Tetragrammaton New Moon Observer is best experienced in broadsheet format. Click here to read the full PDF.

Have You Found Your Center?

Tuukka Toivonen, July 2026

The point is not that we “possess” a center or that we should single-mindedly cultivate a specific core part within ourselves. It is rather that we are a center. In meditation, we feel this truth when the physical sense of sitting and breathing transforms into an effortless quietude or a glow that envelopes us entirely. In martial arts, we experience it when we move as one unified entity, where the movement and our being become inseparable. Exploring a forest path, we detect it when, rather than being focused on the weight of each step we take, movement occurs seamlessly as our bodies blend with the environment. Such experiences show us we are but one unified, embodied whole, anchored in our own totality as well as the world around us. The relational nature of our existence notwithstanding, we exist as an integrated individual center of awareness and experience.

It is this simple realization that captures the deeper learnings concealed within the popular notion of centering. “Finding one’s center” now means nothing less than a return to wholeness through pure experience, based on a profound sense of being a sovereign center of awareness. Having taken this step, I am thankful for having encountered casual approaches to centering for they prompted me to explore further so that I could arrive at a more deeply rooted understanding that better aligns with my own felt reality...

Homo Noeticus

Molly Hankins, June 2026

Syntergic Theory argues that spiritual development is less about acquiring new beliefs and more about refining perception, suggesting that higher states of consciousness correspond to greater levels of neural synergy and integration. As our brains become more coherent, our perspective expands and we gain access to broader dimensions of experience. The result is a fundamentally different relationship with reality itself, the hallmark of our evolution from third dimensional homosapiens into the higher dimensional expression of homo noeticus.

From a Hermetic perspective, this makes perfect sense. If reality is fractal, then the same principle that governs the evolution of individual consciousness also governs the evolution of humanity as a whole. Both can move in unison from fragmented towards integrated consciousness. French philosopher and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin described humanity’s evolution as a movement toward the “Omega Point,” a state of increasing unity and complexity. Grinberg-Zylberbaum envisioned something similar, seeing humans not as static beings but participants in an ongoing evolutionary process. He believed the process of evolution itself was changing, driven more by increased connection with the lattice than purely physical adaptations...

Living in the Future

Noah Gabriel Martin, June 2026

Everything that happens, happens in the present, so it’s a good place to start. Still, Jacques Derrida, who criticizes what he calls the “metaphysics of presence” points out that everything that happens there happens by way of detours into what’s different and distant. The techniques you use for awareness and attunement come to you through 2500 years of Yogic and Buddhist traditions, and the self-discipline you use to shut out the past and shut out the future relies on the reel sent by your friend in Australia. In other words, even being present still involves what is absent, what is in fact very far removed — millenia of practice, and communication with distant continents.

The present is a good place to visit, but it doesn’t have everything we need to live. Though we might wish there was, there is nowhere for us to take refuge in a dead present...

Tetragrammaton on Mondrian

Mondrian’s abstract, geometric squares came to define a new way of thinking in the 20th Century, but in 1910 he was experiencing a transitional period. Coming from formal training — his early work was impressionistic depictions of pastoral scenes — he retreated to the Holland Coast and began painting the Dunes of the Zeeland River. Here, over the course of two years, his work became increasingly abstract. Summer marks a turning point. Though still painting from life, the scene is freed from reality. It becomes a study of form and colour, with sweeping blue shapes polluted by bright yellow shadows. The natural world becomes an inspiration, not a muse...

The Infra-Ordinary

Georges Perec, July 2026

The daily newspapers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I ask or would like to ask.

What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?

To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is no longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?

How are we to speak of these “common things,” how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.

What’s needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we’ve been pillaging from others. Not the exotic anymore, but the endotic...

Have You Found Your Center? by Tuukka Toivonen

There is something reassuring about being asked to find one’s center. Whether it comes to us through a yoga class, a wellbeing book or an old friend, the call gives us permission to pause and breathe, sit for a moment and observe ourselves until we feel more at ease. It reminds us that, regardless of any momentary stress or dissonance, it is always possible to return to a more settled state of being.

