41: Henrik Karlsson: Strolling Through Life's Labrynths

If you're lost in the woods, if you're like flinching and panicking and like, I need to get out of this woods now, it's going to be a terrible experience. But if you're instead like, I guess I'm in the woods, I don't really know where I am, but it's kind of beautiful here. I'm just going to stroll around, notice things, trust that sooner or later I'll end up on a path. Then that can be easier. I started indexing my diaries. What happened, I think, when I did that was that I became my own audience. It's almost like a ballerina in front of a mirror. Imagine that we're moving through a giant labyrinth, a maze that's going in like 100 dimensions at the same time. And inside In this labyrinth, we're going to have good artworks, good essays, good startups, good research ideas somewhere in there. And our job is to take the right path through this labyrinth to find the good stuff. But I don't think we can know beforehand where in the labyrinth will the good stuff be. I guess you just have to try different parts of the labyrinth. Let's say you're trying to fit some tiles to a strange shape. And let's say you only have like square tiles and the thing you're trying to put it into is round. You're just going to put them in. You're going to make a square. You're not going to make it round because you can't do that. And you actually have to sort of break the tiles. The more smaller parts you break them into, more perfectly you're going to be able to fill that square. And I think the same is true with our mental model. But if you kind of get into that confused state, it's like you're breaking your preexisting mental models, the tiles. You're sitting there with a mess. It's just a mess of small shards, right? And that part scares most people and it's very overwhelming. It's like cognitively taxing to be sitting there like, oh, 5 minutes ago I understood this. Now I don't understand anything.

Welcome to Dialectic Episode 41 with Henrik Carlsson. Longtime listeners will know this is not my first conversation with Henrik. I interviewed Henrik last spring when I was in Copenhagen, and it was one of my favorite episodes, and so I had to go back for a round two. Henrik is a writer. He writes full-time on Substack and had gone full-time fairly recently the last time I spoke with him. This time, a number of themes that I think all circle around this idea of how you navigate using feeling and aliveness to more clarity in your life. And this can be in terms of understanding complex problems or creating entirely new things. We talk a lot about creative people, but I think this applies across any kind of problem solving. Henrik uses a number of metaphors throughout this conversation that all build on this idea of navigating through the darkness, getting through the woods, and not being too terrified while you remain in them because you know that whatever is on the other side is worth it. Most great creatives, and a number of the artists Henrik has studied, particularly by way of their private notebooks, consistently find themselves in states of confusion, having had to break down their mental models, their conceptions of what they should be doing, and rebuild them from scratch. Henrik talks about an idea he calls mental proprioception, or this sense of balance and feeling to know that you're doing the right thing. You can imagine the ballet dancer watching herself in the mirror, getting a sense of her bodily intuition. And I think for any of us trying to do something risky or creative, there is an element of that to find your balance. And then continue to push ahead. Towards the end of the conversation, Henrik and I talk about an idea we struggled to put the right words to, but it's this element of being hard and soft at the same time. Or maybe we land on assertiveness and receptiveness— this idea that you can press forward while remaining open to all of the possibilities and all of the things that you may not have conceived of yet. As we did a bit in the first conversation, we talk about maybe the right kind of introspection. A framing Henrik uses that I really loved is observing yourself not as the object to be understood, but instead the subject. We talk plenty about agency and the right kind of risk-taking and what it means to concentrate risk in certain areas and have far less risk in others so you can actually take risks on the right things. And how ultimately most of us are probably still not pushing ourselves enough for what might be possible. We wrap up by discussing conviction, what Henrik believes in, and in the end, what we do with the short time we are here. This was a meaningful one to me, and I hope you enjoy it. You can learn more about the episode and get links, full transcript, all of that at dialectic.fm/henrik-2. And as always, if you enjoyed the episode, please give it a review or a like, thumbs up, whatever it might be, or subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. Before we start the conversation, I'd like to thank Notion, Dialectic's presenting partner. I've been full-time on the project for a few months now, thanks to their support. Notion is a creative tool for your life's work, and it can be used as an individual or with teams big and small. The last year of Notion has been all about the ways they have integrated AI into how you can work. The great thing is that Notion is already where all of your documents, tables, ideas live. Notion is tremendously thoughtful about how they integrate AI in a way that actually enables you to focus on more of the important work and delegate or automate the busy work. For me, it's really two things that I want to spend all my time on. The first is immersing myself in the minds of the people I'm going to speak to, just trying to like get inside their brain for a little bit before we talk. And the second is the actual conversation, getting to be truly present with them and explore all of the ways their mind works. It's been amazing to see how Notion AI and agents can help me with everything on both sides of that. Custom agents, which just launched a few weeks ago, expand this even more. Essentially, you can take something really small, a simple bit of information that everyone on your team might need to query, or something large like, how do I end to end prep a dialectic episode for release? Again, I don't want to delegate the actual research, but Even being able to get a primer on the first things I should know for whoever I'm gonna speak to, or afterwards, be able to speed up the process of compiling the transcript and notes and timestamps and everything else allows me to focus on more of what really matters. Notion AI is also just an amazing way to identify patterns that come up across individual episodes and across all of the body of work in this kind of curriculum or project I'm creating here at Dialectic. In many ways, this is an ongoing discovery of the most interesting minds I can find on the internet, and Notion is my partner along the way. If you don't use Notion or haven't tried it in a while, you can check it out at notion.com/dialectic. With that, here is my second conversation with Henrik Carlsson.

Henrik Carlsson, here we are. We're back.

Yes, we are.

Round 2 in the flesh. Knock on wood. On, uh, on video.

Exactly.

Nice to be with you. We are not in your home, I should establish right up front, so you are not, uh, obligated to any of the aesthetic choices, although I think this is a fun room to be in.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's an old mill and I do live in an old mill. So it's almost right.

Spiritually wrong, um, island or wrong landmass, but right corner of the world. So we'll take it. We're back in Copenhagen. Okay. I want to start with maybe two not obviously related ideas. You have somewhere where you say that in English, we, uh, spend attention. In Spanish, we lend attention. And in Swedish, as I understand it, we are attention.

Yeah.

Hopefully I don't have that totally wrong. Roughly, at least directionally. You also tweeted recently a couple of things I liked. First, the most useful piece of writing advice you can squeeze into 3 words is, don't think, look. And that's Wittgenstein. So much bad writing comes from people moving words about on the page instead instead of staring at the real thing and then adjusting their words to fit. And then you also wrote— this is in a piece where you're reflecting on the ways that children lose the magic. Maybe you say, when children learn to draw, they tend to make more and more interesting images for several years until around age 5, when they learn to be boring. Most people never learn how to draw anything interesting again. This tends to happen in all domains of our lives. We figure out how to do things well enough and then get stuck. And as I reflected on your writing, you actually come back again and again to a— there might be different ways to describe it, but what I might call cultivating the feeling or experience of being bored, coming back to boredom. And maybe specifically this notion that boredom is important in developing attention. And so my slightly cheeky first question is How does practicing boredom keep us from becoming bored? Or excuse me, keep us from becoming boring?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've used that phrase, like the importance of being bored a lot. Like right now, I saw your notes before and instead of thinking about that word boring, I think it's maybe the wrong word because it's not because boring might feel like you're like that's a bad feeling. I guess I'm saying more understimulated, that you're supposed to be not externally stimulated. And that's like, because if you remove external stimulations like rewards and status and YouTube videos and anything, right, that keep you kind of activated, then you will feel bored at first, perhaps. But then eventually, then you will, because we're like curiosity-driven animals that have like rewards inside of us to seek out new stimuli, we'll start to sort of generate that internally. So we'll have start to daydream or we'll start to like pay attention to the flowers around us or we'll be curious about and start researching something or writing something. So I think it's a sort of question of like removing stimuli. Sort of gives point for those kind of maybe slightly more lower tuned kind of stimuli that comes from inside to kind of bubble up. And why does that keep us from being boring? Because I guess boring is in a sense being predictable maybe. That like you can, from what you've observed of me, determine what I'm going to say next. That would be boring. The more you're steered by what comes from the outside, the more predictable you're going to be by the data from outside. And the more you're sort of generating your own decisions internally and from your own, like, whatever that is, that's often a source of surprise. So I think, like, if you attune to that and, like, over many years build up a richer and richer sense internally, that would be a source of surprise. And that's why you kind of end up being more interesting, if you care about that. Feels like maybe that's like the wrong way to frame it, like being not boring or interesting, because that feels like it's for other people. I think it's like, better to think about like, it will make you feel more alive. Yeah. Or something like that.

It's funny. I like that you've taken issue with both my uses of both being boring and boredom. It's funny, I had a conversation. I interviewed Cyan Bannister, and the first time I ever met Cyan, before I interviewed her, we had a conversation about boredom, and she said something along the lines of like, I'm never bored. Like, I try never to be bored. And we— I was kind of debating over this because I think we were having a similar disagreement that wasn't really a disagreement to what you and I are talking about now, which is this kind of boredom that leads to all the things coming in. It's actually more like space. Cyan, and it was funny, I was reading some of some other writing of yours, and Cyan uses this word that you also use, which is "derive." And this kind of not totally aimless but semi-intentional drift captures a little bit of the same thing, which is like, I'm calling that boredom, which is like meandering or walking or just sitting and wondering and daydreaming. But to your point, that is actually about letting all kinds of things in that are going to surprise you or not necessarily like let you.

But it's interesting. I loved our interview with Xi'an. I was— she's so interesting. She's not boring at all. Deriv. I was in Spain recently with my kids and we were in Malaga and like the first day we were there, I had some plans because it was just me and the kids because Johanna has hurt her leg so she was in the apartment. The day after, I had to like entertain the kids in the evening again and I didn't have any plans and so I just told them like they were doing a derivé Right?

That's better pronunciation than mine, by the way.

I don't know French, so I'm also making it up. And then like the 8-year-olds are like, oh, what's a dérivé? And I said, oh, we're just going to go out from the apartment and we're going to look around and you're going to pick the most exciting direction we can go. And then we'll go like until we can't see anything more. And then we, you know, and then you decide again. And it was very interesting to notice like how alive they came. When they got to do that and it's like a labyrinthine city. So we're just going down these back alleys and going into like construction sites and like finding all these nooks and crannies and it just made us so much more alive than when we were going to these more exciting places and like instead of just like, I'm gonna go here, I'm gonna actually like stop every few minutes and like, where do I actually wanna go now? Oh, Because like, yeah, the streets we got to were probably less interesting in some objective way than like it wasn't any of the cool caves we went to or the beach, but we were so much more alive to those places because we were like having to attune to ourselves to like figure out what would be most interesting. So it was just, you could see that you just started galloping down the street, like the kids just came alive and I felt the same that you see it in the kids some more because they, it's in their bodies. But I think we all kind of have that sense of like, You're talking about that, I'm afraid, when you take that time to like change yourself.

Yeah, it's a state of attention. I can't remember, it's possible we even spoke about this last time, but in the Robert Irwin biography, he and Terrell and some guy at NASA like go into the sensory deprivation room and they sit in there for like 8 hours. It's not even, there's not even a water tank, it's just dark. And they sit in there for like 8 hours and they walk, they're like prancing down the street looking at flowers, basically tripping because they're just like, Everything is so— and it— I think it's pretty marvelous how even something as simple as just like, hey kids, we're not going to wander around without a plan, we're going to derive or whatever, and like, as a result, really look. Goes back to the Wittgenstein thing, is, um, maybe the painters have— know it best, which is just look and really see. Look and really see, and you will be quite surprised by what is actually there. I'd like to talk about about something that you've written about in different ways quite a lot, and most recently you described it as mental proprioception, if I'm not pronouncing it incorrectly. A few lines from you: my job as an essayist consists to a large extent in putting myself in the right state for the thoughts to come out right. That's something you continue to come across, come back to over and over again, this form of exhaust. There's a lot else happening that can distract me from my curiosity, or that even worse, I can mistake for curiosity. For example, I also get another kind of positive motivating feeling that, if I observe it closely, says, "If I write this, my readers will be pleased." Staying fully centered in curiosity through an entire essay is perhaps as hard as feeling that you are holding your body exactly right to execute a pirouette. I often, without noticing it, tip over into writing what is popular, and then I stumble.

Yeah, I wrote that maybe a month ago and I stumbled like the last week anyway, because it's like, it is very, very hard to do because I've been struggling with my writing for the last 2 weeks and I was just like, why isn't it working? And I was feeling all this resistance and it wasn't fun at all. And then like, I guess 2 days ago I decided like, I'm gonna put the thing I'm working on aside, and which felt like a very good and important essay that I had made some good progress on, and I'm just going to work on this thing that no one cares about at all. And all of a sudden, everything came loose, and that turned out very lovely, and it was just so easy. So again, I had sort of— what I realized was that I tricked myself up in like thinking that the essay I was working on would be a big, important essay, and that was just like the weight of it was almost—

Yeah, because what I hear in this, by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt you, is maybe I'm over-focusing on the metaphor, but it's about balance. I think so. More so than even leaning one way or another way.

Yeah, it feels like, like, I mean, putting the weight in different parts of my body or something. It's like, it's, yeah, it's very tricky to talk about. It sounds like almost woo when you try to talk about it. But, but like the felt sense of it is that like, my motivation or where I'm writing from is like in some different part of my body. I'm like too low in the body or something. I don't know. Like, it's just, I feel heavy. And then when I get it right, there's a certain kind of nimbleness, a certain lightness, a playfulness that, like, again, as I feel like the kids when they're galloping down the street, it's just like, I get this kind of fluid movement in my body. Uh, so say, yeah, it's very closely related to posture and stance and like balance somehow. Uh, yeah.

One of the things that comes up over and over, um, especially as you kind of seep into the ways you write about other people, is you're just kind of obsessed with this, maybe what I would call the ways that people maybe like disassemble themselves and reassemble themselves. Another way of putting this would be to sort of lean into the confusion used space. Um, and the way that most shows up, I think, at least in the writing you like to read, is these notebooks and these private writings of people who are artistic, um, or even maybe scientific or mathematical. Uh, I know you're big on Grothendieck, Ingmar Bergman, Tarkovsky, but there are other kind of versions of this in Herzog and Nosgaard. I recently read, um, the Steinbeck letters when he was reading East of Eden, another version of this. You also reference Grothendieck again and Newton and Einstein as they're sort of like reinventing things that were already known. And the pattern I kind of— you call it a building up ability to perceive evolution of their own thought. But what I see this almost as, and it maybe ties to some other things you've written, is like this, like wading into the confused space or maybe even the unbalanced space to steal from the earlier metaphor. I guess my question is like, what is the benefit of and why do you try to confuse yourself or move into these spaces of not totally knowing or being sure?

