David Senra (Website, X) is a podcaster and loves that title more than anyone. He hosts Founders, where he teaches the lessons of history's greatest entrepreneurs by way of the biographies he reads of them. This week, he launched a second show, David Senra, where he talks to the greatest living entrepreneurs (often about the lessons from Founders). The first episode with Spotify Founder & CEO Daniel Ek is available now, and the show is in partnership with Scicomm Media, the team behind Huberman Lab.
David is an enthusiast about four things: entrepreneurship, reading, history, and podcasts. His two shows are the articulation of those obsessions in a form of service for the rest of us. He is following Charlie Munger's advice: "take a simple a idea and take it seriously."
David is one of the most energizing people I've ever met and has greatly inspired my work. I've had several multi-hour conversations with him that left me buzzing afterward, and I'm pleased that this is no exception. We cover many of his favorite lessons and founders, his process, biographies, focus, fear, endurance, service, and legacy.
I hope you are inspired to commit yourself to something worth your days and years.
Transcript and extensive linked references: https://dialectic.fm/david-senra
Special thanks to Josh Kale for producing this episode. Please check out his show Limitless on frontier technology and AI.
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Billy Oppenheimer (Website, X) is a researcher and writer who works closely with Ryan Holiday and Rick Rubin, and publishes the “Six at 6” newsletter. Billy is also working on his first book, The Work is the Win.
We kick off by discussing one of my favorite new ideas: "looking for clues," a process and philosophy for creativity that Billy learned from Rick Rubin. He shares the story Rick told him when he learned and adopted this language, which is so representative of how Billy (and I!) research in our work.
From there, we talk about Billy's robust research process and how he has created an external brain of the ideas and patterns that inspire him rather than relying on memory. We also talk about the importance of time as a filter and a series of maxims that underpin his work and creativity. We discuss the importance of inputs over outputs and his big idea and book title, "The Work is the Win," as well many related ideas on success, complacency, compounding, standards, initiative, local maximums, and more. We finish with some lessons from Billy's favorite people.
This conversation is a field guide for making things, pushing through the messiness of progress, and attuning yourself to the richness of the world that often takes the shape of clues.
Full transcript and all links: https://dialectic.fm/billy-oppenheimer
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Maxwell Meyer (X, Newsletter) is the founder and editor of Arena Magazine, an "American Propaganda" print and digital publication focused on technology, capitalism, and civilizational progress. Max also works with Joe Lonsdale at 8VC and is the proprietor of his Iowan farm, Henry Hills. He was previously the editor of the Stanford Review.
Our conversation is about ideas Max is most interested in across storytelling and media, American values, technology and progress, capitalism, writing and craft, and deep love for his country.
We start with critique, the media's tendency toward cliché, and defending the new while building trust with readers. Then we talk about American ideology: its radical founding myth, collective enterprise, and a nation of movers. Max makes a case that national character ought to be lived and formed bottom-up, and repeatedly argues that cultural pendulum swings are as old as time and we need not overreact to the swings of the day. He describes tech's brief abandonment of the rest of America and talks through how we might export Silicon Valley's outcome-oriented culture to government and other industries. Max argues that the foundation of capitalism is simple: "you can't kill your counterparty." We of course discuss Arena, magazines, writing, editing, and his ambitions there too.
Above all else, Max makes the case for America, big and small: the beautiful, always-changing, rarely-agreeing, perpetually striving amalgamation of souls that stretch from sea to shining sea.
You can subscribe to Arena here: https://arenamag.com/subscribe
Full transcript and all links: https://dialectic.fm/maxwell-meyer
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Mackenzie Burnett (Website, X) is the co-founder and CEO of Ambrook, financial software for independent businesses starting with farms and ranches. We trace her arc from a policy-first upbringing (USDA household, Congressional internships, climate-security research at Stanford) to a building software for rural America.
We talk about why Mackenzie loves America and cares about agriculture, the challenges of aligning sustainability with business and government, and pragmatically building resilience. Mackenzie talks about the American Dream and why independent small businesses are the foundation of it in many ways.
Then we get into Ambrook’s product philosophy: why “all roads lead to accounting,” how multi-P&Ls and biological inventories make farms deceptively complex, and why understanding bookkeeping and money movement enables better decision making and understanding over the long run for big and small businesses.