When asked to find our centre, we implicitly understand that what is being gestured towards here is something of a subtle and somatic quality. We are being softly guided to a certain feeling of centeredness that can yield a sense of calm and most of the time, that is exactly what we need and there is no need to inquire further.

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Terracotta Pots and Flowers by Paul Cézanne

The most surprising thing Louis C.K. says in his conversation with Rick isn’t about comedy at all. It’s that laughter can be misleading. Some jokes land immediately because they’re familiar—they strike a note everyone already recognizes. The work he’s most proud of usually begins the opposite way: in uncomfortable silence. Rather than abandoning those moments, he returns to them. Again and again. For Louis, silence isn’t failure. It’s information. It reveals where an idea still has room to grow.

That philosophy extends far beyond stand-up. Throughout the episode, Louis returns to the idea that the artist’s job isn’t to chase validation, but to stay curious enough to hear what’s underneath it. The audience isn’t there to hand down a verdict—they’re part of the conversation. The same is true of criticism, resistance, and even creative uncertainty. If you’re willing to resist the urge to reach for the obvious win, you leave space for something stranger, more personal, and ultimately more enduring to emerge.

Listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribers can listen to the episode ad-free here.

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Homo Noeticus - Our Future Selves by Molly Hankins

To know something noetically is to know it intuitively, beyond the realm of ordinary human perception. Homo noeticus, a term coined in 1973 by author John White when he helped establish the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), refers to an evolved human living in an expanded state of consciousness, outside of an egocentric worldview.

One of the pioneers in the field of noetic sciences was Mexican neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, the eldest child of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish family that immigrated from Poland to Mexico in the early 20th century. In 1994, he disappeared, leaving behind his radical take on noetic consciousness known as Syntergic Theory, preserved in several books he authored. Part neuroscientist, part consciousness researcher, and part student of shamanic traditions, Grinberg-Zylberbaum spent his career trying to find out how consciousness interacts with reality. Syntergic Theory is a model which proposes that consciousness is not produced by the brain, but rather emerges through an interaction between the brain and a deeper informational structure underlying the universe itself. He called this information structure ‘the lattice’ and described it as a pre-physical field of consciousness that permeates everything in existence. His ideas are carried on by the IONS’ science team, who operate on the hypothesis that consciousness is fundamental, rather than a byproduct of the brain.

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Mosaic Head by Henry de Waroquier

Peter McGrath has spent decades recording orchestras, chamber ensembles, choirs, and some of the world's greatest classical musicians. More specifically, he's a recording engineer devoted to capturing a musical performance as faithfully as possible. Throughout this conversation with Rick Rubin, Peter revisits recordings spanning his career—from Handel's Messiah with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Benjamin Britten's War Requiem to performances by the Jerusalem String Quartet, Jordi Savall, Seraphic Fire, and Aaron Copland's Clarinet Concerto. The episode unfolds as both a listening session and a reflection on the philosophy behind the recordings.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribers can listen to the episode ad-free here.

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“If you’re allowed to just keep doing it — that’s 99% the measure of success.”

Dave Eggers learned that his novel The Circle had been banned in Rapid City, South Dakota through a documentary.

A filmmaker named Arthur Bradford, with support from Matt Stone, traveled there to understand how a book ends up removed from library shelves. What he found was stranger than the ban itself.

According to Eggers, nobody they interviewed could identify a genuine controversy surrounding the book. Instead, a newly elected school board had removed it preemptively. The copies were pulled from shelves, marked To Be Destroyed, and discarded.

The irony was that the decision created the very attention it was attempting to avoid.

When local students learned what had happened, they were furious. Eggers partnered with an independent bookstore and offered to pay for copies of the banned books for any high school student who wanted one. More students ended up reading them than likely would have if the books had simply remained on the shelves.

Eventually, the school board members who made the decision were voted out.

What stands out isn’t the politics of the story. It was Eggers’ relationship to it.

He’s spent years asking audiences a simple question: If you could ban one book, what would it be? Most people have an answer. Yet in the town where his book had been removed, nobody was able to name one.

