<div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="5-TinaHe.jpg" alt="5-Tina He"> </div> *Dialectic Episode 5: Tina He - Internet Citizen and Philosopher in Action - is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/7bOj20jO34FESp3SL5paU0?si=d165416abc484f91) and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/pzN7DSDEz1A?si=cNjebX3lb9YbGSoM).* <iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/7bOj20jO34FESp3SL5paU0?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/5-tina-he-internet-citizen-and-philosopher-in-action/id1780282402?i=1000680647561"></iframe> # Description Tina He ([Site](https://tinahe.xyz/), [X](https://x.com/fkpxls), [Newsletter](https://fakepixels.substack.com/)) is a product designer, entrepreneur, writer, and amateur philosopher. She is a product lead at Coinbase, where she works on developer tools for its network [Base](https://www.base.org/). She joined Coinbase through the acquisition of her company, [Station Labs](https://www.station.express/). Tina grew up in China before moving the U.S. at age 14. As an adult, Tina has been a dual-citizen of New York City and the internet. As she has put it, Tina is interested in the culture of technology and the technology of culture. While we share a love of technology and the internet as a "place," Tina is also my favorite person to get reading recommendations from. She studies philosophy, immerses herself in art, film, and fashion, and has been writing online since she was a teenager. I aimed to give listeners a glimpse of the types of wide-ranging conversations that I've enjoyed with Tina over the years. We cover identity, locality, NYC, the internet, writing and sharing online, finding your people online, her career arc from comparative literature in college to venture capital and crypto, how labor markets and economies lay a foundation for culture in cities and online, what it means to be serious, patriotism and greatness, ambition, philosophy, ideas and action, Benjamin Labatut's *When We Cease to Understand the World,* her favorite philosophers from Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein to Byung-Chul Han, Beauty, taste, aesthetics, film, fashion, and how love and attention underpin her life. # Timestamps: - (1:07): Identity & Place: What Does it Mean to be Local? - (7:46): New York City - (14:24): Urban Design and Evolution in Cities and Online - (19:03): Being a Citizen of the Internet & Sharing Yourself Online - (31:55): Tina's Unique Path: from Comparative Literature & CS to VC to Crypto - (45:58): Station & Coinbase: Why Economic Systems & Labor Markets are Upstream of Cultural Outcomes  - (55:22): Being a Serious Person - (58:53): When We Cease to Understand the World - (1:02:47): Greatness, Patriotism, and Ambition - (1:07:00): Reconciling with Obsession and Ambition: Can They Go Too Far?  - (1:10:13): What is Philosophy For? Refining Realities vs. Asserting Reality - (1:20:57): The Patterns in Tina's Favorite Philosophers and Writers - (1:26:04): Making Time for Philosophy and Study - (1:32:09): Aesthetics, Taste, Beauty, Film, Fashion - (01:39:58): Love & Attention # Links - [The New Frontier of Belonging](https://fakepixels.substack.com/p/fkpxls-the-new-frontier-of-belonging) by Tina He - *[Order without Design](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262550970/order-without-design/)* by Alain Bertaud - *[When We Cease to Understand the World](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62069739-when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world)* by Benjamin Labatut - [Tina's "raw thoughts from the journal"](https://x.com/fkpxls/status/1854533928993821085) post-election - *[Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59794522-non-things?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=pXoGcJeLq0&rank=1)* by Byung-Chul Han - [A train rushing through a lightning storm](https://fakepixels.substack.com/p/fkpxls-vol52-a-train-rushing-through) - the first post I read from Tina, which includes the [Bezos speech](https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate-remarks) Dialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms. [Join the ⁠telegram channel for Dialectic⁠](https://t.me/dialecticpod) [Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠](https://x.com/dialecticpod) [Follow Dialectic on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/dialecticpod/) [Subscribe to Dialectic on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@Dialectic) *Photo: Eugene Wei* # Transcript **Jackson:** 00:00:00 Welcome to Dialectic. Tina is a product designer, entrepreneur, and writer. She now leads developer tool products for Coinbase's Network Base, which she joined through the acquisition of her company, Station Labs. Tina grew up in China and yet is one of the most American people I know. She calls New York home, but is even more so a citizen of the internet. Tina is also my favorite person to get reading recommendations from, especially philosophy. I aim to give listeners a glimpse of the types of wide-ranging conversations that I've enjoyed with Tina over the years. Enjoy. Here's Tina. **Tina:** 00:00:38 I think this is my first non-professional podcast, actually. Like, it's my first podcast with a friend. **Jackson:** 00:00:46 And how does that feel? **Tina:** 00:00:48 Actually, it does not. I have had a podcast with a friend, but then it was about asking about my work and my startup. So it's very, it's way easier when I knew that's the topic where for this, I know it's going to be **Jackson:** philosophical. **Jackson:** 00:01:05 We have many places to go. Okay. All right. Well, here's where we will start. You are somebody who makes me think about identity more than almost anyone. And I think that applies in an individual sense and in a communal sense. I want to start specifically with place because I think place is something that you put a lot of thought and intention into. And I'll start with a quote that you included, I think, in your piece on belonging. And this is Olga, I'm going to totally butcher her name, Olga Tokarczuk. Anyway, you say no one has articulated the amorphous identity of locality better than Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk. She says, "To someone from nowhere, every movement turns into a return." And so I want to ask, what does it mean to be local or a local? **Tina:** 00:02:07 This is something that I personally think about out of necessity. And I think recently there are way more representations of people that are migrants as authors in recent publishing. And we're seeing this narrative more and more that's becoming more and more prevalent. And before reading these writers, many of them may be minorities, Asian Americans, African Americans. They may be someone with my background, which is growing up from another country and coming to a new place. Everyone grapples with this identity of, you know, what am I, right? Am I American? Am I Chinese? Am I Korean? That's like kind of the most fundamental level of nationality, which is a very literal interpretation of who you are as a person. And I've had this experience. So, for some context, I came to America when I was 14, and I've been here for, it's going to reveal my age, for more than 14 years now. So I think that I would consider myself an American. I went to high school here. I got a degree here. Most of my friends are American. I had a career here. And you would think that in my very little provincial view that I am as American as it gets with Chinese roots. But I was denied entry two years ago when I was reentering America with a different visa. And the reason being that I work in high tech. And given the broader context and cultural context, I fully understand because of the recent, more intense US-China relationship, this is beyond any individual's control, that basically every individual that's involved in the process now is being affected. Especially those who work in high tech are being held with higher scrutiny. But as an individual who considers themselves American, you kind of felt a moment of expulsion in that moment where you don't feel necessarily accepted by a country that you would consider home. So that was like a very distinct moment when something like identity really comes to my mind of, okay, like the nation that I would consider my home is not accepting me, maybe on paper, or is questioning my intention of being here because you are being reduced to a tech worker in America who's a Chinese national. And then what is my identity if that is not something that clearly defines me and clearly giving me legitimacy, which is, you know, I love tech, and this is a passion of mine. I didn't go into it knowing that I am a Chinese national that is going to potentially one day borrow some IPs from a nation from across the Pacific back to my home country. So my intention has always been so naive and, to be honest, very pure. So I think that makes me think I'm probably not the only person that feels like this. And many people probably are starting to ask, what am I? What's actually my home? And I think people nowadays can find that. And how you and I have met was via the internet and via platforms like Twitter. When you're putting your raw thoughts online, being able to, in a more algorithmic sense, almost being re-identified by algorithm, it's almost like a liberating process of dissecting your identity into almost bits of information that's being reorganized by this algorithm. **Jackson:** 00:06:11 Redrawing it, cutting up, and totally. **Tina:** 00:06:14 Recutting it and regrouping it by it, right? So in some way, people argue that we're brainwashed by or being manipulated by the algorithm to be fed content that completely resonates with our echo chamber and limits our view. But to be honest, I think that argument is totally valid given we are seeing that playing out with the polarized political environment and all that. But I think there's also something that's very beautiful and positive about that. I feel like without the algorithm, I would not have discovered you. I would not have discovered many people that are now close and dear to me. So to kind of tie everything back to your question about what does being local and what does locality mean? I think that the most crude categorization, there's locality in the sense of physicality, like I am present right now in New York in this apartment in East Village with you. I'm local in the sense that I am from a certain country. I belong to a certain nationality. I have a certain identity and culture that identifies me as who I am. And then there's the local as this spiritual, or I would say intellectual, but the intellectual kind of resolves also back to spiritual, which I think is something else that we should talk about. That ends up being something that I think most people are actually yearning for in this day and age. That's beyond kind of where you are physically. **Jackson:** 00:07:46 That was an amazing first answer and covers so many places I want to go. We will certainly spend a lot of time talking about the internet, but one of your other favorite places is, as you mentioned, New York City. **Tina:** 00:07:57 You. **Jackson:** 00:07:58 I have another quote I want to read from Italo Calvino that you've shared that I think is just amazing, but also maybe specifically kind of feels like your relationship with New York. He says, "Life in New York has started to become ferociously pleasant. Again, I must be daft, but I am more in love than ever with this horrendous city. New York is the only true love of my life." And then this really feels like you. "The city which I have felt was my own city more than any other is New York. I wanted New Yorker to be engraved on my tombstone." What does being a New Yorker mean to you? **Tina:** 00:08:36 Yeah, being a New Yorker, I think, really, by the end of the day, is liberation. You are not. It's almost like in New York, every day is a rebirth. I think when I talk to some of my friends who talk about city life being extremely lonely, I actually always respond, "I love that. I love that every day you're able to wake up and feel extremely alone." **Jackson:** 00:09:05 Wow. **Tina:** 00:09:06 There's nowhere else than New York that makes you feel like that. And that actually creates a sense of community, ironically. I think the fact that people in New York always bond, irregardless of where they go, is that they have