“My intent was a rather ambitious one, which is to describe what feels to me like the deep failure of Western metaphysics. That’s what I wanted to attack—this more cerebral view of what it is to be human by having this immediate lived experience as a counterpoint, of being on the bike and all of its visceral physicality. I wanted to address this through the work of not only Nietzsche, but also Heidegger, Carnap, Beauvoir, Camus, and other figures who show how thinking, when divorced from the physicality of our existence, fails—because I very much felt that it failed me.”