Reviving Creativity: Insights on Philosophy, Art, and Culture Decline

You can't necessarily think yourself into the answers. You have to create space for the answers to come to you. You have this amazing introduction. You say the West is dying and we are killing her. The American dream has been replaced by mass

packaged mediocrity porn, encouraging us to revel like happy pigs in our own meekness. Yo, that rips. You know, one of the best of the books are like, you're messed up. And here's like nonfiction about how you can be less messed up. There's

just not that many people who have the courage to reach beyond consensus and go explore new ideas. I'm like, cool. I'll start watching Netflix when I've read the whole of human history. Like, it was...

Reva, why does Rilke's poetry resonate with you so, so deeply? The guy writes about ecstasy, um, and I, that was kind of become corrupted now. Cause like in the past you think about religious ecstasy or spiritual ecstasy, right? In yoga you have

these phrases now, but Rilke saw beauty in everything. Like he describes, he's like, I'm looking at a door, a chair, a flower. I see the ecstasy of everything. He sees. It's in one little thing, a representation of all things that are beautiful. And um,

I don't know many writers that can do, notice in such, with such subtlety, detail that is, provokes such beauty. So it's like, he's not appealing to vast heavens. He's just noticing things around you and re looking them from first principles and saying like, how beautiful

life is. It's just very moving. I think it deeply resonates with some people, not with everybody, but if you're an ecstatic person, then yes. Well, it's funny that you talk about the beauty and subtlety. I've been thinking

a lot about the word vanilla and people see vanilla as a bad thing, but actually vanilla is a very subtle flavor, and I think it speaks to sort of the sensory overload of the modern age, where something that does have that subtlety, it's like people don't even have the receptors

to appreciate it. How contoured something can be in these very subtle ways. Yeah. I went to an underworld concert last night. You remember the underworld? I don't know. It was, I don't know what year, what

year was underworld? Uh, 2000s. Okay. They're in the Hackers soundtrack. That's like how they got the most famous. Are they like Nirvana? No, it's more electronic music. It's kind of a mix between like Prodigy and Radiohead is where I place it. Cool. Love Radiohead.

When we saw them perform last night and it's like two older guys with no stage, right? But the guys performing have such vibe that they hold all your attention just with gentle body movements. Like, he was such an incredible dancer. Not

like a cheesy way, it's electronic music. But he held everyone's attention because it was as if the music flowed through him. And you compare that to something like Katy Perry. She has like 75, I saw this aircraft or something. It's like 75 actors like waving.

It's like Universal Studios in all of her sets, right? Because I think to actually strip that back and have people like Taylor Swift and stuff like this like perform songs, we've lost the ability, like people have such a short attention span that they need something

so theatrical. And last night there was such elegance in this guy's performance, I couldn't stop thinking about it. There's like no set, but you just, everybody's like hypnotic, everyone was so captivated by it. But now everything is just shocking

because we don't have, we don't have good attention span anymore. Yeah, I think this comes back to writing in the way that we don't read things as much repetitively. Right. Right. You know, like when most people think

about reading, they think about, Oh, how many books did you read this year? Reading the news. But like, if you think of the Greeks, they memorize poems. It was funny. I was in a Bible study and there's a guy named Jimmy. And Jimmy's understanding of scripture is

just like next level from everybody else. And he's a smart guy, but I was like, something's different. I said, Jimmy, like, how do you know the Bible so well? And he goes, you know what I do that no one else does? I would, he goes, I memorize entire chapters of the

Bible. And when you memorize chapters, it takes a few months, but you really understand how things are structured and you understand the subtleties that almost get revealed to you through repetition. And I was like, there, there's something

there. Well, not even just that. I mean, I totally agree. But another thing is that you learn more as you get older, which allows you to unlock things in texts that you might have missed before. I think we've had this conversation previously, which is that I've

probably read Atlas Frye, like every two years, but like 15 years. Right. And I look back and I wish that I'd understood it better as a teenager, but you had to have the. Um, the wisdom and the experiences to unlock the context of the things that she

was referring to. So as you get older, if there's books that moved you when you were younger, it's like worth going back and rereading them to see like what nuggets you couldn't possibly have had, you know, comprehension for when you were a little bit more naive.

So I do read books regularly that I've read before because I, I have placed in them some value that there are lessons already that I want to learn from and perhaps more than I just haven't discovered yet. Why is her writing so captivating to you?

Um, I think, well, her and I, I started reading Robert Pelesek, who I also like, the same friend of mine, but she takes philosophy and instead of making it like, here's an argument as to why you shouldn't subscribe to X, um, she puts the characteristics that she values

in characters. And by doing that, you see the embodiment of those characters and their actions in a way that I think is more in, you know, you can invoke the, um, a much deeper and richer experience of what those qualities might look

like in real life by witnessing them as characters in fiction, as opposed to like a very logical, like, you know, matter of fact, philosophical treaties. So I just think it brings alive the references of character that if you just read like, you

know, humility or greatness, it's, you read the world, you know what it means, but if you describe it in a character and see those actions, it becomes much richer and much more alive. So she took You know, complicated philosophy and embodied it in, in a way that anybody

could resonate with and you see, you know, your friends and characters, right? Things I said this before, like sometimes when people piss me off, I'm like, they remind me of Lillian Ridden, right? So she gave you that framework to understand what she was

pointing to in a much deeper way. I'm always amazed at the percentage of people who I admire how they think I admire how they reason I admire how they move through the world How many of them studied philosophy? So what's going on with the disconnect of

oh philosophy is a useless major And oh my goodness. There's something so core here. That isn't just Something that has to do with the actual ideas, but something about how to reason and how to work with ideas and almost configure them like Rubik's cubes or

something. I, I remember when I applied for my philosophy undergrad and I, my, you have to use in America, but in England you have to write a cover letter that's like to the university saying like why they should recruit you into that program.

And I opened my, um, letter to University College London saying that using Bertrand Russell's definition of philosophy, which is that. Philosophy is a no man's land between theology and science, which I really liked as like

an answer, right? It's like, it's asking questions that lots of other groups are trying to answer but it's the question formation. And the thing that frustrated me about my philosophy degree is that I found just studying the history of the questions less interesting than trying

to figure them out. So contemporary academic philosophy becomes like, can you recite Descartes questions or, you know, and what I want to do is like, okay, well, how do we go about solving this? And I was like, no, no, we leave that to the other

realms. So now actually Oxford University in England, you do philosophy and they really recommend it. I don't know if it's compulsory to do it alongside a science. So you did a philosophy and physics. I mean, that would have been my dream course,

like philosophy and physics, like what you ask the questions, you go think about them. That sounds great. But I was like learning about Descartes and like Cartesian dualism and I thought to myself, isn't it a bit redundant to study this and not talk to neurologists

or psychiatrists like other people from other fields? So just the history of philosophy, philosophy just being the history of questions isn't as exciting as people actually trying to answer those questions. And I think that's very,

like, there's not many examples of people doing that now. People are putting forward new ideas or just, you know, analyzing previous ones. So whenever I want to take a risk, I get really excited. What's going on there? We said we're

in a creativity recession, which is a good little way to phrase that. Yeah, you know, it's, it's one of those things I think it's hard to unpack, there's not like one simple causation. I think the education system has, the Overton window

for education has become smaller and smaller to the point where like we're basically taking children and tying them to sort of like adult bulls on SSRIs, right? I say docile and delirious drones, drugged

into oblivion, dishing out ADHD pills like Halloween candy. Yes, exactly that. Um, so there's one aspect which I think is, um, you know. People care a lot about freedom and agency in adults without realizing that people lose it as a child.

Um, so that's one direction. The other thing is that I think there's a lot of cultural nihilism. Because there's lots of negative messaging going on in society. Like, we're always close to the world endings of climate change. And we're always at the

threat of war or something else. Um, in those, in that period of keeping people scared, also it's like hard to take risks or be creative because you're trying to be protective, like you're trying to protect and be defensive. You're

making this point about protectionism and how that hurts creativity. I think that there's something to a short time horizon and a lack of beauty. What is the point of making something beautiful if the world's going to end in 10 years? Like why would you even take on that

challenge? 100%. Right? Like you changed the concept of time and people's lives. And you put in this place, this extreme fear. Now, why did people build such beautiful churches 500 years ago? They had shorter life

expectancies than we did. Right. Right. Which is crazy. But how people thought of themselves with inside, like, structures of the church and what eternal means, like, there was different reasoning of, like, there was lifetime, which you were alive, and then there was your legacy.

And your legacy was, if not more valuable than your life, because your life was so fragile and people died from sickness and ill health. Now people are really healthy. They're full of fear, even though they lived three times as long as anyone in the 16th century. But

in that culture of, of like, fear and thinking that bad things are going to happen, it's like, okay, we're going to move towards hedonism and short term rewards. Cause what's the point of spending, it's crazy now to think of spending 50 years building

and building. I mean, it probably takes that long in San Francisco now anyway, which I mean, the government now makes it, but in the past it used to just be so beautiful. That's why it would take such a long time, but you know, it was beyond themselves.

Like, you know, I'm going to the Vatican next, next week. It's not like everyone who worked on these projects was like, well, I need to see it within an ROI of my lifetime. It was building together towards higher purposes and, and legacy and divine and, and something

that I talk about in my film, which is like, faith. What is faith? And faith is an integrity, I think so value to, to some level of values like it's. It's, it's a personal responsibility to something, um, and it's, and it's noble.