experienced a sense of acute loneliness that they're able to appreciate moments of understanding. There's another experience that I think about a lot. Basically, Jonathan Franzen is this very famous American author that writes about the suburban American life. That was actually one of my first exposures to American literature when I was very young, and I read a lot of his stuff. Raymond Carver is another author that influenced me a lot in terms of my impression of America. There's always a sense of isolation, alienation, even when you're in a very secluded neighborhood in suburban life. In those stories, a lot of their protagonists or stories cover life in the suburbia in America, especially upper middle class or middle class life, where everyone knows everybody else and they're very concerned with, you know, kind of the bourgeois matters. It's just suffocating the same way that it's honestly the reason why I wanted to leave China and my family to come here. I think it is for that sense of liberation. Especially when I was younger, I put such a premium on breaking free from that suffocating sense of community where you have to be very sensitive. Or maybe in any kind of secluded environment with people involved in it, you inevitably result in games. And those games are usually social games. Social games are not always the most productive to pursuing your intellectual or your other pursuits, or for being different. The cost of being an outcast is much higher. But in New York, the problem is being flipped on its head because there's no such idea of a tight knit community besides the fact that it is New York. There are these communities that you can choose to be a part of, but everyone by the end of the day is a true individual. I think that there's something that's very beautiful and resonant in terms of being able to wake up every day knowing that who I was yesterday no longer defines me. And today, I can kind of choose my own adventure all over again. Something about New York City also -- I talk about this with one of our mutual friends a lot, Chris Peck. It is very resonant of the Internet as well, where if you walk down Manhattan and then you go through each neighborhood, every neighborhood almost has its very distinct culture and heritage. This might be a little bit cliche as a New Yorker to say. Basically, you don't feel like there's any limitation in the diversity that you can be a part of. So there's also something that's amazing. It almost feels like a college campus, and it feels like the internet, right? You're going into different departments, using the college campus metaphor. Using the internet metaphor, you're going to different Reddit threads or different forums where you're discovering all these emergents. One thing that I observe about New Yorkers that I find very fascinating, especially old New Yorkers, is like, okay, these newcomers, they're gentrifying and really sabotaging my neighborhood. I find that so fascinating because that is literally what makes New York so great. One day, this culture might become obsolete and someone new is going to come and define what they think New York is. Rebirth again. Birth again. So this constant birth and rebirth is, I think, calming to my soul. **Jackson:** 00:13:34 I love the dichotomy between -- it's interesting, I was reading a poem from David White recently on the word "alone." He talks very similarly to you about this sort of extreme dichotomy between how aloneness is actually also sort of the path to connection. To your point, there's nothing more alone than being alone in an apartment in New York City, surrounded by everyone and yet alone. But also, as someone who's lived in other cities, and notably Los Angeles, for me, Los Angeles is a city that is way more about your cluster. It's way less about individuals, but it doesn't have the interweaving fabric. There's such a fascinating high and low of individualism and interweaving connection in New York. I think you nailed it. Do you -- we've talked about other cities. You love Tokyo as well. You, I think, broadly have an interest in urban design, or really what I would say is place design, as we'll get to, extends into the internet. What is so enamoring to you about cities or these places of connection and particularly thinking about designing them or at least being attuned to how they are designed or how they are grown? **Tina:** 00:14:52 Maybe my interest is more so how urban cities came to be, or evolved into the way that they are, or how they're being shaped, versus how urban designers are capable of designing them. I am not an urban designer. I simply have an interest in how cities evolve. I'm not actually the expert here in urban design. But there's this really interesting dichotomy between schools of thought in urban design. You know, that's common in designing any products or any experiences that you and I may be familiar with, especially on the internet. There is a very top-down way of designing cities, which is a kind of state-owned programming. You have very planned cities, and actually some of them, in Manhattan specifically, the grid system, like Midtown and the way that everything is so structured, I think there's a little bit of centralized planning involved in that. And then there's obviously another school of thought, which is almost fully emergent, where streets kind of form and then you have different cultural centers, the garden, exactly, Jane Jacobs. I think every New Yorker at this point probably has read Jane Jacobs, so I don't want to be overly redundant here. But that was kind of the central idea of her work, which is around this perseverance of the emergent pattern, and how without overly maintaining them, you actually can have faith that as long as there is an ecosystem of feedback loops within those emergent pods, they will continue to thrive and there's going to be a community. Maybe tying urban design back to some of the conversations about the internet, something that I find very interesting around internet products specifically, which is also an area that I like to draw analogy when I'm thinking about topics like urban design, is we kind of see also classes of internet platforms. There are internet platforms that, even without a team actively maintaining them, without very little capital investment, they can just last for a long time. For example, not to diminish any of the work that the teams at Twitter, now X, and at Reddit are doing, and I think that there are kind of this more, there's a lot of interesting work that they're doing in terms of fostering the community. But at the same time, let's just do a thought exercise and imagine those people are all taken away. What would those platforms look like? My guess is that they will still exist. They might not, you know, they might lack some interesting economic activities that are present. Like for example, these platforms invest pretty heavily in moderation, right? In things like advertisement, which actually I think it's not necessarily always a negative thing. It could be positive in curating certain content and certain demographics within the platform. The platform now is heavily investing in things like community nodes and other products that make the content higher quality. So those efforts are definitely recognized, but at the same time, right, just imagine a world without them. **Jackson:** 00:18:28 There's a genesis story. There's the famous kind of critical line of Twitter, which is that it's a clown car in a gold mine. **Jackson:** 00:18:35 But I think more honestly, whether it be Twitter or Reddit or talking about physical world places, a place like New York, obviously there's all the things you were talking about, the ongoing maintenance, the improvements, but there's also some sort of founding story or some founding DNA or culture or something that is self-fulfilling. That's really fascinating. **Tina:** 00:18:53 Totally. **Jackson:** 00:18:55 We don't necessarily have that many of those in a digital sense, although that's obviously something you've spent a lot of time thinking about. Maybe to just get to it and talk specifically about the internet. One of my favorite lines you've ever written, you say it's even becoming much easier to find a weird hidden corner online than to find a physical place that truly feels like one's own. I think that obviously describes your and my experience of the internet as sort of people who maybe at a specific age got to see the world before a little bit and obviously grow up in a world of the internet. Before we talk super specifically about station and your work, do you want to just talk a little about what writing online and making friends online, especially given what you said at the top and coming to the US at 14, how that experience has been for you is someone who, as much as you are a New Yorker, you are also a citizen of the internet. **Tina:** 00:19:45 Totally. I would even maybe say I am first and foremost a citizen of the internet even before I was a New Yorker. But definitely I think New Yorker is as close as it gets right now, at least in this moment in time. So actually writing online is just because I was really bored. **Jackson:** 00:20:07 When did you first start writing? **Tina:** 00:20:12 2018 is probably when I actually first started. I was doing college back then, and I also started working. I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I always knew that I wanted to build products, and that's always something that I grew up being passionate about is internet products. Like why they are the way they are. Like why are people like that on the internet? How does the internet kind of behave in such kind of magical ways to increase economic activities by such large scale for the world? I just feel like this is, I don't have to be redundant here, but internet truly is one of the most magical, I think, human experimenting kind of experiment of all time and a sociological experiment, economic experiment and all of that, all of the above. So when I was in college I started working. But as an international student, I didn't have the luxury, really. Maybe now people are more bold than I used to be, but I didn't have a visa if I dropped out of college. Unless I just found a full time role right away. I think the idea of dropping out also wasn't as prevalent in my time. But I kind of knew that I was kind of getting my diminishing marginal return in school. So as I started writing, most of my classmates just thought I'm always someone with just like all these weird ideas. I write about all the random stuff that I found on the internet, and my college friends kind of gave me this nickname of a walking product hunt because I would always show them and sell them these like new internet products that I found. **Jackson:** 00:21:47 I had a similar. **Tina:** 00:21:47 Yeah, totally. 