Welcome to Humanmaxxing, an interview series on thriving in the age of machines. New episodes drop weekly. You can follow along on Substack, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

We partnered with Granola (the actually discrete meeting notetaker we LOVE and use every day) to sponsor this series and record each conversation. You can chat directly with Adam’s conversation here, pull out takeaways, and follow whatever thread interests you. If you want to try Granola unlimited, use code SUBLIME to get 3 months free here.

Pssst, Granola recently announced an Apple Watch app for meetings away from your laptop (brainstorming at a whiteboard, walking 1:1s, advice over coffee…) and they made 100 limited edition Apple Watch straps to celebrate.

I was one of the lucky ones to receive one, but I don’t have an Apple Watch. Upgrade to Sublime Premium+ or Lifetime this week, email me at sari@sublime.app with subject line STRAP, and I’ll send mine to one of you.

PSA: Code for Creatives x Sublime kicks off late September. Alex Dobrenko—the host of this series and a longtime Sublime collaborator—runs Code for Creatives, a six-week live course where he teaches creative people to make things with Claude Code (like this very cool retro website he made with deets on the course). Apply and learn more using the link below.

Apply to Code for Creatives x Sublime

is the creator of the hit Substack and my definition of an unLLMable writer.

In this conversation, he talks about how he knows when an idea is actually interesting, why having a machine as a competitor has clarified the kind of writer he wants to be, why some obvious things have never actually been said, what reading Moby Dick taught him, and lots more...

You can watch full conversation on YouTube and listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Plus, thanks to Granola, you can chat with the conversation here. Committed wordcels can find the highly edited transcript below.

Alsoooo, Adam’s debut book, The Strangest Idea in the World, is coming soon, and it’s one of three books I can’t wait to get my hands on (the two others are Robert Greene’s book on the sublime and How to Be Moved). Adam’s book is about why breakthroughs take so absurdly long (it took us 300,000 years to invent the toilet!) and the ways of thinking that lead to one. You can preorder a copy here.

Enjoy!
Sari

ALEX DOBRENKO: Have you become anyone new because of all the AI stuff?

ADAM MASTROIANNI: No. I feel more like me. I now have a better-than-ever competitor. There’s this thing that can do a lot of things that previously only humans could do, so what are the remaining things that I can do? I find it a really interesting challenge.

AD: Talk me through that challenge a bit more. What does it feel like?

AM: These things have basically digested the whole internet and they can spit that back at you. They can connect things and they can come up with a lot of examples.

There are plenty of people whose lane that was. They ingest the internet and they spit back takes. But it kind of feels like you have to be a pretty idiosyncratic voice now to do something like that. Remember: computers don’t have life history. Nothing happens to them. Anything that is making meaning out of a thing is going to be something that, at best, a computer can only pretend to do.

The other thing is harder to describe. When I’m going moment to moment and my fingers are on the keyboard, it feels like building a bridge over a chasm, one plank at a time. I have to stand on this plank to put down the next plank, and I don’t know what’s on the other side. By the time the bridge is completed, it was not what I had planned for. I couldn’t plan for it. And so I rely on each thought to lead me to the next thought. By doing this, I don’t go in the straight line that would already be represented in all the text that humans have ever produced—instead I’m this Plinko chip making its way through the board, coming up with thoughts that wouldn’t occur inside the corpus.

AD: It’s like what we’ve been trained to do with comedy and improv. It’s still within the realm of it having to make sense, but you wanna do the weird thing. Makes me feel like comedians are maybe in a good spot.

AM: Especially if part of the way you make comedy is by paying extremely close attention to something. Then there is a level of understanding about something that has not been written about before. That information does not exist in text or in any other thing. It only came from the fact that you looked at this harder than anyone else did. Which means what you create has a thickness to it.

LLMs are really good at producing things that are very thin. The more you think about these things, the more you’re like—no, that’s not really right, but it takes a little bit of attention to see that. Humans are better at producing something that pays more dividends the more attention you pay to it. I think that’s what makes something art in the first place. I was skeptical of this way of thinking in, like, English class, when teachers would ask what the symbolism of a thing is. We’re just making stuff up on top of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But now I’m a big believer in the idea that these things have meaning, or can have meaning that the creator did not intend, that things were operating subconsciously through them because of how they were embedded in the world. I’ve never felt that way with the output of a machine—the machine does not perceive meaning, and that’s not how it operates.

I’m reading Moby Dick right now, which famously flopped when it first came out, and it’s obviously a classic of literature. But a third of the book involves these insane, pointless digressions about very technical aspects of whaling. There’s an entire chapter about rope, and one about different kinds of whales—things that have nothing to do with the plot, except the plot also involves a whale. And I can see why people at the time were like, “What? Why am I reading about the different nails on the ship?” And it’s not doing a lot for me, but I do enjoy being in the presence of someone so addled in mind that they were like, people are really going to want to know how they boiled the whale brain.

AD: When you read that, do you feel like that’s where you see the genius?

AM: Yes. And I’m skeptical of the idea of genius, but I can see the specialness and the idiosyncrasy here. That’s part of what I now feel like I get out of consuming art in any form—it’s just being in the presence of extremely strong emotion, conviction, idiosyncrasy, of just spending time with a mind that’s very unlike mine. I want stuff where the edges haven’t been sanded down. It’s difficult, but if you give it your attention, it unfurls itself to you, and it rewards you with something. This is where I think my English teachers were right, even if they weren’t able to convince me to shimmy my way down the antechambers of the pyramid to see the treasure room inside, even though it just looks like a dusty-ass pyramid from the outside. I think there really are mountains out there worth scaling.

Write things that require and reward your attention, and it requires some discipline on the part of the person consuming it. If you have Netflix on in the background, you’re just not going to get it, and that’s what a lot of content is made like today, with the idea in mind that people aren’t going to be paying full attention. An AI excels here, because if you’re not paying attention, it’s just as good as anything else. And it requires the belief that there can be a difference between those things.

AD: So then, what’s the challenge like for you? Is it to write the things only you can write?

AM: Yeah, that’s certainly part of it. As in, is this obvious in a cool way or a dumb way? Will people be like: why didn’t I think of that? Or is it something that everyone agrees with but just has never said? I know I’m cooking when I’m writing a piece and have a crisis of faith about two-thirds of the way through, where I’m like, no, is this really dumb? Which is nowadays what I think, for me, has a chance of being interesting.

That is the nature of the challenge. How do you present this thought in a way where it doesn’t feel trite and obvious? It is trying to cantilever this strange thought into someone’s mind in a way that the right thing gets where it’s supposed to be going. Dragging people’s brains through these different examples, and steeping them long enough in this idea—that gets the idea where it should go. It wouldn’t work if you just took a battering ram to it.

AD: You have to unlock something in people. It’s a long incantation to wake somebody up, to be like, this is crazy.

AM: Yes. And the fact that it’s hard to see and appreciate means that it’s hard to reward a machine for doing it. AI can’t write a persuasive piece that’s like, when I was 13, I had this experience—it would be lying if it said that. I wouldn’t change my mind, but with my approach, I might.

AD:Yes, and writing has to run that risk. If it’s not risky, then nothing’s at stake, right? Like you’re not putting yourself on the line in some important way.

AM: Yes. And only a human can be on the line, because only a human has something to lose. They could lose their job, they could do a trapeze act and fall. I mean, I go to the circus for the possibility of someone breaking their neck and beating those odds.

AD: …I get the vibe that you’re basically not worried about AI.

AM: There have been days where I’ve been worried! But never productively. I can’t change things by worrying about them. Instead, I’m going to do the things that I like and feel like I’m good and useful at until I can’t anymore, and then I’ll have to figure out something else to do.

But it doesn’t feel that different from pretty much anything else in life. At any moment, there could be a recession, there could be a war. Even if you’re working a supposedly stable job, your company can get bought, the CEO can go to jail. All these things can happen. It doesn’t actually feel to me like a worry of a different kind. This is just the inherent unpredictability of the future.

AD: And there’s this idea that culture is always one step ahead of what’s happening, right? So even if it could do what you’re doing now, you would just do something else that would then be interesting. And it would be like, cool, Adam’s doing that.

AM: Do you think that’s just cope? In your heart of hearts.

AD: I think we’re okay. Have you ever read Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse? He has that basic concept of finite games and infinite games that he plays out in a lot of ways. Society is made up of finite games. There are winners and losers. Culture is the reaction to what’s happening in society. AI is becoming society, and culture is just going to react to it. Culture is always responding to the moment.

AM: I think that’s right. I have this memory from when I was growing up, when my parents had a subscription to Newsweek. Every other cover was the earth being squeezed like a grape. It’d be like, we’re at peak oil, there’s no more oil after this. Decades have passed, and it turns out that, well, oil does get expensive, and then it becomes more financially viable to get it in other ways. This idea that there’s going to be peak oil, or that it’s happening soon, is just an extrapolation of the current. But no trend goes on forever. Every trend creates the incentive for a counter-trend. And that trend creates the incentive for another counter-trend. And it’s really hard to see more than one counter-trend in the future.

AD:You wrote a recent piece about being bored. I love that idea, and I think about it a lot with my kids. I feel like being bored by the right things is hard, but even harder with more AI around. How do you know which things to be bored by?

AM:I think the hallmark of an amateur is that they’re excited by everything or they’re excited by nothing. And the hallmark of a master is that there are some things that they love and have a deep, enriched love for, and other things that they pay zero attention to or that they hate. There’s a texture to both of these things. What I got my training in was doing a PhD, which was sitting in a room with a guy who had much better taste than I did, showing him idea after idea, and watching his eyes glaze over. And learning that there’s nothing to the idea. I could never get as deep as we did if I wasn’t talking with him about things, and this is part of what writing does too.

The metaphor I use: if you ever have to call AAA when you get a flat tire, they’ll take the tire off and spray some soapy water on it, and where the bubbles come out is where the leak is. And I think writing does that with an idea. It exposes where the weak thinking is.

You have to be able to pay close enough attention to realize that there is nothing here to be excited about. But it’s really hard to do that on your own. It’s helpful to have someone else who’s capable of paying more attention to the right things, or you do something like try to make a piece of writing or a piece of art out of it. And in doing so, you’ll see, there’s nothing here. And if you do that enough, you can then start to realize, even before you open it up, that there’s probably not going to be anything in that box.

It’s a skill I’ve come to really appreciate in people who have it. I still feel like, wow, there are people who watch movies better than I watch movies. There are people who listen to music better than I listen to music, they’ve spent enough time paying attention that they can say what makes this cool and good, and why it’ll stick around.

AD: And it’s a secret that people can share with others. Let me tell you why this is awesome. That’s really what taste is, I think. It might not make any sense, but I have a reason I think this is awesome.

AM: I feel this when I look at my dad’s pictures, the ones I use to illustrate my blog posts. I think he’s just a great photographer, and I can’t reverse engineer or understand it. He just puts a person in the picture. It sounds obvious: photos are more interesting when there’s a person there. This picture is about the fact that the town is lighting a Christmas tree, but it’s so much better if there’s a really tiny kid looking up at it, making it seem really huge. We’re interested in people who are interested in Christmas trees! If it were just me, I would have just taken a photo of the tree.

AD: He’s alive, right? What does he think about you using his photos?

AM: He is, yeah. He likes it. They’ve given a second life to some of these photos, a reason to get them back out again. There’s this online upstart that’s the successor to the local newspaper that asked him to do a retrospective column where he explains what these photos were about. And from what I understand, this is the most successful series of columns that this paper has had.

People want to see names and pictures of themselves and people that they know. I feel lucky that I get to use them, but I feel like he’s gotten something out of it too.

Thanks again to Granola for making this series possible. You can chat with the full conversation here and use code SUBLIME to get 3 months free here.

Premium members can enjoy the longer unedited conversation with Adam below.

Read more

Next, we’re teaming up with Alex on a special Code for Creatives x Sublime cohort—a six week experience teaching you how to use AI to make the weird, specific ideas in your head real—and make them well.

Come with something you’re wanting to build, or just the curiosity of what becomes possible when you give yourself permission to explore. Applications are now open and space is limited. Read on for details.

There has never been a better time to not know how to do stuff.

Open any of these AI tools, ask it anything, and keep asking until you get it. What a relief! Except we don’t seem to like it very much?

Our parents think AI is not for them, artists run for the hills to save their souls, and the tech bros keep all the power and use it to flood our feeds with explanations of how their swarms of agents send 10,000 cold emails.

Mostly because the tech industry is bad at storytelling.

What happens if we tell a different story?

We’ve been seeing AI less as a God, an apocalyptic event, or a job-destroying alien intelligence, and more like what it actually feels like to use it… a tool that lets us automate the boring and use our imagination without being limited by our technical skills. It only has as much power as we give it, type s**t.

is the embodiment of this. A longtime Sublime creative collaborator and antithesis of the typical online course guru, he shocked us last year when he told us he’s a “terminal guy” now and launched *Code for Creatives, a six week cohort where he teaches people to make cool stuff with AI.

*He’s done three sold out cohorts since, with 100s of alumni including writers, designers, filmmakers, a broadway career coach, a father daughter duo, and more.

Alex is a comedian, writer, father, the list goes on. He has no formal training as a developer or anything tech for that matter. But Claude made him feel like a kid again, and once he realized he could build almost anything, he started building everything.

He taught Claude his visual taste so it can help him design websites that don’t suck:

He’s built a creative headquarters that remembers his work, knows his clients, and can act across files and projects:

A lot of what he makes is practical. But a lot of it is just… delightful? Like NICOLAS CAGE CONFETTI:

Or the Windows98 website he made for the Sublime Session:

The story of how he summoned the courage to start Code for Creatives is a perfect example of how Code for Creatives works.

Alex had been teaching comedic writing and was getting excited about teaching more people about creatively using AI. Scattered and scared to launch, Alex had Claude analyze his saved calls (using Granola ofc) through the lens of five people he respected—Seth Godin, Derek Sivers, (our very own) Sari, Robin Sloan, and one wild card. Claude selected Alex Hormozi (lol) and Hormozi basically said “you need to just do this.” And apparently that’s exactly what Alex needed to hear and he launched Code for Creatives that day.

Alex is not a confident tech salesperson gimmicking you with a formula on how to make X thing in X amount of minutes. What he has mastered is speaking to everyone’s insecurities around these tools and lightening everything the F up, erasing the rules of what we’re allowed to admit and do amongst each other and with the machines.

There’s effortless alignment in the mission of Code for Creatives and our Sublime quest to shrink the void between inspiration and creation, which is why we’re excited to be teaming up on a special cohort of Code for Creatives x Sublime this fall.

Whether you are a seasoned techie or a clueless artist, Code for Creatives x Sublime is an experience and experiment in giving form to the ideas that collect dust in our mind, and on the fuel of learning and creating with others.

This is the first time Sublime will be hosting week 3, where we will teach you how to use Sublime and any references across platforms to make the stuff you make feel YOU.

Code for Creatives Alumni have made everything from practical to whimsical. Creations include a mortality visualization that moved cohort-mates to tears, personal websites that don’t look like slop, Chinese translators, a myriad of variations on virtual personal assistants, and this site called you are enough (by ).

You walk away with:

• A MINDSET OVERHAUL! Your computer is a database. Everything is a file. Claude reads and writes to your files. Once this clicks, you see possibilities everywhere.

• YOUR OWN CREATIVE HQ! We mean headquarters! Built around your mind, work, and quirks.

• COMFORT WITH THE TECHNICAL STUFF: Terminals, files, folders, paths – we demystify all of it.

• CONFIDENCE! Give them a fish, eat for a day. Teach them how to Claude Code and they’ll build for a lifetime (this analogy doesn’t entirely make sense but you get what we mean)

If you know the future is for the taking but are not quite sure how to take it, this is for you, boo.

The cohort starts the week of September 28. *The full experience is $1,500. Sublime Lifetime and Premium+ members get 20% off.

*Includes live sessions twice weekly (schedule is set by student poll), 24/7 Slack, your own Creative HQ, lifetime course access, a week with the Sublime team on encoding your taste, and bonus of a year of Sublime Premium+ membership. (Invoice available if you’re expensing the course.)

Applications are now open and space is limited.

*Bonus: a note from our founder, Sari.

Alex’s catchphrase is “automate the boring, protect the weird.”

For me, AI first clicked as a way to explore creative possibilities beyond what I technically knew how to do. But I had my first HOLY SHIT experience with AI agents this week using an app called Instinct.

It was SO profoundly helpful that I spontaneously shared about it on my personal IG and accidentally started a mom revolution!!!! The moms (and probably everyone!) are drowning in admin hell and Instinct is a life raft.

Not to go civil war on it but I have some invite codes and I’m giving priority to Sublime Premium+ and lifetime members and anyone who signs up for c4c.

Just email me at sari@sublime.app and I'll send you an invite.

We partnered with Granola (the actually discrete meeting notetaker we LOVE and use every day) to sponsor this series and record each conversation. You can chat directly with Jack’s conversation here, pull out takeaways, and follow whatever thread interests you. If you want to try Granola unlimited, use code SUBLIME to get 3 months for free here.

PSA: Code for Creatives x Sublime is coming late September. Alex Dobrenko—the host of this series and a longtime Sublime collaborator—runs Code for Creatives, a six-week live course where he teaches creative people to make things with Claude Code. We’re teaming up on a special cohort, which includes a bonus week on translating your ever-evolving taste and references into an asset you can use as you make things. Space is limited. Applications are reviewed as they come in.

Apply to Code for Creatives x Sublime

has built one of the most singular careers on the internet. He first became known for Visualize Value, where he distilled complex ideas about business and creativity into a visual language that traveled everywhere, then turned that attention into an independent education business.

More recently, his work has expanded into participatory art. At Art Basel Miami Beach in 2025, his installation Self Checkout invited visitors to pay whatever they wanted for a receipt and made the project’s costs and profits visible in real time. A display began at –$74,211 — the cost of producing the exhibition. By the end, 5,837 receipts had generated nearly $189,000 in revenue.