The whole episode feels like a reminder that creative work has always existed in conversation with forces that want to suppress it, reshape it, ignore it, or control it. Books get challenged. Ideas fall out of favor. Institutions change their minds.

And yet the work has a way of finding its audience.

For Eggers, success doesn’t seem to be measured by whether the obstacles disappear. The obstacles are inevitable.

The question is whether you get to keep going.

Whether you keep making the next thing.

If you’re still doing the work years later, there’s a good chance you’ve already succeeded.

Watch the full video on YouTube.

Red Yellow Blue White and Black II by Ellsworth Kelly

Ten Rules for Students and Teachers by Sister Corita Kent

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.

RULE TWO: General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.

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Life Force Attunement - As Within, So Without by Molly Hankins

Our sacred attention is the dial we use to tune ourselves to all the different frequencies of creation, so when we direct it towards the life-force powering it, we attune ourselves to its limitless potential. Much occult literature references the famous Hermetic axiom, “As above so below,” but the full quote is, “As within so without, as above so below, as the universe, so the soul.” By consciously honoring the expression of this life-giving power in the external world of nature, so too do we activate this energy within ourselves.

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The Swan by Hilma Af Klint

For more than thirty years, Kenny Chesney has lived on the road.

The tours got bigger. The crowds got bigger. The machine kept moving.

Eventually, he realized something had quietly shifted.

“Every decision I was making was for Kenny Chesney the persona, not the person.”

It’s one of the most revealing moments in his conversation with Rick.

Not because it’s a story about fame.

Because it’s a story about identity.

At some point, the version of ourselves that succeeds in the world can begin making decisions on our behalf. The role gets reinforced. The expectations grow. The performance continues.

And the person underneath can slowly disappear.

On this week’s podcast, Kenny reflects on the cost of that split.

He talks about life on the road, which he describes as “a beautiful addiction.” He discusses the unexpected gift of spending an extended period in one place while performing at the Sphere in Las Vegas. After decades of constant movement, the stillness gave him something he hadn’t realized he needed.

“My soul truly needed a break.”

The conversation eventually turns toward plant medicine and the perspective it offered him.

For years, Kenny says, “I was running toward things to mask what I didn’t want to feel.”

Work.
Success.
Momentum.

The things that once felt liberating had become a way of avoiding himself.

What emerges from the conversation is not a story about reinvention. It’s a story about remembering.

About finding the distance between the persona and the person. And discovering that the person is still there.

Paid subscribers can listen here ad-free. Or find the conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

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The tours got bigger. The crowds got bigger. The machine kept moving.

Eventually, he realized something had quietly shifted.

“Every decision I was making was for Kenny Chesney the persona, not the person.”

It’s one of the most revealing moments in his conversation with Rick.

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Tetragrammaton New Moon Observer is best experienced in broadsheet format. Click here to read the full PDF.

Living with Water

Robin Sparkes, May 2026

The ground beneath you may appear fixed, but the most constant quality of existence is change itself. What presents as solid earth are tectonic plates in slow drift, driven by convective force. The same energy that once held Pangea together as a single landmass, fractured it into the continents we inhabit now. The ground moves just as the tides do, shifts with the current, responds to weather and season, only it unfolds across timescales beyond what we can see.

It is bodies of water on our planet that make change visible with our perception of time, currents legible in immediate movement. Water is the elemental bond of hydrogen and oxygen, a convergence so precise it created the conditions in which life on Earth became possible.

Our own bodies are made of water. When we live in close company with external bodies of water, we relate to space differently than we do over solid ground and landlocked horizons. With water, we witness change as it is occurring, see time as it is made visible in the pull of a current, the rise of a tide, the return of rain to the same ground it once left. When we observe water, we reorient the body toward its own molecular biology. To live with water is to hold a different quality of attention, one drawn toward rhythm rather than permanence...

Punctuation Marks (1958)

Theodor Adorno, May 2026

Among the losses that are punctuation’s share in the decay of language is the slash mark as used, for instance, to separate lines of a stanza of verse quoted in a piece of prose. Set as a stanza, the lines would rip the fabric of the language apart; printed simply as prose, the effect of verse is ridiculous, because the meter and the rhyme seem like unintended wordplay. The modern dash, however, is too crude to accomplish what it should in such cases. But the capacity to perceive such differences physiognomically is a prerequisite for the proper use of punctuation marks.

