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Hey friends,
I’ve been circling around questions of authority and legitimacy again.
It’s something I wrote about a lot in my After the End of History series—how we’ve inherited a world where formal institutions are increasingly hollow, where legitimacy feels performative or imposed, and where real authority, if it exists at all, has to be earned differently now. Not by credentials or hierarchy, but through care, coherence, and the capacity to move people.
Grokkist emerged in that space nearly 4 years ago. It wasn't meant to be about setting up an alternative institution—more like an invitation to step outside the frame entirely. A pirate ship, maybe. Something that doesn’t need permission.
And yet here I am, publishing books. Holding up a banner. Curating things. Creating structures.
Watching with some amusement—and some unease—as Grokkist begins to function, in people’s lives, as a source of legitimacy.
People are starting to want to be seen alongside the Grokkist name because it signals something real. Something they’re proud to be associated with. Something that legitimises their voice—not because we bestow it, but because they recognise themselves in what we’re doing.
That recognition is powerful. It’s also a responsibility.
Right now, we’re putting the finishing touches on our very first hardcover Press title—a beautiful gift edition of Peter’s Flirting with Wisdom series. I’m handling the proofs as we speak.
It’ll be available for order soon, and when it’s ready, it will be a milestone—not just for the Press, but for the whole Grokkist experiment. A tangible, enduring expression of the ethos we’ve been growing together. A beautiful object that carries the subtle, emergent wisdom of this community into the world.
The Press is just one expression of Grokkist, but it’s a visible one. This year, we’re running two alternating weekly series—Rodney King’s Living in Absurdity and Margarita Steinberg’s Dance of Lead + Follow.
Margarita’s series will become a Grokkist Press book in time, shaped not only by her words but by the reflections and responses of readers along the way. It’s a live co-creation of something that lasts.
It’s strange terrain, building something like this. I want Grokkist to be a space that confers belonging without demanding conformity. A place that affirms people without enclosing them. That legitimises, not by claiming status, but by cultivating resonance.
But I can’t claim that’s what Grokkist is. Only you can do that.
So I’m inviting you—if Grokkist has moved you, changed something for you, helped you speak or grow or reconnect—I’d love you to say so. We’re collecting testimonials right now, and they’re becoming part of how others come to understand what this is.
You don’t need to say anything fancy—just something real. There’s a gift in it for you (yes, even a copy of Peter’s book once it’s out), but mostly, it’s a way of helping shape the signal Grokkist sends into the world.
Because Grokkist doesn’t explain itself from the top down. It reveals itself through the voices of those who make it matter. Share yours here.
Meanwhile, we’re hosting a Coddiwomple Café soon on estrangement—on what happens when you grow and someone you love can’t come with you. That quiet ache of no longer fitting. If that speaks to something in you, come. And if speaking aloud is still the edge of your comfort zone, Kendra’s next Shoes-On Studio might be your kind of space.
All of this—books, gatherings, series, voices—is part of the same project. Grokkist isn’t legitimate because it says it is. It’s legitimate because people like you keep showing up, and becoming more of who you already are.
Thanks for being part of that.
With curiosity and care,
Danu
Become a Grokkist Member to take part in Groksmithing in community and turn resonance to practice through hands-on gatherings, self-guided courses, and member access to Signature Projects where we help you bring your ideas to life.
For those standing at bigger thresholds, I also offer bespoke Groksmithing engagements — this is the heart of my livelihood, and how I support others to do their most meaningful work.
Your support keeps Grokkist open, regenerative, and dignity-first — sustaining a home for curiosity, care, and creative action.
Grokkist Press
Visit the Press ↗Fresh and Featured Pressings
The Dance of Lead+Follow | Letter 1: It Begins
By Margarita Steinberg (8 minute read)
When we feel life calling us to dance, how do we find the heart to take those first steps?
My coffee with David: A conversation about AI and control
By Zaheer Merali (14 min read)
The looming specter of AI apocalypse can feel almost inevitable due to the staggering momentum of technological development, but there are always new horizons available to those willing to change course.
More from the Press
- Learning to live in the absurd (Rodney King, 3 min read) – In a world that is often beyond our comprehension, much less our control, what does it mean to find freedom?
- Why "everything is connected" can make you miserable (Jessica Böhme, 10 min read) – Is the weight of existential dread a sign we should turn back, or simply the growing pains of a new perspective?
You can also read our guide to learn how the Grokkist Press works and how to get involved.
Grokkist Network
Visit the Network ↗Upcoming Events
Access Key
🟢 Open Access: Free and open to all.
🟣 Member Access: Exclusive to Grokkist Members.
🟠 Ticketed Access: Open to all with a cover charge (members enjoy a 30% discount).
Check out our guide to our events and gatherings to learn how our events work and how to host an event of your own.
Featured Gatherings
🟢 "Shoes-On" Studio – a space for finding your voice in public
🗓️ Tue 10 Feb | 2pm–4pm New York time (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Kendra Fee
Shoes-On Studio is an open space for anyone who wants to get more comfortable speaking in public—whether that means giving a talk, leading a session, joining a panel, raising your hand, or just saying what you mean when it matters.
