41: Henrik Karlsson: Strolling Through Life's Labrynths

Episode summary: Transcript and all linked references: fm/henrik-2 Henrik Karlsson (Substack, X) is a writer and essayist. His newsletter, Escaping Flatland, explores attention, agency, relationships, and the inner life of making things. He is one of my favorite essayists, and I spoke to him previously on Dialectic 19: Cultivating a Life that Fits in Spring 2025. We met again in Copenhagen, this time on video. Our first conversation focused on designing your life iteratively and relationships. This time is about the messiness of creativity and problem-solving. We circle a central theme of navigating through the woods of confusion when you are—and must necessarily be to grow—lost, and trusting yourself to reach clarity on the other side.

Henrik walks us through how he (and so many of his favorite artists and thinkers, from Brian Eno to Charles Darwin to Ingmar Bergman) smashes apart his mental models in pursuit of seeing things more clearly. Or at the very least, offering up something new. He also challenges my praise of boredom, describes how a ballerina finding balance in her body mirrors what creatives must do, likens desire to the energetic discovery of wandering (or dérive, like past guest Cyan Banister has spoken about), explains why the best art is like a Jenga tower, and reflects on what he believes in; Henrik’s humanity is on display.

He challenged me to think much more ambitiously about the risks I take, the ways I am holding on to faulty models of reality, and how living richly is simply a matter of perspective. - Dialectic is presented by Notion. 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, 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 a similar label, 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 this labyrinth, we're going to have good artworks, good essays, good startup, 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. make a square you're not gonna make it wrong because can't do that and you actually have to sort of break the tiles and the more smaller parts you break them into more perfectly you're gonna 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 stick it's like you're breaking your pre-existing 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 five minutes ago i understood this now i don't understand anything Welcome to Dialectic episode 41 with Henrik Carlson.

Long time 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 a 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 what we struggle 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 fm slash Henrik dash two. 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 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 going to 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 com slash dialectic. With that, here is my second conversation with Henrik Carlson.

henner carlson here we are we're back yes we are round two in the flesh knock on wood on uh on video okay 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 this is 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 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. Rough, 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 three words is don't think, look. That's Wittgenstein. So much bad writing comes from people moving words about on the page 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 five 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 it in your notes before, and instead of thinking about that word boring, I think it's maybe the wrong word. Because boring might feel like it's a bad feeling. I guess I'm saying more under-stimulated, that you're supposed to be...

not externally stimulated. 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 will start to sort of generate that internally. So we'll start to daydream or we'll start to like pay attention to the flowers around us or we'll be curious about it 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 key noise from being boring? Because I guess boring is, in a sense, being predictable, maybe. 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 and 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 source of surprise so i think like if you attune to that and like over many years build up a ritual interest 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 that feels like it's for other people yeah i find 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 banister and

The first time I ever met Sian, before I interviewed her, we had a conversation about boredom. And she said something along the lines of, like, I never bored. Like, I try never to be bored. And 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. And Cyan, and it was funny, I was reading some other writing of yours, and Cyan uses this word that you also use, which is dereve.

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 Sian. She's so interesting. She's not boring at all. I was in Spain recently with my kids and we were in Malaga and like the first day we're there.

I have some plans, because it was just me and the kids, because Johanna has her to the legs, 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 dérivé, right? Much better pronunciation than mine, by the way. I don't know French, so I'm also big, you know. And then, like, the eight girls are like, 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 get to pick the most exciting direction we can go.

And I will 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 labyrinth themed 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 going to go here, I'm going to actually like stop every few minutes.

I'm like, where do I actually want to go now? Because like, yeah, the streets we got to were probably less interesting in some objective way than like it was in 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 and i felt the same but you see it in the kids somewhere because they it's in the bodies but i think we all kind of have that sense of like you're talking about that time this week when you take that time to like a change yourself yeah it's a state of attention i i can't remember it's possible we even spoke about this last time but um in the 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 eight hours.

It's not even, there's not even a water tank. It's just dark. And they sit in there for like eight 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, it goes back to the Wittgenstein thing is, Maybe the painters 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 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 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 last week anyway because it's like... It is very, very hard to do because I've been struggling with my brain for the last two weeks and I was just like, why is it working?

And I was feeling all this resistance and it wasn't fun at all. And then like, I guess two days ago, I decided I'm going to put the thing I'm working on aside, which felt like a very good and important essay. 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, what I realized was that I tricked myself up and 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 not 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, I mean, putting the weight in different parts of my body or something. It's like, yeah, it's very tricky to talk about. It sounds like almost wolf when you try to talk about it. But the felt sense of it is that my motivation or where I'm writing from is in some different part of my body.

I'm too low in the body or something. I don't know. It's just... a few heavy uh and then when i get it right there's there's a certain kind of nimbleness a certain lightness a playfulness but 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 yeah it's very closely related to posture and stance and like balance somehow uh yeah one of the things that comes out 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 confused space. 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. or even maybe scientific or mathematical. I know you're big on Grotendijk, Ingmar Bergman, Tarkovsky, but there are other kind of versions of this in Herzog and Nosgaard. I recently read the Steinbeck letters when he was reading East of Eden, another version of this. You also reference Grotendijk 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 maybe it ties to some other things you've written, is this wading into the confused space, or maybe even the unbalanced space, to steal from the earlier metaphor. I guess my question is, 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 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 we have any less mental models of all the situations and they are a little bit like square tiles sometimes. So you get the 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 stick, it's like your great game. your pre-existing 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 we had debris yeah and and that that part scares most people it's and it's very overwhelming it's like cognitively taxing to be sitting there like how like five minutes ago i understood this now i don't understand anything and and people try to like escape from that and like have all sorts of um like in the old sub desires to like reach cognitive.

