journal. It does feel that some amount of, maybe that's what I'm trying to understand or work through, is you want some of the relational and you want some of the isolated. And you don't want to overly rotate to one and maybe I'm wondering about how those two things blur together.

17:40Nicole Seah:Right, well I mean the danger point is if you actually don't feel anything toward a particular piece of work, but because everyone tells you you should feel something, you've sort of labeled it as meaningful. whereas you know if you come to that thing and you still feel something and you and you've also talked to a bunch of other people I think that's still a genuine appreciation of the work yeah it

18:02Nix:reminds me of um I I talked to Celine Wynn who I think you know or at least have read and and it reminds me of how she talks about Proust which is like a different cut on this would be like you don't have to like this for some like arbitrary reason that like you're supposed to like it but also somebody like Celine being like this is fun and gossipy or whatever might be a portal in for your own yeah it's a really I really love the idea that attention is actually just like about doing like I was getting well I almost said doing the work putting in the time yeah um I love

18:32Nicole Seah:Celine's Celine's work and um I think an important part about what she's doing is like sort of expanding the market for literature through her perception and her uh you know um her sharing her perspective on things. And I do think that's very powerful to go back to what we're saying, which is like, okay, maybe you do need someone to guide you. And there's nothing wrong with being guided sometimes as well. I think I take away a lot of the, I don't have any shame to like where I come to things, how I get to things. It's always, how do I feel about this thing at the, at the end of the day? And have I learned something along the way about myself, about the world?

19:10Nicole Seah:And I think that's a much more honest and meaningful way to come at it.

19:13Nix:There's also like less ownership.

19:15Nicole Seah:There's so much less ownership and less pressure, you know?

19:17Nix:Yeah, it kind of comes back to this idea that like, the most beautiful things. What I love about that early idea is that it actually relates a little bit. I talked with Henry Carlson about introspection. And he has this Nick Cave example. And he basically talks about like pushing ourselves to introspect with yourself as the subject, not as the object. And it feels like beauty is something similar, which is not like, who am I? Or how can I be beautiful? Or how can I, like, it's just like, what am I noticing? And when you take that orientation, Part of what I'm sensing in a lot of your answers is just this like very outwardly directed orientation that thus is less concerned about whether it's your idea or somebody else's idea or any of these things.

19:57Nicole Seah:Yeah, exactly.

19:58Nix:I like that. there's a maybe a related idea to beauty which is you write about fantasy and reality and maybe the ways that we cling to fantasy when in fact reality is actually like far more rich or real or beautiful a couple of quick excerpts but the characters that have captured my heart the most, always chose to return to or see reality for how it was, and loved the deeply flawed human world because it was real, not contrived, not airless or soundless or unbruised. It was real and had violence and rapture and bodies that aged and buildings that crumbled, but by that same hand, fervor, courage, and human striving.

20:43Nix:And then a couple other ideas. I expect when I look back on all the notes I collect this year, I'll see the inverse of fantasy, That what lasts, what feels right, looks nothing like what I first imagined or dreamed about. There are no more fantasies to cling on to. There is no past, no backward place for my longings. Only forward into the night, led by the beacon of beauty, which is a really, really sweet sentiment. Maybe a really almost sillily open-ended question, but how have you learned to love what is real?

21:15Nicole Seah:Yeah, it's such a great question. And I think I was referring to a lot of different novels in that writing about one of my favorite sort of character arcs is like young man kind of, you know, goes for glory and victory and goes and embarks on this insane quest. And through that quest realizes, hey, actually what I dreamed about and fantasized about for so long was not real. And I have to actually return to reality and live reality. and I'm always like really interested in that inflection where you, yeah, you see something and you think it's real, but you realize it's a mirage.

21:53Nix:Or it wasn't what you hoped for.

21:54Nicole Seah:It wasn't what you hoped for, right? And I think that's a very important, actually life inflection point where you start to realize like, oh, the things that I dreamed about or hoped for are not coming true, but I can actually chart a new path and actually opens you up to a new aperture of thinking. I think in particular, when I think about that novel or these sets of novels, fiction is always a really interesting, very extreme version of reality, which is maybe we don't go on the quest, right? We don't go on this insane quest to the Wild West and all these things. But we do go on these little quests and we hope and we dream for things.

22:37Nicole Seah:and there's some really fundamental truth to the fact that we don't always get what we want. Yes.

22:43Nix:The texture of the story is deeply real.

22:46Nicole Seah:Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing is when I think about everything that I love and care about, whether it's a beautiful piece of work or it's a person, it's always actually the moments where they chafe against the edge of reality that I realize that they're human and they're flawed. And I'm also human flawed. And that makes it deeply relatable. And so when I reflect on everything that's happened in my life, all of the actually really good moments unfolded in ways that I didn't anticipate for, didn't plan for, and maybe didn't even have the imagination for, which, you know, I think is really beautiful.

23:28Nix:How do you know when you're actually encountering reality? like um much of modern life we we sort of live like a bubble wrapped existence in some sense at least in terms of um reality in terms of stake like we don't face death very often as it may that's a very extreme example obviously there are times in life where you really get slapped in the face you have something you desperately want and you don't get it or you lose or whatever you you have the job you want like but i think in a lot of the cases it's like a little more subtle does that feel true to you or does it feel like you're kind of or maybe it's only true in hindsight like I definitely find like there are again there are the glass shattering moments but a lot of

24:11Nicole Seah:time it's like I realized like a year later or something yeah I think they're both I think it's both I mean I think there are moments where you're just really shell-shocked or you're um there's moments where you're really let down by something someone or you just didn't get the you didn't get the thing you wanted. And then there's other moments where, where it's only with time passing that you kind of reflect back and be like, okay, I didn't get what I wanted, but I got something far better. I think having that mindset is important. You know, I think prior to the past four years, I think I had a very rigid mindset of, or I'm a big planning personality.

24:48Nix:Prior to the two, until four years ago.

24:50Nicole Seah:Yeah. Maybe four or five years ago. Whenever I started writing, I had like a very - Writing publicly. Writing publicly. I had a very big planning personality. And I think that the process is actually me learning how to not plan for things and be surprised by the unexpected.

25:07Nix:Is that, I was going to ask, like, what is your strategy of introducing more reality? Is it that? Is it just not planning? Or are they, because that's like almost a passive, like, openness to reality. Yeah. But maybe there's, like, there's probably another orientation that's like, how do I, I don't know, it's the Henrik line, like, make contact with reality.

25:23Nicole Seah:world and make it yield something. Yeah.

25:25Nix:How do you do that?

25:26Nicole Seah:Yeah. I think it's saying your ideas out loud and testing them. And, you know, there's been moments where people have shut down my ideas and it's always really humbling. My gosh, it's like really humbling. But in hindsight, I've always been really grateful for those moments as well, because perhaps there was some truth in them. Perhaps there was something I have yet to learn and have to incorporate into the work to make it better. And so having a sort of an intellectual honesty as well is really important.

25:57Nix:When that often relies on, like you have to externalize it to be totally intellectually honest sometimes. Yes. Like it's very hard to realize you're in the fantasy world.

26:10Nicole Seah:Right. It's not good thinking alone, you know?

26:12Nix:Right. Right. Back to the boy in the hair, like that you so well, you make such an excellent point. Like that's what that film is about, basically it's like the fan the dreamland is pretty appealing like and it's almost like why are you yeah why are you leaving i i think it's really easy to lull myself into believing my fantasies unless i'm forced like and i i don't know one example is i've been fortunate to have friends who are like smack you across the face oh there's a uh you you alluded to it earlier there's a David White quote I think we both quite like a lot. He says, whatever human being desires for themselves will not come about exactly as they first imagined it or first laid it out in their minds.

26:57Nix:What always happens is the meeting between what you desire from your world and what the world desires of you. It's this frontier where you overhear yourself and you overhear the world. Maybe this relates to the notion you were pointing out of, I think it's changed maybe four or five years ago with the writing, but you had said it's important, referencing that I think, it's important to overhear the world rather than narrate it in advance. And there's an element of the planning thing about that. But again, this is back to the more subtle part of it. What does it feel like to like overhear the world?

27:32Nicole Seah:Yeah, well, maybe this is a naive or innocent point of view, but I do see the world as sort of benevolent and sort of narrating it internally in your head it actually closes you off to any sort of external information or external redirection or any sort of feedback. And I think it's always dangerous when you close yourself off to feedback or you live in like a sealed chamber. It's much more useful to actually see the world, talk to people. And even when you're getting bad feedback, it's actually kind of benevolent. People are telling you that something's not registering, something's not working.

28:14Nicole Seah:and yeah, I remember this moment in art class. I used to paint a lot. We can talk about that, but before I wrote and I used to paint acrylics and my art teacher came up behind me and was like, oh, you know, this painting, it could be so much richer and deeper if you had these different, if you added these different colors to it. And I was like, great, let me just try it out. And the art teacher came to me later and said, you're the least defensive person I've met. Like you just are like ready to try things out. And I'm not sure if it's going to work out, but you are ready to put new colors on the painting.

28:50Nicole Seah:And I always think about that line of like putting new colors on the painting as like a frame in which I think to view the world.

28:57Nix:Are you that way with things outside of painting or with writing?

29:01Nicole Seah:Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

29:03Nix:Huh. Where do you think that, does that come from that experience? Like what, have you always been like that?

29:08Nicole Seah:Yeah, maybe it's a sense of eagelessness yeah or i believe in like and it's not necessarily true that i have no ego but um you know i think everyone does if we're honest to ourselves but i think trying the best to be um egoless in the pursuit of beauty or in pursuit of craft i think is very important and you have to balance that with sort of your your opinionation about what you should be doing as well um of course but um there are some aspect of like okay don't take yourself too seriously sometimes

29:41Nix:So this is, as I was doing a prep for this, like I was finding myself kind of continuing to swing on this pendulum. And I think this is starting to get at it, which is what you just said has this lightness and this almost like Zen like quality of just like go back to like the reality is better than fantasy. And I should just be really, really open to it. And I should be loose and egoless. and yet you are a person who, and certainly someone who writes about intensity and deep effort and seriousness. There's a bit where you say, beauty is effort. Effort is monstrous and ugly, but it also is the source of everything beautiful in this world.

