Thoughts + Things, May 2023

Words on Steve, Fred, Frank, and Hunter

This week, my extended thoughts on content from four inspiring creative minds: Steve Jobs, Fred again, Frank Ocean, and Hunter S. Thompson.

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Founders Podcast on Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words

I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about compulsions and how to get closer to a life and work of operating in my zone of genius. One of the most satisfying things to observe is someone who has gotten there. Someone who has found the "ball they like to hit."

David Senra is clearly one of those people. I'm sure he'd protest the notion of having fully actaulized, but listening to this guy operate in his zone is awesome. He's obsessed with studying the lives of great entrepreneurial people and has built a platform where he shares his learnings (usually from biographies) with the rest of us. His podcast style is also unusual: he has no guests and speaks directly to "you" the listener, like a teacher. It's intimate, thoughtful, and often riveting.

David's favorite person to study is Steve Jobs, and he's covered him several times. Naturally, he was quick to dive into the recently released digital book from the Steve Jobs Archive that surfaces various overlooked content from Steve.

I’m excited to read the book in full. But David's two-hour breakdown is not only an amazing primer for it. It’s also a synthesis that combines his highlights with a broader treasure trove of Steve’s wisdom, collected from David’s encyclopedic knowledge and study. I listened on a long run and found myself bounding with inspiration and creative energy. Not much better. Please do yourself the favor of listening in full.

If you’re not fully convinced, consider Laurene Powell Jobs’ intro to the book:

Steve once told a group of students, “You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.” He gave an extraordinary amount of thought to how best to use our fleeting time. He was compelled by the notion of being part of the arc of human existence, animated by the thought that he—or that any of us—might elevate or expedite human progress.

It is hard enough to see what is already there, to gain a clear view. Steve’s gift was greater still: he saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary: he imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments, but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom and an epic sense of possibility.

In these pages, Steve drafts and refines. He stumbles, grows, and changes. But always, always, he retains that sense of possibility. I hope these selections ignite in you the understanding that drove him: that everything that makes up what we call life was made by people no smarter, no more capable, than we are; that our world is not fixed—and so we can change it for the better.

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Fred again..: Tiny Desk Concert

Fred again has had all the hype and then some over the last year. People raved about his Coachella 2022 set and I suspect many of us found him via the incredible Boiler Room set last July (it now has 18M views). I think 3-4 friends all sent me this in a matter of a few days, and I've probably listened at least 10x since. I can still hear it... "Fred..AGAIN, Fred..AGAIN, Fred.. AGAIN... introducing FRED AGAIN FOR BOILER ROOOOOOM!".

My near ~year of Fred fandom was recently capped off by his performance alongside Skrillex and Four Tet to close out main stage at Coachella 2023. This was, of course, bananas (full set here).

For those of you who are already bought in, I'm surely preaching to the choir. But maybe you watched part of the boiler room, or are just not into EDM or "rave music" and haven't given it a try. I'll be honest: I'm not really an electronic music guy. I think Fred is somewhat responsible for expanding my horizons on what the electronic or dance genres can be. Or at least pushing me to widen my aperture on what I'll listen to. This role as a bridge isn't too surprising: Fred has a background as a songwriter and producer for more traditional artists and a history working with Brian Eno. The two just released an album together.

And while I do think you should give the full Boiler Room set a chance, it might just not be your speed. Fred's got an answer, even for you: one of the more stylistically unique Tiny Desk's I've watched. I've long been a huge fan of NPR's series that brings the world's best artists into an intimate, stripped-down setting (shades of MTV Unplugged in a different era). A few past favorites to give you a taste: Mac Miller, Anderson Paak, Adrianne Lenker, Jacob Collier.

In this performance, Fred totally re-imagines his sound, turning his sample-heavy dance hits into a gentle and blissful wave of melody that crashes over you. He combines piano, various electronics and samples, his vocals, and a giant xylophone-like instrument that's apparently called a vibraphone. It's serene and magical.

If you really aren't sure, I played it for my mom recently and it passed the mom test with flying colors. Fred's a genre-bending craftsman.

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What's a God to a Machine? by Jeff Weiss for The Ringer

Speaking of Coachella: Frank Ocean performed. Things didn't go to plan, and he dropped out of performing Weekend 2 shortly after the backlash of his first performance. People are angry, Frank Ocean is over, and Fred Again, Skrillex, Four Tet, and Blink 182 saved the day... or so the internet would lead you to believe.

And some of this uproar and criticism was justified! Frank showed up an hour late and pissed off attendees. The set was scattered, contained an impromptu rave section, was apparently supposed to involve an ice rink that was scrapped on short notice, and Frank even danced to a few of his own songs rather than performing them (most tragically, Nights). There was no live stream of the performance, despite that being table stakes for all other major performances.

On that last note: a talented editor named Brian Kinnes, in maximum the-internet-can-just-be-awesome-sometimes fashion, amalgamated 400+ videos into his "Rebuild Cut," a now unavailable concert film of Frank's set. It's worth tracking down, if just for the remix of White Ferrari that Brian has since suggested we think of as "Ryan's Version" (audio here).

I'm not quite sure how to feel about the whole thing, aside from a simple gratitude to have heard Frank Ocean, live, for the first time. But Jeff Weiss's piece on the performance for The Ringer (thanks to Andrew for first flagging) is a must-read for fans, critics, and indifferent bystanders alike.