You don’t need to be “a speaker” to belong here. You just need a voice—or a desire to find yours.
You can come to speak, to support, or to soak it in. Everyone’s voice matters — including the quiet ones.
🟢 Coddiwomple Cafe: Estrangement
🗓️ Sun 15 Feb | 2pm–3.30pm New York time (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Danu Poyner
Estrangement is one of the most common human experiences — and one of the least spoken about.
Sometimes estrangement comes from rupture: a betrayal, a choice, a fracture you can point to. But often it’s quieter than that. It’s adulthood friendships that slowly stop returning your calls. It’s family ties that remain technically intact, but feel emotionally unreachable. It’s the relationship you didn’t end… yet somehow you’re no longer in.
It’s the ache of missing someone who’s still alive. And then there’s another kind — one that can feel especially close to home for grokkists: the estrangement that happens when you grow, and someone you love can’t keep pace with your unfolding.
This Coddiwomple Cafe is a hosted, conversational gathering where we’ll explore our lived experiences of estrangement: the pain of it, the intelligence in it, the ways it can distort us, and the strange ways it can also set us free.
Other Upcoming Gatherings
- 17 Feb | 🟣 Members Lab & Lounge [Timezone A]
- 19 Feb | 🟢 PhilosophyGym @ Grokkist
- 2 Mar | 🟢 Grokkist Writing Salon
- 3 Mar | 🟣 Members Lab & Lounge [Timezone B]
🍬 Snackables
#1 - Best gas masks
Sarah Jeong
“What is tear gas for? It is for inciting riots. How did people go out and get gas masks? They ordered them online, because they do not want to riot.”
Part product guide, part personal dispatch from inside the tear gas. Sarah Jeong draws from her experience reporting the 2020 Portland protests to walk readers through the practicalities of equipping oneself for air thick with state repression. It calmly outlines mask specs, filter options, use cases and cleaning protocols. But the subtext hums: when systems fail, breath becomes tactical. A good gas mask can buy you critical minutes—but it won’t save you from the system that made you need one. This is also, in its way, a strange kind of love letter to the part of you that wants to be ready—to protect what matters when the air itself is no longer neutral.
#2 - Suno, AI music, and the Bad Future
In a sustained, sincere grappling with generative AI and music, Adam Neely turns what could’ve been (and sometimes nearly is) a cranky “AI is bad” rant into a rich meditation on what music means—to artists, listeners, and communities. You get a careful walkthrough of the culture forming around tools like Suno—why so many musicians recoil from them, why some lean in anyway, and where the real stakes in this technological shift might lie. [Watch - 89 mins]
It’s a philosophical diagnosis of emotional permissioning, musical narcissism, the lived difference between crafted and generated sound, and the widening gap between performing music and consuming it. This sits somewhere between embracing what’s possible and mourning what might slip away. And for a companion piece that takes a more personal approach to similar territory, a few months ago I offered my own reflections on experimenting with Suno as both play and provocation.
#3 - Advice for the ambitious who can’t seem to start
Maria Popova
A hundred years before your favourite productivity guru was born, neuroscience pioneer Santiago Ramón y Cajal was handing out devastatingly precise diagnoses for what ails the creatively ambitious but motivationally cursed. In this excerpt from his Advice for a Young Investigator, Cajal outlines six “diseases of the will” that afflict the gifted-but-stuck—a lovingly savage taxonomy of minds that can’t seem to get out of their own way.
The Marginalian’s Maria Popova turns this into a lyrical excavation of creative inertia. She moves with her usual grace between reverence and critique, teasing out how Cajal’s portraits still hold uncanny resonance: the dreamer who never delivers, the bibliophile who hoards ideas but never contributes to them, the theorist so enamoured with their own concepts they forget to ask the world if any of them are true. Popova doesn’t just transmit his ideas—she contextualises and complicates them. She lets his brilliance shine while also tracing the shadow it casts: gendered assumptions, elitist framings, and the paradox of timeless wisdom embedded in a deeply time-bound mind. For anyone who’s ever felt the weight of potential pressing in on their still-empty page.
#4 - Want that podcast quote? Just screenshot it
Podcast Magic is a creative fix for a problem every podcast listener knows: you hear something worth remembering, but by the time you try to capture it, the moment’s already gone. This tool keeps it simple: just take a screenshot of your podcast player (with a visible timestamp), email it to Podcast Magic, and within a minute you’ll get back the clip and a full transcript—no app, logins or extra faff. Smart, simple, and actually useful.
#5 - What the sheep do while you sleep
A cute and vaguely ominous 3.5-minute short film that begins with the familiar ritual of counting sheep to fall asleep. The sheep get progressively more surreal as sleep takes hold—each one a little more distorted, absurd, or unsettling than the last. It unfolds in that liminal drift between day and night where the weird work the mind does when you finally stop trying to think takes place.
Grokkist is a living ecosystem — 🟢 free to enter, powered by members 🟣.
If you’d like to go deeper, you can join as a member, explore Signature Projects, or work with Danu.
Parting thoughts...
"The best life is the life lived out unmeasured." – Ricard Reis
"Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it." – Hellen Keller
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