Dialectic 46: Nicole Seah (Nix) - Loving What is Real
Nicole Seah (Nix) — writer and investor who profiles founders and launched New Ontologies. She explores beauty as attention and strangeness, the choice of reality over fantasy, and balancing multiple identities. Conversations range across craft, techne, memory, desire, and why other people’s unknowability is beautiful.
01:55:13
Observe Founders Ambiently Rather Than Only 30 Minute Pitches
- Spend uncontrived time with founders to see how they work; ambient observation reveals patterns hidden in pitch meetings.
- Nicole spent weeks with Ando's team and argues casual proximity (walks, rides, dinners) yields better signals for judgment.
Memory Is Remixed As Media And Tools Evolve
- Memory shifts as medium change: from communal transmission to individualized, remixable artifacts shaped by printing and digital tools.
- Nicole links historical media, context windows, and LMs to argue writing now enables distributed remixing and new communal memories.
Write To Be Remixed And Redistributed
- Make writing communal and remixable so other people can integrate and reuse it, expanding its practical impact.
- Nicole says research on LM memory pushed her to design writing that others can remix into their own projects.
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Intro
00:00 • 1min
How Beauty Became an Orientation
01:15 • 52sec
Ad break
02:07 • 2min
Two Kinds of Beauty: Inward and Outward
03:46 • 3min
Learning to Love Difficult Beauty
06:54 • 4min
When to Persist with a Work
11:13 • 3min
Guidance, Community, and Authentic Appreciation
14:20 • 6min
Choosing Reality Over Fantasy
20:08 • 5min
Making Ideas Meet the World
25:26 • 4min
Multiple Identities and Creative Duality
29:02 • 6min
Seriousness That Enables Playfulness
35:01 • 4min
Commitment, Salvation, and the Romantic Ethic
39:20 • 3min
Habits, Identity, and Sustaining Creative Aliveness
42:48 • 7min
New Ontologies: Telling Ambitious Founder Stories
50:14 • 5min
Techne and the Cosmology of Self
55:03 • 7min
Why Profiles Improve Investing
01:01:34 • 8min
Memory, Latent vs. Living, and Writing as Lineage
01:09:08 • 6min
Practical Memory for Agents and Product
01:14:57 • 4min
Appetite, Desire, and Female Longing
01:18:42 • 5min
Friendship, Creativity, and Soul Resonance
01:23:51 • 10min
Proximity, Rhythm, and Sustaining Bonds
01:34:13 • 2min
The Joy of the Other's Unknowability
01:36:39 • 5min
Solitude Versus Loneliness
01:41:33 • 2min
Noticing, Deep Reading, and Supra-Personal Worlds
01:43:39 • 7min
Craft Standards and the Renewal of Creativity
01:50:23 • 3min
Outro
01:53:39 • 2min
#60014
Starting point
all you need is kill,1979-1996
Hayao Miyazaki
In the first two decades of his career, filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki laid the groundwork for his legendary movies.
Starting Point is a collection of essays, interviews, and memoirs that go back to the roots of Miyazaki's childhood, the formulation of his theories of animation, and the founding of Studio Ghibli.
Before directing such acclaimed films as Spirited Away, Miyazaki was just another salaried animator, but with a vision of his own.
It chronicles his frustrations with the manga and animation industries and emphasizes bringing childhood dreams to life through the power of the moving image.
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Borges and I
Jorge Luis Borges
'Borges and I' is a short essay by Jorge Luis Borges that explores the duality between the public persona of a writer and their private, internal self.
Borges delves into the idea that the 'Borges' who writes, publishes books, and engages with the world is distinct from the 'I' who experiences life, feels emotions, and contemplates existence.
The essay blurs the line between reality and fiction, questioning the nature of identity and the creative process.
Borges suggests that the writer's public self becomes a construct, often overshadowing the authentic self that exists beyond the realm of literature.
The essay is a reflection on the complexities of fame and the challenges of maintaining a sense of self in the face of public perception.
#52843
Appetites
A Cookbook
Anthony Bourdain
Laurie Woolever
Appetites is a home-cooking cookbook that distills Anthony Bourdain's decades of professional cooking and global culinary experiences into a collection of personal favorite dishes.
The book reflects his transition from a globe-trotting chef to a family man, offering recipes for home cooks.
It combines his no-holds-barred style with practical cooking advice.