And right now it's, it's, it's also fast and, um, like you said, like, uh, very short term. Very short term. Well, I think the faith thing is deep because at some level trying to achieve anything great You can't reason your way into some justification

for wanting to do that. It's almost even hard to quantify the outer limits of beauty. Something that is beautiful, you just know it's beautiful, but you can't be like, you can't look at the Duomo in Florence and be like, Oh, that's beautiful. I can like

explain like the ROI economic value. Like for me, so much of. What faith has given me in terms of pursuing something beautiful is just like my relationship with God and just trying to please him and Having that be my only justification and nothing in the material

realm as something that's pushing me or driving me Yeah, well, I unfortunately think you're a very rare case If there was a lot more of that energy in the world that people would probably make more beautiful things But to the point of the Duomo in Florence So my mom

my mother who you know has the crazy researcher gene whenever that I have It's currently studying Vasari's lives as an artist, like an account of like 16th century Italian artists. And one of the ones she's studying is Masaccio, and his entire life pretty much, I'm pretty

sure it's Masaccio, spent 40 years just making the door of the Duomo of Florence. Like, imagine if you said this to someone now, right? Even carpentry and stuff like that isn't recognized as like a beautiful skill anymore, like now everything is machine manufactured and it's

come from somewhere, like, we don't really value like beautiful words, beautiful Imagine saying to someone in this present age, the guy spent 40 years just making a door, everyone would be like, what a joker. Right? Like, it sounds so farfetched. There's

something so beautiful in that that he was like, I want to get this little thing. I have this little opportunity to deliver beauty on something that's going to last for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And I'm going to put my everything into it. There's a level

of formality of like showing up to the craft that we're really missing now because we're surrounded by cheap and short term things from furniture to like media. Everything is cheap and fast. He spent 40 years making a door, and now everyone queues

up to go see it because it's so beautiful. Did he not win? I think he won. Yeah. He got what he wanted. I mean, I think you see it in writing, in how many things are sort of mass produced and clearly books as business cards, and the writing that I think both of

us admire. I mean, I know that you walked Nietzsche's trail. He wasn't trying to make a business card. He wasn't trying to have an ROI It was like a crazy guy who saw something about the nature of reality and needed to express it

Yeah, you'd go on these walks and have these crazy ideas and then had this very aphoristic style that was n equals one And I would also say, um, I heard the story about Zadie Smith. She's just not on the internet because she doesn't want to even hear what her critics

think. And I just think that that's awesome. Like, I'm just increasingly thinking I'm way too connected. Like, the feedback loop is too fast. Yeah, I, I would almost say that the best thing I've ever done in my life was like,

in the last two years, just completely disengaged Yeah. I was talking with my boyfriend about this, like, I haven't, we looked at the top 50 grossest grossing films of the last decade. I hadn't seen, I seen like one of them maybe. In terms

of TV shows, like from Mad Men to any cultural references you've heard, all these things I've heard about, I've never even consumed a second. I've never had, I've never watched Netflix. Um, I do, I go on Twitter is where I kind

of get news, but I even kind of disengaged from that about a year ago. And it puts me in a state of like some fear because like I don't always know exactly what's going on in the world, but I, it will get to me eventually. But I also am so, um, perplexed by how open

people are to just consuming the media that is around them passively. I'm like, I'm very selective what I put inside my mind, right? Like, I'm like, cool. I'll start watching Netflix when I've read the whole of human history. Like, I'm really, I'd rather read

the Odyssey a hundred times than watch Netflix. Like, I am not looking for passive entertainment. And I think that's a, um, like a skill or like, uh, not defensive. It's like some kind of limit that people are not putting on themselves enough. Like, I'm so surprised by how many

of my, you know, smart intellectual friends come home and they just zone out. It's like TV shows. I just can't think of anything worse. Um, like for me, like it has to have something that I'm like, I, I want, I have so many things I want to learn. Like,

I don't want to just be entertained. Right. Um, and I watched the Barbie movie and wrote that review and I, I remember like watching the Barbie movie and thinking to myself, like, this would be such an interesting way for me to understand zeitgeist.

And halfway through, I was like, I have no idea what's going on. I'm so confused. Like I hear people's conversations and I think, and now that I'm out of zeitgeist, I can't place all the conversation topics anymore. But it's been great. I think it's a very

valuable skill. Something that I've really come to appreciate is just the value of deep reading, and that sounds so trite, but basically I wrote a piece a few years ago called against three X speed, which was basically a condemnation of this idea of like.

I got in the car with somebody and he, you know, sometimes like the car will turn on and then the thing that they were listening to will automatically play. Yeah. And he was listening to an audiobook at like 5x speed. And I was like, dude, normally listen to books

like this? He goes, yeah, yeah, what I do is I've figured out it's better to like listen to it two or three times, but then I listened to the entire thing. I was like. Dude, that's crazy. And I just gave me so much anxiety. I was like, I'm not

gonna do that. And then back to the philosophy point, I had some friends who, when I was living in New York, they were at Columbia, and I took, uh, they invited me to a class, and the entire semester was on the, like, 300 pages of Max Weber, like basically all

about The, the Protestant work ethic and I was like, this is interesting. I never realized you could go so deep in something. Yeah, and now I've ended up all the way on the other side of the barbell like the only book that I read is the Bible and I just spend

every day trying to like understand one little section of the Old Testament and the New Testament and like I read it and then I read Uh, one study Bible, the ESB, and then I read this like biblical theology study Bible. So I read two study Bibles, get the etymologies

and stuff like that. And then I go based on that, I journal on what do I need to know? Who do I need to be? What do I need to do? And I do it every day, every day. And then me and my friend Brent, we text each other what we will do. And I've been doing it for

like six months and it's changed my life more than any other learning habit. And it's not even close. Like it's changed me at the level of my heart, not just my mind, which has been beautiful. Yeah. I have some friends

who've done similar kind of in depth biblical study and I am so envious. Like I want to do that. That is sounds amazing. And, uh, when I first applied to university, I applied to philosophy and theology because I wanted to study kind of New Testament manuscripts

was something I've been thinking about for like the last year, but I was trying to understand. And you had an amazing tweet. Do you remember you had a tweet like, um, it was like a couple of years ago where you said, it's crazy, like how people don't study or read the Bible,

considering the fact it's been around for a really long time. It's had such a huge effect, regardless of your faith. Yeah. Like there's this book that for some reason, even if you don't think about it, it has shaped human history, especially in the West.

And I was talking to a friend saying, she said that her friend, her other friend's eight year old child asked her who Jesus Christ was. And I was like, wow, this is really crazy to me. Cause like as an eight year old, like I, I mean, I went to a Christian school. So

just to far fetch, it's been so out of the zeitgeist that people don't know, but uh, you know, studying these texts, like there's a reason they stood the test of time. Like people found something. It's the most word read book in the world. Like the Bible

is like, maybe people should consider it. Like it's the fact that that's like a radical position is crazy. Well, it's insane because you know, if you ask some intellectual, right. You're like, Hey, what do you think of Plato?

They're like. And say they haven't read it. They'll be like, Oh, I, you know, I haven't read Plato and they'll be really embarrassed. Haven't read Nietzsche. I'll be really embarrassed. Haven't read Kant. Be very embarrassed. Haven't read the Bible. And they'll be like proud

to have not read the Bible. I have resisted such dogma. I am in the age of reason now. And yeah, I think that's crazy. The biases around personal life and thinking are really insane. The fact that

you can disregard a text that has been so foundational to all of Western thought, even just from a self explanatory anthropology thing, like, why is our culture the way it is? Like, maybe you should read, people should

read historical texts. Netflix. Like, yes, I need to, like, read the Bible intensely. I did actually read the Bible a lot when I was a kid. Like, I didn't come from a Christian family, but I was interested in religious texts. And I read a bunch of the Bible when

I was younger and then again when I was in my university degree. And I was kind of like shaped, shaping myself as an atheist, especially during university. And like, as I've got older and changed my views on that, I have started to pick up reading

religious texts, but that's what led me into studying the manuscript. So like, I've just gone the other way and like now the history of the manuscripts in the Bible, which has like become a recent obsession, as opposed to like reading the Bible.

It's just like, I'm not probably doing the thing that's going to give me any wisdom. I'm just finding the conspiracies about the manuscripts. But it's so fascinating, it's like, I don't know, more people should be reading it. Wait,

tell me about those conspiracies. Well, I, when I was, uh, like thinking about what I should work on next after the pathogen essay, I wanted to do something very different. And I started thinking about history just as a field, I was like, well, you know, history

is one of those weird fields because it sounds so, um, soft and friendly, like, oh, history. But history is kind of like the foundation of propaganda. Like, how people define the past is how people place themselves in the present.

And, like, we all know, like, the winner's often right, the vic the victories, they, they go back and, like, the ultimate power is to be able to, like, change civilization or kill people or, like, whatever, and also be able to, like, hide and get them done.

Like, the, the point is everyone wants to look like the good guys, so. You know, if allies and if things, different things have been had different in WWII, like it would have been very different now. Right. In terms of how we think about history. But,

um, the question I asked myself was like, okay, let me think of like a book that has been so foundational. And it was around the time when you wrote your tweet as well, because I was reading out my old notes earlier. And I thought to myself, well, if I'm going

to study the New Testament, I want to read the oldest New Testament. And that's how this started. Right? I was like, what's the oldest New Testament? And the oldest New Testament, there's lots of fragments of the New Testament, but the oldest claiming New Testament, like

entire copy, um, Codex, the Codex Sinaiticus, which was discovered in the late 19th century by a biblical researcher called Constantine Tischendorf, which is meant to be from the fourth century. It's meant to be one of Constantine's 50 Bibles

that he sent around to like, re discover, like redistribute Christianity. It's like, it's meant to be one of Constantine's 50, 50 New Testaments, and it's written in a codex. All the other, all the other manuscripts are written on scrolls. And I started looking

into this story, the story just got weirder and weirder. And it just fascinated me. Like I've, I've probably written 80 pages on it so far. Like, I don't even know what it is. Like, I'm like, who is going to read my like deep dive of

like the New Testament manuscript? You will. It's fine. David will. You'll read it. So it's okay. But, um, this story is just crazy because Konstantin Tischendorf, the researcher, claims he found the manuscript in Mount Sinai Monastery in Egypt, which is the oldest continuous

