Better Conversations
Why Conversations?
In Thinking in Public, I made the case for better questions and hinted at how often they emerge through dialogue. One of the key examples was a podcast: not a monologue, not an article, but conversations.
There’s something uniquely generative about talking things through.
Even when we’re not searching for answers, dialogue remains one of the most natural triggers for deeper thinking.
A meaningful conversation is demanding. It asks us to say what we think and it makes us almost immediately notice when our thinking hasn’t quite landed. It quickly challenges vague phrasing, borrowed ideas, and half-finished thoughts. It exposes the parts of our thinking that still need work.
There is a lot of friction involved.
We might even consider conversations as pure intellectual friction.
It can be a good thing when the friction helps you carving out a thought and sharpen it. It can be highly frustrating when the friction actually prevents it.
Aiming for Clarity
There’s a strange moment that happens when you try to say something out loud that’s only ever existed in your head.
You often realize it’s not ready.
What felt clear internally can suddenly sounds messy or vague. That’s not a mistake, it’s only the next phase of thinking clearly: sharing a thought and allowing it to meet real world friction.
Conversations do that. They pressure-test your thinking. They reveal blind spots. They help connect dots better. And they do it fast.
Speaking a thought out loud is often the quickest way to find out whether you actually understand it.
The Pressure of Live
The catch is that most professional conversations happen live.
Live means scheduling (and this matters more than you think, when the aim is to synchronize deep thinking between two people). Live means showing up ready to “perform”. It means hoping your best ideas arrive on time, in the right order, with clarity.
You don’t get to pause for very long. You don’t get to say, “give me an hour, I know there’s something better in here.”
The editorial process you go through when writing suddenly has to happen on the spot.
Unless both person come highly prepared (not as common as we would expect) and/or with already fully formed ideas (which means we are not really here to refine our thinking), most live conversations are not an ideal format for meaningful thought.
They don’t leave much room for exploration.
What Async Changes
There is another way to have conversations and think together: asynchronously.
An asynchronous conversation means you do not need to align calendars, and more importantly to synchronize “when” you think best. There is no pressure to be quick and perform “on the spot”.
Instead, you get time. To pause. To wander. To reframe.
The conversation doesn’t have to end after 60 minutes. It’s not boxed in by a meeting slot. You can return to it. Add to it. Let it breathe. It lives at a very different pace.
All it really means is this: there’s a gap between the question and the answer.
And that gap is where the magic happens. The async format rewards depth and intention over speed and performance. It gives your best thinking a proper stage.
Beyond Email
When people hear “asynchronous conversation,” they usually think of email. That format is familiar. Email is supposed to be low-pressure. You write when you can; they reply when they can.
But in practice, email rarely delivers on that promise. It’s often short, rushed, and reactive. Fragmented insights are buried in threads.
Even when it does work, it is still text. It lacks the nuance of voice and the presence that helps you untangle complex ideas.
This is why I don’t rely on email alone.
When I say asynchronous, I mean something much richer. Conversations that mix writing, voice notes, and video replies.
Writing is still part of the process. It does sharpens clarity. But when paired with sound and image, it becomes something else: a thinking environment that doesn’t depend on schedules or inboxes.
That’s what I use. And that’s what I invite people into: a private space from which we can find raw ideas and work on them until they are ready to be shared.
inLabs
If you’ve read these four articles, you now have a good sense of what I believe and what I’m trying to build here.
inLabs is my quiet attempt to create space for people who want to share their insights without chasing algorithms, vanity metrics, or performance.
It’s not about reach. It’s not about scale. It’s about finding the kind of clarity and relevance that allow thought kinship to happen.