Colin Marshall

Delusional Bubbles, Light Sculpting and Finding Good Guys in Creativity: a conversation with Blake Williams

Blake Williams is a Texas-born, Toronto-based video artist, installation artist and critic. When I first stumbled upon his cinema blog, R and G and B, I instantly understood that he was a pretty sharp character. While most bloggers on film simply write about whatever they happen to see, Williams' posts cover primarily the most interesting names in the medium: Terrence Malick, Alan Zweig, Sangsoo Hong, Miklos Jancsó, Werner Herzog. You know, the ones worth, like, talking about. When I found out that this unsually smart critical perspective accompanies actual art-making skill, I knew I had to engage the man in a conversation.

Colin Marshall: Because what initially hooked me about your blog is the particular selection of pictures you choose to cover, we might first want to establish what we can of your — as people often call this hazy, amorphous quality — "critical perspective." But I can't simply ask you what your critical perspective is, since that doesn't even provide the barest framework within which to answer, so let's reveal it this way: could you name a few of the filmmakers who most frequently and most fully satisfy your viewing sensibilities? Who can you rely on to turn out the movies most closely aligned with your taste?

Blake Williams: My semi-recent spike in film-watching (and, recently, blogging) began as a research tactic for my own video work. Though what I make still rests snugly in the 'fine art' category, I've easily been more inspired by certain films than art in gallery exhibitions. The best film to my taste, then, is one that has an aspect of it that I respond to intensely enough that it evolves into something that I can, without any feelings of plagiarism, call my own. I've probably gotten just as much use from "bad" cinema as the "good."

If I were having a massive idea and productivity strike, I might first turn to the oeuvres of guys like James Benning, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, David Lynch and Jacques Tati (though, if we're strictly talking good cinema for good cinema, I've yet to be anywhere near disappointed by Mr. Kiarostami).

Colin Marshall: Kiarostami has never disappointed me either. But as a friend once told me, "I mentally divide the people I know into two groups: those who get Kiarostami and those who don't." While I wouldn't quite make it an issue of "getting" his work, I do sense a pretty stark divide between his appreciators and the rest of the filmgoing world. I've tried to introduce my own friends to his pictures, and those disinclined to enjoy them don't tend to give an inch. What would you say Kiarostami does right that other filmmakers don't? What about his work do you think puts off some people?

Abbas Kiarostami: the coolest man alive?

Blake Williams: I'm clearly living in a delusional bubble where everyone loves Kiarostami! Especially living in Toronto, where the Cinematheque Ontario's best of the 90s poll last decade had all four of Kiarostami's films in the top twelve or something ridiculous. He's no Almodóvar, for sure, who appeals to anyone willing to read subtitles, but I've never understood the occasional complaint of pretension that A.K. gets called out on. It's like once he stopped making didactic kids' films (very good ones though, to be sure) and started playing with narrative and postmodern twists, people finally found something to criticize him for.

I think Kiarostami's films can be very clever, but what really gets me is all of the hidden emotion in the veins of his work. Whether I'm watching one of his early shorts or his Koker trilogy or his award-winning 90s stuff, its obvious that he understands the most basic elements of human happiness and sorrow, and pulls them out at just the right moments. I'm still waiting for my first Kiarostami experience in a theatre, which I expect will change the way I see his films once again, for the better.

Colin Marshall: A bubble where everyone loves Kiarostami? Jeez, where might this bubble be located? I wouldn't mind moving in myself.

As much as I'd like to spend this entire interview discussing A.K. — either the Iranian one or the Japanese one, really — I should do a little more exploration of the other names you've dropped. You happened to name another one of my own very favorite filmmakers, Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul. (I even devoted an entire 3Quarksdaily column to Syndromes and a Century.) Either surprisingly or totally unsurprisingly, I've encountered the same problem with his work: I love it more than almost anything else on celluloid, yet when I show it to friends it flops more often than it flies.

And so the exercise in revealing critical perspective continutes: what about Weerasethakul's cinema fires you up? What has he mastered that most filmmakers haven't? When you're about to watch a Weerasethakul film, what about it do you most look forward to savoring?

The greatest moment of 21st-century cinema

Blake Williams: With Apichatpong there's definitely no bubble, unfortunately. When Strand released their DVD of Syndromes and a Century at the beginning of 2008, I told all of my art school friends to anticipate a movie night when I got the disc in the mail. Well, the disc came, and so did the people. I had about fifteen people over and I showed them the film. There was respectful silence throughout, but when it ended three or four of them just went off, criticizing the film's lack of plot, incoherence, emptiness, "pretty pictures and nothing more." That negative tone overshadowed the general mood, and I think everyone ended up leaving feeling pretty ambivalent about it. I was very disturbed by this, because I thought that it was a film above all skepticism and cynicism, but that proved to very much not be the case.

I certainly don't anticipate Apichatpong's films for an emotional response like I do with Kiarostami's, but it's not an intellectual one either. There's an intuitive satisfaction that is beyond my comprehension that floors me in his work. I wouldn't know where to begin if I tried to convince anyone that the vacuum in the steam room at the end of Syndromes is potentially the best cinematic moment of the 21st century, but I believe it to be the case. Likening his work to hypnosis feels cheap, and it isn't merely spiritual or ethereal. I don't think I've learned the adjective to describe the best quality of his work, but when I do, that's my answer to your question.

Colin Marshall: Indeed, despite all I've written — er, tried to write — about his work, I fall just short of conveying the element you're talking about. Suffice to say that I heartily agree about that steam pipe representing the current high point of 21st-century cinema. I do admit to more than a little surprise, though, that your art student compatriots couldn't get with it. I'd have thought that the sort of person interested in pursuing an entire art education would be more than open to an experience like Syndromes.

Before I ask more about your own art education and art career, though, I must spend some time on the first favorite filmmaker you named, who I would bet also happens to be the least known of them all: James Benning. He's currently talked about for what are called his "landscape films," RR, Casting a Glance, 13 Lakes and Ten Skies, which you wrote a post reviewing in April. What do Benning's films express to you that others' — even Weerasethakul's and Kiarostami's — don't?

James Benning's RR (representative still)

Blake Williams: Benning is more of a visual artist in the traditional sense than the other two, never addressing or showing an interest in narrative, using film as an art medium like video art uses video; I guess avant-garde filmmaking is how it's categorized. He tackles two of my favorite subjects in his work, landscape and duration, and does it quite well. I've only scratched the surface of durational filmmaking (Snow, Warhol, Ono, and Benning), but Benning's work is the most welcoming and "pure" that I know. (Though I hate using that word when discussing cinema, Benning is the most deserving.) But more than addressing the most basic formal and structural characteristics of the medium (the temporal length of the reel, the successive, forward motion it is locked into, etc.), he's documenting the American landscape during one of the most rapidly transitional periods it has seen, both industrially and meteorologically. It's all so simple, but heavily weighted with beautiful ideas.

Colin Marshall: And this brings me to what I've come to consider one of the most important issues of perspective in filmgoing. When you think of cinema, what form do you consider it the primary descendant of? I was just reading an old interview with Peter Greenaway, probably the most well-known of the painter-turned-filmmakers, wherein he explains his view that cinema is a descendant of visual art, and that it only produces anything of value when considered that way. This is, I guess, opposed to cinema's being a descendant of a more necessarily narrative-driven form, like live theater. Which branches do you see as the most relevant of film's family tree?

Blake Williams: This assumes that live theatre isn't visual art, which I think it is. In that sense, then, film was just an evolution of that medium. If they (theatre and visual art) are different, I'd say that it's a descendant of visual art, and was a mainstay because of its close relationship to theatre. Like most new technologies (video, internet, HD), they're embraced by the masses and incorporated into forms that are more useful to "them" before they are in the price range of the artists, who then make use of the technologies in their work. Film seems to have been invented and then quickly utilized as a storytelling medium after the very early developmental, experimental years in which the Lumiere bros. were playing around with it — before it was used for more "fine art" purposes by the dadaists and surrealists. There are always some visual artists who are able to sneak in — usually because of wealth acquired from an already established, commercial body of work — and utilize these newer technologies while they're still brand new (for the HD boom, Bill Viola was an early bird), and I think this work has its pluses and minuses (respectively, its ability to be created without influence, and its gimmicky, novelty qualities).

Personally, I am drawn towards filmmaking that rides a line between visual art and theatre (narrative).

Colin Marshall: And this brings us to your career in visual and video art, of which readers can get a pretty solid idea on your site. Reading your statement, one comes away with the notion that your sensibility as a filmgoer and your sensibility as a visual and installation artist are inextricable from one another. Could you describe a bit about how the cinema you view and the art you make influence one another? I imagine you draw plenty of inspiration from filmmakers, but do your art experiences double back and shape how you select and view movies?

