Dialectic

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16: Anjan Katta - A Sunrise Over Computing
Anjan Katta (X) is Founder and CEO of Daylight, a new type of computer company.Having a conversation with Anjan is a bit like trying reign in a wild animal: his horsepower, wide-ranging philosophical interests, and unbelievable depth in the areas he cares about make him one of a kind. Fortunately, all of that energy is being channeled into his life's work, Daylight Computer Company. Daylight's mission is to build a computer that amplifies our humanity. That starts with Daylight's first product: The DC1, a tablet that combines the power and functionality of an iPad with the screen of a kindle. Anjan has been building Daylight for seven years across extensive research on screens and hardware, many near deaths, and mission-driven motivation.Anjan sees computers as a "magical medium" that we're in relationship with, unlike other tools. Unfortunately, "optimization of the means, yet confusion of goals" has led the technology industry to building hardware and software that sits in what he calls a "messy medium." With devices that can do anything and everything, they often fail to empower us toward the vision Steve Jobs called the bicycle for the mind.Throughout, Anjan and I discuss a philosophy toward life, career, design, and creating meaning that I hope will inspire you, whether you work on technology or not. May we all aim to get closer to ourselves and our humanity.---This episode is brought to you by Hampton, a private, highly vetted membership for founders. Hampton makes entrepreneurship less lonely by matching you with a core group of likeminded founders along with community, events, retreats, and more. Visit https://joinhampton.com/community to learn more and apply.---Timestamps:(0:04): Hampton (1:57): Anjan Intro (3:54): A Bicycle for the Mind and The Computer: Tool or Medium? (13:15): The Core of the Computer as a Magical Medium: Relationship (16:39): The Waterslide/fall of Agency and Humanity as Nature's Generalists (27:35): What drove Anjan to Computers (33:00): Building the Non-Inevitable and Confronting Silicon Valley's "Optimization of Means, Yet Confusion of Goals" (39:25): Wandering Toward Daylight: a Computer that Doesn't Feel Like Other Computers (51:02): Is Daylight paternalistic? The messy middle and the Case Against "sporks" or Sh*tting Where You Eat (59:51): The Ultimate Messy Medium: The Phone as Our Main Relationship to the World and Starting Over with a More Simple Tool (1:08:04): A Magical Companion: The Primer, Dynabook, or "Hobbes" (1:13:31): Starting with Light(1:17:32): Daylight as "basically Just a Screen" & Applying "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology" (1:28:18): High Resolution Decision Making: Designing with Intuition and Developing the Right Kind of "Feel" (1:40:24): The Four Dimensions of Daylight's Vision (1:58:08): Growing as a Person and a Leader (2:07:08): Growing Daylight the Company/Organism: Three Principles (2:12:42): Competition, Scaling Daylight, Why Someone Should Work There (2:17:45): Lighting Round: Paravel – Interactive Fiction App Developed for Daylight (2:19:54): The Evolution of Books (2:21:20): Most Influential Books on Anjan (2:23:43): Is AI making Us More Human or Less Human? (2:29:38): Boredom, Authenticity, and Integrity (2:32:06): Faith and Spirituality (2:33:04): What Anjan Has Learned from His Parents and What He's Forgiven Them For (2:34:38): Lilo and Stitch (2:35:50): The Most Important Thing All links and references and full transcript available at dialectic.fm/anjan-katta.Dialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms.Join the ⁠telegram channel for Dialectic⁠Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠Follow Dialectic on InstagramSubscribe to Dialectic on YouTube
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2:37:02
15: D.A. Wallach - Serendipity & Systems
D.A. Wallach (Website, X, Substack, Spotify) is an investor, musician, writer, and polymath. Today he co-runs Time BioVentures, backing frontier life-science and healthcare startups. Before that, he was an investor in in SpaceX, Spotify, Emulate, Beam Therapeutics, and Ripple, among others, and toured the globe as half of Chester French. He also released music as a solo artist and was Spotify’s first Artist-in-Residence.Our conversation moves from engineered serendipity—the art of a well-aimed cold email & surfing the web—to complexity science, the Santa Fe Institute, and what better systems might look like. We dive into markets and medicine: investing with a creative mindset; timing in biotech including CRISPR and GLP-1s; and the tension between free-market innovation and healthcare as a human right. D.A. unpacks how incentives shape everything from venture bubbles to hospital billing and how LLMs might move us closer to a universal standard of care.In the back half we talk creativity, beauty, art, and performance. We discuss whether AI makes us lazy or amplifies originality, DA's many lives across art, tech, and business, and end on his plea for artists to reclaim their throne of "cool". I hope you're inspired by D.A's combination of curiosity and depth and are reminded that you don't have to stay in one lane, regardless of how impressive it might be.Full episode transcript and all linked references available here.