A companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is the organised part, edited and cleaned up with AI.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

Hey you.

This is the episode where we finally have intro music, which Justin built on his handpan the night before we recorded, and which exists because of a couple on TikTok who read children’s books to their six-month-old while the dad beatboxes on a shelf, knuckles for percussion and the flat of his hand for bass. He listened to the baby videos, borrowed the pattern, played it over and over for twenty minutes until fifteen usable seconds came out, put his own chord progression on top, and sent it to me. That is the whole episode in one anecdote, and everything below is just more of it. This one is for you if there is something you have been meaning to make for years and you have been waiting to feel qualified.

The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)

* The tools are digital crayons and almost nobody has picked them up yet. Something shifted around last December when the models converged and the thing built for engineers and the thing built for business people became the same thing, and what that actually means is that people who have never made anything can now find out what they would make.

* The seed matters more than the middleman. It does not bother us that AI sits between the idea and the object, because what decides whether the result is any good is where it came from and what is trying to come out, and a machine cannot supply either of those for you.

* Being underutilised is what makes you miserable, not being busy. When you are not using what you have, you ruminate, you drift back into the past, you get stuck in the ugly loops, and when you take on something that asks for your whole self there is no time left over for any of that.

* Your responsibilities protect your art. You cannot ask your creativity to pay your rent, so you do whatever keeps you fed and housed and you let the art stay free of that weight, which is what Rick Rubin and Elizabeth Gilbert have both been saying for years, and it is the most generous possible reading of having a day job.

* You cannot become anything, you can become the greatest version of who you already are. Neither of us is going to be president or drive in Formula One, and once you stop measuring yourself against the whole field of human possibility you can put everything into the narrow room where you actually belong.

* AI is the largest mirror we have ever built. It hands you a blank space and a great deal of capability and then the only question left is what you want, which turns out to be the thing most of us have spent our lives avoiding.

It started with a Substack header

I needed a better watermark, which I would never have thought about if Justin had not mentioned it, so I made one, and then I made cards, and then I fed my own doodles in to build the frames around them, and the cards came out well enough that Justin’s first response was to tell me to sell them on Etsy as Christmas cards. Then he wanted his own card, in 8-bit, with a wolf dog going on a journey, and one card became twenty-two, and then he remembered Playing Chess with Dragons, the children’s book he started writing thirty years ago, and by the end of that morning the cards had become pages and the book had become an app, because the App Store is a faster way to find out whether anyone wants a thing than printing it. This is how every good week goes with us. One of us shows the other something, the other one immediately wants his own version of it, and neither of us is doing it to win.

The portfolio career

One of our members raised this phrase after the town hall and asked for a weekly session on it, and we both love it. The shape of it is that you stop needing a single job title and instead hold a spread of things you have made, a few of which earn, some of which are passion projects, some of which belong to somebody else entirely, and together they describe you in a way a role never could. The condition is that you have to start from the inside, because a portfolio assembled out of whatever the tools suggest will look exactly like everybody else’s portfolio assembled the same way. That is also why the underutilised feeling matters so much here. The cure is movement and making, going outside, seeing people, putting energy through yourself into something, because when that stops you get what we ended up calling creative constipation, and no amount of good advice clears it from the inside.

If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.

Eleven Dunbar is a curated membership community of dreamers, builders, and founders: a place to play, connect, and grow together. A place to find your voice, find your people, and create the impossible, without doing it all alone.

Our home is Elfen Town, a cozy virtual town that is open around the clock. Members drop in at any hour to work side by side, play without an agenda, and have the kind of conversations where you can be your actual self.

Beyond the town there are live gatherings, in-person meet-ups, and people who notice when you go quiet.

The community is capped at 150.

Who am I, one week later

We both stumbled over this question last episode and I have been chewing on it since, and where I landed is that I do know the answer, I just cannot fit it in a sentence. It lives as a feeling, and you would understand it perfectly well if you asked me about particular things and heard why I see them as I do, which words are too coarse to carry directly. That is an awkward thing to say out loud on a podcast, and it is also the reason knowing yourself comes before every other step of making anything. Justin has meditated twenty-five minutes every morning for a week now, which came partly from a Rick Rubin interview where Rubin told the host that his wife already does this daily and asked him what exactly he was waiting for, and I have been telling Justin the same thing for considerably longer than Rick Rubin has.