Well, maybe I can try to get at it with sort of an image first, right? It's sort of, let's say you're trying to make like a mosaic or however you say that, like you're trying to fit some tiles. To a strange shape. And let's say you only have like square tiles and the thing you're trying to put it into is round. If you're just going to put them in, you're going to make a square. You're not going to make it round because you can't do that. And you actually have to sort of break the tiles in order to— and the more smaller parts you break them into, the more perfectly you're going to be able to fill that square. And I think the same is true with our mental models. So you're We have endless mental models of all the situations and they are a little bit like square tiles sometimes. So you get a new situation and it might apply a little bit, but if you just apply it straight off, it won't fit perfectly. But if you kind of get into that confused state, it's like you're breaking your preexisting mental models, the tiles, and then you end up with like, you're sitting there with a mess. It's just a mess of small shards, right?

Debris.

Yeah. And that, that part scares most people. It's, and it's very overwhelming. It's like cognitively taxing to be sitting there like, oh, like 5 minutes ago I understood this. Now I don't understand anything. And people try to like escape from that and like have all sorts of, um, like inbuilt desires to like reach cognitive closure.

Probably we just see the world as this, like every, everything in the world is a square shape or square frame.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you sort of end up doing. You have like confirmation bias. This is like the classic sample, like you'll go like, oh no, my square is actually correct. Like, I'm just going to find things that confirm that. Or, or you, yeah, you'll get angry. There's all sorts of reactions. And also like, like Darwin made a marvelous observation that he said he has to write down everything that sort of disconfirms him, everything that doesn't fit his mental models, because he'll forget them. And I think that's true of all of us.

I misread that when I originally read it. I didn't totally catch what that The importance of that is, is it's actually rejecting your body, your mental immune system, to shy away from the things that don't fit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because your immune system is specifically writing down the things that he doesn't like.

Yes, exactly, exactly. Because those start like, doesn't fit in, that confuses him. Like, his, his mind's very good at filtering that, and all our minds are very good at that.

Yes, it bounces off of it.

Yeah. So, so we have a tendency to want to protect our squares and like, you know, in, in, in, in sort of cognitive, I don't remember, but this is a Gary Klein maybe, where they do research that they talk about like knowledge shields. Like as you're going through life, you're having to construct all these mental models to navigate, to make good decisions, right? You have to model the world in order to make good decisions. And that's costly. It like costs energy to reconstruct and make these. So, so your, your brain is sort of incentivized to like make them only good enough. You don't want to understand and see the words correctly. You want to see it well enough that you can manage, right? Yes. And that means that at some point when they are like 95% correct or something, it's going to differ for everyone, but like when they're good enough, your brain is going to start to like filter stuff and then you're going to like converge on a mental model, which is not the correct understanding of the situation, but it's like good enough. And when we can get to that point, you stop like taking in new data. Everything new that just doesn't fit just gets thrown off. And that's why it's a shield, like a knowledge shield, because it like shields you from new information. And, and so a lot of work when you're doing like expertise training in the military and so on is just like, it's like finding ways of like breaking these shields. Like how do you, like someone who thinks they understand the situation, how do you make sure that like you break their understanding so they end up confused again? So they end up like breaking their kyles. Because again, like to get back at it, like once you get the tiles apart, but that's like a first step toward like piecing together a better one. And then you have to break it again.

Well, and not only that, there's an element that I think you've written about, which is like when you're sort of sitting there and you've done the initial work, which is you've broken everything up. You, you, you briefly just spoke about this and you're sitting there with your pile of shapeless debris and you're just like, almost like rock bottom of understanding, like there's no coherence. What is it like? Maybe I'll read one more thing and then I'll ask the question I was going to ask, which is, um, Nåsgård on what he calls sub-Bergman. He says, in order to create something, Bergman had to go sub, sub-Bergman to the place in the mind where no name exists, where nothing is as yet nailed down, where one thing can morph into another, where boundlessness prevails. The workbook is this place. In it, Bergman could put anything he wanted. The entries he made there could be completely inane, cringingly talentless, heartrendingly commonplace, intensely transgressive, jaw-droppingly dull. And this was in part their purpose. They had to be free of censorship, in particular self-censorship, which sought to lay down constraints on a process that needed to be wholly unconstrained. And I know you're you're enamored with, with, with those in particular, as well as among a number of these notebooks. What all of those seem to get at, at least the best of them, is, is, is, is something along these lines, which is maybe to use your metaphor, it's like the person sort of sitting with all the broken pieces. What does it look like when you, when you've done that work to start to gradually put these pieces together and maybe fill in the sort of circle? 'Cause that is a very cognitively uphill, emotionally uphill experience.

Yeah. Well, yeah, it is demanding, very demanding. I remember I think I talked with Michael Nielsen, or maybe we tweeted at each other about this at some point several years ago. And he said something that like helped me understand this and like helped me get the right stance, so to speak, around this, because I was sort of complaining that when I was working on my essays, like, they would be good and then they would gradually sprawl. And then at that time, I would like be sort of afraid, like, about that, and I would try to stop them. So like, I would stop that sprawl at some point and like clean it up. And because I felt like if I just keep going, this is gonna sprawl endlessly, it's gonna fall apart. And then he said, look, well, if it starts to sprout, like, then you're halfway there, right? And that was very important for me because I admire Michael's work a lot. And to just have someone whose work I admire tell me that this thing that to you, to me, felt like everything falling apart, that I'm just wasting my wild ratchets. Yeah, I'm lost in the woods. Having hints say that, like, I've been through these woods many, many times and the good stuff is on the other side of it.

Oh, so painful though.

Yeah. And, and that made me like, okay, I'm gonna try. And, and I think actually the one I wrote about Bergman and Grothendieck was the first one where I was like, I'm gonna go through the entire woods. And Johanna and I worked on that for like 3 months or something. It like ends up being a very simple piece in a way, because that's what's happened on the other side of it. You end up with something quite simple again, usually. Yeah, yeah.

The circle is as simple as the square, perhaps.

And that can be humiliating too, because people read it as like, yeah, of course, like this is obvious, but like I have spent pretty much getting there. And so there can be also temptation maybe to like shy away from it, from that, like I wanna keep it complex, looks smart.

But the best writing, by the way, the best writing, not always, but much of the best writing is the kind of writing you're nodding ahead saying, oh yes, this is exa— but and it can seem easy to write, but what it's actually doing is it's sort of giving you the words for something you've kind of felt or acknowledged but didn't know how to— it's almost a version of this, I find. I find that so much of the— that's why so much simple writing can be so elegant is— and maybe you don't get quite as much credit for it because some people will be like, oh yeah, I've been saying this, but that's— that is the work that's inside there.

Yeah, exactly. Uh, because I— it might be fun to like think about that particular essay. Cause it actually sort of started out in some ways sounding smarter than it ended up. Cause like my first idea for that, the draft I wrote was sort of about this idea that our identities are interfaces and like, so cause interfaces are this thing that kind of an interface between you and outer world and like how you arrange that interface is kind of like blah, blah, blah. Right. And I said, this is quite complex idea. And I wrote this piece about it and my wife, Johanna, she looked at it and said, well, I kind of liked that one line where you said that like being bored is important. And it's like, okay, so then I had to throw out like this entire complex apparatus I had built of theory. And I just take this line and I remember feeling, but that line, like that boredom is important, that is just so obvious, right? And then like to build up from that to something deep and interesting, I had to go like read like 10,000, no, like 1,000 pages of like Grothendieck's wild notes. And I had to read like 40 years of Bergman's notebooks. Like, it was an extremely long process and then kind of ended up with something that is in some ways obvious, but it was a fairly long process and ended up. And yeah, so to get back to the question, I don't think we answered your question. Like, so it was something like, like, how do you, how do you build up from that?

Yeah. When you're sitting at the bottom, it's almost like you're the kid who's broken all the Legos apart and you're sitting in your pile of broken pieces and you're like, my feeling is similar to your comment about sort of feeling like you've spilled over is that that's like not only cognitively wearing or a cognitive low point, but it's emotional. If you're halfway through a project, it's emotionally hard too.

I think the two things have made that easier for me over time. Uh, because like that project, when I wrote that And that essay is called Cultivating a State of Mind Where New Ideas Are Born, I think. And so whenever that, I was terror. That was like 3 months of sheer terror, but like it kind of was like this baptism of fire almost where I like, I learned to write in a new way. But I think the thing I did wrong there was that I had sort of the outcome in mind. I was clenching. I was like, I wanted this to cohere too soon. If you can instead, it's a little bit like if you're lost in the woods. If you're like clenching and panicking and like, I need to get out of this woods now, it's going to be a terrible experience. But if you're instead like, well, I guess I'm in the woods. I don't really know where I am, but it's kind of beautiful here. I'm just going to stroll around, notice things, and like trust that sooner or later I'll end up on a path. Then that can be easier. So, so, so, so kind of unclenching and being like, there's no deadline on this. Like when things fall apart, but it's like, you have to trust that that can take time and it will end up looking like something completely different. You just like having to let go of all.

Well, it's not seeing the thing you were hoping to see to tie it back to what we were talking about earlier. Right. It's being open to seeing something else.

Yeah, exactly. So you have to really let go. And so that helps. Uh, and the only thing that helps is to go through the woods a few times. Because it's just like validating, because first few times I went through the woods, it's like, there can't literally be anything on the other side of this, because this is just confusion, this is terror. And then, oh, lo and behold, like, now that I ended up with much more clarity and understood things that were important to me, and I end up writing an essay I like, and doing that a few times kind of changed the emotions around it.

Confidence is the memory of success, as my friend Jason likes to say. Do you keep notebooks in this way?

Yeah, I do from time to time. I sort of alternate, but yeah, I do write several hundred thousand words of journals in a year where I— like, it can differ, but some months I'll write 50,000 words in a month where I'm just like, endlessly sprawling and going.

Do you delete them?

No, I have them. I can think of like maybe if I have time, some like I should edit some of that together and publish it. It could be like a fun sort of companion to the essays because like to take the notebooks for from the last 5 years as I've written essays and like, so that's that. This is kind of the process behind and the life and the frustrations. Yeah, I do find them very valuable. Often I find that as I write them, again, a sense of like just being lost and in a moment. And but what I find valuable often is to, I'll just give myself a few days a week where I'm allowed to kind of wander in the woods in the notebook or just read randomly and let things fall apart without any pressure. And then I'll go back to them maybe a few months later, and then I'll see like, what, like, that was really good. And there I'll find small. It's almost like I'm lost in the woods and I'm finding these clearings, but I can't really see it at the time, or I can't pressure myself to see it at the time. Yes. Uh, because then I'll clutch. So I'll just go around and then when I look back, uh, I find these kind of beautiful essays in there. I actually was rereading some diaries I wrote from maybe like 2 years before I started the blog. And I remember that as sort of a dark night of the soul kind of period where I hadn't found my way yet and so on. And I didn't, I hadn't learned how to write. And a fun thing when I was rereading them was that like, one, that they were much better than I remembered. And two, I had actually like written almost word by word, like two or three essays that I wrote like three years later. So I had already done them in there. But I just didn't notice it and I didn't have the confidence to see it. So actually that wandering, so if I can go, so now I try to be more persistent about going backwards, returning to those wanderings. But like, yeah, so I guess I try to, it's again a little bit like that sort of being a child and then like editing, writing drunk and editing sober. It's a little bit like that, like being a kid on a Defibulator, going around in the woods and then getting back to it like a few months later, being like a sort of a, maybe a connoisseur if it's like I'm gonna pick out the best parts of this.

Yeah, it's funny. I want— I totally relate. I write certainly far less than you do, but like, I have a writing group I go to. I'll write things one Wednesday morning and I'm like, man, the wrong— not in the right mood, this all sucks, whatever. And a week later I'll look at it and be like, oh, this is pretty good. Like, it's— I'm such an unreliable narrator of the present, let alone, uh, The other, yeah, the other thing that's funny about it is on some level writing itself is this practice of doing this often for the experience of living. Um, you go on a dérive walk or whatever. Um, in my experience, uh, unless I spend some time meditating on it and ideally writing about it, I have to kind of trace the grooves once or twice for it to really— there is something about having to encode. The more times we encode something, the more it like gets to work. The other part of this, you don't delete these notebooks. And so there's some element of you in some part of your brain that's saying like, maybe somebody will read these notes if I'm successful enough or what. Like one of the points you make about the notebooks is that it's, it's the one place where Bergman isn't being observed. Um, and I guess I'd like to tie it to another point you make, which is you talk about sort of Constraining oneself. I think it's with, um, von Trier or Winterberg, like tying your hands behind your back, finding ways to sort of create in ways that are deliberately constrained. Now, Asgard forces himself to, I think, write 5 pages a day at certain times, and then eventually 25,000 words in 24 hours, which—

let's not dwell on that.

But that is it. That is dark.

Yeah. Imagine like having agreed to publish that also.

He did?

Yeah, yeah, it's in book 2 of My Struggle. And he's doing it like in the middle of like this being a controversy. Oh my God. So he knows that like 500,000 people, like 10% of the population in Norway is going to read this. And then he spends so much more hours writing 25,000 words about like meeting and falling in love with his wife and like in a very intense and like painful way. Yeah, let's not do that.

The point I think is Maybe one, one version of this is just like finding ways to sort of prompt yourself into new ways of creating or writing or whatever. And then the other version of this is this element of considering how it's going to be observed. And I'm curious how you think about either tricking yourself. I mean, you, I, I can't remember what it was specifically, but you wrote somewhere about like spending one week literally writing and it all has to be deleted at the end of the week. Maybe another week where you like The whole point of it is just to make it as like pop as possible or like most audience-oriented as possible. Maybe you haven't done those examples specifically, but I'm curious how much you play with those types of things or even think about this in the case of the notebook, which is like, is there ever a version of writing that if I truly promise to permanently delete afterwards versus put in my back catalog of notebooks, how it would change?