The ellipsis, a favorite way of leaving sentences meaningfully open during the period when Impressionism became a commercialized mood, suggests an infinitude of thoughts and associations, something the hack journalist does not have; he must depend on typography to simulate them. But to reduce the three dots borrowed from the repeating decimal fractions of arithmetic to two, as the George Circle did, is to imagine that one can continue with impunity to lay claim to that fictive infinitude by costuming as exact something whose inherent intention is to be inexact. The punctuation of the brazen hack is no better than that of the modest hack...

A True Gift Is Never Yours

Molly Hankins, May 2026

The moment the gift is expressed, it extends beyond its point of origin — a poem or song becomes someone else’s memory, a piece of art becomes someone else’s inspiration, a gift of food is ingested and gives sustenance. After a gift leaves its source, it starts weaving connections, creating threads between people linked through its passage. Here, the function of the gift begins to reveal itself — in a system of commodity exchange, all that matters are the materials exchanged. In a gift economy, the gift itself is secondary to the network it creates and the unspoken invitation to keep giving. Throughout the book, Hyde makes the case for considering the impact on the artist of having to survive in a world of commerce, and the artist’s impact on the world...

Tetragrammaton on Klee

“First of all,” said Paul Klee when asked what was most important for a good life, “the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.” Of course, illustrations were more than mere income for Klee, they instead became some of the most important works of the 20th Century, but his tongue-in-cheek response has more truth than he lets on. Klee was a wildly individual artist, refusing the modes of the day and merging influence into a unique style. A soldier, a thinker, a writer, and a teacher at the Bauhaus School alongside his closest friend Wassily Kandinsky — Klee’s genius moved across mediums, but it is perhaps, against popular knowledge, his writing that was his greatest impact. Klee’s notebooks are amongst the most important pedagogical documents of modern art, his perspective exists beneath so much of the post-war and contemporary works we know today. Chiefly, that art was a serious pursuit best pursued unseriously, like a child approaches the blank page...

Responsibilities of the Audience Member

Derek Simpson, May 2026

As an audience member receiving an art experience, the first feeling we get is an instinctive hit. Within a fraction of a second after the lights dim and the curtain opens, old bonds break and new ones form. Our earliest memories, the food we ate for breakfast this morning, and all other input we’ve received throughout our lives serve as the countless data points that connect us to the artwork in front of us. It’s a reaction happening at a cellular level, faster than we can consciously perceive, and it is our task as an audience member to notice each reaction as it takes place.

While noticing, we may recognize that a reaction tends to pull on our attention. This pull can severely undermine our relationship with the artwork. We choose not to finish a book based on the headline of a negative review, we cast aside a series in protest of an unsavory cast member, we voice a slight judgement about a song that a colleague put on at work. If a reaction makes itself present in the form of an opinion, it is within our best interest to note it and continue on. A reaction is a gift of nature, but it is not a final judgement of the artwork, just a signal revealing to us our biases and prejudices. As we come into this awareness, we gradually eliminate the possibility of our reaction becoming a detriment to our art experience. In time, it may no longer impair our ability to receive the artwork’s many exquisite subtleties but keeping the relationship honest is up to us...

Jackie Triptych by Andy Warhol

The Virtue of Experience by Molly Hankins

Experience, unlike patience or valor, is not traditionally regarded as a virtue, and yet it is the well from which all other virtues spring. Defined as “morally good behavior, character or quality, the good that comes from something, an advantage or benefit.” Such qualities can certainly be taught, but they are developed and put into practice only through experience. To seek a variety of experiences correlates directly with cultivation of self-awareness and wisdom. How else can we come to know ourselves except by experience?

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It was December 25th, 2020. Bryce Crawford was 17 years old. He walked into a Waffle House to get his last meal, because it was one of the only things open.