Christian monastery in the world. He says that he rescued the oldest Bible, the oldest New Testament copy. From monks who are using it as, to put the fire, like throwing into the fire and using it to like bustle a fire. Now that story is a little

weird because it's a beautiful text. It's made on parchment, not on papyrus. It's very expensive. It's got beautiful, like manuscript. No, you know, old school monastery would use this as like fire paper, right? So the story goes

a little fishy, and then you look into it more and it's like, well, they didn't even burn, even if it was like heretical text. People don't, like, Christians and Jews, like, they don't burn the texts, they bury them. Like, think about the Dead Sea Scrolls, think

about, if it's heretical, you bury it at a point near to a cemetery. So, I started doing all this investigative research into the testament manuscripts, like, I don't know, I just don't think that version is from the 4th century as it is claimed. So, my argument in this

is that this original New Testament full manuscript is not actually from the 4th century, it's probably been doctored in the 19th. That's not to refute Christianity. That's just one version. I think the guy was trying to get glory and say like, I found the oldest,

right? But there's a lot of weird things that happen around religion because at the time religion was politics. So, well, I think we're actually getting to the core of a lot of your writing and creative process, which is you are willing to ask questions

that other people are willing to ask. And I mean, I just think naturally you're just drawn to these super esoteric places. I mean, the way that I think about you and people like you is like, if the world of ideas has these guardrails or like bumpers at a

bowling alley, like you just kick them over, you break them in half and you just keep going, you know? Yeah, I, well, the, this essay is like, it's like, I went in, I just thought, I'm going to read

the New Testament. Then I thought, I'm going to ask myself, what is the oldest New Testament? And then I thought it was up, how do they discover this? And then it's, I don't even go in with like a set plan of what I'm gonna write about.

I just wanted to study the New Testament. I haven't even got to studying the New Testament because I've gone so far into the manuscript history of the New Testament. But it's by doing this kind of like free flow research, which people don't really value anymore. It's

like, you're gonna do a PhD program that you have to solve this like little niche question within a scientific paradigm or within a sociological paradigm. And like, it's just so fun to go in and not have a goal, right? I was like, I'm just gonna,

I find this area interesting. I'm going to see what gets uncovered. And often, like, no one's really been doing that. So if you just read the story of the Codex Sinai on Wikipedia, like. It sounds a little fishy, right?

Like, if you actually go look at it, but how many times have people gone like, well, I'm just going to go look at the primary sources on this, right? And maybe like a couple, I actually found one professor, like his name is Daniel Wallace, he's a theologian professor

and he runs the Center of Study of New Testament Manuscripts. And like, I'm really bonded with him. He's like, oh, you're the person who's found it. I've been donating to his manuscript center for a while. They're the only people doing

this research, but how fun it's like, I feel like a investigative journalist. Right. But like, I don't know what I'm looking for. I just keep going until I find stuff and then I just keep poking and keep poking and it's like I find things.

I'm like, Oh, hurrah. I found something. How do you structure your life to be able to do this? Well, not well, I go through phases like I, I don't know if the same for you. For people who write and I, you know, I haven't written

much for the last year. It's have been distracted. I'm working, but when I go through like research phases, I pick up something that I'm studying and I can't do anything else. I, I like, I know everyone says that you should do everything in moderation. I write a little

bit every day, but I just get a fanatical and I have to study whatever I'm looking at and I can't think about other things. Like I become obsessive. When I read my pathogen essay, that was kind of six months of me just. I was only thinking about pathogens for a

really long time. And when I started doing the Christianity, thinking about the manuscripts, I was only thinking about that. And I was like planning my trips to Mount Sinai. Like I only want to go on trips that are related to my research. And then something sometimes

happens and breaks me out of it, right? Like family thing where I have to work and then I have to wait until I have the freedom to get back into that space. And to me, it's my happiest place. Like I go to my house in Vegas. I sit at my desk, I write, I have all

my notes on the wall, I look like a crazy person, and I just go full in, and it's such an energy rush, it's like taking amphetamines, like I just, I'm not on anything, but I just get so excited, I can't sleep, it's like, it's like I get manic creative energy.

And then sometimes it gets tired and it goes away, but I try to not, I used to when I was younger, try and force it. I'd be like, why can't it come now? Like, why can't I do it here and then? And I've just learned as I've got older to say like, Hey, come cyclically.

And sometimes you can concentrate on it and sometimes you can't, but don't put pressure on yourself. Right? Like, let it just happen when it happens. And, uh, and inside that freedom, I think it's easier to get into flow state.

This idea of the muses shows up in Greek poetry, shows up in the kind of art you see in Florence. What do you think the muse is pointing at? It's repetitive enough that it's pointing at something deep and fundamental about the human condition.

Yeah, I don't know, it's like that word, what was the etymology of the word genius again? Was that something to do with like there's a genie who like comes and like turns you into a genius? Yes, yes, that's right, right. It's the same kind of thing, it's like some

sort of divine inspiration, some sort of esoteric, special, metaphysical inspiration where you deliver the message and it gets kind of given to you, like some of my favorite writers, And I can't remember which one I was reading recently, he said this was like, I didn't

write this. I just like, he was just channeled through me in one go. And when I go back and read my old essays, I'm like, how do I know these things? I'm just like, I don't even recognize who I was when I write it. And it's not that

we're like, but I think you change mindset. You go into a different state of mind. I think every writer gets like this. I can tell it's in Rilke. When I read Rilke's poetry, I see he gets into that ecstatic curiosity phase. I know even from the words he's He's

using what he's pointing to as a feeling, which is like the ecstasy of aloneness and discovery, discovery in detail. And uh, I think some people feel it and some people don't. And when I, when people do know what I'm talking

about, they resonate it where we do it. It's not necessarily a good thing. It's probably like some sort of, I'm sure some psychiatrists would say like we have some sort of imbalance. Like we should be doing regimented writing from six and eight in the morning before we

go to the gym. And then we should be like drinking a shake. Right. But like, truth is like everyone has their own writing style. You shouldn't put pressure on yourself to do any different. Like, I'm 34 now, like, I'm not going to try

and force myself to write every day. It just doesn't work. Well, this is one of the things that has really changed my creative process since becoming a believer is I now put so much stake in the idea of revelation, right?

I mean, the, the, the New Testament ends with a literal book of revelation that is revealed to John. And it's just like, this is how the world is going to end. And I have very much tweaked my calendar, tweaked my life, given myself free time where I can just sit and

just listen to God. And I sometimes feel like God just airdrops me clear ideas. And Rick Rubin says the same thing. I think that one of his big contributions to the culture around creativity is he's just like, I'm just tuned into frequencies that are all there

and I'm more sensitive to them. And things are just given to me and I just know how to listen to the things that are already there. Meanwhile, everybody else is like a bunny on a hamster wheel. Faster, faster, faster, consume more, think more, be more productive.

But there's a stillness and a calmness where things can just be airdropped and become obvious to you. Yes. And I, I, it perplexes me how much people don't spend time one alone, right? Like they're always doing something. Like

I had this conversation with some friends the other day. I said, how much time a day do you spend thinking? They're like, thinking, what do you mean? I was like, I'm just like sitting and thinking like. No, I'm always doing something. And I was like, well, I spend

hours every day just thinking, like I'll lie in bed, I think about things. And I try to create space, like a vacuum in my mind, like not in a meditative sense, but like a space where like the, all the busyness of all my thoughts can come together and solidify

or, you know, be, come together in an interesting way. And I walk, right? Like I walk sometimes eight miles in the morning. And I think in that process of being alone and in nature, I also get into a different state where like there becomes, there's like

the synapses fire and I see new thoughts or like in, when I look at a flower, which is a very real caress, but like. And I look at a flower, I'll see some synergy of flowers, of colors, and that will like synergize some other thought in my mind.

It's like, I'll see something that inspires me to put two and two together somewhere else. Like, I'm a hundred percent open to that being like a divine, different parts of divine revelation. Um, but it's like having the humility to almost say, like, I can't necessarily think myself

into the answers. Actually, there's a great quote about this, which I now can't remember. It's like, you can't necessarily think yourself into the answers. You have to create space for the answers to come to you. Amen. And it's like,

how many people are alone? Even when they're alone, they're on the phones, right? Like how many people can actually sit with themselves and be alone for a long period of time? I think when you can get to that state, like the thoughts come much more easily and it

takes introspection and. Maybe reading these old, like, texts that people don't want to read, um, there's a humility there, right? Which is like, I have to sit and percolate. I mean, the, the really perverse thing is how much

I agree with you, and yet how much I've tapped into this. Like, how hard it is, even when I'm writing, to just like, You know that moment when you're sitting down and you're working on something and you get stuck and you get stuck like sometimes

I'll just like open Twitter I'll like check my text and it's like why can't I just sit and just be with the thought and in order for me to Do that. I need to like carve out like I need to be super intentional. I need to be like in a

cabin No internet. Yeah, I because if I have any ability to distract myself? I will because it's so easy and it's like so alluring to my senses or something. I don't know what it is. Well, it's just short term dopamine rewards, right?

Like you get those little dopamine hits from, you know, even the UXs of things are just so designed to like please people, right? Yeah. Um, but yeah, I know it's scary, but it's, it's better in Europe. Like, I think it's just a cultural thing about, um, you

know, media and entertainment being so much bigger here than it is in, like the cult of celebrity is much worse in America than it is in European countries. And also in other European countries, there's still more of an appeal to beauty because

it's already there from history. Like you walk around Vienna or Rome or London, there are buildings that surpass the age of America as a country. My school that I went to was built in the 16th century. Like, I mean, it was at its 500th birthday.