Throughout everything he does, Jack’s genius is bridging design, markets, and psychology to challenge and expand our understanding of value in the modern world.

In this conversation, Jack talks about how AI is changing his creative process, why he open-sourced his entire writing history, where creative value lives now, and why dismissing new formats (even brain rot) can prevent us from evolving creatively.

You can watch full conversation on YouTube and listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Plus, thanks to Granola, you can chat with the conversation here.

Committed wordcels can find the highly edited transcript below.

Enjoy!
Sari

ALEX DOBRENKO: What’s AI feeling like for you these days?

JACK BUTCHER: One meta observation is it puts you in this really weird spot where it’s so easy to execute on idea X that by the time I’ve gotten 80% of the way there, I’m like: I didn’t think big enough. I should have just done something way more ambitious. If you’re not really intentional about it, you just get stuck in that loop.

I have 90 GitHub repositories that I feel like I’ve got a better version of, which is also hilarious.

The constant line that I’m trying to navigate with these tools is whether what I’m doing is unique, based on my opinion, perspective, experience, or whether I’m being seduced by the machine making progress. I do know that I no longer hate the very specific creative processes that I hated before. I enjoy some of what I would have considered admin work from before. I get the satisfaction of the machine doing things for me, even if the amount of labor I’m doing is the same.

AD: What are some of those things that you no longer do that you’re happy about?

JB: Specifically for design processes, I really appreciate the idea of being able to query the history or the evolution of a project and turn it into documentation. For example, I’ll work on something for a company, and instead of just sending over an image, I can send over the process. This used to be the most painful thing about commercial creative work. Nobody in an agency wants to do the case study stuff. Now you’re one good prompt away from a complete case study: here’s where we started, or the decisions that guided this thing to where it ended up. The machine just doesn’t forget, and it really can show how much work you did.

The other is really simple file management stuff. I don’t have a dev background, so if I’m working on something with someone, getting the LLM to help with GitHub, versioning, and having the deliverables live on a website instead of 900 PDFs with different file names is a huge unlock for me. Every career or discipline or craft could probably learn something from software development as a practice, because of how much it changes the way you think. Versioning and change logs and pull requests are happening everywhere, but nobody really gets to see them.

Basically, it’s incredibly useful in organizing creative projects with more than one contributor, and now there’s an actual record of work, so people want to contribute.

AD: I was thinking about how you released an MD file of your tweets. And the tool that you built, Spam, that’s basically trained on you, on your writing, to send an email every day.

JB: At everyday writing, that thing is far better than I am. There are 50,000 tweets that I’ve written over the last five or six years. I’d felt defeated a few months ago when I realized that, honestly, unless I’m writing a diary entry about something I really don’t want to tell anybody, an LLM is better at explaining the vast majority of things than I am. It doesn’t leave holes in logic. It’s not true for everyone, maybe not fiction writers.

Tweeting is probably the only thing I’ve done enough of that I could do a proof-of-concept for. And I got a couple of replies to my experiment like, why would you do this? This is stupid. You’re destroying your own value. And I guess I’m like, well, anybody else could do this too, right? They could just go and scrape my tweets and do this in 10 minutes. It’s not defensible. I’ve found it super useful. I plug it into anything I’m working on, to speak in my way and give me feedback: take this really lengthy passage that comes out of the standard model and run it through this rule set and strip it down.

AD: When you said that anybody can scrape this tweet data, it feels like I’m staring into a black hole void where I, as a human, don’t exist anymore. You’re not so afraid of that. I wonder how you do that.

JB: Thinking like this forces you up the abstraction tree. I’m not gonna try and compete with this thing. Remember when everybody would criticize Amazon as a product but have seven Prime boxes show up at their house every day? It’s the same with AI. Creativity should not be automated, but then every single person is using one, two, three, four AI products every single day. Creativity, as a practice, is just evolving, especially digitally.

I would say, right now, being transparent about the fact you’re using AI is the only way to play it so your audience keeps trusting you.

AD: People don’t want to be deceived. That’s what I think audiences hate: I can’t believe you think I’m that dumb.

JB: Just send them the prompt. If you can communicate it to the machine in two sentences, just say the two sentences to the person. I went on this podcast maybe last year and I actually made friends with this woman who teaches film at a university in Hong Kong. She told me that every single one of her students is submitting slop essays. Every single one. And I was like, tell them that you’re just going to grade their prompt. If it’s not an English literature class, where you’re trying to make a stylistic choice about every word, it’s a different exercise anyway, right? The essay existed in the past because it was the only vehicle to express your knowledge. But imagine submitting prompts. It’d be an incredible class. You could fit the prompt on the projector. Kids would read each other’s prompts, even though they never read each other’s essays.

But also, you have to get way more creative even with what you’re asking people to do. If somebody can satisfy the requirements of your ask with a two-sentence prompt, your ask is pointless.

AD: I think a big part of why it’s hard for people to admit using AI is because the assumption is that they’re not needed. If my whole job could be done with AI, then you could just fire me, right?

JB: Rational fear. And there’s the speed at which this is happening. Philosophically speaking, I think it’s a positive thing that entering numbers into a spreadsheet is not going to be a job in 100 years. But if that’s happening in six months, the fallout is not good. I’m going to contradict myself again. Maybe there’s a good argument: a massive percentage of work today could have probably been automated away 10 years ago with the technology that exists — it just hasn’t been. So that’s another slightly comforting thing: just because the technology exists to make something more efficient does not always result in it becoming more efficient, at least not immediately.

But we have to be honest with ourselves. What are we aging out of? Somebody I work with just did this art show in Hong Kong. And there’s a guy named Justin who works for that gallery who I just did a podcast with. He loves brain rot content. He advocates for it. The typical position is: oh, this is destroying everyone’s minds and it’s terrible. And he’s like, man, if you really study this stuff, it’s so unbelievably creative and nuanced and interesting. And it’s obviously resonating. There are no rules to what format is legit, and when you get trapped in that, it really prevents you from evolving your career creatively, for sure. But a lot of people do, it’s all fear.

AD: What do you think you’ll never use AI for?

JB: Communicating with my parents.

AD: You mentioned earlier diary entries being a thing that AI can’t do well. Do you think you’re gonna do more of that — writing more stuff that AI can’t write? More honest, vulnerable?

JB: I’ve done a version of that, which is live streaming. Watching a live stream, unscripted — here I am messing around with this stuff — is compelling in a way that it maybe wasn’t a couple years ago.

AD: One thing that I admire, or I’m jealous of, that you seem to have is: you don’t seem to feel any cringe about anything. Is that true? How do you do that?

JB: Maybe it’s just enough reps where you were wrong about something that you stop filtering yourself. I’ve gotten to that point. And people want to be a part of your process. I’ve been doing this now for five or six years, and the people I’ve met in person for the first time who have been following anything I put out — the quality of conversation and relationship you have with people like that is astounding. The object that you’re putting out doesn’t contain everything in it, right? People are piecing together this picture over ages and ages and ages. And if you remove yourself from that, then you’re defeating the purpose of broadcasting the signal in the first place, especially if your objective is to make something interesting that people want to talk about, and talk to each other about. It’s sort of exposing how much respect anybody has for their audience, I suppose — the degree to which they believe the people listening to them have any ability to decipher anything.

AD: It’s like in improv: treat the audience like they’re geniuses. Don’t dumb anything down.

Thanks again to Granola for making this series possible. You can chat with the full conversation here and use code SUBLIME to get 3 months free here.

Premium members can enjoy the much longer unedited conversation with Jack Butcher below.

Read more

It was such a special few days out in Idyllwild, which I was not expecting would be so charming. I met , , , Emily Segal, Los, and so many more internet friends in the flesh. At one point during my talk, I asked how many people in the room used Sublime. About 25% of the hands went up. I LOVE YOU GUYS!

Thanks to Will Abramson for the invite (!! we met through Sublime’s first zine yearssss ago).

I loved doing this talk, weaving together consciousness research, references to Hannah Arendt, old philosophy papers and lessons from building Sublime. I truly am most in my element when I embody the philosopher builder mindset.

Below is a preview. The full transcript + slides are available below the paywall.

As a reminder, for $100/yr you get the full newsletter subscription, unlimited access to sublime.app, complementary access to all Sublime Sessions (including the past archive, and the upcoming session with and on how to enter side doors). You can upgrade here.

Here’s a sneak peek:

It’s all neck down, baby!

Transcript of a talk given at FWB Fest in Idyllwild, CA July 2026.

When Will invited me to speak, I wasn’t sure what I could contribute. I’ve been feeling confused. But I’m so glad I said yes, because it gave me the perfect excuse to spend the last month sitting with the confusion and coming up with my answer to the question: what the hell is going on?

We are essentially living through the singularity and it feels both brilliant and unsatisfying. Like, is this really it? My life doesn’t feel changed enough.

Less time per task. Great! Except we now have more tasks per day.

The tech everyone thought would save time and bring more leisure is bringing more work. Everyone I talk to is busier, not less.

What the hell is going on?

I can make something decent in five minutes. Amazing! Except everyone can now make something decent in five minutes. The bar for making something great is higher than ever.

I see this in my own writing. AI can write anything super fast, but it’s made my writing slower because I now need to consciously avoid sounding like AI.

It is remarkable and insane that a sufficiently large sample of human language contains enough statistical structure to do what it does. Think about what a chip actually is. We took atoms forged in dying stars. Dug them out of the earth. And gave them the accumulated knowledge of our species.

We taught sand to think...

And yet…. There’s this Mary Oliver line I keep returning to: “Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.”

Something in me still starves too.

We have an abundance of knowledge and intelligence at our fingertips and it’s not the easy button for good work and a good life that we imagined.

Why???

What fascinates me is not so much knowledge but the limits of knowledge.

Humans are funny right? The more we solve our problems, the more we widen our definition of “problem”.

For most of human history, jobs were about physical strength.
Then.. with the industrial revolution, machines took over the heavy lifting
And we largely solved for human physical strength as the bottleneck.

As physical power became cheaper, value moved to the brain.
Now AI is doing for brainpower what machines did for physical power.

So what remains unsolved when intelligence is abundant? What does intelligence fail to give us? Or maybe… what has our obsession with intelligence obscured?

This is the question I set out to explore.

And the only honest way I know to do that is by interrogating my own personal experience.

The AI discourse is full of vague generalities.

Agents are eating the world! The one person one billion dollar company is upon us! Most of the discourse comes from people that need to strip the nuance and make it seem like their tech is nothing short of revolutionary because otherwise investors wouldn’t give them money or you wouldn’t buy their course.

The antidote to that is specificity. So… WE are gonna get specific.

What follows is a field report based on examples from my own personal experience building Sublime where I was really hitting the limits of intelligence to understand: what remains unsolved when intelligence is abundant?

They say what’s most personal is most universal. Let’s see.

Here’s field report # 1.

I have long struggled with the one-liner description for Sublime. Whether it’s in our landing page or when someone asks me what Sublime is, I just haven’t found the description that captures the essence of it.

Save anything that makes you go whoa is too feature focused.
A simpler, more communal way to build your second brain is too nerdy.
The knowledge tool that sparks creativity is too vague.

So Claude releases Fable in June and this is supposed to be the most powerful model. So I spend an hour feeding it a lot of context, results from product market fit studies, hundreds of emails from customers about why they love Sublime, and ask it to help me come up with a one-liner for our landing page.

Here’s what it came up with…

I cringe when Sublime—this thing that I love—is described as a knowledge hub that turns inspiration into action. I do not expect YOU to cringe and I might not cringe if it were about someone else’s thing but to me the only point of a tagline is that it communicate something that feels resonant, honest and alive for me.

When you don’t get the proper output from LLM, you often hear people say, “ohh, it’s a context problem.” But the idea that LLMs lack context is more than a raw data problem. It’s a relationship problem.

When I write about sublime, I don’t know about sublime, I care about it.

When I ask Fable to help me with a tagline for Sublime, the hard part is not that there is not sufficient intelligence. The hard part is that there are competing truths. I want it to be clear, but not generic. Poetic, but not cheesy. Practical, but not utilitarian. Ambitious, but not SaaS-y.

The hard part is that there is no objective best tagline.

The uncertainty is not solved by more knowledge. It’s solved by commitment. By deciding what I am going to stand behind.

Here’s field report number 2.

Sublime’s hero feature is Related Ideas - you save a thought, an essay, or image and we serve high-quality, conceptually adjacent ideas other people found interesting.

Under the hood, every card gets mapped according to its meaning. And then when you save something, we retrieve other cards located in nearby semantic space.

Now the issue is that as we have scaled, these semantic neighborhoods have become more crowded—and the nearest idea isn’t necessarily the best one.

So we tried a different approach: instead of optimizing for proximity, could we teach LLMs our judgment?

So here’s what we did: we took a set of cards and manually curated what we thought the ideal Related Ideas should be. So for a Mary Oliver quote, that might include an Annie Dillard essay, a passage from Jorge Luis Borges, an Agnes Martin painting, a Substack essay and so on.

Then we reverse engineered a rubric from our choices. You can imagine the resulting rubric something like the below (over simplified obvi), listing the properties and qualities of a good related idea.

Then we gave that rubric to an LLM and asked it to build a new Related Ideas feed.

The results were heartbreaking

When we optimized for prose, we got too much dense pretension.
When we optimized for surprise, we got too much randomness.
When we optimized for diversity, we got too much incoherence.

We spent days playing with different rubrics but we kept hitting the same wall: we could recognize when something felt right but we weren’t able to codify the rules that would reproduce it.

There was a qualitative abyss that we couldn’t quite cross by making the rubric more precise, because it was made of feelings, not rules.

There seems to be something very profound happening here.

We can break something down into its constituent parts without being able to build the whole back up from those parts.

This quote from Philip Anderson, a physics nobel laureate captures it:

There is a pervasive worldview in Silicon Valley that everything can eventually be represented as information, reduced to rules, measured by benchmarks, and optimized.

In this worldview, information is not just the map, it’s the territory.

This is what Magritte was poking at with this painting. In English, “This is not a pipe.” Because, of course it isn’t—you can’t smoke the painting.

Similarly, our rubric was not our judgment, it was a representation of our judgment.

This is where computer thinking gets us in trouble. Computers can only optimize what they can measure.

But the conclusion I’ve arrived at is that quality has no discernible metric (this quote comes from , the head of design at Substack).

Here’s field report #3.

I keep seeing guides online for training Claude to write in your voice. And I’m always curious to see how well the models can write. My point of view on these things is: if it’s good, it’s good.

So in preparing this presentation, I fed Claude everything I’ve written that I’m proudest of - newsletters, tweets, presentations. And built a voice skill around it.

Then I gave it the question and ideas I was exploring for this talk: What becomes scarce when intelligence is abundant and asked it to develop an argument in my voice.

First, it flattered me:

Then it proceeded to give me a version of this talk that borrowed stylistic bits of my past talks and had perfect grammar and syntax but absolutely no juju and ultimately set back my ideating and flow for weeks.

To be clear, I think AI can be useful in some parts of writing but the issue here is I asked it to one-shot the two parts of writing AI is least helpful with: discovering the shape of an idea and how I wanted to express it.

On the idea, my writing process is rarely a top-down exercise of applying knowledge I already have. I don’t know what I think before I begin writing. I start with a half-formed idea, put one sentence in front of another, sense where the energy is flowing, and the journey itself changes the destination. I could not have possibly told Claude where I wanted to go because I myself didn’t know. And so getting a response back anchored me, and it put me in evaluation mode before I had time to surprise myself and consider the possibilities.

And on the expression. When I sit down to make something, I’m always trying to get somewhere I haven’t been. I don’t want to write like I already write.

There seems to be something fundamentally different in the way computers think and the way humans think.

Computers think in probabilities. We think in possibilities.

Okay, so Claude couldn’t shape a good idea for this talk. Who cares? But zoom out and relying on probabilistic thinking is a much bigger problem.

If you booted up a super-smart AI in ancient Greece, fed it all human knowledge, and asked it how to land on the moon, it would likely respond with: “You can’t land on the moon. The moon is a god floating in the sky.” It can’t predict the moon is actually a big rock when nothing in the past says it is.

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability

Hannah Arendt called this human capacity natality: our ability to begin something genuinely new—something that could not have been predicted from whatever happened before.

For Arendt, this capacity is what makes humans free.

Now you might be thinking “well, computers can generate randomness” And it is true that you can tune the models to get weirder over time.

But human creativity is different. Randomness breaks the pattern in no direction, natality breaks it in my direction.

Natality feels like me becoming more me over time. Rosalia’s music goes somewhere unpredictable every time. You could never predict her LUX album from listening to her Motomami album, but it is unmistakably Rosalia.

It seems like I’m trying to solve intractable human problems with technology…. precisely.

These field reports are just three of many examples where I hit the limits of artificial intelligence. Now I didn’t talk about examples where AI is excellent. Features that used to take a month now take days to build. Bugs that once took hours to trace can be found in minutes. I no longer need to attend every team meeting because Granola captures what happened and I can catch up async. These things would have been indistinguishable from sorcery to me just five years ago.

But if you look at where AI has made the greatest strides, it’s in domains where success can be verified. A meeting summary can be checked against the transcript. The code runs—or it doesn’t. Chess may be incredibly complex, but the rules are fixed and everyone agrees on what winning means. The computer doesn’t have to decide what counts as good.

But most things in the world do not work this way!

In a lecture called Of Clouds and Clocks, the philosopher Karl Popper described two kinds of systems: clocks and clouds.

Clocks are orderly, their behavior follows clear rules, and their future can be predicted.

Clouds are irregular and difficult to predict.

For centuries, the Newton view of science was animated by the belief that clouds only seem unpredictable because we don’t understand them well enough. That with enough data and intelligence, eventually everything would behave like a clock.

This dream was summarized in four words: All clouds are clocks.

But my experience has taken me to the edge of that worldview.