Probably to see the world as this, like every, everything in the world is a square shape or a square frame. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what we sort of end up doing. You have like confirmation bios, just like the classic sample. Like you have to 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. I misread that when I originally read, 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 jordy music specifically writing down the things that he doesn't like yes exactly exactly because those that are like doesn't fit in that confuse him like his his mind's very good at filtering that and all their minds are very good at that yes it's it bounces off yes so so we have a tendency to want to protect our squares and like in in in in sort of cognitive I don't remember, but this is a character plan, maybe where they do research.

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 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? 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 get to that point, you start like taking 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 braving these shields like how do you like someone who's think they understand the separation how do you make sure that like you break their understanding so they end up confused again so they end up like breaking their tiles because again like to get back it off 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 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 briefly just spoke about this and you're sitting there with your pile of shapeless debris and you're just like almost at like rock bottom of understanding like there's no um 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 Nosgaard on what he calls sub-Bergman. He says, in order to create something, Bergman had to go 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 enamored 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 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've done that work to start to gradually put these pieces together and maybe still in the sort of circle?

Because that is a very cognitively uphill, emotionally uphill experience. Yeah, well. Yeah, it is. It is demanding, very demanding. I remember I, 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 and then 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 this is gonna sprawl endlessly it's gonna fall apart and then he said look well if it starts to sprawl 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 rashers.

Yeah, I'm lost in the woods. Having him say that, like, I've been through these woods many, many times, and the good stuff is on the other side of it. So painful, though. Yeah, and that made me like, okay, I'm going to try. And I think, actually, the one I wrote about Bergman and the Grotten Deck was the first one where I was like, I'm going to go through. For sure. uh the entire woods and johanna and i were from that for like three months or something it like ends up being a very simple piece in a way because that's 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 yeah and that can be humiliating too because people read it as like yeah of course like this is obvious but like i have spent three months getting there and so so there can be also temptation maybe to like shy away from it from that like i wanna

and keep it complex. Look 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, 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.

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 is the work that's inside there. Yeah, exactly. Because it might be fun to like think about that particular essay because it actually sort of started out in some ways sounding smarter than it ended up. Because like my first idea for that. The draft I wrote was sort of about this idea that our identities are interfaces and like, because 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 so 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, oh, and I had to throw up like this entire. complex apparatus I had built of theory. And I just take this line and I remember feeling that 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 Roth and Jack's wild notes.

And I had to read like 40 years of Bergman's notes. It was an extremely long process. And then I kind of ended up with something that is, it's always 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 with 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 it my feeling is is similar to your 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. Because, like, that project, when I wrote that, and that essay is called Cultivating a State of Mind, where you, I guess, are born, I think. And so when I wrote that, that was terror. That was, like, three months of sheer terror. baptismal fire almost where i like i learned right in a new way um but i think the thing i did wrong there was that i had sort of the outcome in mind i was clenching i was i wanted this to cohere too soon if you can instead um it's it's like it's like 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 a similar label. I'll end up on a path. Then that can be easier. So kind of unclenching and being like, there's no deadline on this. Like when things fall apart, you might 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. You have to really let go. And so that helps. And the only thing that helps is to go through the woods a few times. Because it's just like validated. Because the 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 horror. And then, oh, lo and behold, I ended up... with much more clarity and understood things that are 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 like journals in a year where I like it can difference but like some months I'll write 50,000 words in a month like where I'm just like endlessly sprawling and and then going do you delete them now I have I have them um I can think of like maybe if I have time something like I should edit some of that together and then publish it it could be like a fun sort of companion to the essays because I like to take the notebooks for from the last five years as I've written the 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 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 a hot 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 I can't pressure myself to see it at the time, yes.

Because then I'll pledge. So I'll just go around. And then when I look back, I find these kind of beautiful essays in there. I actually was rereading some diaries I wrote from maybe like two 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 the fun thing when I was rereading them was that, like, one, 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 I actually did that wandering. So now I try to be more persistent about going back, returning to those wandering. But, like, yeah, so I guess I tried to, 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 WV 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. It was like, I'm going to pick out the best of works of this. Yeah. It's funny. One, 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, 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. I'm such an unreliable narrator of the present, let alone. 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. You go on a dérive walk or whatever. In my experience, 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 like, one of the points you make about the notebooks is that it's the one place where Bergman isn't being observed. 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 von Trier or Vinterberg, like tying your hands behind your back.

finding ways to sort of create in ways that are deliberately constrained. Nausgaard forces himself to, I think, write five pages a day at certain times, and then eventually 25,000 words in 24 hours, which... Let's not dwell on that. That is dark. Imagine having agreed to publish that also. He did? Yeah, it's in book two of my struggle. And he's doing it like in the middle of like this being a controversy. So you know that, notice that like 500,000 people, like 10% of the population in Norway is going to read this.

And then he's done 24 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 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, 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 in 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 log 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 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 diary from, let's say, around when I turned 30, I can definitely, there's been some shift in my stance where I can clearly feel 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, 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 front page where I would write like on pay, on fold up two. I talk about Ivan Illich and then also on. fold up 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 make sure that I would go back to it and kind of enter into dialogue with my past self and like not have all of these thoughts, ways 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 like, 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 posting, I am doing these things. And that would be embarrassing in front of the audience of myself.

And so I would like, I'll learn that close. right it's almost like a ballerina in front of a mirror like looking at the movement of the leg and knows all like that's the wrong movement of the leg because that that's posing that's that's um cringe and and i guess i kind of without even thinking about it had that kind of reinforcement loop which helped me get into the right post so so whenever i write in the notebook now i i always like immediately go into the right post where i'm like open creative uh

willing to linger in confusion and so on whereas in other mediums like if i open the sub stack 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 that i'll in the whatsapp or different stance 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 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.