It's like the 15th century, I can't remember, but, um, if you're surrounded by more beauty, you start to kind of, uh, be grateful for it. It's like when you walk around Italy, you're not like, man, I wish there were less churches and less beautiful things, but just

by an osmosis of being around beauty, I think you respect it more. And that it's kind of like trashy, like cult of celebrity that's so short and transient in America is, is a very American. It's definitely bad across the West, but I travel a lot. Like

my parents, my mom is in Istanbul. My other friends are in London. It's just so much worse here. One of the things that I feel that we're missing is because of the way that we think about truth in school and the importance of logic, like prove what you're saying, we've

lost deeper sorts of truths that aren't very careful in. How people try to convey them, and like a good example of this is like Gerard. Rene Gerard is a super uncareful thinker. He's... Just sort of throwing stuff out there. Like

it's not super empirical, but like his stuff is deep and he's hitting on things that are beyond the realm of reason. And I feel like by trying to justify everything with scientific studies and by not even listening to what's pouring out of your soul and just having the

courage to just put that on the page and having editors who are saying, Hey, don't say that. Hey, don't say this fact checkers and all this sort of stuff, we're missing these. This deeper essence of what truth could be in this revelation of the deepest parts of the human

spirit. And it's even worse than that, like beyond just truth, it's also just like common sense. Like I call this, I refer to this as the church of graphs, right? It's like the church of graphs. Yeah, yeah.

Graphs in America, but the church of graphs. So I wrote this long essay, well not that long, but you know, documenting my following of the walking tour of Nietzsche, like where Nietzsche went on his walks. And a few weeks after writing this essay, there was some,

like, academic study that came out about how, like, walking was good for you. And I'm like, man, like, how much money and time was spent, like, making this essay, being like, we've got an abstract. It's like, this is the correlatory thing between, like, walking

and being good for people. And I was like, it's just comedy. It's not that it's, I agree that we should question things. Like, I'm not saying that we should, you know, take everything for granted. But the level that like, people just know

these and we have to do an entire study and subscribe to the church of graphs, like, yeah, just go read Nietzsche. Like there's a lot of people in history will tell you that walking is good for you, right? But like, we need to prove it with like a scientific team, like

study the data and it's like, it's just so silly. It's like, walking is good for you. I was like, great. Like, thanks for spending taxpayer money on this. Like it's, there's a common sense also that like has been bounded in history.

That's like tradition and wisdom that now we have to empirically prove. It's like the, you know, the, uh, uh, traditions and thoughts have been passed on generations that we doubt them all now. Like anything medieval has been completely

disregarded. Abba Chena, who wrote about medicine in the 11th century, actually discovered germ theory, but no one cared about him because it was like, it was many people ages. Like no one cares. And we're just disregarding entire things that like don't fit into the

current paradigm. It's just, it's just wild. You know, Ockham's razor was, it's now used as like this logical way to prove things. William of Ockham was like a 14th century religious monk. Did I not tell you this? Maybe

you did. I think I told you this. I don't know. I'm pretty sure I told you this. Maybe. Maybe you tweeted it or something. Everyone takes the Occam's razor and they talk. Describe it as like the law of Par name,

which is its simplest explanation, is the most, is the, is the one that we should prefer. Right? If you read William of Ham, he was a hardcore theologian who was trying to use like logic and other things to justify divine miracles and things like this.

Like, his argument wasn't like, right, the way he's been bastardized now to justify rationality is not what he was saying at all. And I think he must be turning in his grave, like, he was like, no, no, it was the illusion, you suckers, like, I wasn't telling you, like,

he was trying to point out that the most easy explanation is that it's God, right? That was Occam's. Positioning. Not that like, the simplest explanation from the data is correct, he's like, oh, it's probably divine miracle. When nobody reads William Ockham,

he's like, he wrote a lot of books, I actually have a bunch of them in Vegas, like they're very dense. But he's a theologian, not a rationalist. How consciously do you cultivate your taste? Is that something that you're thinking about doing? I mean, you're clearly traveling and

you're pretty intentional about where you're traveling. I would guess. Is that something that you think about? Oh man. I feel like I was way more cultured when I was like 11 than I am now. What? Yeah. What do you mean? I was like,

I think when you're a kid, when you have more freedom to think like I, I was obsessed with classical music when I was young and I was wanting to study art and I had all these. Well, interest, and I read lots of different texts and I do read them now, but I get refocused.

Like now I don't read broad things. I don't know the difference about being in school or not, I think as well when you're in school. I wish I could go into school now. Don't you kind of? Oh, it'd be amazing. Yeah. I'm like, I want to study biology. I mean, I don't want

to learn state schooling, but to have that step with teachers either. No, no, I don't know. But I just like the ability to go and like learn and I think as

a kid, I would find lots of things interesting. And then. You know, I would, I'd go to classical concerts on my own as a teenager. And now as an adult, like you just end up having responsibilities. Right. And then like your, your taste, you start to become kind of not hubristic, but

you start to define your taste as opposed to when you're younger, like you're more open to like, you don't know what your taste is. You start like learning about everything for the first time. We were talking about this. Um, last night at dinner, so like, older people

will pretend they know anything about wine, right? They sit there, they open the menu, they're like, I want this, and I was like, you don't fucking know any of this wine, does he? Can't read the names telling me about the

wine. So we get stuck in our ways when we're older. So it's not like a conscious thing of me trying to specify my taste, but I think as I get older, I'm, I have less time and I like narrow it down to things I get interested, but I try and find ways to, you know, usurp

that it's like, I went to an oil painting course last year and I can't paint, I'm a writer, not a painter, but I thought if I learned to paint, it might make me think in a different medium that might affect my writing. You know, I, well, the thing is, is I'm a

really terrible painter, so you really didn't do great for my confidence, but it reminded me of something that you and I had spoken about before about, like, writing being like word paintings, right? Like, you're a painter, we both are pointillism, pointillism is in

the art of many dots, and there's Many different colored dots, when you go up close, look like nonsense, when you come away, it's like a beautiful scene. And there's an analogy there in writing, right? Which is that the kind of writing that I,

you know, resonate with and other people resonate with, it's a little less, you know, logical and rational and it's a bit more poetic. In that writing, you know, you, you, um, you are creating a, putting forward a mood. It's much more like a word painting than it is

like a argument. And that doesn't strike the heart of everybody. But, uh, yeah, no, it's the, it's the, the, the, I think doing other mediums of communication expressing yourself. So like, obviously valid. You never just sit there and just look at

something for an hour unless you're painting it. You almost need to paint it. Like the motion allows you, it gives you enough movement to see things differently, but focusing on one object gives you enough stillness to like have the depth.

Yeah. And I think it's the same thing in writing. What the brain likes to do is it sort of likes to skip, right? Like when you're meditating, go from this thing to this thing, to this thing. But when you're writing, you're forced to stay in one topic and you're perpetually

frustrated in both activities. But then you look back at it after some time, you're like, I can't believe how deeply I just dissected that. That was so well said. And I think it's an argument for people to read Rilke was what

Rilke does is he finds in little pieces that like he will talk about a flower or about something very simple. And he really notices fine details. And they are like, he to me is like the perfect art, he captured the art of, you know, word paintings.

Um, but yeah, that kind of like, can you focus and notice, like, increase your sensitivity to something so simple. And then it can be quite overwhelming. I don't know if it was like this for you, but like, one of the reasons why I can't watch mainstream media or like

even really go to a restaurant anymore, I guess that's like a bad thing to say. But. When you get sensitive to things, like when you were in the world of Rilke, contemporary society is very overwhelming. Totally. Like I, I, I find it very hard to jump through

different minds. Like my place in LA is like a very old school greenhouse. There's no technology. I just have a bunch of books, loads of candles. And sometimes I'll go to like a restaurant in LA and I'm like, I'm like, so lost from this. Everything's screaming at you. Yeah.

And it's just like, and it's like, everything is loud and yeah, and it's the people who are sensitive. Right. Like it makes you become introverted and people don't realize that the introversion is not like people don't think of me as an introvert, but like I get

really overly stimulated from going to different things. But there's such beauty in, in taking those little, like having the ability to, to take notice of such fine details. Totally. So what I do whenever I go to the shopping

mall in Austin is I, so I walk into the Neiman Marcus and I go to the different high end areas. And my favorite high end brand is Brunello Cucinelli. Like I just love that guy. Like he's my business hero. Yeah. And you know, I'm like dissecting

the cashmere and I'm like reading through the book and like the way that his book, the texture of the paper is so beautiful. And I probably spent 20, 30 minutes in there just like really noticing the subtlety, like reading the tags and feeling them and all that.

And then I instantly went to the Balenciaga section and it was an assault on my senses. Like, I have like a mild grade of trauma from just that sharp transition. Yeah, well, it's like, why is everything so loud now? And I was talking about this the

other day with friends, but You know, an interesting kind of, um, corollary data point for society is what are the popular drugs of the young people in the 90s and the 2000s? Think about a rave culture. Think about Wall Street, right? It was like uppers. People

were taking coke. They were taking MDMA. They were doing like ecstasy. They were raving and partying and Wall Street was booming and this dot com bubble and all this stuff. Now it's like you look at the drugs that people are doing and it's like alcohol was a depressant.

Yeah. So like. So, you know, young people are smoking weed, which is also, you know, a depressive people. There's a lot of Ketamine going on in society right now, but you look at the Google trends for Ketamine, it's way up, you know, in different areas, it's being

legalized, which is anesthetic. So you have an anesthetic alcohol. And then if you're not, if people aren't doing those, they're probably not everyone, but a lot of people also on SSRIs or antipsychotics. So you're in this position where everybody

is desensitized. It's like, does the overwhelming things come first and the desensitization come after? Or are people desensitized and then they need the more loud things? That's a really interesting question. That's a great question. It could be the case that

things are loud and people are actually way more overwhelmed than they realize, so they've lost their sensitivity. They don't know what's wrong with them, so they take all these depressants, like depressive drugs. This thing about like what drugs people are

taking is just very interesting to me. Like an anesthetic? Like you're literally trying to turn yourself off from life. Culture is kind of weird now. Yeah, we agree on that. Amen. Well, here's a transition. You have this amazing introduction and I just

want to break it down. You say the West is dying and we are killing her. We're proud to destroy our own freedoms and repackage failure as democratic progress. We champion our rolling out of red tape, the bureaucratic creep that strangles the nation's

liberty. That American Dream has been replaced by mass packaged mediocrity porn, encouraging us to revel like happy pigs in our own meekness. Yo, that rips. Yeah, that was, I like that essay. What's behind that? Well, I, you, to your

point of, like, revelation, I wasn't, didn't sit down and plan that essay. It was during lockdowns, it was COVID, I was looking out my window at, like, you know, a world that had gone shut down and people were protesting. And it just, I wrote that essay in one go.