I don't think about an audience at all when I'm in my notebook and I'm very, like, I could, I think it would be valuable to publish parts of it, but as I write it, I don't think about the audience at all. Uh, and I couldn't do it. If I go back and read my diaries from when I was like 17, 20, something like that, I can clearly see, like, I'm young and I have hubris. And that I think that like this is going to be read and hopefully not. But if I read my diaries from, let's say, around when I turned 30, I can definitely— there's been some shift in my stance where I can clearly tell like this person does not— no longer think anyone's going to read.

Are you writing to yourself in the future? Are you writing to yourself in the future?

Yes, exactly. So I think the big change that happened for me in 2019, which was like a precursor to that led to the final sort of breakthrough with the writing, uh, public writing was that I started indexing my diaries. So like once a week I would go through and I would number the pages and then I would do an index on the, on the front page where I would write like on page, on fold up, uh, 2, I talk about Ivan Ilich. Uh, and then also on Foldup 18, right? So I would list them.

This is the re-encoding again, by the way, the retracing.

Re-encoding. And then the idea for that was just to, uh, make sure that I would go back to it and, and, and kind of enter into dialogue with my past self and like not have all of these thoughts wasted, that they would be searchable. But what happened, I think, when I did that was that I became my own audience. Because prior to that, I almost never reread my stuff. And then I started rereading.

It became real. Like, you knew the audience. One of the things I like to talk about is it's really easy to write a letter because you know exactly who the audience is, but also, you know, you have extreme confidence the person will read it. Because if you write anyone a letter, at least if you know them, they're probably going to read it. And so it's almost a— what I'm hearing you describing almost is a trust of your reader to actually follow through. You got into a pattern where future you actually would go back and read it. So it made the stakes more serious.

Yeah. And I guess I'm speculating here, but I suspect early on when I did that, I would read things, go back and read things, and I noticed like, oh, that's cringe. Like, I am posing, I am doing these things, and that would be embarrassing in front of the audience of myself. And so I would like unlearn that pose, right? It's almost like a ballerina in front of a mirror, like looking at the movement of the leg and knows, oh, like, that's the wrong movement of the leg because that's posing, that's cringe. And I guess I kind of, without even thinking about it, had that kind of reinforcement loop, which helped me get into the right pose. So whenever I write in the notebook now, I always like immediately go into the right pose where I open creative, willing to linger in confusion and so on. Whereas in other mediums, like if I open the Substack editor, like I'll, like I can't write, if I try to write in Google Docs or if I write, like I'll enter into different stances. Like if I write an email, being one stance, in WhatsApp, all different stances. So, but I have through practice, like encoded a very good stance around my notebook.

So I can always go there and like, yes, it's an environmental priming that is like, I know what we do here.

Boom.

I'm in that. Hmm. There's a little thread, I think, that relates to this in terms of how we sort of talk to ourselves and ask ourselves questions. Um, an old thing on— I think it was old— on Nick Cave, um, and maybe almost like a thesis of, of, of one of the things the notebooks can do. Uh, it's— you're talking about this woman Kelly who is writing into Nick Cave for advice on how to be creative, um, and she's struggling, she's blocked. You say another way to make a distinction between them, Nick and and Kelly is to say that Cave is trying to figure out what his voice is trying to say right here, right now, while Kelly wants to hear her voice tell her what is true about her across time. But they are both introspecting in the sense that they want to know what a voice inside them says if they block out the expectations of broken fathers, society, of the audience. Cave is more modest than Kelly here. He is asking not who he is, but in a roundabout way, who am I in relation to this song, this book, this tour? Is there potential in this song? How can I open it up? What does it want? Those questions are hard, but not as hard as who am I, and can often be solved in a few hours at the desk. And so I guess my question is, is the secret in part to maybe what you were just describing, this, this good, healthy kind of productive conversation with ourselves, just to maybe ask simpler questions or to be more specific?

Well, if I think about my own notebook, I think another shift, I don't remember exactly when that happened, but maybe around the same time is that I shifted a lot of it away from myself. Like I used to use my diary to sort of deal with my frustrations and so I still do that for a little bit, but I started to attend outwards. Listen, my notebook was just filled with like reflections about things I wrote. Things I saw that my kids were doing, things that happen in nature, conversations that happen. So I started to attend outward. I made a note about that recently where it's almost like you can know yourself as an object. And I think that was what Kelly wanted to do. Like, what kind of person am I? Who, who, Who am I? Who am I?

Like, and almost drawing a narrative around yourself as well.

And that's very complex. Like, I have no idea who I am like that. That's like, we're such extremely complicated objects. Like even like saying like, what is Hamlet? Or like a short book is very hard, but we're like that times a thousand. Like we were going around having different experiences, thoughts every moment and like trying to like define down what that is, it's very hard. It's very hard to have good understanding of yourself as an object. And, and, and I think a lot of people try to turn toward that, and that can just be confusing and navel-grazing and so on. And, but, but when I try to attune to things outside of me, like to my kids or to a book or to nature, uh, I also have to connect to myself, but I'm connecting to myself as a subject. Yes. I'm connecting to myself as like a person paying attention and like, what am I noticing here? What am I getting frustrated with? Or what am I curious about? And all of that is also like information and you can understand that kind of subjective perspective of yourself. And, and if you look at someone like Rick Rubin or Nick Cave, they have extreme confidence in their subject. They know themselves as subjects really well.

They know the pieces in the circle. They know the debris more so than they are like looking for the boundary shape in a way. Yes.

Yes.

I think those things, or maybe another way of putting it would be like they're seeing the pixels deeply. They have an incredibly high resolution on the pixels, but they're like less concerned with what the like image, the holistic image is. Yes.

Yes. They do. Yeah. So, so yeah, they are on a dérivé. Right? They are making, uh, it's like, so some, yeah, it's, it's like with someone like Nick Cave, it's not clear at all, like where he's going. Obviously music is very important to him and has been for like [redacted address] that music evolves and the different kinds of like films and books and art projects he does along the way, right? He's making his like small ceramic figurines, like all of that is like very drifting, very much in just It's like, if you were trying to understand Nick Cave as an obvious, but let's say you were his management and you were trying to like, what is the Nick Cave brand?

Yes.

You would never like go like, we should do porcelain figurines of the dead. All right.

I don't know where I'm getting here, but I think it's telling that the world today is very, we are trying to put ourselves into brand-shaped, let alone algorithm-shaped holes. Like we are trying to make ourselves legible. The modern— certainly the internet is about making yourself legible in a way that is like cohesive enough and small enough and contained enough that it can be like replicated externally. And so I do think it's telling that there's some kind of external pressure to be that way. And by the way, maybe less with Nick, but like people love to like draw some guru box around Rick Rubin and then poke fun at it. And I think Rick just doesn't care because he's just like, I like these pixels, or I like these little shapes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, exactly. Like, the understanding that people have of Rick from the outside is probably very divorced from what he is from the inside.

I think they are observing him far more than he's observing himself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also like the stereotypes of him, like just being a guru, like Lewitt is actually a very, very intellectual person and like spends enormous time reading and so on. Like that's not what people think.

Right. This, I think, relates to a thing that relates to also to what we were talking about at the top, which I would call a broad thing around being unpredictable. Um, and I think that extends into taking risks and agency and handful of other things. You say, I have such difficulty hearing what I feel when there are strong external reasons to do something. We were speaking about that. And as a result, you kind of need to create the space to become more unpredictable. You're talking about AI. You say a language model basically analyzes a string of words and completes it by predicting how the text would have continued if it was a sentence on the internet. Your job, on the other hand, is to write the least predictable thing that still makes sense. And then you say, once you learn that grass is supposed to be green, It becomes almost embarrassing to make it blue, even though real grass is often blue, as good painters learn when they start to pay closer attention to reality. My sense here is that there is being unpredictable for its own sake, which I think the wrong reading of how do I make myself irreplaceable to AI, or like you could imagine someone just trying to be chaotic and using unpredictability as a path to getting towards— not sure what the right word is here— like where you want to go, or to the place that is right, or to a place that is ours. Um, maybe something that is true. Like, how do you know? How do you know the difference? Whether it be in a stylistic choice, in creativity and writing, or in a life decision choice, I could imagine there would be a risk of just being unpredictable for its own sake.

Yeah, I think maybe I'm going to push back on that in terms here. I don't think having as a goal to be unpredictable, I think that is again playing to the audience, like I am trying to fight the AI or something. I think that again, better to like trying to orient like what is exciting or what is alive and so on. Like it's maybe more what I would say is what to aim for. I was speaking about like when it comes to constraints and unpredictability, I was thinking about Cage, John Cage and Lars von Trier. So they both do very unpredictable work and they both use constraints a lot in the process. So like John Cage, he has this piece I think where he's set up a system and then he's using AI Xing or like Sol and Dice and so on to like make all the decisions. So the music is total chaos, right? It's like the timing of the notes, the pitches, everything is like decided through this random system. I find, I mean, that's a fun experiment, but it's horror to listen to in my ears. It's like, it can be interesting for a few minutes to—

It's a hack. It's a hack to, funnily enough, Cyan rolls dice to decide to do things in her life, but I don't think she's, she's using it to get to a place of kind of openness or dérive or original seeing versus using it as a way to like get to the finished product, which maybe is the difference.

Yeah. Yeah. Because yes, it's exactly, uh, because randomness can produce all sorts of, it will get you out of the habitual, it will get you to places combinations you would have never seen before. But John Cage, in that at least, he doesn't then apply his own taste on it. He just says, okay, so the system has run its work. Now we have random chaos. Here we go. And that's one kind of experiment. And then you have, well, I was going to go with Lars von Frier, but we could go with Brian Eno. It's maybe closer. He also does these things where he has a system, I think, that runs in his house where he has, you know, 10,000 sonic landscapes that he's made across the years that has never amounted to anything. And then his system will pick two at random and play them at the same time in his loudspeaker. And then he can just like push a button and it will change it to a different combination. And then he can push another button. And it saves that combination. So, so he's like exposing himself to a lot of dissonance, but then he's applying his taste like, nah, it's smart, it's a cue. Yeah. So then he gets outside of his habitual space of ideas, but he then picks the ones that are interesting and then reworks them and improves them into something that works. So that, that's a difference between him and Cage. And I would say then again, Lars von Trier, what he's doing when he's applying constraints on himself is something similar. He's He's applying constraints that limit him from doing the things that are easy and that he knows will work, right? He's very, he's a very, very talented with like framing. And I mean, if you look at the films he'd made in the '80s, that they look like Golden Age Hollywood. It's like so crisp. Everything is like so beautifully choreographed, everything. And then he very consciously said, like, I'm going to forbid myself from doing all of those things that I am famous for and that I do well. So I'm only going to use handheld camera. There's going to be like, for a period, it was even no artificial lighting. And then he brought that back in. But, and he has all these constraints that is forcing him to like remove all of that. And that, but then he's not just like making shitty films. He's actually like within that realm. Now that I can't do the normal interesting things that I like, I'm going to have to go in a new direction and make something new interesting that I haven't tried before. And he actually ends up finding novel things that, but are not only novel, they're also more powerful. They are resonating with us as an audience at a deeper level. And that's what matters. It doesn't matter that it's novel. It matters that it shakes us when we see it.

So the tension here, I was going to say, is it feels sort of like he's using unpredictability to go back to the earlier point, as a tool to unlock more aliveness. Or maybe unpredictability is still the wrong word, but he's using these constraints. I guess the question— you write a lot about Eno in the ways that Eno is really good at just like risking everything over and over again. And you also, I think, critically make the stipulation that like he has like upped his level of risk-taking gradually over time. I think at one point you say if If you have a hit and can build up some savings, that is meant to fund bigger risks going forward, not keeping up with the Joneses. Am I habitually doing what I had to do to get here rather than looking clear-eyed at the possibilities that actually exist now? The question here, I think, to maybe go back to Vontreur, is like, do we know? Yeah, are his films actually better? Maybe, maybe to better ground it with you, like last time we spoke, you talked about how if you could, you'd spend a year just writing about Bergman's diary. And is that the best thing for you to work on? Is the most— is more love in relationships list, as we joked about last time, like maybe go back to the mental proprioception. It's about this like balance in yourself and with the world that like has some space between it that allows you to be— chase what you're alive to and be responsive with the world. And there are these hacks that maybe the most truly attuned person wouldn't even need to use the hacks. And they would just purely make— Lars is using these constraints because he knows that his tendency will be to—

I think, well, we'll start with an image again. Can you imagine that we're like moving through a giant labyrinth, a maze? And when it's not even like the normal labyrinth, it's like a high dimensional, it's going in like 100 dimensions at the same time. And inside this labyrinth, we're going to have good artworks, we're going to have good essays, we're going to have good startups, we're going to have good research ideas somewhere in there. And our job is like to take the right path through this labyrinth to find the good stuff. That's sort of what we're doing when we're creating new things. And these different constraints and different stances are like ways, rules of thumb for how to navigate this labyrinth. So for example, if you're applying constraints, you're saying that I'm not allowed to do this and that, you're blocking off big parts of the labyrinth, the majority of the labyrinth, and saying I'm gonna only work in this direction, and then you're forced to maybe go further down in that direction and you'll find new stuff. But I don't think we can know beforehand that like, where in the labyrinth will the good stuff be, right? So sometimes maybe going very pop, like Coldplay. I think Coldplay had done some like extraordinary art, but I think, I'm not sure, but I think they have thought very hard about what the audience wants and they've like optimized and gone down the labyrinth very, very hard in that direction and they ended up finding some good things. And other people say, uh, you can't know beforehand. And if you look at Lars von Trier, it's very clear that he's always like applying these rules on himself. And more than half of the time he abandons the projects because it turns out that that part of the labyrinth is barbarian, right?

Yeah. It's an explore-exploit a bit in some sense. Yeah.

Because like he had a project where he was, that he started, I think in the early '90s where he was going to film for 3 minutes every year for 30 years. And there's going to be a film. So that's like a strange constraint. Turned out that was a terrible film, so he's not working on that anymore. So he's done many of those. So you, I guess you just have to try, um, uh, different parts of the labyrinth and, uh, yeah, I don't think there's like a one stats.