30:22Nix:And then somewhere else in writing and in life, you need to gnaw on the bone. This kind of goes back to the reality thing, meaning get under the skin, get into the crevices. Writing has become bloodless and fake, but people create the real. And so it's like, am I making up this tension?

30:37Nicole Seah:No, there's definitely a tension. Yeah.

30:39Nix:But like you're like that story about the painter, like that would, people who don't know you very well would be like, wow, Nicole must just be like, so like la-di-da, kind of like very vibes based. Like, and we'll talk more about this later, but like in some sense, you have a creative life, primarily in writing, that is probably a little bit more in that way. But still you write about Timothee Chalamet and intensity and seriousness. And then you have a professional life as an investor that's like much harder. Maybe it's like hard and soft. But like, yeah, that seems, those two things seem so at odds.

31:12Nicole Seah:Yeah, well, I think that you put it really well, which is I have multiple identities. And the reason why they feel at odds is because sometimes those identities conflict or come into friction with one another. I don't know if you read the short story Borges and I. No. Borges, an Argentinian writer. I think you'd really like a short story. And it's about him and having a separate writer self and then himself. And they're sort of like circling around each other and one wins, but who is it? Wow. And I don't know, I read that and I really related because there is these two parts, and there's always dueling parts of me, which is one of this very serious, intense side and then this more playful light side.

31:56Nicole Seah:And maybe disambiguating those identities has been really helpful to get at that, to separate out that tension as well.

32:03Nix:Do you, are you, are you taking that on from almost like a persona sense? Like, I don't know, people talk about, when I'm writing, I'll take on a persona or when I'm performing, I'll take on a persona. When I'm at work, like, do you feel that duality in your, when you're at work versus when you're writing versus when you're in your, the rest of your life? Or is it a little bit subtler?

32:21Nicole Seah:I do feel the distinction. Yeah. And it's something I'm working to bridge.

32:27Nix:And so the implication in there is that that it should be bridged? Like is some separation good?

32:31Nicole Seah:Maybe, I mean, maybe I don't have answers here. But yeah, I do think that there is, maybe you can successfully have them separate. And my personal endeavor is to bridge them slightly more.

32:46Nix:Yeah, I think maybe, not to try to attempt to answer my own question, but it does seem that both aspects of that for you, the playfulness and the lightness and the intensity, kind of are about loving what is real. Like they're different cuts on that maybe, but they both are in service of that, it seems. Yeah, I think there are a bunch of books

33:13Nicole Seah:by the German author Hermann Hesse that I love. And all his books are about duality. If you read any of them, like Siddhartha, Glaspin, and Narcissus and Goldman. Narcissus and Goldman is probably the most relevant here, But it's about these two monks. One of them is very aesthetic and lives in the tower and becomes this really, you know, intellectual and teacher, professor of sorts. And the other is sort of this, you know, man of the world goes into the world, you know, engages in acts of sensuality and violence and all of these sort of like raw things. And at the end of the novel, they come back together and have a conversation.

33:54Nicole Seah:and really when I left that when I read that novel I was like wow like this is us like this is everyone this is me first of all and this is everyone I've ever known which is there's one part of you that's in the tower and there's one part of you in the world and you're constantly dueling between the two and he doesn't pass any judgment as well it's not like oh one is better than the other but one is each is its own integral nature and you have to fulfill your integral nature So maybe that's a non-answer, but.

34:24Nix:I love that answer. I'm probably stretching it, but it reminds me a little bit of my dinner with Andre, if you've ever seen that film.

34:30Nicole Seah:I haven't.

34:31Nix:It's not quite the same, but it's a similar element of sort of duality and not, it really doesn't seem that director is taking too much of an opinion, which is maybe the critical part.

34:43Nicole Seah:Yeah.

34:44Nix:And that certainly describes Siddhartha too.

34:48Nix:on the on the seriousness kind of like effort commitment thing you have a bit where you say when you meet someone with devotion and care for their craft they have a thinner they have thinner barriers between their soul and the external world their soul shines lightly on the surface of their being again i know i'm hitting this over and over again but like that duality is there again which is like that's kind of a like a surprising description of a very serious person. Like their soul shines lightly on the surface of their being. Yeah, I think in that piece, you're referencing Chalamet. This was a year ago, so when he was doing it.

35:23Nix:And like, I both agree with you, but it seems so like when you think of a seriousness, it's like.

35:28Nicole Seah:Yeah. Well, maybe my thesis is that maybe my thesis is or my unspoken thesis is that it is through seriousness that you find playfulness or it's through seriousness that you find this level of, I guess, skating through the world. Like if you think about Miyazaki, right? I write about Miyazaki a lot and I care a lot about his work and he's a great inspiration to me. He hand drew his frames until well into the 70s when there was all the CGI available and there's this one amazing interview where he says, I was thinking about how to make the dragon move. And he's like, I actually went to a restaurant and I looked at the eels wriggling around And I thought, you ever seen an eel move like that?

36:13Nicole Seah:It's amazing. And he's just has like, he's unable, constitutionally unable to not care. And I think that is what makes this film so light and beautiful. And when you watch a Miyazaki film, it's got all these dualities inside of them too, right? There's all these children who have to grow up too early. There are these like wars and famines and fires and, you know, lost children and the like. But at the end of the movie, you come away feeling like, oh, that was a beautiful, playful, light expression of art. So I think maybe my thought is that there can be both. There always is both.

36:53Nix:I think you're really – I've been wrestling with this a little bit and it's come up in conversations where it's like we had this moment maybe that circled around the figure skater, Alyssa Liu. and it was the whole thing was like, like having like the intense person gets crushed by the person who's having fun. It's like Novak Djokovic, I like hitting the tennis ball. There's all these stories. I was just talking to Nick Thompson about this ultra runner, Killian Jernay, I think. And he's like, everybody's pissed because he's just having a blast out there.

37:23Nicole Seah:Right, yeah.

37:24Nix:And this also relates to like, find the thing that feels like play to you that feels like work to everyone else. And I've had this conversation with a bunch of people in real life who are kind of like, but like how much of it should be like play should it be 20 should be 60 do other people who it feels like a play to 100 and then meanwhile may it's not true for all creatives but certainly writers you talk to writers every writer's like i hate writing but also it's so excruciatingly meaningful and so i'm like i really struggle with this is like should it feel easier or should it feel intense and hard and i think i think your answer is my sense is to go back to alissa lu Like my sense is Alyssa is someone who is deeply serious.

38:04Nicole Seah:100%.

38:05Nix:That doesn't mean it's toxic, but it also doesn't mean it's like all loosey-goosey easy all the time.

38:11Nicole Seah:Right. But the expression of it is playful.

38:13Nix:Yes.

38:14Nicole Seah:Right? When you see her on ice, she's just clearly having so much fun. Maybe I'm projecting onto her.

38:19Nix:But also because she's done the work. She put in the work.

38:20Nicole Seah:Because she's done the work. And so then on ice, she can sort of relax in some ways because her body and her muscle memory is carrying her through that piece. Yeah.

38:30Nix:Yeah, I mean, we could talk about this all day. The challenge, I guess, is like, I don't know if you've seen, have you seen Miyazaki and the Heron, the documentary they most recently made? And it's, I'm sure it's like any of them. Like, he's amazing. There's like, there's a line in there, he's like, if we don't create, there is nothing. But like, I don't think he's having fun. Like, he is deeply burdened. And so I think people usually swing to one way or the other. And that's like the thing that, my sense is you were right. I think Alyssa Liu on the ice for the Olympic gold was really, truly like living it, present in it.

39:04Nix:Maybe that's specific to a performer or whatever. And yet, I think she did the work on the interim. Maybe it's just like getting to the point where you're like able to put in all this intensity and then let yourself like drop the weights.

39:19Nicole Seah:Yes, exactly. Well, there's this Joan Didion. I read the Joan Didion collected interviews last week. and one of the lines I saved in there was, salvation comes from extreme and doomed commitments. I wrote that down. It's a banger. It's such a banger. But also, like, you know, and she's asked later, there's an interview where that line is said and later the interviewer is like, oh, so you think it's a doomed commitment? She said, no, I think it's salvation.

39:47Nix:She was talking about her marriage, right? I think I said. Marriage, children, and writing.

39:51Nicole Seah:And so she's like, no, I think that's salvation actually.

39:55Nix:But it's both.

39:56Nicole Seah:But it's both. It's both, right? It's a commitment. It's also salvation.

40:00Nix:You were referencing that same bit and you say, I've always related deeply to a romantic ethic. For a while, writing was a sort of long haul dread, a seasickness that wouldn't abate even when I reached land. Do you still feel that way?

40:14Nicole Seah:I go in waves. Yeah. I go in waves. I'm sure you feel that way too, but there are moments where writing just feels effortless and easy. and there are moments where I know that, oh, I have to dig and excavate something and it's going to require some level of concentration and effort. I'm currently writing a piece about Robert Caro and sort of power broker and also his process and it's something I really admire, but I actually have to do the reading, which is, you know, man, it's a dance, it's a slog, but it's really meaningful.

40:55Nix:yeah you have a there's an old piece you wrote i think quite old about like peaks and troughs and you're i forget the specific word you phrasing you're using but you're talking about it's sort of just like yeah like i uh one of my first guest ever the podcast jason lewis says confidence the memory success and i think there's an element of that it's like knowing i gotta do the slug again but like i've been here before and like i know what's good on the other side which maybe

41:16Nicole Seah:makes it a little easier as you progress oh yeah totally do you find that the amount of slug

41:22Nix:is pretty constant or is it, are you getting lighter? Like is it getting more and more easy over time?

41:29Nicole Seah:It's getting easier to accept. Right.

41:33Nix:It's the paradigm. Yeah.

41:36Nicole Seah:Yeah.

41:37Nix:Yeah. Oh, that's funny. That's really funny.

41:46How has, again, very much on the same note,

41:50Nix:but how has on the note of doomed commitments, like how has commitment to yourself, to your writing, maybe on the note of like sort of making yourself proud, like how have you used, actually maybe a specific kind of silly reference that maybe captured what I'm getting at is, you'd referenced Murakami on his routine. And he says, the repetition itself becomes the important thing. It's a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. And maybe it's a simple question about habits. Maybe it's a deeper question along the lines of what you're getting at. But how have you, you're someone who has, you don't write professionally, at least currently.

