In this episode of Out of the Clouds host Anne Mühlethaler explores the evolution of digital spaces with Sari Azout, founder of Sublime, a personal knowledge management tool for creatives.
Born in Barranquilla, Colombia — the magical hometown of Shakira and Gabriel García Márquez — Sari describes herself as a cerebral child who found her intellectual home first at Brown University, where she developed a "fiercely independent mindset" and discovered the joy of the library as a social space.
With remarkable foresight( Sari "could always see around corners") she strategically planned her path to remain in the U.S. as an international student and got into banking, ultimately landing at Barclays during the 2008 financial crisis. This experience taught her valuable lessons about the importance of connecting work to meaningful impact.
Next the pair discuss Sari’s project, Sublime. Sari articulates her vision as both practical and philosophical, calling it "the personal knowledge management tool of my dreams." She explains that in a world where "intelligence is being commoditized," what remains valuable are "conviction, point of view, courage, intention — the artist's way." This connects to her writing practice, which has revealed that "ideas never come to me before I write. They always come to me in the process of writing."
Their conversation delves into Sublime's three core promises: never lose a valuable idea, never be uninspired, and transform from passive consumption to active creation. Sari emphasizes wanting to "facilitate helping people make things, not just consume things," noting that "being a consumer is just a state of helplessness." Drawing inspiration from books and Marshall McLuhan's quote that "the medium is the message," she envisions a "sublime internet" that moves away from quantifiable metrics toward meaningful engagement.
Sari also speaks candidly about the tension between selfishness and selflessness in entrepreneurship, and her "willingness to be misunderstood for a longer period." She shares her vision of transitioning from the attention economy to the intention economy, reframing digital tools as something "people use instead of products people consume."
The episode concludes with Sari sharing her perspective on happiness and describing her version of "paradise on earth" as working all day alone in anticipation of an evening in great company. This interview with Sari is a fascinating exploration of how we might build more intentional, meaningful digital spaces that serve our creativity rather than just our consumption. Happy listening!
Selected links from episode
Out of the Clouds website: https://outoftheclouds.com/
Out of the Clouds on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_outoftheclouds
The Mettā View website: https://avm.consulting/metta-view
Anne on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annvi/
Anne on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@annvi
Anne on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-v-muhlethaler/
Join Sublime via this exclusive link
Sari Azout on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/saraazout
Sari on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/sariazoutbaka/
Subscribe to Sari’s newsletter https://substack.com/@sariazout
And to the Sublime newsletter https://substack.com/@sublimethenewsletter
Tyler Cowel quote: “One of the highest value things you can do in life is raise other people's aspirations.”
Robert Green’s book, the 48 Laws of Power
Can you imagine a library of possibilities for reimagining the web -
The Disappearance of Rituals by philosopher Byung Shul Han
The Zine
Non-Stop from the Hamilton musical soundtrack
The story of Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet
X 10 Coffee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0BbDdRh2A4
What song best represent you, the Spotify playlist featuring guest answers from Out of the Clouds"
Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger
Invention - A Life - the James Dyson biography
Shoe Dog, a memoir by Phil Knight, the creator of Nike
00:04
Hi, hello, bonjour and namaste. This is Out of the Clouds, a podcast at the crossroads between business and mindfulness, or we could say it's about mindful living, and I'm your host, Anne V Muhlethaler, today. I am delighted, really. I mean, I'm generally delighted, but particularly delighted to be bringing you this interview with the extraordinary Sari Azout. I really love doing the editing myself. In doing the edit of the interviews, I really get a double dose of the conversation, which I think I was particularly seeking with this one. But I had an enormous amount of work and things to do and so I had to parse it out and I edited for 10, 15 minutes at a time and our recording was actually just over two hours, which is indeed a little bit longer than usual. But gosh, how worth it was for me to spend the time to reflect on what we discussed with Sari. And let me now tell you a little bit more about her and the conversation you're about to hear. So Sari Azout is currently based in Miami, born in Barranquilla in Colombia, and she is the founder of Sublime app. In our conversation we talk about her upbringing and how her father used to ask a very particular question at dinner every night. We talk about her upbringing and how her father used to ask a very particular question at dinner. Every night we talk about her fiercely independent mindset and how fun it was for her to study at Brown on Rhode Island and discovering that she could just spend hours in the library and that the library could become social, and that the library could become social.
02:06
Sari talks me through her early work experiences and how she went through a couple of startups before discovering the idea for Sublime. Then we get into the thick of it and discuss what is Sublime, something between a commonplace book which, if you don't know what it is, we'll explain and a personal knowledge management tool. Our discussion also covers her conviction that intelligence is being commoditized, that information is being commoditized and what remains for us humans is to stand out with a point of view, with intention, which she calls the artist's way. We discuss the three pillars of the value proposition of sublime, and we also land on the future of creativity.
02:56
This is really one of these conversations that I think that I will listen to again and again, so I'm really thrilled to be able to bring you such an incredibly interesting thinker and doer. So, without further ado, I'm going to stop talking and let you enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with Sari Azout. Happy listening, sari. Thank you so much for making it today. Welcome to Out of the Clouds. I'm so honored to be here. Where am I finding you today? If we may start there?
03:34
You are finding me in my home office in Miami, Florida, where I've lived for about seven years now?
03:42
And how's Miami at the moment?
03:44
This is Miami. Is this duality, where in the summer we're plotting to leave and in the winter we're just every day, is like pinch me. I can't believe we live here, because it's actually perfect it's. I live where people vacation this time of year, which means it's a lot of traffic, it's crowded, but the weather is just so perfect.
04:02
Yeah, I used to love living in New York because it was so close to Miami. It was just such a lovely hop and, yeah, the winter time there was just so wonderful. I seem to recall you saying on another podcast interview that you live right on the water.
04:18
I do live on the water. I used to live in New York and when we decided to move to Miami, my only condition was I want to be close to the water. So many people move from New York to Miami and live in Brickell with like the big skyscrapers and stuff, but I was like I just want to embrace what Miami has to offer. So we live on a little lake and we can paddleboard on the weekends and I spend so much time at home because I work from home these days that I just really wanted to have a backyard that allowed me to step out of the laptop and just feel inspired by my own backyard views.
04:54
That sounds really lovely. So, as you may know already, I enjoy beginning the conversation with my guests by asking them to tell their story, because I guess that what I've realized despite loving a lot of other podcasts where people have deep conversations that we often overlook the history of someone and we are the sum of our experiences, and I'd love to find out more about who you were when you were a kid, what you wanted to be as a grownup, what kind of teenagers you were.
05:26
So, whatever you feel like telling me, yeah, I love this question because it's one people rarely ask and so, consequently, it's one I don't really think about very much. So I have to revisit that part of my life and interrogate it through the lens of where I am now. But I'm originally from Colombia, south America, so I was born in a small city called Barranquilla, which is where Shakira's from actually and also the home to the wonderful writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It's a tiny town but it's very magical, it's read a lot of kind of artistic talent and it's got this kind of laid back and tropical vibe and the people are so warm and it's a really special place. And so my upbringing was very wholesome, I would say, and loving. My parents were both very loving, but I would say that I also I was a very cerebral kid and in some ways that didn't really fit the wavelength of the city I was born in.
06:28
So I had wonderful friends and there were incredible people around me. But now that I have young children, I can appreciate how the things that I was drawn to when I was young are not really the common things that you're drawn to when you're nine years old. Young are not really the common things that you're drawn to when you're nine years old, I used to have books with quotes and ideas and I was just very interested in the life inside the head early on, the intellectual stuff. And yeah, I guess in some ways that I didn't feel like I could share that with the people that I was physically around, which is why the internet was so impactful for me, because I remember I forget what age I was but I remember discovering TED Talks and being like I just don't want to leave my house, I want to listen to TED Talks all day. And yeah, I guess in some ways I was shaped by TED Talks all day. And yeah, I guess in some ways I was shaped by.
07:30
My father is an entrepreneur and he would ask us every night at the dinner table. He would ask what did you do today to change the world, which in hindsight was a very heavy question, and so in some ways I was raised with this kind of I don't know if pressure is the right word, but this you have to make an impact. You are defined by the impact that you make. So I had I, my, my brother would just laugh it out, but I took it literally. I was like what am I going to do to change the world and my mom was.
07:57
She was a stay at home mom, for the most part very artistic. But now that I'm older I realize I live with both this kind of desire to do things that comes from my father and this just feeling of you can just do things, you can dream up anything and go do it, because that was his energy and my mom, which was this like nurturing, gentle presence, and so I take so much from both of them. But as a woman it's very hard to square those two things, because it's the ambition and in some way like selfishness of believing that you can do anything to change the world, and then the selflessness that is required to nurture and raise a family. That's a little bit about my mom and dad, but I would say overall I yeah, I was just born around a lot of love and a big, tight, wonderful family.
08:51
That sounds wonderful. I resonate very much with what you're saying. I had a feeling before our conversation, as I was reading about you and listening to you, that there'd be a couple of things in which perhaps, though far apart in years and in distance, there are some things we have in common, as in being very cerebral, intellectual and not quite fitting in with the early scenario. It's very interesting what you talk about selfishness versus selflessness, the selfishness of believing that you can change the world. It's a big superpower. What was it like for you when you first arrived in the US?