Kids inviting other kids to play

The guild Justin belonged to in Final Fantasy XIV had five hundred members on paper and eight or ten who showed up every single day for years, and those eight still do not know each other’s real names or faces, and are closer than most people are to their colleagues. What we are building takes that and adds the part they are missing, which is that here you have met, you have applied and been interviewed, you know exactly who you are talking to. People go looking for this because they want connection, and reading it as loneliness is lazy. Then Justin said the thing that stopped the conversation, that we are members zero and double zero and all we are really doing is being kids inviting other kids to play, which is more accurate than anything either of us has written on the website.

The invitation

Find the thing you have been circling for years, the book or the game or the song or the small stupid object, and make the ugliest possible version of it this week with whatever tool is closest to your hand. And if you are stuck, go and ask somebody you trust what they are building right now, because half of everything in this episode exists because one of us went first.

Justin and Gerhard

P.S. We are on TikTok now and we have one follower, user6823434 or thereabouts, and Justin dedicated the end of the episode to him. Sir, whoever you are, we see you, and you are currently holding up our entire distribution strategy on your own.

A companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is the organised part, edited and cleaned up with AI.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

Hey you.

We started this podcast, recorded four episodes, and only this week worked out that neither of us had ever said who we are. No names, no introduction, nothing. We just started talking and assumed everybody had followed us over from the other show, which is not how any of this works.

So we fixed it, and then the fixing turned into the episode. If you have ever been asked what you do and felt yourself reaching for a line you don’t quite believe, this one is for you.

The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)

* “I don’t know, but I’m looking forward to finding out” is a real answer. Most people have a business card version of themselves ready to go. Not having one is uncomfortable for about four seconds and then it’s freedom.

* The macro purpose question paralyses people. The micro one doesn’t. Am I a teacher, a healer, a father, what am I here for, all of that opens a gap between who you are now and who you might be, and the gap is what stops people. Three things you want to do today does not have that problem.

* Reinventing yourself takes years, not a decision. You can wake up tomorrow and decide to think and act differently, and then you meet every pattern that wants you back where you were. The suit wants comfort. The thing inside the suit wants something else.

* Flirt with life. An Argentinian gentleman at a men’s circle in Miami, two hours into a conversation about purpose, said we needed to stop talking and go do things. Then he said flirt with life. Not romantically. Talk to the doorman, talk to the people in the lift, make somebody feel good, watch them light up.

Hi, we’re Gerhard and Justin

Gerhard is from Vienna, co-founder of Eleven Dunbar, and describes himself as a creative, playful builder and dreamer, though when asked who he is the honest answer is that he doesn’t know and is looking forward to finding out. He does not enjoy the question what do you do, partly because it expects a rehearsed answer and he has never had one, so every time it comes up he starts from wherever he happens to be that day.

Justin is from a town of eight hundred people in North Carolina, currently in Miami, leaving in about a month with no fixed idea of where he is going. When he tried to answer who he is, what came out was a family: his mother a schoolteacher, his grandmother a schoolteacher, his sister twice named teacher of the state, her husband running the county, nurses in the family, his father running youth leagues including Buddy Ball for kids with special needs, his great aunt Peggy running a camp, and his grandfather, 92, still working at a grocery store where he puts on a dragon suit to make people laugh. He had never put it together before, and the phrase he landed on was a long line of helpers.

What’s underneath the suit

You arrive here and put on the most advanced biological machine we know of, and underneath it is something that isn’t the machine at all.

The zodiac sign, the human design chart, the personality system of your choice, each of those peels off one layer of the onion and none of them gets to the bottom. Underneath all of them there’s just energy, and the four-letter word for that energy is love. You can tell because of how we’re built. Almost everyone wants to belong to something and give to something larger than themselves, a partnership, a community, a dog, a group. That longing to belong is love wearing ordinary clothes.

The useful part of a system like astrology is being able to say yes, that’s a version I chose for this life, I can feel the traits, and also I’m not only that. You can’t be put in the box.

Two years to become someone else

Justin burned down the boats of a previous life in tech after the last company, and it took two years to reinvent himself in his forties. September was when it finally wrapped up.

That’s the part people don’t hear. You can decide in a morning, and then you hit resistance after resistance, because the body and the mind want comfort and want what they already know. The thing inside the suit wants something else entirely and keeps saying let me out of this skin.

The purpose trap

People read about purpose and feel worse, because purpose is usually presented at the macro scale. What am I on this planet for. And there’s such a gap between where you are and whatever that answer is that the gap itself becomes the obstacle.