An old thing on, I think it was old, on Nick Cave. And maybe almost like a thesis of one of the things the notebooks can do. You're talking about this woman, Kelly, who... is writing into Nick Cave for advice on how to be creative, and she's struggling, she's blocked. You say, another way to make a distinction between them, Nick 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 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

uh, attend outwards. Listen, my notebook was just filled with like reflections about things I wrote, uh, things I saw that my kids were doing, uh, things that happened in nature, uh, conversation as, uh, happened. So I, I, I, I started to attend outward. Um, I made a note about that recently where, where's this, it's, 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 am I? Almost drawing a narrative around yourself as well.

And that's very complex. Like, I have no idea who I am. Like, we're such extremely complicated objects. Saying like what is Hamlet or like a short book is very hard. But we're like that times a thousand. Like we're going around having different experience and spots 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 I think a lot of people try to turn toward that. And that can just be confusing and navel grazing and so on.

But when I try to attune to things outside of me, like to my kids or to a book or to nature, I also have to connect to myself. But I'm connecting to myself as a subject. I'm going to connect 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 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, they do. Yeah, they are on a derivere, right? They are making, yeah, 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 as it's 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, like if you were trying to understand Nick Cave as an obvious, 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 data 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 shapes let alone algorithm shaped holes like we are we are trying to make ourselves legible the the modern certainly the internet is about making yourself legible in a way that is like cohesive enough and small enough and contain 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. 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're 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, where he's actually a very, very intellectual person and, like, spends enormous time reading and so on.

Like, that's not what... 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. And I think that extends into taking risks and agency and a 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?

You could imagine someone just trying to be chaotic. And using unpredictability as a path to getting towards, I'm 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, maybe something that is true. 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 uh i think think they're again better to like trying to orient like what what is exciting or what is alive and so on like it's maybe more what i would say is is what to aim for i was speaking about like when it comes to constraints and unpredictability i was thinking about cage young cage and lost material so they're both do very unpredictable work and we both use constraints a lot in the process.

So like Young Cage, he has this piece, I think, where he, he's set up a system and then he's using I. Xing or like sell endices 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 pictures, everything is like decided through this random system. I find, I mean, that's a fun experiment, but it's a horror to listen to in my ears. It's like, it can be interesting for a few minutes. 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 derivative 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. Exactly. 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 Young 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 Larsen Fee, but we could go with Brian Enois 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 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 bottom but and it will change it to a different combination and then you can push another bottom 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 now 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's the difference between him and Cage. And I would say then, again, that Lars von Trio, what he's doing when he's applying constraints on himself is something similar. He's applying constraints that limit him from doing the things that are easy and that he knows will work. He's a very, very talented with like framing and i mean if you look at the films he made in 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 only gonna use handheld camera there's gonna be Like, for a period where there was even no artificial lightning, and then he brought that back in.

And he has all these constraints that is forcing him to, like, remove all of 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 they're 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. So the tension here, I was going to say, 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 it, you know. in the ways that Eno is really good at just risking everything over and over again. And you also, I think, critically make the stipulation that he has upped his level of risk-taking gradually over time.

I think at one point you say, 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 Von Trier, is like, do we know, are his films actually better? 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 and relationships list, as we joked about last time, like maybe go back to the mental proprioception. It's about this like balance in your, self 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 Imagine that we're moving through a giant labyrinth, a maze.

And when it's not even like a normal labyrinth, it's like a high dimensional. It's going in like 100 dimensions at the same point. 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 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 are saying, I'm going to 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 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 said, you can't know in the forehand. And if you look at Lars von Trier, it's very clear that he's always like playing these rules on himself. 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 explorer exploit a bit, in some sense, yeah. Because he had a project that he started, I think, in the early 90s, where he was going to film for three 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 I guess you just have to try... different cars of the labyrinth. And yeah, I don't think there's like R1 stats. I like that a lot. It's funny that the arbitrary constraints to unpredictability or the hacking it or whatever, that's one version. Another version that maybe fits into that model is you talk about the context of Herzog, but it reminded me of the Steve Jobs thing as well.

It's this thing about Herzog just like being upset about doing things the proper way. 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 worried about the makeup, and he's obsessed with the golden light. Steve Jobs speaks about this at some point, and I think it's in the 80s, and he's talking about how they had some way of doing accounting for hardware, and you basically flub the numbers because there's no way to get the numbers exact.

It's just like, that seems dumb. Like we should just change it. And his point is he calls this like 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 of the labyrinth. And you're like, you come across a certain kind of like dilemma in the labyrinth. And it's just like, well, all conventional wisdom says that when you run across a... 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 yes yes a dice is just an example of a constraint And the thing you're talking about there with like 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 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 going to put this together in a new way. I'm going to be open to the fact that maybe we're not going to do makeup in this scene because we'd rather feel like right now the morning lights.

Yes. And be open for that because that's the right thing for Asesthetic and his kind of ethics of film. But they couldn't because they were so locked in. They had this kind of northern shield again, right? 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 the thing they're saying. Yeah, they're just like reapplying the same idea that they have framework. Like this is how we do it. It's going to be A, B, C. 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 uh 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 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 karma 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 counter argument to this framework would be that breaking away breaking apart all the tiles every time is obviously not tenable um and to your point earlier um 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. 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 speed run that faster? Like, how do you know when to? Maybe this is, again, going back to the unpredictability thing. Unpredictability is the goal in and of itself 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 said... a part of 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're doing it the feeling the podcast like setting up the you probably shouldn't reinvent that every time and let's make that an entire artistic thing because the thing you're trying to maybe if the focus for what you're doing with the podcast 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, then 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's very fast. Like it's 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 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. At the beginning of that, you had this little excerpt that kind of prompted it about Maude.

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, 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 it in the context of all this is like maybe it's similar to cost is 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 the labyrinth how do you think about updating your model of risk maybe maybe in the specifically in the like you know 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 off with move that was like six years ago and then maybe three years ago someday 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 uh change in your life it's very very hard to like update because i still kind of feel like the person i was like four years ago or something which is is not who I am now.