Blake Williams: I don't think my art-making influences my movie watching. Rather, I make things that I like, and I watch things that I think I'll like based on my taste, so there will be similarities I suppose. Although I've been working primarily with video in the last few years, I consider myself more of a "light sculptor," if I have to choose one medium. Sometimes I will build these sculptures, but, lately, I've ended up imagining these sculptures in the video world, in works that are fictionalized documentations of the would-be sculptures and installations. This will only happen if the idea for the sculpture/installation is too ambitious for me to realize it in real space, either because of my limited budget, or, more likely, that it's not really possible for it to be built.

In these video incarnations, I've certainly tended toward a more cinematic display of the ideas, which could be extraneous to the point — that, being, to document a sculpture that doesn't, and never will, exist — and I think that that comes from the fact that almost all of my art heroes and influences are from cinema history rather than art history. I'm only recently diving into the dense art history that I've been missing out on (I nixed all of my art history courses in undergrad for film history courses), so I'll see where that goes.


Blake Williams' "The Storm" (2009)

Colin Marshall: Well, hey, the practice documenting entities that don't actually exist has a respectable history. I mean, what Borges wrote alone...

But your desire to commit nonexistent sculpture to video notwithstanding, I can't help but watch a piece like "The Storm" and see cinema at its core. I view it and think, "Damn, I want to see the rest of that movie." It's got a sensibility I wish more full-length films had. I daresay that I appreciate some of its moments in the same way that I'd appreciate an Apichatpong Weerasethakul view of the manmade world meeting the natural. So do you have any interest, even an inkling, in making what could be called "movies," as opposed to what's normally called "video art"?

Blake Williams: By saying "Damn, I want to see the rest of that movie," do you mean that it feels like an opening chapter, maybe even unfinished? Or is it that you want to see a feature with similar interests and sensibilities?

I don't see myself ever making anything that could be described as a feature film, but I could see myself extending my work to over the hour mark in a few years if the project warrants it. Most of the work feels like sketches to me anyway, so I can't justify drawing it out just because I love features. There's also this fear that I have of working with actors, or pretty much anyone else. Right now I have to have complete control of every single facet of a production — the camera, sound, subject, editing, et al — so I wouldn't trust an actor unless it was myself. I like the cinema crowd more than I like the art crowd in general, though, so I'm not through with trying to find a way to become more associated with that somehow. I submit my videos to short film festivals more often than I submit to art galleries, for what it's worth.

Colin Marshall: By saying "Damn, I want to see the rest of that movie," I don't mean that the piece feels unfinished — it feels like a coherent whole — but that, indeed, I'd want to see a feature with similar interests and sensibilities, especially aesthetically speaking. While it stands on its own, I can also watch it as something of a "trailer" for a nonexistent feature-length experience.

Oh, I totally know what you mean about the whole fear-of-working-with-actors thing. On one hand, I realize full well that collaboration is an engine of all manner of artistic innovation and surprise, but on the other hand... I don't really get along with actors that well.

Since you've worked and interacted in both artistic and cinematic circles, then, what perspective do you have on the difference between them? What sort of qualities of their people lead you to prefer the "cinema crowd" to the "art crowd"?

Blake Williams: Just a slight edge in modesty, I guess. All of my good friends are "art people," but then they are my friends. When I talk to curators, art critics, academics, established artists, regardless of how they feel about my work, there is almost always more condescension than there has a right to be. I think I've worked my way into a corner though, because I'm remembering that it's the same way with many film guys I've met too, I just don't know as many personally. I think good guys are hard to find in most fields of creativity.

Joyful Craft, Fuck-You Money and Entrepreneur's Disease: a conversation with Alex J. Mann

In an attempt to follow a conversation as scintillating as the one I had with Andy McKenzie, I've turned to the font of curiosity and entrepreneurial enthusiasm that is Alex J. Mann. By way of an introduction, I'll copy-paste a selection of his, er, introduction:

I’m 23 years old. I live in San Francisco. I’ve previously lived in New York City, Philadelphia and Florence. I mean business, but I like to relax. I’ve accomplished minor success, but it wasn’t easy. Nothing worthwhile ever is. I’ve previously started two businesses of my own, and failed gracefully. Failure is always more constructive than success; it’s also less fun. I’m currently running my third venture, which I raised seed funding for. I also research and consult independently for people and companies I admire. I enjoy traveling, and have visited 15+ countries. I plan to visit the rest soon. The more you learn about other people, the more you learn about yourself. My ideal world is one where we define ourselves by our joyful craft, rather than our dreadful career. I believe good art is the best business. I have no idea what I want to do with my life.

We'd been talking over e-mail when the subject turned to entrepreneurship, the conditions that affect the modern young entrepreneur and how that self-starting impulse fits into the broader world of human creation. At that point, the conversation became simply too interesting not to take public.

Alex Mann: The concept of entrepreneurship is often stuffed into a little box, limited to specific concentrations of business. A simple Google search for the term brings up what appears to be an overpriced MBA course on the subject. What I think is missing, and what I attempt to evangelize, is its applications outside "business as usual." For instance, breaking down how an artist or writer looks at risk, return and opportunity cost. Paul Graham articulates his business well. But the anomalies are less traditional business-types like David Byrne and Takashi Murakami, who view their art as investments.

As a journalist, how do you take and measure risk? Journalism is an evolving -- not dying -- industry. How have the changes affected your work output and risk appetite?

Colin Marshall: I should first admit that, if I call myself a journalist, I'll only be 25 to maybe 75 percent correct. My work breaks, roughly, into four "quadrants": broadcasting/interviewing, writing/essayism, film/video and sound/music. (Not that they're compartmentalized: essay films, sound-art broadcasts and written interviews like this one all happen at the borders.) Only the first two seem to me to be inherently journalistic pursuits, though the third, given my interest in documentary, isn't without journalistic qualities.

That said, I find I measure risk in my journalistic capacities in pretty much the same way that I measure risk in my other ones. That is to say, I overestimate it -- as almost every human being does -- and the overestimation hurts me. The real humor in this is that journalism, in the forms that interest me, is an un-risky sort of endeavor. (I've never been one of those Young Fourth Estate Types who dreams of clandestinely meeting Deep Throat to learn the dark state secrets that, by god, the American people deserve to know.) Journalism, as I practice it, is for me more of a tool to learn about subjects with which I'm less familiar, make connections with interesting (i.e., stuff-doing) people, raise my public profile for improved attraction of randomness and lay the groundwork for future projects.

I don't think I'd want journalism to be my "job," though, partially because I am uncomfortable with the idea of a "job" but also because, at least at the present moment, I'd have to deal with the thousands of old-guard hand-wringers deeply convinced that, contra your point, journalism is dying, not evolving. Then again, if the maintenance of my food-and-shelter supply chain relied entirely on the functioning of a no-longer-functional business model, I'd be bitching and moaning too. Business evolution is the death of one model and the rise of another, but the death-of-journalism types only care about the one leaving the building.

Not being a career journalist, I care mostly about the newer model(s). My expectations of journalism do not include a lifelong meal ticket, a retirement package or much directly measurable payout at all, really. My expectations of journalism do include a free hand to excel -- because whatever doesn't offer much of a paycheck must offer that freedom -- and the opportunity to accrue the aforementioned knowledge, profile, reach and stuff-doing friends. (Not to mention the fat speaking fees that truly sharp journalistic types like Charlie Rose command. But then, I enjoy public speaking too.)

I feel on a basic level as if I could approach all four of "quadrants" entrepreneurially. Perhaps it's not too far beyond the pale to call myself a talk show entrepreneur. But I'm not quite sure how to articulate what, exactly, constitutes the entrepreneurial approach itself. When you talk about entrepreneurship outside "business as usual," how far, to your mind, can it extend? What operating qualities do you find that David Byrne and Takashi Murakami share with any dozen successful Silicon Valley guys we could name?

Alex Mann: Entrepreneurship is an applied mindset acquired over time. To be an entrepreneur, it requires thinking and feeling like one, which takes practice. The perception of the term is convoluted due to what's taught in business school and the repetitive industry blogs flaunting it as their theme. While I admire the tech entrepreneurs profiled obsessively on the web, it's the artistic outliers I find truly fascinating.

The extension of entrepreneurship, or my interpretation of it, would probably be clear with a definition. At that, I'll funnel the wisdom of Paul Graham and say that entrepreneurship is "making something that people want." It's a liberal representation, but in all fairness, it should be. The "making something" aspect can be anything, including, but not limited to: interviews, essays, software, music, art, communities and ice cream. The "that people want" aspect is more defined, assuming economic tangibility and an understanding of supply and demand.