09:30
It was incredible, I think so. Colombia, where I grew up around a time that was extremely dangerous. So, if you know about the history of Colombia, there were guerrilla groups and kidnappings, and so it was very unsafe. Actually, the first like 10 years of my life growing up in Barranquilla were relatively safe, but then I moved to the capital city, bogota. My father had to relocate for work and there was always this fear. You were hearing the news that people you knew were kidnapped left and right. It was not normal.
10:00
I think I've come to realize now that I live in Miami and it's my children can walk in the neighborhood and it's so safe. And so I remember moving to the US and just so deeply appreciating the little things like going to Starbucks with a tea and sitting there with a book. I was like, wow, this is mind blowing. I can just walk into a place and sit down with a book and read it. My parents wouldn't really let me do so much of that. My teenage years were spent with like I just couldn't do much at all. It was a very unsafe place. We would go from one friend's house to another friend's house, but it was very unsafe.
10:38
And so the US, for me represented freedom. I ended up going to a college in Providence, rhode Island, called Brown, which I again it's so interesting because I back to who I was I remember touring colleges and I just walked into Brown I was like this is what I want, this is where I want to be, and I just felt a strong connection and I just I guess I developed a fiercely kind of independent mindset. I just knew what I wanted and I didn't need anybody to tell me. And so I just got to the US and I'm like I'm going to stay here, I'm going to figure out what I need to do to never have to leave this place. I feel like this is going to be the place where I can explore my intellectual interests and experience freedom and find people in my wavelength, so I just loved it.
11:26
What did you study at Brown?
11:28
So I studied at Brown sociology, philosophy and economics, and Brown is a weird place because you can make up your own majors, and it's one of the best things about Brown is that there are no grades. It's the only Ivy League where you can choose to go through the entire experience and not have a quantifiable number determine your performance, and so, consequently, I think that it really attracts people that are very curious for curiosity's sake. It's not very competitive. I remember taking computer science classes and jazz classes and then making up this major, and it was just so fun to feel like I could spend hours in the library and that that could become social Like. It was just all so new to me. The library can be this like social place where you can hang out with people on a Saturday night. It was really lovely.
12:18
As you say, that certainly it echoes the product that you've developed, a social library. I've heard you say something like that. Anyways, I was scouring through LinkedIn. How did you make your way into banking?
12:37
Okay. So I mentioned that I wanted to really stay in the US. I fell in love with the US and I was lucky that I have a few cousins and friends of mine that were older, that I could always see ahead what was coming. I have a sister that's a year older, so I saw how hard it was for her to apply to college. I was like I'm going to take it upon myself to study for the SAT ahead of time and I lived in Columbia at the time the culture around going to college, and it wasn't like it is in the US where people are just like bred to prepare for that stuff. So I could always see around corners and I realized as I was looking at older friends of mine, that if you were an international student in the US, you basically either had to go back home or find a job in some of the industries that would hire international students, and those industries were typically either banking or consulting. So I wasn't like particularly drawn to banking but I was like whatever it takes to stay in this country, I am just going to do that. So I guess I just like prepared years in advance, did that whole track of finding an internship and getting sponsored and it worked. I ultimately, funnily enough, I graduated around the financial crisis when Lehman Brothers failed and there's this whole crisis. I originally worked at Lehman Brothers and then they went under and sold to Barclays, which is where I started off my banking career. But where I got so lucky is that a lot of international students got their offers rescinded from banks like JP Morgan et cetera, because essentially, the argument was if you are like the US is in crisis, why are we giving jobs to international students? Let's give jobs to the US citizens. And so the JP Morgan offers got rescinded. Barclays happened to be a British bank, so my offer remained. So I just got so lucky. But anyways, barclays was, it was just. It gave me the ability to stay in the US.
14:35
I would say, like banking was very much not for me in the sense that it was this massive corporation. I was trading papers and it was I was. I found it very hard to connect to the big picture, everything about me and what I do. There has to be like there's the nitty gritty, but then there's how does this connect to the bigger picture? How does this connect to making an impact or how does this touch someone's life in some way. And with banking I really struggled to make that connection. And maybe some pension fund here is going to make some money that eventually is going to be somebody's retirement fund. But I just really struggled to be in this high rise skyscraper in Times Square, new York City, trading papers with macho men personalities. It was just not my thing.
15:20
I think that many other people can probably echo your words, because I think it's often in large global companies it's not in the culture to actually infuse a sense of meaning and purpose throughout the hierarchy. Some people at the top have access to that, but it doesn't get passed down. It's a shame, because this is where most people would find more happiness and meaning in their day, and what were you doing to keep your creativity alive around that time?
15:54
I was always like plotting my next move In the back of my mind. I was like, all right, I did it. Check, I have a visa, I can stay here. Also, around that time, I was dating my now husband, who's American, and so I always say 90% love, 10% green card. But I basically had my US kind of residency secured and I was always thinking it's exactly what you said.
16:22
I feel like whatever I do has to be infused with meaning and purpose, Like that is just how I operate. Whether it's a narrative, I tell myself I just need to feel deep in my bones that I'm being useful in some way that connects with my soul. As much as I wish I didn't have it in me. I feel like in some ways, I'm unemployable. I'm always going to be an entrepreneur. I'm never going to be fully settled and at ease, I think, working for somebody else. I wish I didn't have that. But I was just always thinking about how can I do something on my own? And then, around the time I came up with this idea, I was super young, naive, but I was living in New York City and I was like, all right, I'm just going to leave my job and start this new thing. And I did.
17:09
The city of dreams. I mean, it's the city of dreams. Some people think it's Los Angeles, but I think it's New York, where anything can become true.
17:16
Oh my God, yes, it's just. Ambition is so contagious and New York, just yeah, it's just that sense of place and that energy. I've tried to replicate that in Miami, but the truth is that I still have to go to New York every couple months to come back with that infectious energy.
17:35
It's funny you should say that, because I'm trying to bring a sense of that to Geneva and let me tell you it is complicated. It requires a lot of my own energy and conversations with people like you all the way across the pond to sort of feed my well so that I have more to give.
17:53
It's interesting that I don't know if you're familiar with Tyler Cowen, but I think he's one of the. He's an incredible interviewer, thinker, economist, and he said something that there's just an incredible like one of the highest value things you can do in life is raise other people's aspirations and that's so valuable. I've had conversations with people that in a conversation they'll just unlock a whole new way of thinking. They'll give me, they'll inject a ton of confidence, and that happens sporadically in conversations. But I feel like that is New York Every day, everyone, the city walking there. It's just raising your aspirations and that's just so special.
18:34
So what was your first venture? Can you tell us about it? So?
18:37
I, yeah, I basically built a marketplace for secondhand apparel. I was young in New York and I loved shopping and clothes and the iPhone was just becoming a thing and I was like what if I could just sell and trade my stuff? And it was super naive. I was, I think, 21, 22 years old at the time. We ended up raising money from Tory Burch's husband. I remember like sitting there pitching in his office, being like that major imposter syndrome. I think the thing for me in that case it was less about it was less about the idea. It was less about fashion. It was more about how can we use technology to to make an impact sustainability, connecting people. There was just something to me so profound about how we could use technology to unlock different ways of connecting people. There was just something to me so profound about how we could use technology to unlock different ways of connecting people.
19:28
So I yeah, I went down that path for three years, through lots of ups and downs.
19:36
That was very visionary of you, because I think this was way before the time that secondhand platforms became a thing and I know that some of them are still struggling and the American ones stay more American and the European one are again, just stay a little bit more local. How do you feel about that? Is this something you would revisit again in the future.
19:58
It's so interesting. I think it was very formative. I think that it in some ways it was being in New York at the time and meeting so many founders of now very successful companies and just seeing them in the early days. There's a sense that I've carried with me since then of nobody knows what they're doing. That is very freeing right. I remember hanging out with the founding team of nobody knows what they're doing. That is very freeing right. I remember hanging out with the founding team of the Real and they made it pretty big but we were in the same place and I think that for me, that experience with Bib and Tuck was so much of.
20:36
The takeaway for me was, in order to build something, confidence is the scarcest resource. It's you just need that confidence to believe in what you are building in ways that I think at the time I was so threatened by imposter syndrome. I was like, oh, these people are also legitimate and I, this young girl, I have no idea what I'm doing and I think eventually we ended up selling the company to one of our competitors. It wasn't a great outcome. It was a crash course in entrepreneurship, but I think the biggest lessons for me were about the kind of mental challenges around building things. It wasn't just about the financial capital you need to build things, which of course you need, but it's the emotional capital, the resilience, the good energy, the confidence.
21:27
And so I think, looking back at the time, we could have kept going, we could have dreamt a lot bigger, we could have done so much, but I didn't have that confidence. I didn't have that belief in myself and, frankly, that was the only ingredient missing. Like you said, this is around the time these businesses were taking off and, yeah, I just think that so much of what I focus on and try to take care of when building Sublime is like the life of my mind. I can see just how important that is in dictating. It's just we can talk about what kills companies and lack of funding and competition, but I don't. But I think nothing kills companies as much as founders losing energy.