42:31Nix:And you have a deep, deep commitment to it. Without some kind of super, like you don't have, you don't write daily necessarily, you don't write weekly. And yet you seem to have a real commitment to that. How does that happen? Is that, did it start with more scaffolding and now it's lighter? Does it still have a lot of scaffolding?

42:47Nicole Seah:Yeah, I think it's part of my identity now. And I think that's how all change happens, where you integrate it into part of yourself or part of your identity. It's interesting because I've been writing online publicly for four years now. But I've been writing since I was maybe like 10 years old. And in lots of embarrassing outlets. You know, I was like, what, Pad, Blogspot, WordPress, Wix, like all of these weird Tumblr, you know, I was on all these weird internet sites, like writing things. And there was always like fan fiction or fantasy and all these things. And so it's sort of a continuation of that younger child in me that was always writing.

43:25Nicole Seah:And I also wrote a pretty big poetry portfolio and thought poetry was the craft. And I still think that there are some poetic sensibilities in the writing, but they're not so condensed in form. But it is sort of a how do you develop good faith in other people? You develop good faith by trusting that another person is going to say what they're going to do and show up at the right time and do the thing to the best of their ability. And I think that really applies to yourself, which is how do you have good faith in yourself? Is that you actually do the thing you're going to say you say you're going to do.

43:58I think that's been a big, you know, contributor to continuing the writing because I've told myself I'm going to show up here.

44:07Nicole Seah:and I don't want to let myself down the way I wouldn't want to let a friend down. Do you have a relation to yourself with most things,

44:18Nix:with only writing, with some things?

44:20Nicole Seah:Maybe multiple things. Writing creativity. I'm quite serious about work as well as an investor. I'm also quite serious about fitness. So maybe those three, yeah.

44:33Nix:Creatively, you reference poetry and painting both. are those kind of like moons circling the sun of writing or the things kind of come and go like did you ever have that commitment level with painting or other things i tried um i think

44:46Nicole Seah:that there's only one really maybe this is uh you know uh maybe it's not true because there's been a lot of artists who are multi-disciplinary but i do think if you actually want to get really good at one particular medium it it benefits you to spend more time in that medium and painting is It's just a very long, like very, you need a lot of patience to paint a lot.

45:08Nix:I mean, you need a lot of patience to write a lot too. Yeah.

45:11Nicole Seah:So writing and painting, it's just like, okay, then I have time for nothing else in my life. Right.

45:18Nix:You also, you wrote a recent piece kind of referencing this Michael Nielsen idea and this idea of one of the questions I was thinking of as you were speaking is like, the good The good thing about commitments and good faith is that at some point it stops being like a habit or something or something you're really trying to do and it starts to become an identity. I am someone who writes. And yet in this kind of piece, and I think in some of what Michael's referencing, he's talking about sort of like the lightness of identity of a writer. You say, when you free yourself from what Nielsen calls the tyranny of writing as primary identity, you can be free to choose for yourself what kind of writing you want to do and surface your other multiple identities, scientist, researcher, investor, designer, founder.

46:00Nix:and then you say, instead I chose the word sustaining creative aliveness because creative aliveness is the process of discovery, collection, synthesis, and then finally expression. And so it's funny, like, it seems like you do really have a deep identity level commitment to being a writer or being someone who writes maybe. And yet it seems maybe even now is, and we'll talk about it in a little bit, like as your kind of creative and professional lives are converging a little bit as you, like writing is sort of this deep identity thing and it's this tool maybe maybe the broader point here that i think you you also get at is like many people silo their creative lives and their professional lives and writing maybe more so than painting is easier to bring into other worlds but yeah it's like it seems like you're holding this writing thing really really firmly but you're also like not needing to let it define who you like the person you are it's like it's still a tool

47:05Nicole Seah:maybe maybe the point that we keep circling back to is that i feel that it's fine to have multiple identities and writing can be one of those identities and in service of all these other identities and you don't have to have this maybe as michael nielsen says tyranny of one identity. I think when you silo yourself into one particular identity, be it, you know, maybe it's an investor, maybe it's a writer, whatever, then you actually close yourself off to all these other things that you're interested in. And it's actually fine to be, you know, multifaceted and multi identity person. And, and it's okay for that to be slightly illegible as well.

47:46Nix:do you think that we can form new identities or are we just like is it more like um harvesting or or inventing that's a great question

48:00Nicole Seah:man i don't know i think it's harvesting yeah i think it's harvesting i think things show up early

48:06Nix:you know i think things show up early but we maybe neglect that you don't water that or whatever

48:11Nicole Seah:Yeah, and you don't water it. I'm sure that there's a life in which I could have become a painter, but I chose not to become a painter.

48:19Nix:Does that life feel totally gone, lost to you?

48:23Nicole Seah:No, I think at some point maybe I'll harvest that identity. It'll be another one in my little box.

48:28Nix:Yeah, maybe that's an elegant sort of model for much of what we've been discussing, which is like there are all these sort of like seeds and things in your garden.

48:35Nicole Seah:Yep.

48:36Nix:And you can like spend all your time. You can like build a big wall in the middle of the garden. You can just spend your time over here. You can kind of have two kind of core parts of the garden. You can go back to things. And then maybe in the sort of fullness of time and maturity, you eventually you like look around and you realize it's just one garden. Yeah, I like that a lot, yeah. Yeah, I appreciate you checking me on the, clearly I'm trying to like force everything into one jumble instinctively or otherwise. you maybe did talk about bringing things together very recently, just yesterday, two days ago, launched the beginning of a new project, which I think is cool to see at least an aspect of two parts of your identity come together, which is this like one, on one hand, like historically, a lot of your writing is like more poetic and personal and for a long time was even synonymous.

49:34Nix:And then you have this other life, which is like someone who's deeply committed to, on one hand, like technology startups, but I think really like dreamers building really impressive big things. You say, I enjoy the work I do with early-stage software because it's all about telling ambitious stories of technology, failure, reconstruction, and where fantasy confronts reality markets whilst casting a romantic hope for the future. This is beautiful. I'd love to just hear about what New Ontologies is, where it came from. We can talk a little bit about Ando 2 in a minute, but like what is behind this?

50:07Nix:and how has it felt to sort of like find this bridging in parts of your life?

50:13Nicole Seah:Yeah, well, in sort of the tagline of Neo-Antologies, the website, the tagline is, how do we talk more ambitiously about the future? And when I was reflecting on that tagline or reflecting on what this project is, I thought about it as, how do we access ambition at different scales? and on one scale and one way to talk about ambition is this really large moonshot vision of the future. How do we make reality malleable to our inventions? How do we, you know, that quote, which is like the world is just a museum of passion projects. How do we make those projects come to life? But I am just as interested in that aspect as I am the more individual aspect of it, which is what's our personal locus of possibility and how do we expand it?

51:03Nicole Seah:and so I think where you see these things add up together is wow okay I want to talk about the ambitious future but I also care about the ambitious future in a smaller way in a more local way in a more community oriented way I want people to yeah wake up and think like oh hey I can do this thing I can push myself a little bit further I'm living my internal and external worlds are congruent with each other and I am pushing, you know, I am expanding my worldview. And I think the way I've done that personally is through conversations with friends, conversations with people building great companies, and basically an understanding that my life is very constrained and there are all these possibilities that I'm maybe not aware of.

51:48Nicole Seah:So that's maybe a long answer, but I think the point of neo-antologies is to be, to show you like hey there's this angle of like software can be incredibly empowering and we can use software to create all these new concepts and new ontology means sort of like new concepts of the world and you can like enter this rich intellectual world and you know learn a lot about it but i also care about um as you go more granular into the individual which is you know the founder or the person doing this thing how did they get here why are they doing this um how can we learn from them And so merging sort of this larger picture ambition with this more granular ambition is maybe the goal for this project.

52:30Nicole Seah:And maybe that's a lofty goal, but it's something I've been thinking about.

52:34Nix:Why do you think you're attracted to these types of stories? And clearly you've been long attracted to them, like much longer than you were doing this project. I think even on some level, like being a venture capitalist, like there's some draw there. Or what is it about like this kind of corner of the world?

52:51Nicole Seah:I've always loved Dreamers. I mean, even beginning from the poetry days or the writing about fiction days, it's like, oh, if you like fiction, you like dreaming. You like fiction, you like being immersed in a different world. And I think what these founders are doing are creating these new conceptual frames of reality that are very compelling. and a lot of these frames actually become the future landscape of technology. All of these ideas actually harvest and become much larger things. And I've always been really excited about the early days, like the early clay of forming things before they're fully legible and they will become legible.

53:41Nicole Seah:And so I'm just interested in that moment of change.

53:44Nix:Well, it's not just legibility too. There's an element of like, it's fantasy and reality meeting.

53:49Nicole Seah:Yeah, exactly. Maybe it goes back to that, which is like, oh yeah, we're always looking for when the frontier of when fantasy meets reality.

53:58Nix:There's a, maybe to reference Ando specifically in that piece, the first kind of profile you've done on Ando and Sarah, you say, her story reminded me of a Greek term I like, tekne, which you, I might pronounce it wrong. Techni? Techni? Yeah. Comes up all over your writing. Techni, which means craft grounded in practice. A founder builds a particular shape of company out of their techni, all their experiences, personal craft, and taste that they bring to the work. I'd love to hear about that as a, I think your lofty answer was good. The thing that, one of the things that feels very true about your interest is to call this back to everything we're talking about, seriousness, but also this project specifically is that even in the like, Like you and I had a conversation about this.

54:42Nix:It's in the piece, like the care over linguistics and like little forms. And they allude to, like all these little things. Like what is it? And maybe what opportunity is there to, I would expect that's a theme that will, to the extent you keep doing this, will continue to show up in new ways. Like what do you see there?