And so I probably, to get back to risk, I probably take way too little risk. I think all of us do, almost overwhelmingly. Maybe not Elon, but Peter Thiel. But specifically, in my case, I'm still, I haven't updated that I'm actually not struggling with money anymore. But that used to be like a... terror for me with with money for for many years and until me 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 make it 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 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 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. Yeah, well, someone told me. I would love to know. But I do think another thought that came up when you talked about risk is, and which I kind of guessed through that in my... last dance where we start, it kind of helps to think a little bit like a VC or something. 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. I'm 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 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 position yourself correctly so that your experiments have some likelihood of... paying off like most of them will fail but but you 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'm gonna say you're very concentrated you you like to the extent you are like 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 don't have a diversified basket on a relative basis. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And you see that when Albert Maslow did his research on like people are highly self-actualized. You see that, that they're making... concentrated vets in certain domains and and they're not like 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 way 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 wrong thing yeah yeah well what's the thing you're trying to do and and then just yeah i guess and then steve jobs again like to get back to clothes like be used for the same clothes every day because that doesn't have to think about that and uh and there's no friction like it's very what about um 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 four years into this. Now you're five 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, how wide is my aperture? Am I taking enough risk? Am I trying enough other things? Do I just keep doing? This thing, like, and 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, because 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 sort of things that would be very, very valuable for other people I could make. And I would also probably earn a lot of money by doing those things. And sometimes I think it's 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. And that thing is just sort of a personality trait, right? I am someone who's seeking and trying to fix. 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, not changing plans all the time. Because I mean, there are certain things I have done.

Like I am only doing the newsletter. That's the only thing I do. I don't take on any other work, basically. And so I've locked down that. But then I'm keeping some aperture inside of that bell because otherwise I just rebel and quit the whole thing. But conversely, you've talked about a world where 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. You've alluded in your writing to a world where in the future, 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.

It's easy for me to imagine a future for you that is like Henrik wrote essays in the barn for 20 years and maybe the output of that. among other things, is that you write, as you say, a few good essays. 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 where the ways you lean in that way very much at the like the edge on my thinking I'm gonna be incoherent that's that's hopefully the goal with a little bit of this yeah and yeah I'm struggling with these thoughts 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, and for the last year, I've been like, should, what's the next step for that? And I haven't figured that out. But I think 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 I free up more time.

Because right now the blog is like taking everything from me. And that'd be interesting to like carve out so that I work on the blog three days a week. 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 six days a week on the blog at some point i'm going to get very boring because i 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 to do those things in order to like feed the main things. I guess I'm maybe trying to find some way of making those things work together. And I haven't figured that out because... 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 cute? Or is it riskier to try all these other things and like lose the plot? And I think that the root of it, at least how I would relate to it and what I, my reading of you is very attuned.

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 six 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. And one thing that comes to mind when I'm talking about this topic and like, I think seeing it maybe a little bit more clearly as we talk, if 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 Andrew Fragile, he talks about in certain kinds of jobs, like if you have a normal nine to five job, 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. We're anti-fragile because you're planning buffers in your spending and so on to handle swings. And if there's a downturn, your salary is only going to get cut 20%. You're not going to get cut 100%. 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 failing me that I should do and there's these book deals I could do and so on. Earn me more money. It will have more impact. Short term. But 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. eligible diverse bets that that will make my situation now more unstable my income go to up and down and so on but it's probably over time a less risky path oh but that yeah that's that's my current slot 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 version of that. Yeah. And I've had that thought like on and off, 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 if I were just to spring to that goal, 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 consciously started to be a little bit unpredictable, a little bit I would drop my cadence. I would go silent for a month. I would throw curveballs and breakballs, different stuff. And that just slowed my growth quite a lot. And I shurned a lot of subscribers. But it meant that I had the permission a year later when I could, again, in that slower path, get to the point. Now I knew I had the permission.

I can go silent for a month. It enabled you to go farther and to go longer. Yeah, because I was afraid. Otherwise, I'd just be. So I do already have a lot of latitude in here. 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 can kind of sit next to knowing yourself well enough to know that you have to go slow to go longer or something.

And I think the challenge, it's... I'm trying to build up and attune in myself to better identify just fear and risk aversion when that's all it is. Because when you're an analytical person or an introspective person, you could talk yourself into a lot of things. Oh, I'm publishing slower because... Which is why the very Silicon Valley advice, which is just like go faster more, be more agentic, I think generally tends to be pretty good. But the challenge then too is Silicon Valley is not, 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. And I have to be because I am the sole provider of my family. I have to be risk averse. I can't take those kinds of bets. 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? Well, maybe I'm projecting or assuming, but my assumption would be in the same way that I think I don't have that much time.

And I, if you spend 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, my assumption would be that if you were in your 25-year-old's 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 lack of...

knowledge and and as a 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 fry now it's like 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 and i had to like write get up and that's five in the morning and bright and stuff and i was like and they were sitting there five in the morning and you're super tired like like why didn't i do this before i had to get it soon yeah one little thing uh this week a friend asked me about what i want and it's very like um specifically like desire in

And I'm curious how you think about that as it relates to attunement. In the specific sense of sort of like really wanting something. Almost like I'm not quite even sure. It kind of caught me off guard in my inability to answer her question. When you think about maybe everything we just spent the last 20 minutes talking about. How, whatever. Some people really want money and they get money. Maybe they're not fully aware how bad they want that. But I like the word desire. I think that word in itself. does a lot of good work here.

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 to a weird person who wants to write essays and so on. Or it's up to you to see if it transfers to any other domain. But I find that it's very important 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 treat myself all the time so um 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 i'm gonna do And I see it with all my reflections on the Brother Karamasu, right?