I like that a lot. It's funny that the, the arbitrary constraints to unpredictability or the hacking it or whatever, that, that's one version. Another version that maybe fits into that model is Um, you talk about the context of Herzog, but it reminded me of the Steve Jobs thing as well. Um, it's this thing about Herzog just like being upset about doing things the proper way. Uh, one short tiny segment of it is the professionals having too many preconceived ideas of how to go about things wasted resources and missed the light in the trees. They're like worried about the makeup and they— he's obsessed with the golden light. Steve Jobs speaks about this at some point in, I think it's in like the '80s, and he's talking about how Um, they had some way of doing accounting for hardware and you basically flubbed the numbers cuz there's no way to get the numbers exact. And he was just like, that seems dumb. Like we should just change it. And he, his point is he calls this like, um, business folklore. It's just like the way things are done, the way things have to be done. And it feels like that's another version of reasons you might not look in a certain part, part of the labyrinth. Um, and you're like, you come across a certain kind of like solution, uh, uh, dilemma in the, in the labyrinth and it's just like, Well, all conventional wisdom says that when you run across a set of options, A through C, you choose door C or B because door A tends to lead the wrong way. Like, it is about kind of like getting yourself— maybe this is what I was coming back to with the original opening around unpredictability, is that unpredictability almost feels like deliberately just being unpredictable. Rolling the dice is a very low-dimensional way of doing this broader thing that you're describing.

Yeah, so dice is just an example of a constraint. And the thing you're talking about there with Herzog not wanting to do film, like he's irritated with the crew because they're going through the motions and doing all of the normal Hollywood stuff. And he doesn't feel like that's necessary because he'd rather catch these accidents and the beautiful light that comes on at some point. And that is the tile again, right? They are like, this is how you, they have a tile. This is how you make film. And when you're dealing with Werner Herzog, like the normal Hollywood tile is the wrong shape, right? You have to be able to break that apart and go like, I'm gonna put this together in a new way. I'm gonna be open to the fact that maybe we're not gonna do makeup in this scene because we'd rather film it right now with the morning lights. Best and be open for that, uh, because that's the right thing for his aesthetic and his kind of ethics of film. Uh, but they couldn't because they were so locked in. They had this kind of northern shield again, right?

So if we don't get the makeup, we won't have the tile that makes this a square and we have to make it a square. That's what, that's the, that's the thing they're saying. Yeah.

Yeah. They're just like reapplying the same idea that they have framework. Like this is how we do it. It is going to be ABC. It's going to be the same. Over and over again. Whereas if you're going to do really good work, you have to be just open to this thing right now, right? Like the film they were making in that case, it's like a very gritty handheld Vietnam film where it's supposed to be very like claustrophobic. You don't need makeup for that. Like if you pay attention to the film you're making, that is not necessary. But the other way, yeah, but they're so like, we're You're supposed to do it that way. So, but to make good art, you have to like try to be like naive or innocent and like, this is the situation, like, and so if we're filming, like, what kind of camera movements do we need here? What kind of stuff do we need here? And, and not do the habitual thing and just like make the mosaic specifically for this. Piece of work.

How do you think someone like that— the counterargument to this framework would be that breaking away, breaking apart all the tiles every time is obviously not tenable. And to your point earlier, the more you break them, the better you get at rebuilding them. And someone like Herzog, on some level, probably like very comfortable in the broken debris space. He's very comfortable in ambiguity. I think that might be a trait of what you would call someone with high agency. Um, but also like that is fundamentally like, there's a reason we have the consistency of the models. And so like, is it just about getting more comfortable in ambiguity so you can speedrun that faster? Like, how do you know when to— maybe this is again going back to the unpredictability thing. Unpredictability is the goal is in and of itself leads you, leads you astray, leads you to overrating doing things from first principles perhaps. And that's not the point. The point isn't to do things from first principles. The point is to find the new place in the labyrinth. Maybe it's just attunement as we keep coming back to.

But I mean, you, you said a part here, you talked about like it's very costly to do it that way. And, and, and yes, that is, that is the case. But like, if, if what we're talking about now is not like how to run your accounting bureau that is doing the same thing over and over again, then you shouldn't apply this way of thinking. This is not like, and, and when you are doing it, the filling podcast, like setting up the— you probably shouldn't reinvent that every time unless make that an entire artistic thing because the thing you're trying to maybe— if the focus for what you're doing with podcasts is like trying to push the conversations into a better space. So, so maybe around that part where, where it really matters, it's worth like putting in that effort. I get what I'm trying to say. Yes, it's like if you just want to get a result, fast than just tires. Yeah, it's the same as if you're building a house. If you have like these floors that are, I don't know what it's called, like you just click them in and then it looks like a fake wooden floor. It was very fast. Like it's a sort of a tiling. But if you want to make a really nice house, of course you're going to have like a carpenter and hand carve every little part of it. And it depends on what business you're in. And if you're in the business of like creating new ideas for a startup or art or essays, like, yes, it's a very costly kind of research cost. So if you could, these are costly projects, but it's the only way we know how to like get to these powerful new experiences and products and artworks.

One last thing here. You have this— I think you wrote it shortly after we last spoke, and we talked about some similar themes last time, but you wrote about agency. Um, at the beginning of that, you had this little excerpt that kind of prompted it about Maud. Uh, I wish I had a book that I could put in her hands and it helps her learn what many never learn or learn too late, namely that the possibilities are much bigger than you think, that you can live more deeply and truly, and that you can solve almost any problem if you put your mind to it. A book about how to handle being sentenced to freedom and to handle it effectively and authentically and responsibly. You go on in that piece to talk about autonomy and efficacy as these kind of two components of agency, uh, the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. The thing I was thinking about in the context of all this is like, maybe it's similar to cost, is risk. What is the relationship between agency and risk? And how do you think about— along the lines of everything we just spoke about and in trying to do truly new creative things in that labyrinth, how do you think about updating your model of risk? Maybe, maybe in the specifically in the like Eno sense of how do you use the current success to unlock the new unknown thing versus playing the hits?

Yeah, that part is hard. It's like our sense of self and our mental models are always sort of a lagging indicator or something. They are slow to update. I struggle with that a lot because the rate of change for me has been quite rapid. Like I went from like literally like being totally on my own and like isolated on the island of Widmo. That was like 6 years ago. And then maybe 3 years ago, suddenly I started to have some success and now like it's my job. And then like, and, and when you have that kind of almost exponential change in your life, it's very, very hard to like update because I still kind of feel like the person I was like 4 years ago or something, which is not who I am now. And so I probably, to get back to risk, like I probably take way too little risk. I think all of us do almost overwhelmingly, maybe not Elon, but yeah, Peter Thiel, but like, but specifically like in my case, it's like, I'm still, I haven't like updated that, like I'm actually like not struggling with money that hard anymore, right? But that used to be like a terror for me with money for many years and until like less than a year ago. And so I still think that way, even though it's not true. And that's making me make not the optimal decisions I could be making because like if I—

it's a scarcity mindset that is seeping in.

Yeah. And I'm not looking at the situation clear-eyed, like I'm not I'm not like noticing that like the situation is actually like this, like the amount of money I could invest into a project is higher now. I could deal with this and that. I'm not noticing that. And so, and because I'm not noticing, I'm actually not making the best decisions. And I don't know how to actually make that faster, that update. I, yeah, well, someone told me Uh, I would love to know, but I do think another thought that came up when you talked about risk is, and which kind of gets to that in my last answer, was that it kind of helps to think a little bit like a VC or something. You're, you're, you're, you're making a bunch of bets in your life. And like every time I'm writing an essay, I'm making a small bet. Like I'm betting that this will be a valuable thing for me to spend 50 hours working on. Betting on these conversations and I'm betting on things. I find it's usually the case that it's not worth like doing due diligence on everything and that it's a good idea to like not take risk in most domains of your life so that you can play very risky in some domain. Because it's the bold, risky moves that have high payoff. But in order for them to have high payoff, you have to do due diligence. You have to actually think things through and like position yourself correctly so that your experiments have some likelihood of paying off. Like most of them will fail, but you want like 10% of them to succeed. And therefore you like to do that. You have to be okay with like, I'm not like, I don't think too much about like my clothes or things like that. Like I try to simplify many parts of my life in order so that I can say you're very concentrated.

You, you like, to the extent you are like, you, you have almost like overwhelmingly concentrated on a few fairly risky things that maybe are less risky than they look on the outside or whatever, but you're not, you don't have a diversified basket on a relative basis.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And you see that when Abraham Maslow did his research on like people are highly self-actualized, uh, you see that, that they, they're making concentrated vets in certain domains and, and they're not like, uh, taking a lot of risk in their entire life. Usually they are like selective conformists. Like, so people who are very like self-actualized in his opinion, right? They tend to dress very conservatively. They tend to have normal haircuts. They tend to like in all sorts of ways, because they're trying to minimize needless friction, right? Because if I'm wearing a funny t-shirt, that's going to cause some friction in certain situations. And do I really want to spend my limited amount of energy and like time, money, everything on the friction of my t-shirt? Or do I rather spend it on like my relationships or my creative work?

And so you keep talking about clothing too long. You're going to sound like Mark Zuckerberg. You got to be careful. I think the point is well made.

Yeah, but it's a point I often make. It's like priorities. Like what's the—

Sacrifice the wrong thing.

Yeah, yeah. What's the thing you're trying to do? And then you just, yeah, I guess, and then Steve Jobs again, like to get back to clothes, like he just wore the same clothes every day because that doesn't have to think about that. And there's no friction. Like it's very—

What about, and maybe we'll talk about this later, but like, There's another thing that's sort of like, don't get cute. Like, if you found a thing that works, like, really, really— we talked about this last time. You were like, great, you wrote a couple of good essays. Like, that's cool. Let's see if you stick around. Like, I'm 4 years into this now. You're 5 years into this. Like, what about 50 years? And I think about this like, I'm working on this project and I'm very early in. I'm a year and change. And it has more success than it had before. And so like, am I— how wide is my aperture? Am I taking enough risk? Am I trying enough other things? Should I— do I, do I just keep doing this thing? Like, and really, really like, and I think I'm drawing a false comparison, but I'm not totally sure how to think about risk in the context of like opening up the aperture to planting other seeds. Versus like, don't get cute, like you found, hit the ball, like keep hitting the tennis ball.

I don't know, like if I think about myself, like how much choice I have, it's like, cause I keep thinking that like, you know, maybe there are some very big, very valuable things I could be doing if I just like doubled and tripled down on certain things that would be very, very valuable for other people I could make. And, and then, and I would also probably earn a lot of money by doing those things. And sometimes I think like, maybe I should do that. Like, and then I could have a bunch of money that I could donate and I could like have much more impact and do, and I just can't, I can't do it. Uh, it's, it's, uh, uh, and, and I think it's just sort of a personality trait, right? I am someone who's seeking and trying to fix. Um, but to some extent, I think it's a valuable thing to sort of think about at times. Like, this is a period where I'm locking down and like, uh, not changing plans all the time. Because I mean, there are certain things I have locked down. Like, I am only doing the newsletter. That's the only thing I do. I don't take on any other work, uh, basically. And so I've locked down that, but then I'm keeping some aperture inside of that bell because otherwise I'd just rebel and quit the whole thing.

But, but conversely, um, you've talked about a world where like, like the essays are the exhaust of the life you've cultivated or the state of mind you've cultivated or even the milieu you've cultivated. Like, um, you've alluded in your writing to a world where in the future there— I mean, you threw out a whole bunch of ideas, whether it's like doing more investigative kind of like work or interviews, bringing people to the island, making films. There— it's easy to imagine, for me to imagine, a future you, uh, for you that is like Henrik wrote essays in the barn for 20 years, and maybe the, the output of that among other things is that you write, as you say, a few good essays. Um, and there's a different version of you that is like the world of Henrik or the world of escaping Flatland has many more. I think about this a lot in terms of what I'm doing, like, especially as someone who also has a tendency to want to like I like novelty and shiny objects and variety. Like, how do you— along this, maybe to tie it all the way back to this earlier theme of proprioception and balance, like, what is the— when you are attuned to yourself around what to do next, what—

how are you—

how are you attuned to the ways you lean in that way?

I'm very much at the, like, the edge on my thinking. I'm going to be incoherent.

That's hopefully the goal with a little bit of this.

Yeah. And yeah, I'm struggling with this thought a lot. And I think like one promising direction for my like personal work is to, I've had a period where I've locked down very much and done my thing in order to get where I am now. I had to like, this works and this is like very aligned with what I value. So I'm just going to double and triple down on that for a few years. And for the last year, I've been like, should, what's the next step for that? And I haven't figured that out. And, but I'm thinking like one thing that could be valuable is to making sure that I put myself in interesting situations, work on interesting projects such that essays kind of happen of themselves and like trying to put myself in a situation where where I free up more time because right now the blog is like taking everything for me and that'd be interesting to like carve out so that I work on the blog 3 days a week and the rest of the time is me doing related work which is putting me in interesting new situations that feeds the blog. Right. So, so, because I also can't keep going doing what I'm doing now because then I'm just gonna, because if now I'm basically spending 6 days a week on the blog, at some point I'm going to get very boring because I'm not having enough new experiences. So I probably need to like start making films or start a podcast or start traveling more. I need to probably do those things in order to like feed the main thing. So I'm, I guess I'm maybe trying to find some way of of making those things work together.

And I haven't figured that out because, uh, but you have to see that threat. Like, the root of the question, hilariously, is actually just like really trying to figure out what is more risky. Is it riskier to stay focused and like not get distracted, not get cued, or is it riskier to try all these other things and like lose the plot? And I think that it— the root of it, at least how I would relate to it, and what I see— my reading of you is very tuned you are very attuned to knowing that you at some future point will—

like, there is—

forgive the maybe crass metaphor— it's almost like there's a tumor or something, and there's like a little seed of something that's like, well, it's really working to do the essay 6 days a week right now, but I probably won't be able— and so I need to course— I need to unfold, or I need to That's how I see it.

One thing that comes to mind when I'm talking about this topic, and like, I think I'm seeing it maybe a little bit more clearly as we talk, is that I think there's a, I think I have this from like some of Taleb's books, Nassim Taleb, where he talks about maybe in Antifragile, talks about in certain kinds of jobs, like if you have a normal 9-to-5 job, you're going to, it's going to look very stable. And then one day you're going to get fired and then your income is going to go to zero. Whereas if you drive an Uber, your income is going to be up and down a lot more, but you're actually more resilient or antifragile because, because, because you, you, you, you planning buffers in, in your spending and so on to handle swings. So if there's a, and if there's a downturn, go Salaries are only going to get cut 20%. You're not going to get cut 100%. Um, and, and that idea, I think maybe applies to my situation too, is that I could double down on the things that work. And there's a lot of people telling me that I should do, and that I should, like, there's these book deals I could do and so on. And that would earn me more money. It would have more impact short term, but it's, it's like putting all the eggs in one basket. And the risk is that I'll burn out, I'll get bored, other people get bored, I'll be locked in. And so actually that's probably my— it's going to look safer and more stable right now, but over 50 years' time it's probably riskier because I'm locking myself in. So actually trading off like 30% of my time, 50% of my time into more kind of illegible diverse bets, that, that will make my situation now more unstable. My income go up and down at best. So on. But it's probably over time a less risky path. Oh, but that— yeah, that's, that's my current thought at this very hour.

