“Hey friends! I had to cut my hair for military reasons again, so it happens every other year. I’m also continuing to make some progress putting on some muscle mass, feel pretty good.
Anyway, the thing I wanted to talk about was an idea that I had that was kind of like a brain wave while I was working on NSA. It’s not complete and I don’t know if I’m going to finish it, but I do think that what became clear for me in writing that is something that is enduring and useful, and it’s going to inform how I do more of my writing moving forward. I had like a mental image while I was doing it, and I call it like ‘Braided Loops.’
So you start arbitrarily potentially, right? Like I could be ‘Oh let’s talk about the trees, let’s talk about the sky, let’s talk about clothes,’ whatever – any random thing. Hair, right? Or ‘I had to do this thing and I was doing this thing one day’ – anecdote. You start somewhere and you go, you follow that wherever it leads, like you’re going on a walk. And then along the way, you know, any interesting thing that catches your attention. And here I’m describing like myself and my process and what works for me – I’m not necessarily telling you what you should do. See, for everything… so, okay, even that – so that was an example of me like digressing. I was digressing from me describing my process to talking about the nature of advice or the nature of perspective.
And so that is a, that is the first potential braided Loop, and that arose organically. I’m quite lucky, but it would anyway, right? There’s nature of, you know, ADHD mind or just, you know, chaos.
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“And then you kind of trace the path back. So you start with anecdotes – so in this case, it’s a very arbitrary ‘I was working on an essay,’ that’s the starting point, right? And I could tell you more about the essay. The essay was about incompleteness and about… hey baby… was about incompleteness and and how do you resolve Loops, right? The mystery in that was, uh, why do I not finish things as often as I would like? Like it’s just like general answers, but I wanted to know what I would really say and what I would really feel for the question of why do I have so many things that are like sketches.
No, I understand why I have a lot of sketches. Why do I have, why do I so often start something with the intention of finishing it and then not finishing it? And like, why do I often kind of stretch myself too thin? And there I have an anecdote about the way I used to play video games like SimCity when I was a kid, and what I would do is I would make a lot of roads and I would fill the whole map with roads, which is not how you’re supposed to play the game. You’re supposed to make just enough roads to have zones, and zones is where like residential zones, commercial zones, and that’s where people will build stuff, and then you’ll get taxes from them, and then the tax revenue pays for the road maintenance.
If you just build roads and you don’t build any, you don’t designate any zones, you don’t get any taxes, and so the road maintenance costs will bankrupt the city and then you get fired as mayor. That used to happen to me over and over again. So I describe that as like a… um… so when you do the thing with the roads and the zones, and the zones pay taxes, and taxes maintain the roads – that’s a winning loop. It’s a… it’s a close… so I mean, it’s a loop that works, and if you don’t have a loop that works, then you dry out, you fail.
Same for like in Fitness, right? Like, you want to work out well enough that you get, you get a pump, you get… you feel fatigue, you know, you fatigue your muscles, you sweat, you have deep breaths and… B’s going to cry… um, and what and then you, you have a good feeling, right? And then that good feeling gets you motivated to go again, and that motivation is very important ’cause if you don’t have it then you get tired and you can’t go on.
And uh, what else is that to say… so that’s the win… so the winning Loop of completing the SimCity cycle or completing a fitness cycle. And I realized that… hey baby… I realized that I don’t do it well enough in my writing. Like I just sort of start writing and I don’t think about um, where my writing is going necessarily. Like, and so this is one of those like curse of – if you’re, if you’re pretty good, you don’t really need to get better because you can Coast on what works, right?
So you have a janky ass system – it doesn’t work very well and no… a janky system but it works well enough often enough that you don’t think to try and improve it until you’re in a situation where the constraints force you to improve it, right? Which is where I feel like am at right now, especially with a kid where, you know, um, I can’t really go on like walks of fancy with no plan and no sensitivity.
So I’m not planning the things out – I didn’t plan this video out, right? And I still have to Circle all the way back and then move all Circle all the way forward in the braided Loop which I’m trying to talk about. So let’s start over, let’s go all the way back. All the way back I was talking about essay that I was writing. Along the way I was writing the essay, I had an interesting digression. Within that interesting digression, I had another interesting digression, and it didn’t feel, it didn’t feel chaotic in a way that was disorienting – maybe slightly disorienting but it was interesting.
And like, so it felt like I was, I was digressing in a loop and then I went into another loop, and then I could loop back out to the first thing. It’s sort of like Inception, you know? The Dream Within A Dream Within A Dream structure – you go into each next dream and then you come back out into each next dream, and that allows you to… you can change the vibe in a Dream Within a dream or a story within a story, right?