100%. So I wanted to share these passion with people. **Jackson:** 00:21:54 Was there ever any caution or fear about putting yourself out there digitally? **Tina:** 00:21:58 No. **Jackson:** 00:21:59 No. **Tina:** 00:21:59 I will say I have more fear now than I had before. Definitely had zero fear when. **Jackson:** 00:22:03 You didn't know. You didn't know. **Tina:** 00:22:04 Totally. I didn't know. I didn't know. Internet wasn't as much of a dark forest back then. I feel like the idea of dark forest also was not as present to me. And now thinking back, actually maybe to have a divergent thought when Internet was very, very early in its early formation and when I was a kid, it was definitely a dark forest. **Jackson:** 00:22:27 Can you explain what a dark forest is in this context? **Tina:** 00:22:30 Totally. **Tina:** 00:22:29 Thank you for clarifying. So, Dark Forest is this idea by this author, Chinese author Cixin Liu, in his trilogy, *Three-Body Problem*. I won't spoil the book for you, but he did raise a theory. The theory of Dark Forest is essentially that in the universe—and just imagine the universe being this large cosmos that's beyond just Earth and our planetary system—there's actually a limited amount of energy. It's kind of like the axiom of energy preservation: there's a limited amount of energy. And then, as a civilization, if you need to survive, you always want to compete for more energy. That is almost like a zero-sum game. **Jackson:** 00:23:22 People can think about it not too dissimilar from the much smaller system of Earth. Eventually, at some point, you run out of resources, energy especially, as populations are growing, technology is growing, etc. **Tina:** 00:23:31 100%. And information is a very valuable resource when energy is limited, because information kind of predates how you're going to find those energies. So basically, every action that you perform in this universe is a bit of information that can be exploited by your competitor. If you are a rational actor in this universe, you do not want to reveal any information about yourself, because the next thing that will happen to you is that your competitor or someone that's adversarial is going to exploit that information advantage and then basically destroy you. **Jackson:** 00:24:09 Just to make it super concrete for people, this is the sort of remote tribe that's unknown, sending out smoke signals. The colonist will probably see the smoke signals, and colonists usually aren't that kind. **Tina:** 00:24:20 Totally. Yes, totally. **Jackson:** 00:24:22 But so, obviously, this applies in the sort of Fermi Paradox idea. What does that mean in the context of the internet and saying things on the internet? **Tina:** 00:24:29 Yeah, so saying things on the internet basically applies the Dark Forest theory in the book. Essentially, every time you produce a bit of information on the internet, just imagine that on the internet, maybe what is that kind of energy as the currency that's floating on the internet? You can say that the most obvious answer, I think, is actually attention. Attention is zero-sum; everyone has a limited amount of attention. In order to get more attention, you want to basically produce content and information that will capture more information from your competitor. So, if you were to produce a bit of information on the internet to compete for that very scarce resource called attention, you can expect that someone adversarial is going to exploit that information of you looking to also exploit resources. That would translate into something like, maybe, cancel culture, where you say something on the internet and then your adversary could cancel you. Or it could translate in the form of, you know, simply maybe just bad PR, or someone might steal your idea. Many things could happen. **Jackson:** 00:25:43 I don't think you or I think—this gets to the question of fear. You and I are both people who, I think, probably don't believe the Dark Forest really extends to the internet, although maybe it's more in question than it used to be. The question ultimately becomes, is the upside worth the downside? I think you and I have seen so much upside, but more and more, I don't know, it's an interesting tension. It's less obvious than—I'm much more inclined to believe Cixin Liu in the context of the universe. Sending out messages seems like pretty risky. But in the context of the internet, I have seen so much reward. Maybe I'm playing on the edge, but clearly you feel somewhat similarly. **Tina:** 00:26:23 Totally. I think it becomes a fully intellectual conversation. I can see it both sides, where maybe at some point, if you're small—using Cixin Liu's analogy, you're a small civilization that's sending out a signal, and maybe you would form alliances. We're experiencing where we're still small nodes on the internet and everything we do. Obviously, it's not the perfect analogy by all means. But if you think about it in a more adversarial way, then yeah, maybe as people start to see whatever alliance we form as a threat, and they want to have attention capture, they want to have ideological capture on the internet, then whatever we say online would be exploited. **Jackson:** 00:27:05 Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're doing this—you are someone who's written a lot online. You've written a lot less online the last couple of years, granted you've been busy, and we are currently doing a version of this. We're recording a conversation with a level of complexity here, and we're shouting it out. Would I want 10,000 people to hear it? Maybe. Do I want a billion people to hear it? Actually, maybe not. It's an interesting tension. **Tina:** 00:27:27 Totally. A meta thought here is, you know, I'm actually—when I'm just—this is a meta observation of the conversation that we're having, applying the Dark Forest theory. Is without the Dark Forest theory being, you know, let's say, being in action, I would—the thought of, "Oh, I was saying something about leaving China and the China-US relations"—a meta thought came across my mind. It's like, "Oh, what would someone else say about that?" And that thought would have not crossed my mind at all if the theory is not kind of, you know, in action. **Jackson:** 00:28:00 Maybe when you were 16 or at 18 or 20. **Tina:** 00:28:02 Yes, that would not have crossed my mind. And that's just a very honest, raw examination into the root of my brain and why that thought came up as the way that it did. Not that I'm actually consciously worried or anything like that. **Jackson:** 00:28:19 But we—yeah, and this is something that, by the way, I think people 10 years older than us and 10 years younger than us also probably have a different relationship to. Speaking of the positive sides, and I think I feel similarly, maybe a question: how many of the most meaningful relationships in your life have you met online? **Tina:** 00:28:43 Probably like 90%. **Jackson:** 00:28:45 Which, on the other end, it's like, "Oh my gosh," like, undeniably—Twitter alone, I think for me, probably for you too, clearly that was worth the upside. **Tina:** 00:28:56 Totally. **Jackson:** 00:28:56 And maybe—yeah, it's so fascinating the ways that you're constantly dealing with a new negotiation on that risk. The willingness—and to tie it back to when you started writing when you were younger—the willingness to take the risk, to be vulnerable, to put yourself out there, to do whatever it is. You are running one risk on the Dark Forest theory, but you're also spinning the serendipity wheel. This is like the bat signal idea of putting yourself out online. I mean, we—you and I are literally friends. You're the second person I've had on this podcast who I became friends with after reaching out, I think, because of their writing. What an amazing thing. **Tina:** 00:29:34 It is truly a privilege. I would not have met my husband if I did not write online. **Jackson:** 00:29:39 So the dark—I think we have to say the Dark Forest theory for the internet, at least today, is not quite there. What is—before we talk about the more recent work, what has it felt like to actually become much more narrow in terms of what you're putting out online? You were writing weekly with *For Fake Pixels* for almost three or four years. **Tina:** 00:30:00 Yeah. **Jackson:** 00:30:00 And you pulled back from that. How has that experience been? Are you still meeting people online in the same way or less so? **Tina:** 00:30:06 I think much less so, and that is something that I dearly miss. I think that in life there are chapters of exploration and serendipity, where I'm turning that wheel to the max. I think that the past three or four years, just for context, I've been focused on building a company and then there's an acquisition that came about. I've come much more than writing, I kind of wish to another creative mode, which is building software, building product. I feel like I just kind of dialed up risk-taking in a completely different way. And neither defines me. It's probably, I am the combination of both. A lot of people that want me to write, say that, you know, why did you stop? You should keep writing. And vice versa. Some people think that I should be going back and keep building companies, etc. So I don't think one person can be reduced into just one or the other. I think both are me. And I'm learning to be quite honest. All things considered, I feel old now on the internet, given there are so many amazing young people doing crazy things. **Jackson:** 00:31:25 Yeah. **Tina:** 00:31:26 But granted, in the grander scale of things, we're still very young. And I have not experimented doing both at the same time, where I'm writing and I'm building a company. They're very different modes, totally very different modes. One is much more operationally and honestly pragmatic-minded and the other is kind of completely exploratory. Both are exhilarating in their own ways. **Jackson:** 00:31:55 You, as we kind of alluded to a little bit, you've done a lot of writing. You studied comparative literature, as I remember, in college. **Tina:** 00:32:01 Yep. **Jackson:** 00:32:02 You now work at Coinbase. There's a through line there that's not necessarily obvious. Do you want to talk a little, and maybe specifically for, I think it's worth talking about Station as well. You seem particularly interested in going back to the internet as a place, this idea of maybe labor markets and economies and the future of work and the way that people coordinate. I think that's really interesting inroads to crypto and specifically why you were so interested in it. Do you want to talk maybe about how the path from the writer in college studying comparative literature, who had an interest in entrepreneurship, there was a venture capital stop in the middle, and then you ended up building a company for three years thinking about how people coordinate online, was that a smooth path? **Tina:** 00:32:48 I think the only person that where this path makes sense is probably myself, where that's, that's all you need. I can see the through line through it all. But I actually think that my interest is decently consistent through all the years, even since college. College, I would say is a playground of intellectualism. I studied comparative literature on the one side, but also information science, which is applied computer science, I would say, in my school. So I did learn how to code and all that stuff in college. **Jackson:** 00:33:23 And not a total word cell. **Tina:** 00:33:26 Not a total word cell, despite the claims, exactly. But I just loved, I don't know, I love designing products and I love why, how to design technology, why they're being used. I know this since I started playing with computers. I actually started coding when I was even younger when I was making games. But games is a completely different intention. It's about also storytelling for me, not about how the code actually works. And I did not really care at all about languages, which insulted probably more pure programmer friends of mine. **Jackson:** 00:34:04 And I think that probably speaks to one of the reasons I think you're effective in crypto as well, which is a cut across ideology that is a little bit more focused on something in certain. My only observation would be the type of person who's very focused on programming language might also be very focused on block space or different things. It's interesting. **Tina:** 00:34:26 Totally. I admire the technical aspect and the very technical aspects of crypto and there's a lot of interesting things here that I think I'm curious about. But really what fascinates me with crypto is actually kind of the more behavioral part of it. I think crypto is kind of what human behaviors, you know, when unhinged, which is, you can argue isn't are like legal arbitrage or maybe temporary legal arbitrage. When unhinged, like what they would do in this huge economic and political playground. Zero friction. **Jackson:** 00:35:04 Right. **Tina:** 00:35:04 It's kind of what the ideal free market, the high-X vision of what that could look like in practice. And it's deeply intellectually stimulating and fascinating and it never sleeps. We both know this, I remember when we met, shortly after we met, we both stumbled into crypto and I think the height of maybe 2021. I think everyone, I remember back then who was in the space, their eyes were bloodshot. It's very clear, just do not sleep. Everyone's just up all 9, 24/7. Just because, yes, like there's obviously money to be made. From people that are not familiar with crypto, I think that media has really done an injustice both in a positive and negative way. I think it over-amplifies the crypto's potential where, you know, for example, Web3, which I'm also complicit of, of thinking about how we can invent the future of the internet. And I think crypto has a potential of doing that and that's why I'm still working in it. I think that the kind of over-reductionistic of like this is