It relates to a, um, a finance idea, which is the number one thing is to stay in the game, is to keep playing the game, optimize to be able to keep playing the game, not to hit zero. And I think there's a sort of energy curiosity thing version of that.

Yeah. And I've had that thought like on and off for a long time because I think I could have gone like go pro, so to speak. I could have become a full-time writer a year earlier, maybe even sooner. But as soon as I saw that that was possible, I was kind of afraid because I feared that like if I were just like to sprint to that goal, I could quit my job, not be completely reliant on this income, and that might be just a terrible situation for me. It might be very stressful. I might feel very locked in and having to deliver sort of things. So I like consciously started to be a little bit unpredictable, a little bit like I would drop my cadence. I would go silent for a month. I would like throw curveballs and breakballs, different stuff. And that just slowed my growth quite a lot. And I sure earned a lot of subscribers, but it meant that I had the permission a year later when I could like again in that slower path, get to the point. Yes. Now I knew I had the permission, like I can go silent for a month. I can throw—

It enabled you to go farther and to go longer.

And because, yeah, because I was afraid otherwise I'd just be too afraid. So I do already have a lot of latitude in here, right? Uh, but, but, but the question is, do I need even more?

Well, and the challenge with all of this is that you could have read— and it's possible it actually was risk aversion then— but the challenge is risk aversion could actually, like, it can kind of sit next to, like, knowing yourself well enough to know that you have to go slow to go longer or something. And I think the Yeah, the challenge, it's, it's, I'm, I'm trying to build up an attunement in myself to like better identify just fear and risk aversion when that's all it is. Because you can, when you're an analytical person or introspective person, you could talk yourself to a lot of things. Oh, I'm just, I'm, I'm publishing slower because, which is why the, the, the very Silicon Valley advice, which is just like go faster, more, be more agentic. Is, I think, generally tends to be pretty good. But the challenge then too is Silicon Valley is not, um, in that mentality broadly doesn't tend to build the most enduring things.

Yeah, it's interesting with risk aversion too, right? Because what I noticed in that situation was I know that I am risk averse. I am risk averse, like, and I have to be because like I I am the sole provider of my family. Like, I have to be risk-averse. I can't take those kinds of bets. And, and knowing that, like, planning in enough buffer and enough, like, creative freedom—

but that probably makes you realize how really risk-averse you were before you had a family.

What do you mean?

Um, well, maybe I'm projecting or assuming, but, um, my assumption would be, in the same way that I think I don't have that much time and If you spent a day in my life, you would be like laughing about how much time I have. And I suspect there's a similar amount of like the amount of risk that you can take when you're 25 or whatever, like, and don't have a wife and kids is so dramatic. I'm sure like you, my assumption would be that if you were in your 25-year-old shoes, you'd be like, oh my gosh, dude, you're not taking enough risk.

Yeah, maybe. I think I was pretty calibrated when it came to risk. I think my problem was more, um, lack of knowledge and, and sort of lack of, uh, good habits. Yeah. Uh, maybe I could have taken, I could have taken even more risk, but, but I, I took more risk then than I do now, uh, let's say. Uh, but, but I, but I definitely squandered my time in a way that kind of makes me cry now. It's like I had I had so much time and I accomplished almost nothing. And now I have, oh, now I have a bit more time again, but for many years I had no time at all. And I had to like write, get up at 5 in the morning and write and stuff. And I was like, and you were sitting there 5 in the morning and you're super tired. Like, why didn't I do this before I had kids?

Yeah. One little thing this week, a friend asked me about what I want. And it's very like, um, specifically like desire. And, and I'm curious how you think about that as it relates to attunement in, in the specific sense of sort of like really wanting something. I almost like, I'm not quite even sure. I, it kind of caught me off guard in my inability to answer the question, her question. When you think about maybe everything we just spent the last 20 minutes talking about, how, whatever. Some people really, some people really want money and they get money. Maybe they're not fully aware that how bad they, they want that.

But, but I like the word desire. I think that, I think that, that word in itself, like, there's a lot of good work here. Uh, but Chris, I think, at least for me, and I mean, this doesn't apply if your goal is to make as much money as possible. This only applies if you're a weird person who wants to write essays And so on. Or it's up to you to just want like see if it transfers to any other domain. But I find that it's very important that, yeah, it's, it's that it should feel like desire. It should feel bodily. It should, it should feel like my kids when they are galloping down the road, right?

This is it.

It should be. And I treat myself again, like I, the reason I talk about these things is because I find them hard. I trick myself all the time. So I have a bunch of like very intellectual friends who are always reading like hard books and so on. And sometimes I'll be like, oh, I'm gonna do an essay with all my reflections on the Brahma Sutra, right? And then I'm gonna stop working on that. And then I realized like, no, I'm actually just trying to impress my friends. I'm actually not excited about Brahma Sutra. Like I'm actually excited about, like, the things that are feeling light, open, playful, like galloping down the street, are just very different. And I'm trying to, and in order for me to do good work in my line work is that I have to get back to that thing. And it's very hard. I miss it all the time. I get like, I get these ideas. That sound like good ideas and they are projects that I admire from afar. Like I'd love to read that essay. I'd love to read that book, but it's like from the head. It's like I can calculate that that's a good thing for me to do. And I sometimes think that I want that as, but the thing I want is the thing that makes me like feel playful and loose in my body and Yeah. And those are often like almost embarrassing in some sense, those things. So as I like that word desire, like what is like making your blood boil a little bit? And often I find that they are hard to explain. It's like certain ideas, like the ideas that I get in my head are usually better elevator pitches. Yes.

What should I want to want is the meta thing that is actually running here that can crowd out the desire.

Yeah. I'll give an example because I'm talking in the abstract. Like I was reading Sun Tzu, Book 6, On the Calculation of Value.

This is the repeating day.

Yeah, exactly. I was reading Book 6 of that and there was a segment where she was talking about Plato and there's a dialogue with Socrates where they're talking about that. Like in the past, the time used to go in the opposite direction. And I was like, and I got in my head, I was like, what would that feel like? And I started imagining like living your life backward and like you'd go around visiting different funerals and like noticing how sad you were at them to find your friends because like the sadder you got at funerals, the closer Bramson, like, and then at some times you would have to try find some parents, you know, if you were living backwards and like 'cause eventually you would have to climb back into a woman who would like carry you further into the past and you can travel yourself. This is a very strange thing, right? But I got very excited about that idea. And, and it's not like an obviously good idea, right? In some sense, in my line of work, it's like, that's not like, what is that?

It's a new part of the labyrinth that you've never been in before though.

But, but, but I noticed that idea for some reason. I mean, now I give it a lot of space. It's just like a small thought that happened for 3 minutes in my head, but I got excited about it. It's like, yeah, there's a lift and I can't explain, like, that's not an obvious Escape from the Flatland essay or something. I don't know where that's going and maybe it will end up, most likely will end up as nothing or it might end up as something completely different that doesn't look like this at all. But, but there's some seed there that is, and I'm trying to more and more trust that just that excitement. Like if I, travel down this and let that again, go into confusion. Like, because I don't know, like what, how could this work? This, this idea, what is this trying to do? And if I go down there, I might end up with a story from my childhood and it would be like, it would be something completely different, but I'll just trust that this is some interesting part of the labyrinth.

It's a nice compliment to aliveness, which is a word you use so often in talking about the writing. You talk about like a lightning bolt in your body. But it, it feels like those two things are operating in a similar part of the, of our inner space, maybe.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess, I guess aliveness is like the catchphrase for, for that. But, but yeah, today I'm feeling galloping down the street is better because it's more visceral because alive is like a little bit of a dead word.

Well, I was, I was going to, I don't think I need to ask. I think that is It's funny too, with things like this, there's something so true it's pointing at, and yet if you use the same word with it too many times, it sort of gets dulled.

Yeah.

It's like important to find new, new ways to hold it.

It's, it's, uh, I don't know if I've told this story before, but it's a, it's a lovely sort of apocryphal story about, um, mental institution in Copenhagen. I think so. And it was called Yeah, it was called like mental institution, right? And at some point they started feeling that was maybe a little bit old-fashioned, like cold words or how they wanted to change it to psychiatric hospital or something. I don't know. But they had this beautiful carved stone in front of the house where it said mental institution. And that's like what you would do. And then at some meeting, someone had the brilliant idea, can you just like flip the stone over and we can write the new name. On the other side. I was like, that's a brilliant idea. They went out, flipped the stone, and then it said Idiot Asylum. Uh, because like words will get destroyed. So there was like this continual loop of having to rename this place because whatever name they picked for it would be dragged in the dirt.

Uh, uh, finds through a lot of things. That's good. Um, I'd like to talk a little bit about remoteness or space. And I think there are different ways that I guess I mean different things I mean by that. But a place to start from Ingmar Bergman's workbook, April 5th, 1955. The night. As you know, I am afraid of emptiness, desolation, and stillness. I cannot bear the silence and isolation. Death. Emptiness is a mirror turned to your own face. And this is you. Almost everything that makes up our world first appeared in a solitary head. The innovations, the tools, the images, the stories, the prophecies and religions. It did not come from the center. It came from those who ran from it. Why is some form of isolation so foundational to being creative?

Um, well, if we're going to get technical, um, and I decide, so let's go technical. When you have a larger population, as you have in the center, in the big city, in the mainstream, they are going to filter harder. They're going to be like a bandwidth pass. So it's very, very hard to get an idea to catch on in a big population because they are— because you have to make everyone believe it. So it has to be really good.

You have to reach like a critical mass.

Yeah. And for that to work, it is very hard. So, so, so, and the good thing about that is that like the mainstream will filter The bad ideas, right? So the mainstream now are not like the anti-vaxxers and so on. The mainstreams have fairly reasonable understanding of like how vaccines work, right? But they're also not like a good understanding of vaccines either. So big populations filter ideas very hard. So they kill the best and the worst ideas. Smaller populations, because there are fewer people to convince, will filter less hard. So you, if you go into like a Discord or like a group chat, ideas that can float around and get accepted are going to be much more extreme in both directions. It's going to be worse and better. And so like the way society is, well, when it's functioning well, is organized in this kind of hub and spokes kind of form where you're having the fringes where you have like the research labs or the solitary researchers, then they're having some idea in the fringe where there's no filtering, where the ideas are allowed to be extreme and in all directions.

It's like pace layers. Similar idea.

Yeah, exactly. And then it gets passed on to like a scene where it gets filtered a little bit and improved by them and then gets passed on to bigger and bigger populations. So therefore, like almost all the good ideas needs to start out in the fringe shift because if in the middle, it would be censored. In the middle, it wouldn't catch on. And of course, like we can all be in the center and the fringes at the same time and go back and forth. But, but yes, we need the fringes. We need to protect these spaces where people are allowed to become radicalized and allowed to have extremely bad ideas.

And the internet, by the way, I should add, is in theory really good for this, but in practice kind of actually bad for this.

Yeah, hard to tell. I think Nadia, who you interviewed, Nadia Asparouhova, made like an interesting point in her book Antimemetics, which talks about like the evolution of the internet, like you had until like 2016 or whatever, you, there was this gradual centralizing force towards social media. And then of course that blew up in, in massive crazy ways. And then you've had this gradual trickle into group chats. And, and what Gab does is sort of supercharging nomadic evolution because you, you, you're having people connected to the main population, to the big group on Twitter or whatever. And, but then there are like taking ideas from there, taking them into the group chats and then having very rapid evolution of ideas in this radicalized setting and then spawning them back out. So we're getting actually this kind of amplifier of natural selection when you do it in laboratories. So like when you're in a laboratory and you're having a bacteria and you want to have maybe have it evolve, uh, certain characteristics, right? Then the way to do that is accelerate the rate of natural evolution, you can change the topology of the groups. If you put everything in a big blob in the middle, it's going to be very slow for that group to adapt. But if you instead like make these hubs and spokes where you have these smaller things that I described on the sides, then that structure is called like an amplifier of natural selection because if it's structured precisely right, you can like dial up the speed of evolution. And it could be argued, I'm not sure that's the case now, what's happening on the internet is that we've now with group chats like dialed up the rate of evolution by having these like evolutionary breeding lagoons where you're having like most like bizarre mutations in group chats and like then they're getting spawned back into the feed and back and forth and it goes into different group chats that And I guess that depends on like how much time spent people spend in group chats versus the feed and so on. I really find that to be a very interesting idea, generally speaking, that we can, by thinking about the structure of our networks, by like altering the connections in the network in a deliberate way, you can steer the evolution of ideas in that network. You can like make a network that is producing more ideas faster by just changing who talks to who. Feels like we could do some interesting things with that on the internet, like having, because now we're just having these big blobs, but like, if we could create these more structured spaces.

Are you not building something that could be the very early, you talked about like a blog being like your like little room. It's like your little cafe on the internet. And as you build, maybe it starts off as like a little book club and as it scales, it becomes more of a cafe or a church or I don't know what the right metaphor is. Notion that there are sort of various coalitions of probably necessarily in the modern internet, like personality-led clusters. I don't know. There's the Venkatesh Rao part of the island and the Henrik part of the island and Nadia and so on.

I think so. And then obviously like there are many tools for this, like Discord and Substack has their own like chat apps. And then I use like the chat with, with the the people of art, like behind a paywall. I still think we lack the proper tools, but I can't figure out like what would be the correct shape for this. It's because it's a very tricky thing of like, you want to have hierarchy in these things. And you're guessing at that, like, I, there's a, there's a hierarchy, like around my blog where I am sort of the alpha male of my blog and I have much more reach and I can affects that community much more than anyone else. But I think we need to have more, some better few tools for creating hierarchies because how to put this, but like people are going to contribute in at different levels. And the problem like with the open comment section, for example, is that it tends to like drag the quality a little bit down because people, yeah, certain people we very like reaching out and want to connect and they might not be the people that should have, you want to have them there, but maybe they are not the ones that should be front and center. But when they start commenting because they are crying through the shelf, they don't have any friends, maybe then the more people that could contribute more feel like this is maybe amateur hour, I'm not going to contribute there. And then they instant email me. So I have like the interesting conversations, all their email instead of in the comments.