Handpan is the live example. Justin watches players on YouTube, went to a sound bath in Fort Lauderdale where a guy named Adam played singing bowls, gongs and handpan, and thought I want to do that. The distance between now and that is exactly the kind of distance that stops people from starting.

The micro version is where it actually works. Yesterday was the most he’s worked in two years, cycling between two AI tools and a game he loves, hitting a usage limit on one of them for the first time ever, and taking breaks into play when something needed to process. None of it was tied to the big thing. It felt like progress anyway.

The other quote that fits here, roughly: someone’s father took the safe job at the safe company to provide, hated it, and got laid off anyway. The lesson passed down was that if you can fail at something you hate, you might as well fail at something you love.

Sensations, then feelings, then thoughts

Justin has been folding the Gestalt cycle of experience into his morning meditation, and the order matters.

Start with sensations. The sun, the air, sweat, sound, whatever your senses are actually reporting. Then move to feelings, and stay there without explaining them, so anxious or excited or nervous without asking why yet. Only then let the thinking mind in. The premise is that by the time you get to your head, your body has already told you what you need, and you can direct the thinking instead of being dragged around by it.

Gerhard’s version has become something without words at all. He shows up as a student, he listens, there’s often a pressure point between his eyes that helps him drop in, and sometimes a koan. What he notices most easily is tension in how he’s sitting, which is the body reporting before anything else gets a say.

Both of us keep coming back to the same phrase from the manifesto. I feel, therefore I am.

If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.

Eleven Dunbar is a curated membership community of dreamers, builders, and founders: a place to play, connect, and grow together. A place to find your voice, find your people, and create the impossible, without doing it all alone.

Our home is Elfen Town, a cozy virtual town that is open around the clock. Members drop in at any hour to work side by side, play without an agenda, and have the kind of conversations where you can be your actual self.

Beyond the town there are live gatherings, in-person meet-ups, and people who notice when you go quiet.

The community is capped at 150.

Font watching

Gerhard’s exercise this week was to collect twenty things noticed while walking around, and what he kept noticing in Helsinki were the old sixties and seventies typefaces on buildings, lit in white, handmade and specific. The post office sign is the example he sent over mid-recording.

Which raises the question of why we went from those to logos and design systems that all look the same, and how much the architecture of a city shapes what people think is beautiful without anyone noticing it happening.

Justin does not have this ability and would fail a font lineup. He has, however, correctly identified that the real hobby here is font watching, in the same category as the boy who can do any bird call.

Everyone has already designed a font

Shower thought from the same conversation: your handwriting is your own font, unique to you, made without trying.

Gerhard has journals going back years, one small page a day, and can no longer read some of his own entries because his handwriting keeps changing between cursive and not. Somewhere out there is a landfill with a treasure trove of discarded Gerhard journals in it, next to the buried Atari cartridges, waiting for someone to find them and ask who this poet was.

Justin does not journal and has requested one for his birthday, in two months, with the caveat that his hand will cramp.

The invitation

Show up every day and do one thing that is not a chore. An hour, three hours, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s something that puts the creative muscle to work rather than clearing admin.

There’s no timeline on it. It’s like fishing. You keep throwing the net, the ideas come, and one day you feel one properly and commit to it. All of it depends on having been there every day beforehand.

Gerhard & Justin

P.S. Who are you? We’re going to start every episode with that question from now on, and the answer is allowed to be different every week.

This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what I talked about.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

Justin put a shirt on for this one, which we agreed to treat as an experiment, and he is now surrounded by enough recording equipment that he can hear his own fridge. We ended up going through this week’s reflection questions from the Become an Elf programme, which meant talking about what we made as children before anyone told us whether we were any good at it, and that went further than either of us expected, so here is the rundown.

Noise you did not know was there. Condenser microphones pick up everything, the fridge, the storm doors, the flight path over Miami, and once you hear it you cannot stop hearing it. Which led to deprivation tanks, where the absence of sound is so complete that one noise from the front desk makes your whole body react, and to the fact that most of us walk around inside a wall of sound our brains have simply agreed to ignore.

The kid who does bird calls. Justin has been watching videos of a boy who can reproduce essentially any bird call you can name, and the thing that stayed with us is what a person like that would have meant a few thousand years ago, when knowing which berry was safe and which sound meant what was the entire technology available. Then we established that neither of us can identify a tree.