It was, it's emotional. It's because I think the reason why I can write like that is that I'm writing about something that I genuinely care about. You can tell how much I care from how, what I'm thinking about. It's like, I haven't loosely thought about this. Like I

was mad, right? And like in that madness, I thought, how can I express it? I was like, I'm not going to protest. And I was like, I'm going to write it. And it, and again, everyone has, people have different mediums, but in that medium, it just took

out, came out of me as like a pouring of my art where I was like, what is happening to society? Like, why are we okay with this level of mediocrity? And I think if you can get to that point where you care so much, the writing comes very naturally.

It's not like I had to think about the words or looked up the cinnamons or like, what on the thesaurus. com. It's like, I, in, I felt it so intensely that it became like poetry to me because it came from my heart. Like I was just like, man, like I am so mad

and upset about the state of society. Like I'm just going to say it. And then when I read it afterwards, I was like, maybe I should tone it down a bit. I was like, nah. I should put out exactly how my heart wanted this to be, but yeah, I love that

essay. The core thing that you're saying there is just letting yourself feel that rather than rejecting it. Right? Like we have something in society right now. Anger is bad. Vengeance is bad. Rage is bad. And like taking those emotions and

just throwing them on the page, letting them loose. It's like spewing a cannon out of your soul. Like I'm all for that. But I don't think most people allow themselves to feel that emotion. And so they read a paragraph like this and

they're like, How did you repackage that and all this sort of stuff? No, that's just like, it was like, uh, like a, like a volcanic eruption. Yeah, I'm not, I'm just not desensitizing myself. Like the real core is like, I'm not drinking too much. I'm not on a bunch of drugs

and I'm not on SSRIs. And I feel like when you get to a very neutral state of And like, living is hard. It's like a, a good, a good phrase I tell myself is that, um, you've got to experience, you've got to experience the lows to experience the

highs, right? Like, I'd rather oscillate than plateau. Like, I'd rather feel how in the hardness of life you can also then appreciate later the beauty, right? Like, I was really upset when my father died. I didn't, I thought it was like, meds, like

not grieve so much. I was like, no, I should feel this. I was like, this is an important lesson for me to understand and for me to feel. And, uh, by not being desensitized, like these emotions come. But if you desensitize yourself, like, you, it might be much nearer

to the surface than most people if they like, let it happen. If they realize, like, maybe they're over professionalizing. And people love authenticity. This is a, this is a trade off, right? Because people think to themselves, they have to fit

into the Overton window, they have to be professional. But what people are really missing in society, which is valued by a lot of, by a lot of others, is authenticity. Like, can, you can't, you can't read that essay and be like, she doesn't mean it. Like,

I'm, I'm clearly authentic, right? Like, I'm, I have strong views about politics, I mean them very deeply, and I express them in emotional ways. Um, and I wish more people would allow themselves to get there and have that freedom to take risks, to like, feel that emotion.

Like, read Bukowski. I read The Tropic of Cancer the other day. You read Tropic of Cancer, it's like, it goes from extreme explicitness, it's like a train of thought of like a man. Like, even if you read F. Scott Fitzgerald, like, Zelda Fitzgerald, like, she was in and

out of asylums, writing things, like, revenge to her husband, like, it was so much drama, like, there is such, you know, ups and downs in these writing, like, read Bukowski, man, like, it's like, you read contemporary poems now, and it's like, you must be kind, blah,

blah, blah, says tree to house, I'm just like, what is going on, like, you can't feel the emotion, like, you can't read Bukowski and think he's method acting, he's not method acting, you know he feels it. But I, like I can't read contemp I don't read

modern books anymore, so I'm just like, I don't believe, I don't, it doesn't feel authentic to me anymore. What did you do differently writing for the film when you made Every Angel is Terrifying? What did you do when you made that? How did

film allow you to tap into emotions and how did you think about writing differently? I didn't start that with the plan of it becoming a film. What happened was that I got asked to speak at the URBIT conference in Miami, right? And I hadn't made slides even the day

before. Like it was just like classic me, hadn't made any slides. But I care about certain things, right? And I don't need, like this, I don't need to overly prep. So I, myself and my friend, we, we, I, all I did was write bullet points of what I wanted

to say on each slide. I made the slides, I gave the presentation, I'd, I'd seen the slides like an hour before and I delivered this like speech. But Mike Ma designed this? Yeah, Mike did it. Mike is amazing. Mike is, I think, the most talented.

Both, one of the great writers and also an extremely talented artist. Talk about someone who writes from the heart. Authentic. Grasswood Architecture is a crazy book. Yes, it is definitely crazy. But he, in my mind, um, combines like the, um, The

philosophy and freedom and self sovereignty of someone like Ayn Rand, with like, um, Bret Easton Ellis in like the 90s. Like Bret Easton Ellis, like when they wrote American Psycho, it was also like an edgy book, right, like it glorifies violence, all

this kind of stuff, but it's fiction. Mark Marr is also writing fiction, but he's such a, it's so nice to read someone that's so free, like there's no over the window respect there. And in that, like it's, It's like a, yeah,

and Mike McNamara when I worked on the slides, like he also worked on the content because we have the same often crossover and philosophical views. And then that speech which I delivered just in one go having not practiced. It went really well. Like it had like a standing ovation,

people were very happy, like it moved people. And then we thought to ourselves, like, Oh, maybe this is a message that we should package. And the video that we made is just the speech cut down. Like there's, we didn't rewrite it. We took the recording of the speech, we

cut out a lot of the stuff that was referencing to crypto because it's very specific to that audience. And we just left the philosophy and the history, but it wasn't written as a video. And actually I found it really uncomfortable. There's something

much more personal about putting things in your own voice. And then, as you probably know, I'm putting it on the internet and then like hiding behind writing, right? Like, I like to hide behind writing, I see words, I see the distance between myself and

the words, right? To do a voiceover, and even a speech, is not, and even sitting here, is not really how I feel comfortable. So I can't watch that video. Like, I know that video people really liked, like I've had some people say it really moved them and made them rethink

their life choices and all this kind of stuff, which I love. But I can't, I can't like, as a writer, I really struggled to hear it. So it wasn't written as a speech. It wasn't written as a video. It was written as a speech. But yes,

I'm proud of it. I hope more people watch it and it resonates with, with people. But yeah, it was, it was definitely not a normal experience for me. I mean, I loved it. Like the, and I'm not just saying

that. Like, I liked it so much that I had to go make my own short film that was like, okay, inspired by this, what is it that I would add to the conversation? And how would I David ify this? Yeah. And. I felt like that video that you made tapped into a dark energy

that I feel a little bit that I hadn't really seen expressed, but then I wanted to, when I made you were made for more than this, I wanted to start with that and then do what I like to do, which is provide like a very concrete cheerier solution for if you're stuck

in this world, you're trapped on, you're trapped in your job and you want to make something more of yourself. Then, you go right on the internet, and through that freedom, meeting, influence, and I wrote, I remember writing, carve the path that only

you can carve, live the life that only you can live, write the essay that only you can write, and for me, a sentence like that could have only come out in a video script, I would have never written that. Oh, interesting. Because of the poetry

or something. Yeah. Yeah, I, I mean, we wanted to do follow up videos, like I wanted to do more ones about crypto, but the, the cool thing actually about making video and turning writing into that format is that people don't have attention span to read. It's like, like

I was saying, Meteor is very cheap and very fast right now. To get people to read long essays is not as captivating as people hearing it and having moving images. And I think it's actually, it's, I mean, you know, we both have, like,

we just use stock, we just use footage that we got from other places on the internet. It's not like I had to go around with a film, like I didn't have to do all this, right? Like me and Mike just sat and we just. Looked for not directly the imagery that of what

we were saying. It's not like I needed that. It's just something that picked up. It's like the word painting again. It's like what feeling does this sentence invoke? And what is the corollary imagery? And to make that word painting be real in a film is a beautiful prop to like

experience it. It made me really value like having good video editing skills. I was like, damn, you can make beautiful art this way. And I would love to make more. Like I definitely want to make more things like that because I think it just

resonates. It's much more strongly with a, with a much, with a younger and a much more broader audience in writing because people aren't reading like a book consumption is down. People are reading short form, even a long

essay about like what you should do with your life or how you should think about it. It's just not as captivating I think as a video. So. I'm, I think we both have to just keep doing them, I'm afraid. Yeah. Why are there more people like you in the

world? Like you just, just even doing this podcast, like it's so fun to hear how generative and how distinct your ideas are and like, you're, you're, there's just not that many people who have the freedom. And I think. Like the courage to reach beyond

consensus and find, go explore new ideas. Oh, I feel that's sad and I hope more people will go and do fun research, but, um, yeah, I don't know. I guess it's like, do you want to live a conventional path or not? Like it's not like, do you have the,

like, I, you know, I didn't grow up with like normal parents and like a normal life. I didn't really ever understand what normal was. You know, things were, but people are so censored to kind of stay within these guardrails, you refer, like, to what their career path

is, what they should think about, what their relationship should be like, and like, everything is up for reconsideration, right? Like, I've learned about science, I've learned about history, I've learned about all these things, and I don't know. I hope more people

can be more curious. Like, there's a whole world to learn out there. Like, I find it so captivating. I wish I could never... If my dream situation, my transhumanist future, my transhumanist dream is I never need to sleep.