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Narcissus and Goldmund
Herman Hesse
Narcissus and Goldmund is a philosophical novel by Hermann Hesse that explores the lives of two men with diametrically opposite characters.
Narcissus is an ascetic monk devoted to spiritual pursuits, while Goldmund is a sensual wanderer seeking love and experience.
Their friendship serves as a backdrop to explore themes of identity, morality, and the search for meaning in life.
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Siddhartha
Herman Hesse
Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha" is a philosophical novel that follows the spiritual journey of a young man named Siddhartha Gautama.
The story explores themes of self-discovery, enlightenment, and the search for meaning beyond material possessions.
Siddhartha's experiences with various aspects of life, including sensuality, asceticism, and worldly pursuits, lead him to a deeper understanding of himself and the universe.
The novel's evocative prose and profound insights into the human condition have resonated with readers for generations.
Hesse's exploration of spiritual awakening and the interconnectedness of all things makes "Siddhartha" a timeless classic.
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Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees
Lawrence Weschler
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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
George Saunders
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays by Joan Didion that captures the essence of 1960s America, especially in California.
The book includes twenty essays that cover a wide range of topics, from the counterculture movement in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to personal narratives and character portraits.
Didion's essays explore themes such as the decline of traditional values, the disillusionment of the American Dream, and the tumultuous social changes of the era.
The title essay, 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' is a vivid portrayal of the hippie culture and its contrast with its idealized representations, drawing imagery from W.B.
Yeats' poem 'The Second Coming.
' The collection also includes essays like 'On Keeping a Notebook' and 'Goodbye to All That,' which reflect on Didion's personal life and writing habits.
Through her keen observations and vivid storytelling, Didion provides an unflinching and insightful overview of America during the 1960s.
#155
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The Power Broker
Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Robert Caro
This book is a monumental biography of Robert Moses, who was the single most powerful man in New York City and State during his time.
It explores how Moses accumulated and wielded power, shaping the city through his public works projects, including highways, bridges, and parks.
The book delves into Moses's early life, his idealistic beginnings, and his transformation into a powerful figure who dominated New York's politics without ever being elected.
It also highlights the social and environmental impacts of his projects and his eventual fall from power.
The biography is renowned for its detailed and nuanced portrayal of power dynamics in urban politics.
Nicole Seah (X, Substack, LinkedIn), aka Nix, is a writer at Starting From Nix and investor at Costanoa Ventures. She recently launched New Ontologies, where she profiles founders and companies thinking ambitiously about the future. Her first piece is live now, on Ando: the team building a chat platform for the era of agents.
Nicole balances identities with poise, moving between the literary and the practical. I spoke to her about different kinds of beauty and how it takes us out of ourselves, Nietzsche’s case for tolerating strangeness, and choosing reality over fantasy. Then we discuss duality and balancing intensity and lightness, and talk through Borges, Hesse, Miyazaki, Alyssa Liu, and Joan Didion. Nicole argues that freedom comes from not collapsing yourself into a single identity. I asked her about the drive behind New Ontologies, her obsession with techne, and Rebecca Solnit's "cosmology of self.” We then skate across a range of ideas, including memory, appetite and desire, and friendship and why other people’s unknowability is part of what makes them wonderful.
I hope this conversation inspires you to look for and love what is real, to be patient with and attuned to the multiple people inside you, and to give freely with your creative life.
Full transcript and all links and references: dialectic.fm/nix.
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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Notion recently launched custom agents: helpful AI teammates that handle recurring work across your entire suite of tools. Automate you and your team’s repetitive tasks so you can focus on the deep work. Inside Notion by Brie Wolfson & Camille Ricketts for Colossus. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.
Timestamps:
- 00:00 - Opening Highlights
- 01:14 - Intro to Nicole
- 02:04 - Thanks to Notion
- 03:48 - Start: Beauty — Effort, Attention, Strangeness
- 19:59 - Fantasy and Reality
- 29:41 - Multiple Identities, Intensity, and Lightness
- 49:08 - New Ontologies: Profiling Founders Building the Future
- 1:08:57 - Memory, Lineage, and Process
- 1:18:41 - Appetite and Honesty
- 1:23:47 - Friendship, Proximity, and The Unknowability of the Other
- 1:41:18 - Closing Notes: Solitude, Noticing, and Generosity
- 1:53:40 - Thanks Again to Notion