Dialectic

All links and transcript: dialectic.fm/cab

Are.na channel for this episode: are.na/jackson-dahl/dialectic-cab

Charles Broskoski (Website, Are.na, X), aka Cab, is an artist turned entrepreneur and co-founder & CEO of Are.na, a platform for collecting, connecting, and self-directed learning. I created an are.na channel for all of the references I used in preparation for this episode.

Charles began as an artist before becoming a software engineer, and started Are.na with many collaborators out of a desire to replace the now defunct del.icio.us after it was acquired by Yahoo. He and a range of collaborators have been working on Are.na for nearly 15 years, and he is now focused on it full-time, thanks to the platform’s 18,000 paying subscribers.

While I’m not a longtime Are.na user, I discovered Charles by way of his talk / essay, “Here for the Wrong Reasons” and was enthused by his philosophy of attention and how the things we encounter shape us.

Our conversation centers on patterns of noticing and what it means to know yourself through what you pay attention to, or as Charles calls it, your radar. We discuss creativity as decision-making, self-directed learning and research, and Are.na's channels as frames for what we encounter. We also talk about personal versus performative taste, opinionated design that still gives you space, building something that lasts, and why Charles believes creative people should start deeply personal businesses.

I hope you are inspired to be generous and scrutinizing with your attention, to create things that are personal and durable, and to remember that knowing yourself is a worthy journey of a lifetime.

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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams build their best work. Notion is also where I compile research for episodes and where you can find all links and transcripts. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

Special thanks to Earshot in NYC for hosting us for this conversation.

Timestamps

(0:00) - Opening Highlights

(1:21) - Intro: Charles Broskoski

(4:00) - Thanks to Notion

(5:26) - Start: Creativity as Self-Knowledge and Problem-Solving

(13:37) - Self-directed Learning and Casual Research

(21:33) - Skateboarding, Being a Beginner, In Defense of Posers

(33:26) - Contextual Patterns and Channels

(45:54) - Nodal Points, Your Radar, and Careful Attention

(1:04:57) - Subjectivity, Self-Knowledge, and Taste

(1:15:09) - Performance: Here for Fame and Not Love

(1:22:53) - Aspirational Attention

(1:29:02) - Designing Generous Tools

(1:42:44) - Space in a Product and Fading into the Background

(1:50:01) - Why Creatives Should Be Entrepreneurial & Building an Independent Business Online

(1:54:11) - Patience, Durability, and Antifragility

(1:59:48) - Personal Businesses

(2:10:27) - Grab Bag: Authenticity, Bohm Dialogue, Skateboarding, and Keeping Things Personal

(2:28:28) - Thanks Again to Notion

Full transcript and links: https://dialectic.fm/andrew-reed.

Andrew Reed (X, Website, Sequoia) is a growth investor at Sequoia Capital, where he has invested in companies including Robinhood, Figma, Klarna, Phantom, Vanta, and ElevenLabs. He is quietly one of the best growth investors of his generation.

We begin with how Andrew's competitiveness and humanity coexist—the twin brother rivalry, the football player who also did musicals, the Goldman analyst who came to value people over spreadsheets. He also shares how an early lack of confidence helped him become a great observer of people and situations.

We talk through his approach to investing: why spreadsheets are “always wrong” in one direction, how he underwriters revenue growth, and what he sees in the world-beaters he invests in. We discuss several of his most formative investments—Robinhood as a 27-year-old’s first check, and again during the first week of COVID; Figma at a price people thought was insane; and a 14-second conviction on Vanta’s—and what each taught him about conviction, timing, and not flinching.

Andrew shares his perspective on serving as a board member, knowing when to double down, closing deals, and how craft can be a commercial input. We also talk extensively about Sequoia Capital and its legendary leaders, from Don Valentine, to Doug Leone and Mike Moritz, to newly-appointed Co-Steward Pat Grady. Andrew reflects on what it means to apprentice at an institution where greatness is the expectation and the champagne toast lasts five minutes.

I hope this conversation inspires you to show up ready for the day you don't expect, to rise to the stakes rather than shrink from them, and to move through your life and work a little more lightly.

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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams build their best work. Notion is also where I compile research for episodes and the home of this site where you can find all links and transcripts. My “What are You Building This Year feature with Notion on Instagram.

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Timestamps

(0:00) - Opening Highlights

(2:02) - Intro: Andrew Reed

(3:50) - Thanks to Notion

(5:23) - Start: Humanity, Spotting Weird, and Competitiveness

(19:07) - Investing & Great Founders

(37:53) - Andrew's Style, Pat Grady, and Continuous Learning

(47:31) - Doubling Down and Not Flinching

(56:09) - Empathy on Boards, Learning the Real Business, "Expensive" Prices, and Selling

(1:07:18) - Managing Ego and Becoming a Leader

(1:14:08) - Craft as a Commercial Input, Knowing vs. Feeling, Preparing for Big Days, Becoming a Great Closer

(1:28:39) - Sequoia Capital

(1:38:57) - Don Valentine, Mike Moritz, and Doug Leone

(1:51:29) - Closing Questions

(1:59:08) - Thanks Again to Notion

Transcript and all links: dialectic.fm/mmm

Molly Mielke McCarthy (Website, X, Substack) is an investor, writer, and founder of Moth Fund, an early-stage fund focused on backing "moths": quirky, quiet, mission-driven founders who are often underpriced by traditional venture capital.

Molly's career has been a dance between "peopling" and making. She's held design, product, and editorial roles at Figma, Notion, Stripe Press, and The Browser Company, and explored film, photography, and the arts before finding her way to venture, where she started as a scout for Sequoia Capital. Today, she invests in people at the earliest stages. She also writes beautifully about agency, vocation, discernment, and what it means to live an authentic life.