“I planned on taking my life because of the depression and anxiety. Not because I wanted to die, but because I thought it was the only way to get the pain to go away.”

The restaurant was packed with families. He couldn’t get a seat alone, so he grabbed a stranger — a man in his thirties — and offered to pay for his meal if they could share a booth. The man sat down and started unloading everything. Divorce. His kids getting taken away. His family’s last Christmas together. Losing his money, losing it all. Bryce was barely listening.

Then the man said: “There’s no growth in a relationship if the love isn’t mutual.”

Every Bible verse Bryce had ever half-heard in church or Vacation Bible School flooded in at once. He threw money on the table and ran to his car. He prayed for the first time in his life — broken, honest, not performing. The crippling depression and anxiety he’d carried since 8th grade lifted the moment he finished. It hasn’t come back since.

That was five years ago. He started talking about Jesus the next day, and he hasn’t stopped since.

On this week’s podcast, Bryce, a 22-year-old evangelist and founder of a street ministry based in Los Angeles, traces the full arc of what followed in his conversation with Rick— from locking himself in his room with a Bible and a systematic theology textbook on Christmas break, to losing most of his friends at his Christian school for being too openly Christian, to moving to Los Angeles at 18 on what he describes only as a calling, with nowhere to stay and no plan.

He shares what it feels like to walk up to strangers in West Hollywood and on Venice Beach and ask them when someone last told them they were loved. He talks about the Holy Spirit the way you'd talk about a close friend. And the 18 inches between his head and his heart that finally connected inside that Waffle House on Christmas night.

Throughout the conversation, Bryce returns to one thing:

He wasn’t looking for God. God was looking for him.

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Step into another era through the Tetragrammaton Networks — a curated broadcast of vintage films and visual media.

“I planned on taking my life because of the depression and anxiety. Not because I wanted to die, but because I thought it was the only way to get the pain to go away.”

On this week’s podcast, Bryce, a…

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Juggler in April (Gaukler im April) by Paul Klee

Living with Water by Robin Sparkes

The ground beneath you may appear fixed, but the most constant quality of existence is change itself. What presents as solid earth are tectonic plates in slow drift, driven by convective force. The same energy that once held Pangea together as a single landmass, fractured it into the continents we inhabit now. The ground moves just as the tides do, shifts with the current, responds to weather and season, only it unfolds across timescales beyond what we can see.

Continue reading…

In early 2012, Vlad Tenev was at a party in San Francisco explaining his startup — a software company selling high-frequency trading infrastructure to hedge funds. A stranger listened, then asked a question that changed everything.

“So you’re telling me these customers trade tens of billions of dollars a day and they pay next to nothing? I have my Schwab account. They’re charging me $10, $20 a trade. Why can’t I have that?”

Vlad’s first instinct was to dismiss it. The software was for institutions. For developers. Not for people at parties.

But he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Vlad Tenev is now the co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, the platform that forced every major brokerage in America to cut their trading commissions to zero. What started as a simple question — why do hedge funds get cheap trades and regular people don’t — became a company that now runs eleven business lines, each generating over $100 million in annual revenue.

In this week’s conversation with Rick, Vlad traces the full arc of that journey — from bonding with his co-founder over graduate-level physics problems at Stanford to surviving the chaos of GameStop.

He explains how a mathematics degree that made him nearly unemployable turned out to be the exact preparation he needed. He talks about what it took to raise a million dollars before being allowed to build a single feature, and why the incumbents’ first response to Robinhood was simply to pretend it wasn’t a threat.

Throughout the conversation, Vlad returns to the same instinct that started everything: the best financial products should work for everyone, not just the people who already have money.

“If you give people the best economics and the best customer experience, it’s really strong. One of the two gives you a good product. But if you nail both — that’s the whole thing.”

Paid subscribers can listen ad-free. Or find the conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

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That question became the founding idea of a company that would force Wall Street to change forever. Vlad tells Rick the full…

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He was there to teach meditation.

In a basement room, thirty men closed their eyes — members of the Mexican Mafia, the Black Panthers, and the Aryan Brotherho…

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Tetragrammaton New Moon Observer is best experienced in broadsheet format. Click here to read the full PDF.