22:12
We can definitely dig into that, because I think that I had reserved this for a little bit later in the conversation. But since we're here, I mentioned in the email I sent you yesterday that I have a good friend who's five years into her startup journey and she's in the fashion tech space. But another part of it it's really intense grueling. There's constant fundraising roadblocks. They're very lean, they're working very hard. She's, like you, very passionate. She feels like she really has found her mission. So perhaps what I would ask you is or remark one of the reasons maybe why you didn't have all that confidence is because Bib and Tuck was just not the right project for you to throw yourself into.
22:59
There's definitely an element of you need to be willing to devote a decade plus of your life to something, to see it through, and I definitely feel that so deeply with Sublime. But it's interesting that I think there's just such a mismatch between expectations and reality in general. Thank you for saying it. There's just this belief of you. Look at Mr Beast today and you're like he goes like crazy viral. But look at he spent years making videos for, with a hundred views, the Acquired Podcasts very famous podcast. I think they spent five years just making podcasts without much of an audience, and so I've.
23:44
Actually one of the benefits of Sublime is that you get to see inside of my mind with the ideas I'm grappling with, and some of the collections that I just love nurturing the most are things like Don't Be Discouraged, where I collect collections of people that struggled in the early days before they broke through. And another one I nurture is patience. I am a naturally very impatient person and so I feel this need to collect insights around the art of patience and how important that is, and also just long-term thinking, like with Sublime, I really want to think about this as a 50-year project and, yeah, I guess I really tried to tame my expectations of how long things take. I think that everyone wants to succeed immediately. Everyone assumes that is the norm, but that's not the norm. That's what the internet like. Our expectations are just not realistic enough. To begin with, there are so many stories that I love around, like the 48 Laws of Power this is one of my favorite books written by Robert Greene. He's actually writing a book right now about the sublime, and it's a book that missed the bestseller lists for more than a decade and still sold more than a million copies. And the Shawshank Redemption, one of my favorite movies. It failed at the box office and then went on to gross like over a hundred million. I don't know I so much of the.
25:09
My journey with Sublime and with putting new ideas out into the world has been, especially before they're ready for a kind of mass adoption, has been understanding that it takes time for ideas to settle into the zeitgeist, that you have to often repeat something for five, six, seven years before people truly internalize it, and that's also become more and more true today we live. Everyone is drowning in information. There's so many incredible ideas that are just buried. They haven't seen the light of day and they're just waiting for that big unlock. So I guess I have so much patience and it comes from like you said. I think I know this is what I want to be doing for the next decade plus of my life. So I'm less in a rush because I kind of trust that this will unfold in its own time. Of course there are the pressure of startups and payroll and people and whatnot, but I just have so much more conviction and I think I have a willingness to be misunderstood for longer periods than I think I ever have.
26:22
Oh, that's beautiful. A willingness to be misunderstood for longer? Yes, that's gorgeous. I want to add to the list you already curate of companies that took a long time to flourish. I started working for Christian Louboutin as a salesperson, working cash on hand on Saturdays in 2000, july or something, and he'd already been in business for nine years. Nobody really started to even remember or connect with his name until the mid to late 2000s. It was the sex in the city kind of stuff that really helped it echo, and this is where the acceleration of luxury was happening. But he's been in business for 30 years, 34, technically, and it doesn't look like it because it took at least 15 years for about the entirety of the fashion world to go. Oh yeah, I know who Louboutin is 15, not two, not six months.
27:28
I think the tech world has so much to learn from the luxury world, in the sense that in order to build a brand that lasts, it has to in some ways. The faster you build something, the easier it is for it to be destroyed.
27:42
Sure. I want to also add that, perhaps echoing how you're envisioning your work with Sublime, he never wanted to sell. He never wanted to cash out and make big money. He was courted by every single buyer you can imagine under the sun and only two or three years ago gave only 30% to an external entity that belongs to friends of his Wow. So he's not relinquished control. He remained with one of his two original associates, wow, and the goal was not to sell. So I think let's talk a little bit, because I feel like conviction is a word that I heard you say that was important. Can you tell me more about conviction?
28:29
I feel like conviction is the most valuable and rarest thing to come by these days. It requires such an intimate relationship with your gut and your intuition, and I think that we are so exposed, in ways that we weren't before, to other people's ideas. The right way to build a company is to raise venture capital and do this and sell and this and that, and so it just becomes harder to find these pockets of stillness where you are interrogating what do I want? What do I have conviction about? What do I believe that nobody else believes? Where my mind goes with this question is we basically are living in unprecedented times where intelligence is being commoditized, where information is being commoditized, and so what remains.
29:28
What remains is conviction, point of view, courage, intention, and these are things that this is the artist's way. These are things that where you have to be in tune with yourself in ways that are incredibly hard to achieve in today's modern world, and I saw a funny graphic a couple months ago that said something like the definition of modern art equals. Like modern art equals oh, you could do this plus, but you didn't, and so in some ways, to me that's so reflective of tech, like, basically, like everything in the world, all of all art, everything we could build, is going to be democratized and commoditized to such an extent where skill is no longer going to be the constraint for anything. It's going to be taste, conviction, courage, point of view. So these are the things that I care deeply about is, how do we help people figure out what they believe? Because, again, if you're on Twitter, you've spent a lot of time online.
30:36
There is this pressure to show up as somebody that has a lot of conviction and has these like very established opinions, because the medium rewards, like fortune cookie, 140 character type aphorisms. But that's not the conviction that I'm interested in. I'm interested in something far deeper and more nuanced, that takes, that is gradual, that requires patience, that requires unfolding of how do you over years? Like sublime is not something I developed conviction in overnight. It was years of gradually unfolding, writing, talking to people. It's just taken. People ask me when did this start? And I say, officially we launched a year and a half ago, but in my mind I've been grappling with these ideas for far longer and I just don't think there is a shortcut to hard-won insight as you were describing that I was thinking conviction is also needs to become anchored in your heart.
31:38
And I didn't say I didn't think mind, because mind is almost like the tool that translates what happens between the heart, gut, creative system that we. I'm changing a bit a question that I wanted to ask you, so I'm going to twist this a little bit. A question that I wanted to ask you, so I'm going to twist this a little bit how are your writing and sublime connected?
32:04
Sublime would not exist had I not developed a writing practice, and the reason for that is I didn't write because I had something to say. I wrote to figure out what it is I had inside of me. It was an act of. It wasn't like oh, I have this insight, let me go write and share it with the world. It's, it was. I developed this practice of writing and that was my way of developing a very close relationship with an idea, because there's writing. It's just the ideas like naked and exposed, and, and, and. You could see all of the logical gaps and, in some ways, um, sublime was born from that writing practice and that just to to share some context with you and with listeners.
32:51
I don't, first of all, I don't think of myself as a writer. English is my second language. I've never saw myself as a writer. I just't, first of all, I don't think of myself as a writer. English is my second language. I never saw myself as a writer. I just happened to be. It was around 2019,. I was running the strategy team at a startup studio and so much of my work I felt was well-received, but that work was, for the most part, collecting dust in drawers. I was basically spending my days creating powerpoint presentations, presenting them to executives at large companies. They would be like, oh, this is wonderful, clap. And then none of these ideas would see the light and I don't know.
33:28
I, just I. I was. I felt like I had something to say to more than just this, the rooms of executives that I was pitching and and at the time I think, substack had not even raised any funding. It was brand new. But I discovered it and I started a Substack, but I initially wasn't even writing. I didn't have the confidence to do that. I was just curating.
33:50
I was just so much of my work was reading and collecting ideas and connecting the dots between them. So I started collecting links, adding some commentary to them. But then, of course, the natural progression of these things is, as you collect ideas and connect ideas and you engage with them, you feel this kind of burning need to, like you, become desperate to communicate something else. And so I think, very gradually, I went from sharing a set of links every week, chatting commentary, to then writing my own thoughts and ideas. And then I think, naturally I was gravitating towards exploring ideas around the future of the web, how the web makes us feel, the consumer internet, exploring social media, what it does to us, the attention economy I was also.
34:41
I went deep down the rabbit hole of the second brain movement, so I was in some ways like internalizing all of these ideas and then trying to make sense of them. And I wrote. I remember I wrote an article about the future of search and I wrote an article about the future of how we share knowledge, and this was years before Sublime came to be, but I was already thinking about these ideas. And again, it was the process of writing that reveals these ideas. The ideas never come to me before I write. They always come to me in the process of writing always come to me in the process of writing.
35:19
Yes, really inspiring. Now is a good time to start talking about what Sublime is and what Sublime does, and what is the vision that you have for it Amazing, yes.
35:26
Sublime is the personal knowledge management tool of my dreams. Essentially, I think I'll share that, because I think there are two sides to sublime there's the practical side and there's the philosophical side. So, practically speaking, it is the personal knowledge management tool that I always dreamt of. I, as you can tell, I love ideas. I love reading and collecting fragments of inspiration and then making sense of them. My memory is extremely leaky and I think inspiration is limitless but it's fleeting, and so I felt this burning need. When I was young I would do it in notebooks, but as I got older I felt this kind of burning need to offload some of my mind into some kind of digital repository. And I tried pretty much everything Apple Notes, notion, obsidian and nothing was built the way that I would want to build it for myself. It really came down to I wanted to build a tool with zero learning curve, just simplicity at the core. So no learning curve was one of the North Stars.