---This episode is brought to you by Hampton, a private, highly vetted membership for founders. Hampton makes entrepreneurship less lonely by matching you with a core group of likeminded founders along with community, events, retreats, and more. Visit https://joinhampton.com/community to learn more and apply.---Timestamps:(0:04) Hampton(1:56) Intro to D.A.(3:29) Curiosity, Serendipity, and the Power of Cold Emails(9:21) Web Surfing & D.A.'s Potential One-Man Show(13:28) Learning to Go Deep: Explore vs. Exploit(19:18) Complexity Science, EO Wilson(29:20) What Makes Santa Fe Institute Special?(33:13) Complex and Bureaucratic Systems: How do you design a good system? And how do you change entrenched systems?(40:25) D.A.'s Attraction to Markets and the Fed Challenge(45:19) What Makes a Good Investor?(48:30) Creativity in Investing, Index Funds, Elon's Take on a Great VC, and Venture Capital's Real Customer(58:45) What Makes for Commercially Successful Creatives: Doing(1:05:24) Gene Editing & CRISPR, What "Early" Means in Biotech, and Isolating the Bet You're Making(1:12:48) GLP-1, Slow Burn Technological Innovation, FOMO, and Bubbles(1:18:49) Healthcare Incentives: The Tension between Free Market Capitalism and Healthcare as a Right(1:24:53) Patient Agency, LLMs, and Shifting Away from Paternalistic Doctors(1:29:02) Progress Toward a "Universal Standard of Care"(1:32:58) Artificial vs. Natural Intelligence(1:38:32) Should We Limit Technological Progress? D.A.'s Response to Alarm-Sounding: Focus on Today's Real Problems & Solutions(1:43:32) How Do You Keep Technology from Making You Creatively Lazy?(1:52:37) Performance, Fame, and Authenticity(2:00:27) Beauty As the Primary Motivation(2:06:17) Multiple Lives, Art vs. Tech & Business, and D.A.'s Plea for the Artists to Revolt(2:14:04) What Would D.A. Not Stop Doing for $1B?(2:15:41) Lightning Round: Anonymity, Tyler the Creator, Pharrell(2:20:04) African Studies at Harvard(2:22:08) Favorite Jazz Album(2:23:40) Finding New Music(2:25:08) LA: The Most Open-Minded City(2:27:16) What He Hopes to Teach His Young DaughterLinks (all available here)D.A. - Glowing (Official Music Video) Zero Toll MedicineModern Medicine Demands A Universal Standard of CareD.A. Live: "Feel" (Live From Capitol Studio B)Dialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms.Join the ⁠telegram channel for Dialectic⁠Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠Follow Dialectic on InstagramSubscribe to Dialectic on YouTube
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2:32:49
14: Alex Zhang - Curating Cultural Playgrounds
Alex Zhang (Website, X, Instagram) is a cultural curator, community builder, and creative director. Currently, he's Chief Creative Officer of Powder Mountain, a where he's working with Reed Hastings to create a globally unique ski experience that combines art, architecture, and lots of fresh tracks.Alex loves people and curating spaces and experiences for them: whether that means parties, music festivals, or mountain towns. He joined Summit Series out of school, throwing large scale events around the world and working on Powder Mountain, a Utah mountain resort the ownership group had acquired. He then joined one of the first social DAOs, Friends with Benefits (FWB) as Mayor/CEO, after being tapped by its founder Trevor McFedries to scale the tokenized social club beyond a Discord Server. He launched FWB Fest, an annual in-person music festival and crypto conference with past performers including James Blake, Charli XCX, and Caroline Polachek. Most recently, he joined Reed Hastings to return to Powder Mountain after the Netflix co-founder acquired a controlling stake in the resort. Alex leads brand, art, architecture, and marketing.Blending culture, commerce, and "cool" is anything but a science, but Alex has made a career of it. I've known him for a decade and it's been a thrill to watch him continue to find strange intersections, blending worlds like music and tech, crypto and culture, and skiing and art. We talk about this, how to create spaces and events, living in the mountains, large scale art experiences, Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs, challenges in creating new cities, learning from Reed Hastings, and a life of deepening one's taste.I hope you enjoy and are inspired to life a more connected, playful, and present life.