And so you hosted an event and you pulled like the actually interesting people into a back room afterwards or the after party or whatever.

And there has to be some structure where, where like the main conversation is maybe backed by the people who are having like the most high quality conversations or like where you have a hierarchy. And, but I don't know what the structure of that is. And it's probably going to be controversial for some people that you're ranking people, but I think it's, it's important that you can control those things, um, the flow of information. And we don't really have the right tools for that, or it's not easy to do.

I, I think it's quite interesting that we have a very good structure for the very like vertical, like creator-audience relationship. And then we have very good, like wide open egalitarian kind of like horizontal. But yeah, there's very little resolution in that space between in the like vertical and the horizontal. Maybe you write, wrote about, um, and I'm using space in a different way here, but like like, uh, like almost like air gaps in time between publishing work. Uh, you said, I suspect many of my friends who write and publish rapidly are shortchanging themselves. They generate text filled with hidden doors and move on before they've opened them. Another metaphor that I use is that my drafts are rooms I go to when I want to think, and when I publish, I throw away the key. Keep the key for a little while. Say more about that.

It's, it's, it's It's that forest of confusion again. When I write the first draft of something, and ideally the first draft of it is just note to myself in my journal, that's just me exposing what I already think. That's like, that's usually basically a tide, right? That's basically, this is already what I think about. But then sort of next step for me is to, what I'm saying there with the hidden doors is like, once I have that thing on the table, I'll notice first, like, some open questions or some things that do not fit. And if I just publish it and move on, I'm not actually going to get the real value from that draft because the real value is when I go like, this isn't really making sense. And like, maybe I need to go and do some more research, or maybe I should go talk to this person or whatever. And and, and like start smashing it to pieces. It's, it's in that process where I'm actually updating how I think, how I actually, yeah, get into closer contact.

I guess my, my assumption was that what you described totally makes sense. It's sort of like a piece is 80% there and you could publish it, but like you, you have an itch or something. Like, I guess my assumption, and maybe this is naive, was like you're sort of, you have things that you're like, this is good and I'm going to hold it. Yeah, I'm going to put it in there. You talk about holding things for a year, which my sense is probably closer to the previous example, but—

but it's— that's the part is also true because— and it comes back to— well, there's something about my brain that when I publish something, it's like gone from my life, which is that metaphor, right? It's— and I— that That sucks a little bit because like, it means I can almost like never like rest on my laurels, so to speak. Like, cause whenever I write a good essay, like I'm putting in hard work and like, yeah, I'll finally achieve something and then I publish it. Okay, now I have nothing. That's the feeling, right? I never get to like feel like, oh, I've built such body of work. Like that's never how it feels to me. It's always like, well, that I wish I had that interesting room. I was hanging out it and now I've abandoned it. And now I need to build, find some other interesting room that will make me come alive. So, so they are valuable to hold for that reason because it's like nice to have a nice room that I can hang in.

It's almost selfish.

Yeah. And also because when I am in dark room, I am thinking about things that are valuable to me. That way, framing Zen Ideas, those stories are putting me in a mind state where I I'm able to like get closer to certain things that are meaningful in my life. If I'm writing an essay about my kids, I'm going to be a more present father during that project, right? And then as soon as I close that door, I would have usually become a better father than I was before, but I'm even better during—

It's like an active lens. You write somewhere about like writing about things almost like like, butchering it, but like pulling the world into you or something.

Yeah.

And it's like, you've got like a vacuum or I don't know what the right metaphor. You got a lens that is, or an aperture that is like sucking in all that stuff and to take it off. There's, there's both one, something great about that because it's being compressed and offered, but there's something locked.

Yeah.

I really, my, my, my thought was going to be like, man, I really worry if you write a book. Yeah.

Why?

Because a book is this experience, but like. In a much more totalizing way. Like, I just spent a year on this. I mean, presumably if you were to write a book, it would have to be something that was so foundational, something you could have written 50 essays about or something. And so like, I imagine something akin to, far less extreme, but akin to a mother seeing their child go off to college or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And yeah, and if you spend a year or 2 years on a project, it's gonna be a part of your life. That was when my kids learned to bike and everything is in that book. Yeah, I'm not working on a book. So, well, I don't know. But I think the thing that is to some degree like the core is night writing. It's just like sort of a meditative practice. Because if you meditate, you're going to put yourself in a certain state. And as you say, the NASA people that were sitting in a deprivation tank, they get out, You see the flowers. The essays are like that for me, right? If I spend some time writing about my kids, I go out and then I notice everything about them. And that's very lovely. And I get to like prime my own mind toward both being more present and also like understanding at a deeper level. And the presence kind of goes away after the project, but the deeper insight stays. Hmm.

Priming your own mind is a really, really wonderful way of putting why some creative thing might be worth it, independent of anything else. You wrote, uh, I'm shouting at myself here briefly. You wrote about Joanna reflecting on, I guess she was reading the transcript of my interview with Nadia, and she asked you like, are we making a mistake being so isolated? Um, We could be people who go to dinners and talk to interesting people and whatever, have these conversations. You've said elsewhere, uh, you really, really love talking to people. Um, and for what it's worth, we, we have the internet. Um, you, you, you have a great binary in that way. Do you get lonely?

No.

No.

Is it—

maybe a better question would be, is it— do you, do you worry at all about the pressure of one person being so foundational to how you can think aloud? And I don't mean it in like, she's not enough. Like, clearly you've talked— we talked last time about the ways that you're compounding into the 20,000 hours or whatever, but just the— it's a lot to hold.

No, that is, that is something Johanna and I talk about, and it's maybe even more acute for her than for me because Like if I, we talk about that, like, what if I were to like be hit by a bus, right? I am, we're homeschooling together and well, like with the French, I am the sole income and like, like her life would be very, very, very difficult after that happened. And, and, and so it's important like both to like plan for that eventuality or for that, that could happen, but also like to make sure that like she has her own things and her own social network that she can rely on in those situations. And that's also true for me. But it's like a little bit easier for me since I like naturally end up having a lot of connections with people through the writing. And so I have collaborators and friends. Yeah, it's always good to have multiple legs to stand on. But then as you say, like it is something we like think about all the time, like should we Would it be better for us to be in a city, be surrounded with like more of a scene? I think it's like valuable to like try to weigh these things. Like how are we constructing the context, the environment around ourselves? Like, cause like when we made a decision where we live now, we didn't think we would ever like earn any money and we were, we wanted to homeschool. So it had to be cheap. Like, and now we can see a path like maybe we could actually live in a city and actually afford to homeschool and like. So maybe we should update. So yeah, it's important to like, for Arvid Åhrlund, go through these, like, so now that the situation is different, like, does it still make sense for us to live on a cheap farm on an island or not? And I think where we have landed on that is that yes, it does make sense for us because the way we're sort of wired, uh, and I mean, we have, we like the local community there and we like nature and especially we just like to have a lot of time on our own, a lot of space to come back to it. Because I remember like when we lived in the city, like both of us, but especially me, I'm just like a yes man. Like if I remember like, I was just, I knew everyone in town, right? Like I couldn't go through the city because it was just Uxos, it's like a city of 200,000. I couldn't go through the city without like running into someone else. And it was always keep getting dragged into cafes and then there'll be a party. Like I can't saying no to things. I'm like, there's so many exciting things and I'm always talking. So yeah, I constrain myself. Like I'm in this place and because when you're in the country, you have to like actively decide like where I want to go talk to someone. I want to travel and visit someone and then you have to actually go through and make the priorities like who am I actually, who would I actually like to spend more time with and so on. And I like to be, have to be deliberate about my choices like that.

I think there's a thing here that I've thought a lot about, which is like, life is a constant fight against inertia. And the point isn't to just change things, but the point is to build a— and I think this is something you do really well across so many of these contexts we've spoken about, which is just build a habit of reevaluating. I think most, most of us, the temptation is like, I don't know if I can make a change. I don't know if I can make a change. Why we're so hesitant, by the way, to unfold and explore the possibility of something else. And then if we do make the change, it's like, all right, now this has to be how it is. And it's like, maybe it comes back to a lightness or a loose grip or something that is not about a lack of conviction, but an openness to the thing that was true for me then very well might still be true for me. And it could change in a year. And that could be true about the work or the where you live or much smaller things. But it's, it's like there's a tension, there's a temptation to just hold. Once you get something, just hold it. Keep holding it. Let the end.

I find that meeting new people is a very good way of unclenching that fist, especially if they are like curious, agentic people who are like doing different things and are like maybe a little bit disagreeable, can push on you.

It's the spheres.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's fun because they're all so different. Like, so I have like different people who are like, I don't know, mentors, peers, whatever to call them, but with people I turn to for perspectives, advice, and they say like their opinions going completely like different directions. Like they're, yeah, so again, I get confused by talking to them. Like one, I'll be super excited because I also always want to do the thing that whoever I talk to say. So it's very good for me to have people who are like saying the opposite fails.

Yeah.

Because that just like blows my head open and I get confused and then I can like maybe, maybe I'll do, I'll try a little bit of that and a little bit of that or something in between. I think I've relied, I used to rely a lot on solitude for that work. And now I have the luxury of relying more on peers because I found people who can do that to my mind. Previously, like the people I had access to were maybe not Right, right. Yeah. Priming me in the right way. They were maybe a little bit too conservative, so then I would have to retreat into solitude, which might be the best thing, but it's also sometimes I find that solitude is like, it's maybe slower but better. And sometimes I just want to make fast pivot or make fast decision, then they have to just talk to a few different people.

I think you want to cycle through the different modes too. Yeah. Something quick, but I just really liked it. You talked about good and bad consumption and another kind of theme of this, the space theme showing up and how certain art or information or content perhaps can be good consumption and certain can be bad. Maybe it's a little obtuse, but the essence of it being about how close you feel to yourself. You say Johanna and I sometimes open a page in an art book and look at it for 10 minutes. We can't do it for much longer than that. Paintings, unlike reading the internet, spit us back out after a while. And despite having allowed ourselves to get completely absorbed by something external, when we close the art book, we feel more attuned to ourselves. And you, you, you go on to talk about Philip Glass and the way he thinks about composing music for films and leaving space versus the internet, most, most parts of the internet, or maybe a TV series or something where there are certain forms of art where you come out of it, maybe it's really engaging, but you come out of it and you don't really feel super close to yourself. And then other forms of art where you're, as I read you, almost like it's about this— it has enough space for you to put yourself into it. What are the patterns of the art that to you— I mean, obviously part of this is just the mediums, as you allude to in the painting, but what are the patterns of the types of art that has this kind of space? At least for you, that makes you really learn about yourself or get closer to yourself?

Well, I think, is it Emerson who talks about like the 7 types of ambiguity? Because I think that's one way to think about it. It's the type of art I'm talking about has ambiguity. It has space. There's some, it's not reaching closure in itself. Like, compared to like a field pass next to the stage, or between like a commercial. It's like a perfectly closed, like everything fits together and the message is like super clear.

It's like propaganda.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The propaganda commercials, like they know exactly what they want you to feel and there's everything is designed and forced that message that there's like no, they don't want you to know interpretation.

Yeah.

Whereas like when you, you start removing things and like creating some space for interpretation. The viewer has to fill those spaces to make the artwork meaningful. So, so, so like famously Shakespeare, when you read the plays, they are often based on like historical things that have actually happened. And, and often if you compare what actually happened to what he writes, he's gone through and like removed the motivations for behaviors. So like he, You actually, in the historical record, we know exactly why that person did that thing. But he goes through and like deletes that. Because then you have like, why is he killing his wife or whatever? You don't know that. And when you don't know, everyone can like project different things in it and different actors can play these plays in different ways. And there's like so much space for reflections and emotions to be pushed into Shakespeare's work, which wouldn't have been there if we knew exactly how to interpret it. That's often the case that when there's those things that you need to fill with yourself, then in that act of filling it with yourself, the way you fill it is by listening inward. Like, so why do I think he killed his wife? Like, I noticed the way he turned his head. I think he was lying there, blah, blah, blah. And the thing you're attuning to there is yourself. Yeah. And so, so therefore, but it, but then, but it also spits you out because like, if you've ever read like Shakespeare, it's like, it's hard work. It's, it's, it's because it's like you have to stop at every other line and fill in. I'm like, what does that word mean? And like, how should I interpret that? So it's like exhausting to fill in now, to, to read, uh, ambiguous work compared to like propaganda or like Twitter or something where there's less of that. And so it has those like twin things of like, it will spit you out because you'll get tired and then you'll just lean back in the sofa and like, I'm just gonna be with myself now. But you will also be close to yourself because you have been forced to pull from yourself. That's my read on what is happening in those situations where a piece of art or a piece of writing brings me back to myself.

I love the spitting out because it's such a great way to articulate the thing that is, has friction. And that, by the way, the, the majority of incentives in culture today are incentivizing all media to not have that affect. If you really think about like people talk about people reading less, like one of my favorite ideas is that reading is a co-collaborative act, more, more so than most other mediums we spend a lot of time with today. Obviously painting is an extreme example on the other end. But reading, read, like no person reads the same book. I have to put myself into, and maybe a truly remarkable novelist or whatever is really good at projecting something very specific, but we usually are the other way around.

Usually, you know, we usually see the skill as with Shakespeare, as with Kafka, the skill is removing. Yes. As it's, it's almost like this game of like, what is it called? Like there's this game where you have like these blocks and Jenga. Is that, yeah. And like a good, uh, novelist or something is someone who can pull the Jenga box and build it really, really high. And it's like, how could that even stand?

Yes.

But it's somehow still standing.

Which by the way, it's no surprise that many of these worlds we adore so much are the ones that you can put yourself into and imagine yourself in.

Yeah. So, so whereas like weak, weak writers can't do like build a very compact thing where there's The whole set.

Jenga block of narrative writing.

But that's the USA. So.

I like that. I like that a lot.