36:34
I really cared about connecting ideas, not just collecting them. To me, the goal is not to collect more information. The goal is to connect ideas so we can build new forms of knowledge and unlock a more fulfilling way to live and work through this knowledge. So I really cared about the connection piece. And then I had this. This is probably the biggest one, but I felt this immense sort of gap where I was spending hours and hours laboring away in my solo tool. So it was. I tried everything, but I had at one point I had an Airtable database with a lot of articles and highlights and I was like this is so valuable. A lot of what's here I would never broadcast on social media, but it reveals so much about my thinking process, what I'm consuming. It's just such an interesting way to see what's inside of my mind and yet there's no easy way to share this or build this in a way that is equal parts personal and communal.
37:39
So that it was that insight of I am spending years laboring away in my solo knowledge tool and I just wanted to figure out there was a feeling that was missing for me of why am I alone here? Why on social media does it feel like I'm on a stage? What is that in between? What is that social library, as you said, where the metaphor is one of? I am deeply focusing intentionally on my own projects, but there are people around me. I am in the quiet company of incredible people.
38:11
So to me, it was this feeling that kept me captive of how can we recreate this feeling that I feel is missing on the web. So there was a practical side of I want a tool that lets me capture anything from anywhere, that is simple, that allows me to both collect and connect ideas, check, check. I just wanted to build that software. But on the philosophical side, there was this feeling that I was after, and that's where I just went so deep down studying the history of the internet. We even published a publication. It was called Can you Imagine, a Library of Possibilities for Reimagining the Internet.
38:46
And, yeah, I think I've gone deep into thinking about, in a very kind of Marshall McLuhan-esque way, the medium is the message. What are the mediums that we have created? What new metaphors can unlock new ways of thinking? And so, in some ways sublime is this kind of marriage of two mindsets that I try to hold of feet on the ground. It's got to be practical, it's got to solve a problem. It's the tech sass thinker in me, with the head in the clouds, which is the meaning and purpose and bigger picture, and the thing that the fuel that sustains me is that bigger kind of feeling that I'm after and so much of the journey I think of Sublime has been really trying to to marry these two things and really embody the kind of practical and the philosophical, the thinker and the doer, the laundry, as we call it, and the ecstasy, the mundane and the grandiose. It's really trying to embody both of these things and figure out how they can coexist.
39:47
After the ecstasy, the laundry by Jack Kornfield.
39:50
Love that yeah.
39:52
So on a practical side, I'd love for you to describe how Sublime works. So I've been using it for over a couple of weeks Actually, yesterday because I'd done some research and I'd listened to other interviews you've done and read more from you, I decided to use Sublime in a way I hadn't from Google Doc and I was working on an essay where I wanted to find some interesting and connected ideas. So, thank you, it really unlocked something super interesting. I'll come back to it tomorrow morning. Yes, would you explain to people what it looks and feels like practically? And you can talk about Austin Kleon, because I think that's quite funny and you can talk about Austin Kleon, because I think that's quite funny.
40:41
Love Austin Kleon. Definitely. One of my 2025 goals is to get him on.
40:44
Sublime because he talks so much about commonplace books, so maybe people don't know what that is. So I've discovered I didn't know the term myself.
40:50
So I feel like I'm going to butcher this definition, but commonplace books were this very common practice that a lot of the kind of renowned figures of the 20th, 19th century writers whether it was Benjamin Franklin or a lot of these like big figures had commonplace books. They were essentially notebooks where they would collect fragments and quotes and inspiration. There's actually a substract devoted to studying deeply how different thinkers organize their commonplace books, but it was this idea of essentially doing what we do on Sublime digitally collecting ideas as you scour the web. Except this was manual and analog. So in some ways I feel like Sublime is the digital collaborative commonplace book, because it's a tool that allows you to save anything from anywhere, so completely multimedia. As you're browsing the web, see a link, that you like, a quote, that you like an image, that you like a video, an audio. You can collect basically anything with our browser extension, with our iOS app. So the first thing is save anything from anywhere. Very similar to commonplace books, it's a place to save anything interesting you come across. But then where things get interesting is every idea you save unlocks a web of related insights. So if you think about a commonplace book, you'd have a quote and it would live there. You'd have to figure out where it could only live. In one page in one book there weren't really portals to other things.
42:22
Sublime takes the magic of AI and digital and advanced technologies and enables you to save anything and then discover related ideas from other people's libraries or your own, and so what that looks like practically is I can I one? One theme I'm exploring right now, especially for people that think about the future of the web, is that a lot of people complain about existing social media, and I find the complaining is boring and I want to exit that kind of complaining and propose something new instead of trying to, like you know, smash the old or focus too much on complaint. And again, I can't articulate this idea well yet. It's okay, but what I can do is I can create a container for that idea on Sublime. We call these containers collections, and as I add things, it starts to recommend related ideas from other people's libraries. So really the gist of Sublime is save anything from anywhere and then discover related ideas and really combined, you really get three value propositions. The brand promise really is.
43:30
I think about it in three ways. Number one is never lose a valuable idea. The world's greatest lie is is I'll remember that later. It's just, time and time again, you just you don't remember. And there have been times where you know, even on an afternoon where I'm having a particularly hard day with parenting, where I'll revisit quotes from a book that I read, and it's just, it changes my afternoon to be in touch with that insight at that right time, being able to retrieve and find valuable ideas. That's number one. Number two is never be uninspired.
44:04
I really truly believe that people's time they spend uninspired is one of the most underutilized resources in the world, that if we could increase the amount of time people spend in an inspired state, in a state of flow, the impact of that would be just enormous. And so, for me, the idea of related ideas, it's just, it's helping lift the floor of inspiration because it's no longer just doing the job of. I saw this quote, I like it. Let me, for peace of mind, paste it in my Apple notes. It's inviting me to grow and evolve that idea. So that piece is number two.
44:44
But then the third one, and one that I think we're still very much developing inside the product is I genuinely believe that one of the biggest problems we have as a species is that we've basically delegated our attention to the world's largest advertising companies and consequently we've become passive consumers of information. But the reality is that to live a fulfilling life, we need to create. We need to be in a position where we're not just scrolling and endlessly consuming. It's a natural human desire to create, and so much of the kind of spirit and what we want the product to enable you to do is to turn your content, consumption, the things that you consume that resonate, to have that feed your creative output.
45:31
So one of the ways we do that in our product is we have a tool called Canvas where, essentially, as you collect all of these ideas, you can then, as you're ready to maybe make a podcast with them, a book with them. It could be anything. It could be writing a recipe book, it could be converting my don't be discouraged collection of how long things take into a little zine collection of how long things take into a little zine. The point being, we want the tool to really facilitate helping people make things, not just consume things, because I think just being a consumer is just, it's just a state of helplessness. I think that a lot of people feel so. Again, I can't help but take this down both practical and philosophical paths, but I hope that I communicated somewhat what the tool does.
46:19
Yes, absolutely you did. I find it really interesting because I have had a writing practice for a number of years and it started with curating other people's ideas because I was already sending people links here and there, but it wasn't organized. I was sending sending people links here and there, but it wasn't organized. I was sending one person this, one person this and I thought let's send it to a group. But over the years I've tried a lot of different solutions so I absolutely did not get into Notion. I was like anything that makes me that I need to take a course to learn how to do is just not for me. I refuse to spend more time learning one more tool, even though it was so-so, I paid for it for a while. Eventually, just somehow it just wasn't doing it for me.
47:11
It did allow me to use my pen to take notes and draw. So, for example, when I was studying with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, it did allow me to use my pen to take notes and draw. So, for example, when I was studying with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, and then they were talking about the two wings of mindfulness, where I could doodle right into Evernote, which I thought was really helpful, and I tried MyMind recently, although it was an absolute failure because I never used it. I think I used it five times since I have used the browser extension. So I've had a collection of tools to try and curate all of my interests, and I'm trying to work on two companies, I've got a book project, I teach, and so there are things everywhere, there are ideas everywhere I'm grappling at stuff. There are piles and piles of books here, post-its vision boards, and so I guess that a part of me has been looking for something new to be able to get to.
48:07
Where I want to be.
48:08
I think that what I found the most interesting in Sublime which I think it'd been perhaps useful for you to speak to is the idea that I don't have to tag in Sublime, whereas in the past it was always going to be the information that's only available if I've appropriately tagged it in whatever tool I am using, that's on my computer or on my phone.
48:38
I love this question. I love this question because I think that for years I'm embarrassed of my habits pre-sublime, pre-ai in the sense that I spent so long collecting ideas and I would just tag them by every like. I would read a quote by Tara Brock and I would say meditation, mindfulness. It was this like fear of never finding that thing again, and so I would just compulsively tag it, and in some ways it was a very mechanical exercise. It wasn't a creative exercise. It was the idea of tagging something was. It was just about ensuring retrieval. And so what I love the most about what is possible today is that, essentially, with AI, you no longer have just keyword search. You can search by meaning, because AI understands. If I store a quote by Jack Kornfield, it understands the meaning of it. I don't have to compulsively tag it the way I would have tagged it before.
