5: Tina He - Internet Citizen and Philosopher in Action
Tina He (Site, X, Newsletter) is a product designer, entrepreneur, writer, and amateur philosopher. She is a product lead at Coinbase, where she works on developer tools for its network Base. She joined Coinbase through the acquisition of her company, Station Labs. Tina grew up in China before moving the U.S. at age 14. As an adult, Tina has been a dual-citizen of New York City and the internet. As she has put it, Tina is interested in the culture of technology and the technology of culture. While we share a love of technology and the internet as a "place," Tina is also my favorite person to get reading recommendations from. She studies philosophy, immerses herself in art, film, and fashion, and has been writing online since she was a teenager. I aimed to give listeners a glimpse of the types of wide-ranging conversations that I've enjoyed with Tina over the years. We cover identity, locality, NYC, the internet, writing and sharing online, finding your people online, her career arc from comparative literature in college to venture capital and crypto, how labor markets and economies lay a foundation for culture in cities and online, what it means to be serious, patriotism and greatness, ambition, philosophy, ideas and action, Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, her favorite philosophers from Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein to Byung-Chul Han, Beauty, taste, aesthetics, film, fashion, and how love and attention underpin her life. Timestamps:
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Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic. Tina He is a product designer, entrepreneur, and writer. She now leads developer tool products for Coinbase's network base, which she joined through acquisition of her company Station Labs. Tina grew up in China and yet is one of the most American people I know. She calls New York home, but is even more so a citizen of the internet. Tina is also my favorite person to get reading recommendations from. Especially philosophy. I aim to give listeners a glimpse of the types of wide-ranging conversations that I've enjoyed with Tina over the years.
Enjoy. Here's Tina. Speaker B: I think this is my first non-professional podcast, actually. Like, it's my first podcast with a friend. And how does that feel? I actually— it does not. I have had a podcast with a friend, but then it was about asking about my work. My startup. So it's very— it's way easier when I knew that's the topic, where for this I didn't know it's gonna be Jackson philosophical. Speaker A: We have many places to go. Okay, all right, well, here's where we will start. You are somebody who makes me think about identity more than almost anyone, and I think that applies in an individual sense and in a communal sense.
And I want to start specifically with place, because I think place is something that you put a lot of thought and intention into. And I'll start with a quote that, uh, you included, I think, in your piece on belonging. And this is Olga— I'm going to totally butcher her name— Olga Tokarczyk. Anyway, you say no one has articulated the amorphous identity of locality better than Polish novelist Olga Torkaczuk. She says, "To someone from nowhere, every movement turns into a return." And so I want to ask, what does it mean to be local or alocal?
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