The Magic of Creative Partnerships

A Pre-FTX pause that refreshes, and one amazing game recommendation

This is partly a programming note, and partly a peek behind the curtain. Today I’m in Florida, doing something that I haven’t done in more than a decade: recording music.

As hesitant as I am about operationalizing the weirder elements of my creative life into this “professional” venue, I think there are some things to learn, because those two things aren’t really all that separate at all.

We started our week of collaboration with the sacred Japanese ritual known as “Kara-Oke”

But first, I want everyone to know about an incredible game I played last night: The Awkward Storyteller. It’s a competitive storytelling game with great interaction and actual strategic gameplay tailored for the narrative mind. In essence, it’s an excuse to tell hilariously convoluted lies.

The rules are a bit hard to summarize, but involve a “storyteller” being asked a series of questions about an initial random prompt. Those questions also come with randomized *restrictions* on how they can be answered, for instance forcing the storyteller to use specific words. This is an amazing setup for hilarious and creative answers, and seems like it would be a good excercise even for people who don’t consider themselves “creative.”

We played with close to ten people and it was a blast. Strong recommend.

But I mostly want to talk a bit about my creative partner, Altus Noumena, and how powerful it can be to have a long-term collaborator in your life. Altus created the music for Crypto Crooks, my podcast at CoinDesk. If you’re looking for music for a project, I can connect you, he’s amazing and I’m not trying to keep him to myself.

But that’s barely the beginning of what we’ve done together, and what we plan to.

I’ll keep this brief, because after one or two more cups of coffee, we’re going to go make some music.

Altus and I met about 12 years ago now, when we were both affiliated with an unlicensed warehouse venue in St. Petersburg, Florida called the Venture Compound. That’s also where I met my wife, so it was obviously a very formative period. Altus is a very talented musician, but he’s also a huge game nerd, so we connected on that level as well.

It’s hard to exaggerate how lucky we were to connect with each other. We have almost completely aligned creative tastes in weird, fucked-up shit, while being personally extremely upstanding, moral, positive guys. (Altus even has proof of this, having raised one of the coolest kids I’ve ever met).

While Altus stayed in Florida, we kept in very close touch after I moved to New York, and for maybe three years talked vaguely about collaborating on something. Then in 2020, in the first year of the pandemic, we finally got serious about it and launched our first Kickstarter as Moon Beast Games. It wasn’t an entirely smooth process, but it was a great learning experience, and we successfully produced a small game book that I’m very proud of.

It’s called Encounters for Dark Cities, and while we haven’t yet made it available for retail, I hope we can soon.

That delay just one example of the truly relaxed approach we’ve taken to the project, and one of the big things I discovered while working on the project is that it’s *necessary* to think that way if you’re trying to balance a creative life with the typical 9-to-5 demands of a high-achieving professional life. It’s really tough and I just didn’t find it possible to truly balance the two, so the book just kind of got worked on when I had the time and bandwidth.

That back-seat approach has defined all of my creative endeavors over the past four or five years as my professional life has taken off. This is the main reason I have been working on a novel now for *14 years* (though I’m finishing it very soon, I swear).

While we took a relaxed approach, my work with Altus *didn’t* stall out or stagnate, in large part because I was obligated to him as a partner. And he has absolutely no affiliation with the crypto or finance industries, so there’s no temptation to shortchange my work with him when things get hard at the 9-5.

On top of the motivating sense of duty that comes from a great creative partnership, it also involves a balance of talents and skills. Altus is a great musician, producer, and also visual artist while I’m an out-of-practice dabbler. I bring the writing and narrative, as well as more of the administrative side of things (though to be honest I also suck at that part).

But really, I think the most important part of our or any good partnership is affirmation. Altus and I have very similar taste, we’ve learned the contours of each other’s taste over the years, and we have also learned to be frank in our assessments of each other’s contributions. Among other nuances, once you have complete faith in one another’s talents, it’s very easy to be frank when one of us contributes something that doesn’t quite bang or just isn’t there yet.

As my recent layoff reminded me, that kind of trust is very hard to build within the confines of a 21st century professional career. The rest of the team I worked on Crypto Crooks with were also incredibly talented, and I do sincerely hope to work with each and every one of them again. But that involves a lot more barriers, restrictions, and hangups than just jamming with a good friend.

And to be clear, a lot of it *is* just aimlessly messing around, another rare luxury in any kind of professional setting, but absolutely a prerequisite for real innovation. That’s not to say there’s a direct line from freeform noodling to great product, but that the pattern of freedom set in your brain transfers to everything you do.

Obviousy and emphatically, time with your friends and working on creative projects - particularly creative project that have no great ambition and are pursued entirely out of the joy of it - are ends in themselves. They are the stuff of life. And so, as I said, it feels weird to operationalize them, to hook them into the reductive world of exchange value.

But it’s undeniable that in my life, my nonprofessional work has helped my professional work, in ways broad and narrow, direct and indirect. So the long and short of it is: If you find someone who you can do silly, crazy things with; who can motivate you to practice your own gifts and grow with them; who reminds you that there’s more to life than work -

Hang on to them.