Popper used the phrase “all clouds are clocks” to describe the deterministic dream. But he actually defended the opposite:

All clocks are clouds.

He said the universe is too complex and entangled and even the most orderly world contains openness and possibility.

And yet—think about how we were trained. What do we learn in school?

We learn in school that there’s one answer and the teacher has it.

Chatbots make this worse. They encourage the fantasy that every problem has an answer and that more intelligence can produce it.

And the problem is the more we believe there’s a right answer, the less likely we are to come up with our own

The less likely we are to develop an artist’s sense and relationship with the world. The more likely we are to look for someone, or something to tell us what is right.

You know, all my life, there was such a tremendous emphasis on acing my AP tests, getting into an Ivy League school, earning the valedictorian award. This system worked very well for me. I was great at clock problems.

And yet all of the wicked problems I have faced have come from incompetence with emotions: doubting myself, not trusting my instincts, needing certainty before I could act, struggling to commit.

Now the strange gift of this moment is that the more things can be automated, the easier it is to identify and appreciate the things that can’t be.

In other words, we need artificial intelligence to reveal the limits of artificial intelligence.

I have become obsessed with the hard problem of consciousness over the past few years. If you don’t know what that means, basically think of consciousness as subjective experience. We have subjective experience. A toaster does not. But scientists don’t have an explanation for why we have any subjective experience at all. That’s the hard problem of consciousness.

And something really clicked for me when I learned of a theory from a neuroscientist in South Africa by the name of Mark Solms who said: “consciousness arises when something cannot be automated.”

And his example is very simple: let’s say you’re hungry and you’re tired, and you have to decide which to privilege. That takes decision-making. And what consciousness does is open up this space to resolve uncertainty. So if everything in the world was predictable—like clocks—then you wouldn’t need consciousness. But consciousness exists because the world is unpredictable.

And so he defines consciousness as felt uncertainty (isn’t that beautiful?)

This is why for many of the problems I describe, I prefer a psilocybin journey over a better model. I need self-trust more than intelligence. I need to mute other people’s thoughts to get closer to my own. I need to improve my ability to make decisions without certainty.

And so what this moment calls for is two things:

Number one is embrace technology. Automate whatever can be automated. Civilization advances by increasing the amount of things that can be done without cognition. Philosophically, we should agree that no one should have to spend their one precious life manually processing insurance claims. This is a shitty and anti-human way to live. The fallout of that happening within 12 months is not great, but like says: “No nostalgia! The old world was not great!”

But number two is to become more conscious in the areas that cannot be automated. Every task the machines take over is attention handed back to us. The opportunity is to reinvest ourselves in the faculties that we have long abandoned to left brainism.

No amount of data or intelligence can resolve the fundamental uncertainties that confront every human being: What possibility should I commit to? What path is right for me? What kind of world is worth building? The answers to those questions aren’t resolved by more intelligence. They are the work of being.

So let’s return to the question we asked at the beginning: What does intelligence fail to give us?

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We partnered with Granola (the actually discrete meeting notetaker we LOVE and use every day) to sponsor this series and record each conversation. You can chat directly with Cate’s conversation here, pull out takeaways, and follow whatever thread interests you. If you want to try Granola unlimited, use code SUBLIME to get 3 months for free here.

PSA: Code for Creatives x Sublime is coming this fall. Alex Dobrenko—the host of this series and a longtime Sublime collaborator—runs Code for Creatives, where he teaches creative people to build with Claude Code. We’re teaming up on a special cohort all about making the weird, specific ideas in your head real — and making them well.

Apply to Code for Creatives x Sublime

is a former Supreme Court attorney and once the world’s top-ranked female poker player who went from the throes of addiction to leading a multibillion-dollar foundation. Her life is proof that even the most trapped among us can discover a path to fulfillment.

There must be something like the opposite of suicide, whereby a person radically and abruptly decides to start living, or rescue their own life from destruction. If there’s one book we’d bet on to catalyze that reaction, it’s Cate Hall’s You Can Just Do Things. We loved it so much we asked Cate if we can share a piece with the Sublime community. You can read an excerpt here.

In this conversation, Alex and Cate talk about what it means to live agentically, touching on God, AI surrender, meaning, and her #1 piece of advice for becoming more agentic.

You can watch full conversation on YouTube and listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Plus, thanks to Granola, you can chat with the conversation here.

Committed wordcels can find the highly edited interview below.

Enjoy!
Sari

ALEX DOBRENKO: Do you feel like the ideas of your book — being high agency — change in a world where AI is everywhere?

CATE HALL: Agency is an extremely important thing for the future. It is broadly useful in responding to uncertainty and adapting to the world as it changes. So it is a generally useful skill set. But in terms of how people respond to AI, there are a couple of directions that people will naturally go.

There will be some people who have their agency really amped up by AI. I feel like I am naturally in this bucket. I’ve always been happy to switch from thing to thing. I love the process of being on the learning curve for something — getting up to speed on it quickly, figuring out an area. I’m really psychologically well-suited for this adaptation that is happening at a social level. I’m just like, great, on to the next thing, let’s learn this area.

There’s another side of the relationship between technology and agency that you see on social media. One thing that technology can do is reduce a lot of friction and make it really easy and effortless to become a passive consumer of the world, of entertainment, of culture, of everything. The more you sand off the edges of reality and reduce the friction with which you consume the world, the less alive you become in some important sense and the less agentic you are. I’m also susceptible to this.

I worry about the part of technology that is simply increasing convenience, substituting some form of algorithmic taste for your own. That all threatens to be very agency-reducing. It’s pretty easy to feel like we are right in front of the wave of history, and it’s just gonna break over us regardless of what we do.

AD: Is it annoying to be the high agency person, and that being a big part of how people know you?

CH: There are much worse things to be. It does put me in a position where I’m disappointing people a lot of the time, which is not something that I enjoy doing. I am very easily susceptible to feelings of guilt, or like I am letting people down. I have a particular psychological orientation that is not well suited to failing to answer inbound. I’ve gotten to a point in life now where I just really cannot say yes to most things, and so I do say no to most things. But it’s just a little painful.

AD: It just feels like you understand a lot of things. Is there something that you just don’t understand?

CH: There’s a large category of things that I don’t currently understand but theoretically could understand. And then there are a lot of things that I don’t understand and don’t believe that I have the capacity to understand. A lot of higher math and physics goes in the second category. When it comes to practical knowledge, my long-term blind spot has been people’s motivations and how their behavior flows from it. In the course of my relationship with my husband, I’ve gotten a little bit better at understanding people, but that has always been what’s challenging for me.

AD: How has that matured through your relationship with your husband?

CH: He’s given me better insight into the value of understanding people, and also into the fact that people can have really different psychological operating systems, especially with what motivates them and how that affects how they move through the world. They can be different, and still be healthy, good contributors to society. For a lot of my life, I was imputing my own set of mental structures to other people, and then was confused when their behavior didn’t seem to make any sense. What is your core psychological structure? What is the lens through which you view the world?

AD: I really need people to like me, and I don’t think they do until I get a lot of information to the contrary. And I have a deep lack of self-worth until it’s given to me. And then whatever’s given to me I forget within seconds and need again. It’s a very leaky bucket. I need a lot more of it all the time.

CH: Is it more that you want to be loved by other people, or that you want to be valued by other people?

AD: Loved. But I think they’re similar. I want people to be like, dude, you’re the most incredible guy. You know what I mean? Like that movie Good Will Hunting, I want people to be like, dude, you’re so smart, it’s crazy. Or so funny, or so creative.

CH: So it’s not interpersonal love, it’s more like admiration.

AD: Kind of both. Those seem similar to me.

CH: Which would you rather be? Somebody who is adored as a lovable buffoon, or somebody who is deeply respected but not totally liked?

AD: I want both.

CH: Okay. You’re just resistant to psychologizing.

AD: Am I? I don’t know if I am. Both of those seem bad because they seem like they wouldn’t have the thing that I really want, which is to be respected and adored.

CH: “Adored” has different connotations for me than “loved.” Let me put it this way. Do you have a long-term romantic partner?

AD: I do, yeah.

CH: What does that person find most annoying about you?

AD: Annoying. I think she would say that I can think too much about myself, and I don’t think about other people. I don’t know if she’d put it that way, but yeah.

CH: Okay. That is useful.

AD: Useful how?

CH: It helps me think about wanting to be adored or loved. There are people who want to be loved in this interpersonal sense where they are willing to sacrifice everything for the benefit of other people. They’re always putting other people’s interests first and they want to be recognized for that self-sacrifice. But that is a different sort of mental shape than somebody who is like, I want people to admire me, which is inherently sort of self-focused. It’s not self-centered. It’s more concerned with how you are viewed than with the effect that you have on other people.

AD: Right. I want people to think I’m really special. Because that’s how my parents showed love. You’re the best, you’re the smartest guy, you did the SATs so young, you’re incredible. Look at the numbers, look at this. There’s a real gravitation toward the numbers.

What are you struggling right now to have high agency in? What in your life is hard right now?

CH: I think my primary struggle for the last several years, probably for most of my life, has been having agency in dealing with emotions and relationships. I’ve always had quite high agency when it comes to professional stuff. If you need somebody to start a company without having any background knowledge in the area, I am your guy. I’m very undaunted by stuff like that. But for childhood development reasons, I got a little bit stunted when it comes to my ability to form close relationships with people. A lot of my attempts to grow over the last few years have been focused on those things — building really deep personal relationships that involve genuine vulnerability and the capacity to be hurt by other people, and learning to recognize and not suppress the emotions that I have. I’m incredibly good at compartmentalizing, which has made me really effective professionally, but it’s not conducive to really great relationships.

AD: What’s made it better?

CH: My husband is the most emotionally mature, intelligent person I’ve ever met. He’s truly extraordinary. He has both managed to convince me that these are things worth working on and helped me figure out how to do that. So all credit goes to him. A lot of it is just developing awareness of how things could be different, and wanting them to be.

AD: And believing that they can be. I’m very emotional, and not very mature about it. I didn’t know you could not be emotional at work, for example. Do you deal with this by compartmentalizing?

CH: Yes. It happens so naturally to me that it’s not like I suddenly have an emotion and the feeling that I should suppress it. I just don’t experience them in the first place.

AD: I want to talk a little about being cringe. I find sometimes in my own writing that I’ll come up with something I want to share, but then I don’t do it because it seems cringe. For me it’s anything that seems self-helpy, or that seems inauthentic. Your writing doesn’t ever seem to worry about that. You just tell people, here’s the deal. I really admire and am envious of that. How do you do that?

CH: I just have a different cringe minefield than you do. The things you see as vulnerable don’t bother me at all. The thing that does make me cringe is anything where I feel like I’m bragging, where I feel like people are going to think that I am full of myself or self-centered. I am hyper-vigilant about it in my writing.

AD: Is going towards your cringe where you can grow the most? By leaning into bragging and just being like, I’m awesome, here’s all the ways?

CH: I don’t think it’s quite that far. But nobody ever thinks that I am self-involved, which means that maybe I am not hitting the optimal point in the spectrum of self-involvement. Like, if you are getting every job that you apply for, you probably just aren’t being ambitious enough in what you apply for. The optimal failure rate or embarrassment rate on any spectrum that you have is not zero. If people are never like, God, she’s so full of herself, then maybe I should be inserting myself more into things.

AD: If people wanted to be more agentic tomorrow, what should they do first?

CH: I always have the same piece of first advice for people, and nobody ever takes it. Set up an anonymous feedback box. If you actually want to move forward in life in ways that you aren’t already just doing, understanding how you are viewed by other people is a really important piece of information. And it doesn’t hurt nearly as badly as you think it’s going to.

AD: Sometimes, I wonder if free will exists, or if it’s just better for me to believe that. Do you grapple with this sort of thing?

CH: There’s a funny thing in my life. I both have a really high agency mindset and a really high surrender mindset. One of my core internal definitions of agency, which I don’t talk about a lot because it’s not appealing to very many people, is increasing the number of opportunities that God can work through my life in plausibly deniable ways. I’m not actually responsible for a lot of results. I can just put myself out there and create a lot of surface contact with the world and let things hit me. Then, I can be responsive to the opportunities that arise. It’s fundamentally a kind of Taoist way of being. It is easier for people to think about agency as a set of tactics that you can go out with and use to make the world more like what you want. And there is definitely an aspect of that in it for me. But in reality, what I’m doing is constantly taking the temperature of the universe and trying to figure out what the universe wants for me. Then, I exert effort in that direction, as opposed to setting a goal and then trying to plow through everything on my way to it.

There’s a taste that I have developed over the course of the last five years for when I am going with the flow. It’s not complacency. I am putting maximum effort into things in the world. There is just a sense in which sometimes I encounter resistance from the universe when I meet the world in a very maximum energy way.

And sometimes the world just opens itself up easily and makes itself available, and then I keep on that route. I am not just letting things happen, but I’m also not plowing through barriers that the universe puts up. There’s a parable that we include in the book, an ancient Chinese parable. Cook Ding is carving up an ox, moving very quickly in places that allow for the speed. And then when he gets to a joint, he works carefully, with great deliberateness.

Sometimes the universe makes things complicated, and that’s not necessarily a bad sign. But there’s a difference between something being complicated and feeling like you’re sawing through bone.

Thanks again to Granola for making this series possible. You can chat with the full conversation here and use code SUBLIME to get 3 months free here.

Premium members can enjoy the much longer unedited conversation below.

We partnered with Granola (the actually discrete meeting notetaker we LOVE and use every day) to sponsor this series and record each conversation. You can chat directly with Henrik’s conversation here, pull out takeaways, and follow whatever thread interests you. If you want to try Granola unlimited, use code SUBLIME to get 3 months for free here.

PSA: Code for Creatives x Sublime is coming this fall. Alex Dobrenko—the host of this series and a longtime Sublime collaborator—runs Code for Creatives, where he teaches creative people to build with Claude Code. We’re teaming up on a special cohort all about making the weird, specific ideas in your head real — and making them well.

Apply for Cohort 4

Spots are limited, and applications will be accepted on a rolling basis.

is Substack-famous, but he is still my answer when people ask what the best newsletter they may not be reading is. If you’re new to his work, start with this 2min read. He is someone who can get me to care about pretty much anything he writes about, because of his insane ability to observe things deeply and perfectly string together words.

In this conversation, he covers the pressures of internet fame and monetizing creative work, why he doesn’t understand people who don’t marvel at LLMs, why his online persona is more aspirational than accurate, and lots more.

You can watch full conversation on YouTube, and listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Plus, thanks to Granola, you can chat with the conversation here.

Committed wordcels can find the edited interview below.

Enjoy!
Sari

ALEX DOBRENKO: My sense is that someone who doesn’t know you would assume you’re really against AI, that you live in the woods and farm, and so you think AI is bad. But I don’t get that vibe from you, which I find interesting.

HENRIK KARLSSON: I get very suspicious when all of someone’s cards align. They’re in the woods, they’re homeschooling, they’re anti-AI. You have to switch one of them up, right?

AD: Right. So what’s your vibe with AI?

HK: I’ve always been fascinated by it. I was looking at my diary recently. In 2017 I made a neural net, a kind of predecessor to ChatGPT, which I trained on a poet I hate. And I got it to write nonsense. It couldn’t do grammar, it was really bad at writing, but it could use the kind of words he would use in random nonsense ways, so it would sound a little like his poems. And I would use that to submit to fancy poetry anthologies and stuff.

AD: Are you a coder? That sounds very computer-sciencey.

HK: Yeah, I’ve worked as a software engineer. I haven’t had a big career in it. I was a poet, but I had a very particular way of thinking about poetry, and then I realized that the thing I was actually thinking about was mathematics. I pivoted from poetry to mathematics, and then I started coding, doing consultancy, doing virtual reality games and stuff. I’ve had a weird, mixed career. All of this was always intermixed with doing art projects: I’ve worked in theaters and art galleries as well. So, yes, because I think it’s very interesting to find and extract patterns from text, I’ve followed AI very closely and started playing around a lot with these newer language models early. I had access to research versions of ChatGPT maybe a year before it was released.

I live on a farm on an island in the woods, I love nature, I love books, I love art, I love working at theaters. But none of this is different from technology for me. The weights inside a language model are a complex architecture of information, like a jungle. For me, it’s the same as looking at nature. A large language model is one of the most complex objects that has ever been created by mankind. It’s marvelous, it’s beautiful.

I also find it horrifying. I fear a lot of the consequences that are going to be unleashed on the job market. Potentially the killer robots. I’m afraid of that. But I also marvel at it. It feels like an expression of shared humanity: we’ve been writing books for thousands of years, and it’s all getting compiled and the patterns are being extracted. I understand why you would hate its tone, hate what it does to work, hate its consequences, but I can’t relate to anyone who doesn’t feel awe and marvel at it. When a complex, marvelous new object arrives in the universe, I want to pay attention to it, be curious, be gentle with it.


AD: Where do you draw the line with AI? Are you figuring out how you want to use it, or do you not really have much of a temptation?

HK: It’s a work in progress. I don’t use it to write my essays, but I’ve used it for some concrete things: certain types of copyedits, for example, or asking if there are any subtle grammatical errors that Grammarly may have missed, or if I overuse words. But with the latter, I’ll ask it to send me all the sentences where I overuse those words and I change them manually. And sometimes, I’ll send it my notes, my diaries, and ask it to pull out related things while I’m drafting. Or I ask it to make an MP3 of a finished piece so I can take it on a walk and listen to it read aloud. It’s actually nice that the voice is a little bad and strange, because it makes the piece unfamiliar to me. I’ll also do the obvious things: get an overview of a new topic, ask for good books to read. I love using it like a metaphorical search engine, like, I understand this topic in machine learning, is there something similar in neuroscience about the human brain? And it can do that.

I don’t go to it when I’m stuck, though. A huge part of writing is meditating on things. If you allow things like that to enter your process, you’re going to diminish your skills over time.

AD: How do you react to AI as a writer?