just internet but like upgraded, an upgraded version of an iPhone, I think is hugely imprecise and it's over-dramatized what the impact of technology could be. **Jackson:** 00:36:25 Yes. **Tina:** 00:36:25 And the other side of that is obviously the criticisms, which is: crypto is all scam, it's all gambling, without actually diving into the mechanisms and the details of it all. So, I will say that that's the media business, right? You over-amplify or you over-criticize on certain issues. Both of which have hurt crypto, I think, tremendously. And back to your point, it's very flattering that you mentioned that and observed that I approach crypto from that lens. So, okay, back to the question of how did that career make sense? I think even when I was in venture capital -- and the reason why I actually was in venture capital was pretty simple -- I graduated, and actually, that was a great year for graduates, I think. I was feeling really great about myself. I was like, "Oh yeah, I was doing contract work, designing and building stuff for people, and I could make a living, just go independent." I could join some companies that were going public then as product hires, but none of those products really excited me. I just thought it was such a moment that I wanted to build my own thing at some point soon. So, I got connected to an alumni -- this is 2019. He taught me about what venture capital was, and I was like, "That sounds like a really cool job. You just talk to people with ideas every day." And that's how he sold me. He's like, "Yeah, you want to build a company? If you want to be a great chef, you need to go to Michelin restaurants and actually have good taste." **Jackson:** 00:38:04 Eat tons of good food. **Tina:** 00:38:05 Yes, tons of good food, or else you wouldn't know what good tastes like. And I think that there's a famous quote -- when I actually had a short stint as a product designer in training -- I think that's actually what I learned from my mentor in product design, where as a young designer, you think that you have great taste, and then, but you have terrible abilities. So, every day you just live in agony thinking that everything you do is shit, and then there's like, you don't see the light of the day. Really, the entirety of your career is not to improve your taste. The entirety of your career is to improve your ability so that your abilities and your taste align. **Jackson:** 00:38:42 Yeah. **Tina:** 00:38:42 And I feel that so painfully. I think that especially with a stint of venture capital, I think that ruined me in some ways where I met some of the most world-class founders. My taste in people, and my ability to see what has worked and what has not -- especially having worked with some people that have such a rigorous thinking process -- I think that has really spoiled me in a way that now, even 'til this day, I have such a high standard for extremely crisp and clear thinking. Very few disciplines actually require that in some degree because there are disciplines that, actually, if you're more loose and creative, you're able to succeed as well. Or if you're able to find your own principle in something, you're able to operate well. But I do believe that in any discipline, in order to play and operate at the highest level, you need that level of clarity of thinking. But those people are kind of far and few in between. And I think many of them concentrate in, obviously, founders because they kind of have to, out of necessity, to have a thesis and then to be able to orient such a group of people around them to execute on that thesis. And I think that has been just very eye-opening to me as just a young person that's trying to figure out what they want to do in the world, but kind of intellectually, the power. **Jackson:** 00:40:05 And who has such rich interests and tastes. Back to the alignment, which I think you're -- Ira Glass is actually at least the first place I was exposed to that. So interesting. And then he's talking about artists, and yet I think it generalizes across everything, which is that the more you are enamored with things and the more you, like, the harder it is to say, "Oh, I gotta consolidate, by the way. And I'm not good enough at this yet." **Tina:** 00:40:27 Totally. I think we just went on a completely different train. **Jackson:** 00:40:33 That's okay. **Tina:** 00:40:34 Yeah. **Jackson:** 00:40:34 So, you landed in venture. You got to eat at a bunch of amazing restaurants for a while, but then you left. And, by the way, you were at a place called Pace Capital with some amazing people. I think very few people would leave that comfortable, great, intellectually interesting thing. Why did you leave, and why did you start Station? **Tina:** 00:40:56 Yeah, the very honest answer is: I do think that there's a part of me that is very analytical and kind of more rational as a human. But I think the other part of that is like hugely irrational and kind of almost follow my intuition by, by, by a fault, to a fault. When I was at Pace, I started being enamored by crypto and by all the topics that we discussed. Actually, you mentioned previously my interest in economic activities and potentially crypto's ability to change that, labor markets coordination. Those are all true. And for those of you that may be unfamiliar with crypto, there was this thing that was happening in crypto around 2020 and '21. That was really the moment when a lot of things connected for me. I've always known crypto's potential, and I've always admired the Bitcoin white paper, like many in the space, of the elegant mechanism design. I see its future of being this alternative asset platform that's completely programmatic, that is completely trustless, permissionless. Basically, all those words may mean nothing, but really what it means is the absence of a middleman, the absence of an institution that's required to make arbitrary or necessary laws to ensure that value flows. **Jackson:** 00:42:24 And just to make it even more explicit, I think the thing you spent so much of your career on, and you've written so well about too, is specifically the way that crypto is a tool to make the Internet a place that we want, that is more rich for all of us. **Tina:** 00:42:40 Yes. **Jackson:** 00:42:40 And I think more than anyone I know, you remind me most of myself in what drew you to crypto, which is actually that person who grew up on the Internet and like, "Oh, we could fix that. We could make this place better for ourselves," which I think is really -- and maybe some of that, that through line can get lost in these words, especially for people who are less sophisticated on it. The words around openness and permission, like what? But really they're like, how do we make New York better? **Tina:** 00:43:08 How do we make Europe better? It's the citizenship of the internet, like you said. So it is about that. And as you go deeper into it, around 2020, 2021, there was this thing called a DAO, which stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, that started to emerge. Really, they're like flash mobs. It's almost like, you know, you go around New York and suddenly you see a group of people that are aggregated. When I was on my way here to your apartment, I saw a group of Santa people in Santa Claus clothing. They're just in a circle. I don't know what they're doing, but they're aggregated for a purpose. You're seeing that happening on the internet where they're gathered together, and most of them have anime profile pictures. You don't know what their names are, but what you know is that they have a shared bank account. And that bank account is not actually a bank account. It's a cryptographic wallet that stores assets in it. And you look at it, it's like, "Oh, these anime avatars. What could they be doing together?" And you look at the wallet address, and it's, you know, $50 million. You're just like, "Wow, that's a lot of money being run by this group of cyberpunks," right? These group of independent-minded people that are trying to build something together. I dived into some of these communities, Maker or Yearn, some of these top projects back then, and you look at how they're operated. They have these things called governance proposals, which are things that you only see in forums or games. When we grew up, every forum had a mod that had so much political power. They took it super seriously and had these improvement proposals. If you would debate about them, it's like that all over again, but with actual money and actual assets on the table. You can't help but feel like this intuitively just makes sense, without being too sophisticated about it. Obviously, the more you learn about finance and its history, the more you start to understand how all these rules and laws are being put in place. But at the same time, over the course of human history, there's so much brokenness in that system as we know it, and there's so much inefficiency that is incurred from that complexity. If crypto were to do one thing, which is just to simplify that, that doesn't mean that it should be unregulated, it should be just completely free. But then if it's an opportunity for us to just take a step back, maybe as humanity, to be like, "Are we designing our financial system? Are we designing the way that value or economic activities are performed in the way that's most fair, most open, most conducive to productivity and growth?" **Jackson:** 00:45:57 All the good stuff, especially in a new form, which is this digital space, where we haven't. There's one quote that you referenced that I really like, especially in the way that it frames why starting with economic systems is actually so important for cultural things. From Alain Bertaud, if I'm pronouncing correctly, "Order Without Design." You use this as an anchor that I've come back to it several times. He says, "A well-functioning labor market brings together people with varied but complementary knowledge and skills, the preconditions for innovation. A well-functioning labor market makes possible every other urban attraction: symphonic orchestra, museums, art galleries, public libraries, well-designed public spaces, and great restaurants, among many others." The way that this is a frame for what -- because again, I think part of the crypto stuff is people have a complicated relationship with money and with economic systems. And yet, so many of the other things we care so deeply about, and you more than almost anyone I know deeply care about culture. And so, it's fascinating but also resonant in this quote that someone who cares so deeply about culture is actually working on economic systems, specifically through the internet. **Tina:** 00:47:05 Totally. You nailed that. And I think that's kind of the conclusion, right? You don't build the museums, and then the economic activities start to happen. It's just kind of the economic reality where economic systems and financial systems, by the end of the day, are just allocation mechanisms and distribution mechanisms. The axiom of capitalism is you vote with your money. The kind of sacred job of an investor, maybe we're giving them too much credit, but a sacred job of an investor is to curate in some ways what the next generation of infrastructure, what the next generation of culture, what the next generation of art will look like. **Jackson:** 00:47:50 Do you want to talk a little more concretely about Station, the journey, the mission, and then now being acquired by Coinbase and joining Coinbase? How do you think about the work you're doing today, and why it matters? **Tina:** 00:48:07 It's very interesting. Now I'm working at Base at Coinbase, and Base's mission now is we're building a global on-chain economy, right? Increase creativity, innovation, and freedom. Those are all the things that we literally just talked about. So from a mission alignment perspective, definitely there's a lot of that, even very obvious from the first time I've talked to the team there. But in regards to Station, I think Station had this very ambitious mission of, like, you should be able to do meaningful work no matter where you are and who you are. And that's again, you know, from a very personal place of wanting to be recognized for who I am and not be identified necessarily by kind of the real-world constraints, but really by my ideas and by my contributions online. **Jackson:** 00:49:01 Cutting it up and rearranging it. **Tina:** 