Scout badges. If we were awarding them, Gerhard is going for trees and fish, having discovered fishing this week at the summer cabin, four perch caught, three returned, one filleted and eaten. Justin would take archery, from summer camp in a town of eight hundred people, with a bow from about 1992 and no wrist guard.

The wahoo. Justin went deep sea fishing once, in the Atlantic off St Martin, and it took three hours of taking turns in a strapped-in chair to land a six foot sport fish. The part worth hearing is what happens as it comes out of the water, when the whole body shimmers with rainbow colour for about ten seconds and then fades. They took the steaks to a restaurant that evening and had the chef cook them, and Justin still calls it the best thing he has eaten.

What we do here, briefly. Every week members of Eleven Dunbar get three small things: a reflection question, a creation quest that takes five or ten minutes, and a connect prompt to bring to their Elf buddy. We are each other’s buddies, so this episode is us doing the exercise properly rather than talking about it.

Gerhard has no memories before ten. The question was what did you make as a child before anyone told you whether you were good at it, and the honest answer was nothing, because there is no footage. Make-believe, sci-fi, action figures in space, and then a hard cut to age ten. Justin’s theory is that Gerhard arrived on the planet fully formed at ten with the beard already in place, which is roughly how it works with Jesus. Baby Jesus, then Jesus with the disciples, and no teenage Jesus in between.

The nerd he pretended not to be. From ten to fourteen it was PCs, building them for friends, organising LAN parties, working out how networks fit together, and inventing games to play in a park with nothing. Also shame about all of it, because there was no computer club in Vienna and nobody else in the room was into it, so the move was to love it and act too cool for it at the same time. Software engineering found him again at 29.

The serious purpose problem. The thing Gerhard carried for years is that games needed a justification, an educational angle, something that made people better, otherwise fun was not enough of a reason. It shaped the master’s thesis, it nearly turned into a PhD, and it took until now to let go of. Building something with play at the centre has turned out to be a healing thing for him rather than a career move.

The line from yesterday. Some people create so that others can see it. The real thing is creating so that you can see yourself.

Justin’s teddy bear. Singing solos in church and at school until his voice changed at puberty and he had to find it again. Elementary school art every week, pottery, kiln, jewellery, watercolour. And in sixth grade a floppy-eared teddy bear in the corner of a room, drawn and shaded and then painted, which he became obsessed with getting right, and which is the last thing he ever really made. Also brackets, hand-drawn March Madness and World Cup simulations with loser brackets, which is geometry and imagination doing the same job.

Kick the can, and Pong. Making up games with uncles and cousins, including one invented so a boy with a broken leg could still be involved. Fantasy fiction, a children’s book called Playing Chess with Dragons, then computer science at college to make video games. His senior high school project was Pong in QBasic, taught to himself off the internet with one snippet of code from a stranger on a forum. He got an A plus. He then rebuilt Pong thirty years later, with AI, for Elfen Town.

Brownies are done. In 1999 or 2000 Justin sent his brother a picture with an executable hidden in it. His brother double clicked, nothing appeared to happen, and moments later a printer in a different city produced a page that said brownies are done, followed by the CD tray opening on its own. His brother was not impressed, largely because he understood the legal situation better. Justin never worked out how to remove it.

Curiosity with no obvious use. Gerhard watches people who have mastered something narrow, pastry chefs, pizza guys in New York, a man who chops trees, pixel artists, and finds it more inspiring than anything with a point to it. His answer to what he would want to be watched doing at ninety is still forming, though a 91 year old who surfs, paddle boards and built his own house is currently the model. Justin’s is the handpan, eight or nine months in, two or three hours a day, plus audio production and the engineering side of getting clean sound in a loud apartment.

If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.

Eleven Dunbar is a curated membership community of dreamers, builders, and founders: a place to play, connect, and grow together. A place to find your voice, find your people, and create the impossible, without doing it all alone.

Our home is Elfen Town, a cozy virtual town that is open around the clock. Members drop in at any hour to work side by side, play without an agenda, and have the kind of conversations where you can be your actual self.

Beyond the town there are live gatherings, in-person meet-ups, and people who notice when you go quiet.

The community is capped at 150.

Reinventing at 42. Justin leaves Miami in October, out of a building he has been in for five years, which is ten percent of his life. What he is curious about is not an alternative way to live, since that implies something was wrong with the current one, but a different one, on the road, with less, and with a lot less control and structure than his hermit setup gives him. It is exciting and it is angsty, which is probably the correct combination.