But, but he, something that, okay, again, another thought that's like on the edge of my, my thinking is what you're saying, because there's very strong incentives, uh, today to, to write in, in ways that fill all the holes. To write propaganda, to write like these obvious things. If you look at what's trending on Substack or whatever your asset is. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's all like these, these clichés that get like filled up with, with fluff words and just like reinforcing what people already think. There's no space to, to fill in that. And, and I noticed that myself, like, um, if I, if I use, if I were to use like the techniques that Kafka or Shakespeare use, like of making things like gnarly and like hard to interpret and the ways they did it, I wouldn't have any readers. And so there's like a tension because I want to provide that space, but at the same time, I, in order to have readers, I need to make my writing very clear, very easy to read on your phone on the toilet. Yeah.

And like the very, like if it's going to spit you out, it needs to be very easy to get into.

Yeah. Uh, and, and there's an obvious tension because the easiest way to make something that is ambiguous is to write sort of more like modernist poetry or something. But, but I'm not, but again, it's like a constraint. I'm not allowed to use those tricks. I'm not allowed to like Mary Sue chase, uh, elliptical kind of writing. And, and the tension is like, how do I write something that is on the surface very clear, very easy to read, almost like a Twitter article, uh, and at the same time opens those spaces. Uh, I'm not sure I always succeed, but, but that's, I think it's an interesting challenge. It's like without using obscure language. Yes.

Yes.

Can I use simple sentences?

Subversion though. It's finding some way for subversion.

Yeah. And I think someone like Hemingway does that well. Very simple sentence. Uh, maybe some of his sentences are obscure, but But it's quite simple language and somehow it still creates these things. But, uh, yeah.

Well, you, you talk about this a little bit when you talk about like the, the biggest topics can be really boring to write about. It's not exactly the same idea. And like the trick is like, how do you, how do you talk about these sort of things that people are so— romance or whatever, figuring out how to do it. Like, how do you talk about these things in a fresh way?

Mm-hmm.

Because that is so electrifying, but it's so hard to get there because the temptation is to just make it overly obscure or overly basic.

Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's, it's, it's, um, one way I think about it is sort of like, guess if you're playing jazz or something, you want to, you can like, when they're playing jazz, they'll take some like classic chord progression and then they're improvising on top of it and adding like disc harmonies on top of it. And like, can you, Can you, like, a lot of it is just like taking something that's kind of simple and adding these interesting juxtapositions and interesting shifts in it, like bringing in, like, if I write about, like, love or emotions, it's interesting to, like, I'll bring in some Tolstoy and some machine learning, like, because they're, like, from different domains. And if I can, like, weave them together, I can write them quite simply. I can see a few simple things about machine learning, a few simple things about Tolstoy, but the way they kind of clash produces this kind of, these resonances that are bigger. And so, and I think that that's one way I try to like create these spaces, like while using simple language by like juxtapositioning ideas from different fields and so on. And then another good thing about it is that I've found is that it helps bridge those domains. So I have a lot of my readers who are like programmers and they can then maybe resonate and understand what Tolstoy is doing in The Oral. Yeah, because, because you're connecting that and vice versa, right? So, so it's valuable in a way too.

There is a thread that I find myself coming to maybe two words that stand out. Um, one is sort of— and I realize this one's especially, uh, hard to pin down— but like something towards like being true, being true to yourself, being true to your feeling. The other word is conviction. Um, and one of the points that I read your kind of like big essay on agency, it kind of culminates in this my takeaway was like, agency is basically actually about your values and your desires and like taking a stand. And like, if you have enough conviction, agency is actually quite easy. You, you, uh, I think it's at the end of the piece and it's very, very powerful. You're writing about Maud and you say, the reason having Maud in my life made me more agentic was that it was the first time I experienced what it means to surrender to my values. I had a lot of idiosyncratic opinions and values when I was younger, 2. But I held them in a rather flimsy way. Whenever things got too hard or people disapproved of what I was doing, I tended to give up and do the normal thing instead. If I had experienced it before, Mod, I would have caved in after 30 seconds. But in this case, caving in was unforgivable. I must never fail Mod. I don't mean to trivialize it, But in the, in the cases of like, that's such a powerful example. And it's also like it's an impenetrable example in the cases that are maybe like less biological. Where do you think this type of conviction comes from? Maybe this relates a little bit to our conversation about desire in a more serious way. Maybe this is also what I'm pointing out when I talk about like this trueness and search of trueness.

Yes, let's stay with conviction. Um, I think, I think that can probably come from multiple directions. I mean, it's for some people that's just easier. They're kind of disagreeable people and it comes easy. Uh, for me, as you said, it was like having kids and like feeling that I had to stand up for them and act on that, which, and the good thing about that was it was sort of arbitration in the good sense that I, by being forced to stand up for my convictions, I had to like go through this entire process of the pain of doing what I wanted to do. And I came out on the other end. And I was like, that's kind of okay. And so it was like, again, some of this is like being held by the hand or like being forced. It's like going into the Marines or something. Like you get forced to do more sit-ups than you've ever done in your life and you realize I can actually do that. And it can probably be in different ways. It can be like, I guess like a lot of being in a like startup incubator can be like that too. Like you get these external pressures, like you have to live up to your mentors and people are invested in you and that kind of social pressure forces you to do things that are uncomfortable for you.

It's like a constructed stakes.

Yeah. So, so, so I think, yeah, having investors, having kids, like there are different ways of constructing those stakes. Another way of like securing your conviction or acting on what you believe that's been used a lot historically is like to, to say that like, if I do not do this, I betray God.

I wrote that down. You said, um, thinking of the work in religious terms as a service to or a search for God. Bergman, Goethe, and Pascal all do this. It might be easier to summon the awe and daring necessary to push out into the unknown and against social pressure if the alternative is failing God or a fiendish muse.

Yeah, so, and, and I mean, that's, that's— if we're gonna be like— I'm atheist, so I'm gonna be like very like crass about what, what that mental move is doing. It's just hijacking or conformity bias. Like we, we have a tendency to like want to bow our heads to authority. And then if you just like invent an authority, which is all seeing and all powerful, and then you give them your idolized values, then you're hijacking your innate drive to like submit to authority or to like fit in. So you're kind of hijacking that kind of monkey brain thing we have. I mean, one shouldn't explain that because it works less well if you understand that that's what you're doing. I struggle to do that myself since I don't believe in God. And so then I would know that I was like tricking myself. I was just using God as a prop.

What do you believe in?

That's a good question. I believe, It's something like, maybe something like that. We all, it sounds cliché, but like we all have something we can contribute to. Like we, one of the universe in itself is just so extraordinary. Like with everything like quantum particles and black holes and evolution, it's just like we get come here and explore. And take part in this unfolding creation. And that's just like so remarkable and so big in itself. And then on top of that, because of like the accident of your genetics and the place you're born, there's going to be certain things that will only be possible for you. Like there will be certain things that only you will be in a position to care for. And, and, uh, And so I'm not sure why, but for some reason it feels imperative to me that like, uh, you should protect and like, uh, be a guardian of that possibility and like make sure that you leave the universe a like better place that you are like, uh, maybe it's sort of a force toward higher complexity that like when you leave the planet, like if the desired fight against entropy has like been won, like civilization is a little bit more coherent, like the, we have better theories of the world, we have richer relationships, we have more diversity and perspectives. I don't know. It's like, but being a force for like, uh, whereas it feels it would be super boring if the universe was just like rocks floating in dead space. And it like, because that wouldn't have as much complexity as biological evolution. So you're just like being the force for increasing the complexity, something like that.

Is it fulfilled potential? Is that too simple?

Yeah, that's a good way of simplifying it down. But not only for yourself, it's that, because I am not like you're, I am not all that important in myself. Of course, I value myself because I get to live in, I have to live in my body. But what matters more to me is just this continual unfolding that like my ancestors and they're all behind me and like, how can I play a part in this like ongoing evolution dance and like make sure that it's like we're in this big jam session and like, how do I make sure that like when I leave the stage, the song is in a—

The music was going on, it kept going.

Yeah, and was hopefully like going in an even better direction because people around you had grown and were playing more interesting things and so on.

We talked about this a bit last time, but it is being a good steward of being sentenced to freedom. That's how I hear it a little bit. You were, you were writing about, uh, uh, Spignev Herbert, forgive my pronunciation, um, and ethics and talking about how ethics is care and not something an external authority demands of you. It's not a list of commands you follow. And you, you also spoke about, uh, with David Perel about like this kind of hard and soft together. So like, uh, being open or porous, I think that maybe was his language, and also very firm at the same time. In the Herbert essay, you said you have to see the world for what it is in all its brutality. And you need to do this while keeping your heart soft for the beauty that makes it all worthwhile. Maybe you could replace hard and soft with like bravery and openness. Does that resonate with you? Is there anything in that thread that resonates?

Yeah, I think that's part of it. But it's interesting when we have these conversations because it's all the same topic all the way through. Because the reason you need to be both harsh and soft when interfacing with the world is that the world can be quite horrendous place. There's like many things big and small that are terrible. And you want to see them with clear eyes because you want to see all of reality as clearly as you can. Like, and we don't have to think about like the big horrible things, but just like in your life, in a relationship, like you want to be able to see the ways you are failing as a father or a husband. You want to see the frictions. You want to be able to like sit with those uncomfortable things. And that requires a certain hardness. I don't know if that's the right word, but it requires a certain, like, non-naivety. It's a certain forcefulness and strength and just, like, facing these painful things. Because, uh, unless you can do that, you're not going to see reality clearly. And if you're not seeing reality clearly, you're not going to be able to chart the most ethical, good, interesting path through the labyrinth. And, but you also need to be soft. And the reason soft is gesturing out is that thing that is going to guide you through this world. So, so it's the hardness is letting you see the labyrinth, letting you see the world, but it's not telling you where to go. And the softness is what tells you where to go. Because you also at the same time, yes, because the risk, the risk if you're just very hard is that you get like stoical and you just close down and you're tense and like the world is a terrible place. I'm not going to trust anyone, whatever. And that's not going to help you navigate. You also at the same time have to get back to the galloping down the road, being playful, being soft, because it's those like small intuitions from the inside, what feels alive, what feels good, that is going to guide you, uh, where you should walk in this realitas. And we've talked about it in terms of creative work, that it's, uh, connecting to these 12 senses that lets you do good creative work. But it's also true in other ways, right? When we were having— when you're having a conversation, It's, it's that ability to like feel inside yourself when something is right. That's gonna, uh, if you can tap into that, be vulnerable with that and share that, that's gonna make the conversation come alive. So it's the same thing as with creative work. And, and, and I think it's the same thing if you're designing a house or if you're building a company or whatever, because like I noticed like when I was mentioned that I didn't believe in God. You got curious there and you stopped and you went off script and asked him, so what do you believe in? That was sort of because you were genuinely curious about that. And it felt like there was a little bit of an opening up in the conversation when that happens. And like, there's been several of those in the conversation here. So, and so yes, you want to be both hard and soft. Like, those are not great words for it, but like, you need to see it, be stoical enough so you can see reality. And like child is playful enough so you can decide how to walk in through that world. And they are not easy to combine.

Yeah, it's like assertive and receptive. I was going to say the same thing. It's so— I mean, you brought it up, like even this, what I do is so hard to— and there's— I could do this show with no notes and I could just like be maximally receptive and like we would probably have a pretty generative conversation and I should probably try more of that. But I also don't think we would cover as much ground, and I tend to drift and whatever. And I could also just come and like read off a teleprompter, and it's so hard. And obviously all wonder comes— and that's a trivial example, but everything good comes from that marriage. But it's, it's like, it's this balance again. It's like, can I, can I stay right in the middle of this, like, asserting, receiving?

Yeah, but so much of it feels like we're coming back again and again to sort of phenomenology of navigating in murky spaces. It's like, how does— how much is supposed to feel in the body? What kind of rules of thumb? How are you going to put your feet and how are you going to feel inside? Where to go? And it's— yeah, it feels like basically everything you talked about, like different aspects of of that, those felt senses.

I think that's one of the kind of primary readings I have of your work, is something that you are not always staring directly at, but you are circling around. One of the reasons I find the writing to be beyond beautiful or compelling or entertaining, but to be useful. Is I think that's a worthy, worthy thing to pursue. I have a few more things, a couple of just quick miscellaneous things. Your essays are short, um, very, very readable in a very— in a way that must be quite deliberate, I guess, is my reaction. Even compared to other things on Substack.

Yeah, they've gotten shorter. I think I used to sort of average 4,000 words. Now I probably average 2,000 words. I think 2,000, that's a nice length. It's like enough that you can do it in one sitting. I think I used to be more like allowing myself to sprawl everywhere, but just like, I want to make sure that each essay is its own little small room and like not having, I used to, because if I look at my older essays, they are actually like 3 rooms. Put together and because I didn't feel like it was enough and just like trusting that this one thing is enough. Yeah. So, and also simplifying, it's like I prune my writing a lot. Like I, yeah, when I read a lot of other writers, there's much more fluff and that can be good because it can be a way of like when it's done well, can be a way of like putting you in a state more because they're repeating the same idea from different perspectives over and over again. But I try to keep it a little bit more trimmed to maybe hopefully, well, hopefully it's easier to get through it, but also leave some more space to, because I think most people obviously just read through my essays very rapidly and that's probably hopefully a pleasant experience. But I try to make them so that if you slow down and actually like, what would this mean if I applied it to my life? How does this connect? What does this actually mean? That there was actually a lot to unpack, even though the sentences are like written in a way that it should flow very easily. But I say, I want, yeah, it's again that double lead. Yeah.

It's the Jenga tower too.

Yeah. I want it to be, you should just be able to scroll through it and read it and be sure, but you should also be able to read it I mean, I have some people have told me that they've read certain of my essays like 50 times and that's wonderful if you can create something that people can come back to and see there's more and more layers to it.

How is reading like running?

Reading is like running in that it is, well, it's a skill. It's, it's, um, To be able to run, you need to build up many parts of your body, your muscles in your legs, your heart. If you want to be a good runner, you have to like develop your mental models and understanding of, you know, you taught me about like the pacing and things like that. So there's this whole thing like if you're going to run a marathon, it's just like you're not just going to go out and do it. You have to You have become the kind of person who can run a marathon, right? And that takes 6 months at least, probably several years. And the same thing is true with writing, uh, reading, uh, and writing, uh, but reading, and I think a lot of people kind of misunderstand that because they, they can read a little bit and then they think like, oh, this is the year, but I can't read yet. And I'm like, I'm going to do Alekharyan and that's like saying I'm going to do a marathon on my first training run, right?

