My guest today is my former teammate Vizi Andrei, founder of The Sovereign Artist program and author of Sovereign Artist: Meditations on Lifestyle Design.

Vizi's journey has been anything but conventional. After dabbling in various creative projects, he realized that the internet offers a unique opportunity: the freedom to take countless small risks without catastrophic consequences.

He built The Sovereign Artist program to help creators step away from the toxic hustle culture and build sustainable, meaningful lives rooted in creativity, deep work, and sacred leisure. His insights into Slow Living, the Sicilian Dream, and embracing experimentation over optimization can help one break free from comparison traps.

He joins me to discuss the dangers of chasing unrealistic benchmarks of success, the myths of modern productivity, how to unlock creative freedom, and MUCH more!

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. For the full transcript, episode takeaways, and bucketloads of other goodies designed to make you go, "Hmm, that's interesting!", check out our Substack.

Important Links:

Show Notes:

Is procrastination a signal for something bigger?
The Sicilian Dream: challenging the hustle culture
The Pursuit of Busyness
The rise of the pseudo-entrepreneur
Are we taking the internet for granted?
The outlier obsession can kill your creative potential
Are your goals your own? or borrowed from prepackaged societal narratives?
Drunk with too many choices
Crossing the bridge of nihilism
The art of boredom: slow living might just be the answer
Knowledge is existential; energy is everything
MORE!

Books Mentioned:

Sovereign Artist: Meditations on Lifestyle Design; by Vizi Andrei
The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story for Work and Life; by Paul Millerd
Status Anxiety; by Alain de Botton
The Soul of the World; by Roger Scruton
Escolios to an Implicit Text; by Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder; by Nassim Taleb
The Infinity of Lists; by Umberto Eco
The Myth of the Eternal Return; by Mircea Eliade
Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine; by Derren Brown

Susanna Rabow-Edling, "The First Russian Revolution: The Decembrist Revolt Of 1825" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

New Books in History

How does the film Union of Salvation portray them?

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