00:49:02 Totally cutting over, rearranging it. And if none of the words that I put out there on the internet ether, right, those are all intangible assets that I own, are invaluable, then honestly, my life isn't real in many ways because so much of the relationship and the work that I do reside in those cyber cyberspaces. **Jackson:** 00:49:19 Right. And "real" is a really interesting word in this case. **Tina:** 00:49:22 Totally. Right. And you kind of had that kind of dissonance when I was forming the company, right? Like needing to sign and kind of do the actual paperwork and all the realness kind of that involves in that. And not that I was completely ignorant of the process of forming a company or running the company. But I think what really was stark was, you know, we are kind of painting this picture, you know, of wanting to bring as many things into the digital world, being digital native as possible because it's way more efficient. And because it's problematic, I think there are also ways that things are just more productive, and I think economically made more sense. Why should I need to set up different banking entities and having to file all these paperworks, hire a lawyer that's super expensive for the company at that stage when some of our investors just send USDC over and it costs them nothing? **Jackson:** 00:50:15 Or if I'm an employee, why do I need to have a W-2 and only be able to work for one company at a time? All that stuff could be redrawn. **Tina:** 00:50:22 So much of that can be redrawn, and I wanted to rebuild all of that. I think that's kind of the first-time founder ambition. And to be honest, I think that idea is still there. **Jackson:** 00:50:35 And what literally was Station in its most pragmatic form, just for people who are a little confused? **Tina:** 00:50:42 We wanted to build a smart contract platform that essentially allows you to have a wallet to receive funds. If you want to create some arbitrary rules where you want recurring payments to another wallet, or if you want a smart contract, we basically expose them through a set of APIs and SDKs. The intention of building these modular contract systems is so that, our hypothesis is that, if we arm people with the tools, they're able to basically modularize and use them as Lego blocks and build the company or organizational structure of their dreams. **Jackson:** 00:51:18 So, all these online payroll systems, like Gusto and passports and identity, we're basically saying, what if we allowed people to build these in an internet-native way versus something that was just purely adopted from how payroll used to work, but now it's digitized? And by the way, I could work for four companies. **Tina:** 00:51:35 Yep. **Jackson:** 00:51:36 I'm an online contributor, or what? **Tina:** 00:51:38 100%. So, our customers were all kinds of emergent organizations that need a bank account and to move funds around to pay their contributors. Some of them call themselves DAOs. **Jackson:** 00:51:48 Yep. **Tina:** 00:51:48 Some of them are GitHub repos that want to also pay their contributors. We realized that most of what they needed, yes, they need the tech infrastructure, which we also provided them, is also the legal, what we call IRL compatibility issues. **Jackson:** 00:52:06 The reconnection to the quote-unquote "real world." **Tina:** 00:52:09 The reconnection to the real world, exactly. And then there's another aspect, which is the marketplace aspect. Really what we want to get to is a network. How can we actually enable all the people that are leveraging our tools in the future to discover one another? We admire companies like Canva or Figma or Notion, where they're creating a new class of jobs. There's Notion creators or Figma template creators. **Jackson:** 00:52:57 We're talking about new labor markets. **Tina:** 00:53:00 New labor markets, exactly. So, we hypothesized that there's going to be a new labor market of people that want to be paid in crypto, and they want to also set up an entity in a particular way that looks completely different from how LLCs and C-Corps are being formed. With that type of liquidity of both the supply side and the demand side, there can be a huge network that is built. I think that a lot of the hypotheses are still being played out today with the work that I'm doing at Coinbase and Base. The reason why this collaboration started to make sense to us and to me is that we grew our tool side of things. Basically, that looks very much like a glorified SaaS business. We got some large customers, and then we were doing the math in our heads. It's like, okay, but we are a venture-backed company. We need to grow to a certain scale. At that point of the journey, we realized that in order to grow to scale, we have to basically become a network like Base or some of the Ethereum networks now. Rather than doing that from scratch, what would that look like to continue the chapter at a place where they already have some traction and liquidity? Now, I think that my estimation of the timeline back when I started Station was around maybe three to five years. I don't know. I think that with some of the revival of traction with this new administration, it could take shorter than I expected. But I do think it's going to take much longer. **Jackson:** 00:54:16 In the substantive mechanical elements. But yet, if you just look at it as a tailwind or a directional flow, the future is going to be one of internet citizens doing work with people across the world in all different kinds of permutations that we never imagined before. **Tina:** 00:54:32 Totally. I agree with that, and I think it's going to happen in my lifetime regardless. I want to be a part of that. One thing that actually threw me off, maybe surprised me the most, is actually the development of agents in AI and how sophisticated they are becoming in the labor market. That's another new actor that we're considering in this game, almost this new iteration. **Jackson:** 00:55:10 A new member of the labor force. **Tina:** 00:55:12 A new member of the labor force. And actually, those players, I think, require maybe crypto even more than humans because it's just digitally native. **Jackson:** 00:55:21 Yeah, what's real? Changing gears a little bit, but it ties into the work. You are a serious person. I don't think that can be said about that many people. What I mean by that is, I'm alluding a little bit to this essay from a guy named Visa Kannan Veraswamy, who wrote an essay called "Are You Serious?" that I think about a lot. But what I mean is that you take your work seriously. You take yourself seriously. You take your ideas seriously. You take your life seriously. That doesn't necessarily mean you're not fun or joyful or funnier, but you have an earnestness with which you do the things that you do, and you're not really hedging. Is that intrinsic? Is that something you've improved on? Is that based on confidence and success? Do you know no other way? **Tina:** 00:56:09 What a question, **Jackson:**. Let me meditate on that. I think from a very young age, I've always known that I really want to be a creator. I want to be a creative. But the form and the medium of that, right? **Tina:** 00:56:30 I think there were some people that maybe from a young age knew that they wanted to be a writer, a painter, or a pianist. I always knew that I would be working in the creative field, whether building technology, writing books, or something of that nature. All of the above. I just always knew that I wanted to do that. Really what hurts me the most is mediocre work. And I think that really is maybe to pay respect to people that are actually great. There's this quote from Simone Weil, "Attention is the purest form of prayer." I think about that almost every day, especially in our day and age of the attention economy where our attention is always being monetized by something. **Jackson:** 00:57:48 And drawn in 14 directions. **Tina:** 00:57:51 Exactly. And when you've been blessed by someone's great work, you know that great work comes from their entire soul. You can just feel it in someone's writing, in the game, or in the piece of music. I feel like once you've been touched by something like that, anything not that is almost sacrilegious. **Jackson:** 00:58:22 That feels very resonant for you in particular. **Tina:** 00:58:25 I'm still in the phase where your craft and your ability don't match your taste and vision. I'm very far from that, and I'm being tormented by it every day. That's probably where that seriousness comes from, where I actually just feel deeply inadequate in many ways. It's not a lack of confidence, but it's a very objective evaluation. **Jackson:** 00:58:59 And you're never going to get to the... it's always going to be a moving target. **Tina:** 00:59:03 It's always going to be a moving target, probably. **Jackson:** 00:59:07 I think about the Hokusai waves. He basically says, at 75, everything I did before this was total garbage. And now I'm starting to maybe get good. **Tina:** 00:59:20 It's actually a very painful thought. I battle with this very deeply. In the past two years, I didn't really share this with many people, but I had this moment where I was deeply obsessed with this book called *When We Cease to Understand the World*. Many of our mutual friends share that obsession with the book. It's by Benjamin Labatut, a Chilean writer. He's obsessed with this idea of obsessive individuals that are literally possessed by an idea beyond their control. He writes in this very creative style of creative historical fiction. Maybe it's historical creative fiction. He writes in a way that, as if, you know, those characters are all based on real historical characters. Many of them are Nobel Prize winners in physics, mathematics, and literature. But he kind of made up some of the experiences that these people may have had. We can't tell as readers what is real and what is not because they're bordering on this line of real and fake. **Jackson:** 01:00:31 Yes. **Tina:** 01:00:32 And I think that is his genius. **Jackson:** 01:00:34 Again, back to questions of real, what does the word real mean? **Tina:** 01:00:39 Yeah, what does the word real mean? Some of these people suffer from pretty severe mental illness, if you consider real-world standards. Via the kind of possession of the idea, many of them see the world as this very dark, meaningless, nihilistic place. One example is the discovery of quantum physics, this quantum leap from mechanical physics. Rather than all the results being deterministic, now you have these endless possibilities that are all simultaneously true at the same time. **Jackson:** 01:01:18 Schrodinger's cat, in the very small, simple sense. **Tina:** 01:01:21 Totally. And how that invalidates most of the science or progress that has been made by humanity throughout. In short, reading that book is both a mind-blowing experience for me as an admirer of Labatut's craft, but it's also a deeply unsettling book. Just a sense of, if you become some type of obsessive person, your ends are always very tragic. I meditate on that a lot. To be honest, I really try, and I take pride in being a decently joyful person. I love joy, and I like a baseline level of peace and joy. That's what enables great work. Life is short, and you want to be able to enjoy it. But at the same time, I'm definitely very prone to being possessed by ideas and to an extent, of obsession. Actually, my investors have given me this feedback. I will write these company updates, just like any startup would, to the investors. They're pretty simple with metrics and whatnot. But then they catch up with me in person, and I would just give them an essay about how I think about the space. They're like, "Are you okay? These are very interesting thoughts. Do you think about publishing them?" I never thought about publishing them. Maybe I should, and I should be more vocal about these things. I've constantly gotten the feedback that I keep so much in my own head to an extent that maybe it's unproductive at some point. I externalize maybe a fraction of what really lives in my head, and that can lead to pretty bad outcomes. Maybe the seriousness comes from this kind of obsessiveness. **Jackson:** 01:03:12 Sitting in this tension. **Tina:** 01:03:14 Totally, that tension. **Jackson:** 01:03:17 Well, you led right into where I want to go because I'd like to talk more about that