49:43
Collections serve a different purpose, right Like when we think about what kinds of organizational functions are still needed in a world where semantic search exists. It's not really tagging the way we are accustomed to thinking. It's really about creating personal contexts and containers for actionable use, and what I mean by that is it's very different to see a quote from Jack Kornfield and feel this compulsive need to tag it by meditation. Mindfulness isn't that I don't do that anymore. I trust that the system is smart enough that I will be able to retrieve that quote just by typing in some of that language. That said, the quote, the Jack Kornfield framing of after the ecstasy, the laundry that became the foundation for an annual letter I wrote at the end of 2023. And that was a personal context for me that there was a connection between that quote that mirrored how I felt about Sublime and the stage we were in and how we had experienced the ecstasy, and now we had to do our laundry, and so that was something that AI can't do make the connection between where I am with Sublime and that quote.
50:58
And so I just think of the function of collections as entirely different from the function of tags, and I hope that I talk about the shift from a productivity mindset to a creativity mindset, because tagging is about productivity and it's this mechanical mindset, like I said, of this pretty, it's robotic, it's. There's not a lot of creativity to it, whereas on Sublime, the hope is that we use advanced technology to free you from these tasks that are not uniquely human, so that we can, so that you can focus on organizing by contexts that are a lot more personal and creative and so you can see, on Sublime people, get really creative with collection names and I have a collection called Things to Come Back to when I'm Feeling Me, and it's an emotion, it's built around an emotion, a project, a personal context. It's the higher order creative thinking that is just more fun and I think, consequently, I think the tool feels less like a chore and more like play.
52:00
Yeah, it definitely does not feel like a chore and I think it's also coming. I'm going to venture as well that it's so clean, it's so minimalist that it really puts whatever you're uploading, whatever form that may take, into center stage. So it's a very unique experience because it does feel like play. Also, there's a very satisfying upload noise. It's very satisfying. There was an article in the FT before the holidays that was talking about the ASMR of certain luxury products, that upload noise that you guys have created. It reminds me of what that article said about I think it was a Dior lipstick. It's really funny. It was very satisfying, so that helps.
52:53
Yeah, it's the little things that contribute to a feeling. I'm very similar to you in the sense that a tool like Notion is not for me. I don't want a steep learning curve. I don't want my tool to feel like an airplane cockpit. We want it to feel like a yoga studio. I'm working on the copy for a new landing page, and one of the kind of little bits of copy that we're injecting there is you are not a knowledge worker, you are a creative human being, and I just think we're Ooh, excuse me.
53:22
What a reframe.
53:23
What a reframe Can you say?
53:24
it. Can you say it again?
53:26
Yeah, you are not a knowledge worker, you are a creative human being, and so I just think so many tools in our space are, we build tools for power readers and super tools to help knowledge workers make work faster, and it's like no, no, no, no, no, like we. You're not a knowledge worker, you are a creative human being and in the future, as like more as AI is commoditizing quantity and speed, what's left is quality, creativity intention and speed. What's left is quality, creativity, intention, and so I just we really want to build a brand and we're just so early in building a brand around these values that feels consistent and that can really, we can really inject in a meaningful way, in a culturally relevant way, but these are the values that we care about and that we're interested in building the brand around.
54:14
As you talk about brand building, it brings me back to a question that I'd written down prior to meeting you today, which was how did you find the name? And also I love the logo. Can you talk to me about how these two things came about?
54:27
Yes, the name is a long story, but essentially the predecessor to Sublime was a tool called Startupy and to go too deep into the origins, but Startupy was basically me open sourcing my database of kind of startup insights that I had created over the years of working in tech and startups and I was going to give this a name. So I said let's call it Startupy. As the kind of idea evolved and we realized like there's going to be more to this, that the vision is becoming clearer. We were desperate and struggling for a name for a while because we knew the name could not be startup-y as the vision was evolving. And one day my co-founder texts me and he lives in Madrid and he said I have our name and I said what is it? And he just said Sublime and he didn't respond for 24 hours. That was it. I have our name and it's Sublime.
55:25
And so I went so deep down a rabbit hole. I went down like I first went to the Wikipedia page for Sublime and followed rabbit holes and I became obsessed with the concept of the Sublime because the definition of for Sublime and followed rabbit holes and I became obsessed with the concept of the Sublime because the definition of the Sublime is really about the qualities and the greatness beyond the possibility of measurement. So it's the aesthetic and intellectual greatness of different art, intellectual pursuits and, to me, beyond the possibility of measurement. It was such a huge unlock because that was the feeling that we were looking for on the web is what is a sublime internet. It's the internet. Today, everything is quantifiable, it's every post is engineered for likes and engagement and measurement and consequently, there's this kind of flattening of what the internet feels like and so Sublime. For us it was just like wow, this is the adjective that we've been looking for the whole time around. What is this feeling that we want to engineer and what do we want this product to feel like? And it's sublimity.
56:36
I'm so glad I asked you that question. It feels like it's in contrast and perhaps I don't know if the opposite is good in contrast to flattening.
56:45
I think there's something so powerful about we basically have created an internet where everything is so calculated and engineered for measurement that we've lost touch with the sublime. We've lost touch with that quality of greatness that transcends the possibility of calculation, and so the only way to escape that like on sublime, like I'll give you a very concrete manifestation of this. So if you think about algorithms on Sublime, like I'll give you a very concrete manifestation of this. So if you think about algorithms on the internet, for the most part, the way it works I actually love Ev Williams, the founder of Twitter, described this best.
57:26
He said on the internet, the way algorithms work is if you are driving down the street and you see a car crash and you turn around and look at the car crash, then the algorithms just start showing you car crashes and then, consequently, all car crashes get likes and attention, and so, consequently, everyone's just uploading videos of car crashes. That's a little bit of a metaphor of how the internet works. It's this gets attention, this gets numbers. Consequently, everyone uploads things that are engineered for that kind of attention and, of course, engagement tends to attract things that are polarizing. Sublime has no likes.
57:59
Oh yeah, I'm sorry I forgot to mention yeah.
58:02
But what's interesting is that there's obviously like a question of how do you then rank for quality, right, if there are no likes? There wasn't some evil person on Twitter or Instagram saying we're going to? No, it made sense. It made sense to think about if a lot of people like this. These algorithms are not nonsensical.
58:24
What we believe, and where the sublime comes in, is that past a certain threshold of popularity, you need more serendipity, that there are a lot of incredible things that don't see the light of day, and so for us, once the card is in two libraries, for example, that's a pretty strong signal that two people added it, not just one.
58:46
But we don't treat something that's in two libraries versus 100 libraries that differently because we treat that threshold of popularity so differently. So what that means is that the vectors in which somebody would want to come to Sublime are not audience building or fame. You're not going to come here to get famous, to build a huge audience and I'm not saying that's wrong. You need places for that but what I'm saying is that you come here to experience flow, state, to develop a closer relationship with an idea, to discover and find serendipity and inspiration by traversing a trail of your own thoughts interspersed with other people's thoughts. So it's just a different feeling altogether, but it is, I think, the result of us really, at our core, embracing this idea of the sublime and greatness that is beyond the possibility of calculation.
59:43
You hinted, prior to that, at the connection that the sublime has to meaning in our lives. In our lives and I think we evoked once before David Perel in a prior conversation and I'm in a group with three or 400 prior cohort members of Rite of Passage and over the last couple of weeks, because I host a small writing group on Fridays we've talked about the fact that some people are coming back to religion because they feel like there's too much of a gap. There's too much of a gap is the wrong word. There's too much of an emptiness in the world as they engage with it. Today, as I hear you describe how we can use Sublime, that potential of this gives me shivers, that potential of inviting serendipity, of encouraging different ways to make meaning emerge. I find that it could be a tool that's going to bring a little bit of forgive me for the word, but a little bit of magic in what has been until now, like you said before, a flatter digital experience.
01:01:09
One of the most profound books I've read recently is a book called the Disappearance of Rituals by, I think, byung Shul Han, incredible philosopher. I think about this a lot because I think what religion offers that the digital world doesn't offer is ritual. It's this kind of temporal like boundness that I don't think we've. I think about it a lot. I don't think we've nailed this within Sublime, but I think there's something about the difference between reading a physical book versus reading this same book online. The sensation is so different, because online there's this anxiety of there's a million other things I could be doing right now, whereas when I'm on the beach with one book in my hand, and that's it that I am in that place, in that time there's a I don't know if the boundness is the word, but there's something finite about it that I think we have not managed to recreate in the digital world, and this sense of abundance in the digital world is also a source of immense anxiety, right, I think we for so much of the beginning of the 20th century, we lived in scarcity and now we have the opposite problem. We live with abundance, and I think that rituals, religion being one of them they create structures of meaning in our lives that, as humans without constraints, we do not know how to operate well without constraints, and so I've been trying to think about how do you recreate For me?
01:02:44
I do Shabbat dinners every Friday. That's my ritual. I absolutely love it. It gives me something to look forward to. I bake brownies every Friday afternoon with my three-year-old son. I light candles every Friday night. These are the rituals that give life meaning in a way that it's inexplicable what it does, but it does something very powerful that I think we've lost in the digital realm, and so I don't know why your question about religion brought me to this concept of how do we recreate rituals within technology, because scrolling is the opposite of a ritual it's never ending, it's unpredictable, and so I don't know. It's something that I want to continue to think about deeply.