We also talk through Mackenzie's broad ambition for Ambrook; her growth as a leader; brand, aesthetics, and environment; Ambrook's editorially independent research division, Offrange, and more. Mackenzie is one of the most quietly ambitious and focused people I've met, and yet under her impressive and serious exterior is a life and love for America and its people that is all heart.
Special thanks to Josh Kale for his help producing this episode.
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Full transcript and all links: https://dialectic.fm/mackenzie-burnett
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Cyan Banister (Website, X, Substack) is an investor, artist, and co-founder and General Partner of Long Journey Ventures. Previously, Cyan spent four years at Founders Fund and has a legendary angel investing track record alongside her husband, Scott, including early rounds in SpaceX, Uber, and DeepMind.
Cyan is as original as they come: she grew up on a Navajo reservation and was homeless by 15, with a series of unlikely serendipitous moments combined with optimism, agency, and love of capitalism taking her to a very different life than the one she grew up with. I focused this conversation not on Cyan's work, but her unique approach to living.
We begin with Cyan’s “church”: a weekly visit to see Bobby McFerrin and co. do live, jazz acapella in Berkeley, CA. We discuss how this space ties to presence, openness, and play, and then talk about the tension between novelty and consistency as she continues on her own path toward self-love and mindfulness. She also tells me about her radical approach to accountability and the empowering results of assuming that everything is her fault.
One of Cyan's favorite words is the French dérive, or an intentional drift, and it embodies her approach to the world. She moves with childlike wonder, seeking to see things and people from new perspectives and challenging others to react beyond their default settings. She daydreams about the outcomes she wants and has remarkable conviction and faith even when others do not believe her.
We wrap with a grab bag representative of Cyan's diverse interests, from filmmaking and performance art to the US Constitution to Bill Murray. Cyan manages to combine randomness and intentionality, naiveté and sober-minded awareness, humility and conviction. I hope you are are as inspired as I am to live more playfully, seriously, and courageously.
Full transcript is available at https://dialectic.fm/cyan-banister
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Reggie James (Substack, X) is a designer, writer, and entrepreneur. Reggie previously founded Eternal and recently edited and published Hardware 2024, a book highlighting recent attempts at creating a different hardware future. This conversation happened live on stage at FWB Fest 2025 in Idyllwild, CA.
We explored Reggie's frame of technology as a mirror and the Kevin Kelly-inspired notion that technology has an agenda of its own. Reggie has a fresh perspective on brand and "feel" as they relate to technology products, why friction can create meaning, and a Naoto Fukasawa-influenced view that design is about communicating values. The latter, for Reggie, originates with writing.
We dipped into a discussion about how hardware and how it shapes our software cultures, and what a world with more basic luxuries like the iPhone might look like. We also discussed "loaded" technologies and the current narratives that are working in crypto vs. what might be idealized.
The conversation concludes with a zoomed out meditation on myth, American western idealism, personal history, and what type of vision is required to create something radically new. This episode is shorter than usual given the live nature, but it's jam packed and I'm thrilled that we were able to cover a lot of ground across many of the ideas that are representative of Reggie.
Full transcript and all links: https://dialectic.fm/reggie-james
Video version from FWB livestream available here.
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Linus Lee (Website, X) is a builder, engineer, and writer who explores how software can amplify our abilities, humanity, and agency. He builds, researches, and advises on AI at Thrive Capital, a venture capital firm, and continues to write and hack on personal projects.
Previously, Linus held research or engineering roles at Notion, Betaworks, Replit, and others, and has built over 100 personal projects on the side--including his own programming language and most of the tools he uses day to day. Most of his work, writing, and projects revolve around language, knowledge work, thinking tools, machine intelligence, and latent space for creativity.
We begin with how technology can concentrate or distribute power and amplify our diminish our agency. Then he breaks down his framework around instrumental and engaged interfaces, why representation is so critical in tools, and talks through what 'tools for thought' actually means. We also discuss the state of LLM tools and how they can become more robust, as well as how latent space could be codified to help us understand more qualitative domains. This bleeds into his approach to and work at Thrive, which we discuss in detail.
Linus is attuned to the ways technology can make us more or less human, and that's reflected throughout. Technology is not determined: the future we imagine and create is entirely up to us. Will we optimize ourselves into something non-human, or dream our way into something beautiful?
Views expressed here are the interviewee's and not intended as investment advice.
Full transcript and all links are available at https://dialectic.fm/linus-lee
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Tamara Winter (X) is the Commissioning Editor of Stripe Press, where she exercises her taste to identify the knowledge and "ideas for progress" that matter most in alignment with Stripe's mission: to increase the GDP of the internet.
