A letter from the guy asking all the questions
Why Alex Dobrenko interviewed nine artists on hope, money, and authenticity
In case you missed it, we made a print zine. It’s called Whoa, Vol 1 and it features conversations with some of our favorite creatives, thinkers, builders, and technologists including Yancey Strickler (Kickstarter), Leandra Medine (Man Repeller and Cereal Aisle), Anjan Katta (Daylight Computer), Douglas Rushkoff (Team Human), and Melanie Masarin (Ghia) and more.
100 physical copies (~10 left!)
unlimited digital copies
podcast and YT feeds of all unedited interviews with all purchases (!!)
On the other side of each conversation is Sublime’s own Alex Dobrenko. Here’s a letter from Alex that beautifully captures what’s inside.
The assignment was simple: interview people who I find inspiring about the big ideas that move them.
Which I did, sort of. Mostly though I just steered each conversation toward the same set of questions:
How do you stay optimistic and hopeful in a world where cynicism is the default?
How do you make enough money doing your art?
Is there even such a thing as authenticity, or is it all bullshit?
You know, super general questions that weren’t at all the ones I was desperately trying to solve for myself.
For the last few years, I’d been slowly (oh, so slowly) emerging from my personal Great Depression (the 5th in as many years) and found myself clinging for something, anything, to hold onto before the next tide of sadness swept me away.
By then, I’d identified my own cynicism as both the cause and effect of my worldview. I saw things as negative, and so they were.
But naming a problem and solving it are two very different things. The answers, I was sure, would be in these conversations.
In October of 2020, I asked a tattoo artist in LA to design something based on Rilke’s “live the questions” quote.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
She created a landscape scene of a fox on his back—legs all cozy, cuddled in the tall grass—reading a book. And from that book emerged an orange-dotted question mark that half-circled the moon.
Yet, even with this quote being permanently inked on my body, I’d forgotten it.
And maybe that’s for the best. Maybe some truths are meant to be forgotten? How else could we taste the sweetness of experiencing them anew?
I felt a deep peace after each conversation. Not because of anything said, but because the conversation itself was the answer. It’s hard to be cynical when you’re connecting with someone.
My hope for you is that being a part of these conversations (for what is reading if not participation?) will launch you the same galaxy of feelings—freedom, hope, connection, belonging, sublimity—they brought me.
Thank you to , and Sublime for entrusting me with this, and most of all thank you to Anjan Katta, , , , , Isabel, , , and
for taking the time to chat.Without you all, I’d be a lost fox. With you, I’m still a lost fox, but one who isn’t so lonely.
—Alex Dobrenko
P.S. Ideal reading conditions for the zine: in a field, feet up, staring at the moon. Get your copy here.
Stoked to get my zine in the mail!