46: Nicole Seah (Nix) - Loving What is Real
Nicole Seah (X, Substack, LinkedIn), aka Nix, is a writer at Starting From Nix and investor at Costanoa Ventures. She recently launched New Ontologies, where she profiles founders and companies thinking ambitiously about the future. Her first piece is live now, on Ando: the team building a chat platform for the era of agents. Nicole balances identities with poise, moving between the literary and the practical. I spoke to her about different kinds of beauty and how it takes us out of ourselves, Nietzsche’s case for tolerating strangeness, and choosing reality over fantasy. Then we discuss duality and balancing intensity and lightness, and talk through Borges, Hesse, Miyazaki, Alyssa Liu, and Joan Didion. Nicole argues that freedom comes from not collapsing yourself into a single identity. I asked her about the drive behind New Ontologies, her obsession with techne, and Rebecca Solnit's "cosmology of self.” We then skate across a range of ideas, including memory, appetite and desire, and friendship and why other people’s unknowability is part of what makes them wonderful. I hope this conversation inspires you to look for and love what is real, to be patient with and attuned to the multiple people inside you, and to give freely with your creative life. Full transcript and all links and references: dialectic.fm/nix. - Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Notion recently launched custom agents: helpful AI teammates that handle recurring work across your entire suite of tools.
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Speaker A: Everything that you make, whether it's company, a piece of writing, a podcast, is this amalgamation of your experiences in the world. Grow up, all the things you read, all of the people you've met, it's a collection of these things brought into the furnace of something and come out the other side. You really see in this very subtle moment is how a person's entire being has gone into this. Any of these very large significant companies, you can actually trace back the lineage and the sense of ineffable feeling that it's come from the founder.
I have multiple identities and the reason why they feel at odds is because sometimes those identities conflict or come into friction with one another. I don't know if you've read the short story, "Borges and I." It's about him and having a separate writer self and then himself circling around each other. And, you know, one wins, but who is it? And there's always these dueling parts of me, which is one, this very serious, intense side, and then this more playful, light side. Speaker B: So the implication there is that it should be bridged.
Is some separation good? Speaker A: Maybe. I don't have answers here. It's through seriousness that you find playfulness. Think about Miyazaki, right? He hand-drew his frames until well into the '70s. There's this one amazing interview where he says, like, I was thinking about how to make the dragon move. And he's like, I actually went to a restaurant and I looked at the eels wriggling around and I thought, you ever seen an eel move like that? He just has like constitutionally unable to not care. And I think that is what makes this film so light.
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