Crunching the phrase together would proclaim you're making stuff good enough that someone, somewhere in the world, will pay you more than it cost to make. Successful entrepreneurs leverage the relationship between the two halves of the phrase to their favor. This is why the guy that's actually scooping the ice cream isn't an entrepreneur, even though he's technically "making stuff people want." The guy who scouts the location of the shop, develops a unique formula, builds an efficient serving system and manages a skilled team to execute the entire operation, is an entrepreneur. He's made something out of nothing, or, he's made more out of less.

The reason a stereotypical entrepreneur is a technology entrepreneur is because the software business has relatively low barriers of entry. You can develop a piece of software at the cost of an engineer's time and server fees, both continuously dropping in price. The low financial cost of developing software adds leverage to the "making something out of nothing" relationship. The financial "something" can prove to be relatively large, simply because your inputs, mostly time, are comparatively slim. Successful tech entrepreneurs are noticeable, and thus stereotypical, because their return on investment is often quickly substantial.

The operational practices of David Byrne and Takashi Murakami are unique, and using my purposely scattered criteria, are arguably entrepreneurial figures:

David Byrne and the Talking Heads invented a fresh genre of sound by combining punk, world, electronic and rock. Similar to Byrne, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs develop software by choosing sporadic features from existing platforms and molding them into a unique creation. Looking at the progression of social networks, from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter, the "pick what works and drop what doesn't" evolution is apparent. Also, the Talking Heads live shows weren't concerts; they were meticulously engineered performances (i.e. Stop Making Sense). Technologists, like Byrne, are concerned with product perception, including engineered design. Byrne understood the importance of design to marketing, and so do successful Valley entrepreneurs.

Takashi Murakami popularized a new wave of pop art, like nothing since Andy Warhol, and has a team of artists working under him to execute his grandiose vision. Like Murakami, an entrepreneur, specifically the Valley types, often have teams working behind the scenes allowing them to appear "bigger than they are." Technical ideas are rarely executed by just one person, as a surplus of development tasks can be outsourced and uncredited. Also, Murakami's work is a business platform beyond paintings, expanding to books, film, sculpture and even handbags. He's has created a global brand that sells itself in unexpected genres. Entrepreneurs hope for business development this effective.

The connection between art and entrepreneurship is based on the continuous experimentation involved with each activity. It's an instinct as much as it's a skill. An artist chooses from an unlimited variety of colors, strokes a brush on a canvas and patiently reworks and edits until a picture appears. An entrepreneur chooses from an unlimited variety of hypothesized ideas, tests a market, and diligently works a revenue model until a business appears. Murakami, Byrne or any Silicon Valley entrepreneur experiments often and has learned to fail quickly if they must.

What is your entrepreneurial process, from start to finish, for any one of your artistic compartments? What is your creative daily routine? My parallels to Byrne and Murakami are less traditional icons for someone in business. I've reviewed your list of icons. Who's practice is most "out" of your arena?

Colin Marshall: That's one of the finest definitions of entrepreneurship that I've read. It's certainly most appealing, especially those bits about "pick what works and drop what doesn't" evolution, about "continuous experimentation involved with each activity." That is a mindset that I've consciously attempted to apply to much of what I do or produce. I could stand to up the rate of mutation in my work, actually -- I suspect I fall victim to staleness of formula somewhat too often.

And yes, the Graham command "make something people want" deserves all the thought one wants to give it. I know I enjoy making stuff, but gauging what "people want" seems like an altogether tougher nut to crack. Then again, hasn't Graham also written about this? My mind returns to his essay "Copy What You Like", in which he advises the reader to look to their own genuine pleasures in order to find out what people want, because hey, they're a person too. Here he gets his point across by describing what happened when he didn't do this:

When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number one. The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which people suffered in complicated ways. Anything funny or gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Mistake number two. The ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing. But since their size made them perfect for use in high school classes, we read a lot of them, which gave us the impression the short story was flourishing. Mistake number three. And because they were so short, nothing really had to happen; you could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that was considered advanced. Mistake number four. The result was that I wrote a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone was unhappy in a way that seemed deep.

One problem, though: I do genuinely enjoy a lot of those short stories he seems to be talking about.

In any case, whatever one could call my "creative daily routine" turns out to be highly variable, since I have to wedge it in around "regular work," that is to say, the stuff that pays me cash bucks but is not broadcasting/interviewing, writing/essayism, film/video or sound/music. (I'm not sure how much sense it makes to organize life this way at my age, but bear with me.) But, to whip out my own horn and toot, I'm pretty good at that. Which is not to confuse skill at a practice with the practice itself being tenable, but still.

Pretty much everything I do has its basis in writing, since that's where the bulk of my thinking happens. In its involvement with concrete reality via manipulable symbols and responding readers, I find writing has an enormous advantage over pure thinking. I would submit that my creative routines are cyclical, and begin with absorbing some input from the world -- films, books, music, blog posts -- thought-digesting this input by writing about it here or elsewhere and then using what I write as a prompt for other types of action. I might write up a movie, write up an album, and then learn from the writing process that I should combine them into a video or something. To use a stupid-simple example.

If I could be said to have ever used an "entrepreneurial process," it would be in the development of my most fully-realized project, The Marketplace of Ideas. That phrase almost misrepresents it, though, since it's almost ludicrously un-nuanced:

1. Flip on Charlie Rose, notice that I like interview shows
2. Discover podcasts, notice that technology has arrived that a such a point that interview shows can be produced on the cheap
3. Remember that I am licensed to broadcast on a local radio station
4. Simultaneously assemble podcasting gear and FM program proposal
5. Send out "feeler" e-mails to potential guests
6. Record, distribute interviews
7. ?
8. Profit

But! Your elegant definition above states that an entrepreneur "chooses from an unlimited variety of hypothesized ideas, tests a market, and diligently works a revenue model until a business appears." In this case, I did choose a hypothesized idea. Unless you count looking at my download stats and nodding solemnly as market testing, though, I haven't done any market testing. Nor have I given thought one to revenue models, at least in the sense of revenue models for the show itself.

I recall once reading an interview with The Sound of Young America host/producer Jesse Thorn wherein he admitted that, when he thinks about delivering what the market wants, he looks at the market and a voice within him says, "Eww, the market wants that?" I think I harbor a little bit of that voice myself. Jesse uses a donation model, which has made him a success but with which I would be for some reason uncomfortable. I think quite a bit about the revenue model of my life as a whole, and in that context no given individual project necessarily needs one of its own.

I'll interpret your question about which of my icons is, in what I know of their own creative/entrepreneurial processes, most different from me. The obvious answer, to work his name into this response as many times as humanly possible, is Paul Graham. As a past internet tech startup founder and current internet tech startup funder, he would seem to reside in a different universe than me. Yet in his essays, he thinks brilliant and clearly about many of the same issues I do -- and sometimes he seems to be the only other guy who does.

John Brockman's working style also appears to bear little similarity to my own. As an organizer and literary agent, he remains behind the scenes much more than I do (or would want to), and as someone who works primarily with science and engineering types, he's also quite distinct from my own subject areas. But on a fundamental level, he's in the basic business of communicating with other humans, which I suppose is also my thang (and the thang of everyone in the icon rectangle, I'd argue).

I'm now going to take this entrepreneurship angle in an even more personal direction. What provided your own entrée into entrepreneurship? Friends? Family? Mentors? School? Surroundings? You just decided to get into it out of the blue? What was your journey from guy-with-an-inkling-that-being-an-entrepreneur-might-be-neat to legit entrepreneur?

Alex Mann: My entrée into the land of entrepreneurship, or whatever you'd like to call it, breaks down into a relatively easy answer and a personally difficult, somewhat self-indulgent answer. The easy answer is a bit of the Gladwellian Outlier equation, where a mix of luck, timing and cultural advantage guided me into it. The difficult answer is admittedly a combination of my stubbornness to bureaucracy, the urge to be creative and the audacity to do things on my own terms. Both factors have become reliant and dependent on each other, while each of the inputs you named have played a role as well:

Friends: Friends, at least initially, did not play a major role in my career choice, although they did play a role in my personality development. Through my friends, I had a knack for being competitive both psychologically and physically, while always in good fun. Currently, on the other hand, a few friends play a crucial role as an entrepreneurial support team. Business decisions, especially in what I do, can be so ambiguous that it's beneficial to have someone around not afraid to call you out on being irrational, idiotic or crazy. These friends, however, were developed after I started diving into entrepreneurial projects.