And then I stopped working on that. And then I was like, no, I'm actually just going to try and do first our friends. I'm actually not excited about Brother Karamasu. I'm actually excited about the things that are feeling light, open, playful, like galloping down the street. We're 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 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... I can calculate that that's a good thing to do. And I sometimes think that I want that. But the thing I want is the thing that makes me feel playful and loose in my body. And they're often almost embarrassing, in some sense, those things. So as I like that word, what is making your blood boil a little bit? And often...

I find that they are hard to explain. It's like certain ideas, 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 Sunbei Bale, book six on the calculation of volume. This is the repeating day. Yeah, exactly. Which we did book six 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. It's 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 funeral the closer friends and like and then at sometimes you would have to try find some parents you know if you were living backwards and like because eventually would have to climb back into a woman who would like carry you further into the past and can travel yourself this is a very strange thing right But I got very excited about that idea.

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 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 three minutes in my head. But I got excited about it. There's a lift. Yeah, there's a lift. And I can't explain, like... that's not an obvious escape in the flatland essay or something i don't know where that's going and maybe it will end up most likely when it 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 yes 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 library it's a nice compliment to aliveness which is a word you use so often and talking about the writing you you talk about like a lightning bolt in your body but it it feels like those two things are operating in a similar parts of the of our inner space maybe yeah yeah i guess i guess aliveness is is like the catchphrase for for that but but yeah today i'm feeling galloping down the street is this is better because it's more visceral because alive is like a little bit of a dead word well that i was i was gonna i i don't think i need to ask i think that is it's 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 out with it too many times, it sort of gets dulled.

Yeah. It's important to find new ways to hold it. I don't know if I've told this story before, but it's a lovely sort of apocryphal story about a mental institution in Copenhagen. I think it was called Mental Institution, right? And at some point, they started feeling that was maybe a little bit old-fashioned, like Cold War, so how they wanted to change it to... It's like you're at the hospital or something. I don't know. But they had this beautiful card stone in front of the house where it said mental institution. And they're like, what should we do?

And then at some meeting, someone had the brilliant idea. Can we just flip the stone over and we can write the new name on the other side? That's a brilliant idea. They went out, flipped the stone, and then it said Idiot Asylum. Because, like, words will get destroyed. So there is this continual noob of having to rename this place because whatever name they picked for it should be drag of the dirt. Fonts know a lot of things. That's good. 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 and i decide so let's go technical when you have a larger population as you have in the center in the big city and the mainstream they are going to filter harder they're going to be like a bandwidth pass so it's it's very very hard to get an idea to catch on in a big population um because they are Cause 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, 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 if you go into like a Discord or like a group shot, the 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 their 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 it gets passed on to bigger and bigger populations. So therefore, like almost all the good ideas needs to start out in the friendship because if in the middle, it would be censored. In the middle, it wouldn't catch on. And of course, we can all be in the center and the fringeships at the same time and go back and forth. But yes, we need the fringeships.

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, we interviewed Nadia Asperova, made like an interesting point in her book, Antimimetics, where she talks about like the evolution of the internet like you had until like 2016 or whatever. There was this gradual centralizing force towards social media. And then, of course, that blew up in massive, crazy ways.

And then you've had this gradual trickle into group chats. And what God does is sort of supercharging nomadic evolution because you're having people connected to the main population, to be grouped on Twitter or whatever. 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 to accelerate the rate of natural of evolution you you can change the the topology of the groups if you put everything in in a big blob in the middle

uh it's gonna 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 that structure is called like an amplifier of natural selection because it's if it's you structurally precisely right you can dial up the speed of evolution. And it could be argued. I'm not sure that's the case. What's happening on the internet is that we've now with group chats dialed up the rate of evolution by having these evolutionary breeding lagoons where you're having the most bizarre mutations in group chats.

And then they're getting spawned back into the feed and that goes into different group chats. And I guess that depends on like how much time spent people spending group chats versus defeat 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 delivered 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 do.

We could do so 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 the 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 they're sweet Many tools for this, like Discord and Substack has their own chat apps.

And then I use the chat with the people who are behind the paywall. I still think we lack the proper tools, but I can't figure out what would be the correct shape for this. Because it's a very tricky thing of like, you want to have a hierarchy in these days. And you're questioning at that. There's a hierarchy around my blog where I am. sort of the alpha male of my blog and i have much more reach and i can affect 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 yes and the problem like with with the open comment section for example is that it tends to like dragged quality a little bit down because people yeah certain people we very like reaching out and want to connect and 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 trying to reach out they don't have any friends maybe then the more people that could contribute more feel like this is maybe less amateur hour.

I'm not going to contribute there. And then they instant email me. So I have like the interesting conversations, also 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 by the people who are having like the most high quality conversations or like we have a hierarchy and, but I don't know what the structure of that is.

It's probably going to be controversial for some people that you're ragging people. But I think it's important that you can control those things, the flow of information. And we don't really have the right tools. It's not easy to do. I think it's quite interesting that we have a very good structure for the very vertical creator-audience relationship. And we have very good wide-open egalitarian, kind of horizontal. Well, yeah, there's very little resolution in that space between in the like vertical and the horizontal, maybe. You wrote about, and I'm using space in a different way here, but like almost like air gaps in time between publishing work.

You said, I expect 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 that forest of confusion again. When I write the first draft of something, and ideally the first draft of it is just nil to myself in my journal, that's just me exposing what I already think.