HK: In May 2022, six months before ChatGPT, I was playing around with the predecessor to it, and my thought was that this was going to blow up concise, information-dense prose. It’s actually the weird stuff that doesn’t make sense that will matter. And at the time, being more personal and weird, was not rewarded. It was considered better to be very technical. But I realized there was no future in that, and it has to be infused with my own experiences and perspectives. I think that things are playing out in that direction. That’s an example of AI enabling humans — it was giving me a kick in the butt, saying: go be more human. It has given me rich dividends, because it forced me to pay closer attention to my feelings and playfulness and do weird stuff. My life has become much richer because of that competitive pressure. For now.

AD: Do you use it with your kids at all, especially as a homeschooler?

HK: From time to time. If I don’t know why ice floats, I can look it up. But my kids are a little afraid of it somehow. They don’t want to type into it and use it. My eight-year-old is the only one who can type, and it seems to be a bit weird to her that someone is replying.

Also, when you’re out of ideas, it can be brilliant. You can feed it context to make education personal, of course. Even there though, I’m on the fence. I want to be able to use it as a tool, but not have it become something where I’m avoiding thinking very deeply about things. It’s so valuable to think deeply about your child as a parent.

As in, I’m trying to teach this specific child how to write. What do I know about her? What did we try? What didn’t work? Why might that be? It’s a virtuous thing to actually pay deep attention, even if what you arrive at is worse than what ChatGPT can suggest.

AD: You seem very wary of writing what you think people want. How do you navigate that tension as a writer whose income is tied directly to Substack?

HK: Being a self-employed writer is a very hard-mode way of trying to be honest. If I write something that doesn’t resonate, I can literally get a salary cut that day. I try to shield myself by not checking stats until after I work. Really, I should only check my bank account once a month. Can we pay the bills? That’s the only metric that actually matters. But of course, a part of me deeply cares if people like it.

I’m Jekyll and Hyde on that. Sometimes I’ll write things where I consciously don’t want people to like it. Other times, I feel very much like Coldplay—I really love giving a good show to people. I always come back to Radiohead and Coldplay as these two approaches to a creative career, and I relate to both.

The stuff that really pushes my work forward—the stuff that ends up being deeply resonant for years—is never optimized. If I just optimized for what I know you’ll like, I could consistently give you things that are a three or four out of five. But in order to give you a five out of five, I need to forget about what you like and just start throwing stuff at you. The only way for me to do five-out-of-five work is to risk doing a lot of one-out-of-five work.

My most iconic post is probably “Looking for Alice,” which is about how I met my wife. At the time, I was writing about math and machine learning for rationalist blogs. Writing an emotional, personal piece was completely out of left field. I was 100% sure it would rub people the wrong way, to the point where I think I originally included a line at the top telling readers they could skip it and the next one would be normal again. But it blew up. You can’t be rational about planning a creative move like that.

AD: You seem to live your values in this deep way. I’m always like, God, this guy homeschools. He says no to money for the art. I call people like you staring-at-the-sun people, where I can’t even really read a ton of your stuff, because I’m like, God, this guy’s just so good. The work is good, but also the human seems so good.

HK: I probably look better on the page than I am in real life. The reason I’m writing about the things I write about is because I struggle with them. I primarily write about stuff that I want to strengthen in myself. I write these things as mantras, almost. It’s an excuse to sit with these topics — I’ll struggle with things ethically, or struggle with my attention, and then I sit for forty hours thinking and writing about that.

AD: So the you that you present yourself to be, or that you end up as in these pieces, is an aspirational self.

HK: It’s a little cringe, right? Because I come from literature, it’s more artful to write about your flaws, write about your depressions. That’s more high-brow, it’s funnier, it’s more relatable. But for me it’s not as productive. When I do that, I don’t strengthen those sides of myself. And then there’s this wonderful thing where I’m going to be a complete asshole if I’ve said it publicly in front of tens of thousands of people and I’m not trying my best to be like that. And that has really changed me. I’ve done this for five years now, so I am a different person.

Thanks again to Granola for making this series possible. You can chat with the full conversation here and use code SUBLIME to get 3 months free here.

Premium members can enjoy the much longer unedited conversation below.

But there’s another version of this story.

Some of the most interesting people we know aren’t taking the bait on the “human vs. AI” debate. They’re doing their thing and leaning harder into themselves. We think they’re a window into a future where advances in machines will usher in an era of re-enchantment where we will become freer, stranger, more creative, more idiosyncratic, more alive.

Whoa, Vol. 3: Humanmaxxing: How to thrive in the age of machines is this year’s annual interview series. returns as the host.

The lineup includes , who built her thriving newsletter Link in Bio by taking her obsessions seriously. , a poet-turned-programmer raising his children on an island farm, who finds LLMs marvelous, horrifying, and a reason to get weirder. , a former Supreme Court attorney and top-ranked female poker player, who recently released the book You Can Just Do Things. Experimental psychologist whose writing is proof that the topic you’re writing about doesn’t matter so long as the writer is great. And conceptual artist who thinks the people declaring creatives should never use AI are the new Amazon critics with seven Prime boxes in their doorway.

We kept returning to the idea that doom is too easy. That the way out is to tell the stories of people whose lives and work are a direct argument against the diminishment story.

New episodes will drop weekly through August. Follow along on Substack, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

❧

We partnered with Granola (the actually discrete meeting notetaker we LOVE and use daily) to sponsor this series and record each conversation so that you can get the insights, and chat with the notes at your will.

We first met Granola’s founder, Chris, back when he was still figuring out what to build next (he had sold his previous company to Google), and we were in the early days of building Sublime. He became a friend and mentor and someone whose product judgment we deeply respect. So it has been especially fun to watch him go from “what should I build?” to building a product we can’t imagine creating Sublime without, to his company now sponsoring this series. Thank you Granola! If you want to try Granola unlimited, use code SUBLIME to get 3 months for free here.

PSA: Code for Creatives x Sublime is coming this fall. Alex Dobrenko—the host of this series and a longtime Sublime collaborator—runs Code for Creatives, where he teaches creative people to build with Claude Code. We’re teaming up on a special cohort all about making the weird, specific ideas in your head real—and making them well.

Apply for Cohort 4

Spots are limited, and applications will be accepted on a rolling basis.

The first conversation drops tomorrow, but it’s live on YouTube for the early birds:

Elan writes the newsletter Escape the Algorithm and teaches a course by the same name at the University of Pennsylvania, where he helps students explore what creativity looks like outside the gravitational pull of feeds and metrics.

In today’s conversation, Elan speaks to , a journalist and essayist who thinks about questions of community, technology, and why the world is the way it is. Together with Aminatou Sow, Ann co-hosted the trailblazing podcast Call Your Girlfriend and co-authored the book Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close. She also teaches writing workshops with Jade Chang. You can keep up with her work by subscribing to The Ann Friedman Weekly.

We’re thrilled Ann took Elan up on the invitation to talk about a book project that nobody wanted to buy. Their conversation moves through creative hauntings, confronting external markers of success, and what’s wrong with traditional publishing.

Tell me about your book project that never came to be.

I went back and reread the proposal in advance of this conversation and had to stop because I was like, this is good. I was so mad all over again. In 2020, a book that I co-wrote with my friend and collaborator Aminatou Sow, Big Friendship, was released, and I spent most of 2021 on a quest for what book I was going to try to write by and for myself. This also coincided with becoming a homeowner in 2021.

I think a lot of the best work comes from a place of wanting to read something meaty and satisfying about an experience I’m having. And I wondered, where is the book about transitioning from renter to homeowner and everything that entails—financially, culturally, emotionally, socially? There are definitely some books that nibble at different aspects of this, but there wasn’t anything like what I wanted to read.

So I spent many months working on a book proposal about the less tangible aspects of owning a home. I think my agent’s exact quote was, “That sounds very commercial,” which in agent-speak is ding, ding, ding.

So I was feeling confident about being able to write this book. It felt rich to me because it was rooted in my personal experience, but there was a lot of fun reporting to do. And it mirrored conversations I was having with friends and in my personal life, which is also a good tell for me that I want to write about something: if I want to keep talking about it.

Then the book first went out to Simon & Schuster, which published Big Friendship, because many authors have a clause in their contract that gives their publisher the right to either bite on or refuse their next book. They passed very quickly on this, which I was fine with. But then my agent sent this proposal to lots of other editors. And every single one of them was like, hell no.

Sometimes if an editor is kind of interested, they’ll ask a few more questions, or they’ll kind of push back and be like, “What if we framed it this way?” And this proposal received none of that. It just received a hard pass. The general reasoning was: we don’t think there’s an audience for this book. If publishing thinks there’s an audience for a nonfiction book, they buy it. It’s all about presumed sales, it’s all about presumed audience, and this book had none of those things, to their eyes.

[Editor’s note: nonfiction books are typically sold “on proposal,” meaning that rather than write the full manuscript, authors draft a long document that makes the case for what the book will be and why it will sell.]

What is it about this particular project that is still haunting you after all these years?

Here’s what’s so good about it. The topic is actually pretty narrow: owning a home. But it touches so many contentious, emotional, unresolved issues of this moment: how I feel about the modern state of America, what it means to be in middle-aged adulthood right now. It touches really big stuff while still being specific.

And it’s quite serious. Where do you live? How do you put a roof over your head? Questions of land ownership. But also, it’s kind of superficial and fun. There was a real throughline of this book that was about design, aesthetics, and the funhouse mirror of social media when it comes to the home. I know every topic that’s deep also has its lightness, but it had a really nice mix of those features.

In the idealized version of this book that will truly never be—because no idealized version of a book ever really comes to fruition—it was satisfying because it was all of those things. I still might write a version of it, but it will disappoint me in the act of writing. I will disappoint myself.

Was the rejection more about whether the book had a built-in audience, or about whether you were positioned to sell to that audience?

The feedback was twofold. One was: people don’t buy books about buying houses. Homeownership is not a topic that sells in this more reported, essayistic category. People only want to know how to do it, the mechanics of saving for it. And I wasn’t pitching a practical guide to becoming a homeowner.

The other problem was: you are not a housing market reporter. You write about friendship and “women’s stuff.” If you wanted to pivot and position yourself as a housing expert with a talking-head gig on MSNBC, maybe we would buy a book about homeownership from you. One editor said, “We would literally buy anything else from you.” So it was really quite universally negative feedback. Most things in life are more mixed than that. Most things in writing are more mixed than that. And this was just a hard pass from all corners, for reasons of perceived audience.

What story do you think those publishers are telling about why this project wouldn’t draw readers?

I’ll tell you something that my agent frequently says, which is that people pick up a book either to be entertained—swept away by a story—or to learn something to solve a very concrete problem in their lives. I would like to believe that my work, and some of the best essayistic reporting in this category, do both of those things. It’s not pick a lane: there are juicy stories, and you’re going to learn something about how you approach the world.

Maybe it’s not solving a problem in the sense of, how do I buy a house? But figuring out how to ask the right questions is why I read a lot of things. And that seems to be universally acknowledged as a bad way to sell books right now.

I’m content to acknowledge that maybe you and I are weirdos. Maybe we read in a way that most people don’t. I do sometimes read purely for story, or purely to get concrete advice about something. But I would say all of my favorite books, and most things I pick up, are a combination.

The other thread I’m hearing is this idea of personal brand. You had a popular podcast with your best friend, so now your brand is “friend,” and you’re allowed to write a book about friendship. But you hadn’t yet built your brand as a homeowner. It feels like an inherently internet-age logic.

Totally. Maybe I could have found some loophole if I were assiduously documenting a home renovation on Instagram, or if I freelanced for Architectural Digest. Maybe there would be a side door I could get in, with something approaching the career I have now, as opposed to being a market analyst. The appeal of that is less than zero.

What is your relationship with attention in general—with being perceived as a public figure?

I feel fine about being perceived. I like to have a say in which aspects of my life are perceived. When I used Instagram or Twitter, I was not showing the interior of my home. I have a robust quilting practice, but you will never catch me posting any quilts, because it’s protected. Texting friends, yes, but documenting for the internet, no. My child will never be on the internet posted by me. I spend a lot of time unchecking boxes from daycare that are like, can we post photos of your child? Are you kidding me?

Did the rejection change how you felt about the value of the project?

I thought it was a great idea, and I still do. My reaction was: something is wrong with publishing. Maybe if I had gotten feedback that was like, look, we agree that there’s a space for this book, but the way you approached it wasn’t quite right, or we need to add this angle, then I would have done a little bit more soul-searching. But my feeling was, it’s not my job to convince you to want this.

I think it’s a fool’s errand to try to convince a huge system like publishing or Hollywood that something is inherently valuable. I was obviously not going to become a talking-head commentator on cable news about the housing market. So my options were: sell it to a really tiny press, where I wouldn’t be making any money up front, which was not a financial possibility for me; or set it aside and think about what else I might want to do.

I work as a journalist. My job is selling words. So these words didn’t sell; I’m going to find new words to sell. I feel quite practical about it in a lot of ways. Maybe after another project, if no one has beaten me to this, I can come back around to it.

And I’m fully aware that maybe one viral Atlantic article about homeownership hitting right before I pitched this idea would have changed everything. It’s not logical. As much as it seems like there’s a formula, what editors want to acquire is subject to whims that I don’t control.

What do you think is wrong with publishing?

Every big industry that produces creative work, or funds creative work, has a risk-taking problem. They do not want to take a risk on something unless they are absolutely certain there will be an audience for it. And that’s doomed to fail from the start.

How many things have you personally loved in your life where you’re like, wow, I never would have thought I would love this, but it was great? That is the way we consume things. From an investment perspective, any industry that is investing in creative work is so small-c conservative. Finding a way to cater to that conservatism while still making things that you want to make is the trick.

The other option is to not expect any payment upfront, fund for yourself the making of exactly what you want to make, and then, once you demonstrate an audience for it, say, “Haha, now you can pay me.”

Time for you to launch your homeownership Substack.

If I were to time travel back to late 2021 and talk to the version of Ann who didn’t want to give up this project, that is exactly what I would advise her to do. I would say: start a really juicy, journally, bloggiest-personal-Substack-you-can-think-of newsletter about your experience as a non-homeowner → maybe-I’ll-be-a-homeowner → trying-to-be-a-homeowner → being-a-homeowner trajectory.

She didn’t want to do that. And that’s fine.

Given that you are so haunted by this idea, why have you never written about homeownership in your newsletter?

There is a sweet spot for when to write about something personal for me, and it is when I feel a little bit of resolution—when I feel like I’m starting to come to some language for what has happened to me, but I’m not quite there yet. In 2021, as I was working on this book proposal, it was still pretty fresh.

Then there was a period of time where I was like, okay, it’s all going in the proposal. I’m going to save it for that. I don’t want to burn this publicly. And I do think a book is the right venue for a lot of this. I don’t actually think a 1,500-word essay is how I want to talk about becoming a homeowner. It doesn’t feel like enough space for everything I want to tease apart.

Then there was honestly a period of grieving this book proposal, where I was like, I don’t want to touch it now. It feels tainted. A proposal takes months and months. It takes effort, reporting, revision. I was done for a while.

The question of what books get made feels so cosmically important. And at the same time, the way those decisions actually happen feels so cosmically random. On an individual level, everyone I’ve met in publishing is passionate and acting in good faith and genuinely loves the book as an artifact. But on the level of the machine, it feels so tragic to think about all the books that aren’t written based on such an imperfect measure of value.

The counter to that is small and independent presses, which do not have the budget to fund reporting work upfront, but do publish things that are more driven by a logic of “I like this and so someone else will too” as opposed to: “What is the exact market niche? What table will this be featured on? Which celebrity book club is likely to pick this up? Will BookTok like it?“

I think that once you let go of major publishing buy-in equals value, or equals this is a good idea, and accept that it is just random, you’ll be better oriented towards publishing.

What’s an example of a book that the publishing industry would not have predicted you would like, but that changed you?

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a great example. A book that’s not going to light any marketing person’s loins on fire. It’s a book that is a little academic, a little personal, and frankly a little journalistic. She’s talking about a moment in time, what it was like to be in a specific place, in a specific relationship, with the politics of the moment. That book was riveting to me. I actually drooled on myself while reading the final third of The Argonauts.

I read it as someone who was not queer, not interested in having children—demographically, other than being a woman of words in California, not aligning with what a marketing professional might have said was the demo of that book. And I know so many people who just had their views of family, self, and relationships rocked by that piece of writing. A friend of mine always keeps a copy on her table because that book is the reason she decided to have children. That book has it all.

That book changed me, too. It was one of the first things my partner and I talked about when we met, and it’s quoted in our marriage vows.

Green flag. Talking about The Argonauts on an early date: green flag.

I can’t imagine that book was sold on proposal.

Exactly. And granted, I don’t know what number book that was for her. She’s a prolific, experienced writer with serious-writer, faculty-type accolades appended to her name, so maybe she was a safe bet to do what she wanted. And I don’t know who published it, was it Graywolf? [We both run to grab our copies]. It was published by Graywolf, so it’s a small press. That is no coincidence to me: a Big Five publisher was not “boi-oi-yoing” to that idea.

There’s a throughline between homeownership and publishing, where these innate human needs—shelter, groundedness, expression, connection—are co-opted into financial instruments, which in turn corrupts those initial human needs: People end up without shelter. People can’t publish books. As someone who has thought about ownership a lot, how do you think turning both books and homes into financial instruments changes what those things are?

We don’t think or talk about it enough. That was one reason I was excited to write about it at book length. It is not only people who are shut out from having a home or owning a home who experience the warping effects of turning where you live into a financial product. In the same way, it is not just people who are shut out of traditional publishing who are affected. It’s also people who do get published traditionally, and who bend their work to fit into that space.

Maybe more than anything, it’s just talking about it and acknowledging it. I don’t think the homeownership book would have ended with a call to abolish private ownership of homes or anything like that. I think it would be: What are we really talking about when we talk about this? What are we really craving when we say we want it? What are we really feeling shut out of?