edge on one side. I think this ties into maybe getting out of your head and pragmatism, too. You published something the day after the election that was part reflections, but also part sort of like, not quite a manifesto, but very emboldening. The theme of it, to me, was a bit about individualism but specifically around greatness in contrast, maybe, to goodness. There's one line in particular that is incredible. You say, "Can I make monuments? If I'm bold enough to put my bare hands in scorching steel, can I be great? Not on the premise of anything at all, but simply that I want to." There's a line from John Collison where he says, "All of everything around you was created by probably by one or a small group of people who were emboldened to do something great. The world is a museum of passion projects." Obviously, there's an element of this being maybe the place where seriousness meets reality and ambition, a yearning again beyond just living a good life and goodness and joy and comfort, but to maybe drift into that possessed zone. **Tina:** 01:04:35 I don't have anything good to follow up on that. I think that's truly a manifestation of how I felt at the moment. I wrote that as a journal entry. I said it as a journal, but I think no one believed that. **Jackson:** 01:04:56 It's almost like people, it's like very similar back to the dark forest theory. **Tina:** 01:05:00 I think people just actually think I thought about it or something. **Jackson:** 01:05:05 You're trying to make some point about... **Tina:** 01:04:36 Some point about political. And it's like, to be honest, it's really not about politics at all. I think it really was about maybe a vibe shift, which is, you know, I think a lot of people are writing about that now. Where I think I felt it maybe around the time approaching election, where you kind of start to see people that you would not have expected to come together. Let's just use Elon and Trump as an example. This is, again, not a moral or ethical evaluation of that coalition. But just from a pure observation perspective, it is someone that has been a president before, and is doing it again at the age of 78, and someone that's basically breaking conventions, and someone that obviously is the richest man in the world, but that's the least interesting fact about him. It's someone that has not hedged his bets, ever, and kind of went all in many, many times over. It's kind of two crazy people. **Jackson:** 01:05:35 Right. **Tina:** 01:05:35 They're coming together. And beyond that, other members of that administration, I think they all have very interesting stories on their own. That type of coalition, something that, you know, I think greatness is very reductionist as a word because greatness can take many forms. But it is this maybe bravery of maybe going against what is considered normal and what is considered expected. **Jackson:** 01:06:05 Right. You have a line in your journal about the notion that it didn't feel like America was yearning for greatness much more and was starting to become something more like Europe. I think the other thing, as someone who has been very critical of Trump broadly, I think some of this political stuff, the thing that was so powerful to me mostly about what you wrote, was the combination. One, it was a distinctly American journal from a person who I find to be distinctly American and yet obviously has a complicated history around that, around identity and these things. And the specific, the way you just talked about greatness and also freedom and liberty and ambition and this ability. You say it in the line, the desire to be great for its own sake, which is, I think, very American and not very anything else idea in a way, which is really powerful. **Tina:** 01:06:58 Totally. **Jackson:** 01:07:00 You brought up Labatut. You got ahead of me. You recommended this book to me, *When We Cease to Understand the World*. I think it's one of our favorite books, especially in this context, and we've already danced around this dichotomy so much already. But in this context, you and I are two people who are very pro progress and technology and ambition and greatness. The ending of that book is interesting in contrast, and I wanted to read the last paragraph of the book. He says, "It is a strange sight to see such exuberance before death. One can picture it in an animal species." And he's talking about citrus trees, the ways that citrus trees die in a very unique way. Unlike most trees or even animals, they die from abundance. "But trees are very different organisms, and such displays of over-ripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species with its uncontrolled, devastating growth. I asked him how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But really, who would want to do that?" Obviously, he's a talented writer. This is a book to the possession point. I find that almost anything about obsession, you got you got at some of this, almost that. You go watch *Whiplash* or *The Last Dance* or any of these. On one hand, I'm someone who finds the obsession. There's the line in *Whiplash* from J.K. Simmons to the drummer. He says, "The worst two words in the English language are 'good job.'" Like the worst thing I could possibly do is let the next Charlie Parker go, not let him be great because he wasn't pushed enough. And yet on the other hand, this book, Labatut, talks about the utter chaos and, frankly, mental collapse of people who are possessed. And yet inside this, maybe, is seriousness. **Tina:** 01:09:00 Totally. **Jackson:** 01:09:02 How do you hold all this tension? **Tina:** 01:09:03 Once you embrace it, I think it's less tension. It becomes the way you just are. I think there's always going to be tension, but that tension is more so an observation about how maybe that state of existence is not what is expected of a normal individual. As I think, when you, I believe all these people that are actually the living embodiment, you know, of these possessed or the obsessive people, they do not think about themselves being possessed or obsessive. I actually do think that I'm the most fulfilled, maybe not happy, I'm the most fulfilled when I am deeply possessed about something. I do not think about, and I don't, it's not a choice, and I don't think about the meta of like, why am I so possessed? What is wrong with me? But I think one is still taken by such kind of obsession or mission or whatever that is, that they're just so laser-focused on that. **Jackson:** 01:10:13 Staying on Labatut for a second, I think the other thing I really admire about you is you're someone who's quite both grounded in reality and action and building and creating, and yet also loves ideas and words and philosophy. Reconciling the two of these is not always an obvious thing, or they're not necessarily harmonious, especially when it comes to sort of seeking truth or what's real, maybe back to this idea of realness. *When We Cease to Understand the World* is a book about horizons and what's past maybe the horizon of our ability to map truth or real or understanding, whether it be the Schwarzschild radius or quantum mechanics. The sort of blanket that draws, Einstein's in the book. Einstein cannot manage to stomach this notion that quantum mechanics doesn't follow an intuitive lens. God does not play dice for the universe. There are a couple of lines in the main novella around Heisenberg that I think embody this. One is, "The physicist, like the poet, should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections." And then on Einstein, "The father of relativity was a great master of visualization. All of his ideas about space and time had been born of this capacity to imagine himself in the most extreme physical circumstances. For this reason, he was unwilling to accept the restrictions demanded by Heisenberg, who seemed to have gouged out both of his eyes in order to see further." And then finally, "Physics ought not to concern itself with reality, but rather with what we can say about reality." Maybe the last thing I'll give you here is you've written about the enchanting and the disenchanting in the way, I think, specifically around science and religion, the mystical. And as someone who, again, is so you're spending your day job today and for the last four years, very pragmatically trudging through the mud of trying to build a new mechanical economic system for the world, and yet you live in the world of Kierkegaard. **Tina:** 01:12:17 I think, to be honest, they're more related to the insane people. But maybe there's more of us out there. I'm not sure because I don't know how many of my friends or people that I know at work know about my Kierkegaard or my philosophical side, and vice versa. Many of my more ideas-minded friends might find me a very different or distinct person at work. Not to say that one is not authentic to the other, but I definitely try to have a little bit of separation between the two realms. One, I think the philosophical side is about interpreting or seeing realities, like plural, and the doer and operator side is about defining reality, singular. And that is a very empowering idea. What is the point of philosophy? Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein have two different, completely different schools of thought. Kierkegaard, the kind of father of existentialism, for him, the whole point of philosophy is to learn how to live actually and how to be oneself. **Jackson:** 01:13:51 To find this reality, in a sense. **Tina:** 01:13:53 Totally, to find your own reality. You are the most moral when you are the most authentic and when you are the most faithful to God. To him, it sounds like a very Christian idea, but to him, the central idea that he raised is that, you know, why does Abraham kill Isaac when it's literally his son? No father will kill his own son. It violates all rational principles because God told him so. And God can be anything. God can be his own dream, which actually was the case in the Bible. God can be maybe a tree. It can be in any form or a prophet or anything, as long as he believes in this thing. Believe in something. And that relationship with that belief is completely Abraham's. It's his own. It's his subjective belief that he's able to commit such act. And of course, in the Bible, he was able to get Isaac back. I think that's very symbolic and definitely metaphorical where any act of irrationality, in many ways, is actually a subjective relationship of you and your belief. If you actually believe in it, then you will get whatever you think that you're sacrificing back even more. For Abraham's case, he's basically proven his faith to God, which is maybe worth even more than Isaac in that particular case. Versus, Wittgenstein spent his entire life wanting to build a mathematical model because he is the student of Bertrand Russell, who's kind of this mathematician and definitely the defining philosopher that's kind of. We're able to define logic as almost a discipline in philosophy. Wittgenstein's ambition as a young student, and he's definitely the obsessive type that literally just would not even touch anybody, women and men alike, to devote himself to wanting to model the world. I think that many young intellectual types that I've encountered, and maybe myself included when I was also younger, had this maybe hubristic impulse to want to model the world. It's like, I want to have a universal theory of everything, and this is going to help me build out the world. **Jackson:** 01:16:13 Yeah, I'll act after I've sufficiently modeled all reality. **Tina:** 01:16:18 I will act sufficiently to model the reality. And the irony here is there are realities plural. Reality is that when you act on that subjective instinct of whatever you believe in, that becomes a reality. And that actually connects with a lot of the quantum theories as well, where there's all these parallel possibilities, but when your attention is the kind of very classic quantum graph of those two lines forming, that becomes real. I think those ideas are connected. If that's your faith, that's what you believe in, and that's directionally what you want, that's the reality you can manifest and create for yourself via your actions. Many existential philosophers also have similar ideas where actions are how you make decisions, and your actions actually are your essence. There's no such thing as an intrinsic essence of a person. Your