AI Will Be Many Things. But Never Human.

Ian Rogers, May 2026

My granddaughter thinks her blanket is lonely when she goes to school in the morning. This is not a mistake in her reasoning. It is the beginning of empathy.

We do this all our lives. We name our cars, talk to our plants,say “the sky is crying” when it rains. We project inner life onto things that have none because we are alive, and aliveness spills out of us.

I do it at work. I refer to my AI agent as “he.” I say please and thank you, not because I believe it matters to him, but because it matters to me. If I am going to use natural English to communicate for much of my working day, I do not want to bark orders meanly. It makes me feel like a jerk.

These are small kindnesses. They are also where a much larger problem begins.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth would say this is our psychology doing what it has always done: finding meaning where there are only patterns. In his recent TED talk, he says we see consciousness in AI the same way we see faces in clouds. The machine reflects us back to ourselves so convincingly that we begin to mistake the reflection for a subject.

That distinction matters. A subject has an inner life. A subject can suffer. A subject is someone. AI may become many things, but it will never be human and one of the most dangerous things that can happen is for us to believe that it is...

“Black” is a Country (1962)

Amiri Baraka, April 2026

To a growing list of “dirty” words that make Americans squirm add the word Nationalism. I would say that the word has gained almost as much infamy in some quarters of this country as that all-time anathema and ugliness, Communism. In fact, some journalists, commentators, and similar types have begun to use the two words interchangeably. It goes without saying that said commentators, etc., and the great masses of Americans who shudder visibly at the mention of those words cannot know what they mean. And it is certainly not my function, here, to rectify that situation completely. But I do think that unless the great majority of people in this country begin to understand just exactly what Nationalism is (or at least that variety of Nationalism which is most in evidence among the smaller, so-called uncommitted countries of the world) they will pass from the scene like the boxer who “never knew what hit him”...

The Secret Chamber of the Heart

Molly Hankins, April 2026

There is a tiny space inside our hearts. Described in ancient religious texts dating as far back as the Chandogya Upanishad, between the 8th and 6th century BCE, and even further, in a little-known addendum to the Torah written about in countless secondary sources, with a title said to roughly translate to “The Secret Chamber of the Heart.” The original source material has never been found, and there is no known complete English translation but its message is said to mirror that of the Chandogya Upanishad - it is from this space in our hearts, which we can enter into through meditation or simply by visualising, where we access the part of ourselves still connected to The Creator. When we create from that place, we bypass the egoic mind of judgement, creating with the most highly potent energy available, free of fear...

Tetragrammaton on Degas

Combining fragility with experimentation, Degas tried to match the mediums of depiction with the subjects themselves. From the view of the orchestra pit, our sightline obscured by the curving, almost sensual necks of the double basses, we see dancers in rehearsal. They lean and whisper, observing the prima ballerina as she stand en pointe, and we become voyeurs to unfinished artistry, and the process of alchemy through which movements of bodies becomes transformative art. His technique was wildly experimental, creating a work that is, at every level of its creation, about the strange, magical alchemy that can happen on stage, or on paper, to produce art...

Talking About Men

Noah Gabriel Martin, April 2026

A man in this society has to struggle with the view that a man who cannot feed his family is not really a man, and, since that same worldview suggests that’s the only thing for a man to be, it follows that he is not really a human, not even really anything at all.
It is important to remember that no particular man is going to suffer from economic problems and their social comorbidities more than any particular woman—everyone’s relationship to money is going to be determined by a whole slew of factors, from their circumstances growing up to the goals they set for themselves. On top of that, we must not forget (as reactionaries would like us to) that women are still significantly less financially prosperous than men on average. This disparity has worsened since Covid.
Yet, this way of looking at the features of life as a man can help us understand the specific challenges it poses, without overgeneralising or falling back on gender stereotypes. By looking at the way near universal pressures, such as financial strain, nevertheless affect men in a peculiar way due to the sexist expectations that we are all subjected to, we can make sense of them, give voice to them, and lend them an ear, without succumbing to sexism ourselves.
This way of looking at the problems faced by men today can also help us understand why those who say that the answer to these problems is to go back to a more regressive patriarchal culture are wrong. Their so-called answer is completely backwards—they mistake the poison for the cure.
If we are not all willing to talk about the disease, then that backwards analysis is the only one we will have access to...

