Riva Tez's Advice on Writing: Becoming a Free Thinker

Riva Tez writes, paints, studies ancient manuscripts, invests, and has never watched Netflix. David Perell describes her as "one of the freest writers I know. It's as if the boundaries of conventional thinking don't apply to her." She is allergic to dogma. She asks questions that most people avoid. Her intellectual framework draws from Rilke's poetry, Descartes' doubt, Nietzsche's hammer, theology, and consciousness studies.

Her writing advice comes from her conversation with David Perell on How I Write, Daniel Miessler's extracted wisdom, and Matthew Siu's analysis of her philosophy.

The Passionately Unoptimized Life

"In a world of people who are obsessed with optimization, Riva is passionately unoptimized."

This is not laziness. It is a deliberate stance against the productivity culture that turns writing into content production and thinking into output. Tez refuses to optimize her creative process because optimization implies a known destination. If you already know where you are going, you are not thinking freely. You are executing.

Free thinking requires slack in the system. Time without purpose. Afternoons that do not contribute to any metric. The unoptimized life creates the mental space where genuinely original ideas can form. Ideas that would never survive a productivity audit.

Most writers who produce surprising work share this trait. They are not efficient. They are obsessed. Efficiency and obsession look different. Efficiency minimizes waste. Obsession follows curiosity wherever it leads, including into apparent waste that turns out to be the most important work.

Deep Reading as Foundation

Tez reads deeply. Not widely in the shallow sense. Deeply. She has probably read Atlas Shrugged every two years for fifteen years. Each time she returns, she unlocks things she could not have understood before. The wisdom and experience accumulated since the last reading open new layers. She gives copies of Rilke's Duino Elegies to most of her friends. Many tell her they have never read poetry as an adult.

Her intellectual range - Rilke to transhumanism, theology to venture capital - comes from this practice. She does not sample these fields. She inhabits them. When you inhabit a field deeply enough, you begin to see connections between fields that surface-level readers miss entirely.

A friend named Jimmy at her Bible study demonstrated this. His understanding of Scripture was leagues beyond everyone else's. His secret: he memorized entire chapters. When you memorize chapters, it takes months, but you understand how things are structured and discover subtleties that reveal themselves only through repetition. This is the opposite of the 3x-speed audiobook culture. Tez aligns with the ancient practice: the Greeks memorized poems. Depth comes from dwelling, not from throughput.

Writing as Public Thinking

Tez treats writing as a way to think in public. Not to present finished conclusions. To share evolving beliefs, test hypotheses, and attract people who think along similar lines.

She does not need to have all the answers before publishing. "Write to share what you currently believe in and become better when you are wrong." This is the opposite of the authority model, where you write only when you are certain. Certainty is the enemy of free thinking. If you are certain, you have stopped questioning.

Public writing serves as collaborative mentorship. You publish a half-formed idea. Someone responds with a challenge or an extension. Your thinking sharpens. You publish again. The loop continues. The audience is not consuming your output. They are participating in your thinking.

This only works if you write with genuine conviction. Hedging everything, qualifying every sentence, preemptively apologizing for potential disagreement - these habits kill the signal. Tez writes with force. She takes positions. She is willing to be wrong. That willingness is what makes the thinking public rather than performative.

Questioning Dogma

Tez goes after dogma with the enthusiasm of a philosopher who has read enough history to know that every era's certainties look foolish to the next. She asks questions about consciousness, technology's impact on humanity, and what defines being human. These are inherently controversial territories.

Her approach to controversial ideas is not contrarian for its own sake. She asks questions that only she can ask, informed by her specific combination of interests and study. By asking those questions, she finds answers that only she can find. The specificity of the questioner determines the originality of the answer.

This is a writing principle disguised as a thinking principle. The most distinctive writing comes from writers who pursue their own questions rather than answering questions that are already in circulation. If everyone is writing about the same topic from the same angle, the writing will be indistinguishable regardless of style. The angle is the voice.

Hours of Just Thinking

Tez spends hours each day just thinking. Not writing. Not reading. Not consuming. Thinking. She told a company president about this. He asked, "Thinking? What do you mean?" She said, "Just sitting and thinking." He said he was always doing something. She walks sometimes eight miles in the morning, alone, in nature, letting synapses fire. When she looks at a flower, something about the colors synergizes another thought in her mind. She sees connections where others see scenery.