What do you think a publishing economy would look like that valued this kind of work more highly?

I think it would empower individuals with considered, but probably flawed, taste to make decisions based on what they wanted to read and what they wanted to see in the world. That is why I say that if someone had read that proposal and been like, “Ugh, not for me,” I would have been like, “I get it.” But the idea that it’s outsourced to some nebulous idea of the crowd makes me not respect the feedback.

I don’t have close friends who are editors at Big Five publishers. And I do wonder sometimes about the toll of not being able to just leap at something because you like it, even though it seems like there is no “market value.” Much like turning a home into a financial product also hurts homeowners, it’s probably not great for your soul to be in it for the love of words and then cater to the abstractions of a market.

It’s interesting to have this conversation as someone who has a general, documented following, because you hear this over and over: publishers want someone who can demonstrate that they can sell a book. I’ve known many writers who pitched really worthy books and were told, you don’t have enough of a following. Come back to us when you have a magic number of Instagram followers. I’ve advised people to just buy followers while their book is out on submission. This is how stupid the whole system is.

The publishing police are going to come for you.

[Laughs] My God, are they? What’s the worst they can do? Cancel the contract for this book I’m working on? At this point that would be a blessing. Come for me.

But what I think is worthwhile about telling this story is that I don’t have that problem. I have Instagram followers. I have newsletter subscribers. I have people who are familiar with my work because I’ve been working for so long. And still, it wasn’t enough to just do what I wanted.

We spent a lot of time and effort trying to make Big Friendship a bestseller. And one reason was that I thought it would mint me for the next project. I thought it would be this silver bullet—she’s published a bestseller. Sure, we wouldn’t normally greenlight this, but you go ahead, girl! I thought I wouldn’t be in the position I was in because we had just barely crested that bestseller status. And it wasn’t enough.

Understanding that it doesn’t matter, it’s quite liberating. Not that I’m not going to try to sell the next book. I’ll try to get people to read it; I will have spent years of my life on it. But the idea that there’s any kind of reward from the system for becoming a bestseller, I’m over it. There’s none. That’s not part of my calculus anymore. In that way, I guess it was a very worthy experiment in whether I care about external markers of success from the publishing industry. Who cares about a bestseller if you can’t do the thing you want?

You can keep up with Ann’s work by subscribing to The Ann Friedman Weekly.

You can follow more of Elan Ullendorff’s work by subscribing to Escape the Algorithm.

You can view the Sublime collection of selected quotes, links, and snippets from the Anti-Viral series here.

A time to dance

There is a version of this essay where we simply tell you to close all other tabs and give twenty minutes of your attention to a dance piece ^{turn sound on}.

A recording of Crystal Pite’s ‘The Statement’ performed by Netherlands Dance Theatre.

The piece relates to this essay only insofar as all things are related.

Nevertheless we recommend the watch.

Because tangents are sublime, dance deserves more virality, and the piece is something extraordinary.

The best of times, the worst of times

Welcome dear reader to our times. The offspring of the age of information. The only time we have. We are IN it.

Where an age lasts as long as a moment of virality, and by the time you’ve wrapped your head around the next big thing it is already inconsequential.

A time where multiple timelines run alongside each other, and we can tune into whichever with a simple swipe. A time of so many times, and yet no time at all.

These times have been predicted and prophesied in vague and literal ways for centuries.

In the bible it says:

Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.
—Daniel 12:4

In ancient Indian texts it is stated that what in other eras had to be achieved through copious amounts of spiritual labor, in our age can be attained through “simply” chanting:

As madness increases, the stark contrast of that which is holy, true, and beneficial is easier to identify. Thus, what seems like our demise is actually the most accessible avenue to awaken.

Any desired information is at our fingertips. The possibility to lose our minds is imminent, the opportunity to rewire an entirely new one, too.

By definition what is real and what is fake is changing in such a way that it may not even matter anymore what is and what isn’t.

In this holographic world, reality takes on a permeable, shapeshifting quality. (Many psychonauts, spiritual people, and physicists would say this has always been the case.)

You have a body. True. You use machines (if you are reading this, that is certain). The machine does not have a body. True. The machine is using us as we are using it, one no longer exists without the other. The rest is up to our:

Brave New Old World

If you’re into “woo” or astrology you may have heard our times described as the shift from the Piscean age into the age of Aquarius.

Or maybe you’ve heard the hit 60’s song that goes like this:

… Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation, Aquarius …

The Piscean age being what we are moving away from. Where most systems were centered around a leader or “guru” in a position of authority, deciding binary true and false for everyone else.

The Aquarian age that we are moving towards is a shift from the hierarchy of leader and led, to personal and collective power. Where truth is up to the discernment of each individual, and the collective is more important than “superior” people and ideas.

A shift of power from the leader and answers being “out there” to within each one of us. Less importance on outcomes and chasing the future, and instead embracing infinite possibilities and living the questions now.

¿Por qué no los dos?

Our suffering comes from needing to choose, our freedom comes from getting to choose.

The etymology of the word paradise is a walled-in garden.

Without boundaries—walls—there is no paradise. There is only us, lost in the woods. Lions, Tigers, Bears, oh my.

Choice turns our wilderness into paradise, and turns the source of our suffering into the source of our delight.

The irony is that the critique in tech over the last decade is that “walled gardens” like Twitter and Facebook have ruined the internet. Referring to the fact that these platforms are closed ecosystems that exercise control over how its participants use it.

Which brings us to our weapon of choice for this age of transformation—discernment.

It is not the technology, but how we use it. Or rather, let it use us.

The internet is a web. Like the spider that feels pain when its web is broken, the internet is an extension of us.

As far out as the internet goes is as far in as we go. Terrifying or mystifying—we get to choose. There is nothing to fear out there when it is us.

The difference between medicine and poison is the dose

The poet Ariana Reines writes1,

The world always sustains the maximum suffering it can bear, according to the nature of its age.

There will always be the maximum possible destruction in a given time.

The idea that the chaos of our world is part of a grand, divine order. Deadly, yes. New, no.

The earth has seen it all, and then some. These times do not ask us to try to even the scales of insanity by swallowing our own intensity.

Reines continues,

This is why the other world
has always needed to be created.

Instead, these times ask of us: make something.

Knowing that the world has always sustained and will always sustain the maximum of destruction possible

is why the other world has always and will always need to be created.

MAKE SOMETHING!!!!!!!!!

Consider Tinkerbell:

Technology + Belief in humanity’s beauty = flight.

Throughout history, people have questioned and feared the very advancements they helped create.

Maybe the information overload is here for us to know that we’re never going to know it all. Maybe our ancestors feared the unknown so that we no longer have to.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't—you're right.
—Henry Ford

Whether you think these times are a living heaven or a living hell—you’re right.

We compiled a Sublime collection for this piece. Full of contradiction, messianic stories, and truths for you to choose.

This guide, adapted from a Sublime Session with Lucas Crespo, designer at OpenAI and formerly Head of Design at Every, is for brands, small businesses, and creators who want a more distinct and cohesive visual identity.

In the session, Lucas used a hypothetical product called “Instead of Doomscrolling” (an antidote to mindless scrolling built around digital gardens, intentional browsing, curiosity, and wandering with purpose, h/t ) to show how he turned a messy collection of inspiration into a visual world with a point of view.

Enjoy ;)

Note: Sublime Sessions are free for Premium+ members. Upgrade to access the full archive of past sessions--including recordings and materials--with Emmett Shine on how to teach machines your taste, Zara Zhang on code as a medium for storytelling, Carly Valancy on how to write an unignorable email, and more. This week only, you can use code INSTEADOFDOOMSCROLLING for 20% off.

Step 1: Gather references

Start wide. Lucas began by collecting references in a Sublime collection (he made it collaborative and we added some references too).

He laid the references out on a Sublime Canvas along with some insight on the project for a spatial macro view.

Your job at this stage is to capture what you’re drawn to before you know why — the references do not need to make sense. They just needed to carry some kind of signal.

✴︎ Sublime is especially useful in this step because good reference-gathering rarely happens in one sitting. Create a Sublime collection for the project and save anything from the browser extension, the iOS app while you’re on the go, or things you discover inside Sublime. ✴︎

Step 2: Export your references

Lucas then exported the Sublime collection as a ZIP file to his computer.

This folder became the raw material to work with Claude (see step 3).

Step 3: Give Claude access to the reference folder

Lucas used Claude Cowork to work directly with files and folders in his computer.

Instead of pasting images one by one into a chat, he pointed Claude to the folder of references he exported from Sublime.

From there, Claude could look through the images, describe what was inside them, create new folders, and group references by visual direction.

Step 4: Ask Claude to analyze the material

Once you’ve exported your Sublime collection and pointed Claude to the folder on your computer, ask it to help you understand what you’ve collected.

This step gives you the vocabulary you’ll use later in Midjourney, Nano Banana or anywhere else you generate visuals.

Lucas used Monologue, a dictation tool, to ramble context into Claude.

Here’s the prompt he used:

This is the first big unlock: AI can help turn visual instinct into very precise language.

Claude reviewed the folder and began creating a visual analysis.

Step 5: Ask Claude to group the references into visual directions and pick one

Once Claude had analyzed every image, Lucas asked it to group the references into distinct visual directions.

This is the prompt he used:

Claude identified three themes:

This is where the creative director comes back in.

Claude surfaced options and explained them in detail. Lucas still had to choose the one that feels right. He picked #3, Open Threshold. See this process in action in the video below:

Step 6: Build a brand language around the chosen direction

Once you pick a direction, ask Claude to go deeper.

Here’s the prompt Lucas used:

Claude then produced a brand language brief with feelings, vocabulary, typography, and what to avoid. The language is pretty cool, see a sneak peek below:

Step 7: Turn the brand language into image prompts for Midjourney

After Claude creates the brand language, ask it to write short prompts for image generation.

The key is to avoid asking for final brand assets. Instead ask for prompts that generate scenes, textures, moods, and images that belong to this world.

Here’s the prompt Lucas used:

Here’s what Claude came back with. The prompts are intentionally simple because the heavy lifting is coming from the references and the moodboard.

Step 8: Build a Midjourney moodboard

Now with the chosen direction and some prompt directions, Lucas went into Midjourney Moodboards to create a moodboard using only the images from the chosen direction: Open Threshold.

If he had chosen every image from the original reference dump, the output would have been scattered.

Then, Lucas tested the prompts against the moodboard by clicking the “use in prompt” button in the Midjourney moodboard page. Because the moodboard already contained the visual DNA, even simple prompts started producing images that felt like they came from the same world.

This is where the process starts to compound. When Midjourney creates something you like, save it. Add it back into the moodboard, and let the moodboard become more specific over time.

And voila, this is how you go from a scattered collection of references to a coherent aesthetic.

Once the aesthetic world is defined, designing logos, interface details, launch assets, and campaign imagery gets easier.

Lucas’ lessons for making non-generic AI visuals

1. Vague words make vague work.
“Calm,” “cool,” “premium,” and “organic” mean different things to different people. The art director’s job is to turn subjective taste into specific language the model can actually use.

2. Prompt the inputs, not the output.
Don’t start with “make me a cool logo.” Start with: “Here are my references, constraints, visual language, etc... Help me think.” The model’s default taste is generic. Your references are what give it specificity, texture, contradiction, and point of view.

Below the paywall, five more lessons, the full recording of the session, and a list of the tools Lucas used.

Read more

Act II was originally going to be a view of Sublime’s redesign through the lens of the love story between Sublime’s co-founder, Gabriel, and his wife. A story of divine intervention in both the virtual and real plane.

Turns out, there is no good love story without an ENEMY. Not so much a love story, as a mythic journey. Here goes.

Dragon slaying

There once was a teacher who referred to meditation as dragon slaying. He would sit still on his cushion with eyes closed—while on the inside—he was hacking away at the heaviest of thoughts, the stickiest beliefs, the gnarliest distractions, the most sinister kinds of mental dragons.

In his simple office sanctuary, Gabriel does the virtual version of this.

See Gabriel’s desk:

His desk looks a lot like the Sublime interface.

Minimalist with a touch of the personal, the nostalgic, the one-of-a-kind.

Through Sublime, and particularly through the new redesign, we see the world as Gabriel would have it:

Simple, but not sterile.

Communal, with ample space for oneself.

Creative but organized.

Calculated chaos.

At its worst it’s American-Psycho-level-order, at its best it’s a pure vessel for creation and life to flourish.

Like many of us, he spends a lot of time online. While doing what appears to be the refining of things that only matter to Sublime, he is head-to-head with the carelessness, apathy, boredom, lethargy, and ennui that he often refers to as the anti life.

The anti-life force

The enemy advances.

It’s in the soup, it’s in the sky, it’s in our dreams, it’s in our minds.

It is BEIGE colored, banana bread matcha flavored, smells like vacation pictures from the Amalfi coast, feels empty but looks full to the brim.

It is not a monster, or a friend, but a secret third thing.

You know it is the enemy because it will not let you rest.

It will not let you know the difference between what you like and what you don’t, what is flavorful and what is bland, what is stylish and what is trend because…

…OH GOSH THE ENEMY IS NOW BEING SHOVED DOWN YOUR THROAT!

No one will save you for this story has no hero. There is only you. You and the invisible, undeniable fog behind your eyes that threatens to absorb every last thread of the unique, the mysterious, the sublime.

The magic is in the making

Swallow and follow the silence long enough for an original impulse to emerge.

Find the kindred lights.

Resist the urge to succumb to apathy.

Rub against the deceptively challenging task of slicing through the meaningless scroll and focusing on the beauty long enough for the fire of creation to spark.

Quit complaining about the enemy and start creating the antidote.

Breathe deeper.
Become the antidote.

We know that the journey is the destination, yet we keep buying into the idea that we can bypass the process.

Our nature—mind, nervous system, body, and spirit—are designed for and fulfilled by the step-by-step. By experiencing, feeling, embodying, and digesting how we get from one thing to another. Yet we fall into the trap of believing there is a shortcut for the well done.

What if we actually want to get into it but forgot how to?

How can we, piece by piece, build our attention, our interest, our awe?

What we are talking about after all, is life.
To be in the process is to be in life.

The enemy, the anti life, does not shoot to kill. The enemy is after our life force. To make us a zombie cog in the machine, alive but not living.

The timing is just right

Somehow, the origin story of Sublime makes the people behind it the unsuspecting candidates to slay the enemy.

Because the story of Sublime is laced with love.

The story goes something like this:

The founders of Sublime, Gabriel and Sari, first met in Miami circa 2018 working for a small startup studio called Rokk3r Labs.

One of their clients was a woman named Cynthia Zak, and her kids movement, music, and mindfulness company called Yomu.

Whilst Gabriel followed Cynthia around, studying her method, Cynthia and her business partner Luz Maria secretly tried setting Gabriel up with Cynthia’s middle daughter, Allegra.

Their efforts were mostly incognito—one mention of Allegra to Gabriel in passing, a couple of secretive office photos of Gabriel to Allegra, and lots of side chatter between Luz Ma and Cynthia.

The match making did not go very far.

Eventually everyone went their separate ways. Gabriel moved to Madrid, Sari continued doing strategy consulting in Miami, Yomu did their thing.

Years later Sari calls Gabriel with an idea, and pretty soon they’re all in, building from a distance what would become Sublime.

Cut to 2024 and Gabriel is visiting Miami. He reaches out to Allegra. Her number had come to him (completely unrelated to the Rokk3r era) because he’d spotted her picture in a family group chat, leading a women’s circle for a cousin’s party.

Allegra agrees to a date with this stranger. Stranger, until she sees they have one mutual friend, Luz Ma.

Cue flashback of Luz Ma, seven years earlier, conspiring with her mom to set her up with Gabriel while he and Sari were helping digitize Yomu.

Allegra realizes who she is about to go on a date with. Gabriel, still thinking he’s picking up a random girl his cousin gave him the number of, doesn’t have a clue.

It all clicks when they meet in person and discover quite quickly that they are made for each other.

To create is to get naked

Like points in space that will eventually collide despite all missed-chances and obstructions, Sublime finds you finding things.

Each idea like a particle that might repel or combine, wither or flourish—and ultimately become different than imagined.

This kind of magic is woven into the fabric of Sublime—a reflection of its creator’s trust in the natural order of life—mirroring the sublime in each person who encounters it.

We cannot hide behind our art.

On the contrary, our creations can reveal parts of ourselves we cannot even consciously see.

Our gifts, our shortcomings, our genius and our blindspots are revealed in the way we arrange our home, in our offspring, in the way we run our business, the way we make a meal.

The signature of you that is embedded in everything you do and everything you choose.

In other words, show me your Sublime library and I’ll tell you who you are.*

Getting out of the way

If Gabriel were an action figure, his catchphrase would be “No design is good design.”

When he read that line he requested a cooler catchphrase—he doesn’t want other designers thinking he’s basic (Dieter Rams).

But Gabriel is not even a trained designer, so have mercy.

“Sublime is literally just an empty vessel.”
Was Gabriel’s response when asked what Sublime is.

Which is funny coming from the guy who knows just how much painstaking work and detail goes into making something feel empty.

Sublime is designed to feel like it is not there—defined by what it leaves out.

Purposefully crafted to be an empty vessel that gets out of the way so that you can be the vessel.

An empty vessel so that you can actually see the stuff you save without ads, asses, and for-you crap blinking incessantly from the corners of the screen.

So that the stuff you saved three days ago and the stuff you liked five years ago can commingle in delightfully unexpected ways.

It’s an empty vessel where your version of the carefully crafted and the great-minds-that-think-alike’s carefully crafted, can inspire and grow off each other.

Sublime is technically a tech company, but the people who make it are more interested in life. They build Sublime to mimic the way of nature and life, online.

By lovers for lovers

When they started dating Allegra would tell Gabriel,
“There is no one like you.”

He would ask her to elaborate, and she couldn’t, or wouldn’t. It was like asking “why do I love you?”