I could just be in front of a compu... I know this sounds ridiculous, but... Be by computer in my books all day and just read. Like it is so fun to just go, the whole human knowledge is out there for you to discover and to rethink about a place, everything. It's like every

solution to every problem has been written about in like different industries and different fields. It's just sort of been blended together. It's like, it's so cool. Like, I don't know, I get excited and yeah, I, um, I think as we've

discussed before, the problem starts much more young. Curiosity is beaten out of you for school, right? Like. Is really, you're not meant to ask questions. You're meant to be obedient. If you're not obedient, then like you're in

trouble. So we have a problem which is that why aren't adults like this? It's like only a few can get through the system. I don't think it's their fault. I don't think it's people's individual's agency fault. It's like the whole system's against you to stop you

being extremely curious. Totally. Um, and that's really sad and I hope more people just push past that just for themselves and for their children. I mean, I love this quote from you. I dream of many different careers, many different

lives, many different loves, many different renewals of myself. As if I was an immortal being who was able to experiment and explore across an endless timeline, right? It's like everyone says, you should live as if you'll die tomorrow. That's like, it's

like James Dean quote, right? Live as if you'll live as if you'll die tomorrow. Dream as if you'll live forever. I don't remember the exact, something like that. Yeah. Is it cooler to live as if you'll live forever? Because if you live as if you're gonna like you plan

your life, like I'm gonna live on average. 85 years or whatever. It's probably way less than America now. It's probably like 30. But, um, , whatever the current life expectancy is in the us. Um, if you tell yourself you have this pipeline, you're like, well, I'm

gonna have one career. I'm gonna have one relationship that's medium, four blah, blah. If you were gonna live, if you were a mortal. There's a great book actually called Alan by Alan Harrington called The Immortalists. You just talks about what society would look

like if you'd, if you'd like, got rid of mortality and those campaigning for poor against, it's just an interesting thought experiment, regardless of your views on longevity. If you lived forever, you wouldn't have one job, right? You would probably do different

things and experience stuff and there's some level where it's like I want to try all the flavors of life. Like my first company was a toy store It's so farfetched from what I've been doing the last 10 years, but it was probably some of the happiest years of my life.

Kids came into this shop every day. We sold them toys, we taught them about entrepreneurship. I ran a philosophy class called Petit Plato's. It was so cute. Petit Plato's? Yeah. What was that? It was a philosophy school for kids. We ran it in the back of our toy shop. That

is awesome. Some of those kids are like still my friends. Like there was one girl, she's called Hermione, she's now studying philosophy and theology at university like I was. She came to stay with me in America. She's like 21 now. Yeah.

And like, you don't realize until you try different, completely different fields and completely different worlds and completely different cultures about like the beauty and the things you can learn. Like I find it's crazy that some people just

have lived in the same place their entire lives. But I went back to my high school reunion and everyone was like still dating each other. And I was like, wait, what? I go, I was like, there's a whole world out there. How is it the chance that you all found the best people

in this one moment of your life? And I just want to experience all that. Maybe it is the case that, you know, you found the best thing when you were eighties. Right. But like, I want to experience this. I want to live in Tokyo. I want to be a bus driver.

There's so many things I want to do. Like, I would love to be like a criminal detective. Like, I'm not going to probably have the time, but I'm going to go study them. Like, why not? Like, imagine just thinking about technology my entire life. Like, I obviously love technology.

It's my most focused on interest because technology to me is pragmatic philosophy. Like, it takes philosophical questions and it answers them. But, yeah, I want to do everything, like I, that's why I care about longevity. It's like I just selfishly want more time to like go

do more fun things. Like, people are having fun and life is so fun, like I have a great time. What is it that you see in reading that other people are missing? Because like when most people think of reading, they think, oh, that's

a boring activity. Meanwhile, you're like, my ideal vibe is sitting in a room with unlimited books, and I just get to like bathe in the wisdom of great scholars. What is it? I think that people just also don't disregard books if they don't like them.

It's like, don't force yourself to read books if you don't like it. Everyone's like, well, I don't really like this book, but I can read it. I'm like, well, stop reading it. I don't like reading. I'm like, maybe that's, you're not buying the

right books, right? Like, it's like, I don't know what my interests are, like, from the start, but I just start digging around and I look over here and I look over here and I'm like, ooh, that sounds interesting over there, but I might end up appreciating it.

I told you I went to go read the New Testament and I ended up reading about New Testament manuscripts. Right. That wasn't set out, but I just followed my own curiosity. But people should just free flow. It's like, don't read what your friends are telling you to read

or what the New York Times bestseller is telling you to read. Definitely not that. Cool. The, you know, all the bestseller books are like how to be more productive. It's all nonfiction about how to like, you're messed up and here's like

nonfiction about how you can be less messed up, which is a weird cultural, again, perverse thing going around that like we all need like to be fixed. But it's like, go find things that resonate with you, right? And like, don't be embarrassed

by it, right? Like who, I don't know many people who's like reading Rolke. I gave a copy of it, of his poetry. Like poetry is like a little cringe now in modern society. People aren't like, going, reading poetry. I gave copies of, uh, Domino Elegies to most

of my friends. And a lot of them said, were like, really grateful. They're like, you know what? I've never actually read poetry. Like, not as an adult. Like, I was in school and I really resonated with this. It's like, go try it.

Like, go pick up a poetry book. You might be surprised. I feel like there's a thread that you've been pulling on for a few years now about Scenes that we're missing about consciousness. You have this crazy story about when your

aunt died or something. Yeah Yeah, I, I, yeah, I, I, I, I, two my family members have died, and like, around the time exactly when they died, like, I've had panic attacks. Like, I've never had, I've never had, like, a panic attack. I'm not a super

anxious person. Which are you, they died and right before you had a panic attack. They died in Turkey, my cousin and my aunt, different times, and both those times was in the night in U. S. time, and I woke up

in the night and had a panic attack. Jeez. And the first time, I didn't think of anything. The next morning, I woke up, and they were like, Oh, your cousin died from a heart attack. And I was like, Whoa, that's crazy. Like, I woke up in the night, and I had a,

I thought I was having a heart attack. The second time was with my aunt, um, and like, there could be, you know, normal explanations for this, um, but as I've become more humble. Right. So like science doesn't have the answers and just to clarify how much science doesn't

have the answer in science, like everyone's like physics and the standard model, like all this stuff, 95 percent of all observable reality is just labeled as dark matter that we don't understand, like, could you not have a situation where people should be more humble

than that? It's like, all observable reality is 5 percent of what we can see. The whole rest of it, what we call dark matter is just an unknown thing that like scientists can't figure out. So, okay, well, maybe we shouldn't. Be very

humble that we don't understand how things work and I used to find all this like spirituality energy stuff like kind of weird I was like, I don't want to like turn 30 and do the thing where everyone does is like I've gone to ayahuasca I'm like now I like talk to a plant But at

the same time like as you get older if you're sensitive you start to realize that like there are some things like aren't explanatory and I'm not making the cases necessarily about my panic attacks as you know, they can be explained away, but If you're sensitive, you

start to notice that there's a little, there's like magic. There's like some, you can tap into it. It's not magic in the way that people think of it, but it's like serendipity and like synchronicity. And like, there's something where it's like

very, it's, it's my, my boyfriend, I was like, it's always like you, we call it something, we call it prop guy. It's like, you know, he's been touched by God. It's like, this is a very unlikely chance of these exact things can happen. And they

worked in certain ways. And in that humility, I thought a lot about consciousness and in post enlightenment thinking everyone was like, consciousness is following neurons and the neurons fly and that's how things work. And maybe consciousness is non localized,

and it's everywhere, and we tap into it, and like, you know, Persick has this argument that you can, like, even rocks have some sort of level of preferences, like, that things are working towards. Um, and I've just become humble that I don't have the answer. It's

not I'm saying I know what consciousness is. I'm just saying that I'm not fully bought in to the current paradigm and questioning it is like total heresy. I tweeted once about the, you know, I read an article saying like, Oh, I said something wrong, like I, you know,

started to doubt materialism, right? Like I was like, yeah, consciousness seems a little weird. Like I, I think we should all be a little humble about it. Every AI engineer in like the world went, Oh my gosh, look at this Silicon

Valley VC who doesn't believe in consciousness. And I was like, no, I'm just. Asking questions, like, you can't prove, we don't have a proof of what consciousness is. So to be able to be that arrogant about it shows these, like, dogmas, right?

There's, like, a certain post enlightenment dogmatic view of consciousness that you're not allowed to question. Which I think is also a problem with people, how people are building AI. They're like, we're just going to build this language calculator and it'll

become conscious. Like, you don't even know what conscious means, right? Um, but this is just a problem with post enlightenment thought, which is, you know, something that we've talked about for a long time. Yeah. I think it was in 19... I

want to say 1945, but that year strikes me that might be off because that was right after the war. But there's a guy named C. P. Snow who wrote a book called The Two Cultures. And what he was trying to get at, not a book essay, what he's trying to get at in this

piece is like, We're now dividing the humanities from STEM and he was basically like raising the red flag saying, this is not good. And I think that you can see how specialized everything has become and how much we're missing because of that.

Like Einstein died with a book from like an Indian mystic right next to him on his bed. Marshall McLuhan, who was like a crazy media theorist, everyone's like, wow, he knew so much about that. He was like obsessed with Catholicism. He was like a Christian scholar

for years. And you just see this over and over and over. I mean, the classic example, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs goes out and does, you know, circles around Buddhism and does the typography. Like that's sort of the cliche example, but there's

something here about we've gone so much into specialization that we've sort of separated. Either you can be this logic person who works from the head or this. Humanity is a person who works from the heart, but you have to choose, and there's so much

that we're missing by creating this wall between them. And it's also extremely arrogant, right, because like the scientific charge of broths, right, you know, like, think about the current narrative around AI, it's like, we, people who've never thought about thinking,

never thought about thinking, we're engineers, we've thought about how to build things from the ground up using code. There's been a lot of philosophical thought on what is, like, what it talks like, justify a belief. That's the field of epistemology.