55:02Nicole Seah:Yeah, well, I think that story was really compelling to me because Sarah is a second time founder. And I think much of her learning in that reflection of starting a new company was, you know, I'm good at these things, but what am I truly great at? And what is my natural leverage in this world? And what's the type of company that should come out of that natural leverage? I don't think a lot of us actually do that really deep work, which is maybe you get pulled into things that you think you're supposed to do or other people have in mind for you. But really, what's your true talent and gift in this world?

55:36Nicole Seah:And how can you put that into practice, put that into motion? and so technique is a very you know beautiful term and something that i think about a lot another sort of related concept is what rebecca solnit a writer talks about the cosmology of self right which is like everything that you make whether it's a company a piece of writing a podcast is uh this amalgamation of your experiences in the world you know how you grew up all the things you read, all of the people you've met. It's a collection of these things brought into the furnace of something and come out the other side. And she writes this line, which is like, underneath the task of writing a specific piece is making the self who can make the work you're meant to.

56:22Nix:Yeah. And I just. It's like the exhaust.

56:25Nicole Seah:Exactly. It's exhaust, which is like, you never look at this fully formed thing and be, and maybe you do and you think it's wonderful and amazing and this fully formed asset or whatever but actually what you really see in this very subtle moment is how a person's entire being has gone into this thing and I think this applies to companies 100 % like look at any like Notion for example or Ramp or any of these very large significant companies are you can actually trace back the lineage and the sense of this ineffable feeling that it's come from the founder, right?

57:02Nix:It's Apple Steve Jobs with 10 ,000 lives.

57:04Nicole Seah:Exactly, exactly. And you and I read Christopher Alexander, and one who's an architectural theorist, and one of his concepts is, you know, all these little patterns are what makes a space come alive. And all these little patterns in like, everything that you do makes your work come alive, makes your company come alive makes your um yeah it makes your your work more whole and more you if that makes sense um

57:33Nix:so i'm interested in exploring that um yes i'm gonna go back to it one more time because i i can't help myself the the sarah example um second company obviously like uh not quite the same idea but so much of what you're just talking about is very related to like the ikigai the idea it's like Like, how do you sort of find this convergence? And that feels, whereas previously, as I understand it, Sarah's previous company, Alloy, like less of, but she's also like, maybe like you, like very intense driven striver who also cares about these other things, craft and de-da-da-da. And so my assumption is that Sarah in her previous founding role had more of like separate identities.

58:17Nix:Yes. and now and so maybe I'm maybe I'm answering my own question but like on one hand you seem okay with like it's okay to have different identities and you don't have to force them together I think for any young person it's like how should I be trying to find the thing that is it a guy now or should I like do my creative stuff and my professional stuff and then eventually converge it and you seem so interested like it's not it's not inherently intentioned I it's not like total paradox, but it does seem that like, maybe you're just like patient with the fact that there are going to be sort of dualities and at some point they'll come together and when they come together, it's really beautiful.

58:55Nicole Seah:Yeah, well, I think it's a process of discovery. I think you find Ikigai after a long route. And you don't force it. And you don't have to force it, yeah. And I'm sure if you, you know, talk to any founder, they're probably like, hey, the thing that I landed on, the thing that worked actually took a long time to get. Even think about artists. I mean, look at Monet. I mean, I was just looking at the Monet Water Lily exhibition and he painted water lilies 250 times. And it's just incredible, right? But it's like, okay, it just took a lot of time to get right. And I think having that grace is also really important.

59:32Nix:Grace is the right word. Yeah, not only something like you probably literally can't force the convergence.

59:40Nicole Seah:Yeah.

59:41Nix:I think of Robert Irwin as well, like drawing the lines, like just, yeah, just, and I almost wonder what like someone like that, maybe, I don't know if Monet did this, but he's like almost trying to like, with through so much repetition, he's just trying to like have the ego part of it, like fall away. Like that's probably the main reason we actually can't converge faster. Is there just like, it's, it's your, am I overhearing the world or am I trying to narrowize it? Yeah.

1:00:08Nicole Seah:And I think importantly, as we circle around this question of like, okay, there's lots of dualities, lots of identities, you can be multiple things, you can be one thing, all of these like, you know, different things is that I think it's important to note that in my writing, I'm not actually trying to be prescriptive. I am trying to be a peer or like I'm trying to stand next to the person. And like I said, whatever is your personal locus of possibility, I want to expand that in you or like in the reader. and I'm not actually trying to teach someone or say how things should be or tell you that you should merge these identities.

1:00:40Nicole Seah:It's more like, hey, can you walk next to me while I am trying to figure this out for myself and can we learn something together? So I think that's maybe the frame I'm coming from.

1:00:52Nix:It's interesting. Perhaps this isn't correct, but it reminds me a bit of Joan Didion in the way that she, I was talking to somebody this week and I was observing that like in slouching towards Bethlehem, I sort of much preferred her personal writing and notes and things to even some of the reporting. But on some level, like she tries to convey this aspect, maybe this isn't exactly the same, she tries to convey this aspect of like, I'm not putting myself into this totally, or at the very least, I'm not trying to tell you anything. Like I'm just kind of observing.

1:01:22Nicole Seah:Yeah.

1:01:23Nix:But in so doing, there's a huge amount of self in it. And it's like, yeah, I don't know. It really works well. What do you hope this becomes?

1:01:34Nicole Seah:New ontologies? I hope that it becomes an archive or, you know, documenting a very important time in technology, first of all. I think watching the shapes of new companies being built in this time. Well, there's some legendary companies that are going to be built in this era. And I just want to be involved in writing those stories, first of all. And then second, I hope that it touches on that ambition thing again, which is, okay I am looking at a person creating something new how can I in my own life find the agency and the hope and the ambition to do something of my own and it doesn't have to be big it doesn't have to be a company but how do I actually push myself to achieve greatness or improve myself in this more personal way as well Hmm.

1:02:28Nix:Hmm. Do you think it will make you a better investor?

1:02:33Nicole Seah:Yes, I think so.

1:02:35Nix:Why?

1:02:36Nicole Seah:I think it's, well, it's something about, so I guess some backdrop is, you know, I spent almost a month with them, kind of in and out of the office and lots of walks with Sarah and Uber rides and dinners. And I think the thing that came out of it was actually just watching someone work ambiently is really important.

1:02:56Nix:It's a different level of access.

1:02:58Nicole Seah:It's a different level of access.

1:02:59Nix:almost anyone's gave it certainly a vc or somebody's gonna get right um and it's just yeah it's a different level of uh um you know i think there's always this sense of like

1:03:09Nicole Seah:masking in some ways when you're meeting in a very contrived state where it's like i'm an investor and you're a founder you know it's just like 30 minute window block yeah it's like 30 minutes i you know it's a hard stop you know what i mean and i i don't really like i i think that the practice of actually not having hard stops is really important. You know, I've always admired people that actually go the extra mile. And, you know, an example is, you know, someone I know, a partner on the team, you know, flew to this very remote part of Canada for this team and pretended, you know, and acted as their intern and, you know, got them coffee and donuts, you know, so it's just, it's just one of these levels where you get to know someone on a very deep and and everyday level, which I guess gives you patterns or helps you understand what you're looking for in people.

1:04:02That's cool.

1:04:04Nix:Do you have a call for anything, any types of founders or companies you're looking for? Or is somebody who reaching out to you, like you do not want to be a part of any club that would have you as a member?

1:04:12Nicole Seah:That's funny. No, I'm very, I mean, I'm looking for the right fit with me as well.

1:04:19Nix:What does that mean? I'm even curious what that means in your day job too.

1:04:24Nicole Seah:Right, yeah. I think it's more creative leaning, a little oddball, you know, lyrical, appreciates art, thinks a lot about, you know, both the technically interesting parts that I can share about the product, but also the poetic sensibilities that come with that.

1:04:47Nix:um why is that not just like that's cute but like why does that do you think that has any impact on success if we were to zoom way out and be like okay all the humanity that's cool it's cool that Sarah likes to know like but like either she's going to sell enterprise sass or she's not right

1:05:04Nicole Seah:well I push back a little on that because um let's use and as an example like and it was like a software product but it's it's it's also in some ways a cultural product right you're gonna And actually, if we think about, you know, Andro is an AI native Slack or a Slack built from scratch for agents. If you think about it, we spend so much time on this platform every single day. And the way the notifications impact us is actually.

1:05:29Nix:Psychological.

1:05:31Nicole Seah:It's psychosocial. It's, you know, it's actually like, you know, a really interesting human aspect of it. And so much of what she's trying to do and something I really like is that she's trying to make this experience feel different. and in making something feel different and making an interface feel different, it unlocks this sort of agency or experience in a human being that is almost close to enjoyment or flow or allows you to step into creativity in a different way.

1:05:59Nix:Or certainly prevent the opposite, which most messaging platforms just hijack my, like, right.

1:06:05Nicole Seah:Yeah. And so I do believe that there's something there around, there's something there about like competitive differentiation, which is like, maybe you need a founder who actually understands culture.

1:06:17Nix:Yes. And when there's certainly, I love the psychosocial point. Maybe there's an always has been element of this, but certainly looking forward, the delineation that like the tool you use while you're at work, eight hours of your day shouldn't like, like it doesn't matter. As long as it's useful, it doesn't matter how it feels. maybe that was tolerated for a long time but like it certainly doesn't seem like it will probably be tolerated for much longer

1:06:44Nicole Seah:right

1:06:49Nix:yeah I'm really curious to see I mean obviously I'm partially asking that question to play this as an advocate I'm certainly hopeful that these things matter but I also do wonder if it's a little bit romantic and maybe it depends on the thing like a chat app is probably as like consumery as you're going to get for an enterprise tool.

1:07:13Nicole Seah:Yeah, well, the way you put it, which is, well, this kind of product, you don't really do outbound sales on it. And maybe in an enterprise SaaS, if you're selling to maybe insurance carriers, that's maybe a slightly different frame.

1:07:27Nix:Right, but why can't that be more beautiful?

1:07:29Nicole Seah:That can also be more beautiful, yeah.

1:07:31Nix:Now we have enough abundance.

1:07:33Nicole Seah:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Use and beauty are not also that separate. Trade-offs. Right? Which is like, if something's more beautiful, you might use it more. And so I think there is some link there.