---This episode is brought to you by Hampton, a private, highly vetted membership for founders. Hampton makes entrepreneurship less lonely by matching you with a core group of likeminded founders along with community, events, retreats, and more. Visit joinhampton.com/community to learn more and apply.---Full episode transcript and links available at dialectic.fm/alex-zhang.Timestamps(0:05): Hampton: Dialectic's First Partner (4:09): Commerce & Culture, Patronage, and Constraints (12:17): Curating People, Spaces, and Art: "Host Energy" (19:44): How to Throw a Party or Start a Scene (27:05): Unlikely Intersections and Authentic Marketing (35:36): Returning to Powder and Building a Unique Mountain Resort (42:31): Utah and Mountain Living (47:27): Randomness & Emergence: Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, and Cities (52:24): Creating a Digital Feeling of Place (55:15): Network States and New Cities (1:00:42): "Community" (1:08:27): Organic Leadership Opportunities, Partnership, and Trust (1:15:12): Focused Leadership and The Power of Memetic Language (1:20:02): Learning from Reed Hastings as a Leader (1:29:09): Getting into Rooms and Finding Serendipity (1:32:58): Playfulness and Elon (1:36:25): Intuition and Career Decisions (1:39:10): Curating Music and a Life Goal of Refining Taste (1:42:56): Music's Role in Creating Great Spaces (1:44:08): Photography (1:46:02): Beginning, Learning to Ski and Scuba (1:48:10): Improving Los Angeles and What Makes it Special LinksPowder MountainFriends With BenefitsSummit SeriesHow Music Works - David Byrne‎Studio 54 (2018)Storm King Art CenterNaoshima IslandMarfa"The world is a museum of passion projects"Roden CraterChristopher AlexanderJane JacobsThe Network StateEdge CityEdge EsmeraldaWSA, a Manhattan Office Tower, Becomes an Unlikely ‘It’ BuildingRemedy PlaceWAREHOUSEWas That a James Turrell I Just Skied By?Dialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms.Join the ⁠telegram channel for Dialectic⁠Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠Follow Dialectic on InstagramSubscribe to Dialectic on YouTube
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1:51:47
13: Nabeel Qureshi - The Will to Care
Nabeel S. Qureshi (Website, X, Substack) is a writer, entrepreneur, and former Palantir product lead known for his writing on technology, AI, Palantir, culture, and learning. After a brief hiatus writing and researching and spending nearly a decade at Palantir working across government, healthcare, and intelligence, he's now founding a new company.The first half of the conversation focuses on two big ideas. First: the growth of "slop" across media and culture and how "care" is its opposite. Then: how to think, learn, and understand more deeply across domains over a lifetime. We discuss how both of these sit against the backdrop of AI's rapid challenging of what it means to make and what it means to think.Then we discuss Palantir and "grey areas" that many technologists avoid working on or thinking about, government bureaucracy and DOGE, and how technologists are pursuing and accumulating power. We also chat about Nabeel's idea maze ahead of the new company, art and what it is for, and a range of other topics that showcase how curious, polymathic, and considerate Nabeel is.As the world changes at a breakneck pace thanks to technology and AI, Nabeel embodies a deeply humanistic approach that also accepts change as the default. This conversation inspired me to embrace surprise and strangeness, especially in creativity; to push through the friction and temptation to accept the answers at face value and instead yearn to more deeply understand; and to pursue a life of growth, practice, and care.Full transcript with all linked references available here.Timestamps:(3:21): “The Opposite of Slop Is Care.”(4:15): Defining Slop (14:17): Do We Decide What We Care About? (20:16): Original Seeing and Intimacy as a Path to Care (24:05): Creativity, Craft, and Care in the Digital World and Physical World (28:24): The Human Moat and Practice (32:48): Can AIs Care? (35:52): Understanding Things Deeply and “The Will to Think” (39:52): School: Getting the Answer vs. Deeply Understanding (41:44): High-Dimensional Learning from Simulations (Games) and Reality (the Real World) (48:38): Moving Down from Abstraction: Be Specific (50:49): Karl Popper, Fallibilism, Tyler Cowen, and Fighting Intellectual Inertia (53:00): Slowing Down (56:00): Nabeel's Funnel for Information & Retention (59:18): Spaced Repetition (Flashcards) (1:01:09): Palantir, Duty, and Engaging in Political and Moral Gray Areas (1:07:06): Palantir's Culture of Independent Thinking: People Who Speak Their Mind but Aren't Douchebags (1:09:38): Government Bureaucracy, DOGE, Power (1:14:51): Why Can't Governments Be Better at Error Correction and Healthy Renewal? (1:17:02): Technologists and Power (1:23:47): Nabeel's Next Company and the Idea Maze: “Context Is That Which Is Scarce” (1:27:11): Scientist Brain vs. Founder Brain and Context vs. Details (1:30:17): Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and