We begin with how Molly identifies exceptional people—her "three-month rule," spikiness, and why competence is harder to find than storytelling. We discuss the bat signal she sends to attract founders who feel misunderstood, and one of her central distinctions: agency versus ambition, or why playing your own game matters more than playing games others have created. We go deep on commerciality and why it is so essential, and talk about how Molly's work as an investor often looks most like coaching. We also explore legibility versus illegibility: the freedom in not being easily understood, and when it's worth becoming legible. Molly's one of my favorite thinkers on self-knowing, and we talk about how she's navigated uncertainty toward authentically shaping her life and work into a form that fits her.

Molly embodies rare combinations: people-centric yet fiercely individual, intuitive yet pragmatic, truth-seeking yet full of care. I hope this conversation inspires you to yield to your own calling, and to be patient enough to see what's true about yourself and the people around you.

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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams build their best work. Notion is also where I compile research for episodes and the home of my new site where you can find all links and transcripts. My “What are You Building This Year feature with Notion on Instagram.

Timestamps

0:00: Opening Highlights

1:29: Intro to Molly

3:36: Thanks to Notion

5:14: Start: People, Spikeyness, and Discernment

21:36: Agency and Ambition

34:45: Commerciality

49:19: Investing, Feedback Loops, and Creating a Bat Signal

59:46: Coaching and Working with Young People

1:06:54: Self-Knowledge, Uncertainty, "Should," Others' Acceptance, Motivations

1:16:38: Illegibility & Legibility, Principles, Authentic Service

1:29:28: Friends, Seeing in the Third Person, Feminity in a Masculine World, Love

1:42:07: Grab Bag: Art, Catholicism, Gratitude, Beauty

1:58:58: Thanks Again to Notion

All linked references & transcript available at dialectic.fm/trevor-mcfedries.
Trevor McFedries (X, Instagram, Wikipedia) is a musician, technologist, and entrepreneur. Today he is the founder of Runner and 1/2 of electronic dance duo SoFTT. Previously, Trevor was co-founder and CEO of Brud, the company behind Lil Miquela that was acquired by Dapper Labs; Founder of FWB (Friends with Benefits); early artist in residence at Spotify; and a touring DJ who performed as DJ Skeet Skeet, was part of the rap group Shwayze, and produced for a range of artists.
Trevor’s work emerges from a tension he’s lived with throughout his career: the gap between who creates cultural value and who captures it. Growing up poor in Iowa and entering the dying music industry in the late 2000s, he witnessed firsthand how the instruments that capture value rarely benefit the creative people who generate that value. This has run across his entrepreneurial work, from building virtual pop stars to a range of crypto projects that hope to give creative people more upside.
Trevor bridges culture and technology, art and capital, and high and low. I’ve met few people who are as consistently ahead of culture. His perspective challenges both the art world’s disdain for commerce and Silicon Valley’s shallow engagement with culture, arguing instead for creative people to play the game on the field and build the instruments that will make them rich. Today, he’s focused on how that may end up being as much about predicting what’s next with stakes as it is actually making things. We also talk about authenticity and honesty, why he continues to spend time in crypto despite it being low status, why speculation is rational and selling out is punk, how power comes from consensus, his keen nose for weird—especially on the internet, briefly working with Kanye West, and his forever optimistic curiosity.
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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams build their best work. Notion is also where I compile research for episodes and the home of my new site where you can find all links and transcripts. You can read more about why Notion embodies Dialectic’s values and our partnership announcement here. My “What are You Building This Year feature with Notion on Instagram.

Full episode transcript and all linked references available at https://dialectic.fm/c-thi-nguyen.

C. Thi Nguyen (Website, Philpeople.org, X) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah focused on values, games, agency, art, aesthetics, and data. His new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game is out now.
Thi is also the author of Games: Agency as Art, in which he explores how game designers work in the medium of agency, but sculpting a players abilities, goals, and obstacles to create "harmonious action." I first learned about Thi's work via his interview with Ezra Klein in 2022, which is one of my all-time favorite podcast episodes. In it, he discusses Agency as Art, How Twitter Gamifies Communication, Why Q-Anon is game-like, and more.
The Score is a marriage of his work on games and on data and metrics. He explores how scoring systems in games allow for playfulness and agentic exploration of our values, while scoring systems in real life produce what he calls value capture. In an effort to make the world more quantified, comprehensible, and trustless, metrics are flattening our values and sapping the meaning out of our lives. One way he describes his work is that James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State also applies to the human soul.
In this conversation, I aimed to cover the most compelling ideas in the book in two parts. First, we explore the local side: personal agency and values, attention and the difference between recognition and perception, process vs. outcome, and why playfulness and openness allow us to have richer lives. He also shares how games are a compelling template for this kind of exploration.
Second, we talk about the societal level: what we miss in a world of values dominated by what is easily measurable, how we can scale trust and enjoy the benefits of collaboration, science, and technology while not delegating our understanding to the wrong people, and why objectivity and truth are not always the same thing. Thi makes the case that technology is value-laden, not value-neutral, and that we must be more vigilant and nuanced in our approach to the ethical decisions that exist everywhere.
I hope this conversation is a prompt for you and I to think more deeply about what we truly care about, to "move lightly" between agentic and value-laden worlds, and bring a perceptive playfulness to our lives. Remember, we are all grasshoppers in disguise. If you enjoy the episode, please support Thi's work and check out The Score.
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