The thing you actually fight. Not your father, not the person who wronged you, not society. Yourself, every day, in the form of your own discipline and routine. And knowing that does not mean having solved it, which is the honest part.

Making the room, not the mood. Justin is not trying to make anyone feel better, because that is not something you can do to a person. What he is trying to do is create the environment in which somebody can feel good on their own terms. Forty years to get to that one, after a long stretch of looking for happiness in everyone else.

The invitation. Answer the question yourself. What did you make as a child, before anyone told you whether you were any good at it? And what are you curious about right now that has no use at all?

This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what I talked about.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

Gerhard is in Finland at a summer cabin, Justin is in Miami with a new machine and two condenser microphones held up by candles, and somewhere between those two facts we ended up on discipline, resistance, and why almost nobody acts on the voice they have been hearing for years. Also a new word: menifest, which neither of us can now say correctly, so here is the rundown.

Finland, and the thing every friend group says once. Two Jans and a Marina booked a summer cabin an hour and a half west of Helsinki and asked if I wanted to come, and it is their first time here and they cannot get over how calm it is. September is about the limit for cabin weather, after that it gets cold and dark and you lose the part that makes it worth it. Which led to the conversation every group of friends has at least once, about buying land together somewhere remote and keeping it for themselves. Neither of us knows anyone who has actually done it.

Candles as microphone stands. Justin’s seven year old MacBook has been retired and the new one does not sound like a jet engine, which matters more than it should, because recording with condenser mics means killing the AC, the fridge, the storm doors, and waiting for a gap in the flight path over Miami. It took him two weeks to work out the old fan was on every recording. The mics currently stay in position thanks to two candles and a cord, which is either engineering or devotion depending on how you look at it.

Working without a nine to five takes more discipline, not less. When you have a job or kids or employees, the day has a shape whether you like it or not. What we do has no shape at all, which sounds like freedom and is, and also means that if you want to learn audio engineering or get to the gym or keep any practice going, nobody is going to build the container for you.

Priming. The morning routine is really one idea, which is connecting with yourself before you connect with the world. Meditation, nine minutes of stretching, journaling, coffee, and the phone in flight mode all night until after the espresso. Then, and only then, the world gets access to you.

The struggle phase. Flow has four phases and the first one is struggle, which is the minute where you sit down and your body suddenly needs water, a walk, or your phone. Enormous numbers of people quit within touching distance of the chemicals they were about to get. You just have to sit through it.

The six things. Koya’s list of morning habits is sunlight, movement, hydration before coffee, breathwork, no scrolling, and journaling, and Gerhard turned out to be doing all six without having read it. Justin adds ten or fifteen minutes of handpan, which is his version of journaling.

Why the habits fall apart without a north star. All of it means nothing without something underneath it. Tony Robbins’ six human needs work as a ladder: certainty and safety, then variety, then significance, then connection and love, and those four make the last two possible, which are growth and, at the top, contribution. Once you know what you are of service to, the routines stop being hacks you read about and start being preparation for something that will ask everything of you.

The gremlin wants you exactly where you are. Justin had six weeks of COVID and then five more days of not going to the gym, each one with its own excellent reason, the class time moved, it looked like rain, he had recording to do. Then he went, and by the walk home the motivation was back. This is the thing worth remembering: you do not wake up motivated and then act. You act, and the motivation catches up. Resistance is not a sign you picked the wrong thing, it shows up because you are about to change, and it never fully goes away.

And the opposite trap. People build rigid routines and get so precious about them that one missed day ruins the week, which is just control wearing a healthier outfit. Some days you are travelling and cannot run or meditate, and that is fine. The trickster throws the ball out and trusts it comes back, sometimes late, sometimes in the shape of a butterfly.

If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.

Eleven Dunbar is a curated membership community of dreamers, builders, and founders: a place to play, connect, and grow together. A place to find your voice, find your people, and create the impossible, without doing it all alone.

Our home is Elfen Town, a cozy virtual town that is open around the clock. Members drop in at any hour to work side by side, play without an agenda, and have the kind of conversations where you can be your actual self.

Beyond the town there are live gatherings, in-person meet-ups, and people who notice when you go quiet.

The community is capped at 150.

The suffering artist is a myth. Very German romanticism, the idea that making anything real has to hurt. It had a founder version too, in San Francisco, where taking no salary was treated as a rite of passage. Both are stories, and neither is a requirement.

