Strategy consultant turned writer Natasha Joukovsky joins me to discuss why bourgeois comfort is more conducive to writing than you think, why choice-plots make for better fiction, the eyerolling prevalence of manufactured nonchalance, our shared distaste for Atlantis Bahamas, 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.

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Show Notes:

“You can do everything, just not at the same time”
It’s Recursion All the Way Down
Pretending to Read vs Actually Reading
Manufactured Nonchalance as a Status Signal
Counter-Signalling, Fake-Famous & Jim’s Cursed Trip to Atlantis Bahamas
On No-Choice Plots & Writing in Service of Beauty
The Self-Deception of Status Hunting
Why Bourgeois Comfort is More Conducive to Art Than You Think
Natasha’s Next Book
“We don’t do auctions”
Natasha as World Empress

Books Mentioned:

The Portrait of a Mirror; by Natasha Joukovsky
The novels of Jane Austen
Status Anxiety; by Alain de Botton
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (poem); by T.S. Eliot
Class: A Guide Through the American Status System; by Paul Fussell
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid; by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Ulysses; by James Joyce
Metamorphosis; by Franz Kafka
Beloved; by Toni Morrison
In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past); by Marcel Proust
Collective Illusions; by Todd Rose
The Status Game; by Will Storr
Anna Karenina; by Leo Tolstoy
The Theory of the Leisure Class; by Thorstein Veblen
A Little Life; by Hanya Yanagihara

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