Right through, like, what it means to, like, define agency. And you have all this AI researchers now who are like, we've built this code and it's, we've anthropomorphized it in such a way that this language calculator is going to become conscious.

I'm like, these are very loaded terms. These are very loaded terms that you haven't introspected on a lot. We don't even know what those definitions mean. Like we don't have a collective definitions of even what the word intelligence means. There's no single answer of what intelligence

means. There's something that a spider can do when it creates a web that's intelligent, that's going towards a preference and a goal. Because bees and ants. Exactly, there's like murmuration and buzz, there's many different types of intelligence. To have the arrogance

to say, if we can make it resemble our intelligence in this way, like to build these kind of very smart, very human sounding, you know, language calculators, because we can see ourselves in it, that is primary form of intelligence. Like, I think something that's way more scary

from an existential risk point of view is synthetic biology. People actually try and build biological intelligence, right? Like, how do we build organisms from non organic matter? Like, that to me is a little bit more like, we should be thinking about that as

opposed to like, if we just keep adding thousands more training inputs to this giant language code page, it's going to walk out the screen and kill us. But it comes from this arrogance, right, of like, everything is logical. And we are so,

it's such a great paradigm of science that we figured out what consciousness is thinking. It's like, no, we have, it's like, we don't have a definition of what the goal even is. We don't even know what intelligence is, that we're somehow going to get there, even though

we don't really know what the goal is. Yeah, the Arab, they're like current hubris in STEM to disregard the humanities. I've been thinking about these questions for a long period of time. Like it's just, it was just saved much more time and people were

talking to each other. Like every, I mean, a lot of the machine learning examples come from behaviorism they used to in the past. Like looking at like Pavlov's models and trying to understand like how you do reward functions. That was some of the beginning basis of machine

learning. And then it kind of separated out and became much, much more about code and not even looking at mimetic behaviors and intelligence, intelligent animals. It's like, this divorce, like you say, like, I mean, how much is that slowing down progress?

This extreme arrogance between both camps, right? Like, everyone needs to take a massive familiarity pill. Yeah. As you think of the writing that you've read, how do you think handwriting to the typewriter to the keyboard changes?

The shape of thought. Oh, it's such a good one. It's something I've been thinking about for a while because I want to get a really good new fountain pen. I was like, I need a fountain, I need a really good fountain pen. Um, but yeah, it's divorcing

you from it. When you write with a pen, this is why I've been trying to reunite with, because in my school, I don't know, I just probably don't have the same in the US, but I went to a very old school. Between four and 18, I had to only use, I

was only allowed to use a fountain pen. Is that happening in America? No, no, it's not. Okay. So everything that I wrote from four to 18 had to be, if it was a school, like law, like we had to write a fountain pen. And then when you're writing, it becomes like

a somatic experience, right? Like your handwriting is part of the art, how you do cursive, how you phrase your letters, like. Look at Islamic calligraphy. I know. And like medieval manuscripts.

And there was a, there's a formality, the thing I love when I go look at these like old historical texts, including the New Testament manuscripts, is that the, how they display the words was also part of like the total whole of the writing.

Yes. Right? Like they wanted it to be beautiful. If you read Abba Chenna's Calendar of Medicine, which is an 11th century medical textbook. Right. It has beautiful calligraphy, trying to imagine like a medical textbook now, like having this in, but it was a formality of

like, I am doing something. It's a legacy. Like I'm showing up. Right. It's the same thing about like, why does everyone in LA walk around in a sports bra? Right. Cause like nobody feels this respect. It's me to like dress up and, you know, make an effort

for this. We've lost the respect for formality. Like it's cringe to try, right? Like it's cringe to try. Now everything's we're in reduced to, but I read everything on a Kindle. Like I admit, like I take a Kindle around with me sometimes,

but they still drive me mad because like, I feel like divorced from the reading experience and maybe because I'm just too old, but like, you know, writing was meant to be, it was an art form and now it's really not an art form.

It's like mass market paperback or hardback. And it's like, how do we bring back beautiful books? Like, think about like, um, uh, um, William Morris did the Canterbury Tales. Like, have you seen these books? Oh, it's just so beautiful. It was like 19th century revival

of medieval texts with beautiful calligraphy and drawing. But like, nobody has, nobody respects it anymore, right? They want it as fast and as quick as possible. Um, but it's a shame. I think we're going to get some return of this. Like we've

gone too far and like now some people are making beautiful books again. Because it's like they've gone so far that people are like, wait, actually like we like some of the pretty stuff. But yeah, I want to, I want to go back to

handwriting with a pen for this exact reason, which is that I want to show up to it. And I think there's some level where when I type on a computer, it's divorcing me from the formality of my own thoughts. Plus you can't delete it, which is something that you and

I spoke about, right? A typewriter is also great for this, like when you write and edit, you get rid of things and you lose, sometimes things that were very good, um. It's like jazz. It's like jazz. Yeah. Like

jazz flows and then you roll with the mistakes. Yes, exactly. When you're typing, the mistakes, delete, delete, delete, and so you lose the mistakes. Yeah. And sometimes the mistakes, like you go back and realize they weren't mistakes.

Right? The mistake, creativity is sometimes recognizing the best mistakes that you've made and actually building on them. Totally. So, you know, I, I think we're going to start seeing, like, I hope that there's, and you start to see

like, even the fact that the videos that we've made have been, have resonated with people that I think there's a slight backlash towards the over indexing on technology for everything. I spoke to a 19 year old the other day who like has his own history, like essay competition.

He's writing beautiful books and doing, I was like, okay, like maybe there's a hope in the younger generation. I mean, like, I don't want to be like those guys, like they're all on Tik Tok and like, we don't want to be like our older brothers and sisters.

I'm hopeful. Well, it's funny cause we were talking last night about these super high end cars, like higher end than Lamborghini and Ferrari. Yeah. And the designer. Who's the head designer. He draws by hand before he brings them into AutoCAD.

And I was talking to another designer and he was in his mid 70s and I, I really respected the guy. I was like, Hey, you know, when you look at stuff on Pinterest, stuff on Instagram, like what do you think is the fundamental problem?

And he sort of stops and he thinks, and he goes that people don't design by hand anymore. When you design by hand and you have the ink that moves through, you have, you have a texture, you have sort of this lack of perfection. Now he's like, When people design something,

they start with templates. They start with things that they can copy and paste. They start within these. Invisible constraints that limit their thinking from the very beginning. And what's great about handwriting when you're writing, but in particular with modern design,

when you have a pen, there's a boundlessness. You're only constrained by the eight and a half by 11 page itself. I think you see it in writing too. Like the idea of the spirit has died. Like how often do most people think of the spirit? Like, does this piece of writing,

is it spirited? Is it alive? And I think you see the same thing in houses. It was funny because my friend sent me a zoom screenshot. It was all these people on this grid and people just working at their houses. Every single one of the screenshots had bare white walls.

Yeah. There were like 12 all white walls. I'm like, where is the spirit? Where is the distinctiveness? Where is the personality? How are we? Stripping the world of life time and time again. And I think you see it writing, but it's hard

to see there, but you can see the residue of this dilution of the human spirit in architecture and painting and aesthetics. And I'm just like, what is happening? I know. And I, I so much more even a contrast if you spend time in Europe compared to the

U S right, which is that the U S has become hyper minimal. It's almost like egalitarian. It's almost aesthetic. Right. Which is that. It's embarrassing or to be ostentatious or to have any kind of. You know, um, outbursts of creativity

and it's make an effort. It's just cringe. Like it's cringe to look like you care and try. You want to look like you don't care, which is like the Balenciaga, like Vetterman's thing you talk about earlier. It's like, we don't literally put young people

in trash bags and charge 900. And it's like, you're just showing how much you don't care. Right. And you're paying a lot to pray. So it's like, I'm rich and I don't care, which is like the main message of fashion right now, which is weird. Like look at the nineties,

like. When we were dressing up, the supermodels they looked up to, it's like, there was a different kind of like prestige, like there was a meritocracy. This is back to the point, why don't people like it? Well, beauty, Plato's

quote, beauty is a natural superiority. It plays to meritocracy. Like there is some objective standards of beauty. People want to not say it, but there's when people go to the dentist, they all want more symmetrical teeth. They're not like, you know,

I want one tooth this way and one tooth this way. There are objective values of beauty. There is, you know, symmetry. There is complexity. There's elegance, mathematical elegance. You can see in a mathematical formula also represented in a flower. And that flower has

a symmetry that is based on math and art and so many things. And now like people just kind of like disregard all of these things. It's like, there's no such thing. We don't want to have superiority. Things call me better. Everything must be the same. And this is what

Nietzsche spoke so heavily about. This is his last man argument, right? Which is a last man wants to be like everybody else. Right. And the madman who is just trying to like be an individualistic person. And that's why like everyone hates. Ayn Rand so much. Like,

why do people hate Ayn Rand so much? It's like a nice Russian woman who like, her argument is like, if people should listen to her talks on America. She has this talk on American businessmen, which I listened to the other day. And she's just saying like,

they should be great. They should, people should look up to them. Like, they should be the models of society that people want to embody their characters and values. Everyone's like, she's awful. And I'm like, what? Like, you want to have shitty leaders?

Like, I think it's good that they have virtuous qualities. But this perverse and extremely dominant view that, you know, any kind of meritocracy is bad works against our entire, you know, aspirations as humans and progress. Like, there are natural hierarchies. Denying

them is denying science. Like, there's natural hierarchies. Some things are more beautiful than others. Like, we should celebrate it. Like, I don't care that I'm not the world's best painter, but I love going and seeing Monet's painting. I'm not like, damn that

guy, stop painting, right? Like, it's crazy. It's like, it's fine. It's not my skill, but we now everyone has to be equal in this egalitarian world. There's no space for beauty. What do you get from spending time in Istanbul

besides seeing your mom? What do I get? Well, I learned a lot about why I don't want to live, why, how countries should not be dysfunctional, right? It's like an extremely dysfunctional country. But it's that Istanbul. Have you been to Istanbul?