What Art Is For (1:34:02): Art for Defamiliarization (1:36:00): What Makes Film Special (1:37:15): Depth in Text and Other Mediums (1:40:32): Patterns Across Nabeel's Taste: The Unfamiliar (1:43:11): Lightning Round: Travel (1:44:37): Stories Nabeel Tells Himself (1:45:31): Agency and Being Told What to Do by AI (1:47:49): Negotiation and Creating Optionality (1:50:28): Palantir's Vocabulary (1:53:07): Lessons from Tyler Cowen (1:54:41): Fighting Inertia Key Links (all references available here)"We don't get a lot of things to really care about." (Pig, 2021)The opposite of slop is care. (Tweet Thread)PrinciplesHow To Understand Things Video Games are the Future of Education Notes On Karl PopperReflections on Palantir Dialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms.Join the ⁠telegram channel for Dialectic⁠Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠Follow Dialectic on InstagramSubscribe to Dialectic on YouTube
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1:59:07
12: Che-Wei Wang & Taylor Levy (CW&T) - Iterating Together with Time
Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy are the founders of CW&T (Website, Instagram, X, TikTok), a Brooklyn-based studio creating products that exist somewhere between art, design, and engineering.The husband-and-wife team met at NYU ITP and shares a background across industrial design, architecture, computer science, film, including time at Pratt Institute and MIT. They won the 2022 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Product Design. They design and manufacture everyday objects including clocks, pens, tools, and other strange objects that challenge our relationship with time, attention, and materiality. Their most recognizable products include the Pen Type-A, Pen Type-C (my favorite), Time Since Launch (a one-time-use, 100-year timekeeper), and Solid State Watch, a remix of the classic Casio F-91W.Our conversation explores their fascination with time, their commitment to creating heirloom-quality objects in a disposable world, and how they've built a sustainable creative practice on their own terms. We discuss their prototyping-centered approach, the tension between digital and physical creation, and how they navigate collaboration as partners in life and work.Throughout, Che-Wei and Taylor reveal a philosophy that treats making as its own reward—they create what fascinates them first, trusting that others will connect with their vision. In a world increasingly dominated by disposable products and digital experiences, CW&T offers a refreshing counterpoint: a workshop where physical objects are thoughtfully conceived, meticulously crafted, and built to accompany us through life's journeys. Their work invites us to reconsider our relationship with the objects we use daily and the passage of time itself, offering a refreshing counterpoint to our increasingly digital, ephemeral world.Full transcript with all links and references.Timestamps(00:00): Time: a pattern across CW&T’s careers(11:21): Time Since Launch: the idea of counting up instead of down, and creating personal epochs (14:11): "Good design is long-lasting,” Durability of Electric Objects(19:31): Balancing art, product, and design: CW&T's approach to creating strange (but useful) things (23:51): First Word vs. Last Word Art: Michael Naimark's essay on innovation (28:01): Death by consensus: Why Che-Wei left architecture, and the joy of creative collaboration(32:52): Inspiration, Theory, and Self-Evidence(38:40): Tools: iPhone world, what makes a great tool, and design that optimizes for joy(44:21): The Hi-Tec-C pen cartridge and remixing what has come before(48:01): Making physical objects: a case for prototyping and against rendering(55:41): CW&T’s beloved products(53:27): ITP, Electrified Objects, Software in Objects(56:49): Dream Stem: Generative design, openness to new tools, AI's impact on the creative process, and intuition(01:07:11): The value of friction, and what's lost and gained in the pursuit of efficiency (01:09:46): CW&T the brand, contemplating CW&T's legacy and purpose(01:15:24): Kickstarter, owning your audience, and what it would look like to start today(01:19:35): Partners in life and work, the tension between merging identities and maintaining individuality (01:25:02): Growth, explore vs. exploit, and learning, dream collaborators, and more resources(1:33:56): Lighting round: great teachers, New York City focus & serendipity, creative inspirations, CW&T book, nature and green things, morphology and architecture, “form and force,” a gift for children or grandchildren, what to hang onto,(01:52:07): TimelessnessDialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms.Join the ⁠telegram channel for Dialectic⁠Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠Follow Dialectic on InstagramSubscribe to Dialectic on YouTube
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1:55:06