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. It's 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 I start smashing it to pieces. It's, it's in that process where I'm actually updating how I think that the, how I actually, yeah, get, 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 gonna hold it yeah i'm gonna 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? And that sucks a little bit because it means I can almost never rest on my laurels, so to speak. Because whenever I write a good essay, like I'm putting in hard work, I'm 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 feel like, oh, I've built such body of work. That's never how it feels to me. It's always like, well, I wish I had that interesting room. I was hanging out with 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 they are valuable to hold for that reason, because it's nice to have a nice room that I can hang in. It's almost selfish. Yeah, and also because when I am in that room, I am thinking about things that are valuable to me. That way of framing certain ideas, those stories are putting me in a mind state where I am able to 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... closed that door and i'm i would have usually become a better father than i was before but i'm i'm even better it's like an active lens you you write somewhere about like writing about things almost 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 is both one, something great about that because it's being compressed and offered, but there's something, yeah, I really, my thought was going to be like, man, I really worry if you write a book.

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 three years on a project, it's going to be a part of your life.

Like that was when my kids learned to bike and like everything is in that book. Yeah, I'm not born on a book. So, well, I don't know. But I think that is to some degree like, The core reason I write is just like sort of a meditative practice. Because if you meditate, you're going to put yourself in a certain state. And as they say, the NASA people, they were sitting in a deprivation tank. They get out, they 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. Yes. 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. 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, I'm shouting at myself here briefly. You wrote about Johanna reflecting on, I guess she was reading the transcript of 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 uh like if i we talk about that like but if i were to like be hit by a bus right i am we're homeschooling together and well like with the first that i am the sold income and like like her life would be very very very difficult to have that happen and and um and so it's important like both to like plan for that eventuality uh or but 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 a little bit easier for me since I 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 lives to stand on. But then as you say, it is something we think about all the time. Would it be better for us to be in a city, be surrounded with more of a scene?

i think it's like valuable to like try to weigh these things like how are we constructing the context environment around ourselves like because like when we made a decision where we live now we didn't think we would ever like earn any money we were we wanted a homeschool so it had to be cheap like and now we can see about like maybe we could actually yeah live in a city and actually afford a homeschool and like So maybe we should update. It's important to go through these. So now that the situation is different, does it still make sense for us to live on a cheat 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. And we like the local community there. We like nature. And especially we just like to have a lot of time on our own. A lot of space. Come back to it. Because I remember when we lived in the city, both of us, but especially me, I'm just like, yes, man. I knew everyone in town. I couldn't go through the city because it was like a city of 200,000.

I couldn't go through the city without running into someone. It was always getting dragged into cafes and then it would be a party. I can't say no to things. There's so many exciting things and I'm always talking. yeah i constrained 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 it priorities like who am i actually 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 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. um or a loose grip or something that is not about a lack of conviction but a 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 uh especially with if they are like curious agent people who are like doing different things and are like uh made a little bit disagreeable can push on you it's the spheres yeah yeah exactly and and and 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 you for perspectives advice and they say like Their opinions go in completely different directions.

Sorry, again, I get confused. 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 saying the opposite thing. Because that just blows my head open and I get confused. And then I can maybe, maybe 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 priding 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 sometimes I find that solitude is maybe slower, but better. And sometimes I just want to make. fast people like fast decision then they have students talk to three different people you want to cycle through the different modes too yeah something quick but i i just really liked it um 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 um 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 go on to talk about Philip Glass and the way he thinks about composing music for films and leaving space versus the internet, 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 um at least for you that makes you really learn about yourself or get closer to yourself well i think um is it empson it talks about like the seven types of ambiguity because i think that's 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 it's not reaching closure in itself, like compared to like a film class next to the stage or beginning, like a commercial, it's like a perfectly close, like everything fits together.

And the, 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 to enforce that message that there's like, no, they don't want you to, no interpretation. Yeah. Whereas like when you, you start removing things and like creating some, uh, 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 you you actually in the historical record we know exactly why that person did that thing but he goes through and like deletes that because that then because then you have like why is he you know killing his wife or whatever you don't know that and when you don't know there's everyone can like project different things in it and and and different actors can play this place in different ways and there's like so much space for 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 in 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. So therefore... But it also spits you out. Because if you've ever read Shakespeare, it's hard work. Because it's like you have to stop at every other line and fill in.

And what does that word mean? And how should I interpret that? So it's exhausting to fill in now. To read anguish work compared to propaganda or Twitter or something where there's less of that. And so it has those twin things of 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 want to be with myself now but you will also be close to yourself because you have been half forced to pull from yourself but that's my read on what is happening in those situations where where piece art or piece of writing uh bring speedy 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 a 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 a 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.

Usually the other way around. Usually the skill, as with Shakespeare, as with Kafka, the skill is removing. Yes. It's almost like this game of like, what is it called? Like there's this game where you have like these blocks. Jenga. Yeah. And like a good. 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 stat yes but it's somehow still standing which by the way it's no surprise that many of these worlds we 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 do like build a very compact thing where there's a full set jenga block of of narrative writing that's the usa so I like that.

I like that a lot. But something that... Okay, again, another thought is on the edge of my thinking. What you're saying, because there's very strong incentives today to write in ways that fill all the holes, to write propaganda, to write these obvious things if you look at what's trending on Substack or whatever your asset is. Yeah, yeah. It's all like... These cliches that get filled up with fluff words and just reinforcing what people ought to think there's no space to fill in that. And I noticed that myself. If I were to use the techniques that Kafka or Shakespeare use of making things gnarly and hard to interpret and the ways they did it, I wouldn't have any readers.

There's a tension because I want to provide that space, but at the same time, in order to have readers, I need to make my writing very clear, very easy to read on your phone on the toilet. If it's going to spit you out, it needs to be very easy to get into. Yeah. And there's an obvious tension because the easiest way to make something that is ambiguous is to reflect more like modernist poetry or something. But again, it's like a constraint. I'm not allowed to use those tricks. I'm not allowed to, like, elliptical kind of brain.

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, and at the same time opens those spaces? I'm not sure I always succeed, but I think it's an interesting challenge. 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 sentences. Maybe some of his sentences are obscure, but it's quite simple language and somehow it still creates these things.