actions start to define your identity. But going back to Wittgenstein, I think Wittgenstein's approach is very similar to a more scientific approach to understanding the world. Wittgenstein actually became hyper-religious in the later part of his life. After *Tractatus*, his first book that's attempting to model the world, he wrote a second book, *Philosophical Investigations*, which basically invalidates all the things that he wrote in his first book. And then he actually became deeply religious in his later life. But just using those two philosophers as examples of two different ways of operating, I think that especially working in startups, you have to be very, very comfortable with the fact that there are parallel universes that exist in front of you. And to be quite honest, it is true. Whatever you tell the investor is just one possible iteration of that truth. But very likely, most early-stage founders just have this vague intuition, maybe a thesis, an observation about a market, and none of that is real yet. They don't have any employees. They don't have anything. They don't have an office. It's kind of a deck and an idea. And then as you build out the company into the stages, it becomes more and more of a constructed reality and a model of the world. That model could be right or could be wrong completely, of how that model fits into reality. But I would say that the founders that are the strongest are the ones that can be consistent around however they want to subjectively see the world and actually have coherent actions align with that pretty ridiculous vision. If you think about Mars and why we need to go to Mars, there's so much rational, analytical lens to look at why Elon Musk wants to go to Mars. It's kind of a propellant of maybe renewable energy. It's a propellant for us to figure out different ways to innovate on material science across the board. There are so many innovations that are required for us to go to Mars. That's just good for humanity, probably net good. But the actual intention of going to Mars is pretty ridiculous. It's like, why do we need to do that? It is his very dedicated belief. Even he kind of articulated that in a very analytical sense. I think when you ask Elon why he wants to go to Mars, he would say that we need humanity to have redundancy. Humans need future generations to have a place to live when Earth becomes inhabitable. And that's probably scientific. There's some scientific backing towards it. But I think most of it is actually just Elon's. This is Elon's God. It's Elon's faith. And then his action is just strictly pointing towards that. That's something I reflect on deeply every single day, where I think that the biggest gap between maybe myself as an entrepreneur and Elon as an entrepreneur -- Elon definitely is very, very talented, very smart, and I don't deny that, but I also think that many people are very talented and very smart. But in terms of the strength of the faith and the strength of delusion... **Jackson:** 01:20:26 You believed as much as he did. **Tina:** 01:20:28 I don't think I believe as much as he did. **Jackson:** 01:20:29 Right. **Tina:** 01:20:30 And. **Jackson:** 01:20:30 And I think that's the thing that makes him unique. **Tina:** 01:20:32 Totally. Yes. **Jackson:** 01:20:33 There's something so powerful in what you said, too, around the -- I almost relate to the reality distortion field idea as the person who sort of, there's an extension of not believing anything is intrinsic and just believing that if you look, your attention makes reality. And if you truly embody that, it would enable you to act in a radical way, in a radically uninhibited way. **Tina:** 01:20:55 Yeah. **Jackson:** 01:20:56 Wow. Are there -- about philosophy, broadly. One of my favorite things you have on your website is this list of inspiring names. And a bunch of them are philosophers and writers: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jung, Chul-Han, Goethe, Camus, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Carver, Ted Chiang, Murakami, Herman Hesse. Is this a smattering of interest? Is it too much of a reach to try to draw a through line across what might be other patterns across that list of names I mentioned? **Tina:** 01:21:33 I probably have also some entrepreneurs on there too. I feel like the list of all the people on that list are people that have a very strong coherence in their attention and in their style. That's not something, to be honest, you can just learn. It's almost like a way of living. **Jackson:** 01:22:07 Is that belief? Is it too much of a reach to say that's strong belief? **Tina:** 01:22:11 Yes, I would say belief. I think belief in the Kierkegaard sense is a strong belief combined with an obsession with their craft. Or else that belief would not be manifested. **Jackson:** 01:22:29 Are there reasons -- maybe a two-part question. Are there reasons -- Byung-Chul Han's modern, obviously. Ted Chiang, Murakami -- there are a few modern writers. Is there a reason there are more modern philosophers and maybe even writers in this vintage or type that have inspired you? And in a related way, are there things you've learned from studying so much writing and thinking from one to two hundred years ago about what's changed about people and what hasn't changed? **Tina:** 01:23:00 Definitely. I think that people really don't change that much, to be quite honest. I think that our modalities change dramatically. And that's what's interesting is it kind of shows you modalities are pretty human-made. And whoever has the conviction that this is the modality, this is going to be... **Jackson:** 01:23:22 What do you mean by modality? **Tina:** 01:23:24 Modality means medium. Maybe another way to say it. Essentially, humans always communicate. It's like, how do we communicate? **Jackson:** 01:23:34 And the medium shapes us more than we realize. But the human -- McLuhan was right. But also the old philosophy works because we haven't changed. **Tina:** 01:23:42 We haven't changed. And the way that we manifest our basic desires, you know, the seven vices... **Jackson:** 01:23:48 Why haven't we found philosophers in new modalities? Why don't we? Is it a silly question to imagine what the Kierkegaard of our time would be, or who that might be? And if so, if not, I'd be curious for both sides of that. Maybe it just takes time for things to get Lindy, and Kierkegaard on TikTok seems less likely. But it also doesn't seem like we have much over the last— even Byung-Chul Han, at least as I understand, is pretty rare in terms of a philosopher like this who's writing pretty short books, kind of using the internet and writing about the internet. We don't have a lot of those. **Tina:** 01:24:23 Yeah. **Jackson:** 01:24:23 Is there a reason for that? **Tina:** 01:24:24 I just feel like those people are probably just rare in general. And how many Kierkegaards and Nietzsches are there in history, right? **Jackson:** 01:24:33 And there are probably only more people writing today and more accessibility to the writing of the world. **Tina:** 01:24:41 Yeah. **Jackson:** 01:24:44 But again, it could be a modality, which is that people aren't reading. **Tina:** 01:24:47 Yeah, people aren't reading. I also feel like philosophy— I think that maybe people are consuming— I'm not a purist in any sense where philosophy has to be these really long, dense texts that have to be read in a certain way, or you have to learn them in a certain way. I definitely don't think that's true. I think there are great philosophers online, on Twitter, right? That we call them armchair philosophers or whatever. Naval, I believe many people think he's a philosopher, and in many ways he is. Because what is philosophy? Philosophy is just a coherent way of seeing the world. It's a framework of seeing the world, and I think he presented one that ended up influencing the lives of many people. **Jackson:** 01:25:30 Yeah. **Tina:** 01:25:31 And I think venture capital actually is playing a big role in, you know, at least in our industry, on philosophy. I think that potentially maybe Rick Rubin is a philosopher in some way in his respective field. I'm just thinking about some very contemporary and maybe popular writers that are not necessarily being known for necessarily, you know, just— **Jackson:** 01:25:59 We don't call it the same thing, but totally. **Tina:** 01:26:01 We don't call it the same thing, but there are known for kind of abstract ideas. **Jackson:** 01:26:04 It's funny, this makes me think of— I should digress and say there's no one who, at least in recent years, has better tickled my brain with their recommendations for me. And I thank you very much for that. Whether that be *When We Cease to Understand the World*, or to talk about this next point, *Non-Things* by Byung-Chul Han. There's probably the excerpt from that book, *Non-Things*, that I think about most that maybe ties into this: where are the modern philosophers? He says, and this is a little bit of a longer one, but I think it's relevant. He says, "Anything time-consuming is on the way out. Truth is time-consuming. Where bits of information come in quick succession, we have no time for truth. In our post-factual culture of excitement, communication is dominated by affects and emotions as opposed to rationality. These are temporarily unstable. They thus destabilize life. Trust, promises, and responsibility are also time-consuming practices. They stretch out from the present far into the future. Everything that stabilizes human life is time-consuming. Faithfulness, bonding, and commitment are time-consuming practices." And then finally, "Lingering is another time-consuming practice. Perception that latches onto information does not have a lasting and slow gaze. Information makes us short-sighted and short of breath. It is not possible to linger on information. Lingering on things in contemplation, intentionless seeing, which would be a formula for happiness, gives way to the hunt for information." And yet you are someone who, at least as far as I can tell, makes more time to linger on big ideas, on philosophy, to go back and read these things that nobody else reads. How do you do it? What draws you to these things and lights you up and keeps you in the world of Kierkegaard when the rest of us are sort of dazzled with the spray of a million lights of Twitter and Instagram and everything else? How do you find it? **Tina:** 01:28:08 I think that finding them is a process of— if you start picking one book up, and then you kind of see the whole tree and how they're formed. It's like, you know, Nietzsche is the disciple of Schopenhauer, and Schopenhauer was impacted by someone else. And you kind of see the lineage of how the entire intellectual tree came about. I think for many students of the internet, you can also see how different ideas came about. For example, ByteDance was actually completely inspired by Google. The founders weren't even— didn't even know what they wanted to build. They just knew that China needed a modern tech company that is fostering innovation like Google. And they structured a lot of things like Google, and they kind of figured out their products later on. And that's the rest of history, the rest of the story. But going back to your question, I think that I can actually do much better. I don't think I'm completely immune to that. And I think part of the challenge of our modern mode of existence is that, as someone whose profession is to be online— and I will say that most of the knowledge workers are. And in order to be competitive online, you do need to say interesting things or build interesting products. And then in order to live in the now and to promote those products, you need to be on Twitter. Actually, I think my Twitter these days actually has become much less philosophical and a lot more about just kind of sharing the products that I'm working on, which I'm very proud to share because that's also part of my work. But it's definitely not some revelation from a three-hour meditation session. **Jackson:** 01:29:50 This is the realities and the reality, though. You put that so perfectly well. And it is maybe one interpretation of the first thing you started to say was like, by having this backdrop, doing the work— one, it's easier to do the work for it when you start to fill in the picture and you have some touch. Oh, I actually can relate Kierkegaard to Nietzsche or