And uh, my friend Richard Bartlet has this amazing tweet that I think is underappreciated, where he talks about how everything that lives is born inside something else. Everything that has aliveness has to be inside something else, and I have all these examples of like sanctum within sanctum structures and temples and, you know, like frame stories in mythology and uh, just this General sense that you can do more interesting things when you control the frame within the frame, right?
So you don’t… so when you’re telling a story and then inside that story someone else is telling another story, you become a lot more free. You no longer have to worry so much about how you will be perceived, and because people can’t remember that much, and you get to suspend disbelief better in a story within a story, right? So like, um, you know some of the interesting things I’ve seen are like in the video game Grand Theft Auto, for example. You’re playing GTA, there is a TV in game, and the TV has TV shows, and the TV shows get to be ridiculous because they are not for TV in real life – they are for TV within the game.
And that’s just so interesting because you get to, you get to be over the top in certain ways. And now I’m reminded of um, the song “Two” by Blur, right? Which they made kind of as a joke – they made it, you know, they thinking that no one would actually take it seriously. It’s kind of they’re kind of trying to piss off their record label or something like that, and I… it’s piss off… just annoy something, but it ended up being a big hit. And you only get that by like messing around, and when you do stories within stories, frames within frames, braided Loops, you just get… you don’t have to explain things so much ’cause you’re in the middle of a digression. It is understood that you cannot contextualize everything properly.
Circling back, so I was talking about the essay, and then I was talking about this is not advice, and you know I do have other videos and stuff about essay about advice, and I’ve written about the nature of advice. And if I had wanted to explore that further, I could have, but but I guess I didn’t. So this wasn’t really a perfect example of what I’m trying to do with my braided Loops, but uh, yeah.
Where else would I look through from this… I was writing my essays and it’s about incompleteness, and so in that essay particularly I came around talking about like, I think ContraPoints’s video that she’s doing – her latest video “Twilight” I thought was great because again she uses Twilight as a vehicle for talking about all these bigger ideas about like power, identity, kink, all that stuff.
And how clever that is – I was inspired by that video, by the way she architectured her information and the way she presented, you know, if anybody’s like, if anybody wants… if anybody wants to say shit like ‘Oh this is… that’s not a great description of power’ or whatever, she said ‘Well this is a video about Twilight,’ you know? So that’s the thing about um, frame stories – you have an intent, and then you have these things within the thing that is not the quote unquote original intent, and that just frees you up so much.
And I think with a lot of my essays or my essay drafts, um, what I need is to put them inside other things so that they don’t suffer from the kind of overexposure effect. And you know, in my… when I do marketing consulting for my clients, I often… and I consult with a lot of like artists and creatives, and people are often hesitant to do Marketing in a way that they feel is like doing a TikTok. That’s how I describe it – it’s like they don’t want to be like ‘Hi, I’m the artist, this is my artist vision and my mission and this is how I want you to perceive my work.’ Like it’s, it’s very clinical, very sterile, and it’s the furthest vibe from what they want.
And then I point out to them that you don’t have to do that, you don’t have to have an… you don’t have to do a TikTok, right? You can do your Marketing in a way that’s indirect – you can do it in a conversation with another person, you can do it telling a story, you can do it, you know, without even showing your face, you can do it like a voiceover, you can do it all sorts of creative crazy silly ways. And I think people sometimes feel self-conscious about doing that right off the bat, uh, but if you put it inside something else then you can do it ’cause you’re experimenting, right?
And another last version I… I’m remembering, last version of this I’m remembering is that when I wrote a novel, which is I have a draft of and I haven’t published yet, but when I wrote that novel, uh, it’s about the local music scene with a bunch of bands in it. And I still, still remember several of the bands that I made up for the novel, and I still want to write songs for those bands because there’s something about those fictional bands that just feels so pure and feels so exciting. And I feel like I can be more dramatic and, you know, in a sense dramatic is less realistic but in reality is unrealistic. So being dramatic in the context of fiction, uh, you can be more truthful in a sense.
And that is ultimately what I think I’m trying to do – I’m trying to tell the truth without being all twisted about it, and there’s something about the braided Loop structure that lets you tell truths without getting, you know, perceived in a way that you don’t want to be perceived.
Now I’m remembering that um, there’s Gwern – he has a blog post about like anime, and somewhere in that blog post it’s like a sidenote about developmental hell, and it’s a great sidenote. And a part of me used to think ‘Well why is a post like that in a sidenote instead of of a post by itself?’ but now I’m convinced that it’s just an excellent sidenote, and I would like to build a collection of excellent sidenotes. And I’ll end on there. Done.”