For one, he made Allegra a briefing pack site along with an entire data base complete with hours of recorded video to make this piece easier for her to write.

That certain something about him that keeps her ever intrigued even when they’re knee-deep in domestic mundanity.

That je ne sais quoi is precisely the thing Allegra believes Gabriel is finely attuned to.

He can see things about people that others can’t, and he builds an entire company around helping people see their uniqueness, too.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

𝑅𝑜𝓈𝑒𝓈 𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝓇𝑒𝒹
𝒱𝒾𝑜𝓁𝑒𝓉𝓈 𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝒷𝓁𝓊𝑒
𝑒𝒶𝒸𝒽 𝒮𝓊𝒷𝓁𝒾𝓂𝑒 𝑔𝒶𝓇𝒹𝑒𝓃 𝑔𝓇𝑜𝓌𝓈 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓌𝑜𝓇𝓁𝒹 𝒶𝓃𝑒𝓌 𝒷𝑒𝒸𝒶𝓊𝓈𝑒
𝒯𝐻𝐸𝑅𝐸 𝐼𝒮 𝒩𝒪 𝒪𝒩𝐸 𝐿𝐼𝒦𝐸 𝒴𝒪𝒰

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

THERE IS NO ONE LIKE YOU

Thousands of hours of all-hands-on-deck to make something simple, clear, fast—usable. When we have infinite ways of articulating something it will feel like we have none. The only worthy story is the one that is true. And the only worthy way to tell it is the way that is fun.

In part one of this three part series, we explore how figuring out how to 🚀 in a sublime way became the 🚀 itself. Welcome Sublime 2.0, we’ve been waiting for you. From our founder Sari’s angle, as told by Allegra, our other co-founder Gabriel's wife.

2.0 !! 2.0 !! 2.0 !! 2.0

A velvety red theater curtain lifts to reveal another curtain. And then another, and another, and another, until the audience tires. Most have left the theater when the last curtain finally lifts to reveal an astronaut.

The astronaut floats alone, wondering:

If a spaceship launches into the stratosphere and no one writes a Substack think piece about it, did the spaceship really launch?

Last year the creators of Sublime paid 8k to make this explainer video—complete with lonely astronaut, hyperspeed time lapse depictions of blooming flower, and shots of the essential parts of Sublime.

With the hope that it could make Sublime easy enough to understand that you might try it before merciless thumbs could swipe it into routine oblivion.

The creators of Sublime have spent the last three years obsessively refining this tool that helps people collect what inspires them, connect ideas, and create. Their confidence in its commercial viability contains almost no detectable trace of delusion.

And yet, they describe Sublime so obliquely, so allergic to the mainstream and anything that sounds like a pitch, that the people who’d most love it don’t even know it exists.

If its not evident yet, the creators of Sublime have a complex.

Which is why they sought a third person point of view.

The third person in the room is Allegra—Gabriel’s Aquarian wife who has a love for words, a degree in dance, and a tendency to psychoanalyze.

She would overhear the daily Sublime affairs—including Gabriel’s frustrations with the company’s communication habits, the engineer’s challenges with crazy architecture, and Sari’s compulsive need to turn everything into an opportunity to *sell Sublime memberships.

(*Is now a good time?)

Allegra got to work proposing possible 🚀 concepts, some of which included:

☼ Stage a fake 🚀 that purposefully flops and make a mockumentary about it that ends up going viral and becomes the real 🚀. ☼ Pretend that the band Sublime sues Sublime.app and use the attention to 🚀. ☼ Sari and Gabriel eat a magic mushroom with the intention to get ideas for the Sublime 🚀—the whole thing is recorded like an episode for a Vice show. ☼ Sari’s kids interview Sublime or Sublime interviews Sari’s kids. ☼ Roast startup 🚀 videos for using every possible buzzword to describe who they are, then write a spiritually unenlightened essay about how everything you claim you are you really aren’t, and how Sublime is nothing so hahaha its everything. ☼ Create a fable-like animated children’s story that expresses rather than explains Sublime through one big metaphor. ☼ Ten-day-long performance art livestream of Sublime engineers working behind the scenes to convey that people are tinkering away at this while the rest of us don’t care. ☼ Delete Sublime, see who reacts, 🚀. ☼

(Sources say they are actually using one of these as part of the 🚀. Guess which! Winners get a discountedsublimelifetimemembership!)

But every clever idea risked becoming the thing it was trying to escape: more noise, more launch circus.

After many hours of irl tea, group calls, and brain dumps…

…they all agreed that the only way to go was meta—that the journey of answering the question ‘how to launch?’ would itself be the 🚀.

They set some rules:

• Tell the truth while it’s happening.

• Don’t assume the audience is stupid.

• Be a real, living thing on a dead internet.

• Lighten up.

• Embrace the sublime.

One question hung over their head:
WHO CARES?

Allegra asked Sari to film herself being candid about why she cares. The chocolate consumed:to care conveyed ratio was a bit off, but it was a start…

A few months ago, in her interview with Robert Greene, Sari shared,

“I grew up in a small city in Colombia called Barranquilla, and I remember discovering TED talks and the internet when I was about twelve. If you had told me then that one day I’d carry a device in my pocket that could answer any question and connect me with anyone, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

The small town was Barranquilla, the midnight train was the internet. And it is that innocent, original awe of how magnificent the web can be that keeps Sari believing (building Sublime).

Even though, as she puts it, “You have to be a little delusional to get into consumer subscription software.”

(YOU however are not delusional for subscribing. Membership, anyone?!?)

When Sari told Allegra the story of how Sublime got started, Allegra realized that Sari is not so much delusional as she is relentless and borderline magical:

What began as Startupy—curated folders of ideas, people, and inspiration that Sari would collect across the web for founders she worked with in VC who were too heads-down to find themselves—eventually evolved into Sublime.

When personal zone of genius aligns with something the world is missing, the industry calls it product-market fit.

We think of it more like letting the soft body of your animal love what it loves and trusting that the world will also love it.

Allegra starts to synthesize the vision for Sublime. She can feel the distance between the ambition and what the world sees. She struggles to put it all into words, which is her one job…

Until one night, when Allegra hears something deep in a dream.

She wakes up and says to her husband:

On one hand, who cares? On the other hand, anything in the world can be saved on Sublime. Sublime saves the world?!

Sublime doesn’t contain any ads. There are no vanity metrics. It doesn’t feed off of distraction—it’s not even meant to be used every day.

The friction is baked in because every time you click that “save” button, you ask yourself, “do I actually want to keep this?”

Slowly, the true essence of your world gets saved on your Sublime.

Allegra lights her deadline candle and sifts through the Sublime collection she curated for this project:

The pieces are there and yet, Allegra fixates on the words thinking,
“…It must be worthy of a launch, it must be worthy of a launch…”

Before the apathy phantom threatens to consume any excitement left in her endeavor, Allegra calls Sari once again.

Sari says, “Sublime is growing up.”

Allegra is not so sure that’s the whole picture.

But she knows that parallel to building Sublime, Sari has been mothering three boys—now ages 10, 7, and 4.

Three boys and a tech startup isn’t the usual recipe for a personal revolution, but it is Sari’s.

Three boys and a tech startup had her confront limits, humility, ambition, devotion, and creation.

Three boys and a tech startup is what made Sari care. Care from the core even when it’s inconvenient, inefficient, exhausting.

She’s raising three boys and a tech startup, as they’re raising her.

Now they’re all growing up.

…

The curtain rises one last time:

INT. DARK THEATER
A single spotlight shines towards the edge of the stage.

Sari pulls up a chair, close to the audience, where they can see her eyes and she can see theirs.

She takes a seat and begins her soliloquy.

SARI

Sublime began because I needed a place where inspiration could lead to ideas and ideas could become creation.

The first people that invested in lifetime memberships bought a dream — a philosophy.

A slower, realer, richer internet.

Now Sublime is growing up—the team, too—we’ve been humbled, we’ve matured. Recognizing our gifts, owning what Sublime is, and rising to the occasion with really good software.

The ‘cool’ essence remains—without the obscurity and vagueness—usable, like the apps and sites that become second nature to us.

Sari rises. She walks towards a small stand and opens a laptop. The screen projects on the wall behind her. We watch her open and close tabs, scrolling through meaninglessness.

She stops scrolling.

SARI (CONT’D)

I am not here because I am the most qualified person in the room.

I am here because I know what it’s like to not care.

I know how easy it is for the world to feel dull and how convincing the voice in my head can be when it says nothing is interesting.

The mundanity of domestic life gets suffocating, and the internet can either double down or be the antidote…

From underneath the laptop Sari pulls out a children’s book.

“If you give a Mouse a Cookie” by Laura Numeroff.

She closes the laptop, takes a seat, and begins as if she is reading her children a bedtime story.

SARI (CONT’D)

“If you give a mouse a cookie...
He is going to ask for a glass of milk.

When you give him the milk,
he will probably ask you for a straw.

When he’s finished he’ll ask for a napkin.

Then he’ll want to look in a mirror to make sure he doesn’t have a milk moustache.

When he looks into the mirror he might notice his hair needs a trim...”

Sari looks up from the book and out at the audience.

SARI (CONT’D)

It continues like this, a chaotic at-home-saga of the boy tending to the mouse’s ever-growing requests.

Until the mouse grows tired, gets thirsty, and comes around wanting milk and a cookie.

She closes the book and sets it down on her lap.

SARI (CONT’D)

This is how I see the internet.

We tried this cookie—a tool that could facilitate, connect, and create beyond belief.

One thing led to the next, and we started requesting things that soon became demands.

So much so, we lost track of why we tried the cookie in the first place.

The lights dim.
Sari stands up one last time.

SARI (CONT’D)

When our privacy settings have exploded into exhibitionism, when the algorithmic aesthetic has melted into one indistinguishable beige, when the cloud storage comes storming down…

…the internet swallows itself like an ouroboros, and everything seems so dark we can’t find the light…

Like the mouse and the cookie…chances are we will want to go where the internet began.

With an idea.
A spark of life.
And a wish to connect.

The stage goes dark.
A single spotlight shines on Sari.

SARI (CONT’D)

If you give a human the unlimited web, chances are they will burn out.

And if they burn out, they will need to dance.
And chances are,
if they dance…

…they will want the link to their favorite song to dance to…

…and with Sublime…
they will know exactly where they saved it.

Hit it!

2.0 !! 2.0 !! 2.0 !! 2.0

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your first intermission. The performance will resume in approximately two weeks. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy Sublime’s redesign. Remember, Sublime memberships are available at various plans through this link. Part two will invite you into Gabriel’s world, as a love story across virtual space. We hope you will return to your seats when it comes time. Thank you, endlessly.

For your leisure and entertainment, a theatrical reading of this piece. Here’s to embracing launch disasters and turning mistakes into opportunities.

In April, I convinced Allegra, the wife of my Sublime co-founder Gabriel, to help us figure out what to do for the launch of Sublime 2.0. On paper, Allegra is a dance and yoga teacher. But what I saw in her is a 99th percentile writer and someone who is INTO IT.

Over the course of a few weeks, she put pen to paper. When she shared the draft, I felt a pang of sadness — here was this great thing, destined to be opened between a pregnancy announcement, a breaking news alert, a Venmo request.

We are just confronted with SO much content that it makes anything feel kinda worthless, you know? (I know this is a bad headspace to create from and I’m working on it!!!)

So I said to Gabriel and Allegra, let’s eventize it.

When you go to theater, you’re not constantly trying to switch your attention to the next best thing. You’ve made a commitment. For the next hour, this is the thing.

The plan was to pre-record a theatrical reading of part one of a three-part opera, and give it an opening night.

The night before we were due to film Allegra’s baby threw up. Then Allegra got sick. Then the videographer got sick. Solidarity with the “it’s always something” community.

We finally managed to record on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, we saw the footage and realized the audio is completely fucked.

Opening night was already on the calendar for the following Wednesday.

The next morning, Allegra and Gabriel were leaving for Colorado for a friend’s wedding, which was also doubling as the honeymoon they didn’t take when they got married earlier this year. And I was flying to Bogotá for my niece’s Bat mitzvah.

We discuss options…

We can just release the essay and call the “release-the-essay-as-a-performance” idea a failed attempt (I hated this option). We can “try” to salvage the audio (not sure if possible). Or we can reshoot (ugh).

We sleep on it.

It’s Thursday, I am driving to pick up my son from his end of year school party and start voice vomiting my thoughts into ChatGPT. ChatGPT does what ChatGPT does. Talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk.

But alas, you cannot reach creative enlightenment via the average of other people’s words. Chatbots have created the illusion that AI can solve any problem with a simple prompt. But sometimes you’re not searching for an answer, you’re searching for a feeling.. You want to feel inspired again, to encounter a sentence, an image, a reference, a connective and humanizing resonance that unfunks you. Tell me you know what I mean?

This is the part where Sublime saved me from the funk.

If you are in a creative funk, here’s a simple two-step formula for you.

Step 1: Articulate the feeling and vibe search it on Sublime, baby

Searching on Sublime is like spell-casting. The right string of words opens windows no other algorithm would.

In my case, it was queries like:

Blabbering is good. The more you blabber, the more signals Sublime has to pick up your vibe and intent.

That means “perfection” is an okay query but “perfection is boring and examples of artistic projects where the mistake became the point” is a much better one.

With a bit of practice, you can summon an interview excerpt from Lorde, a forgotten Rebecca Solnit quote, an algorithmically invisible passage from a niche newsletter, and whole worlds otherwise buried under SEO rubble.

Try it here.

Step 2: Follow the breadcrumbs until your body feels different

Once you find one card that makes you go oof, CLICK IT!

Then scroll down to discover related ideas.

This is wandering with intent. Using the internet to deepen your intention instead of hijack your attention.

When the results start to feel boring or repetitive, you probably have a different search query than the one you started with.

Search that.

Here are the cards I discovered in this process that did the unfunking.

Enjoy ;)

And that’s that, friends.

Next time you’re stuck on anything (an essay waiting for its aha moment, a feeling you’re wrangling personally or professionally, a campaign concept that has’t clicked) don’t reach for the machine that gives you the average of everyone. Reach for Sublime.

As for opening night, we’re not sure yet. If you have advice or thoughts, we’d love to hear them. Until then, RSVP here to get notified of updates. More to come next week…

If you got all the way here and you are not yet a Sublime Premium member, can you really afford not to prioritize your creativity in these trying times? Use code ALLTHEWAYDOWN to get 20% off any paid plan. Thank you for enduring our commercial updates, your support continues to be shocking and meaningful.

We’re having fun. We’re doing weird, sublime-y things. And for the first time, I have absolutely no expectations for the launch.

We’ve never been good at the algo-hacking required of big launches. Something in our soul dies when we try to show up in ways that feel unnatural to us. Our goals are simpler and… more realistic? Launch in a way that feels true to us, have fun, bring more people into our orbit.

It feels like we are hitting a post-naive level of maturity, three years in. Thinking indefinite vs. hoping to grab an algorithmic lottery ticket. Every day I am grateful for this newsletter, for this direct line to (!! now 86,0000) of you, and for not being beholden to an algorithm no one can explain and that changes its whims every other month. I heard someone recently say that the worst advice is to live each day like it’s your last. Instead, you should live like you’ll make it to 100. Think in centuries, not days!

Still, it’s Friday afternoon and I’m thinking fuck, I should share something here to feel like a good girl over the weekend. Good girl to who? I have no idea. But while I wait for my children in carline and before I head home to make my friend Michelle’s fish puttanesca recipe for shabbat dinner, here are some links/cards, for your pleasure:

☼ RSVP link for the next sublime sesh: code as a medium for storytelling with Zara Zhang. One year ago, Zara didn’t know what a terminal was (she was a Harvard psych major!) Today, she is a prolific builder with dozens of projects that have gone viral. If you’ve been wondering what these new tools make possible for people without technical backgrounds, this one’s for you.

☼ Talk to Talkie, a vintage LLM from the 1930s.

☼ Fear and attention by Ann Bogart hit me like a pile or bricks (h/t for sharing).

☼ Everybody needs at least one person in the world to see them, to see who they are in their deepest greatness. (via Podcast Magic).

Ted Gioia wrote about it. In our conversation in March, Robert Greene talked about how in periods of intense rationalism and darkness humanity bends towards rebirth and possibility. The Black Plague was followed by the Renaissance. The scientific revolution paved the way to the Enlightenment. The Vietnam War gave us Woodstock, etc. etc.

The new romanticism won’t look like the world joining hands and singing kumbaya. It will look, at first, like a yearning for ways of being/thinking/seeing that feel alive, creative, strange, personal, and free (followed, naturally, by a moment of profound spiritual clarity where you get a Sublime membership wink-wink).

Today we’re sharing a voice-y, historically literate, fun piece by about the impulse to seek the sublime in periods of technological upheaval. You can follow Sithara’s work here.

Around here, we sit in the Venn diagram of love tech and hate tech. Which is why I was relieved that Sithara’s essay doesn’t end with “throw your phone into the sea.” We are not that pure. We love the internet.

Enjoy ;)

P.S. For premium members, below the paywall, a recording from yesterday’s fab session with and on BECOMING IRREPLACEABLE.

Romanticism in the digital age

Every industrial revolution has produced some form of Romantic backlash, where people run away from tech and towards the human, the medieval, the handmade, the… sublime.

By Sithara Ranasinghe

At this precise moment, I’m cheating on three separate friend groups who each believe that I will be joining their hypothetical countryside communes. After a slew of years defined by tech fatigue, it’s not too strange that so many of my friends have independently reached the conclusion that they need to return to the soil. Every industrial revolution¹ has produced some form of Romantic backlash, where people run away from tech and towards the human, the medieval, the handmade, the… sublime. (Sorry.)

We’re currently living through a Fourth Industrial Revolution — artificial intelligence, algorithmic platforms, the total dominion of daily life by a handful of big tech companies. None of these communes are ever going to progress past the stage of googling “is farming hard?”, but my new state as a commune Casanova only hints at a tiny sliver of our current Romantic backlash. People are quitting social media, going back to handcrafts and ‘analogue living’.