Family: Family was influential, even though it was through hindsight that I was able to recognize it. I was brought up in a household that encouraged me to earn the things I wanted, resulting in me working from a fairly young age. I remember feeling slightly rebellious attempting to pave my own way (to the extent that I could) as an adolescent, rather than relying on an allowance. It sounds silly now, but it built a foundation for projects to come. Also, my father runs a business and he's an artist, so my appeal to that combination of capitalistic design makes sense as well.

Mentors: I've been grateful enough to seek out a select handful of mentors that are both doing what I want to be doing and doing it in a way that's personally appealing. Even when I find myself damagingly particular, it's soothing to know those I look up to have made their radical aspirations a reality. The path I'm on has been shaped by mentors, although it hasn't necessarily been determined by them. They mostly act as reinforcement.

School: Contrary to my feelings on the university system in regards to academic applicability, I'll take a chance of sounding hypocritical my admitting my school, not my schooling, was influential on my entrepreneurial endeavors. In addition to studying finance, an aspect of my degree was deemed "engineering entrepreneurship," allowing me to pursue my own projects and courses while getting graded on them respectively. Fortunately, the professors I worked with were not just academics; they were "been-there, done-that" entrepreneurs. The degree flexibility allowed me the time to focus on what I wanted, instead of what the university wanted.

Surroundings: As I mentioned before, I come from a family of artists, so that part of the equation was natural, especially in my fondness for people like David Byrne and Takashi Murakami. I also grew up constantly listening to music, especially hip-hop (I grew up in the suburbs, who didn't?). The hip-hop artists I listened to had a unique way of gaming the system, or at least pretending to. Either way, from a young age, I identified the existence of the hustler's advantage. Meaning, I recognized a way to win a system not by conning or trickery, but by using your mind.

The path of entrepreneurship didn't pop out of the blue. It was a long equation of factors, some described above. I remember one of my first businesses, perhaps marking the start of the journey, was when I was 11 or 12 years old and CD burners were released into the market. I recall scanning computer store pamphlets in the mail identifying where I could purchase the cheapest device, reviewing listings for blank discs and finally raping my 56K modem limitations as I downloaded every Billboard Hot 100 song on Napster. I then sold discs for $5 to $10 a piece. The lower range was for copies of complete albums I owned and the higher range was for customized mixes. I always charged girls less. Since then, I've become less sympathetic to gender, while more sympathetic to the viability of the music industry.

I've experimented with other projects, including failed startups and even working on a trading desk at an investment bank on Wall Street. Like any skill, making money takes practice, especially if you want to enjoy what you're doing. Occasionally, this may mean leaving a piece of your dignity at the door. Like you said, artists often begrudge the economic process by saying "eww, the market wants that?" But, when you look at the guys who have won, they've all partially "gave in" at some point or another to get where they are now.

My journey was a combination of me doing what I wanted, people telling me I couldn't, trying something else, not liking it, and again doing what I wanted with the maturity and empathy to make it work. I assume I'll go through this cycle a few more times as well. Ultimately, I have realized I enjoy working on startup businesses. It's not because startups are entrepreneurial; it's because they are vehicles for entrepreneurial people.

Colin Marshall: And thus, as we continue down the "entrepreneurial people" subject, we arrive at one the ideas that prompted this whole conversation in the first place: Entrepreneur's Disease. What, third parties reading this might ask, could this awful-sounding malady be? Simply put, Entrepreneur's Disease is how I've bannered an affliction of which I was once vaguely aware, but which I've come up against several times in my efforts to interview entrepreneurs on The Marketplace of Ideas.

Any reader of mine knows that I find entrepreneurs to be some of the most interesting people around. Hell, any reader of this post alone could have figured that out. As an interviewer, I'm thus extremely interested in interviewing entrepreneurs. One of my very first guests on the program, a certain young entrepreneur named Ben Casnocha, turned out to be interesting enough to give me hope for much future entrepreneur-interviewing. Authors? Artists? Broadcasters? Musicians? Scientists? Sure, all solid guest material, I thought, but give me more of these entrepreneurs!

But alas, the dream remains unrealized. I've since found that many entrepreneurs -- if not most of them -- aren't exactly chomping at the bit to be interviewed, and the ones who submit to my questions tend to be either unwilling or unable to answer them with much richness, detail, clarity or connection to other elements of the human condition. When I try to scout out entrepreneurs to talk to, I usually find they can't say much about anything besides their current project's core mission. If that.

I remain at a loss as to why this Entrepreneur's Disease seems to have afflicted so many, to such a degree. When I brought it up with you in an e-mail exchange, you sounded as if you recognized it. So what's your take on the Disease? Is it a real thing, or am I making it up? Is it as bad as it sounds, or do I exaggerate? Can we hope for a cure?

Alex Mann: The entrepreneurial path, shrouded in startups, is life entangling. It's an obsessive journey, especially in the early stages of a company, entrapping the chosen traveler like a giant vampire squid in the hopeful progress of their venture's success. It's truly a selfish establishment where the entrepreneur and respective organization take precedent over most other things in life. It requires ego, aggression, an appetite for risk and probably a few loose screws.

Given the listed symptoms, your coined Entrepreneur's Disease is less a hyperbole and more an actual condition. I mean, what type of nut would choose to put themselves through that? I've never met an entrepreneur who would not be deemed a bit "crazy" if they were let loose in the "business as usual" setting. To use a personal example, a few years ago when I was heavily involved with finance, I wasn't hired for a hedge fund job because they thought I'd "try to takeover the company." And, it wasn't a positive thing. Crazy or not, you really have to love the entrepreneurial process to remain determined on its path. The deck is not slanted in your favor.

The Disease is a real thing, but probably more explicit for the outside observer than it is for even the most self-aware entrepreneur. Articulation of the craft in respect to the human condition is not an easy task. To echo reasons you've already mentioned: it's hard for an entrepreneur to look past their own project and mission. It's a tunnel vision where anything besides the venture is blindly distracting. It's a cruise control of the mind. Careful articulation of "what do you do?" is not in line with how an in-the-moment entrepreneur thinks. This is why one entrepreneur explaining to another entrepreneur "what they do" is painless. They can fill in between the lines, while other people can't.

The rationality for the self-acceptance of the Disease, of course, is the home run. The "fuck you money." The golden relief of success. The result of stuffing an entire career's worth of accumulated wealth into a pot at the end of a startup's life of three to four yours, or in the case of certain companies, one to two years. The method entrepreneurs use to articulate their process, in terms of vision and mission, isn't a crutch; it's their way of viewing their world at any given time. It's not that they don't care about anything else; it's just that caring about anything else takes their eyes off the prize.

Articulation is a hurdle because the entrepreneurial process, again using the example of a startup, is completely ambiguous. Picture a 360 degree circle of arrows pointing outwards, each one beginning with the input of the entrepreneur at the center and ending in a different output at the edge. With each output, the process begins again with an unlimited amount of potential inputs and respective results, each one affecting money available, time-to-live and morale. Knowing the "right" path to take is impossible without the ability to compile the relevant information. This is why an entrepreneur builds a startup with a balanced team, advisory board and investors. It's so they can make the best decisions possible with the most information, improving the odds at any given time.

With that being said, how could a single entrepreneur accurately articulate what they do? The best, most sensible answer would result from an interview with everyone influential in a given entrepreneurial organization.

If I can take a step back, or maybe I already did by attempting to explain the Disease, I'd like to admit, with the chance of contradicting myself, that the majority of the Disease is in the head of the entrepreneur. The work of the entrepreneur--the actual operational work--could be completed during normal work hours and not during the daily twenty-hour time period classically described. As we discussed before, a large aspect of the process is experimentation. With experimentation comes questioning, panicking and even some dreaded freaking out. Most entrepreneurs work the same way they articulate, which is a bit all over the place. So, your exaggeration accurately reflects the Disease, because an exaggerated reality is exactly what the mentality is.

Is it curable? No, I believe it's embedded into the entrepreneurial culture. But can it be alleviated? Sure. Entrepreneurs -- take a deep breath and chill the fuck out. The entrepreneurial paranoid disillusionment has no merit on the success of a venture; it just makes the narrative more dramatic, exciting and egotistic.

What role have you observed ego playing across the fields of art, science and business? Does the inability to explain "what one does" make an interview guest more or less interesting? Do you recall a pattern of successful guests attributing a portion of luck to their personal success? Thirty years from now, what do you envision your body of work to look like?