1:07:46Nix:How do you think about like, this is so silly, but like, what do you think of like Amazon? Like Amazon is so not beautiful. Right, but it's so useful.

1:07:54Nicole Seah:Ubiquity and scale is also useful, right? Yeah. But let's say, well, let's use that example, right? Like if there's an Amazon that has the same ubiquity and scale and has the same, you can buy the same things, but it's a much more beautiful interface. Are you, are you wedded to Amazon as a brand?

1:08:12Nix:Right. And I don't know if I would use the word beauty, but at least effectiveness. There is a case to be made that like you're looking the wrong thing, that Amazon's buttons don't matter. The beauty in that experience is that you can press a button and have something appear. I don't know if it's beautiful. Like that's a.

1:08:26Nicole Seah:Yeah. maybe the point is that the core of the thing is whatever it is that you're perceiving the core of the thing to be has to align with the pattern of distribution or something like that.

1:08:40Nix:Yeah, I mean, to put it a different way, maybe it's like, did you, this is cliche, but like, did you truly sweat the details on the part that really matters?

1:08:49Nicole Seah:On the part that matters. Yeah. Yeah.

1:08:51Nix:I like that a lot. I mean, well, I'm very excited for the future of new ontologies. Hopefully there will be many more to come. I want to talk a little bit. I'm just curious to, you did a, and I don't know if you put any of this out publicly, but you did some work on memory this year, or last year, last year. There's a specific thing that stood out to me reading some of your notes around latent versus living memory. And this idea that like, you sort of frame it as like latent memory is the potential to be recalled and shared and living memory is relationally created. How does living memory change when you prompt it or activate it on your own in writing versus when it's actually relational?

1:09:31Nix:Is there a delineation there?

1:09:34Nicole Seah:Yeah, maybe first to give credit to that idea, it actually comes from Kie Kretler's work on artificial memory and the reading that she's done there. And I love that so much. And I used it as part of the presentation. I also talked to Kie. So just want to say that first. but her whole point is that or maybe her point mixed with my point is that you know the study of memory that I did was two-pronged one is understanding the mediums in which writing and memory and history have been have changed over time and what has that done and then the second which is more of a like okay technology what does memory mean right now context management thing but if we focus back on your question which is like how do we think about living memory versus latent memory, I think part of it is understanding, like, how does memory get transmitted communally?

1:10:26So an example of this is, you know, in the past,

1:10:30Nicole Seah:writing used to be on all of these different mediums, like stone, paper, tablet, and all of these history and words used to be moved around physically, right? You'd have to like physically be in the room. And with the invention of, you know, things like the printing press became this dissemination of a large corpus of knowledge that you could access anywhere. And, you know, Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan kind of frame it as, okay, now you're going back into the individual, you can sit alone and reflect on the things that you've written, reflect on the things that you've done. And so maybe the point that I'm trying to make there is sort of like, there is this one form of historical memory that was a transmission, a communal, you know, expression of memory and then there's one where you're sitting alone in a room and sort of cogitating and and thinking about things in the past and synthesizing them bring them to the present um and they're just two different forms it's funny that makes me think about like that's happened to

1:11:31Nix:like most of media yeah like i mean it's still an example you think about like a film used to be this really almost spiritual experience of like we're gonna go project something on the wall of the cave like we're gonna you're gonna sit in a room with a bunch of other people and they project magical story on the wall. And now we sit in our beds on our phones privately with our private screens. There's an element of that too, that I think probably extends beyond just the memory implications, which is like the, yeah, the way that that so much of that experience when it's even when you're just looking at a phone with another person, it's like such a different experience.

1:12:05Nicole Seah:Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's this, I think you'd like this metaphor, but there was In one of the books that I read, I'm forgetting the name, it's probably in Elizabeth Eisenstein's printing press book, was this example of the cave. And one of the caves, one of the historical caves that they were looking at or looking into, and I think Werner Herzog talks about that as well in his films, is that you go into the cave and it hasn't been touched. But when you do analysis on the cave, actually, some of the drawings were like 10 ,000 years old and some were like 5 ,000 years old. There was a continuation of something.

1:12:45Nix:Yes.

1:12:46Nicole Seah:A lineage. Yeah, like a lineage. And I think that's really powerful, right? And I think writing works this way too. We return to the point of like, oh, how do we think about writing as memory? Which is that I think that writing is not a static thing. It's something that people continue to iterate on. and they think about your idea, and they relate back to a different idea. The example of Michael Nielsen, he wrote a piece on developing creative identity, which I remixed and said, hey, this is how I think of creative identity for myself. And so this remix culture or this more communal sense of memory is something that I'm quite interested in thinking about.

1:13:22Nix:Do you think we're losing it?

1:13:25Nicole Seah:Do I think we're losing it? I don't know if I'd say we're losing it. I think there's a lot more remixing happening.

1:13:35Nix:It's true. What was my intuition pointing at there? Yeah, it feels like one aspect of that muscle, like it's easier for anything to be... Maybe what I'm pointing at is we have less collective text, which is maybe a different idea. But I'm thinking of this canon of the cave,

1:13:57Nicole Seah:of the fig and the k and yeah well maybe if you think about it um where where look now we have all of these ai tools um then the um collection of texts or collection of prompts and responses are like siloed in these little like in these little channels that are just between you and

1:14:18Nix:an ai thing oh oh oh i see i thought you're gonna go there is like there's another aspect of which which is actually a model trained is sort of a version of this corpus.

1:14:28Nicole Seah:Right, yeah. But it's different permutations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are two different orientations.

1:14:33Nix:What broadly did you learn or conclude? A ton of this work was specifically around LMS and memory. What did, and even a lot has changed in six months. I think so much of the, at least the technical side of the work was about context windows and so on and so forth. Now they're just getting bigger. But what have you concluded? And maybe what perspectives do you have in your personal use of memory with these tools and what's good or bad or what direction things should kind of be pushed?

1:14:57Nicole Seah:Yeah, well, it's funny. After I completed that research, it was a three-month sort of project on memory, I thought, well, maybe this is going to be relevant, maybe not. And then actually, while I was writing the Ando piece, so much of Ando is context management and how do you feed the agent the right thing at the right time? How do you create new... The longer context window isn't actually better. We're thinking about retrieval and all of these different ways to make language more ergonomic for agents. And so it was funny because it was a weird recurrence where it's like, oh, dang, like maybe something, you know, maybe things always appear when they're meant to.

1:15:33Nicole Seah:And so actually a lot of the learnings were extremely practical, which is I don't think I could have understood the end of product without having done a lot of that research and understanding

1:15:41Nix:of context engineering from a technical standpoint,

1:15:45Nicole Seah:which I think is interesting itself. In terms of this like broader, I guess, memory as a medium kind of works that I've been doing. It's just been pushing me to think about how do I include community more in the writing? How do I continue to remix things and to make writing more open and accessible to other people such that they can remix things? And so maybe that's my orientation towards it, which is creating more open spaces for creativity.

1:16:15Nix:It reminds me of Tyler Cowen talking about writing for the LLMs. Have you seen this? No, I haven't.

1:16:20Nicole Seah:What's it about?

1:16:21Nix:He just is like, I'm trying to like now, I don't know, he was giving some interview and he talked about like visiting Iceland. And then later in the interview, he's talking about this and he's like, yeah, now the LLMs know what I think about Iceland, which is like more useful for me. But also like, I'm like, maybe I think what he's gesturing at is like, you're kind of like bending the, well, maybe one aspect is maybe you're influencing them. But I think maybe actually better to your point is you're adding to the lineage or something.

1:16:47Nicole Seah:Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And by externalizing, like as someone who's done a lot of writing in your life, most of which hasn't been public, something has changed in the way that you've contributed to this project of humanity or whatever.

1:17:01Nix:Not to be overly lofty, but there is something to that, I think.

1:17:05Nicole Seah:Yeah. It goes back to also, I think distribution is important because it helps you reach that one right person for which that writing can hit them at a particular time. And they can integrate it into their life. you know there's been so many short stories or books that I've read where like I read it at particular time and it influenced the way that I did my work like you know I was telling you earlier about Robert Caro and working researching writing is the name of his book yeah it's sort of like a side book because if you think of Robert Caro's books you think like Power Broker and then like LBJ and all these different books but actually that book was really really instrumental in me thinking about oh hey how do i go about interviewing you know sarah ando how do i go about talking to these people um and he talks about this moment where he's sitting in the library with all of the stacks of like you know back when there were files right he goes into this dungeon of files and he sits along the files and he and his researcher go each of the files each of the phone books and try to call up different people and when i read that i was just like dang i'm just like not digging deep enough i'm not gnawing on the bone hard enough like i need to be pushing it right and so i think there's like moments like that where you know um a piece of writing can change one person's life and that's like really has long-term butterfly effects

1:18:27Nix:very good reminder to the nudge towards externalizing thing i mean yes it ties It's something we were talking about way back in the conversation of just like, yeah, the benefits of making something real.

1:18:39Nicole Seah:Yeah, exactly.

1:18:41Nix:Totally different category of thing. But something that really stood out to me in a piece of yours, you were referencing a series of quotes from Caroline Knapp's Appetites. And it's specifically kind of like a feminine cut on desire and ambition and appetite. This is Caroline. The primarily underlying striving among many women is the appetite for appetite, a longing to feel secure and safe enough to name one's true appetites and worthy and powerful enough to have them satisfied. The question of appetite and specifically what happens to a female appetite when it is submerged and rerouted. Female appetite moves in guilty, circuitous ways.

1:19:17Nix:Where are the lines between satisfaction and excess, between restraint and indulgence, between pleasure and self-destruction? We seem to inhabit a realm of essential sparseness, sensuality, and strong emotion not completely absent, but muzzled and kept least in the yard. Wanting is a frightening thing, especially when you lack models for it or permission or a sense that your desires are good, valid, and satiable.

1:19:40Nicole Seah:It's so good. Amazing.

1:19:42Nix:And obviously there's a specific, I'm quite interested in the specific feminine part of this, but I think there's also a meta thing, which is I talked with Henrik and I had had a few conversations recently about just like desire in general and wanting. and like how often are you really letting yourself into this like deep, almost like childlike desire? There's a version of this that I think relates to some of the seriousness and effort and that conversation. But I'm curious how you relate to this, maybe even having since read it and letting your appetite grow in a way that feels, you feel connected to and healthy and feels like aligned versus maybe a more ravenous or ego-based ambition or desire or something.