No. It's incredible because it's a place where the East meets the West, right? It's half European and it's. Middle Eastern, and there's Islamic, and there's European, like half is literally Europe. And, you know, I cross my hotel in Europe to my mom's house on the Asian

side every day by boat. So I literally cross across continents. Oh, that's cool. And you just start to realize, like, um, I mean, the Ottoman Empire is also really cool, but like the history of Istanbul is Incredible. We just listened to the Fall

of Civilizations podcast on the, on the Byzantine Empire. Really good. Highly recommend. Um, but it's just, there's a lot of legacy and a lot of history there and you can't help but be humbled. And also to experience different faiths. I'm not Muslim. Some of my family

members are Muslim, but to hear the call to prayer five times a day, or however many times a day. It really stop me to pause and reflect. It dices up my days. It reminds me of what it must've been like in the medieval period when you had church. Like you had the, you

know, um, Matan and like the, and the, that's how the Cox were. It was, comes from the church, right. They would definitely the time with like bells. Yep. Um, so in, in an Islamic country like Turkey. And to have a different way of like breaking

up the day, hearing things ringing, like this kind of stuff. It just reminds you that, like, there isn't just one way of living. In America, everyone's, like, obsessed with clock time. In Istanbul, you hear the five call, like, calls to prayer, and that separates your day,

and it causes you to reflect. It's just a, it's a beautiful place. It's a beautiful place to visit. It's not a beautiful place to live, because it gets very frustrating, but just the history there, like, the old Ottoman palaces, they're just... They're like

the 16th century who spent what would be equivalent to a billion dollars. Like they really were obsessed with detail. There's no, like they, they definitely, they're definitely maximalists. You know, this is interesting, like the obsession with

detail, the maximalists, like that's one thing I love going for in my writing, like my favorite part of the editing process is looking at what I've written and basically trying to like add vibrancy to individual words and sentences and try to create, like, I'm such

a maximalist. I just love to. Like for me the peak of writing and visual aesthetics is like how do I make things maximalist while still retaining their coherence and while still retaining a sense of elegance. Like what I'm always teetering

on the edge of is maximalism but it sometimes gets confusing and now it gets messy and stuff like that and I'm always trying to find that balance. And I just feel like the soul, at least like the expressive part of ourselves, like we

want to show maximalism. We want to show like the depths, the contours of our personality and like minimalism is a suppression of all that to come back to the drugs that you were talking about. Yeah, and I really, if people want empirical

evidence of the case, just look at every health, expensive health list for sale in Los Angeles right now. They look exactly the same. And it's just so crazy, like, look at the wealth of the past, like the William Randolph Hearst, look

at the Hearst Castle. Hearst Castle, incredible! It's insane! And, you know, he wasn't even just like a newspaper magnate, like, he collected antiques, like, um, uh, G. P. Morgan. His library. His library is my favorite place, like, it

is such a stunning homage to books. He has, you know, leaders in the Pinter Pretty press, like, on the walls. Even just, like, the balconies and, like, the decoration on the balcony in that place and, like, the color of the mahogany is

gorgeous. And, like, he was an industrialist. Like, people think of him as a banker, right, like, I'm able to say this is J. P. Morgan. But if you go look at his library and then look at the, he collected medieval manuscripts. He actually, I think, died on, like, an archaeological

dig. Like, he went, he himself went to archaeological quests. It's like, these people in the past, when you read people's diaries, they didn't just do one thing. They had all these varied interests, because education wasn't so siloed, and like, like,

it wasn't so fixed that you were meant to do one thing at the end of it. It's like, the great industrious about Asia, the Hearst, the J. P. Morgans, were very interesting characters who had a lot of, like, what you were saying about people being interested in esoteric

philosophy, and like, Steve Jobs, for example. But like, no, like everyone just lives with these very narrow views. And I'm so inspired by the JP Morgans of this world. They like, they cared about these things. Like they realized that it was important to learn from the past,

learn from history. He obviously loved books. Like you can't go into that place. It's like a book church. And then you go to Italy, right? And like, I remember being in, hearing all this stuff around like geopolitical risks, like a, like a year and a half ago.

And I was in Rome and everyone in Rome was like drinking red wine and eating pizza. So they weren't talking about like that. Older countries have seen many phases of revolutions and countries come and go and like blah blah. America is still so new and there's some level

like we have to stay how it is and we have to keep everyone subdued and like keep them within the system. But yeah, I think if you could change a really weird way to increase cultural self efficacy in America is just to make it harder for litigation.

And I think you'd stop seeing so many warning signs and people would relax and in that period of breathing and stillness, they would find more creativity. Am I hallucinating or did you do a Federalist paper rabbit hole?

I did. Yeah. Yeah. I did do that. Yeah. And what'd you pick up about the writing style of the four fathers of America? Um, that they were very deep, philosophical people,

not like any politician now, like you read the federalist papers and the anti federalist papers was also interesting. And if anyone interested in like the early American, like founding history, I did a fellowship at the Claremont Institute is. It was unbelievable.

It was like 10 days in Orange County where all we did was sit with scholars and learn like the Ferris Papers and the Constitution. Even more fun for me because I'm not from this country, so I learned it like from scratch, right? It's like, I didn't learn about this

in school, we just learned about like Henry VIII. So I learned all this stuff, and I was like, wow, like, there was a lot of thought put into this, right? Like, they were, they thought about things, like, all you did was actually

printed, the Federalist Papers were printed in newspapers as debates, right? Like, it was like, Federalist Paper, and then, you know, the, the response to that. And it was very thoughtful, and it was pro liberty, and it was grounded in values. And

it was very well considered and you compare that to political discourse now, like I watched the midterms, like I, I was way too involved with thinking about politics in 2020 and last few years I've disengaged. I was like, I don't know what's happening.

But I watched the midterms, like people can't even string a sentence and that's fine. Like everyone's like, that's fine. They don't make any sense. If you read the Federalist Papers, it's extremely humble that these people cared. They really, really cared. And it made me

respect America a lot more of like what its founding history was and why it was so based and rooted in liberty. I was like, man, I wish more America's like, I'm surprised how few actual Americans have studied the Federalist Papers, like, I'm English

and I've studied the Federalist Papers, but they haven't. But I think it kind of goes against the grain of contemporary education to go back and read that stuff because you can see what the decline is, right? Like, really, like, this doesn't even make

sense, like. It doesn't make sense, just very erudite. So it was, it was very humbling to read it and it gave me a lot of respect for the American political founding and the minds that came to it. It was, it was very fun. Last question. If you were to design a curriculum

about teaching writing, what wedge into writing education would you have? I would guess it wouldn't be around spelling and grammar. Like, I was like, is that a diss on the fact that I'm really bad at spelling and grammar

in general? I was like, how do you know? I'm just like, you're gonna have a, I'm terrible at it too. My sentence is always just too long. Like, that was like my thing. Like, I, I, it's a train of thought for me. So like, I always just write, then I'm like,

this sentence is like seven paragraphs. It's just one train of thought. But you have to be free, right? Before I inject things, well, I just think people aren't studying the classical texts enough. I feel very fortunate now, as a person in my 30s, that I went to a very

old school, school in England, where we got taught Latin and Greek by default. We got taught Latin and we studied classical Roman texts. Like, we had to. It wasn't like a choice, right? Like, here in America, like, you can maybe learn that if you pick it up.

And if you read Euripides, Or like poetry, if you read the Odyssey, right, which I'm sure you have, or the Aeneid. In that, which is in my, on my mind, like the next, like the next level of foundational books after like the Bible, right?

It's like, go read other stuff that's been around for a long time and Euripides and these other great Greek writers, including Homer, did something very similar to Ayn Rand. They took characteristics and qualities of what they think humans should be like, or not be

like, and put them in characters. You read Euripides, it's similar as Shakespeare does the same thing. It's makes, it's irrelevant in any era that you read it. You use the same thing, like, she loves him, he loves that, she's not being

noble, traitor y, like. Humans haven't, the context has changed, but human drive hasn't changed. Like we're, we still have the same drives, we just find different solutions. You're saying that right. And to go read Euripides in probably the same

way that you, you are doing with the Bible, it's like you go back and you realize like, ah, like everyone's had the same questions. And we're thinking about the same time from a writing perspective. I think it gives you humility, right? I'm not, I'm not living in

the greatest moment of human intellect, right? Like there's things for me to learn from the past. There's things for me to appreciate about the present. And in that humility, I find my voice, right? Like it's like a respect for that. And I just don't think people are

reading old enough texts enough. They're not. Going back, it's seen as like boring. I'm like, damn, that's lost for 2000 years for a reason. Yeah. It was funny. We went out to dinner last night. We're in downtown LA and it was

about a 10 minute walk downtown. And it literally felt like a scene of I am legend. I felt like if I'd been there an hour later, we walked at sunset. I felt like we had walked. An hour and a half later, we would have been murdered. I mean, there was no one on the streets. It's

totally dead. We're driving back from dinner after and the driver's like, I cannot believe what has happened to this place. There's no life on these streets. Yeah. And he drops us off and there's this beautiful lobby. It must have been built 1920, but between 1920,

1928, just has that. Almost like deco exterior, but then also like that Art Nouveau life and vibrancy to it. Like that detail. And I just look at it like, wow, that is magnificent. And then you just sort of look at the streets and like the paint

is chipped and there's no care to the outside. And just the juxtaposition between what you have inside something that was built 110 years ago and the outside, like these decrepit, sad, lifeless streets. I was just like, what? And I'm like, if that's

not a motif for what's happening right now with the decline of the creative spirit, I don't know what is. Yeah. Drumroll. End of podcast. That's why you should end it. That's totally

amazing. Exactly. I totally agree. Yes. That was a blast. That was a blast. Thank you. That was fun.