But yeah. Well, you talk about this a little bit when you talk about like 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? How do you talk about these things in a fresh way? 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, one way I think about it is sort of like 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, this 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 above, like. love or emotions it's interesting to like i'll bring in some polstoi and some machine learning like because they're like from different domains and if i can like weave them together yeah uh i can write them quite simply i can see a few simple things about machine learning a few simple things about polstoi but the way they kind of clash produces this kind of ex these resonances that are bigger uh and so And I think that's one way I try to create these spaces while using simple leverage by juxtapositioning ideas from different fields and so on.

And another good thing about it that I've found is that it helps bridge those domains. So I have a lot of my readers who are programmers and they can then... maybe resonate and understand what Tolstoy is doing in the world. Yeah, because you're connecting that and then vice versa, right? So it's valuable. There is a thread that I find myself coming to, maybe two words that stand out. One is sort of, and I realize this one's especially 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. 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. I think it's at the end of the piece, and it's very, very powerful. You're writing about Maude. You say, the reason having Maude 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, too, 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 Maude. 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 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 this trueness and search of trueness. Let's stay with conviction. I think that can probably come from multiple directions. I mean, it's personal people that's just easier. They're kind of disagreeable people. and 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 and the good thing about that was it was sort of happy duration in the good sense that i but being forced to stand up for my convictions i i had to like go through this entire process of 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 even less than 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 in those states. Another way of. like securing your conviction or acting on what you believe, that's been used a lot historically to say that, like, if I do not do this, I betray God.

I wrote that down. You said, thinking of the work in religious terms as a service to or a search for God, Bergman, Grothendieck, 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 I mean, that's, if we're going to be like, I'm atheist, I'm going to be like very like crass about what that mental move is doing. It's just like hijacking or conformity bias.

Like we have a tendency to like want to bow our heads to authority. And then if you just like inventing an authority, which is all seeing and all powerful, and then you give them your idolized values, then there's a hijacking your innate. drive to 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 cliche, but like we all have something we can contribute to. Like we. The universe itself is just so extraordinary. Like with everything like quantum particles and black balls 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 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 ah maybe it's sort of a force toward higher complexity that like when you leave the planet like The fight against entropy has been won.

Civilization is a little bit more coherent. We have better theories of the world. We have richer relationships. We have more diversity and perspectives. I don't know. It's like being a force. Whereas it feels... It would be super boring if the universe was just like rocks floating in dead space. 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.

Because I am not all that important in myself. Of course, I value myself. because i get to live them i have to live in my body but but what matters more to me is just it's 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 the like the song is and the music was going on kept going yeah and was hopefully like going in an even better direction because people around you had to grow and that were playing more interesting things and so on we talked about this a bit last time but it is um 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 spignew 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 also spoke about, with David Perel, about like this kind of hard and soft together. So like a... 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 hard and soft when interfacing with the world is that the world can be a 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 creamy as you can like um and we don't have to think about like the big horrible things but just like in your life um in a relationship like you you want to be able to see the ways you are failing as a father or husband you want to see the friction you want to be able to like sit with those uncomfortable things uh and that requires some hardness i don't know if that's the right word but it requires a certain like non-naivete it's a certain forcefulness and strength and just like facing these painful things because uh unless you can't 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 short that's the most ethical good interesting path for the labyrinth and um

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 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, 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 terrible place i'm not going to trust anyone whatever and and that's not going to help you navigate yeah also at the same time i have to get back to that galloping down the road being playful being soft because it's 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 reality test and we've talked about it in terms of creative work that it's uh connecting to these 12 senses that that lets you do good creative work but it's also true in all the mates 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 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 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 you you got curious there you stopped and you went off script and asking so what do you believe in that was sort of because you were genuinely curious about that and and it felt like It 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, 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 shyness and 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 i you brought it up like even this what i do is so hard to and there's i could 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 like, it's this balance again. It's like, can I stay right in the middle of this, like, asserting, receiving? Yeah, but so much of it, 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 is this 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 talk about, like different aspects of that, those felt senses.

I think that's, 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 thing to pursue. I have a few more things. A couple of just quick miscellaneous things. Your essays are short. 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 sub stack.

Yeah, they'd gotten shorter. I think I used to sort of average 4,000 words. Now I've probably averaged 3,000 words. I think 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 us to sprawl everywhere, but just like, I want to. make sure that each essay is its own little small rub and like not having i used because if i look at my mother's they are actually like three rubes put together and because i didn't feel like it was enough yeah and just like trusting that this one thing is enough yeah uh so and also simplifying it's like i prune my writing a lot like i 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 it can be a way of like putting you in a state more because you they 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 it 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 lab? How does this connect? What does this action mean? That there is 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 that will lead yeah yeah it's the jenga tower too yeah i want to be you should just be able to scroll through it and read it and be short but you should also be able to read it i mean i have some people have told me that the red center of my s is like 50 times and and uh and and and and that's wonderful if you can create something that people can come back to and 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.

To be able to run, you need to build up many parts of your body, your muscles and your legs, your heart. If you want to be a good runner, you have to develop your mental wellness and understanding of, you know, you taught me about 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 to become the kind of person that can run a marathon. Right.

And that takes six months at least, probably several years. And the same thing is true, writing, reading and writing. But reading, and I think a lot of people kind of misunderstand that because they can read a little bit and then they think like, oh, this is the year about us. can't read it and i'm like i'm gonna do alec arena and it's like that's like saying i'm gonna do a marathon on my first training run right and everyone runs too fast and too far when they start exactly and and enough you get the same and it's just like trusting that you what matters in reading it's just like gradually gilding up your capacity to to process words your References, understanding, like if you're reading Dante, like there's going to be references to a million things and poems going to do much better if you understand those references and so on.

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 thought it was very hard to read. And now I read it and I was like, this is like a romance novel.