"You can't necessarily think yourself into the answers. You have to create space for the answers to come to you." This echoes Rick Rubin's claim that he tunes into frequencies already present in the world. But Tez is more direct about the practical requirement: you need solitude, you need silence, and you need to resist the phone.

The default mode is perpetual input: podcasts during walks, articles during meals, social media during any gap. Tez reverses this. Her LA home is an old-school greenhouse with no technology, just books and candles. She finds contemporary restaurants overwhelming - everything screams. The sensitivity that makes her writing distinctive also makes ordinary life loud. When you strip away the noise, the thoughts come easily. But how many people, she asks, can actually sit with themselves and be alone for a long period of time?

Creativity as Remix

Tez embraces the idea that nothing is completely original. She admires Max Richter's reinterpretation of Vivaldi's Four Seasons - a work that takes something existing and transforms it for contemporary relevance. The transformation is the creativity, not the raw material.

This applies to intellectual writing as much as to music. Every essay is a remix of your reading, conversations, and thinking. The originality is in the combination and the lens, not in inventing from nothing. Writers who try to be completely original often end up saying nothing, because they refuse to build on what already exists.

Tez builds explicitly on philosophy, poetry, and science. She credits her sources. She shows her intellectual inheritance. The result is writing that feels both ancient and contemporary, rooted in deep tradition but asking new questions.

Life as a Self-Created Game

Tez views reality as malleable. She has run a toy store, launched a tech startup after three months of coding, and entered venture capital without traditional credentials. Each move reflects a philosophy about life that directly shapes her writing: you are not bound by the narrative others assign you.

This translates to prose that refuses to stay in its lane. Her writing crosses between technology and poetry, investment and philosophy, ancient manuscripts and artificial intelligence. These combinations feel natural because they reflect how she actually thinks, not because she is strategically positioning herself as interdisciplinary.

The writing lesson: your life is your material. If your life is conventional, your writing will be conventional. If you have the courage to live unconventionally - to pursue interests that do not fit neatly together, to make career moves that do not make sense on a resume - your writing will carry the energy of that courage.

Writing From the Volcanic

Tez's most striking piece of writing opens: "The West is dying and we are killing her. The American dream has been replaced by mass-packaged mediocrity porn, encouraging us to revel like happy pigs in our own meekness." She wrote it in one go during COVID lockdowns, looking out her window at a shut-down world. No thesaurus. No synonym hunting. No planning. She was angry, and the anger became poetry because the emotion was real.

"If you can get to that point where you care so much, the writing comes very naturally." She did not plan word choices or look up synonyms. She felt it so intensely that the words became inevitable. When she read it afterward, she thought it was a little edgy. She kept it.

This is her deepest writing principle: she is not desensitized. She does not drink too much, does not take SSRIs, does not numb herself. She oscillates rather than plateaus. When her father died, she chose to feel the grief fully rather than medicate it away. The same emotional range that makes life harder makes the writing alive. Readers cannot fake-detect this kind of authenticity. They know immediately whether the writer has something at stake.

Her film Every Angel Is Terrifying followed the same pattern. The script was not written as a film. It was a speech she delivered at a conference having barely prepared slides. The standing ovation led to a collaboration with designer Mike Ma, who cut the speech into a short film. She found the experience uncomfortable - putting her voice out there is more exposing than hiding behind written words. But it resonated precisely because it was unguarded.

Key Takeaways

• Stay unoptimized. Slack in your schedule creates space for original thought.
• Read deeply, not just widely. Revisit texts that changed you and let them change you again.
• Write to think in public. Share evolving beliefs. Become better when wrong.
• Pursue your own questions. The specificity of your question determines the originality of your answer.
• Spend hours just thinking. Protect time with no input and no output.
• Nothing is completely original. Creativity is transformation, not invention from nothing.
• Your life is your material. Unconventional living produces unconventional writing.
• Do not wait for permission. Publish the full thought and let it speak.

Tez represents a kind of writer that the AI era needs badly: someone who thinks for herself, reads deeply, and refuses to let her ideas be smoothed into acceptability. In a world where AI can generate infinite competent prose, the writer who thinks freely is the one who cannot be replicated.

This post draws from Tez's appearance on How I Write, Daniel Miessler's analysis, and Matthew Siu's profile. Athens is an AI writing editor that helps you sharpen your thinking without flattening your voice.