"Tammy" worked at the Charter Cities Institute and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which is chaired by Tyler Cowen.
Tammy is obsessed with tacit knowledge and the illegible parts of the world that actually support so much of our lives, work, and societies. This includes taste, charisma, relationships, and a wide-range of load-bearing infrastructure that supports healthy and trustful societies, from small-talk and manners to hidden forces that prevent anti-social behavior and maintain safe places to live and work.
We discuss this and more, including how she selects the ideas worthy of Stripe's audience, her unique career path, her refreshing take on agency, her standards for herself, reading and writing, and how she chooses how to spend her time. Above all, Tammy's incredible love of other people shines throughout the conversation.
Full episode transcript with all linked references: https://dialectic.fm/tamara-winter
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Nadia Asparouhova (Website, X, Substack) is a writer and researcher who has spent much of her career in service of the question: 'what's happening here?' across various parts of the internet.
Nadia recently published her newest book, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. She explores why consequential ideas, unlike memes and supermemes, fail to spread. She also recounts the last several years of online public and private life and how we're all less naive than we were in previous eras of the internet. Critically, she suggests a path toward poking our heads out of group chats and silos to engage in publicly discussing or promoting the ideas that matter most.
Her first book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, was published by Stripe Press. Nadia also worked at Substack, Protocol Labs, and Github, and has written extensively on Silicon Valley Culture; the importance of ideas and institutions; consciousness, attention, and meditation; and more.
Nadia's self-described sweet spot is when people respond to her writing by saying,"I read this piece and it gave me words for a thing that I didn't know how to express before." I can attest that is true, both for Antimemetics and for much of her other thinking. And as much as she writes about ideas, I admire how focused she is on how they might produce action.
Nadia believes that important ideas infect us, and the reasonable response to that is to be tremendously thoughtful about our attention. I hope this conversation inspires you to put great care into where your attention goes.
Transcript and all links: https://dialectic.fm/nadia-asparouhova
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Geoffrey Litt (Website, X) is a designer, engineer, writer, and researcher at Ink & Switch, where he champions malleable software: the idea that ordinary people should be able to mold the digital tools they rely on every day.
Ink & Switch is an independent research lab focused on how computers can help us think and work. While researching and writing, Geoffrey and team also build products and prototypes to explore how their ideas can exist in practice. Geoffrey got his PhD at MIT CSAIL, where he built on his inspiration around computational media like spreadsheets, hoping to push more software toward the ethos of end-user programming, but without the technical complexity. In a sense, why should using software and changing it be any different? Previously, he built software for teachers at Panorama Education, which he joined out of school as one of the first employees.
Geoffrey and collaborators recently published a definitive piece on malleable software and we discussed it in detail. We dig into why most modern apps feel like sealed boxes rather than flexible tools and environments, and what changes when your app, document, or workspace, feels more like Lego than machinery. Geoffrey makes his case that we want software tooling to feel like a chef knife, not an avocado slicer, and we talk about how the best designed tools help users up a smooth slope of learning and ability. He argues in favor of deeper understanding, illustrated by one of my favorite ideas: The Nightmare Bicycle. We talk about how LLMs are enabling malleable software and how local tinkerers might be able to build systems for themselves and their team or communities that understand their needs more deeply than any professional designer could. Finally, Geoffrey lays out a call to arms for founders: build products that treat users as co-authors who understand their own needs, not just consumers.
On one level, this is a conversation about software and design. But it is really about agency. I hope it inspires you to pop open the hood on various aspects of your life, look at what's inside, and trust yourself to tinker. As Steve Jobs said many years ago, "the minute you can understand that you can poke life, and if you push in, then something will pop out the other side; that you can change it, you can mold it—that's maybe the most important thing."
All links and transcript: https://dialectic.fm/geoffrey-litt
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Yancey Strickler (Website, X, Metalabel) is a writer, entrepreneur, creative, and founder of Metalabel, a network and platform that allows creative people to release work together. He is also a board member, co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter and is currently working on establishing a new kind of corporate structure, the Artist Corporation.
Yancey's life and work has revolved around what it means to be a creative individual, and how to improve the cultural and mechanical forms that enable artists and creatives.