Colin Marshall: I suspected that Entrepreneur's Disease might be not just a correlated affliction, but a condition springing out of the very nature of the entrepreneur itself. I've heard over and over again that "startups will consume your life. No, really, they'll totally consume your life, and you can't even envision the extent of the utter completeness with which every non-startup aspect of your existence will be decimated and the earth beneath it salted." Sounds like the victims of Entrepreneur's Disease have not just heard that but embraced it, internalized it and loved it.

As unappealing as the life of someone in the heady midst of Entrepreneur's Disease might superficially sound to me -- and probably sounds to many readers -- I must admit my unquashable attractions to (a) bold, audacious moves, (b) complete self-determination, whether it leads to success or failure, (c) endeavors the odds are against and (d) the amassing of fuck-you money. Especially (d). So I probably front like I understand entrepreneurship less than I actually do.

And even though I haven't done much classically-defined entrepreneurial stuff -- yet -- I can tell that your urging fellow entrepreneurs to "take a deep breath and chill the fuck out" is well-advised indeed. Taking a deep breath and chilling the fuck out represents, in fact, a cornerstone of my own approach to life, so I've learned its advantages firsthand. Of course, to take a deep breath and chill the fuck out requires one to rein in the old ego a bit, since a roiling internal demand for self-aggrandizement does not mix well with chilledness.

But some amount of ego is necessary, I would submit, or at least extremely helpful, whether the arena is art, science or business. Though he's perhaps not the most sterling example, I remember once hearing Donald Trump ask, in response to a confrontational Larry King Live caller question about his big ego, "What successful person doesn't have a big ego?" I don't feel that anyone I would consider "successful" lacks an ego, but maybe that's because they all have -- or, more realistically, need -- a high public profile.

I do fear that working to satiate one's own ego, while it could result in some impressive feats, risks turning into the short road to madness. Trump had a solution to that, too: in the same interview, he revealed that, no matter how big a deal he's doing, he constantly reminds himself that "it doesn't matter." He said that, in a world where an earthquake in India, say, might kill thousands of people in a day, it makes no sense to freak about the business gamesmanship you're engaged in, even if it goes south. So there you go: a couple unexpectedly wise lessons from The Donald. Just avoid adopting his tonsorial weltanschauung and you're set.

I've run into surprisingly few totally egotistical interview guests, which surprises me now that I think about it since they tend to be so accomplished, and can usually articulate their motivations intelligently. If I gave them more of an opportunity to chalk those accomplishments up to luck, I could probably separate the humble from the, uh, less humble. But I've never liked the concept of luck, not because I don't believe it exists at all but because I find it so sloppily thought about. Many seem to consider it a purely random absolute determinant of success, but the sharpest people I talk to appear to treat luck more like something they can use rather than something that has its foul way with them. Brian Eno, whom I'd give my left buttock to interview, said it best. I've quoted it before, and I'll quote it again: "Luck is being ready."

Thirty years on, I'll ideally have created as many interesting things as possible in the aforementioned realms of text, film, broadcasting and sound (and, if possible, domains yet unenvisioned). My mandate increasingly consists only of creating interesting things, since creating interesting things leads to making connections with interesting people. That leads to collaborations with said interesting people, one of which I work on as I type right now. That leads to the making of even more interesting things, which leads to even more connections with even more interesting people, all of which makes my life, and those of my collaborators and the fans of the stuff we make, more interesting.

As you can surely tell, what can be created in this manner involves many unpredictable variabled and thus rapidly becomes difficult to envision. Theoretically, I should be able to measure my accomplishment not just by what out there in concrete reality owes its existence to my hand, but by how connected I am to others who make stuff.

Let me turn this around on you. Give me -- give us all -- the bigger picture, as you envision it, for the long-term enterprise that is Alex J. Mann. Let's say you've managed to accrue all the fuck-you money you'd ever need, and you can ignore existing markets with impunity, if you so desire. What sort of project do you start up? I don't need any specifics, and besides, any specific would be incorrect. Freed from any restrictions to which you might currently be subject, what do you start working on?

Alex Mann: In an ideal world, The Project will defy a fine line of craftsmanship between what's traditionally viewed as work and play. The thoughts I'll carry with me out of bed in the morning will remain fluid until I crash restfully at night, all pulsing to the beat of The Project. The Project will remain dynamic to global markets, solving a problem deemed by most as unsolvable. The pride of The Project will be contagious, igniting entrepreneurs to start building and luring corporate drones to quit their jobs to join them. The Project will disperse political laughing gas, surprising the liberals and scaring the shit out of the conservatives. The Project will be remarkably simple, in both design and structure. And regardless of the size of my bank account, I'll strive to make The Project immensely profitable, because profit is the way the invisible hand of the market signals capitalism is working as intended.

To be honest, I have no idea what The Project will be.

You see, my problem is always having too much. To put my finger on what The Project will be still feels, like you said, entrepreneurially incorrect. However, I can briefly chronicle three, admittedly broad, problematic theses that bug me enough to work on:

1. Cracking the social media marketplace by developing an intelligence platform that helps organizations improve and accurately measure their decision making;
   
2. Accounting for individualized learning styles at the crossroads of education and technology, specifically at the university environment;
3. Compensating artists across all aspects of media, including journalism, music, film and art, with revenue streams -- not marketing streams -- fueled by their content.

The first is something I'm currently working on full-time. The second is something I envision will be my next startup, because I'm dabbling in it already. The third, to be honest, bothers me the most, while I have done little to alleviate it besides one consulting project for a startup. Regardless, my Disease-free entrepreneurial mindset tells me I'll continue to dance around these ideas one way or another. My strategy, I think, is forward velocity. Meaning, even if I misstep somewhere along the way, which I have before and will again, is to fall forward in line with the theses of my work.

Cocky triteness, cinematic disrespect, rational-fu: a double-barreled interview with Andy McKenzie

Extending my conversational enterprise from sound into text, I shot an e-mail to blogger and reader Andy McKenzie to see if he'd submit to a public interview about, y'know, whatever's fascinating. A Vassar student with strong interests in the full span of ideas from neuroscience to the arts, he came off as a promising subject for the first iteration of this entirely experimental venture. Though I originally assumed that I'd simply ask him questions and he'd respond, we inadvertently stumbled upon an even more intriguing format: the two way —or, as I think I'll call it, "double-barreled" —interview, where both of us take on the roles of interviewer and guest. Brilliance, folly or something in between, here is the result.

Andy McKenzie: Do you consider yourself a better tweeter or blogger? I don't want to implicitly insult The War on Mediocrity, but you can write one hundred and forty characters with the some of the best of them.

Colin Marshall: It increasingly looks as if I'll have to face the reality that I may well be a better tweeter than blogger, at least if the metric is the number of compliments I get on my tweets versus the number of compliments I get on my posts. (Or is this just a function of the relative accessibility of what I do in each medium?) While I'd long assumed that the unrestricted freedom of blogging (potentially) allows me to do my best written work, I also buy, from experience, all those assertions about creativity only really being unleashed under constraints. Errol Morris (appropriately) tweeted it best, providing his own definition of art: "Set up a series of arbitrary rules, then follow them slavishly." I genuinely enjoy working around Twitter's 140-character limit; blogging, I sometimes feel out at sea as far as what, in the limitless realm of posting possibilities, I should actually do. So maybe that's at the heart of it. (Maybe I should impose more arbitrary rules on my blog.)

Since we're in the territory, then, I'll hold off on my more substantive questions for the moment and ask you this: how do you think of the relationship between your own blogging presence and tweeting presence? Two fundamentally different entities? Two expressions of the same central core? Brothers from other mothers?

Andy McKenzie: My Twitter presence oscillates between cocky and trite. Being sarcastically cocky is such an effective way of being funny in person that I want to try to do it on the 'net too, but it's so tough because sarcasm doesn't always transfer to print. Look at the relative dearth of emoticons. Wikipedia says that :d implies sarcasm, but I've never seen that used, and although :P might work, it seems a little bit too cheerful. Generally, from my experience effective tweeting has been much more difficult than blogging. I can sit down at the computer with no ideas and think of something decent to blog about, but that almost never works for tweets. Nearly all of my insightful tweets I thought of earlier during the day and copied over to the computer merely as a conduit.

Nevertheless, I remain a huge Twitter evangelist. One of the most frustrating things for me is losing touch with good friends. It's simply very difficult to stay in touch with people, despite what the wunderkinds of the domain insist. Since Twitter takes relatively low effort, is not as dorky as blogging, and is an opt-in media, it's a great way to stay in touch with old friends. At the very least I feel comfortable that my tweeting friends are out there in the world, doing stuff. So in large part I tweet in order to encourage others to do so too, if that makes any sense.