1:20:21Nicole Seah:yeah i think that book was very instrumental in helping me understand um that uh if you submerge desire or you yeah if you reroute it it always just comes out in some weird way you know like if you're like she's talking a lot about you know um appetite and food in some ways but um that's the whole separate conversation but um i think in terms of allowing yourself to feel desire or allowing yourself to say, I want more than this. It's like, it goes back to the point of like, hey, look, like you grew up thinking that all of these things are inbuilt constraints. And then you actually learn that they're not inbuilt constraints.

1:21:01Nicole Seah:I think that's like a really important thing. And we've talked about before, which is like, how do you understand that you can be differently free and free in different ways that you're not originally. And some of that's true, just like mere exposure to things that you're interested in.

1:21:17Nix:So let's say one example is for a long time,

1:21:20Nicole Seah:I desired having friends in creative circles. It's just like, oh, I have this really interesting creative part of my life and I don't feel like I have community there. And so much of like writing the blog is being like, hey, like I'm creating this community, like, or I'm looking, it's a search query for other people who are creative. Allowing myself to express that desire is not very shameful. It's actually quite empowering. But if you, yeah, if you don't, then there's always this feeling that you keep coming back to or it haunts you in some ways.

1:21:52Nix:I love that. It's on the note of allowing yourself to want more. Like there's a recursive nature to this where a reflexive, like my friend Steph Ango, he has this blog post, nibble on your appetite will grow. Which is kind of like more of a general thing. But there's an element of that in this too, which is like, okay, do I want to have a creative life or do I have creative friends who are like, and could I, am I allowed to have that? And then by the way, you write a blog post and you're like, oh wow, there's people like, and it compounds on itself.

1:22:23Nicole Seah:Yes, yeah.

1:22:24Nix:I think it's like an underrated element of one of, not this whole can of worms, but like one of the underrated parts of agency is that it like, it compounds.

1:22:32Nicole Seah:Yes.

1:22:33Nix:Like by being agentic makes you more agentic. Confidence is the memory of success.

1:22:37Nicole Seah:Yeah, yeah, exactly.

1:22:40Nix:Oh, yes. Yeah, it makes me wonder about what are the ways that all of us probably, what are the things I might want or desire that I've like not? It's like, yeah, you're allowed to have this, but we like, we wall ourselves off in interesting ways.

1:22:56Nicole Seah:Yeah, which is maybe another way to put it is like, what's the truth of the matter? What's the down, what's the deep down truth? and I think we use a lot of different things to mask that deep down truth and engaging with it in a non-shameful way is actually really relieving like one example is I think the past few years since being in venture or having more interesting honest conversations with different people it's like oh actually I could have just said the thing that was underneath the thing what's the question under the question right and oftentimes you put the question on top of the question so that, okay, eventually we're going to meander down to the question, but like, let's get to the bottom of the question and answer it.

1:23:37Nix:It's great for everybody.

1:23:38Nicole Seah:It's great for everything. It's great in business. It's great in personal relationships. It's just like this thing that

1:23:42Nix:make it real.

1:23:43Nicole Seah:Yeah. Make it real. It just like comes back to this. Yeah.

1:23:47Nix:You brought up differently free. Um, I love to talk about friendship. You have some amazing writing on friendship, maybe specifically on that note, there's like a tension between in some other place you had suggested, like your closest friend should make you feel free and safe, which is beautiful. And yet, I think it's in the context of the differently free part, you had said relishing the company of people who sometimes make you feel by comparison uninformed, closed to new ideas, disordered, defensive, rigid, fearful, unambitious. This is an acquired skill. It kicks up shame. It humbles you. It dares you to grow.

1:24:20Nix:Which is, yeah, definitely true. Like relate to that. A beautiful part of the differently free thing. And yet like that can be like quite alienating. sometimes being around people who are differently free doesn't make you feel more free it makes you like it's deeply humbling and also it almost makes you like have you noticed patterns in the people who sort of they're the ways that they're differently free expands you even if it takes a little time versus like wow the gap between us is so big it's almost like alienating yeah it's

1:24:52Nicole Seah:it's a great question. I think, um, when I say they should humble you and dare you to grow, I don't mean that in a direct sense, they shouldn't be like, you're really bad.

1:25:03Nix:It's more like, I, wow, this is out there.

1:25:05Nicole Seah:Yeah. This is out there. Like, Oh, watching Jackson do his podcast inspires me that I can do a podcast. You know what I mean? Like it's sort of, well, I mean, I mean, I'm not there, but just by, I think, um, inspiration through witness is what I'm talking about. Yes. Rather than this sort of like conflicting, conflicting more antagonistic relationship with another person.

1:25:26Nix:Yeah, it's bringing it down to earth. Even if it's really great, like seeing somebody up close, as we've talked about, like seeing somebody up close does make it more real. And thus, like on one hand, you see the amount of detail required and the effort required, but also like it is real. Yeah. It's not, it's not this imaginary.

1:25:43Nicole Seah:Well, again, going back to the effort piece, right? Is if you were looking at someone from the outside, you'd be, you know, you'd be so intimidated by the things that they've created because you don't actually see the inner working of, you know, how much effort they're putting in. I think a lot of my friends that I really admire, I've just seen them put in so much effort and force applied at this very specific angle and eventually works. But I saw the journey from, you know, the beginning to get there. And so maybe that encourages you that you don't have to be perfect to actually do the thing.

1:26:13Nix:You have to compound.

1:26:14Nicole Seah:You have to compound and you have to, you'd have to try, right? So...

1:26:17Nix:Yeah, a little bit. You have to show up. You have to show up. Can the same person make you feel really... Can do this, like this freedom thing and make you feel really safe? Are those like different roles?

1:26:27Nicole Seah:I think they can come in the same person.

1:26:29Nix:That's not intuitive.

1:26:30Nicole Seah:Yeah. I mean, it's... Well, one thing that I also write about is, you know, it takes two to think, which is creative partnerships. Right. And there's lots of examples that I look up to, like Amos Fersky and Daniel Kahneman. Even Joan Didion and her husband, John, were a creative partnership in some ways. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in Oxford and all those things, which is sort of like, oh, for a long time, I was reading this biography of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. And in it was that for a long time, they were each other's only audience. But they were also really challenging to each other. I mean, honestly, the friendship was challenging.

1:27:15Nicole Seah:Like if you read the actual end to that, they end up having a bit of a tiff and a bit of conflict there because of religious beliefs, because of writing beliefs. But I'd argue that they probably did both. Like they're probably like, I'm your biggest supporter. I'm your number one person that I'm going to read this and encourage you.

1:27:34Nix:Deep trust, but not low standards.

1:27:36Nicole Seah:But not low standards. And I'm going to push you and it's going to be hard.

1:27:39Nix:Yeah. Yeah. I think you're so right. I think you're so right. A couple other things on Friends. who help us see ourselves. In Winterson's The Passion, Henri says this about love, but I think it's just as resonant about friendship. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does. Then each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it's only by meeting this that the new world is born, the diary of Anae, Nin. Nin, Nin. maybe there's an open-ended part of this, or maybe it would be better to get specific.

1:28:18Nix:I know you've referenced, and you've talked to me a little bit about your friend and former collaborator, Justine, but I'm curious what, yeah, what does it feel like to have somebody who can do, a friend who can do that for you?

1:28:29Nicole Seah:Yeah, so for some context, Justine and I went to college together. We lived together for four years, and we wrote a blog together. My first sub-stack ever. That's not actually, many people don't know about this sub-stack. It was called Copi Club. Copi? Copi. I grew up in Singapore and Kopi is a local drink there. And it was honestly like letters to friends, letters to each other and letters to the broader world. And I think so much of what Justine helped me see was number one, sheer encouragement. I think she always believed in me in a way that, you know, maybe didn't make sense at the time, like a little bit illegible.

1:29:09Nicole Seah:and the other thing is that when we were writing together it truly felt as though we were improvising together so there's this line that Patti Smith writes about her friend Sam Shepard when she's learning how to improvise with music and he says hey after one beat of the drum stop getting so rigid about it you can just add another beat the music hasn't ended we can keep going and And I think so much of what Justine and I's friendship is so, that quote is so relevant. Because I think whenever I was stuck or lost or listless, Justine would say, hey, let's keep going. And I think that was a very beautiful thing.

1:29:48Nicole Seah:We wrote 30 pieces together. And it was, you know, that's a lot. That's a lot to write with another person, let alone by yourself. Yeah, what an amazing, truly, truly one of the great attributes is when someone makes you feel like things are possible. Yeah.

1:30:05Nix:like there's road ahead. It makes it easier to step. Yeah.

1:30:10Nicole Seah:And also, I mean, one other part is, oh, I want to impress my friends. Like I want, like, I trust their judgment. I want them to feel proud of me as well. That's a good reason to have,

1:30:23Nix:it's a good reason to have high standards.

1:30:25Nicole Seah:Exactly. Yeah.

1:30:26Nix:Again, maybe this applies to Justine or maybe not. Maybe just broadly, Hua Su in Stay True, friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity of drifting in and out of one another's lives with occasional moments of wild intensity this points to something that i i certainly feel deeply which is friendship is this strange relationship we have where like there's no obligations there's no rules at least and so most relationships at least the farther and farther you get away from like the kind of confined school like parts of your life um or like there's this old old essay i always reference that's like your best friend could tell you on a whim they're moving across the country and if you protested it would be weird and like if a romantic partner did that you'd be a sociopath whatever um yeah how do you relate to how do you relate to again maybe with people in your life who you don't aren't in active proximity with which is obviously so important

1:31:16Nicole Seah:yeah well i think you're pointing at something which is um really deep and true about friendship which is that it's sort of under theorized as a connected tissue yeah like anyone can sort of be

1:31:28Nix:a friend in some ways um yeah what are we are we friends yet like you know like like people can be

1:31:34Nicole Seah:friends and collaborators and all of these different things um but i think it's uh actually about i gonna i don't know like soul resonance like i feel that if i understand someone's character and soul and and what they are put on this earth to do that bond is actually very difficult to sever um and so even when i reflect on justine lives in london and um we rarely like honestly we see each other maybe like in person once a year i'm actually seeing her in two weeks um but you know we really don't have a very uh a lot of surface area a lot of surface area but there's a lot of density right there's just a lot of density um well it's similar like you and i see each other not that regularly but when we do we're like on going on three hour walks right so So it's sort of depth of friendship rather than breadth.