Weiss recounts the messiness of the evening, with scathing critiques of Coachella VIP culture. He then addresses the contrast Frank's imperfection created alongside the changing tide of a world of pop music that is increasingly mechanized. Of course, he notes the recent rise of AI-created music and the ways it will surely progress this quest for songs perfectly designed for our popular music machine. And while that may not be our reality yet, his words about the magnificent architecture that is BLACKPINK are cutting:

What if the Spice Girls had been spawned in the mid-2010s by a vertically integrated consulting firm? There is something hypnotically transfixing about them, as if every visual, graphic, dance shimmy, and autocorrected note has been focus-grouped to ensure Maximum Fun. There is not a single original idea, but it is an immaculate synthesis. They can precisely match the sum of all previous human creativity but cannot provide a note more.

I'll admit, the vertically-integrated spectacle is compelling.

And as for Frank? Well, Weiss alludes—both in the essay’s title and in his dissection—to the god complex that permeates our celebrity culture; whether that be implicitly or explicitly, as in Frank's lyrics to open 2011's Watch the Throne ("Human beings in a mob / What's a mob to a king? / What's a king to a God? / What's a God to a non-believer?"):

When he addresses the crowd, there is genuine sincerity and authenticity—the desire to engage, but the inability to connect. The prevailing emotion of the set isn’t disappointment or resentment that this is some sort of scam, but rather an obliterating sadness that something sacred has fractured, becoming remote and only intermittently accessible...

What most in the crowd are responding to is the death of something that Ocean cannot control. The outsized expectations that had made him infallible, a timeless avatar of their vanished youth, the dark reality that what comes unglued cannot always be repaired.

He who appears to rise to something beyond humanity must of course come crashing down. Weiss finishes with style:

In this rendering of a biblical soul ballad, reduced to a weeping guitar and a bleeding piano, Ocean uses that empyrean falsetto, closes his eyes, and pours out every remaining ounce of painful honesty that he can physically summon. It is raw and frail, a wisp of a song that seems to float away from him—but he’s always desperately trying to catch up. Yet it captures the majesty and despair of our human mess, full of glorious errors, far more valuable than a perfect machine.

Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose via Farnam Street & Letters of Note

In a letter to a friend, 22-year-old Hunter Thompson wrote timeless advice about figuring out what to do with yourself. I’ve revisited it through the years, but thanks to Spencer Kier for bumping it up in my mental queue recently.

Thompson dives straight into the eternal question: whether to continue as is or put intention into changing direction:

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect—between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

But why not float if you have no goal? That is another question. It is unquestionably better to enjoy the floating than to swim in uncertainty. So how does a man find a goal?

Life is a fight against inertia. My friend Michael wrote an essay on this topic, and I think about it often. Most people succumb to "floating," whether intentionally or (usually) otherwise. And while inertia isn't always a bad thing, lacking self-awareness about how life can make decisions for you is a real risk. You wake up at 40/60/80 and wonder, is this it? What about all those dreams?

Thompson later makes this point exactly:

But a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

We surely can't be intentional ("swimming" in Thompson-speak) about everything, but choosing which areas of life to press back against the friction of change and swim upstream is an essential part of really living.

I like this pair of tweets from Andrew Ruiz about how the speed of time passing is correlated with predictability. And how the antidote comes from novelty, or as he says, deciding to "play at the edge, where serendipity likes to slumber”:

(1) The more predictable your life is, the more quickly it’ll pass by. As you get older (unless you’re proactive) life tends to become more predictable, punctuated by the odd unpredictable event. Five years starts to feel like a day and old men begin to reflect on a wasted life.

(2) How do you break free from this nightmare? Inject some novelty. Introduce some chaos. Invite the unexpected. Play at the edge, where serendipity likes to slumber. He’ll awaken to your footsteps

And of course, a favorite line from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow:

It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.

And yet, constantly chasing novelty isn’t a path to fulfillment either. I'm as jealous of Peter Pan as the next guy, but that road seems sure to run out. A recurring theme lately has been the value of stillness, being bored, familiarity. Stuff that doesn't come as easily to me. And still, some of the most important growth, depth, and—as a friend wisely framed last week— "internal" novelty can come when the external novelty is low. I'm not sure what the right balance is here. Thompson even acknowledges part of this tension, and previously noted that it’s better to float than swim without direction:

There is more to it than that— no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that’s what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You’ll have lots of company.

In the meat of the letter, he goes on with guidance on how to, when we do decide to swim, choose the right direction. And dissect what a direction should even look or feel like (a selection of excerpts):

The answer— and, in a sense, the tragedy of life— is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day?...

As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES...

But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors— but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires— including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL...

But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.

This is powerful. It reminds me a bit of how Josh Waitzkin frames learning: an opportunity for unobstructed self-expression. How do you find this infinite game (or series of games) that you want to play for 20 years? Longer? That you could theoretically even play across domains, across goals? And that is, in its purest, most ideal form, a game that only you can play? I think that's what Thompson is driving toward.

And of course, the section this letter is probably most known for, and from which the line that has reverberated in my mind for many years comes:

In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life— the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.

Let’s assume that you think you have a choice of eight paths to follow (all pre-defined paths, of course). And let’s assume that you can’t see any real purpose in any of the eight. THEN— and here is the essence of all I’ve said— you MUST FIND A NINTH PATH.

Here’s to seeking.

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Thanks for reading. Be well, be kind, and reach deep with yourself and others. And, if this stuff resonates with you, please send me your own recommendations!