One of my favorite parts of your website is the "icons" section of your Livejournal user page, which is made of black and white head shots of various people. I recognize a few of them, like Hofstadter, Foster Wallace, and Ang Lee, but others I am blissfully unaware of. How did the designation of icon come about? What makes each of those guys special?

Colin Marshall:The good old icon grid has become slightly outdated, but I'll replicate it here for the readers:

Articulating exactly how I came to designate these fellows "icons" —which, in practice, seems to mean "people whose works and lives I look to as examples" —actually comes as a beneficial mental clarification exercise that I should have undertaken long ago. So, going from left to right, top to bottom, we have:

• Douglas Hofstadter, author of the immortal Gödel, Escher, Bach —one of my favorite books of all time —and a bunch of other neat stuff. I'm drawn by his distinctive combination of interests in emergent systems, language, aesthetics and how the three tie together. I happen to enjoy learning about all those subjects, and usually others only like one or two of them: systems people look down on aesthetics, language people don't care about emergence, aesthetics people don't think about systems, etc.
• P.J. O'Rourke, the libertarian conservative humorist and journalist. Happening upon his books in high school at a Borders during a 15-minute break from my job —I worked in the adjoining mall —led me to realize that essays dealing with politics and current events could be hilarious, even if they're written in the middle of a war zone. While I don't aim to fill a very similar journalistic capacity to his, his work taught me that any subject can, with sufficient skill, be described entertainingly. (David Sedaris probably deserves inclusion as an icon for nearly the exact same reason.)
• Takeshi Kitano, the filmmaker/television host/author/painter/comedian/poet who evidently bears a strong resemblance to Ang Lee. He'd almost merit inclusion based simply on how many occupations he manages to juggle —those who claim the renaissance man is dead, behold —but the fact that he does them all so well puts him over the top. Having directed, starred in and painted images for Hana-bi, at least for the moment my favorite film of all time, doesn't hurt either.
• David Foster Wallace, the novelist and novelistic journalist and novelistically journalistic essayist who killed himself last year. Where P.J. O'Rourke showed me how entertaining you can make essays, Wallace showed me how fascinating you can make them, delivering an enormous depth of curiosity-driven detail in a hyperdescriptive voice both staggeringly intelligent and almost breezily conversational. I've never read anyone like him from the past, and I'm not sure we'll see anyone like him in the future.
• Paul Graham, entrepreneur, programmer, essayist and funder of new entrepreneurs. Readers can surely tell by now that I read a lot of essays, and perhaps won't take it lightly when I say that he's quite possibly our finest living essayist, writing with unparalleled clarity, concision and nose for what's interesting.
• Brian Eno, music-making "non-musician," thinker about the whole of culture and co-creator of the Oblique Strategies. Props be to him first for inventing the modern iteration of ambient music, one of my most beloved genres of sound, and for elaborating upon the widely-applicable idea behind it that a thing can —and should! —be as ignorable as it is interesting, as backgroundable as it is foregroundable. He also appears —especially in his published diary, A Year With Swollen Appendices, also known as my favorite book —to live his live in accordance with the same principles that go into his artwork, including the mandate to continually experiment. And he doesn't simply make art; he makes art and honestly cares about how it fits into the culture (as opposed to spinning made-up reasons it fits into the culture in order to secure grant money).
• Charlie Rose, the interviewer whose (aesthetically near-perfect) program prompted me to get into the public talking game myself. His willingness to put in a solid hour with a guest shouldn't be a rarity, but it is, and thus he's one of the very few beacons of long-form conversation in broadcast media. Too many network owners seem to believe that, say, 25 minutes constitutes long-form, almost dangerously so, when in fact that length of time can't even scratch the surface of dust on top of the surface.
• Errol Morris, the documentarian behind Gates of Heaven, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, the television series First Person, the Ellen Feiss Apple spot and a bunch more neat stuff. As I type up these justifications, I begin to realize that curiosity is the most prominent common trait. (It's probably fair to say that I only truly like curious people. To the uncurious: see ya, wouldn't wanna be ya.) Errol Morris may hold the title of Most Curious Man Alive. Standing in evidence are his films about subjects as wide-ranging as police incompetence, pet burial and astrophysics; his interviews about subjects as wide-ranging as attempted cryonics, the pursuit of giant squid and how to control a DC-10 without hydraulic fluid; and his New York Times blog about every possible aspect of photography.
• John Brockman, the literary agent and "organizer" —I can think of no better title —behind Edge.org, the nexus of an ongoing conversation between scientists and sci/tech thinkers with the uncommon ability to communicate well to a general readership. The importance I find in communication and conversation should be obvious, and I have enormous admiration for anyone who can orchestrate it at this scale about material this cutting-edge, as it were. I regard the scientific enterprise's quantification, organization and falsification of knowledge as pretty damn foundational in human society, but without communication, all the research ever performed wouldn't mean a thing.
• Robert Hughes, one of the few art writers always worth reading. I've written before that I have no respect for those who write unclearly about soft subjects, respect for those who write clearly about hard subjects, and high respect for those who write clearly about soft subjects. By "soft" and "hard," I don't mean that the former's somehow "easier" to think about and discuss than the latter; in fact, the opposite is true. That's why good popular physics writers outnumber good popular painting writers at least a hundred to one. Hughes never fails to pen strong, clear, solid sentences, essays and books about the visual arts, a topic which has suffered and continues to suffer endless abuse at the hands of fuzzy thinkers. This legally makes him a miracle. (Kenneth Clark represents another such miracle, but his wealthy Londoner's voice doesn't speak to me quite as directly as Hughes' more rugged Aussie one.)
• (Former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Clive James, known, somewhat to his chagrin, as a "cultural polymath," but more specifically an essayist, poet, critic, novelist, travel journalist, autobiographer, television presenter, etc. As with Kitano, I'm fascinated and impressed by James' occupational range, but the way he thinks about culture —really thinks about it —and then translates that thought into words will never stop inspiring me. Curiosity, again, plays no small part.
• Tom Stoppard, playwright. That is to say, writer of the best plays ever written: Arcadia, Jumpers, The Coast of Utopia, Night and Day, and so on, and so forth. I was hooked when my family attended a production of Arcadia at Seattle's ACT, but for some reason we never attended the rest of the season after that. Though I haven't actually seen any on-stage Stoppard since, I've nearly memorized his festivals of wordplay, speculation, anti-communism and multidisciplinary fact and fiction, free from what I believe the man himself once called Pinteresque "moralizing from on high."

There are others who I suspect could make it to icon status if not for my lesser familiarity with their work: Werner Herzog's pretty much a shoo-in, "intellectual gatecrasher" Geoff Dyer seems promising indeed, I find I could do with more of whatever ultra-prolific literary stuntman William T. Vollman's imbibing, I already look to 70s talk show host Dick Cavett for examples of engaging interviews and, for whatever reason, Thomas Dolby's rising through my ranks too, perhaps because he's a musician for whom the creation of music springs from something more than an impulse. I recently described my goal as becoming "one part Werner Herzog, one part Brian Eno, one part David Foster Wallace, one part Charlie Rose." Grand as that might sound, it's not too wide of the mark of my actual aspirations.

Good lord, this conversation has already hit 1967 words. To think I'd originally planned to wrap it at 1,000. I suppose we should go to 5,000. In any case, here's my question for you; it's the one in which I try to get an idea of your blogging persona, specifically. Your blog's front page states pretty prominently that you're "an undergraduate at Vassar College studying neuroscience and the liberal arts." It's that last bit I'm interested in: that you stand at the intersection of these two (commonly perceived to be) vastly different intellectual threads can't be an accident, can it? What's preventing you from diving into a neuroscience obsession —though lord knows enough of those victimize students even as we speak —or a completely humanities-driven life of the mind? How does the duality manifest itself in your thought and writing?

Andy McKenzie: That's a good question, and I wish I had a good answer. I haven't yet found a way to weave the emphasis on both neuro and more traditional stuff into my personal narrative. There are a few possibilities:

1. In Creativity in Science, Simonton notes that the most creative scientists read broadly outside of their subject matter. I believe in one-boxing on Newcomb's paradox. If the people who have success at creativity read broadly, then I shouldn't expect myself to be an exception, and I should read widely too.
2. Vassar requires at least eight classes outside of the natural sciences, thus I am forced to study both. This is the cynical explanation.
3. Most of my friends and peers are much more interesting in fiction, movies, TV, econ, sports, and current events, so if I want to have fruitful conversations with them (which I do), then I have to understand what is going on in those worlds. Perhaps I would prefer a utopia in which everyone would subscribe to and discuss Hippocampus and Neural Networks, but that is unlikely to ever become a reality. So if I want spend most of my time in the Real World then I need to consider and study the liberal arts.

