THOT LIBRARY

BSS: The first step with anything is to make a diagonal line from the top right corner to the bottom left. Visualizing that diagonal always tells me what to do. It calls my attention to the nature of the space and once you know that, you’re halfway there. Whether it’s a drawing on a sheet of paper or the ceiling of a museum. At Sea Ranch with the wonderfully complicated architecture I also had the benefit of utility. A big S upstairs for the sauna, blue lines for the shower, things like that. Really, the space tells you what to do.

Throughout this piece, I’ve tried to emphasize that Adams was usually pretty self-aware. Did that include the hypnosis stuff? I’m not sure. I think he would have answered: certainly some people are great charismatic manipulators. Either their skills are magic, or they operate by some physical law. If they operate by physical law, they should be learnable. Maybe I’m not quite Steve Jobs level yet, but I have to be somewhere along the path to becoming Steve Jobs, right? And why not describe it in impressive terms? Steve Jobs would have come up with impressive-sounding terms for any skills he had, and you would have believed him!

Every few months, some group of bright nerds in San Francisco has the same idea: we’ll use our intelligence to hack ourselves to become hot and hard-working and charismatic and persuasive, then reap the benefits of all those things! This is such a seductive idea, there’s no reason whatsoever that it shouldn’t work, and every yoga studio and therapist’s office in the Bay Area has a little shed in the back where they keep the skulls of the last ten thousand bright nerds who tried this. I can’t explain why it so invariably goes wrong. The best I can do is tell a story where, when you’re trying to do this, you’re selecting for either techniques that can change you, or techniques that can compellingly make you think you’ve been changed. The latter are much more common than the former. And the most successful parasites are always those which can alter their host environment to be more amenable to themselves, and if you’re a parasite taking the form of a bad idea, that means hijacking your host’s rationality. So you’re really selecting for things that are compelling, seductive, and damage your ability to tell good ideas from bad ones. This is a just-so story that I have no evidence for - but seriously, go to someone who has the words “human potential” on their business card and ask them if you can see the skull shed.

In 1983, Toyota president Eiji Toyoda challenged his company to build “a car that is better than the best in the world.” It was a remarkable ambition, and there were many in the automotive world ready to dismiss the idea as fantasy. After all, how could a business with no experience of the international luxury car market have any hope of matching, let alone exceeding the achievements of the industry’s established leaders? Even within Toyota there were doubters who said his plans were simply impossible.

Nailing performances like this was an all-consuming process of trial-and-error. Winter says he’ll either get a vocal right on “take one, take two, or take 47.” Humphrey distills the process of making Heavy Metal down to Winter “singing it 1,000 times to get to the guy that ended up singing the final cuts. He had to wear himself down to the point where the person singing was that burnt-out.” 

Armani was known for his slouchy, generously cut clothes rendered in colors that suggested spareness and luxury, such as black, stone, and greige. But behind the tranquility of his designs was a life marked by trauma and obsession. In a 2004 documentary about the designer, Anna Wintour suggested that no major decision was ever made without Armani’s approval. The truth was starker: no decision, no matter how minor, passed without his input. Armani chose the cast-iron lanterns that flanked his headquarters, the exact hue and shade of his store displays, and the weight of the stationary used at his branch offices. Even when he contracted bronchitis at the age of 91 and was advised by a doctor to not travel, he oversaw the fittings, make-up, and sequencing for his fall 2025 Armani Privé show via a remote video link. “Everything you will see has been done under my direction and carries my approval,” he emailed attendees. To borrow a Biblical line, no sparrow fell in Armani’s world without his permission.

Craving dopamine and distraction, I was at my local climbing gym more than ever. Then, when summer came, my brother took me out on the Isle of Skye. We scrambled to the top of Sgùrr nan Gillean, perhaps the most famous of the peaks making up the Black Cuillin. From the top, we saw the whole ridge stretching out ahead of us, 12 summits strung together under a stonewashed sky.

For years I had been diving deeper into the dark hallucination of my digital life, feeling my trust eroded, in the news, the truth, the very evidence before my eyes. It was invigorating, suddenly, to take hold of something real. There is nothing more real than rock. Not when you trust your weight to it, maybe your life.

I’m hardly the first person to flee the shallows of modern life by running for the hills. “I am losing the precious days,” said John Muir, the pioneering American environmentalist and mountaineer, in 1883. “I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”

“The fact that we were married helped,” Sparhawk said. “I think it gave a certain license for creative intimacy and trust, though it also made us each other’s harshest critics and harshest editors.” Nobody knew that better than Zak Sally, who replaced Nichols in 1994 and went on to become Low’s longest-serving bassist. “We hit it very, very, very hard,” Sally said. “This is a band that makes music, this is also a marriage, this is also a matter of faith. This is also family, this is also friends, and it’s also a job, and some of those lines just cross over each other.”

How we men dress isn’t the most important thing in the world, but it’s not inconsequential either. When meeting friends for dinner, I choose an outfit that I hope will be flattering. I do so as much for my friends as for myself. I know they will be flattered that I have chosen to shine a little brighter just for them. We don’t dress solely for ourselves. We also do it to broadcast, without speaking, “I am here to be with you.” 

It is a feeling more than anything else. Your dress should be in sync with you, with how you feel that day. The key to style is finding that equilibrium between the way you are feeling that day and the way you dress. You are constantly expressing yourself.

What I am trying to say is that more important than how many centimeters of shirt cuff you are showing is that you be in sync with the way you dress.

We are almost like characters in a film, we are moving, living characters, we are playing ourselves.

As a livestock farmer, I am reminded of death fairly regularly. Often my customers will ask me if I get sad taking a load of hogs to the abattoir or processing chickens. The truth is, no, I don’t. I am grateful and appreciative, but not sad. Daily I’m surrounded by magnitudes of life. I see babies born and flowers bloom, and at night the frogs can be so loud they keep me up. I also see death, and not only is it a part of life, it provides life. To be a livestock animal on my farm means you get a lot of great days and one bad one. We should all be so lucky. But when you work with dogs, you get into a rhythm, even with the lying-around types. It’s a beautiful thing. And when you lose a dog, that rhythm changes in a way that is profoundly heartbreaking.