Five years. Two conversations this week. A woman in her forties who started crying on a call because someone else finally said out loud what she had been feeling for years, and a man at a dinner in Miami who had made a big career change, who Justin guessed had been thinking about it for three years. It had been five. Almost everyone has a version of this, and what usually breaks the loop is something that jolts you, a death, an injury, a breakup, a job lost. The practices and the people are the alternative to waiting for the jolt.

Two layers. There is the layer that needs healing, the nervous system and the wounds, and that work is real. Underneath it is something that was never damaged, the essence you arrived with, and it is not asking to be fixed. It already knows and it wants the best for you. The whole job is remembering it is there.

Right relation. The phrase comes from a shaman Justin worked with, and it means your body and heart being in right relation with your surroundings. The useful part is that it takes the judgment out. A room that is not yours is not a bad room, and you are not broken for feeling wrong in it. It is just not yours.

Practicing being human. There is a scene in Westworld where the robots keep talking to each other when nobody is watching, because they are practicing. That is what this podcast is, and what most good conversations are. The alternative is stacking it all up inside you, where it turns into resentment and gets ten times harder to move.

The one nobody does. We tell everyone about the problem except the person it is actually about. Friends, family, anyone who will listen, while the other person stays oblivious, which means you have done all the analysing and they have not even been told there is something to analyse.

The canoe. You are rowing towards your north star and then your shoulders turn and you are in a tributary with low water and mud and something in the trees, and eventually you remember where you were supposed to be going and row back. The way back is hard and then you are in it again and it feels obvious. Then the next side quest arrives, as a person or an opportunity or just a thing that happens, and around it goes.

The invitation. Pick the thing you have been not doing and go and do it today, badly, at the wrong time, in the rain. Do not wait to feel like it, because that is not the order it happens in.

This is the Levity Field, which is the show Justin and I make for the lighter end of things, and this week it nearly became the Brevity Field because his six year old MacBook spent forty five minutes deciding whether to keep going. It held. We talked about donuts for longer than anyone needed, and then found the thing underneath, so here is the rundown.

The donut, again. Justin ordered one donut. Instacart does not sell one donut, so the shopper messaged him to ask whether he wanted six, and he said yes, which is roughly the same test the universe set him in Asheville a while back when one donut turned into twelve. This time there was a complication, because there were only three plain glazed and three with chocolate, which led to an actual conversation with a stranger about whether the chocolate sits on top of the glaze or replaces it. She did not know. He had to investigate. The chocolate ones turned out to be a speed bump rather than a treat, and he has three glazed sitting in wait, on a clock.

Toy Story 5, without the spoilers. Bonnie has grown up a bit and is finding it hard to make friends, because she still wants to play with toys while everyone around her is looking at a Lilypad, which is the film’s iPad. Then she gets one herself. What Pixar does so well, across five films now with the quality somehow holding, is use the medium to remind adults what make believe felt like before it became something you grew out of. It is also, for what it is worth, the only Pixar franchise where nobody dies.

If-then. This is where the conversation turned. Justin described the loop plainly: for years it was if I get the exit, then I’ll be happy, and now that the exit is no longer the point, it has quietly become if I get to the right place, then I’ll be ready. Six weeks until Miami ends, everything in storage, Costa Rica and Mexico and Hawaii and Chiang Mai all on the table, and underneath it the same sentence that never finishes. The advice he got from someone he played a sound bath for was better than most of what he had been telling himself. Just go places. Stop picking a spot on a map and go.

Demons and gremlins. The way Justin describes it is that there is a demon behind the scenes ringing a bell, and while the bell is ringing you are under the spell without hearing a thing. The work is noticing the bell, which shatters it, and then noticing that the demon has come back with a different one, which is the universe running the same test until you pass it. My addition is that you can draw it. Give it a face, ask it what it wants, sit with it long enough to understand it, because it is also you, and it would rather be met with some compassion than fought.

Write with your hand. We agreed we need to make a physical journal for Eleven Dunbar members, an analog donut to go with the digital one. Justin meditates, sits in the sun for ten minutes, and does not journal. I have been doing it every morning for years and it is the single practice I would keep over all the others. It does not matter what you write, one sentence is enough. What matters is that it is by hand, in the morning, every day, because something cascades from that over time and slowly untangles a great deal.

The thing underneath all of it. How deeply conditioned we are to wait for permission, from parents, siblings, partners, friends, institutions, and how strange it is when you say it out loud, that we believe we need approval from somewhere outside to simply be who we are and live how we want to live.

