This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what I talked about.
You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.
Justin put a shirt on for this one, which we agreed to treat as an experiment, and he is now surrounded by enough recording equipment that he can hear his own fridge. We ended up going through this week’s reflection questions from the Become an Elf programme, which meant talking about what we made as children before anyone told us whether we were any good at it, and that went further than either of us expected, so here is the rundown.
Noise you did not know was there. Condenser microphones pick up everything, the fridge, the storm doors, the flight path over Miami, and once you hear it you cannot stop hearing it. Which led to deprivation tanks, where the absence of sound is so complete that one noise from the front desk makes your whole body react, and to the fact that most of us walk around inside a wall of sound our brains have simply agreed to ignore.
The kid who does bird calls. Justin has been watching videos of a boy who can reproduce essentially any bird call you can name, and the thing that stayed with us is what a person like that would have meant a few thousand years ago, when knowing which berry was safe and which sound meant what was the entire technology available. Then we established that neither of us can identify a tree.
Scout badges. If we were awarding them, Gerhard is going for trees and fish, having discovered fishing this week at the summer cabin, four perch caught, three returned, one filleted and eaten. Justin would take archery, from summer camp in a town of eight hundred people, with a bow from about 1992 and no wrist guard.
The wahoo. Justin went deep sea fishing once, in the Atlantic off St Martin, and it took three hours of taking turns in a strapped-in chair to land a six foot sport fish. The part worth hearing is what happens as it comes out of the water, when the whole body shimmers with rainbow colour for about ten seconds and then fades. They took the steaks to a restaurant that evening and had the chef cook them, and Justin still calls it the best thing he has eaten.
What we do here, briefly. Every week members of Eleven Dunbar get three small things: a reflection question, a creation quest that takes five or ten minutes, and a connect prompt to bring to their Elf buddy. We are each other’s buddies, so this episode is us doing the exercise properly rather than talking about it.
Gerhard has no memories before ten. The question was what did you make as a child before anyone told you whether you were good at it, and the honest answer was nothing, because there is no footage. Make-believe, sci-fi, action figures in space, and then a hard cut to age ten. Justin’s theory is that Gerhard arrived on the planet fully formed at ten with the beard already in place, which is roughly how it works with Jesus. Baby Jesus, then Jesus with the disciples, and no teenage Jesus in between.
The nerd he pretended not to be. From ten to fourteen it was PCs, building them for friends, organising LAN parties, working out how networks fit together, and inventing games to play in a park with nothing. Also shame about all of it, because there was no computer club in Vienna and nobody else in the room was into it, so the move was to love it and act too cool for it at the same time. Software engineering found him again at 29.
The serious purpose problem. The thing Gerhard carried for years is that games needed a justification, an educational angle, something that made people better, otherwise fun was not enough of a reason. It shaped the master’s thesis, it nearly turned into a PhD, and it took until now to let go of. Building something with play at the centre has turned out to be a healing thing for him rather than a career move.
The line from yesterday. Some people create so that others can see it. The real thing is creating so that you can see yourself.
Justin’s teddy bear. Singing solos in church and at school until his voice changed at puberty and he had to find it again. Elementary school art every week, pottery, kiln, jewellery, watercolour. And in sixth grade a floppy-eared teddy bear in the corner of a room, drawn and shaded and then painted, which he became obsessed with getting right, and which is the last thing he ever really made. Also brackets, hand-drawn March Madness and World Cup simulations with loser brackets, which is geometry and imagination doing the same job.
Kick the can, and Pong. Making up games with uncles and cousins, including one invented so a boy with a broken leg could still be involved. Fantasy fiction, a children’s book called Playing Chess with Dragons, then computer science at college to make video games. His senior high school project was Pong in QBasic, taught to himself off the internet with one snippet of code from a stranger on a forum. He got an A plus. He then rebuilt Pong thirty years later, with AI, for Elfen Town.
Brownies are done. In 1999 or 2000 Justin sent his brother a picture with an executable hidden in it. His brother double clicked, nothing appeared to happen, and moments later a printer in a different city produced a page that said brownies are done, followed by the CD tray opening on its own. His brother was not impressed, largely because he understood the legal situation better. Justin never worked out how to remove it.
Curiosity with no obvious use. Gerhard watches people who have mastered something narrow, pastry chefs, pizza guys in New York, a man who chops trees, pixel artists, and finds it more inspiring than anything with a point to it. His answer to what he would want to be watched doing at ninety is still forming, though a 91 year old who surfs, paddle boards and built his own house is currently the model. Justin’s is the handpan, eight or nine months in, two or three hours a day, plus audio production and the engineering side of getting clean sound in a loud apartment.
If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.
Eleven Dunbar is a curated membership community of dreamers, builders, and founders: a place to play, connect, and grow together. A place to find your voice, find your people, and create the impossible, without doing it all alone.
Our home is Elfen Town, a cozy virtual town that is open around the clock. Members drop in at any hour to work side by side, play without an agenda, and have the kind of conversations where you can be your actual self.
Beyond the town there are live gatherings, in-person meet-ups, and people who notice when you go quiet.
The community is capped at 150.
Reinventing at 42. Justin leaves Miami in October, out of a building he has been in for five years, which is ten percent of his life. What he is curious about is not an alternative way to live, since that implies something was wrong with the current one, but a different one, on the road, with less, and with a lot less control and structure than his hermit setup gives him. It is exciting and it is angsty, which is probably the correct combination.
The thing you actually fight. Not your father, not the person who wronged you, not society. Yourself, every day, in the form of your own discipline and routine. And knowing that does not mean having solved it, which is the honest part.
Making the room, not the mood. Justin is not trying to make anyone feel better, because that is not something you can do to a person. What he is trying to do is create the environment in which somebody can feel good on their own terms. Forty years to get to that one, after a long stretch of looking for happiness in everyone else.
The invitation. Answer the question yourself. What did you make as a child, before anyone told you whether you were any good at it? And what are you curious about right now that has no use at all?