1:32:23Nix:One of my theories is that people deeply underrate proximity in relationships. And so you can talk yourself into like, oh, we had this really meaningful walk or whatever. And then when you, part of maybe what I'm getting at is I've had, I've gone back into proximity with old, very close friends. And I thought we were as close as ever. And you realize when you get back into extreme proximity, you're like, oh, this is a little different.

1:32:44Nicole Seah:Right. Yeah.

1:32:45Nix:I think it can be maintained with a very close friend here and there.

1:32:50Nicole Seah:How do you think of mental proximity? So like I get physical, right? But like, you know, you live next door to each other. But like, how do you think of like, hey, look, we're always in each other's orbit?

1:33:00Nix:It has to be a non-intentional. That's my answer. So if you're in an active group text with multiple other people, it doesn't really work in a one-on-one. I have two of my best friends who I now live in the same city as, who largely Brenner and Andrew, who are big parts of me doing this podcast. needed a kick in the ass basically. We, for the first like five years of our friendship, we didn't live in the same city, but we had a very active group text.

1:33:22Nicole Seah:Yeah.

1:33:23Nix:Which is different than like, hey man, we should catch up. Right. Which is great. Like intentionality matters. Hey, I'm thinking of you. But I suspect, again, maybe with your very best friend or a person you like, but for most of the other relationships, if you don't live in the same city, you need to have some kind of, there has to be some kind of rhythm maybe.

1:33:40Nicole Seah:There's some threshold as well.

1:33:42Nix:Yeah.

1:33:42Nicole Seah:Yeah. There's some threshold that you have to meet to even, I guess, consider yourself close or enough exposure therapy to that person's -

1:33:49Nix:Right, the physical version of this is like, you want to go on, we're going to run some errands together or we're going to sit in the car and not talk for an hour. Yes. That's a level you can't really get to with only intentionality.

1:34:01Nicole Seah:Yes, 100%. Yeah, sort of like blank space time or white noise. White noise time might be the way there.

1:34:07Nix:Yes, yes, yes. Not a question, but I just thought it was so cool and lovely. any thoughts to share on Linda Montano and Te Ching Shea and their tying each other together?

1:34:20Nicole Seah:Yeah. Oh my gosh. I loved that art piece where they actually tied a physical piece of rope to each other for 365 days, which is just insane.

1:34:31Nix:And they weren't allowed to touch?

1:34:32Nicole Seah:Yeah, and they weren't allowed to touch. And they weren't lovers also. No, they're just friends, I guess. I guess I hope they can call each other friends. It'd be awkward after. Talk about proximity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk about proximity, right? And yeah, it's very, it was a really big, I think a lot of these like performance art pieces say something very true about the nature of like connection. And so part of that piece was actually just exploring what they did there. And there was this like piece of paper that they signed, which is like, we will never be apart, which I think is, it's kind of finished, right?

1:35:06when they finished yeah yeah yeah that would be that would be that would be quite crazy but

1:35:12Nix:you know it's like it for some reason it makes me think have you ever seen um it's not related in any way so i don't know why i bring it up but um the maria abramovich i have yeah well which one the one the one where she's sitting in the thing in her old collaborator yeah it's like this it's maybe the reason i thought of is the extreme synthesis of these two former incredibly dense. It would be like these two people if they were in love. They didn't see each other for years, 30 years or something. That is a moment.

1:35:41Nicole Seah:Yes. Yeah. Well, I think Maria Abramanovich's work is really about human nature. I mean, she also does this one where she's like, you can do anything to her or whatever. And you see some people do some things where you're just a little shocked. And it's really about, oh, what do you do when the human when all these false pretenses of civility go away and what happens. And maybe it's a little dark, right? I think there's dark parts to human nature as well that she portrays quite well.

1:36:08Nix:Related to friendship, love. You say, complexity means appreciating the critical difference between love and attachment, between fantasy and reality. We experience friction when we're faced with the inherent mystery or a nobility of another. Ties to our conversation about reality and fantasy. You referenced, or excuse me, you recommended me a short story called Closer by Greg Egan. Why is the unknowability of the other so important?

1:36:36Nicole Seah:So beautiful. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious to hear what you thought of the short story, but basically the short story by Greg Egan, it's a book, Axiomatic. It's a science fiction set of short stories. And the book Closer is about this couple where one of them wants to constantly get closer to the other person. And so what they do is this sort of transformation where you can take someone's brain and put it into another person and you can inherit all of their memories and therefore become the same person, essentially. Or union, like become a union.

1:37:07Nix:It's closer and closer.

1:37:08Nicole Seah:It's closer and closer. And the moral of the story there is actually that it's the fundamental unknowability or the mystery of another person that interests us so.

1:37:17Nix:Yeah.

1:37:18Nicole Seah:And that you can, I think it's a very romantic idea to constantly be surprised by another person and to also be seen in a different way by another person. There's this quote, which is not in Greg Egan, but that marriage is like one long conversation. And I think part of a conversation that keeps it going is that you don't know what the other person's going to say next. And there's some surprise. And yeah, and there's lots of like relationship theorists who talk about this, you know, dynamic as well, which is like, how do you keep the mystery and also the familiarity? And those are two poles of tension that you need to keep in a relationship.

1:37:57Nicole Seah:But I thought that short story just did a really great job of talking about, oh, hey, what happens when you don't fully know another person? And isn't that beautiful? And, you know, isn't it hard to actually know everyone, knows everything about someone? Yeah, you can surprise another person. You can also surprise yourself, I think is the moral there.

1:38:17Nix:But yeah, especially you can surprise yourself by way of them, which is -

1:38:21Nicole Seah:Yes, yeah.

1:38:22Nix:Yeah, the thoughts I, I mean, one, it's recommended. It's short and people can read it. It's a really beautiful, beautiful example of the way that reality is more beautiful than fantasy,

1:38:33Nicole Seah:I think, in a sense.

1:38:35Nix:You had some other quote. You had said, true resonance arises from the feeling that what you were seeing is real. It was forged through a complicated interconnectedness and friction with the world. Ironically, the apex of absolute beauty or symmetry or pleasantness lacks real intimacy. It's flat. You take a doll and feel nothing but the uncanny, but look at a face you love in all its quirks and think it inimmigably beautiful. My, maybe it's a silly thing, but my reaction in part to your prompt about Closer is there's an old idea from a friend who he says, in a relationship, you have to decide whether you'd rather be bored or annoyed.

1:39:12Nix:And it's not quite the same, but I think there's an element of this, which is like, yeah, you want both, the implication is you want to both be deeply seen and known and have more and more intimacy, which by definition, intimacy is knowledge, right? And yet, as someone who definitely doesn't want to be bored, like you need to, we need to be surprised. Like, and reality is surprising, even if it's abrasive. Again, maybe to the same theme.

1:39:40Nicole Seah:Yeah, and I think it's very important to have the mindset of you can change and you will change actually. And anticipating change is also really important. There's a, I think you maybe saw this, like, I really love this one particular piece by John Repetti called Yet Byron Never Makes Tea As You Do, which is about his wife. And I've quoted it so many times. I hope John Repetti's not annoyed at me. I have it down here. But he talks about, you know, seeing the chip in his wife's shrunk tooth and being, you know, so enamored in that moment with the, you know, story of the tooth. And he's like, well, if you actually look from the outside, it might look like an imperfection.

1:40:21Nicole Seah:But to me, it was, you know, proof of humanity, sort of. The title, Yet Byron Never Makes Tea As You Do, comes from this poem by Virginia, a line in Virginia Woolf's book or novel. And it's in the poem or in the novel, the point is, oh, you're telling me that you do all these things like Byron. But Byron never makes tea as you do when you spill the pot and you like mop it up carelessly and you like put the pot in a different place. And all these little quirks are like a little bit annoying, right? Like you didn't pour the tea perfectly, but that's what makes you, you. And so inimitably you, that if you were gone, I would weep.

1:41:00Nicole Seah:And I just thought that was so beautiful. And so I keep sharing it because I think it deserves to be read. And just like, it's a beautiful piece.

1:41:07Nix:One of my favorite bits of that, love begins not with me, but with the other, with the little eruption of the real that I experienced in the other.

1:41:14Nicole Seah:Yeah, it's so good.

1:41:15Nix:Eruption of the real. Just a few more things. You have a line, you say, I spent a lot of time alone, finding myself in the chasm between solitude and loneliness. Loneliness, I should say. What's the difference between solitude and loneliness? What is that chasm?

1:41:33Nicole Seah:Yeah, I think the chasm comes from, you can feel like really alone in a crowd of people. And you can be surrounded by people and still feel alone and lonely. in terms of solitude you can feel really held and seen by a lot of people and you're just actually doing your own thing you know it's like oh i have a really vibrant beautiful community of people that love me and care about me but i'm just going to do my own thing and i think that's the difference which is like oh do i have uh people who really understand me and get me and uh hold me and i trust them so that i can be free and and and alone yeah and choose to be alone and choose to be alone.

1:42:15Nix:And what is the chasm? Is that you're sort of like dipping in between those two?

1:42:19Nicole Seah:Yeah, where it's like, oh, sometimes you forget.

1:42:23Nix:Yes, I was gonna say.

1:42:24Nicole Seah:Sometimes you're like, I'm just this hyper individual person in the world. And then you realize like, oh, no, actually, all of this, I'm built up of all of these other people. I'm basking in the grace of all these other people around me. It's funny.

1:42:37Nix:I thought you were gonna go the other way, which is when you sort of like are willfully in solitude and you forget and you get lonely.

1:42:44Nicole Seah:Yeah, maybe you do. Well, I think that's also true. You spend enough time alone and maybe you start to feel like I chose this.

1:42:51Nix:I chose this. I promise. Yeah. Yeah.

