What's in the cards?
humanity at its best, proposals, Jiro dislikes vacations
Here’s what made us go whoa this week:
Face it: You’re a crazy person is the best piece of writing I’ve read this year. If I owned a school, this essay would be turned into a required high school course.
Chris Martin joins Jacob Collier live on stage for Fix You at London's O2 Arena. This is humanity at its best. Tears did in fact stream down my face.
A beautiful snippet from this wonderful conversation with the artist Lorde:
Everyone’s good at everything, and I kind of don’t care. Show me what it looks like when you are bad. Show me how it looks when you get it wrong.
When technical mastery becomes available to everyone, the cracks, the risk, the emotional stakes is what we’ll value. I discovered many more amazing ideas around this theme using Sublime’s “related ideas” tool, like this one from Judd Appatow.Taylor Swift describing Travis Kelce, captured using Podcast Magic (our new product that will change your life if you listen to podcasts). I love great descriptions of people and I’m floored by how she can improvise with such emotional precision:
Travis is like, he's just a vibe booster in everyone's life... He's like a human exclamation point. Like you know when you take a picture on your phone and you push the enhance color button, that’s what you do to everyone’s life.
P.S. I am now a walking cliché who suddenly wants to understand football and master sourdough after listening to one Taylor Swift podcast episode.A great way to think about proposals.
Revisiting this piece I wrote last year — make something to learn more about what’s inside you — and realizing this idea still runs my life. I’m pouring it into everything we’re building at Sublime. If you want a sneak peek at what’s coming, become a Sublime Premium member. You’ll get first dibs on the tools we’re making to help you turn inspiration into output. Human curation × AI creation, baby!
Loved David Senra's Founders episode on Jiro, where he talks about how Jiro dislikes holidays and thinks they're too long. I'm having the uncomfortable realization that I might be the same way having just spent a month in Colorado with my fam. I loved it, but I kept getting antsy about getting back to routine. Flaubert knew when he said: "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be original in your work." Go listen to this episode and use Podcast Magic to capture all the gems.
What people actually want isn’t a paid newsletter was a great read. I do think we are at a failure of imagination point for consumer subscription services in how they price their products. It’s telling that 15% of Sublime’s paying customers opt for a one-time lifetime payment. It’s also why we decided to go with a one-time $20 payment for Podcast Magic. People hate subscriptions!
Cool wears off, useful doesn’t
I’m in the thick of editing this year’s Sublime’s zine on AI × creativity, with conversations featuring David Perell, Oliver Burkeman, Venkatesh Rao, Robin Sloan, Seth Godin, and more. It’s making me nostalgic for last year’s issue, which still feels like a nervous system massage in print form. The print edition sold out, but you can still grab a digital copy.
Before you go!
Our friends at Restless Egg are looking for 10 artist-founders to join their 6-month incubator program. They provide $50k stipends (with investment up to 200k), access to the egg network and guidance on product development. You don’t need an existing product to apply. Just restless agency, heterodox thinking, and practicality. Which I suspect is a lot of people reading this newsletter.
Thanks again for the great curation! The experimental history article is so powerful!
Thank you so much for including my article!