01:03:31
Thank you. Yeah, I'm not sure I knew where that was going either, but it feels like there's something there. I love that you do the Shabbat dinners. I think for me the rituals have become really anchored, particularly in my mornings as my phone is on do not disturb for hours on end just because I do not want to get notifications and spending the first hour and a half of every day journaling, reading, writing, having a walk with my dog and meditating is just a really. I find that it's a primer, as if whatever happens after will be smoother. I'll be a smoother human being coming out into the world, do you?
01:04:18
wake up and look at your phone in the morning? Not at all. I want to be able to do that and I can't.
01:04:28
Years of practice, sorry, years of practice.
01:04:32
Now I think that it's taken me a long time, but it's true that I find that if I forget to put it on the not disturb and instead it's on sleep mode, that from 7am it's going to start beeping at me, and that already disturbs my inner peace, and so I protect my time. For obviously, if I expect a phone call or have things to do, I'll pick it up, but just this idea that I need to be reacting to whatever publisher or app is sending to me no, it's not. I'm not free for this. This is not for me now. I don't want to engage with this now. I'm totally happy to engage with it later, when I have dedicated time to faff around with my phone.
01:05:14
One of the kind of most deeply held beliefs we have as a team at Sublime is the urgency of having to transition from the attention economy to the intention economy. So attention is things that hijack your attention that have nothing to do with what you want to do in the moment. It's these notifications coming at you at all times. You don't need to know at this moment that some friend uploaded a photo to Instagram about her trip to whatever a safari, and so much of the way we are trying to design Sublime is about deepening your intention instead of hijacking your attention. So that shift from attention to intention. And the truth is that what I mentioned earlier about incentives dictate everything, and we've essentially outsourced our time and attention to the world's largest advertising companies. Their incentive is to keep you engaged. Their metric the metric that they are held accountable by their shareholders is time on site.
01:06:17
We don't track time on site on Sublime. The only metric that we track is how many paying customers do we have? Because, at the end of the day, whether I spend 30 minutes on Sublime or 10 hours, what matters is that we're giving you a tool and a service that is valuable enough that you want to keep using. What matters is that we're giving you a tool and a service that is valuable enough that you want to keep using. When you bought a laptop, when you buy a laptop or back in the kind of glory days of the early web, nobody was thinking like how much is this person going to use their laptop? It's no, you bought a laptop here's some money for the laptop and go home. It was a service, it was. You were paying for a product.
01:06:55
The ad based business model really warped everything that's a really great reframe about the tool and the purchase. Right, it's not about how much you use it, it's about the value that you place on it.
01:07:08
That's really radical it's about the reframe. I think about the reframe as build tools people use instead of products people consume. So, of course, lime has some discovery and some consumption, but we think about that as being wrapped in utility, in a tool that is useful, not in a tool whose sole purpose is to keep you in an endless consumption loop.
01:07:37
I should add that one of the things that I found really helpful. So I read on all mediums, so I've got iBooks, kindles, print books if there were other forms audio books, blah, blah, blah, blah I've got them all. I did find it incredible how easy it was because I'm very efficient. So once I signed up, I paid for my subscription. I signed up, I paid for my subscription. I just downloaded all of the possible extensions, integrations that I could have with Sublime to see what it was capable of.
01:08:13
It was so great to see that the time I spent making notes in books suddenly all appearing in my personal knowledge tool. I never thought when I was first grabbing those notes that they were going to be resurfacing somewhere else that would be so easy to access them, and I don't feel like I've yet come to the stage where I'm deeply engaging with that part of the tool, but it's really fun. So one of my questions is and I think you mentioned somewhere else you were going to do this soon you mentioned you wanted to try and be able to pull from podcasts as well from videos. I'm like when I was listening to you speaking to someone I forgot the name of, but that was a very interesting conversation. For example, you quoted a Kevin Kelly quote, which, by the way, once I found it, I added to Sublime, because, you know, let's make this like a nice circle, but I really would have wanted to keep that clip of you explaining what that quote meant to you. So is that coming soon?
01:09:13
Oh my gosh, yes, I'm so excited about this. Yeah, so, essentially, so many of the world's best ideas these days are coming out of podcasts. They're stuck in audio formats that are hard to clip and remember, and I basically spent months downloading every possible solution to this and I was like this feels very clunky, and I knew we needed a solution for this because people kept saying I added a link to a podcast on Sublime, but I really wanted just that one clip, and so, as a team, I posed the question of like, how could we do this in a way that's better? And Alex, a member of our team, he said on Slack this is probably a very stupid idea, but I wish I could just take a screenshot of my Spotify podcast player. And I said, oh my God, I do that all the time and I said that's not stupid.
01:10:09
I also think it might be possible, with an advanced AI, to convert that screenshot into an actual clip and transcript of that moment, and I basically spent the last couple months making that possible. It's a great time to be talking, because we basically have a functioning prototype that works, and I actually tested it with your episode with Yancey, and so there was a part of that conversation you had with Yancey. That really resonated. I actually didn't know that Kickstarter took so long. He talked about how he met his co-founder and for years they were talking and it was so hard at the beginning because people didn't really know how to describe it and anyway, I found those things so relatable. So I just took a screenshot of the podcast and then it just gave me that clip and it's just that one transcript and a little bit a way to play it.
01:11:02
No way.
01:11:04
So we have a functioning yeah. So it's really amazing. It's really. It's also really and simple in a way that Sublime is not, in the sense that this does one thing capture insights from podcasts using screenshots whereas Sublime is like it's this, like life project. For me, it's more cerebral, it's more it's like the way that we've built the brand around. Sublime it's just a little bit. It takes time to fully warm up to what the tool is and what it represents and why it's so powerful. So I'm excited about this is laundry. This is pure laundry, but done, I think, in a way that's just clever and simple and practical, and so I'm excited to roll it out, hopefully in the next month or so.
01:11:51
This is going to be revolutionary, because I don't know how many people you may know who just are walking down the street or in their car, starting traffic and you can just do a screen grab. Yes, that's just. I don't know how many times I've done that and then gone home to go back to the podcast to then get a transcription.
01:12:13
We are solving that for you. Yeah, it's a complex problem to solve, but it's possible. That's why I think it's such an incredible time to be alive. All of these things are possible.
01:12:25
Yeah, you know, what I love also so much about this is often, I think, we. So this is a personal. You'll tell me what you think about this. This is a personal feeling. I feel like I get a lot more aha moments in listening to conversations rather than in reading, and I think that it's because we don't write like we talk and sometimes we make our stories a little bit more cerebral, which I'm guilty of as well Less sensorial, so it's perhaps less resonant for our storytelling brain, and I find that so many people have changed my life on walks at home, when I'm cleaning and cooking while I'm doing something else and my ears are wide open, because you know, as everybody else, you can be reading and half your brain is somewhere else and you have to reread the same page three times. That was me last night in bed, very bad reading time, but so this is going to be a game changer for sure. I'm so excited.
01:13:28
I definitely resonate with what you said. I think the other thing about writing is that writing is such a time consuming effort that something that would take me 12 hours to write, I could just record something in 20 minutes conversational. Consequently, I think a lot of people who don't have a lot of written records out like the people that I most want to hear from, are rarely the journalist. The person whose like job is to have hot takes the the. It's the people who have skin in the game who are making things, and those people are rarely writing consistently, but more and more they're in podcasts. So I think there's a lot of the tone comes through in podcasts. It feels more human and relatable, but I also think the quality of.
01:14:15
There's just a lot of people whose knowledge is not accessible via writing, but it is via podcast knowledge is not accessible via writing, but it is via talking, so I think that talking about people who write this is a good moment to be maybe moving away from sublime to asking you about how you have become involved in the work of MetaLabel and worked with your friend, yancy Strickler, who I had the pleasure to get to know a few years ago.
01:14:49
I love Yancy. So Yancy and I, we became internet friends a couple of years ago. He was starting Metal Label around the same time that I was starting Sublime. I think we were both at that stage where we were working on something that we still did not have the words for. We were working on something that we still did not have the words for, and we were in that kind of at that point where it's very easy to feel lonely in the beginning and so, yeah, we would, he was writing and I was writing. And every time he'd put something out and I'd put something out, we would both be like, oh, that struck a chord, that struck a chord. And obviously we were also both building in the internet, thinking about the creator economy, the future of social web, mechanics. So I think we bonded over that just shared values and, yeah, and I think, really bonded over the difficulty of a way that I know he's also struggled with. This feels too cerebral, but I just got it immediately. This idea of releasing versus posting was so powerful to me and, yeah, again, I think it's going to be one of those things that will take years for people to understand, but he's ahead of the curve. So, yeah, so we've been in touch over the years.
01:16:02
We, I think, as part of Sublime we love, because Sublime is a company built by creatives for creatives.
01:16:11
We think part of our responsibility and part of the way we should build this brand is not just to build software but to construct a universe and put ideas out there, and so creating zines has been one way of doing that.
01:16:24
So we released one last year or in 2023, which was called Can you Imagine A Library of Possibilities for Reimagining the Internet. Yancey was interviewed in that one and then in 2024, we wanted to release another one. We were very stretched for time and had very little bandwidth, and we wanted to do it in a way that was easy and fun, and Metal Label just made sense. I think that the software that they've built around contextualizing a creation like there's just so the act of posting about something on Twitter and it disappearing and it living alongside a hundred other irrelevant things. It's just so different, like the mechanics and the nuances of how that happens on Metal Label and how you release creative work are so different, so really no real story beyond. We are just fans of each other and wanted to support one another's work and the zine felt like a great way to do that, so we released it through Metal Label.