Regarding pure integration of the two, there are lots of people attempting to do that. I find most of these attempts to be mostly bullshit. The ones that have some success, like Lehrer in Proust was a Neuroscientist, do so mainly when they focus on the interplay between psychology and art instead of actual brain structure and function. Of course nobody wants to admit this because psychology is so much less sexy. But the reality is that until something like serial section transmission electron microscopy becomes automated and performed on a number of humans (presumably post-mortem), it's going to be difficult to talk conclusively about neuroscience. So, IMHO, the most important advancements in neuro over the next twenty years will be technological, emphasizing advances in biomedical optics especially.

My question: You once tweeted (and later elaborated in a blog post) that one of the two keys to success is to cultivate risk tolerance. Now, does this require conscious effort on the part of the risk taker? Or, can one cultivate a risk tolerance by simply doing risky things? For example, every individual in a densely populated area now stands at a higher risk of illness in their day to day lives as a result of swine flu. Going to public places is in some ways an exercise in risk tolerance. Will this lead to an inevitable increase in risk tolerance throughout the country over time?

Colin Marshall: You're right; most attempts to get science in with the humanities don't pass the bullshit detector. I often wonder why this must be the case, since I'm extremely interested in seeing tighter integration of the two. I've stopped counting the times I've attended exhibitions promising a union of art and science only to find some art simply placed next to some science. If I'm lucky.

You've hit on a terribly fascinating point in your response to which I can't simply note without making a big deal of. The notion that a working knowledge of the liberal arts —let the record show that I've never been crazy about that name —aids one's functioning in the real world is, I think, quite true, though it's stated so infrequently that it sounds as counterintuitive as a Malcolm Gladwell article pitch. If you want to operate effectively in the real world, which is the wider social world, you've got to get conversant in the arts. There is no escape; it's just how humans interact, and if you don't want to interact, you might as well pack it in. If anyone's looking for a reason why studying topics outside of engineering, natural science or quantitative business isn't a waste of time, there it is.

For readers who don't know —or, even more likely, have forgotten —"cultivate risk tolerance" is one plank of my two-plank success guide, the other plank being "cultivate endurance." To address the first point of your question, I've so far found that doing something a bajillion times to be just about the only way to cultivate any personal quality; I'd argue that most traits are essentially habits, and one forms habits by doing the same thing over and over. So indeed, cultivating risk tolerance would seem to require doing risky things, or at least things one perceives as risky. (Let's not forget the human risk-overperception and loss-overaversion factors.) Thus there's definitely a conscious element: if you don't deliberately take on tasks you believe to be risky, you'll never sand the edge off that familiar "Don't do it! Don't do it! Don't do it!" impulse.

As for the second point, well, good question. The relevant distinction here comes, I suppose, between instances of risktaking on the part of an individual and a rise in the ambient level of risk that's out of any individual's control. I can't help but believe that people from riskier places exhibit a higher risk tolerance threshold —think about how those who emigrate from dangerous, fatalistic and thus relatively high-risk foreign countries behave when they get to safer ones —but I'd be surprised if the effect reached anything like the level someone reaches when they really bear down and boost their own risk tolerance.

So what's your own relationship to risk-taking in life? Do you think you do to little of it? Too much? About enough? And in this vein, I'd also like to compare notes on these alleged success rules I pulled out of the air; surely you've pulled a few out of the air yourself over the years. If items one and two are "cultivate risk tolerance" and "cultivate endurance," where, based on your own observations of life, people, everything, etc., would the list go from there? Or might you strike those first two in the interest of improved revisions?

Andy McKenzie: My own relationship to risk taking is fairly mild. I try to take risks on things I value like education or relationships and not bother with things I don't value like jumping from high heights. Does it always work? I don't know. I have read that people who are moderate and rational risk takers are the most satisfied with their lives (from the sidebar here). And since anyone reading a blog is probably at least a bit of a nerd, we are probably on the lower end of the risk taking spectrum compared to the majority of society. So, take more risks and be merry!

I like "cultivate risk tolerance" and "cultivate endurance" a lot as a success guide. The main thing I might add would be a subsection to cultivating risk tolerance. I think that the two ways it can be done are either a) having confidence or b) subjugating your ego. I don't think you can fake the confidence part. It's true that people vary in their levels of self-serving biases but at some point the fact that you suck at something will be staring you in the face. And contrary to some public conceptions, telling yourself that you're good at everything in the mirror won't help because you won't believe yourself. So the point is that you can't fake confidence, but it's really useful for risk tolerance if you do have it. That's why it seems easy to string successes together. Your other option towards risk tolerance to subjugate your ego, i.e. "I may suck at this, but that won't hold me back, I don't care what people think of me, etc." This option is probably more sustainable over the long term but it's also definitely less fun.

OK, I know you watch a lot of movies. So, what is your routine for movie watching? You recently tweeted that you can't eat while watching a movie, but can drink tea. Any other rules such as that? Do you take notes? Watch with subtitles on? Rewind crazy scenes? What about watching with other people, can you tolerate that? If you've already written a post about this feel free to refer me to that instead of re-writing it. I searched but couldn't find anything in one place.


Colin Marshall: It's not so much that I can't eat while watching a movie, but that I'd rather not. I suppose I'd fallen into the habit, over twenty or so years, of eating meals while watching at home. It only recently dawned on me that, hey, I can't really enjoy the movie or the meal to the fullest extent while desperately trying to handle both at once. Both films and food are meant to be experienced, and if you treat either as non-experiential fodder —as many do —you're going to find both pretty boring. Acknowledging that I can't experience two things at once in any meaningful way, I now separate these acts whenever possible.

(The issue of consuming meals while viewing films at home is, of course, entirely separate from the issue of scarfing down huge boxes of candy at a theater, which behavior is and has always been a grotesque abomination.)

As for the others:

• Do you take notes? I should, more often. I can usually bring myself to dig out the old notebook when I know I'll be writing something big, like a 3Quarksdaily column, on what I'm about to see. But since I write up almost half the pictures I watch on this blog anyway, it might well be a good idea to keep pen in hand as a matter of habit. All too often I'll go to write something about a movie I and just sit there, discouraged by having to cast around at slightly-too-faded memories for minutes on end.
• Watch with subtitles on? Only if I don't understand the language —my interest in Korean cinema provided the impetus to start learning Korean —or if the dialogue was recorded particularly poorly. (These things happen.) I most certainly prefer my foreign-language movies subtitled rather than dubbed, not out of purism but of a desire to remain as close to the authorially-intended product as possible.
• Rewind crazy scenes? Depends on how you define "crazy," but yes, when I'm doing some re-watching by myself, I have been known to repeat my favorite sequences —i.e., those I think I can learn the most from —over and over again. To think of how much time I've spent viewing the "Painters" montage from Kitano's Hana-bi alone...
• What about watching with other people, can you tolerate that? Oh, my. Can I tolerate it? I must really come off as a titanic film weenie. I actually prefer watching films with friends and such whenever possible, since I find some fairly rich discussions can result. Plus, I just like to compare cinematic notes —not that, per the above, I'm physically taking them —whenever possible. That's one reason I so enjoy reading film criticism.

However, I must admit that this can backfire; the upside of watching movies with others is, like the upside of anything else, proportional to its downside. In another interview that will appear here soon, my interlocutor relates the experience of screening Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century —one of my own personal favorites —for his art school friends, only to have them bitch and moan about it afterward. Sometimes even my most earnest attempts to share the joy of my favorite directors with friends —Abbas Kiarostami, Chris Marker, Jim Jarmusch —produce similarly disheartening outcomes. Few things irk me more than that sort of disrespect. On a larger, more public scale, I'll never forget the time I saw Béla Tarr's The Man from London screened at LACMA: half the people in the audience spent the entire runtime coughing, shuffling and, very slowly, exiting.

One of the more useful lessons I've learned about filmgoing, and one that I've only recently acknowledged, is that watching is rewatching. Just like writing is rewriting and reading is rereading, the second time you watch a film is really the first time you watch the film. I suppose I can't speak for others, but my attention during the first viewing of most any given movie gets burnt up following the plot, which I kind of resent since I tend to find plot to be the least interesting aspect of cinema. If I want a plot, I can open a book.

I'd like to ask you about your interest in rationality, or, more broadly, the way we think as perceived on the subective human scale. I specify that because I want to get at the issue of how tied it is to your interest in neuroscience, which I think we can safely say does not operate on the subjective human scale —if it did, none of its findings would be quite so counterintuitive. (I'm reminded of a time Brian Eno talked about having lunch with a table of particle physicists. He listened to their discussion of their research for a while, then asked, "Do any of you actually perceive the real world like this?" They all said "of course not.")