Yet a lot of this romantic longing is tied with distinctly digital aesthetics. Gen Z’s current yearning from the past is often expressed through visuals of old tech, or nostalgic visions of the future. Even our popular medieval aesthetics have a distinctly hard, shiny tech feel, centred less on princesses and more on knights — faceless metal humanoids who, at a stretch, might resemble a robot. If we take a journey though the Romantic backlashes to the past 3 industrial revolutions, perhaps we can understand why this one’s different.

My friends aren’t the first people to get the idea to run away to the countryside. The First Industrial Revolution replaced weavers with power looms, spawning factories all over cities. Poet William Blake described them as “dark Satanic mills” which, upon my first read, felt like it carried a really similar energy to when I was 14 and I’d call my mum a fascist. But unlike me (sorry ma), Blake had a point.

Instead of working from or near home, workers moved close to factories. As more and more workers packed into cities, they became crowded and polluted — a living symbol of everything that was wrong with technological progress. In response, the Romantics escaped to “England’s pleasant pastures”. The countryside was more serene, but also more representative of the medieval times the Romantics valorised.

But, as anyone who has tried a ‘digital detox’ might tell you, it’s not quite so easy any more to simply go where the machines aren’t. You can’t escape cyberspace by going to the Lake District because cyberspace is in your pocket and the Lake District has 4G signal.

In the days of Tron and Spy Kids, the internet was described as an almost physical realm where we could walk around and leave our ‘digital footprints’. There was a clear delineation between the ‘real world’ (IRL) and the ‘virtual world’ (URL?) where the laws of physics worked differently. But with the invention of the smartphone, the barriers between URL and IRL have been growing thin, like the mortal veil in an 80s ghost movie. Not only are our avatars direct mirrors of our real selves (I can see your full name and employment history on LinkedIn) but we’re flicking between worlds faster and faster. You might check your Hinge messages during dinner, or watch some TikToks on the bus. The cyber world is engulfing the real one, and there are ghosts everywhere.

So if the ‘virtual world’ is treated as a physical space, social anthropologist Dr Alexander E.R. Taylor argues that the analogue world is too. “If the rural idyll [of the Romantics] offered a vision of a time and place free from the malaise of urban life,” he suggests, “the analogue idyll offers a vision of a time and place free from the malaise of digital life.”

Instead of fleeing to nature, we’re fleeing to vinyl and zines and cyberdecks.

19th century factory owners used steam power and assembly lines to turn Britain into the “workshop of the world”. Victorian homes began to fill up with cheap, mass-produced tat — or as William Morris called it, “devilish capitalistic botch.” Much like Oliver Twist, he had a very significant relationship to Victorian slop.

Morris was one of the loudest critics of the industrial revolution. He started a protest movement known as Arts and Crafts, which he described as a battle “against the age”.

The goal was to remedy the way mass production was alienating workers from their craft and labour. Morris longed to return to the medieval cottage industry where artisans hand-build useful, beautiful items from their homes.

To emphasise the handmade origin of his products, he left defects as signs of life, leaving his furniture unfinished to show its wood grain. But, as any small business owner might sympathise with in 2026, factory owners just took his designs and mass-produced them wholesale.

Morris’ instinct to leave marks of human life (let’s call it a humanprint) is back today. Human artists (f.k.a. ‘Artists’ </3) are using defects as signs of a human auteur. You might prefer a mug with streaky glazing to a Sports Direct mug because there’s evidence it was made by an artisanal potter and not a child slave in a factory. Walter Benjamin might have called this ‘aura’, but in the AI age, we might also call it soul.

You can see humanprints everywhere in the digital world. The logo for bakery Jolene was hand-drawn by the graphic designer’s six-year-old, and it was celebrated by the design press as a conscious counterpoint to AI-generated aesthetics. But AI companies can use that visual language too — they can even generate it themselves if they want to. Think about Claude’s hand-drawn logo, rendered in warm, earthy terracotta on an ecru or charcoal background. It’s so human — a teenager’s sketch of a Lorax anus — that it bypasses any natural mistrust we might have for machines.

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The Third Industrial Revolution is generally time-marked from the 1950s to the 2000s. This spans satellites, lasers, email, GPS, touchscreen, biogenetics, drones and, most importantly to me personally, Tamagotchis.

While there was a movement in the 1960s and 70s to return to the land, and to communal, medieval values, this was a backlash against The System, not tech. So where’s our Romanticism this time?

In his 1999 book Technoromanticism, Richard Coyne argues that ideas of Romanticism are pre-baked into the way we speak about computers. He writes, “The IT world, from computer games to supposed anarchy on the net, … celebrates romantic medievalism, its tangled aesthetic, its sense of carnival, and the chaos of the marketplace.”

Instead of escaping new tech to go back to medieval times, we would go back to medieval times using tech. The internet would connect humanity into a global village, and craft — computer craft — would be valued again. Most romantically of all, we would use our new machines to return to a time of magic.²

From the very beginning, the internet described itself in the language of sorcery. Computers were quasi-magical items — the majority of people didn’t understand how they worked, and those who did were referred to as “wizards”. The 1985 textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (nicknamed the “Wizard Book” for its cover) reads, “A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer’s idea of a spirit.”

This idea that tech is quasi-magical and unknowable has only embedded more and more in our current culture, with AI commonly compared to a genie. Peter Nagy and Gina Neff have made the case that modern tech companies deploy the language and tricks of magicians “to create a ‘magical aura’ around their technologies while distracting the public from being able to see through their illusions.” ³

Back in IR3, some dreamers had the utopian vision of an ‘electronic cottage’. This was the idea that computers would allow us to return to the medieval way of living, where the home was the centre of society. James Martin and Adrian R.D. Norman wrote in 1970s, “We may see a return to cottage industry, with the spinning wheel replaced by the computer terminal.” Computers would let us work, shop and do our banking from home. At last, we would be unshackled from the oppressive chains of fresh air and grass.

I think we all read that Martin & Norman quote with the same sense of irony. What was a utopia to them has stopped feeling fun any more. The medievalism we’re projecting onto tech is less of a revel and more of a feudal system.

Technofeudalism is the idea that Big Tech companies will have powers similar to medieval feudal lords. People and businesses rely on Meta the way peasants once relied on lords. Us serfs must perform free labour (content creation) in exchange for our plot of land in cyberspace. Even those of us who never post still become serf-like in that we won’t fully own anything — good luck accessing your midnight BabyBels if you miss your Smartfridge payments. Or at least, that’s the idea.

If you look at the past few Industrial Revolutions, one thing that crops up again and again is this desire to ‘return’ to a pre-industrial golden age, even if that return is mediated through computers. Something slightly different is happening with IR4.

In a recent NBC News poll, nearly half (47%) of adults aged 18-29 said if they had the option, they’d choose to live in the past, with many specifically citing the very recent past. While there’s definitely some romanticisation of certain medieval-inspired aesthetics and lifestyles, our romantic ‘return’ seems to be more focused on that IR3 early internet era where tech felt exciting instead of oppressive. People are building cyberdecks to escape algorithms, or ditching Meta to explore niche corners of the internet.

One of my favourite niche websites is Cameron’s World, a net.art collage that archives defunct GeoCities websites from the 2000s. At the top of the collection, each website is represented by a planet, and — at least from my hazy childhood memory — that’s really how it felt to browse the net back then.

I’ve always found the internet amazing, and you’ll never catch me throwing my phone under a cybertruck. What I need, though, is the restraint to use the internet on my own terms. I definitely think a step in the right direction would be to lower my reliance on the big Broligarchy-run platforms, and also to educate myself on tech to demystify the “magic” of it all. And if, in the end, I do wind up milking chickens in a commune, I only hope our farm has a computer room.

Thank you sihaam and Nick for chatting with me about this topic! <3

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Elan writes the newsletter Escape the Algorithm and teaches a course by the same name at the University of Pennsylvania, where he helps students explore what creativity looks like outside the gravitational pull of feeds and metrics.

We are always looking to collaborate with people who have a certain Sublime “-ness”. Elan is very much one of them.

In today’s conversation, speaks to singer-songwriter and podcast producer . Hrishi is best known as the host of the critically acclaimed podcast and Netflix Series Song Exploder, in which musicians break down how their songs are made. He also co-hosts the food podcast Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat, and The West Wing Weekly with Joshua Malina. His debut album, In The Last Hour of Light, marks his first full-length project under his own name. We talked about releasing music when you’re better known for your podcasts, whether it’s scarier to be perceived or not to be perceived, and how to discover music that moves you.

I wanted to start this conversation with a little bit of time travel, since it seems to me that your new album is in many ways about time travel. In November 2020 you were profiled in The New York Times, primarily about Song Exploder. But you spoke in that interview about how your ultimate goal was for your day job to support your music making rather than the other way around. If you can take yourself back to that time, how were you feeling about your relationship with music making?

At the time, I probably still would have introduced myself as a singer-songwriter first, but it was connected to something that was so far in my past that it was almost more like a theoretical title than a practical one. Nowadays, I feel much more connected to that most important part of my identity.

You said in that interview that compared to your other projects, when you’re working on music, it’s just a different kind of emotional response. Six years later, you’ve released your first album in 15 years. What emotional response is that evoking for you?

It’s complicated. On the positive side, I feel proud that I was able to get back to something I had thought maybe I’d lost. It took a lot of willpower and willfulness, and changing the way I thought about music and my own relationship with it.

I’m also really proud of the record itself. I think my songwriting got better. And then, being back in the practice of making music, I also got reminded of all the hard feelings that made me stop making music in the first place — the feelings that, back in 2011, made me say, “I’m going to step away from music for a while,” because it felt... I don’t know if futile is the word, but there was a sense of futility brushing around the edges. I missed so much about making music, but I also knew, going back into it, that this was part of what I was signing up for. And now it’s here.

What are you talking about specifically when you talk about those hard parts?

Whenever you put anything out into the world, you hope that it might land and connect with people. Some of that is luck, and some of that is resources. What determines whether something connects with people can feel so mysterious.

For a long time, when I stopped making music, I used to conflate how well something did with how good it was. One of the difficult things now is I really know that it’s not true. And yet there’s still this magnetic pull that idea has. So I find myself actively resisting it.

When we first spoke about you participating in this series, you immediately knew that you wanted to talk about the anxieties around garnering attention for this album. The day your album came out, you wrote in your newsletter: “If people associate me with music, it’s most likely as someone who interviews musicians about their stories, not someone with their own story, and their own music. And so I thought any flaw in the music, especially in my singing, would be obvious proof that I ought to stay on that side of the divide, and leave the music-making to others.” What do you think is the underlying fear beneath that anxiety?

I guess it’s a fear of not being enough. Of not measuring up, or not being worthy of a kind of love or connection that feels really meaningful to me.

What do you think is happening that might make it hard for your music to reach people?

In 2020, when that New York Times thing came out, a lot of the stuff I was working on, or posting on Instagram, would get a lot of engagement — or at least it felt like that to me. When I announced the Netflix series, or when I was posting about Home Cooking, things would get thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. Now it’s a fraction of that.

I’m posting about my music. Every day, I’ve got something to post: here’s a new song that came out leading up to the album, here’s the story behind it, whatever. The fact that those posts seem to have so little attention paid to them has been really tricky emotionally, because it makes it feel like I’m doing something people don’t care about as much.

You get a few bits of data, and then I think it’s natural to construct an entire narrative around that data. The way my brain works is it interprets that data as: clearly, nobody cares about this stuff. It’s two things: people are less interested in this part of my life, but also people are less interested in what I’m doing in general. So it’s hard not to feel like I peaked five or six years ago, and now I’m five years past that point.

The ultimate question is whether to attribute those changes in attention to something that’s changed about the platform, or something that has changed about you that the platform can’t reconcile with what it previously knew about you.

I think there’s both a gift and a curse in some of the data that does come my way. It’s not just how many people have liked or commented on a thing. There’s also the number of people who have viewed it. And one of the frustrating things is seeing the tiny, tiny percentage of people who, in theory, follow me for a reason, who are actually even seeing it.

Last week, in one of my more despairing moments about trying to connect with people about the album, I had this fear that nobody cares, that it’s not resonating with anybody. Then somebody pointed out that a lot of people who might actually care just aren’t seeing it. It’s never reached their feed.

That helps in some ways, because it makes me feel like, okay, it’s not a referendum on the work. But it’s still depressing, because it feels like all the work I’ve put into connecting with people and building an audience there has been eroded.

It’s interesting to contrast this with the other medium you work in — podcasting — where, at least for me, I find creators that I trust and let them take me wherever they want to take me. I’m not screening each episode — I just hit play, and that allows the creator to subvert my expectations and play around with the format in a way that Spotify and Instagram might approach differently.

Podcasting is a medium that exists — or at least was distributed — through RSS. An RSS syndicated feed is mechanically the opposite of an algorithmically controlled thing. You’re going to get the next thing that comes out because you’ve subscribed, and it’s going to happen chronologically. That’s it.

It allows the subscriber to determine whether they’re going to tune in or not, but they’ve already decided they’re subscribing. It would be like if you subscribed to magazines that you get in the mail, but then the delivery person was like, “I think you’re going to like this one, so I’m going to give that one to you first. The other ones, if you want them, you can come get me and I’ll deliver them, but you’re not just going to have them.”

I keep coming back to the lyric in your track “Dark Circles:” “Careful to be who you think that they want / Careful to stay in the lines you’ve drawn... You’re far away now / Too small, too dark, circle around / All of the places you’ve found / Where your voice fades out / Til it’s far away now.” As I understand it, that song is about growing up and the experience of being perceived as an other. But when I hear “where your voice fades out,” I also think about Song Exploder, and your choice to edit your voice out of the work completely. I’m curious what your relationship is with attention and being perceived, and how that’s changed over time.

I’ve always been motivated, because of my parents, to try and do well. In my understanding of how things worked from childhood, attention and love — attention being a form of love, really — came from achievement. If you do well, people will like you more. Especially when it came to school. So that’s always what I tried to do.

I had a very sweet elementary school experience. But in middle school, like for so many people, everything changed. The whole dynamic got turned upside down, and suddenly I was very conscious of the social strata of middle school, where I fit in and where I didn’t. My best friend growing up got bullied in a way that I didn’t, even though we were a pair. I think it was because I figured out a way to conform, or not take up space, or not draw attention to myself in a negative way. That was formative.

I always wanted, with my music, to connect with and reach as many people as possible. I wasn’t actively concerned with doing X to reach the largest audience possible. I was just making the music I wanted to make, and I hoped it would land with enough people that my career would grow.

That changed around the time when I started making my living as a musician. That’s when I had a different relationship with my music: If I don’t reach enough people, it’s not just a matter of quality; it’s a matter of whether I’ll be able to have a viable career.

When I started Song Exploder, I thought of it as a side project I was doing while I figured out what was next for me with music. I’d been releasing music under the name The One AM Radio since 1999. At that point, in 2013, my only public identity had been through that music. I had faith in the concept of the show, and I didn’t want anyone to think I was doing this as a marketing vehicle for The One AM Radio. I was like, these are completely separate ideas, so I’ll use my real name. I hoped the podcast would do well because, if it did, that could be my day job while I continued making music. So that was part of the reason why I wanted to take myself out of the episodes.

Am I right that you’ve started reintroducing your voice a little bit more into the podcast? What drove that?

You’re absolutely right. Part of what drove that was the experience of making the TV version of the show. I had a pretty strong creative disagreement with my co-executive producer, Morgan Neville. I really wanted the TV show to feel as much like the podcast as possible, which in my mind meant, once again, that I wouldn’t be in it. You wouldn’t see me, you wouldn’t hear from me. I had made those choices because I thought it heightened the intimacy of the listening experience to have it feel like the artist was speaking directly to the listener.

Morgan’s take was the opposite. He said that pointing the camera at the guest and having them alone in a room talking to the camera doesn’t feel intimate or special. It feels like what all other documentaries do. He said, you might not realize it, but I’m very aware of your presence in the show — from the questions you must have asked, to the way it’s edited, to the curation of artists. So he thought what would actually be special was getting to be a fly on the wall and witness the conversations I must be having with these artists.

Eventually, that’s what we went with, and afterwards I was able to recognize certain elements of genuine human interaction between the guest and myself that would have been impossible to convey in the one-sided mode.

So, based on that TV experience, I started to be more open-minded about those moments, and about a different kind of intimacy that could exist in dialogue as opposed to monologue. Instead of cutting 100 percent of my voice out, I would cut 90 or 80 percent of my voice out. Those little moments allowed for a new kind of storytelling — something maybe less formally pure, but the story was better and the meaning was deeper. It was a relaxing of the parameters I’d set, in order to open up the possibility of intimacy existing in a different kind of way.

This is kind of an intense question, but since death has such a prominent place on this album… do you ever think at all about what your epitaph will be when you leave this world?

The second One AM Radio album, which came out in 2004, is called A Name Writ in Water. It was named after the headstone of the poet John Keats. His headstone says": “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

I loved that because of the ephemeral nature that it gives death, or our lives. And what’s funny to me is that it says, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” and yet it’s carved in stone. I thought the true nature of having your name writ in water is that you accept that it’s here for a moment, and then eventually it goes away.

I want to talk about the other kind of attention, as a form of love (as you said before), or a gift. When I think of Song Exploder, I think primarily about what a gift your sustained attention is to me as a listener, but even more than that, it’s tangible that the artists feel seen and moved to be asked about their work in such a serious way. It seems ill-advised to allow corporations, primarily motivated by profit, to control the exchange of that gift of attention. When you think about the artists who have been a gift to you over the course of your life, how did you come in contact with them?

The ones where I most profoundly remember the discovery are the ones where a friend played them for me or shared their music with me.