whatever. And then also, by the way, it can free you up to, at times, go off with this backdrop of philosophy and go be very in your very specific reality, do things. And that ebb and flow is maybe the optimal. But I think a lot of us are just riding on the edge of consuming the now and not necessarily asserting too much reality or refining too much reality. **Tina:** 01:30:34 I think the analogy here is like an apartment. I'm in this apartment of yours right now, and this is like the living room. The living room is where you probably spend a lot of your time thinking about things, reading, maybe on the internet, and this is where you kind of build your own context. I would say that this room is probably very **Jackson:**. And there's a room, and then you enter that room, and that room is maybe where you sleep, or maybe there's a study. In that room is where you do your reading. I think that's kind of like how, maybe as a human, I kind of wish that my room and my home, that intellectual home, can be just really rich and truly my own. It's a place that's hopefully sacred. And I think that my career and my work, which I take tremendously seriously, is a huge part of who I am. There are those through lines in this main room of mine that I kind of maybe decorate. There are definitely elements of that. But then inside of that room of work, I try to borrow. I can bring books from the living room back in my room, right? It's still truly mine, but it is a different space where I can do my work. **Jackson:** 01:31:47 And that allows you to move between the contexts. **Tina:** 01:31:48 Totally. **Jackson:** 01:31:49 There's this idea from Billy Oppenheimer, where he talks about environmental priming. I think it's from Jerry Seinfeld. It's like, "I know what we do here." Like James Cameron, having two desks while he was working on Terminator and Alien at the same time. He literally had a separate desk for each project. Obviously, a much more micro sense of the metaphor you're drawing, but I think that's a beautiful metaphor. One of the last things I want to talk about is your interest in beauty and art and aesthetics. Along with all those amazing writers and philosophers on your website, you also have a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs. And then you also have filmmakers and artists and writers and fashion designers. I have a guest question. You mentioned him already, but I asked a dear friend of ours, Chris Peck, what I should ask you. He, of course, thought for about 20 seconds and gave me this: How do you process the synergy between your aesthetic tastes and your business and intellectual tastes? **Tina:** 01:32:46 Wow, that's a very Chris Peck question. I think that those three, he grouped them very interestingly. First of all, he grouped them into aesthetic taste and then business and intellectual, I believe. **Jackson:** 01:33:04 I could be misremembering. It may have been across all three. **Tina:** 01:33:08 Let me just interpret it. **Jackson:** 01:33:09 Or maybe across all three. **Tina:** 01:33:10 Totally, across all three, because I think that business and intellectual to me are also distinctive. **Jackson:** 01:33:15 Right. **Tina:** 01:33:15 And it would be interesting if, for him, they're the same. I'm kind of thinking more so, like, why that would be the case for him, which I'll... **Jackson:** 01:33:25 I'll cut in and say that, frankly, I almost think I relate to business and intellectual tastes more similarly. To me, there's something else with, particularly, beauty. You can obviously get, I can get, read my Letterboxd. I can get quite intellectual about my movie reviews. But there's something different when I watch *Portrait of a Lady on Fire* that is not about words. **Tina:** 01:33:46 Totally. **Jackson:** 01:33:47 And so maybe it's possible, or at least that would be my... **Tina:** 01:33:52 Yeah, totally. No, I just think that's a very interesting one. I think even intellectually and business-wise, I have slightly different tastes. Obviously, the three are all Venn diagrams with lots of overlaps, right? And I will say, both in business and in intellectual pursuits, intellectual maybe less so, but especially in business. Actually, I think business and aesthetics to me are quite intersecting. That's why, you know, every product that are successful invest in design and invest in the first impression. No matter how great your idea is, if the experience and user experience is not great, people really just would not care about it. **Jackson:** 01:34:30 It's about feel. **Tina:** 01:34:31 It's about feel. It's about feel, especially when you want to build a product at scale, even if you're building a developer product. **Jackson:** 01:34:37 And that's what is beauty in software? **Tina:** 01:34:39 Meaning simplicity. Actually, maybe that's just beauty in many things. **Jackson:** 01:34:48 Self-evidence. **Tina:** 01:34:48 Yeah, self-evidence. I think it's simplicity and coherent. Simplicity is pretty more evident. And coherence is like, you know, there is something beautiful about going to a noodle shop and knowing what you're going to get. And that's, you know, and that going back to the idea of taste and attention. If you are paying attention and you are being authentic to yourself, there's a coherent through line of everything you do. When you go to a nice restaurant that you really love, it's usually because, you know, maybe it's reflective of the owner. It's reflective of something that's quirky about the neighborhood or something like that. And there's something so beautiful and authentic about that coherence. So I think those two are also true in software, especially for engineers, right? They want to know, you know, if you have input X and then given certain operations, what is going to come out on the other side. And they want to expect that outcome to be consistent over time. They want the coherence of this, like, kind of the different product lines to all have the same expected behavior. Nothing is more irritating than something behaving... **Jackson:** 01:35:53 Having affordance. There's this Steve Jobs line about how great objects should explain themselves, which I think is the best definition of an affordance I could ever imagine. **Tina:** 01:36:00 Totally, totally. Aesthetics and business actually have a lot more overlap. Maybe going back to answering the question more succinctly, aesthetic taste is a lot more about your body. It's about how you as a human and a biological object react to your environment. I think there's a lot of critique of modern art that talks about how the over intellectualization of modern art, where when you look at art you have to hold the reference of many decades of work behind you. It's like, "Oh, this is in the context of everything that came before it. And if you didn't understand that artist, you would not understand this artist and what they're referring to." And in that kind of circular reference, it makes appreciating just simple beauty very difficult. When you see maybe a beautiful painting of a flower -- my mother actually recently picked up this new hobby as a painter, and I recently discovered she's insanely talented. She painted these beautiful flowers, and I was just astounded. That's just really beautiful art. She didn't have an art degree. She actually does not know any references at all to maybe the high art world. But she just creates what she thinks is beautiful, and it is actually just beautiful. It's pretty simple. And I think that any intellectual boundary pushing, which I always appreciate, of maybe some fashion or art -- they are trying to push the boundary of some construct. Like early Celine, Phoebe Philo, I think for a long time, her construction of clothing is very architectural, using bold colors. Those are very new concepts to fashion, especially women's fashion back then. So she is pushing modality, but by the end of the day, the colors are harmonious. All those things follow some natural principle, and your body kind of reacts very positively towards that. So basically the short answer is, I think aesthetics needs to... **Jackson:** 01:38:01 How does that... You have a bunch of fashion designers: Virgil, Yohji, Phoebe, Karl Lagerfeld. And you have a bunch of filmmakers. Fashion especially, one of the most important things with clothing is actually to be able to go feel it on your body or touch it. Does that still extend into film? **Tina:** 01:38:23 Yes, definitely. And we both are film consumers. Actually, I remember this scene specifically. You mentioned Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is a fantastic film. The other one that comes to mind that's very similar in nature is actually Blue is the Warmest Color. You've never seen it? But there's one scene where it's about two female lovers... **Jackson:** 01:38:45 This is Léa Seydoux? **Tina:** 01:38:48 Yeah, Léa Seydoux. Two female lovers that fell in love for the first time. But it's about this kind of lesbian couple's story, but it really applies to everyone. There's a scene where they're under the sun, lying on the grass, and they're just falling in love. One of them is just looking at the other, and the little baby blonde hair is being reflected under the sun. And it's that one scene, and you know that whenever you have a crush on someone, you kind of notice the smallest thing about them. Every small body part becomes just so weirdly important to you and so beautiful to you. And I think they capture those moments extremely well. So I think there's also that universality in how our sensual processes react to certain environments and emotions. The best filmmakers recognize that. **Jackson:** 01:39:35 Yeah. The week I watched Portrait of a Lady, I also watched In the Mood for Love. **Tina:** 01:39:39 Oh, yeah. **Jackson:** 01:39:39 It's a movie that's not intellectual. It's purely this... Yeah. One of my favorite definitions of art comes from Shia LaBeouf, where he says that anything that moves you is art. He was asked, "Are memes art?" And he says, "Yes, anything that moves you is art." And I think that might be another articulation of the theory. What role does love play in your life? And specifically as it relates to people, to work and creativity, to ambition, to greatness, to beauty? **Tina:** 01:40:17 I think love and faith and attention and everything we talked about are very interconnected. And I don't think there is a more sacred saying or more genuine expression of love than paying attention to something. And by paying attention, I mean paying attention. Not just, you know, we're looking at each other at dinner and I'm scrolling on my phone. But I think even at this moment, my love for you as a friend is captured by me spending two hours here, not thinking about anything else on a Saturday afternoon with you and talking about this. And I'm deeply grateful for this. **Jackson:** 01:41:03 Attention is all we have, and it's, in a world of abundance, one of the only things that is scarce. **Tina:** 01:41:12 Totally. **Jackson:** 01:41:12 I experience you as someone who is deeply loving in all that you are, and I think that's an amazing articulation of it. The last thing I have for you is just something that reminds me of you, and I think it maybe is an especially compelling frame for the tension between modeling realities and choosing a reality. It's from the first thing I ever read of yours. You quoted Jeff Bezos's Princeton commencement speech, and I'd like to read it back to you. It makes me think of you. He says, "Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life -- the life you author from scratch on your own -- begins. How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make? Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions? Will you follow dogma, or will you be original? Will you choose a life of ease or a life of service and adventure? Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions? Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize? Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love? Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling? When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless? Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder? Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind? When you are 80 years old and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices." It's been wonderful to be with you. **Tina:** 01:42:53 I'm deeply flattered.