We talk about how much of modern society is rooted in individualism, how that wasn't always the case, and how the internet is evolving our sense of self. We get into creativity, the term's surprisingly recent origins, and why Yancey believes the 21st will be the "Creative Century." Then, we go beyond the individual and discuss the deeply-rooted longing that all of us have to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. Yancey suggests that is not simply about being subsumed by a collective, but by maintaining our individual star while becoming part of larger constellations—like the labels that have empowered the distribution of ideas for centuries. Finally, we discuss the forms Yancey has or is helping to build and imagine a future where even more of the world creates professionally.
May we all shine more brightly and find others who inspire us to make wonderful things.
Full transcript and all links available at https://dialectic.fm/yancey-strickler.
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Full transcript and all links: dialectic.fm/henrik-karlsson
Henrik Karlsson (Substack, X) is an independent writer focused on "writing a few good essays." Two of them are among my most consistently recommended: on designing your life and finding your wife (or husband).
Henrik's always written, but lived a winding path across software programming, music, poetry, biology, an art gallery, and other odd jobs. A few years ago, Henrik and Johanna picked up their life in Sweden to move to a small island farm in Denmark so they could homeschool their daughters. He now writes on Substack full-time and lives an unusual dual-life: one is remote and intimate; the other is connected and wide.
My favorite theme of his writing is self-cultivation: introspection and action, designing a life that fits you by experimenting, how to think and how to learn, embracing being wrong and seeing past your blindspots, and living in concert with past and future selves.
I also love his writing on relationships: how to find your life partner, why writing helps others see the inside of your head, how to use the internet as a serendipity machine for finding your people, teaching and parenting, and what its like to be around exceptional people who make your world bigger.
He also writes about education, self-organizing systems, AI, exceptional childhoods, and more. But I find the topic rarely matters—all of his writing expands me. What a gift. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. May we all embrace the burden of freedom—freedom to iteratively unfold into a life we never could have imagined. If you enjoy the episode, please consider supporting Henrik's writing, as he is fully reader-supported.
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Tom Morgan (X, Substack) is a "curiosity sherpa," writer, and podcaster who runs The Leading Edge, a community for leaders focused on personal transformation and authenticity.
I first encountered Tom and his ideas during his talk at Sohn on Iain McGilchrist, left vs. right brain, and curiosity. Tom writes about complexity, curiosity, and consciousness, and wades into the deep end of various topics that most of us would place in "woo," mystic, and spiritual territories. He spent most of his career on Wall Street and brings a scientifically-inclined, rationalist approach to researching and amplifying some of the most surprising modern and ancient ideas about the nature of humanity and the universe.
With this conversation, I aimed to create a primer on Tom's writing, approach, and the ideas he returns to most. We discuss following your energy, how curiosity is a guiding force, complexity and emergence, and why the world is overrated toward left-brain rationalism. We explore practical questions—How do you know your gifts? When should you pivot or persevere? What does real exploration look like when the world offers no safety nets? And then we wade into much stranger, or even heretical ideas—at least for a modern, intellectual, western audience—including the notion that consciousness is much vaster than what we've come to understand, and how we are just a small part of a much bigger whole.
I hope you enjoy the conversation and consider some ideas that are much more fringe than you're used to. I definitely left it with more questions than answers. And more than that, I hope you are inspired to attune yourself to your curiosity. Perhaps, you may even have the faith to follow that thread pulling you toward what appears today only to be a wall.
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They asked about financial goals, spending habits, how much founders themselves, investment portfolio breakdowns, risk tolerance, estate planning and philanthropy, and more. Visit https://joinhampton.com/community to access the report.
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Alex Danco (Website, X, Substack) is a writer and Product Director at Shopify. Alex rose to prominence while writing his Snippets newsletter while at VC firm Social Capital in 2015. He wrote prolifically—about markets and financial systems, venture capital, startups, cities, culture, the technology-driven shift to a world of abundance, to name a few topics—through 2020, when he joined Shopify. Since then, he's had his hands full with Shopify and young kids, but recently published a flurry of new pieces on his blog while on paternity leave.
This conversation starts with one of Alex's most insightful ideas: that a culture of gift-giving underpins technology, innovation, and creative work, and is the key to solving many of capitalism's coordination problems. We then talk about what businesses will look like in a world of abundance: AI agents, massive and accessible infrastructure, and where moats might actually lie. Alex shares why AI-enabled creativity may resemble musicians finding their sound and how and where we might find internet-native subcultures in 2025. Then he explains what "the medium is the message" actually means across different content formats and why audio continues to thrive. We wrap up with Alex's thoughts on the U.S and Canada as someone who identifies with both places and by taking a peek into some of the books that have most influenced his thinking.