So when you write about human decisionmaking and such, and when you quote the likes of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson, is that merely a branch sprouting off of your main fascination with neuroscience, or is being an observer of your own thought process a whole other area of interest, deserving its own circle on the Venn diagram of your life?


Andy McKenzie: Didn't ask the "tolerate" question because you come off as a film weenie at all! I asked because I myself am annoyed when I watch movies with (some) other people who aren't as into the movie as I am and end up distracting me, or forcing me to watch with subtitles due to irreparable chit chat.

I remember about three years ago I read Eliezer's Twelve Virtues of Rationality on his old site (now here) and I thought it was the coolest thing out. The first couple lines of the "lightness" virtue remains one of my favorite quotes of all time. And over time I've come to love Robin's stuff on Overcoming Bias too. I've said before and I'll say again that as of today, October 21 2009, I think he's the most interesting person on the internet.

On the surface at least, I think part of what made OB attractive at first is that it could actually improve me as a person by making me a better truth-seeker. But now I think I have to admit that this is at least slightly masturbatory and probably won't actually do much good. Robin had a damning post very early on at Less Wrong basically saying that individual, martial-arts style rationality won't help much, and that instead we should prefer institutional design. I still like posting about decision-making "hacks" on my blog because I like them when other people post about them and I think they add more value than a lot of the other stuff I could be writing about instead (a high VORBP!). But for most of the sixteen hours I am awake each day I don't actively think about being rational. So in the Venn diagram that makes up interests, human decision-making is just one of those cool ancillary facet that hopefully becomes part of my subconscious over time.

Ultimately I'm very much a newbie to neuroscience. I have read about some research on human subjects making decisions and undergoing fMRI, but it doesn't make sense to me. Why does it matter that the PFC is lighting up but not the ACC in some given task? Surely it matters to some computational neuroscientist trying to falsify theories, but I can't grok the lay fascination with brain regions. Of course, nobody knows what science doesn't know. However, I imagine that beyond the brain region business anatomical neuroscience doesn't have much to say about human decision-making.

What most interests me most about neuroscience, for the record, is the search for a circuit diagram of the whole human brain. I don't know how long it will take, I don't know how much individual variation there will be, and I don't know how it will happen. But I do know that it would be such a game changer that I am very motivated to look into it and hopefully I will get a chance to work on it.

First a trivial question: If you think you focus too much on the plot the first time you watch movies, why don't you just read a plot summary first? Once you've swatted that fly aside, I'm curious: What is your relationship to your old material on the internet? Your posts on LJ go back to 2002. If I were to characterize those old posts as compared to your current output, I'd say you had more posts about specific convos you overheard, more posts that are explicitly humorous (like your hilarious Life Plan), and more posts about straight pop culture like Rick Astley, and that now you post more mindfully about the future, write more legitimate film reviews, and etc.

Is that fair? If so, has the shift been in any way intentional? More generally, how do you feel that people are able to look back at your intellectual development online?


Colin Marshall: Man, I hear you on the chitchat-while-watching thing. If the people around me were talking at enough volume or with enough frequency to drive me to subtitles on an English-language film, let's just say that the applicable button on the DVD player's remote isn't all I'd punch. I'm as much of a Mystery Science Theater 3000-lover as the next pseudo-geek, but I often find myself having to make the same point about the still-common practice of home MiSTing: when Mike, Joel, Servo and Crow did it, they did it to bad movies. (Also, they were funny.)

Despite having posted to Les Wrong myself, I get the feeling I'm not quite the truth-seeker you are. Don't get me wrong (as it were), I still love that stuff, but a large part of me harbors the same sort of reservations you cite Hanson —whose fascinatingness you're totally right about, by the by —as having. The question I can't shake is, how much does being right have to do with being successful? My natural impulse is to argue that the less wrong (as it were) you are, the more successful you can be, but I have absolutely no way of demonstrating that. How many of the people I admire most could be called true rationalists? Twenty percent, maybe? Thirty, if the definition stretches?

I often read plot summaries in advance of viewing (or simply happen to come across a bunch in my usual research), and I find I do enjoy a fuller experience of the film when I don't have to allocate disproportional concentration to that one particular element of the work. I would submit that this, in large part, causes the utter mediocrity of most films: they're conceived not as films, but as screenplays, and sometimes as mere single-page treatments that can contain nothing but plot. Hence the final, impoverished product that's little more than a very expensively-illustrated bedtime story, harnessing maybe —maybe -- a tenth of cinema's artistic bandwidth.

On some level, I believe —or want to believe —that nobody would ever go to the lowest depth of my back pages, but since you're now a living counterexample, I suppose I've got to face the facts. While it's easy to dismiss anything one wrote at 18 as juvenile nonsense —and surely much of my archives that old indeed amounts to juvenile nonsense —I've got to give Colin-18 his due: he knew some stuff I don't know now, and he kept in mind some stuff of which I've lost sight. He had a pretty constant strain of enthusiasm where my own has begun to oscillate troublingly, and his sense of humor was all-pervasive, whereas mine has, like a couple centimeters of my hairline, partially receded. I don't miss his tendency to waste time arguing on the internet or spark ludicrous conflicts in life just for the hell of it, but in some ways I'm circling back to what he was, having drifted away involuntarily, gradually, imperceptibly (to me, anyway). And let it never be said that I no longer write posts on Rick Astley.

If someone can learn something by subjecting themselves to the entirety of my archive, I got no objections. I realize that there are few human phenomena as fascinating to observe as the growth, change and odd two-steps-forward-one-step-back dance that an individual takes through life. Lord knows that's the secret to the success of Michael Apted's Up documentaries. Not that I'm self-aggrandizing enough to compare my internet writing to perhaps cinema's greatest ongoing achievement. No, not at all.

As this conversation careens toward 6000 words, I fear we should wrap it up soon. But not yet! I've got a final question for you, and perhaps it's a grand one, so to those who say TL;DR, I say: suck it. By way of setup, let me say that you have a strong blog; it's well-written and unfailingly serves up fascinating ideas. However, most of the idea I've formed of your actual personality has come from this very conversation. I find it fascinating that your other writings maintain what I don't have a precise word for but what I'll simply fudge and call "engaging anonymity." It's as if you hold a poker face while turning over super-interesting cards. Assuming I've managed to convey so much as a part of the concept I'm trying to invoke here, I'll ask this: how much is that a deliberately-cultivated part of your internet persona? Do you make any conscious choices to cultivate a particular internet persona, or is it just the extension of your real-life one? Is the issue of someone's "internet" self versus their "real" self even a distinction you think much about?

Andy McKenzie: Rationality does often get a bad rap for being not particularly helpful to the person practicing it, and perhaps deservedly so. I don't have any data. But I think Eliezer et al's main point is that rationality is helpful to everyone else, too. In theory at least there are huge positive externalities to considering the most important problems that the world faces and methodologically applying oneself to them. Hence "saving the world."

It's interesting to hear that you find my blog somewhat distant. I suppose I'm not actively trying to create any image of myself through the blog. It's certainly not an exercise in personal branding, despite what the self-named title suggests. (I'm working on a cool new name.) I think of my blog more as tracking my intellectual development, much like I track my sleep, or my school tracks my middling academic progress via grades. I'd like to discuss genuinely interesting ideas and leave the rest to the side.

The distinction between "internet" and "real" selves is a fascinating one. Tyler Cowen has said people think he's less funny in person than on his blog, I think Ben Caz is generally more in-depth in person than on his blog (although his blog is great!), and the one time I met Eliezer in person he was more light-hearted and fun-loving that you might imagine from his blog. Tyler is probably the exception in that most people are more willing to joke around in person and will generally be funnier off-line. This makes sense. Online we have to worry about our thoughts being permanent and offending somebody down the line, but in person our words are mostly transient. That's why I tiptoe around the "r" word.

In general bloggers will be more outgoing than the typical educated human. Some of this is personality. To be willing to be a blogger you must have always been willing to "put yourself out there" to some degree. In fact, I expect that if you invited a random group of bloggers to a party, the ones who use their actual name instead of a pseudoname will be more likely to mingle. The real-namers will also be less likely to have aspirations in politics! Some of it is also the creative process that writing ultimately is. Once you recognize how much effort it takes to keep up a blog that others give you little credit or praise for, you'll have more respect for those who chug through their own atypical endeavors.

Thanks very much for the interview, Colin. You asked a number of thought-provoking questions. We'll have to do this again in five years or so, assuming that the Mayan apocalypse hasn't killed us all off in the interim.