And everyone runs too fast and too far when they start.

Exactly. And enough, you get the same. And it's just like trusting that what matters in reading is just like gradually gilding up your capacity to process words, your references, understanding, like if you're reading Dante, like there's going to be references to a million things and poem's going to do much better if you understand those references and so on. Like, so So it takes time to build up those things to actually do it. So it's like a good idea is just like to start slowly and steadily and just making it fun and gradually pushing yourself a little bit because reading Anna Karenina is supposed to be very easy, right? It's not a hard book if you are prepared for it. It's a very readable, easy book, but I remember that the first time when I was like 17, I've I thought it was very hard to read and now I read it and it was like, this is like a romance novel, it's very easy, but that's because I built up the capacity. I think about that more and more in like all domains. I used to think, you know, it's like you just need to explain certain ideas to people and I think that's like a big part of why I've started writing publicly. So it's like, oh, I figured this thing out, I should just write down. How to do this thing, right? And then you realize like that's not how it works, right? Because like I used to write a bunch of essays about how I write my essays and like thinking I could teach other people that way because to me it's obvious like it's actually like these things I'm doing, but obviously the reason I can write the way I write is because I've spent 15, 20 years becoming the kind of person who can write them and there's like my entire nervous system is like been redesigned for the purpose of writing essays. And so you probably like, if someone tried to do what I do, it'd take at least 5 years of like deliberate hard effort of like becoming, because it's, yeah, you have to like literally rewire your entire brain. And, and I think that's sort of underappreciated also. And again, with the agency, like people say, like, you can just do things like But if you are the kind of person where your parents abused you and no one's ever believed in you and you get like an intense anxiety at the thought of like putting your foot forward, you can't just do things. It's going to be a very long process of like rebuilding yourself into the kind of person who can just do things. But it's also a hopeful image, like, because basically everyone can run a marathon and basically everyone can become a good reader or become a good writer.

You have to show up.

You have to show up. You have to do it again and again for many years and you have to like not burn out by expecting too much of yourself. But that kind of gradual increasing of strength and the little practice. Yeah.

I found an old, uh, draft of Looking for Alice that you linked to in a footnote, a couple, couple excerpts. Instead, I've done it by chaining myself to someone who grew weird in ways synergistic with me. And then that word unpalatable is interesting. What is palatable and what is not is often a question of context. I'm going to preface this, but this is a weird one. So I had to pull it out. A Westerner sees someone eat a dog and feels revulsion. The revulsion isn't in the dog, it is in the context. To understand the delicacy of the dog, you must inhabit another world. That can be very hard. Maybe you figure out how to place yourself in the context where dogs are tasty, and now you're munching on one. Along comes your mother. I've just had a revelation, you say. Let me tell you. But all she sees is the paw on your plate. I think love is a lot like that.

Hans-Georg Gadamer. Yeah, that was cut from that final lesson.

Why is love a lot like that?

Um, because love, as compared to like infatuation or something, uh, is a deep, knowledgeable appreciation of another person. It's like you can't love one in sort of the erring from sense of that word or something, unless you're so intimate with that person, if you actually like have looked at them and understand them. And I find personally that many of my closest relationships with people that I feel deepest love for are almost like acquired tastes. Like they're almost like, well, it's not, it's not, that's not strictly the right way of saying it. Like I think a lot of people fell in love with Johanna around the time when we met because she was very lovely in some easy to read ways. But the important parts of her personality, the parts that I truly love now, and that are like the core of her, they didn't see and didn't appreciate. And so it's where I'm going. It's to really deeply love someone for who they are. You have to see them very deeply and you have to be very— yeah, and that requires a lot of context. And so like, it's sort of almost like acquiring the skill of of loving someone. And then if you sometimes, if you show that to someone else, it might not make sense, right? Like, you, you take, uh, like, let's take some very obvious example. Like, say some people have an open relationship because, like, they've looked deep at each other and they realize that we're totally okay with each other sleeping with other people. And, and that feels very beautiful and fragile and close for them and, like, totally respecting each other's idiosyncratic feelings and so on. Another person might look at that and say that that seems like a very toxic way of living. And it's like, well, have you actually inhabited this world? Yeah. Have you actually paid attention to what we feel inside when these things happen? And that's a very obvious one. But there's often subtle versions of that in all relationships. If you're actually allowing that relationship to grow into a shape that is fitted to to the people involved.

You write about authors as your friends. Others are our friends. They are odd people who talk to us, sometimes from across the grave. When Joanna and I talk, we'll say Thomas and mean Trønstømer. Pardon my pronunciation. He is one of our mutual friends, and we gossip lovingly about him. And then when I read the biographies of people, exceptional people's early lives, it feels a little bit like getting new peers. Their way of being works on me. Gradually, I raise my aspirations. Who do you feel closest to in this way? It doesn't have to be an answer for all of time, but could be current.

I mean, I've been in, I always turn to different authors at different points in my life where I'm struggling with certain things. So like, as we talked about earlier, I've been like struggling with like, what's the next step of my creative journey? So then it's been natural for me to turn to people like Brian Eno and just like, you know, you read his diaries, you read, listen to interviews he's done and like his biography and trying to piece together how he's done it. And that, you know, it gives you some models and it feels like in some ways it's like easier for me to talk to him because it's like the situation I'm in right now, like if it's not that many people who have been in that situation. Like none of my friends have. So I'd like, it's hard to talk about these things, but I feel I can sort of bounce against his experiences and I don't think I'll, you know, do the same thing as he and I don't, we don't disagree of like, but it does feel like I can sit there like talk with him. And I think I always have that feeling. I can't I get this impression that a lot of people put like authors on like pedestals. And I see people even do that with myself, which is like super weird to me because like, I'm, as I know, like obviously, just like a guy. And it's like very strange when people do that. It's because I'll even see it in comments. People write about me in like third person and as if I'm like some kind of thing.

And I'm like, you are the dictator of the blog, but yeah, you sure I am.

But, but like, But it's so strange when I have some people write about me as if I'm some famous person, then like they're writing for a person. I was like, I'm Peter. Like, I need a room, man. Like, I'm just like, I'm doing the dishes and my kids are playing. Like, I need a room. You don't need to put me up there. And I think the same is true for around. And if you approach people like that, if you approach Dostoevsky like that, you realize like, they were all very Juba. They were all very like relatable and open in their writing in their strange ways. And you can really see eye to eye with them. And I think it's very healthy to just bring them down. But it's like nothing that, I mean, they are weird. They've gone extreme things in their lives. They are very skilled at specific things, but they're just people. And they can be interesting to talk to because they have interesting experiences and they pushed further into that than many others. But it's like nice to just like put them down here and play with them.

You wrote about your, I think, maternal grandfather who passed away last summer, Niels. Life is not a story that builds to a climax. It is a story that meanders. Every single moment in life is as worthy of care and attention as the climax of a story. What I grieved wasn't his— Neil's worn-out body finally giving up. That felt good, actually. It was relief for him. What I grieved was all the moments that were gone. Even more, I grieved all of the moments he had been alive to himself. All of the moments that no one else will ever remember. The feeling of sun on his skin. The long nights in the snowplow, clearing the roads through the pine forests. The feeling, if any, his last night when Maud, the elder, held his hand and he seemed for a moment to slide out of his dementia into sleep and smile. It was the gone-ness of all of those moments that hurt. Are there any other moments that come to mind that you would like the world to know about Niels?

He was a Very special man, meant a lot to me. I would say he's had a very, very close relationship, closer than most people have with their grandparents, I think. He retired, he was a road worker, so he retired and he was 60, and that was the same year I was born, so he spent a lot of time sort of caring for me. When my mom started working again, so he would come there and like be with us. And so I grew up very close. He would take me camping and he was a very down-to-earth kind of person. So those moments are always very important to me. And maybe not so typical for like the cultural milieu that he came from. Like he came from very, very, very poor circumstances, grew up like without electricity, and everyone was like very macho. And so I wanted to be like, grow up to be the kind of person who takes care of kids and like is very soft in many ways. But it was also very, very core. Oh, there's so many interesting things about him. There's one beautiful little story about like, that's since I love about how he was, was when he was I think he was 4 years old. He, on Saturdays, they would get sugar cube and they would put it over fire to make it like a caramel. And he did that and he put it in and then he, it slid down his throat so he couldn't breathe. And he was so sensitive, so he didn't want to disturb anyone. So he just went around like hugging his mom, his dad, his 7 siblings, and then he went out, laid down on the meadow, and like prepared to die, and then it melted and slid down. So he was a very, very special person. And yeah, not the most talkative person, but very, very extremely determined to do Well, and then to help people, like even during COVID and at this point, I mean, he was 92 or something and he was basically not holding together anymore, but he would still like take his, what do you call those rolling chairs? And he would walk like 500 meters down to the house where the elderly people stayed. And he would go from window to window and talk to all the old people that were like in isolation. And so he would always like try to find some way that he could be of use. And toward the very end, he couldn't speak. He was, you know, almost completely lost. I don't think he recognized almost anyone. But he was still the same person because one of them, nurses told us that there was another elderly woman in a wheelchair who had a, who was sort of having a panic attack, I guess, that she was afraid of death and dementia. So she was just acting out and throwing stuff. And he saw that and like couldn't speak and do anything, but he just got up and like moved slowly over and like took her hand. And then he just sat there like for 2 hours just holding her hand because he could still sense that like she was getting calm by him holding her hand. So like, to the very end, he was just doing, was always looking for ways of like being of use to other people and never cared at all about him. Like, he was never self-centered in any way whatsoever. And like when he died, he instructed that like he didn't want a grave. He wanted to be just put in the communal grave and like without any placacy. I think he just felt like his work was done, right? Now he'd like, he was here to be of service. And he also like, I think made the atheism come from him. Like he didn't believe in a life after this. He just believed with like being of service, being of use, and then like disappearing into the night. So he formed me in so many ways. And when I met Johan, we bought their house. And when they moved to like a senior apartment next door, basically, and that was the setup what that was so they would have some time to say goodbye through life in a gradual way. So during those years when we lived there, it was, we hung out. Well, in the beginning, every day he would just like barge into the house all the time and he could always fix things and then gradually less and less, but it was always, and you always had to do the good work. I remember we were going to a party at suit on and he came and it's like, it's the day for the potatoes. You know, it's like, yeah, but we can do that tomorrow maybe because I'm going and he was 87 or something and he's like, no, it's the day of the potatoes. And so he just goes out and starts, it's like, I can't let the 87-year-old plant all the potatoes. So like standing there with us, the suit on, or planting the potatoes, it's just Yeah, he wanted to do the right thing all the time. So that was very important to— it was a special experience. We spent 3 years where he was like the closest friend I had. Like I spent more time with him than anyone else. And that was between 25 and 28, like a very formative period in my life. And I do think that also sort of helped me like shape together some sort of value system.

There's a line from, I think it's from Herbert. I could be mistaken, so forgive me. Repeat words stubbornly. Repeat all incantations of humanity, fables and legends, because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain. Repeat great words. Repeat them stubbornly. Is there anything that you find yourself repeating?

I have some poems that I often return to several lifetimes down there. Yeah, there's certain— usually they're not like— there's a few lines that I like to repeat where I like a sentence where it encapsulates a simple time and an important thought. But many of the ones I turn to are more like a mood almost. There's one that I often return to and I think I have memorized in Swedish, which is called the, I don't know, in English it's maybe like a short pause in the organ concert by John Störmärk, which is, it's a beautiful kind of rendition of him going into a church and, um, experiencing a certain connection to the human condition that comes out very strongly in, in that scene where he's standing in the church. And, and, uh, I think there's like, there's certain lines in there where he's talking about like the, how the book inside every person gets rewritten every second. It's like a big majestic book, but it's with so many pages that's still with air between them. And that there's like waves going through it all the time, and everything changing. I'm butchering the images, but there's something about that, which poem, which you should link, that puts me back into a sense of awe and care for the human being and for like, um, the condition we're in and like the, how fragile we are and how small we are and how meaningful still.

I got one last thing. It's not a question. It's something I wanted to read. If you have a reaction, you do. Um, but it was one of my favorite things you wrote recently. You were writing about a sculptor on the island. If you look at the cliffs that have been carved by the glaciers during the Ice Age, he wrote, you can still see the carvings there 10,000 years later. So these shapes will live on for a long time. And this is you, the feeling of a hand in 1972 made into an object that will stand for millennia. It is hard not to see a parallel to some of the oldest preserved cave paintings, which are hands that have been held up against the cave wall and preserved as silhouettes by color pigments blown at the hand. We were here. We felt this. Yeah.

I think, yeah, I think that is a lot of what it comes down to because we're doing, there's so much work to be done. There's so, you know, hospitals to be manned and companies to be started or roads to be clear. And there's so much work to be done, but sort of what, to me, it all amounts to what the point of it all is, like, these human experiences that that enables. And when you see those, like, I think it's from Argentina, you know, the hunter-gatherers have like blown colored pigments on their hands, leaving those on the wall. It's just kind of, you know, it's a reminder to that feeling. It's like, yes, we have to, you know, gather roots, we have to kill lions, we have to eat, we have to mate, but like, it all sort of calms down eventually. It's like, we're here. This is happening.

Remember. Thank you, Henrik.

Thank you, Axel.

Thanks again for listening to my conversation with Henrik. And before I leave you, I would like to thank Notion one more time. Notion is how it's all possible. Here at Dialectic, especially in the small ways that I use Notion to build out this world, to make sure I have a sense of all of the various aspects of this person that are bouncing off as I read or consume or listen to their various work before the conversation, how I make sense of that in my prep, and then more importantly afterwards, the patterns, the lessons, the ideas that I can synthesize thanks to Notion AI, the things I might be missing, as well as just integrated place where all of that lives, not just individual episodes, but the entire body of work at Dialectic. Uh, my site dialectic.fm is hosted on Notion, and you can check out more there, whether it be the transcripts, the links, individual lessons I pulled out across the episodes, and more. And as a reminder, Notion recently launched Notion Agents, so you can build a whole suite of little guys in your Notion database, whether it be solo or your entire team, that you can work with. For big and small tasks. So little trivial things like reminders or spinning up documents or whatever that might be, or you might even imagine creating a full-on research assistant to help you work through the problem you are working on. Thanks again to Notion, and I will see you next time.