I've read Alex for years and I've always been impressed by how generative he is. That comes through in this conversation and I hope you are inspired to—like Alex—be more curious, creative, and most importantly, generous.
Transcript and all links available at dialectic.fm/alex-danco.
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Anjan Katta (X) is Founder and CEO of Daylight, a new type of computer company.
Having a conversation with Anjan is a bit like trying reign in a wild animal: his horsepower, wide-ranging philosophical interests, and unbelievable depth in the areas he cares about make him one of a kind. Fortunately, all of that energy is being channeled into his life's work, Daylight Computer Company. Daylight's mission is to build a computer that amplifies our humanity. That starts with Daylight's first product: The DC1, a tablet that combines the power and functionality of an iPad with the screen of a kindle. Anjan has been building Daylight for seven years across extensive research on screens and hardware, many near deaths, and mission-driven motivation.
Anjan sees computers as a "magical medium" that we're in relationship with, unlike other tools. Unfortunately, "optimization of the means, yet confusion of goals" has led the technology industry to building hardware and software that sits in what he calls a "messy medium." With devices that can do anything and everything, they often fail to empower us toward the vision Steve Jobs called the bicycle for the mind.
Throughout, Anjan and I discuss a philosophy toward life, career, design, and creating meaning that I hope will inspire you, whether you work on technology or not. May we all aim to get closer to ourselves and our humanity.
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D.A. Wallach (Website, X, Substack, Spotify) is an investor, musician, writer, and polymath. Today he co-runs Time BioVentures, backing frontier life-science and healthcare startups. Before that, he was an investor in in SpaceX, Spotify, Emulate, Beam Therapeutics, and Ripple, among others, and toured the globe as half of Chester French. He also released music as a solo artist and was Spotify’s first Artist-in-Residence.
Our conversation moves from engineered serendipity—the art of a well-aimed cold email & surfing the web—to complexity science, the Santa Fe Institute, and what better systems might look like. We dive into markets and medicine: investing with a creative mindset; timing in biotech including CRISPR and GLP-1s; and the tension between free-market innovation and healthcare as a human right. D.A. unpacks how incentives shape everything from venture bubbles to hospital billing and how LLMs might move us closer to a universal standard of care.
In the back half we talk creativity, beauty, art, and performance. We discuss whether AI makes us lazy or amplifies originality, DA's many lives across art, tech, and business, and end on his plea for artists to reclaim their throne of "cool". I hope you're inspired by D.A's combination of curiosity and depth and are reminded that you don't have to stay in one lane, regardless of how impressive it might be.
Full episode transcript and all linked references available here.
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Alex Zhang (Website, X, Instagram) is a cultural curator, community builder, and creative director. Currently, he's Chief Creative Officer of Powder Mountain, a where he's working with Reed Hastings to create a globally unique ski experience that combines art, architecture, and lots of fresh tracks.
Alex loves people and curating spaces and experiences for them: whether that means parties, music festivals, or mountain towns. He joined Summit Series out of school, throwing large scale events around the world and working on Powder Mountain, a Utah mountain resort the ownership group had acquired. He then joined one of the first social DAOs, Friends with Benefits (FWB) as Mayor/CEO, after being tapped by its founder Trevor McFredries to scale the tokenized social club beyond a Discord Server. He launched FWB Fest, an annual in-person music festival and crypto conference with past performers including James Blake, Charli XCX, and Caroline Polachek. Most recently, he joined Reed Hastings to return to Powder Mountain after the Netflix co-founder acquired a controlling stake in the resort. Alex leads brand, art, architecture, and marketing.
Blending culture, commerce, and "cool" is anything but a science, but Alex has made a career of it. I've known him for a decade and it's been a thrill to watch him continue to find strange intersections, blending worlds like music and tech, crypto and culture, and skiing and art. We talk about this, how to create spaces and events, living in the mountains, large scale art experiences, Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs, challenges in creating new cities, learning from Reed Hastings, and a life of deepening one's taste.
I hope you enjoy and are inspired to life a more connected, playful, and present life.