It's very easy. But that's because I've built up the capacity. I think about how 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 that's not how it works, right? Because like, I used to write a bunch of essays about how I write my essays.

And I'm 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 take at least five years of like deliberate hard effort of like becoming because yeah you have to like literally rewire your entire brain and and i think that's sort of under appreciated And again, with the agency, people say you can just do things.

But if you're the kind of person where your parents abused you and no one's ever believed in you and you get intense anxiety at the thought of putting your foot forward, you can't just do things. It's going to be a very long process of rebuilding yourself into the kind of person who can just do things. But it's also a hopeful image 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 not burn out by expecting too much of yourself. But that kind of gradual increasing of strength and the little practice. I found an old draft of Looking for Alice that you linked to in a footnote, a 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. I just forgot on the phone.

Yeah, that was cut from the phone that I said. Why is love a lot like that? Um, because love as compared to like, you know, catuation or something, uh, is a deep knowledge, 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 you're so intimate with that person if you actually like have looked at them and understand them and um 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 um well it's not it's not that that's not strictly direct 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 part 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 it's almost like acquiring the skill of loving someone. And then sometimes if you show that to someone else, it might not make sense, right? Let's take some very obvious example. Let's say some people have an open relationship. Because they look at each other and they realize that we're totally okay with each other sleeping on other people. And that feels very beautiful and fragile and close for them and totally respecting each other's idiosyncratic feelings and so on. Another person might look like that and say, 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 the soup often subtle versions of that in all relationships, if you're actually allowing that relationship to grow into a shape that is fitted to the people involved. You write about authors as your friends. Authors are our friends. They are odd people who talk to us, sometimes from across the grave. When Ioana and I talk, we'll say Tomas and mean Transtroma, 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 it 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 sort of 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 of 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, 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 it's not that many people who have been in that situation, like none of my friends have.

So it's hard to talk about these things, but I feel like I can sort of bounce against his experiences and I don't. I think I'll do the same thing as he. We don't disagree. But it does feel like I can sit there and talk with him. And I think I always have that feeling. I get this impression that a lot of people put authors on pedestals. And I see people even do that with myself, which is super weird to me. Because as I know, obviously, you're 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 as if I'm, like, some kind of thing. And I'm like... You are the dictator of the blog, but... Yeah, sure, I am. But, like, it's so strange when 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'm in the room, man. Like, I'm just, like, I'm doing the dishes and my kids are playing. Like, I'm in the room. You don't... I hate to put me up there.

And I think the same is true. And if you approach people like that, if you approach Dostoevsky like that, which you realize, like, they're all very Yuba. They're 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. There's like nothing. 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 a 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 snow plow clearing the roads through the pine forests, the feeling, if any, his last night when Maude 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 senior 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 be with us. And so as I sort of grew up very close, he would take me camping and he was a very down-to-earth kind of person. So those moments are usually a very important thing.

And then maybe not so typical for the culture on the earth that he came from. He came from very, very, very poor circumstances, grew up without electricity. and everyone was like very martial and so on and to be like grow up to you be the kind of person who's that takes care of kids and like is very soft in many ways but it was also very very hard oh there's so many interesting things about him there's one beautiful little story about like that sense a lot about how he was was when he was i think he was four years old he on on saturdays they would get uh sugar duke And I would put it over fire to make it like a caramel.

And he did that and I put it in and then 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 seven 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 targeted person, but I'm very, very extremely determined to do well, 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 shares? 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 of 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 the nurses told us that there was another elderly woman in a wheelchair who was sort of having a panic attack, I guess. 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, couldn't do anything. But he just got up and, like, moved slowly over and, like, took her head. And then he just sat there, like, for two hours just holding her hand because he could still sense that, like, she was getting calm by him holding her head.

So, like, to the very end, he was just doing, was always looking for ways of, like, being obvious to other people. And he never... cared at all about him. He was never self-centered in any way whatsoever. And when he died, he instructed that he didn't want a grave. He wanted to be just put in the communal grave and without any placacy. I think he just felt like his work was done. Now he'd like... He was here to be of service. And he also, like, I think made it the atheism prompt from him.

Like, he didn't believe in a life after this. He just believed with, like, being of service in views 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 seer apartment next door, basically. And that was set up so they would have some time to say goodbye through life in a gradual way. So during those years when we lived there, we hung out. Well, in the beginning, every day, he would just like barge into the house all the time.

And it 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 and had a 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 was like, no, it's the day of the potatoes. And so he just goes out and starts like, I can't let the 87-year-old.

plant all the potatoes so like standing there with pasta suet on or plant the potatoes it's just yeah he wanted to do the right thing and all the time um so that was very important to the special experience to we spent three years where he was like the closest friend i had like i spent more time with him than anyone else and that was split between 25 and 28 like a very formative period in my life and i 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 the 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. It's a red light toss burner. Yeah, there's certain... Usually they're not, like... There's a few lines that I like to repeat where, like, a sentence encapsulates a simple time and an important thought.

but many of the ones I'm trying to from more like a mood almost. Oh, there's a, one that I often return to and I think I have never eyes in Swedish was called the, I don't know that in English is maybe like a short pause in the Oregon concert by John Stern, which is, it's beautiful kind of rendition of him going into a church and experiencing. A certain connection to the human condition that comes out very strongly in that scene where he's standing in the church. And I think there's certain lines in there where he's talking about 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 and and and that there's like waves going through it all the time and everything changing i'm butchering the images but but i there's something about that which poem which you should link uh that that puts me back into a like 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. But it was one of my favorite things he 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 that is a lot of what it comes down to. 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 and roads to be cleared. 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 hundred gatherers have, like, blown. colored pigments on their hands, leaving those on the wall. That'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 an integrated place where all of that lives, not just individual episodes, but the entire body of work at Dialectic. My site, 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.