“I was suicidal,” he says at one point in the conversation.

“But when I was in front of my computer… the world was so beautiful and well arranged.”

P…

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Twin Heads by Alfred Henry Maurer

Talking About Men by Noah Gabriel Martin

How should a man act in the 21st century? Anyone participating in traditional gender roles is going to find it easy to respond to this question—provide for and protect a family, be assertive, get swoll. For those of us, however, who believe in gender equality and freedom, it’s not even obvious how to pose the question.

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This week on Tetragrammaton’s podcast: Pink Floyd’s Quadraphonic Sound Inspired Slipknot, a conversation between Michael Shawn Crahan aka Clown from Slipknot and Rick Rubin.

Paid subscribers can listen to the full episode here.

Before the band even appeared, helicopters and distant machines began moving through the arena speakers overhead. It was the first time he had experienced quadraphonic sound — audio traveling not just in front of him, but around him.

Th…

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The idea behind Substack

The internet changed how culture gets made, but not necessarily how it’s sustained.

Chris Best sits down with Rick to discuss how that tension became the starting point for Substack in this week’s Tetragrammaton podcast.

At the center of the conversation is Chris’s deceptively simple idea:

“The writers and the people who make the culture are the heroes… and they need independence. In order to give what they have to give to the world, they need the freedom to make the things they want to make—and to make money doing the work they believe in. If you can create those conditions, what gets created will be different and better.”

That idea didn’t begin as a fully formed platform. It started with something much smaller—a first step.

From there, the conversation expands into the larger tension shaping the modern internet. Most platforms are designed to optimize for attention—maximizing time spent and engagement on platforms. Those systems are incredibly effective, but they also shape what gets made. Creative decisions become filtered through what will perform, rather than what feels worth making.

Throughout the conversation, Chris and Rick touch on the differences between audience and ownership, the limits of algorithmic discovery, and the way many of the most interesting voices in culture tend to emerge from the margins before becoming widely adopted. In that sense, independence isn’t just about economics—it’s about allowing new ideas to take shape before they’re legible to the mainstream.

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Allegory with Boats by Lucien Coutaud

John C. Lilly: Solid-State Intelligence Rebel by Molly Hankins

Scientist, poet and author Dr. John C. Lilly was a controversial figure, best described in a new documentary as a man “determined to get his hands on the steering wheel of consciousness.” Working tirelessly throughout his life to synthesise science-fiction and metaphysics into hard science, Lilly is most well-known for his work studying dolphins and his theory of self-programming, a radical take on neuroscience proclaiming that the brain is a ‘programmable human biocomputer.’ To pack his life story into a single film is a tremendous undertaking, but John C. Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, directed by Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens and released this year, takes it on fearlessly. The film delves into a lesser known portion of Lilly’s work, his obsession with rebelling against what he called ‘solid-state consciousness or intelligence’ in order to free his own mind.

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23 Stripping - The I Ching

Judgement
Stripping, don’t go too far.

Lines

1
Stripping the bed of its legs.

2
Stripping the bed of its frame.

3
Stripping it.

4
Stripping the bed and stripping the sleeper.

5
One catches the favour of courtiers like catching fish.

6
A great fruit goes uneaten. The Sage finds a way out, while the small are stripped of their homes.

Qabalah

Netzach to Malkuth: The Path of Qoph. The Moon.

Two conversations this week circle the same idea from different directions.

GT Dave reflects on fermentation as something alive—guided, but never forced—while Jeff Harmon describes a new model of storytelling shaped by the audience itself. Across both, a shared principle emerges: the most meaningful creations aren’t imposed, but rather cultivated, and allowed to grow into what they’re meant to become.

Listen to Jeff Harmon and GT Dave on the latest episodes of the podcast.

Step into another era through the Tetragrammaton Networks — a curated broadcast of vintage films and visual media.