My convo with
, writer of the amazing , started with us both trying to figure out what the hell Substack live even was.Our best guess: a chance meeting in the digital kitchen of Substack, where we talked about everything from our creative struggles to emotional labor in relationships to Nikita and his partner leaving Russia when the war started.
On Ideas That Don't Want to Be Known
We spent time circling around the mystery of creative work—how good ideas seem to run away when you try to capture them.
"Whenever it's like good ideas and creative, interesting ideas, I feel like don't like to be known," I told Nikita. "And when you like try to pounce on them, they run away. They just make themselves not known."
Nikita took it further, connecting it to Terence McKenna's concept of "a secret that cannot be told." He explained:
"It's like the secret is not something that you're hiding because you don't want to share it. It's just it's impossible to share it. It's secret because it's mystery. It can't be articulated. And that's to me the driving force behind a lot of my creative work—doing circles around something that can't be touched."
We compared this to relationships, how both ideas and people resist being boxed in or defined. The best approach to both might be the same: be curious, pay attention, and see what happens.
On Escaping Russia and Finding Armenia
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Nikita and his wife ended up in Armenia—not by design, but because it was the only flight route that would let them bring their dog in the cabin.
What was supposed to be a temporary stop turned into two years. "Armenia just kind of sucked us in," he said. "We're still both in love with Armenia and the Armenian people... this is the only nation I'm really rooting for right now in the world."
My fav moment from our talk came when Nikita described walking down a dirt road in Armenia when a neighbor called out to him: "I just hear a 'hey' from the back and I turn around and behind the fence, there's a neighbor and he just has apricots and he just throws one at me. And I say, thank you. And that's the entire interaction."
I gotta start throwing more apricots at my neighbors.
This conversation felt like the beginning of something. I’m looking forward to more. Till then, here’s an Prunus armeniaca aka an apricot which, right there in the scientific name, comes from Armenia:
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