01:17:23
Oh, that's great to hear, because it's true that I've been really interested in how. I can't quite figure out how I can engage with Metal Label yet how I would release, but having had a part of my life dedicated toward music, the idea of releasing of course makes so much sense and for so many artists it's different. But it's funny as you describe the life of the project when it's released versus when it's posted. The image that comes to me is also how, in the fashion world, particularly in luxury fashion, when you enter a shop floor on a multi-brand shop floor, one of the biggest things that you want to secure is the right adjacencies so that people get what you do right, because if you put the wrong brand next to yours, then you're going to come out completely out of context.
01:18:13
It may also drive the wrong clients. So I think that there is an aspect of meta-label that I think still comes across to me as cerebral. I think there's a part of me that wants to. There's a part of me that's beating me up for being too intellectual, or maybe that's going to come across as inaccessible. But what I enjoy about the approach of zines like the ones that you've done, because I really enjoyed reading it. I didn't watch the videos yet, but reading it was really wonderful. It felt like there was a bubbly energy to it. There was an energy to it. Does that make sense? It had a substance, even though I was not in the US, so I only got the digital file, and so there's that interesting notion of there, the creative energy. I find that was passed through, despite the fact that it was a digital download yeah, I think that we also.
01:19:12
We wanted to feel human at the end of the day. Um, you succeeded, without a doubt. Love to hear that.
01:19:24
I was very amused to read that you are very anti-naps. Can you please explain?
01:19:31
I don't even remember how this came up in the conversation anymore, but you know I I am in the thick of it now. Right now, I have three young children. I have this ambitious project that I want to see through, that I care about so deeply, and my biggest struggle is time. I have a very complex relationship with time, and so I think the nap thing is I was like I hate naps because, if I like, if time is the most scarce thing, it's like what's keeping me from doing everything I want to do is that I have to run to my kids like second grade school show in a couple hours and my workday is cut short, and so it's this tension that I'm living with around my project is about celebrating creativity and slowness, but in my actual life I am so stretched for time. I need to be ruthlessly efficient and productive, and I just have no space whatsoever for naps. And yeah, I don't know, there's a lot of kind of like personal tension that I wrestle with.
01:20:50
I think we talked earlier about how the selfishness and how self-centered it is to have a dream and want to see through it. You have to be crazy to believe that you can make a dent and build an internet that feels sublime and there's just a certain level of selfishness that comes with that pursuit. On the flip side, I think with that pursuit a lot of the returns of work feel on the spectrum a lot more tangible than the returns of care work. Right, when I spend a morning with you, I know that I'm sharing ideas with somebody that is brilliant and inspiring and that this will lead to all sorts of serendipitous things and for better or worse, you cross it off a checklist. Whereas when you're playing with toy trucks in the ground with a three-year-old, whereas when you're playing with toy trucks in the ground with a three-year-old, that doesn't fit my productivity brain in any way, even though years and years of accumulated time spent doing that amounts to a better adult in some indirect way.
01:21:56
And I don't know. I think right now I'm at a point in my life where I just have to live with all of these tensions right Around, what it means to be a woman and have ambition, selfishness and selflessness, productivity and creativity. There's all of it's like schizophrenic in a sense, because leading a team it's you have to go from the macro to the micro, from the laundry to the ecstasy. There's. It's a lot of duality. It's embracing a lot of dualities. But back to your point. I have no time and consequently naps have no place in my life at the moment.
01:22:27
I'm not particularly pro naps, by the way, but I know that you were on holidays in Europe apparently when that became a point of contention with the surrounding businesses that were closed when you were hungry, I think businesses that were closed when you were hungry, I think.
01:22:41
But it's interesting, in the same article in the zine you did mention this tension of coming off of work and turning to almost changing personalities, right Rather taking off the hat of the founder and the creative and putting on the mummy hat and down in the dirt, kind of thing. It's certainly not at the same level as a struggle, as I don't have children, but I do find that being able to just switch off by looking after my animals or being with friends or just having to attend to my dog's bodily needs actually forces me to take breaks that I normally would not take. I have a really annoying way of working very intensely. When I am down in the zone, I will stay at the computer for six hours and it's not necessarily good for me, and so just saying this to see how that feels.
01:23:43
I. It's exactly what you described it is. It is humbling it. Also it is a forcing function, for I think if I didn't have children, I would be in my laptop for 12 hours a day and that is probably not healthy. So my children have a way of helping me put everything into perspective. But when you read about the daily rituals of men and building things and I think there's like a famous kind of daily schedule for I forget who it was, it may have been like Benjamin Franklin and it was like nine hours of uninterrupted time I'm like I just don't have that luxury. There's always something, a call from school, somebody's got a cold, so yeah, it's just. I'm in the thick of it, you know, and I want to slow down, and Sublime is a multi-decade project, but there's so much to do. I don't know if you ever watched the Hamilton play?
01:24:48
No, I haven't seen it. I've seen Exos, but I've never seen the full play.
01:24:52
Yeah, I saw myself very mirrored and there was a song called Running Out of Time, oh yeah, and I think I'm just naturally a very impatient person and I think the song is like why do you write like you're running out of time? How do you write like tomorrow won't arrive and I just I have this, I'm not done. I have so much left in me that I just need to put in this world. And so I have this like feeling in me of I have no idea if tomorrow will be here and I just have to like I have a lot to do. I have a lot left in me which I don't know where that comes from, to be honest, but it's very funny. I don't like living with that. It's a recipe for anxiety because it takes you into the future instead of the present.
01:25:38
But yeah, it's so interesting. I started a few months ago an essay that I have parked there for the moment, where I talk about the fact that I suffer from a disease, which is time optimism, because I always think I can do more in the time allotted to me, which means that I'm always a bit late and I never quite have enough time.
01:25:57
That also probably explains why you are going through the life with less anxiety and just more lightness.
01:26:06
Perhaps, but also always a little bit late. Before I go to my closing questions, I think there was one that I thought was perhaps a good way to wrap up our conversation. What do you think is important about the future of creativity?
01:26:30
I essentially think that creativity is basically. I believe that we talk a lot about how AI is becoming more human, but I don't think we talk enough about how humans have become very robotic in the last hundred, like post-industrial age, and I think now we're finally going to see a shift or a fork in the road where we can say going to see a shift or a fork in the road where we can say we have an opportunity to do the things that are uniquely human, to ask what are the areas where our humanity actually matters? And I think those things are nurturing and building relationships, developing a point of view, making something wonderful instead of making something fast. That's a huge one for me. Right, We've talked a lot about how good things take time to unfold and develop, and so, to me, this shift from a productivity mindset to a creativity mindset is, for the first time in a long time, not just something that will make us more fulfilled. I think it's also going to be an economic necessity because, the productivity, like everything else, is going to be commoditized.
01:27:49
Are you going to be operating in the SEO, manufactured junk content world where everyone can do that stuff and it's a race to the bottom? Or are you going to do and embrace the weird? I don't know. We've just been thinking about our launch, because Sublime is finally launching publicly in about two months and it took a while for this idea that we have that I'm sure we'll share publicly, but it's so creative and weird and unique and different and you can't manufacture this stuff. It's like creativity is not a process, creativity is not scripted.
01:28:25
I think one of the most salient things about creativity if you look at Steve Jobs, walt Disney, some of the most creative minds is the absence of process. You cannot manufacture this. It's just a process where ideas gradually evolve and refine, based on point of view and serendipity, and so I think that I don't know. I just think that we're about to embrace the woo a little bit more. But finally, not everything has to be measured, not everything has to be a process. Not everything will fit squarely into the shareholder investor update. Some of these things that are hard to communicate because the value is intangible will have the biggest impact and I think that the companies that can reorganize around valuing those things will stand to benefit the most in this coming age.
01:29:15
Thank you so much. Lots to think about Now. As I mentioned in presenting the podcast to you, I like to say that it's at the crossroads between business and mindfulness, just because I approach, let's say, life or the questions, my researching, the guests, with a more holistic, careful and, let's say, caring lens Careful and, let's say, caring lens. And so, given everything you've mentioned already about the struggle with time and the being a mother of three and being the founder of this sublime internet, how do you care for yourself? What are things that support you, that work for you and I don't ask this in order to give anybody's let's say a shortcut, to say do it like Sari, but perhaps more as a source of inspiration, I think, for me.
01:30:15
There are no boundaries for me between work and play. So when I'm working on Sublime, that feels like something I'm doing for me. So my relationship to my work is one where I can be doing this all the time. I have so many more things that I want to untangle in my mind, grapple with. I have more ideas than I have time. So I love, I love my work. It feels like play, in fact.
01:30:39
I think somebody once said that happiness or paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in great company. Oh, that is like my definition of happiness. My definition of how to take care of myself is long bouts of solitude. I like that is like what fills my cup. And then an evening spent in great company, whether that's with my family, with my children, with a friend. But it's that combination of long stretches of solitude with deep connection that I just that fills me and I don't get as much of the former as I would like. Consequently, I don't know that there's this gap always.