1:42:55Nicole Seah:It's why I can never really go on a silent retreat. It's just like I love solitude, but I think that's a little bit too much solitude.

1:43:02Nix:Yeah. A line on noticing. Here's what I like in people. Perceptiveness, humility, wit, a feverishness toward good ideas, high conviction, an iterative process of self-understanding, equanimity. It's easy to distill this into language, but it's hard to notice these things in real life. I think one of life's greatest skills is being good at noticing. either how have you improved to that or i mean the people who you really admire who who do it what what drives what drives that it's it's relates the attention stuff and the beauty stuff

1:43:36Nicole Seah:but noticing is a specific word yeah um i will have another reference for that but um there's this book that um i read recently called a swim in the pond in the rain by george saunders i have it on my shelf do you have it i think you'd really like it but i mean one of the the main um you know well first like one of the main points that he makes in the book is that oh every person in this class it's about his syracuse mfa class about russian short stories he says every person in this class has come to me already perfect and i'm just helping them find their singularity and the whole book is basically like a deep reading of russian short stories and and why they work and the choices that they make and why i bring this up it seems kind of unrelated to noticing but i think uh one uh learning from that book is that to notice deeply means to notice how you feel about a thing and like come to a worldview about a thing or about a person or about a piece of writing um and to actually understand the emotional reactions that you have with a thing and um interrelationship that you create with anything that you consume or make or any person that you relate with.

1:44:43Nicole Seah:Noticing that dynamic, I think is really important. Some conversations and some people are, you know, make you come alive and create a new special world where like there's distinct taxonomies and distinct, you know, characteristics of that world. And in living in that world, you, yeah, in living in that world, you experience a new type of feeling or a new type of way of living. So I think noticing to me is noticing the interrelationships a lot.

1:45:15Nix:Yeah, a little bit even of like noticing the space between. Like what's it? Yeah. Yeah.

1:45:20Nicole Seah:I think he calls it the supra-personal. Not interpersonal, not super-personal, the supra-personal, which I think is cool.

1:45:28Nix:There's a line in Before Sunrise and they're sitting in this alley and she says if God or magic or whatever is real, like it's like when somebody's sharing something, it's like in the space between us trying to understand someone sharing something. A quote from Jeff Buckley, I think in a piece of yours about feeling behind, or maybe things going the way we think they ought to. Life has its own rhythm, and you cannot impose your own structure upon it. You have to listen to what it tells you. It's not earth that you move with a tractor. Life is not like that. Life is more like earth that you learn about and plant seeds in.

1:46:04Nix:It's something you have to have a relationship with in order to experience. You can't mold it. You can't control it. not necessarily a new theme, but yeah. How do you, how do you remember, or how do you loosen your grip?

1:46:18Nicole Seah:I think, um, if you actually look at the through line of my writing throughout time online, which is like four years or five years, maybe four, um, I think you'll see, I've gone through a lot of peaks and troughs.

1:46:30Nix:Yeah.

1:46:30Nicole Seah:And I'm not afraid to say that. Like, I'm also like, oh, this is happening. And like, um, and I'm going to write it down.

1:46:35Nix:Yeah.

1:46:36Nicole Seah:And I think the, the act of documenting and also just like little signposts in the journey of life.

1:46:43Nix:Yeah.

1:46:43Nicole Seah:I think is important to remember that you can't control things. Because even when I'm in like euphoria of having written a piece and like, you know, and like feeling like I'm on track with all these things, I remember that, oh, there's moments of like great, you know, great loss and great despair and great listlessness. Yes. And I always have to remember that these minima and maxima.

1:47:04Nix:You're setting like anchor points though. You're setting anchor points. Yeah.

1:47:06Nicole Seah:and remembering that you can reach the maxima again, I think is really motivating.

1:47:14Nix:Oh, what a great answer. A little thing from Bob Irwin that you had sent to me that I think, I'll read it. This is from that biography. We talked about him a little bit earlier. There is no such thing as a neutral gesture because for that very fact of it being there draws a certain amount of perceptual attention. Let's say it drags a weight of 0.06. Well, then it's got to give back 0.12 in energy. Some mores are major moves, major gestures. I mean, certain things are just support. Everything doesn't maximize all the time. There's some trade-off. But I did come to quickly see this thing about there being no such thing as neutrals.

1:47:53Yeah, it just had me thinking about, especially in the modern era of like,

1:47:59Nix:it's so easy to do everything.

1:48:02Nicole Seah:Yeah.

1:48:03Nix:and where did detail and craft come in? And just these little subtleties that made me think of you and it made me, it just feels like kind of a beautiful philosophy for like the little nudges of things. But I don't know, I was just curious if you had a reaction.

1:48:20Nicole Seah:Yeah, I actually, I have a physical copy of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing that One Sees. It's all about sort of like this ineffable feeling that you get when you see something or you understand something. And it's not exactly explainable. But actually that is the line that I underline furiously in the margins. Because I do think it's important to care about what you put out into the world and care that maybe it's making a statement, maybe it's sharing a perspective on the world and not having it be sort of a waste of space, if that makes sense. Yeah.

1:49:01Nix:Yeah. And every little, I just drew lines all day. Every little flick matters.

1:49:08Nicole Seah:Yeah.

1:49:08Nix:A little.

1:49:08Nicole Seah:Well, small things aren't trivial.

1:49:11Nix:Especially if you're attuned to them or you notice them. Yes. But it's, yeah, it's easy. It's easy. If you haven't, it can be easy to not notice when you've got, when you've loaded yourself into just like, yeah, focusing on maximizing output. You mentioned Miyazaki. One of my favorite quotes or anything you've ever sent me, a little quote on Miyazaki and effort. To endure something is obviously exhausting and agonizing, but at the same time, you must also continue to hold what you regard as important close to your heart and to nurture it. Should you ever relinquish what you truly hold dear, the only path left to you will be that of a pencil pusher, the type of animator whose sense of self-worth is determined by the numerical amount of their earnings or whose cycles between joy and despair over the high or low rating his work receives.

1:49:57Nix:This is related, I think, to what we were speaking about just now with Bob, but But maybe the thing there is about personal standards and like independent of anybody else. Maybe even like an autotelic aspect of it. I think maybe the most interesting question for you would be about writing. But how do you what kind of keeps you pushing?

1:50:23Nicole Seah:Yeah, that book, that quote is from I remember the moment we were talking about it, which is in New York. on a long run. And I have that saved in my phone and I return to it frequently. And the reason being, it comes from his book, Starting Point, which is about the first 20 years, which is so funny that 20 years is a starting point, right? I think that's in itself funny and kind of telling, right? But I think that the other point that's really important there is that like, you will always know. Like you have the knowledge within yourself of like the craft that you're making. is that you will always know how much work that you put in, whether the outside world recognizes it or not.

1:51:03Nicole Seah:You can always look at the color or the particular hue and know that you chose it specifically. And I think that's like when you can actually point to things that you did for... The end is not the means. The means is the end, basically, which is in the process of choosing, in the process of creating, you have the standard for yourself that you meet and it makes you proud. and think a lot about sort of creating is always in that middle ground of like making the work and the process of making the work rather than the final outcome.

1:51:36Nix:Yeah, yeah, great answer. Two final quotes. But as it is, aliveness means impermanence. We are brief bodies. Moment to moment, our cells turn over and our hands touch different surfaces. Our faces change with every smile, grimace, glance, frown. How could I expect us to say the same? I like this line I heard in the song once, any love I made you feel is yours to keep. Some experiences are sealed into the past, but they were still very beautiful. And then don't covet, give everything, give it all. One of my favorite books on the topic is Annie Dillard's A Writing Life, where she writes, anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.

1:52:14Nix:You open your safe and find ashes. Creatives tend to hoard notes and lines thinking they'll be used perfectly once at some point in the future. But writing is a deep well that continues to be refilled by life experience and reading and observations. Use every good sentence you have ever written now. Burn the candles. Feels very fitting. Something that came up repeatedly throughout this conversation. How do you remind yourself to stay so abundant and so generous?

1:52:45Nicole Seah:I think the it's viewing creativity and and the soul that you put into your work as renewable you know Ursula Le Guin has this line that's you know love is like bread remade every day made new I think the same is true for creativity yeah or there's always going to be more inspiring things to read in the world or to ingest. We forget though. We forget. Like we think like, oh, there's a finite number of interesting people to talk to.

1:53:15Nix:I only have so many good ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:53:16Nicole Seah:So many good ideas. But actually, look, there's the deeper you go, the more rich it gets. And so reminding myself that, hey, no matter what I do, I will never reach the bottom of this well, I think is something that really drives me forward. And I think something that's very meaningful.

1:53:32Nix:I think it shows in the work and the way you approach things. So it's an honor to do this. Thank you.

1:53:38Nicole Seah:This was so fun. Thank you, Jackson.

1:53:40Nix:Thank you for listening to Dialectic with Nicole. You can learn more at dialectic.fm slash Nix. That's N-I-X. Also, if you enjoyed the episode, please give it a thumbs up, five stars, subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. And especially, please share it with a friend if you liked it. Every little bit helps. And it would be an honor to have you share it with somebody who you think would really love it. I'd also like to thank Notion one more time for presenting Dialectic. In a time when the central orientation towards AI is just about automating everything and moving faster and making every individual more capable, some of which are good things, I appreciate that notions orientation is about thinking together.

1:54:21Nix:How we can collaborate with each other, with teams big and small, and with the AIs to do better work. At the end of the day, the work I want to do, the work I want to be a part of, and I hope the same is true for you, is to collaborate with amazing people and do great work. For me with Dialectic, that means focusing my time on immersing myself in the minds of the amazing people I get to speak to, like Nicole, having these rich conversations with them, and then putting that together in a way that is rich and exciting for you, whether it be the episode or the transcript and lessons and everything else.

1:54:51Nix:And I'm using AI on the edges to help streamline that process and focus on doing more of the work I don't want to automate. I'll also link to that great piece by Colossus on working inside of Notion. And as I mentioned, if you're interested, you can learn more at notion.com slash dialectic, or you can reach out to them or me at work at jacksondahl.com. Thanks again for listening, and I will see you next time.