Inspiration in the valley of dreams.
Your Swedish friend invites you to a Midsommar party… Coding with the Droids, Wittgenstein party talk, Painting on the edge.
Notes from recent weekends in the valley of dreams… so your Swedish friend invites you to a Midsommar party… What could go wrong? Unfamiliar with the festival, I thought I’d watch the A24 movie first to figure out what to wear and, well, have you seen the movie? OMGGGG.
I went to the party anyway. The party was wonderful. I left before any “rituals” occurred, although they were just hauling out a maypole for dancing as I departed. I was dressed in all white with a vintage 60s white chemise embroidered with a thin red yarn that felt just a little bit vintage Swedish-ish. There was a floral arranging station on the first floor for flower crowns and I couldn’t help but flex: I had done a bit of flower arranging in High School when I got a part-time job delivering flowers because I owned a truck and sensing that the florist-owner was not actually all that great at design at a certain point I just stepped in and did the arranging. My floral headpiece for the party astounded. People took note. Or at least that’s what I told myself.
It was an SF party, so I saw lots of founders, engineers, designers, AI researchers, and more. But the hidden talents revealed after careful questions were the most interesting: one person had animated a music video for Olivia Rodrigo; another was studying the structure of jokes.
The party was hosted by a founder who had just had a wonderful launch for a marvelous product and that thrill of Product Market Fit had just started to vibrate in the ether and there’s just no feeling like it… It’s a starting line, not a finish line, for sure, but that moment is a fun one to witness.
Several blocks away and around the corner, another group was grinding through a Surge. A Surge is like a sprint, except that it actually works. There is a unifying spirit of everyone doing work that matters and where everyone is getting it done. This is the opposite of busy work or “rest-n-vest” or the slacker-hacker or any of the other names given to the trap of inactivity that robs brilliant people of joy—a surge is a jolt of action.
That surge resulted in a new tool that felt like a sea-change in the quest for a solo-builder… a new path forward. The first night I tried the tool I forgot to eat and didn’t stop until 1:30 am when I had a very very robust MVP up and running. It’s shocking how AI can augment your process when it actually works (instead of only promising to work). The tool that actually works is Factory.ai. Give it a try. Here’s a demo:
Spend any amount of time with me and I’ll find a way to talk about story, art, and design. And how together they can bend the arc of humanity’s progress, if you get it just right and do it with all your heart.
(Shoutout to designers Andreas Weiland and Wes O’Haire and Hongyuan Jiang for all the great hands-on design work they do with founders at Arc).
We had our Arc program for founders wrap up last week. It’s wonderful to work with founders on their story—that irreducible truth that guides them as an unhealing wound and an ever-present guiding light—but that’s not what I want to bring up… instead I want to mention a moment at the start of Arc where a founder transformed me instead of the other way around. We went to dinner at a low-key-haute Korean restaurant in NYC and the conversation turned from ideas “in general” to the gamesmanship of ideas, the puzzle-work that is pressed into action in the academic field of philosophy. The talk got deep and I walked away with a reading list (the founder had been a philosophy major) and I had some major work to do.
What work! What a joy to dig into ideas that dare to map out how we think, how we know, how we communicate, and how we kid ourselves. Mostly philosophy is a bit like that moment in math when you need to dip into the world of imaginary numbers to do the work you need to do and then you pop back out to finish up with normal math… except in philosophy you never pop back out… you just go deeper into the well. As if the last layer in Inception was only the beginning.
This lead to connecting old ideas (Wittgenstein’s games with language) to ideas about information theory (Shannon, Turning) to ideas about genetics (as a string of information outside of its physical form or “chemistry”) to ideas about those mysterious forces (like Schopenhauer’s “will”) that feel unscientific and then onward to those other mysterious forces claimed by science (quantum entanglement, gravity…) then back to Kepler back to Gödel, back to Lovelace, back to our own weird world of AI. If you ever meet someone who studied philosophy in school, and I mean really studied it, then do whatever you can to get them talking.
Your mind will thank you.
Here’s an ink painting of Wittgenstein I made a few years ago… painted from a photo before I had actually read any of his work. Now that I have, I must say, the eyes make a lot more sense….
I’m at work on a new painting + video hybrid. (see below…) Oil on wood panel with video installation. On the left is a traditional oil painting, on panel. 18 in x 24 in. On the right the viewer sees a photographer's optical loupe mounted on the wall. When the viewer looks into the loupe, a hidden video is revealed embedded in the wall. This video is an animated AI-extension of the original oil painting that takes the viewer up the stairs. The location is Maryon Park, made famous by Antonioni's Blow Up, a film that deals with the veracity of images, memory, the nature of perception, and the split between the subject and object. I've returned to the park all these years later to revisit the location, but this time with both old and new technology
What is the single biggest idea to leave you with?
(A) The pace of technological change is accelerating and extending to every aspect of human inquiry. (B) It’s not just “faster computers” or “smaller phones” the world is shifting towards interconnected access to all information, and critically, (C) whereas before you needed to know what information existed (what to look up, what to read, what to google, what to ask, etc), going forward (D) we will need different skills: audacity, curiosity, adaptability, creativity, and perseverance.
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So good. I’m going to use that word “surge.” It’s the new flow. And reminds me of Serge.