01:31:27
But yeah, I do think the things that keep me super grounded are the rituals I mentioned. To me, there's something so powerful about knowing every Friday I'm going to have dinner with my extended family and a lot of like startups and children. There's a lot of uncertainty. You never know what will happen. I can't predict what's going to happen this week. I can't predict if my child's going to get sick, but I know that on Friday night I will light the candles and I will have dinner with my family, and so to me, it's really the lighting of the candles, the dinner Friday nights, one thing I've started to do because, for better or worse, I live the laptop life.
01:32:07
My life is like in this office. It's like my kids ask me like what do you do all day in a computer? For them it's like weird, because they're just playing ball and like outside and they're very sporty, and so one of my goals this year was to do something with my hands. So I recently took on guitar again. So I just I feel like that's the thing that I may be lacking to to feel a little bit more grounded is to just use my hands more, because my entire life is around using my head and I feel like I've lost that connection. I don't know, I'm not very handy with my hands, so I yeah, I don't have anything to report because it's been three weeks of lessons, but I'm happy that I made the first move of restarting lessons I used to play when I was younger.
01:32:50
Oh, thanks so much for sharing that. So here are a few of my favorite questions. So, what's your favorite word? And I like to color this question by saying a word that you could live with, for example, tattoo on yourself. And I'm not saying you should get a tattoo, but that's such a hard question.
01:33:12
I'm going to give you the kind of immediate answer that comes to mind, which is my son's name, is Aleph A-L-E-P-H.
01:33:22
Aleph is the first word of the Hebrew alphabet and it's a word that has a lot of meaning for me, because the story about Aleph is it is the first word of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph is it represents leadership, but in the story in the Torah of the Parashah, aleph seeds the second letter, gives the second letter the light, and so in some ways, it's about greatness linked to humility. And so, when I was trying to figure out what to name my child, my grandfather who passed away a year ago, who I was very close with, he was an exceptional man and exceptionally humble, and so to me this idea of humble greatness that is captured in my son's name. And also, if you've ever read Jorge Luis Borges, he writes a lot about the concept of the Aleph and the Aleph representing ideas about infinity and perception and being a metaphor of all things connecting and the universality of things, and it's a very profound concept, but it's all embodied in Aleph, which is the name of my son. So that was my initial instinct is my son's name.
01:34:38
Sounds like a great choice. What does connection mean to you?
01:34:46
what does connection mean to me? I love being in flow state, and connection to me means being in flow state with another person, and connection to me means being in flow state with another person. It comes with letting your guard down as well, because you cannot really enter flow state until you let your guard down. So that's what it means to me.
01:35:16
Thank you. Now that next one is generally thought of as the most complicated or difficult one. What?
01:35:25
song best represents you? Oh, wow, what song best represents? I'm going to go with a song that I discovered not too long ago but that I am obsessed with, and it has this power to instantly shift the mood in my house. I like play it on Sunday mornings full on volume. It's a song about gratitude. It's inspired by Bob Marley's Redemption Song and it's called Times 10, x10 by this artist she's a Grammy award winner called Coffee. I wish I could play it. It's such a. It's just it moves all your senses and it's just so fun and uplifting and it makes you love life, and so I've just gotten in the habit of Sunday mornings playing that song and it's like instant mood shift and it's not a song everybody knows about, but it's like it's such a hidden gem. I want everyone to play that song because I don't think it's possible to listen to that song and feel anything other than life is amazing.
01:36:33
I'm so excited because I don't know it, and I need more of that in my life too.
01:36:37
I discovered it on a music blog probably two years ago and I'm just obsessed. I actually told my husband one day I'm like if I ever die, please play this song at my funeral. He was like this is very dark, but I'm like I just it celebrates life and it's just so beautiful and incredible and I hope people pause this when they're listening to this episode and just search X10 by the artist Coffeeofie K-O-F-E-E.
01:37:05
Fantastic. Also, just so you know, I do curate a collection on Spotify with all of the songs that my guests choose, so yours will be added.
01:37:15
I'll put the link in the show notes oh, amazing I can't wait to discover the one that Yancey put in. Oh, I'm so excited. That's such a fun way to discover new songs. You'll have to share that with me?
01:37:25
Yeah, I will Absolutely. What's a favorite book that you can share and I know that's going to be hard, but one of your favorite books.
01:37:36
Oof, what book? Oof. I love stories. Like, I start reading a lot of books and I don't always finish them. Yeah, but my favorite genre, the ones that I can't put down, are usually stories of people and usually autobiographies. I love a good autobiography, recent ones that I've read Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger, who's the CEO of Disney, was fantastic. James Dyson from Dyson Against the Odds Shoe Dog, of course, by Nike. I just love biographies. I can't put them down, so not one, but that's like my genre of choice.
01:38:15
I would say that's awesome. I'll post all three, Imagining that you can step into a future version of yourself. What most important advice do you think that future you needs to give to present time?
01:38:31
I think I would say try lighter instead of harder. There's just something about just gentle, letting your guard down, surrender that. I think right now, with everything's like full speed and I just want everything to happen, and there's just this, this kind of tension that that builds up when you go through life with this kind of I don't know, in some ways you asked about my childhood and so much love, but so much pressure I was an A student, valedictorian in high school, middle school, college like so much expectation and that's just a weight to carry and I just I think that there's something about softer, lighter instead of trying harder. I don't know that I can articulate this in any way better than that, but I think just remove the framing and the focus on succeeding and making a mark.
01:39:32
I think that, living with this question of what have you done for the world, what did you do today to change the world, I think that it was, in hindsight, not the right question, because it assumes this like separateness between myself and the world, when really we are one, like the world will happen less when you act upon it and more when you become one with it, and I think I would just try to like undo so much of that kind of like baggage that I have around. You need to make an impact, you need to change the world. You have so much responsibility, you were so gifted, you were so talented, you were so smart, you were so this and that, and it just assumes this like separateness between myself and the world. And I just want lightness. I am in the world. I am not separate from the world, if that makes any sense.
01:40:24
Absolutely it does. It resonates very deeply with me because at the end of last year, I had a really great conversation with a new encounter at a party in Paris and we talked about the notion of dancing with life and I feel like most of my time I am pushing through. I'm like life, I am doing this and life is not always agreeing with me and it just shoves me right back. Instead, I think there's a way that we can just it's. Do you know what I mean?
01:40:57
Yes, it's a being with. Yes.
01:41:01
It's a being with, as in being, in, a part of, and just yes.
01:41:06
There's something also about the question of who do you want to be versus what do you want to do. Who do you want to be? Assumes this like identity of I am going to be a founder that makes an impact. That does this versus what do you want to do is I want to read a lot of books and engage with a lot of ideas and it's just um, I think that thinking about what you want to do versus what you want to be, it's in some ways, it's like nothing is worse than like self-concern. So what I would want to do is like unself, just like unself yourself, because what do you want to be is about the self. What do you want to do is a different question, because it's the act of doing, not the act of. It's less of an identity question. So I don't know. I'm grappling with a lot of questions around, like self-centeredness and what that means.
01:42:01
You have such conviction and such passion for the work. You do not just for yourself, it's really for a greater purpose. Yes, and I'm going to bring you to my last and favorite question Time, to release you what brings you happiness?
01:42:23
I'm gonna have to say the same thing I mentioned earlier, which is, I think, my definition of paradise is working all day alone in anticipation of an evening in great company. So what brings me happiness is a long stretch of solitude, followed by connection that, to me, is that's as close to perfect.
01:42:50
That sounds wonderful. Sari, thank you so much for this interview and for the time that you gave me. I'm so excited for people to be able to discover Sublime. You mentioned it's going public in a couple of months, but people can still find and participate. Would you just tell us a couple of things about how they can perhaps create an account, subscribe and get started?
01:43:11
Yes, so we're going to launch publicly in two months, meaning everyone will be able to create an account and use it. In the meantime, if you visit sublimeapp, you'll be able to join our waitlist or pay to create an account. That said, I will happily extend an invite to all of your readers to get early access, so I'll coordinate with you offline to share that link. We'd love to have. Anyone who went through. Listening to this hour plus long podcast definitely deserves to be on Sublime. So thank you for listening, if you got all the way here.
01:43:47
That sounds awesome. Thank you so much. I'll put links to everything we talked about in the show notes and I hope that I'll have a chance to interact with you, perhaps serendipitously, via Sublime, in the next few weeks and months, and perhaps in person one day, who knows?
01:44:04
Thank you so much, anne. This has been lovely. You are, yeah, really great at letting people scarred down, and I can't believe it's been almost two hours and it held really fast, so this was wonderful, thank you.
01:44:31
Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day and speak to you soon. Have a wonderful day and speak to you soon on threads on Instagram Anne V Muhlethaler. On LinkedIn If you don't know how to spell it, the link is in the notes or on Instagram, at underscore. Out of the clouds, where I also share daily musings about mindfulness. You can find all of the episodes of the podcast and much more on the website outoftheclouds.com. If you'd like to find out more from me, I invite you also to subscribe to the MetaView, my weekly newsletter, where I explore coaching, brand development, conscious communication and the future of work. That's the MetaView with two Ts themetaview.com. So that's it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening to Out of the Clouds. I hope that you will join me again next time. Until then, be well, be safe and take care.