The summer of my freshman year of college, I stayed on campus. The campus was mostly empty — just a tiny fraction of students who stayed for summer jobs. A couple of guys I knew were also left in town, and we used to hang out. They were a few years older than me, more worldly, and they felt like big brothers in a way I hadn’t had. They were in bands; one of them was interning at the Village Voice and was a music editor for the school newspaper. I remember going over to their house, and they had the biggest combined CD collection between the two of them, just a wall of their apartment full of CDs.

It was a time in my life when I felt like I had tapped into a certain part of my taste. I was discovering things I loved that were maybe one or two degrees away from the culture I had easy access to growing up. There was this incredible treasure trove. It felt like there was an infinite supply of exciting stuff, especially in music and film.

I remember the day those guys introduced me to Nick Drake. It was incredible.

Funny, I also remember the exact day I was introduced to Nick Drake.

Maybe that says something about Nick Drake. It felt like music that had been waiting for me for so long. It was such a bullseye for my particular tastes. It was like my tastes had already been formed to receive that perfectly. I didn’t have to change anything or adjust. It had just been missing.

What do you want the story to be for how people find your music?

It would be great if people could have a version of that: a caring friend who really sees them and knows them, who says, “I heard something that I think would be really meaningful to you.” Then they play them the song, and that person gets to have the feeling of, yes, I really connect with that song. It resonates with something in myself.

They also get the added bonus of having someone in their life who sees them in that way. It is another form of attention, right? Someone paid enough attention to them to say, I know who you are, and I know what your tastes are like, and I know what you would respond to. That would be the best.

Can I tell you one small, quick story?

Absolutely.

I was just texting with my friend Mike before we started talking. I played at his wedding to his wife, Kelly. For their wedding ceremony, Mike, who’s a film director, had some actor friends do dramatic readings of the first messages he and Kelly had exchanged back and forth on Friendster in 2003.

Kelly’s profile had said something about looking for book recommendations. And in Mike’s first message, he said: “Can I give you a music recommendation? You should check out The One AM Radio — it’s my friend’s music.”

So he did the thing that I’m describing: the ideal version of a share. He made that recommendation to his future wife in their first exchange, and then years later I got to play my music at their wedding.

It’s wild to care about likes on an Instagram post when stories like that happen.

Exactly.

What would an internet look like that valued that kind of attention?

There’s already so little control that you have over what your world is, what your experience is. But so much magic happens through intentional accidents: going for a walk in a new city, going to a cafe for the first time, or talking to a friend who’s going to show you something you haven’t seen or heard before.

The idea that someone has to put their thumb on the scale to create a more addictive version of that, for the sake of a constant experience that’s always entertaining, feels like a flattening out of the special moments in life. The moments that are special when you discover something are special because you’re discovering something.

You need the topography of attention — the flat moments — for the highs to feel memorable and meaningful. The idea that every time you open the app, you need to get this spike feels both disingenuous to human experience and a cheapening of the times when that’s real and genuine.

It sounds like you’re describing a song.

Yeah. It can’t all be the chorus all the time.

You can buy or stream In the Last Hour of Light on Bandcamp, or wherever you get your music.

You can follow more of Elan Ullendorff’s work by subscribing to Escape the Algorithm.

You can view the Sublime collection of selected quotes, links, and snippets from the Anti-Viral series here.

We were hoping to publish a piece today in anticipation of the upcoming launch of Sublime 2.0 but alas, it’s not ready. We don’t like rushing things, which has made us not publish anything in weeks, which makes me sad.

So while the bigger story brews, the Italy version of me (looser and less precious?) is going to share some thoughts I’d usually overthink on something we built last month that has become a big part of my creative life.

I cannot believe I cobbled this together in one sitting. At home in Miami, by the time I’ve shepherded everyone through school pick ups, homework, soccer practice, Miami traffic, dinner, and 9pm bedtime bargaining, I am wiped, and at 6am the next day the maddening repetition begins all over again.

Here, after a day spent walking Brera, followed by dinner at La Langosteria and a slow walk through the Piazza del Duomo, I came back to my hotel room, wrote this, and still had the rest of the night with my husband, who looks way hotter when we’re not arguing over kid logistics.

Now, for an abrupt left turn into the meat of this post.

Five years ago I wrote an essay titled The Future of Search is Boutique (that 16z published) arguing that the internet had gotten so polluted by SEO the only thing worth doing was building little walled gardens of trust.

This was pre-ChatGPT. That thesis has only gotten truer. SEO ruined the internet and is now holding back AI tools by drawing from the same generic web. We need a new way for people to think with AI, in service of interestingness, surprise, funkiness.

We’ve been building toward this for years.

Last month we released the Sublime MCP, which is a WTF/boring way to say you can now use Claude to search and reason across the Sublime corpus (!! more than 10 million hand-curated images/essays/memes/social media posts/etc…).

Human taste as the input layer for machine intelligence is truly sublime.

I know this sounds abstract. Let me show you with examples.

#1

Scenario: You're at an agency, drafting a brand manifesto.

Prompt: Use Sublime to find brand manifestos with a point of view, voice, or weirdness. Not the corporate values-page kind. Link each and tell me why you chose it.

(*The same prompt in ChatGPT surfaced Apple’s Think Different campaign)

#2

Scenario: You’re writing the About page for your personal site.

Prompt: Find references of about me pages/paragraphs/descriptions with soul to inspire my own. Show me different types of approaches.

#3

Scenario:You're prepping a talk and need inspiration.

Prompt: I'm preparing for a talk about AI and creativity. show me non obvious insights that can inspire me as i begin to prep.

#4

Scenario: You’re at an ad agency, pitching a billboard campaign.

Prompt: I work at an ad agency pitching a billboard campaign. Use Sublime to find the most creative billboards with a strong concept, a clever twist, or copy that lands.

You can even start with a specific meme or image and ask for related ideas (notice the difference between the default and when I asked it to use Sublime). And if you have a rich Sublime library already (did you know you can sync your kindle highlights, twitter and instagram bookmarks to Sublime?) you can ask Claude to limit the search to just your library and put your own ideas to work.

I cannot stress enough how much using AI without providing good references can set back your ideating and flow, and how much better creative work is when you’re swimming in inspiration.

This will be a premium feature soon but for now it’s open to everyone. You can set it up in less than 10 seconds here.

Ok going to close this laptop now and enjoy my last day in the Italian Riviera. Let me know if this helps you with something you’re working on, or reply with questions/comments/dreams. Also, we are going to be sunsetting the Sublime Lifetime plan soon. This is your chance to lock the lifetime founding membership for $300 ($100 off) using code FAMIGLIA before it’s gone. I’ll see you back here soon.

xx
Sari

If you want a personal or professional home for your ideas that isn’t entirely dependent on “The Feed,” may I suggest you build yourself two foundations:

1. Sublime to deepen your thinking.

2. Squarespace to present it with intention.

A workshop and a gallery, if you will ;)

I made my own personal site on Squarespace, which you can view here. It’s pretty bare bones, but Squarespace has a whole universe of features I intend to explore… you can sell products, make yourself findable with SEO tweaks, add emails flows, and more. That’s the nice thing about having your own corner of the web: you can do whatever you want with it.

Click here to try it out, and when you’re ready, use code SUBLIME to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Welcome to another edition of “What’s in the Cards?” where we share 10 things that made us go whoa:

1. Highly recommend dropping everything to go and watch this conversation between Ben Stasse and Ross Douthat on his impending death, his biggest regret, America’s dying institutions, and AI. I like what he offered on AI (full excerpt here, captured using Podcast Magic):

   For a small number of people with lots of intentionality, lots of habits, and fit communities of accountability and Sabbaths, these tools are probably going to be pretty great. For the majority of people, I think they’re going to be disastrous.

   

2. A curated collection of great book dedications.

3. I experienced a significant unlock when I heard Michael Pollan describe consciousness as “felt uncertainty” in a recent conversation with Ezra Klein.
   
   He follows, “… consciousness arises when you can't automate things. For example, you're hungry and you're tired, and you have to decide which to privilege, which takes decision-making. And what consciousness does is open up this space to resolve uncertainty.”
   
   I will be sitting with this for a long time. Full excerpt here, captured using Podcast Magic.

   

4. Inside me are two wolves

   

5. 1000000% harness the system to reward you for being who you are.

   

6. Bitching is voluntary brain damage.

   

7. is an underrated writer on all things AI. Here’s an excerpt from one of her recent essays. (h/t ).

   

Plus, in this week’s cards for Premium members:

• The brand strategy template Emmett Shine uses for agents (shared at the how to teach machines your taste event).

• An exclusive conversation with Douglas Rushkoff from Team Human. So real and moving.

• A collection of great conversations I’m loving, if you want to fall down a great new internet rabbit hole.

We appreciate and love you dearly for the support.

Read more

These live sessions are treasure troves of wisdom and ideas, and we invite our Premium+ members to pull up a chair. Each recording also gets added to a private YouTube playlist (link behind the paywall below) for our members to rewatch any time.

Here’s a preview of some session’s we’ve hosted:

• In December, we hosted Allegra Preuss for an online yoga class to get into our bodies and out of our minds. Pure bliss.
  
  

• In January, we hosted for a session on How to write an uningnorable email. Carly might be the best cold email writer on the internet. More than one person messaged us after the session saying the examples she shared brought them to tears.
  
  

• In February, we hosted Lucas Crespo (the creative director at Every) for a session on how to build a brand identity using your taste + AI. This was one of the most mind opening hours of our year so far.
  
  

• In March, we hosted Emmett Shine, the wildly creative mind behind brands like Warby Parker, Sweetgreen, and Hims & Hers for a whatever you call the opposite of performative session. He jumped between Figma and a dozen tools, and gave us a raw window into his creative process. He described the future of work with a Pez dispenser analogy and shared his template for brand guidelines to share with agents. Insanely valuable stuff.
  

In April, we’re hosting , one of our favorite contemporary thinkers for a session on How to pull the human out of the machine. Luke is the Director of the Cluny Institute, a home for people at the intersection of Athens (arts and philosophy), Jerusalem (faith and religion), and Silicon Valley (tech and venture). Which is to say, he’s one of the few people approaching this moment with spiritual seriousness and moral imagination.

You can RSVP here, and because we really want you to get a taste of this one, you can use code PREMIUMPASS for free access ;)

P.S. If you didn’t read in between the lines, this is us continuing our patient campaign to lure you away from the great-but-ultimately-lacking-free-tier and make the case, without shame, that for $100/year Sublime is the most underpriced membership on Earth.

The recordings + assets for all past sessions are below the paywall. If you’re a Premium+ member and have trouble accessing, email us at sari@sublime.app.

Alsooo, let us know in the comments who’d you like us to host a session with and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

Read more

Last week, Kyle Chayka published a piece in the New Yorker titled why tech bros are now obsessed with taste.

Sublime makes a brief appearance, described as: ”a bookmarking app that promises to build a library that reflects your taste, with the help of A.I.-driven recommendations.”

I agree with 60% of the story. But the other 40% is driving me insane, which is what pushed me to the keyboard.

I AM THE LABELMAKER I DESPISE

Silicon Valley has always run on language.

I’m old enough to have pitched investors for a peer-to-peer fashion marketplace back when slapping THE SHARING ECONOMY on a deck was enough to get a check.

Then came disruption! The creator economy! Blockchain! Authenticity! Vibecoding!

And taste.

For an idea to spread, you need something people can repeat at dinner, put in a pitch deck, tweet without thinking too hard. These words function as compression algorithms. They take something complex and reduce it to a unit that can be easily transmitted, repeated, monetized.

The aura of the labelmaker has the sterile sheen of corporate efficiency and bullshit jobs. And yet it sticks a little too well with my overbearing desire to make myself easier to explain.

I’ve written about my uphill battle to find the right words for Sublime. And yet, one post aligning with the term du jour, and the next week Sublime is in The New Yorker.

The label did its job.

But words are a lossy medium for describing rich, multidimensional ideas. To use a word is to borrow its relevance, but also to inherit its baggage.

How does one align with the zeitgeist without diluting an honest belief system? I don’t know. But one has to at least try.

EVERYONE WANTS GOOD TASTE. NOBODY WANTS TO LOOK INWARDS.

The old world of creative and knowledge work was built on a monopoly: making things was hard. Now, you prompt a machine, and it vomits twenty options in seconds. That monopoly evaporates.

The tyranny of LLMs is that you could ask for options forever and never finish. You are left disoriented, with a single question: what will you put your name on?

This is where the discourse has landed:
AI creates abundance.
Abundance creates too many options.
So now the bottleneck is taste.

So far so good, until you ask: what do they mean by “taste”?

The Silicon Valley version of taste is instrumental. Taste as moat. Taste as competitive advantage. The ability to discern what will make the most money, what will win. It faces outward. It asks: what does the market want?

But this isn’t taste. It’s the performance of coherence without conviction.

What the discourse misses is that the hardest part of creating anything today is understanding oneself. Real taste is decision-making aligned with your own perspective. It faces inward before it faces outward. It answers to a different question: not what will win, but what is true to me? It is about connection to yourself as a divine bridge to something else—what George Saunders calls the “iconic space,” where you make the things only you can make.

recently open-sourced his entire writing voice: 50,000 tweets distilled into a single .md file. He gave it away for free. Nobody who downloads jackbutcher.md becomes Jack Butcher.

Style isn’t transferable. The file was never the moat.

The reason people want the file, and the reason the taste discourse feels so hollow, is that most people don’t have beliefs to fall back on.

The tech industry today is at a shocking loss for any kind of coherent narrative concerning what it is we’re doing. Intelligence, yes, but why? How will it improve our lives? The metrics have eaten the mission. Did people look? If yes, you’re winning. If not, try again. Few ask: winning at what?

NOSTALGIA FOR PRE-DIGITAL PURITY IS ITSELF A DIGITAL AESTHETIC

Okayyy, but how do you figure out what you believe?

One answer, increasingly popular, is: step away from the machine. Chayka says:

I think it’s vital now to actively think about your own taste and separate it from the influence of digital machinery.

By all means, building a bench of inspiration beyond what’s on your algorithm is a great thing. But stepping back from the machine entirely assumes a clean border exists. We’re already hybrids of machine and organism. The algorithm isn’t something that contaminates your taste from the outside. It’s part of how you encounter culture, how you form preferences, how you learn what moves you. Nostalgia for pre-digital purity is itself a digital aesthetic.

I watched a good TikTok recently (!! my first ever TikTok citation) where the speaker describes life as a game of hot and cold. You move through the world and certain ideas resonate in your body, touch some invisible place within. The warmth is your internal guidance system telling you that you’re getting closer to yourself:

You don’t discover who you are by introspecting in isolation. You discover who you are by noticing how you meet the world, and having a place where your accumulated senses become legible to you over time.

A misreading of Sublime would be that it’s a tool for borrowing taste: save what smart people save, let the AI recommend more of it.

I prefer this description, from a Sublime member:

“a way to dive into my mind, through the minds of others, for me to find my own footholds within it.”

It’s the Ram Dass thing: the mouth you’ve rented isn’t telling you something new, it’s helping you muster the nerve to trust the things you already know. We need one another so that we can feel safe in our thoughts.

IN THE TRENCHES

What does it actually look like in practice, when you’re sitting there, trying to make something, unsure what you believe?

This post that you’re reading started out as a mess of thoughts in my head. I knew I wanted to respond to Kyle Chayka’s piece, articulate what is driving me crazy about the taste discourse, and clarify how we at Sublime think about AI’s role in the creative process. But I had to decide on a general structure, figure out what concepts to pull in, and find my voice in it. Writing is hard!

A very common trope is to use LLMs to generate creative output (imo, they’re only getting worse at prose, this is a convincing explanation). The more interesting use is as a sparring partner in the trenches with you.

I didn’t start by asking Claude to generate the text you’re reading. I started by sharing a half-formed instinct and using Sublime’s new MCP connection (basically a way to give Claude access to my inspiration library and the broader Sublime network) to pull in related ideas and get my juices going.

It came back with adjacent references from Gurwinder, Ezra Klein, Eugene Wei, Signull, Ava. Things I’d saved months ago and forgotten, plus some things I’d never encountered. So much juju!

The Ava quote on interiority struck a chord, so I asked it to pull me deeper. That thread became the backbone of everything I wrote above about the difference between taste as competitive advantage and taste as self-understanding.

Pulling from a curated set of my own and others’ ideas has so much more aliveness to it than the default LLM experience where you often drag your eyes across the words and feel…nothing.

Here, there’s a feeling that these words matter, the jolt from reading a very good sentence, a just-in-time encounter with something true and weird and original that lights you up inside.

AI doesn't have taste. It is, as Chayka says, tasteless technology. But the humans using it do. The AI does the thing you can't easily do: hold it all in memory, reason alongside you as you find your way. You do the Steve-Jobs thing of: yes, this. No, not this.

THE PART WHERE BOTH ARE TRUE

It is one of the sublime ironies of our current moment that the AI community vastly underestimates what the human mind is capable of and AI critics vastly underestimate what the human mind is capable of alongside machines.

If there is a throughline here, it’s that taste isn’t a weapon you deploy in the marketplace or a purity you protect from the machine; it’s the slow, inefficient work of becoming someone who can make things that are good and true, machines and all.

Now on to the good news! You can laugh at the way the tech world employs the word “taste” and still believe human discernment is the bottleneck. You can embrace AI and still have a definition of taste closer to Voltaire’s than Paul Graham’s. You can be mesmerized by the fact that you now have access to a machine that holds the entire internet’s worth of information while still being terrified of what it’s doing to your ability to think. The hard critique of technology from someone who loves technology—not from someone who hates it—might be the most important kind of criticism we need right now. And it’s the one almost nobody is writing.

I’d like to try.

Yours truly,
Sari (founder of Sublime, mom of three, honorary tech bro)

P.S. If you made it all the way down, wow, thank you. I am so grateful to be part of a living, breathing network of people who save the things that move them, and to have a machine that can reach into all of it and help us each find our way. If you’re not yet a Sublime Premium member, you can use code ALLTHEWAYDOWN to get 20% off.

https://www.sublime.app