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Nabeel S. Qureshi (Website, X, Substack) is a writer, entrepreneur, and former Palantir product lead known for his writing on technology, AI, Palantir, culture, and learning. After a brief hiatus writing and researching and spending nearly a decade at Palantir working across government, healthcare, and intelligence, he's now founding a new company.
The first half of the conversation focuses on two big ideas. First: the growth of "slop" across media and culture and how "care" is its opposite. Then: how to think, learn, and understand more deeply across domains over a lifetime. We discuss how both of these sit against the backdrop of AI's rapid challenging of what it means to make and what it means to think.
Then we discuss Palantir and "grey areas" that many technologists avoid working on or thinking about, government bureaucracy and DOGE, and how technologists are pursuing and accumulating power. We also chat about Nabeel's idea maze ahead of the new company, art and what it is for, and a range of other topics that showcase how curious, polymathic, and considerate Nabeel is.
As the world changes at a breakneck pace thanks to technology and AI, Nabeel embodies a deeply humanistic approach that also accepts change as the default. This conversation inspired me to embrace surprise and strangeness, especially in creativity; to push through the friction and temptation to accept the answers at face value and instead yearn to more deeply understand; and to pursue a life of growth, practice, and care.
Full transcript with all linked references available here.
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Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy are the founders of CW&T (Website, Instagram, X, TikTok), a Brooklyn-based studio creating products that exist somewhere between art, design, and engineering.
The husband-and-wife team met at NYU ITP and shares a background across industrial design, architecture, computer science, film, including time at Pratt Institute and MIT. They won the 2022 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Product Design. They design and manufacture everyday objects including clocks, pens, tools, and other strange objects that challenge our relationship with time, attention, and materiality. Their most recognizable products include the Pen Type-A, Pen Type-C (my favorite), Time Since Launch (a one-time-use, 100-year timekeeper), and Solid State Watch, a remix of the classic Casio F-91W.
Our conversation explores their fascination with time, their commitment to creating heirloom-quality objects in a disposable world, and how they've built a sustainable creative practice on their own terms. We discuss their prototyping-centered approach, the tension between digital and physical creation, and how they navigate collaboration as partners in life and work.
Throughout, Che-Wei and Taylor reveal a philosophy that treats making as its own reward—they create what fascinates them first, trusting that others will connect with their vision. In a world increasingly dominated by disposable products and digital experiences, CW&T offers a refreshing counterpoint: a workshop where physical objects are thoughtfully conceived, meticulously crafted, and built to accompany us through life's journeys. Their work invites us to reconsider our relationship with the objects we use daily and the passage of time itself, offering a refreshing counterpoint to our increasingly digital, ephemeral world.
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Eugene Wei (Website, X) is a writer, product thinker, and cultural observer best known for his essays on technology, media, and social networks, including Status as a Service, Invisible asymptotes, and TikTok and the Sorting Hat.
Eugene spent seven years at Amazon in its early days before following a brief detour to pursue filmmaking at UCLA. He then led product, design, editorial, and marketing teams at Hulu, co-founded Erly, and worked at Flipboard and Oculus. Today, he works on his own ideas at the intersection of media and technology while advising and angel investing.
This conversation explores the evolving landscape of entertainment, social media, community, and humanity in our digital age—topics Eugene has examined deeply. We revisit some of Eugene’s greatest hits on how platforms like Twitter and TikTok shape society and also get into fresh ideas he's yet to share publicly.
We start by discussing how today's social media world compares to the television-centric world that Neil Postman lamented in Amusing Ourselves to Death, and how entertainment-maximizing, adversarial, algorithmic social platforms might lead us to "Amusing Each Other to Death." Eugene unpacks TikTok's profound impact on our "digital nervous system," differentiating between social networks and social media—highlighting the latter's emphasis on frictionless positivity rather than meaningful connection.
Amid rising nihilism among young people, Eugene analyzes how cultural and economic structures contribute to lost hope, exploring social media’s role in exacerbating these trends. We discuss power laws influencing tech, media, sports, and finance, and how that drives pervasive speculation across culture. Then, he traces these themes through American television, from 1960s-1990s sitcoms to shows like The Sopranos, Succession, and Industry, revealing how they reflect the erosion of community and purpose in late-stage capitalism.
Throughout, Eugene offers nuanced observations on how technology's removal of friction has paradoxically weakened our sense of meaning and connection. We wrap up with how AI might shape media and creativity, what elements of humanity may be valued in the future, learnings from Bezos and film school, and a movie recommendation for anyone trying to make sense of it all.
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