The invitation. Catch one if-then this week and take the if away. Not the whole life, just one. Then go and do the thing that was waiting on the other side of it.

First episode, first recording, no intro music yet and a silly background that neither of us wants to change, so here is the rundown of what happened.

Why this show exists at all. We have been recording together on The Unreasonable Art of Living for ten or twelve episodes now and something kept showing up in those conversations that did not belong to that project, a different energy that wanted its own room, so we built one, and the deal here is that we can wander wherever we like, consciousness and meditation and longevity and donuts and whatever film one of us watched last week, without carrying the weight of representing anything.

The names that did not survive. We spent a long time noodling and produced, in order of increasing embarrassment, The Justin and Gerhard Show with Justin and Gerhard, Eleven Donuts, which sat too close to Eleven Dunbar but gave us one donut short of a full box as a description of our general condition, Glazed and Confused, which was very nearly perfect, One of Us, which we both loved because of the little chant we do every time a new member joins, and Oonga Boonga, which came from Justin spending an entire silent meditation wondering what the first human word was while I was sitting three feet away being at one with the source of the universe, and which we had to abandon after discovering it carries connotations nobody warned us about.

How we actually got there. Justin, in the middle of all this, said the words are out there, we just have to go find them, delivered with the full sincerity of a man in a marketing meeting, and it was so good that it became the working method, so I went and asked for words, and levity came back, an old word for lightness that the Greeks and Romans used for upward motion, the actual opposite of gravity, and once we had gravity field and Levity Field sitting next to each other there was nothing left to decide.

Ideas as things that visit you. Justin brought up Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and the notion that ideas are entities floating around looking for someone to commit to them, and if you say not now they simply move on to somebody else, which is exactly what happened with this name, and when I asked how he caught it he said with a slime gun, which is not the answer I expected from anyone.

The salt pellet wasp turret. Austria has a wasp problem this summer, there are Chinese salt guns designed for shooting flies, and somewhere in between those two facts is an AI-guided turret mounted outside every house, which Justin insists I should pitch at an American public access town hall, an institution we do not have and which now sounds like the greatest civic invention in history.

Arcades, roller rinks and holding hands. Dance Dance Revolution as the machine everybody watched and nobody played, the very American ritual of the roller rink with the DJ and the slow song and the cute girl, and the confirmed fact that eight-year-old Justin could hold hands going around the circle while wearing four-wheeled skates, a level of coordination neither of us has retained.

A summer camp in a castle. Three weeks, bunk beds, a homemade Olympics where I took silver in the high jump, and a great deal of Magic the Gathering, all of which Justin refused to believe until I explained that Austria simply has castles the way North Carolina has parking lots, including small ones.

The hardest thing a human can do. Not naming things, not physics, but explaining a card game out loud to someone who has never seen it, demonstrated by my attempt at the drafting rules, and by his great aunt Peggy, who at eighty-eight hands you a sheet of her own handwritten rules, will not let you read the actual rulebook, and somehow the game works perfectly the moment you stop asking questions and start playing, which is a lesson about most things.

Camp Woodmen of the World. Riflery, archery, potato sack races, a half-mile marathon, and a talent show that Justin’s friend Travis nearly missed because he was playing in the mud, then walked on stage covered head to toe in it, sang Take Me Out to the Ball Game and won gold, which is still the purest description of commitment either of us can offer.

The Pentagon files. Justin had not seen them, I have been going down the rabbit hole for two weeks, and we ended up less interested in whether they are aliens than in what would actually happen if it were confirmed, whether it would break religion and finance and the whole structure of how people see reality, or whether we would all do what we did after the Facebook data breach, which is to say nothing and carry on exactly as before.

One question, on behalf of humanity. Justin’s is how you doing, man, and then, because a member of Eleven Dunbar would immediately reject good as an answer, the follow-up, how are you really, asked while handing the visitor a donut, which by his account should not be chewed but slowly sucked through the hole as the intergalactic sign of peace and goodwill.

Twelve donuts. Publix bakery glazed, ordered as one, delivered as six, previously delivered as twelve, eaten in a single day by a man who freely admits he has no self-control and therefore does not keep them in the house.

The invitation. Tune in when things feel heavy and let something silly do the lifting, and if you want to try the version you can do today, ask someone how they are, wait for the automatic fine, and then ask again properly.