41: Henrik Karlsson: Strolling Through Life's Labrynths

[00:00] 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 that sooner or later I'll end up on a path. Then that can be easier. I started indexing my diaries. What happened, I think, when I did that was that I became my own audience. It's almost like a ballerina in front of a mirror. Imagine that we're moving through a giant labyrinth, a maze. [00:30] 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 [01:00] ground because you 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 going to be able to fill that square. And I think the same is true with our mental model. But if you kind of get into that confused 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

[01:30] 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. 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 [02:00] 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 [02:30] 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. [02:54] 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

[03:24] 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 [03:43] what we do with the short time we are here. This was a meaningful one to me, and I hope you enjoy it. You can learn more about the episode and get links, full transcript, all of that, at dialectic.fm 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. [04:13] 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 [04:43] to speak to, just trying to like get inside their brain for a little bit before we talk. And the second is the actual conversation, getting to be truly present with them and explore all of the ways their mind works. It's been amazing to see how Notion AI and agents can help me with everything on both sides of that. Custom agents, which just launched a few weeks ago, expand this even more. Essentially, you can take something really small, a simple bit of information that everyone on your team might need to query or something large, like how do I end to end prep a dialectic

[05:13] Again, I don't want to delegate the actual research, but... [05:16] 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. [05:46] it and notion is my partner along the way if you don't use notion or haven't tried it in a while you can check it out at notion.com slash dialectic with that here is my second conversation with Henrik Carlson [05:59] hannah carlson here we are we're back yes we are round two in the flesh knock on wood on uh on video [06:08] Exactly. Nice to be with you. We are not in your home. I should establish right up front. So you are not obligated to any of the aesthetic choices. Although I think this is a fun room to be in. Yeah. [06:18] It is an old mill, and I do land in an old mill, so it's almost right. Spiritually. Wrong island or wrong landmass, but... [06:26] right corner of the world. So we'll take it. We're back in Copenhagen. [06:30] Okay, I want to start with maybe two not obviously related ideas. [06:37] You have somewhere where you say that in English, we spend attention.

[06:43] In Spanish, we lend attention. [06:46] And in Swedish, as I understand it, we are attention. [06:52] Yeah. [06:54] Hopefully I don't have that totally wrong. Rough, at least directionally. You also tweeted recently a couple of... [07:01] 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. [07:19] And then you also wrote, this is in a piece where you're reflecting on [07:23] The ways that children lose the magic, maybe. You say, [07:47] Thank you. [07:48] And [07:49] As I reflected on your writing, [07:51] you actually come back again and again to a – [07:55] 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. [08:04] and [08:05] 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.

[08:21] Yeah, I've used that phrase, like the importance of being bored of law. [08:26] Like right now, I saw it in your notes before, and instead of thinking about that word boring, I think it's maybe... [08:32] the wrong word, because it's, [08:35] It's not because... [08:37] boring might feel like you're [08:39] That's a bad feeling. I guess I'm saying more [08:43] it. [08:44] under-stimulators, that you're supposed to be [08:47] not externally stimulated. Because if you remove external stimulations like rewards and status and YouTube videos and anything, that keeps you kind of activated. [08:59] then [09:00] You will feel bored. [09:02] At first, perhaps, but then eventually then you will, because we're like curiosity driven animals that have like rewards inside of us to seek out new stimuli, we'll start to sort of generate that internally. So we'll have start to daydream or we'll start to like pay attention to the flowers around us or whatever. [09:21] will be curious about and start researching something or writing something. So, [09:26] I think it's a sort of question of like removing stimuli, um, [09:31] Still Kids. [09:32] point for those kind of maybe slightly more lower tuned kind of stimuli that comes from inside kind of bubble up. [09:41] and uh [09:42] Why I just thought a freak hero is from being boring. It's because I guess... [09:47] uh [09:49] boring is in a sense being predictable maybe uh like you can't from what you've observed me determine what i'm gonna say next that would be boring but the more you're

[10:02] steered by what comes from the outside, the more predictable you're going to be by the data from outside and the more [10:08] You're sort of generating your own decisions internally and from your own, like whatever that is. [10:13] that's an open source of surprise. So I think if you attune to that and over many years... [10:21] build up a richer and richer sense internally, that would be a source of surprise. And that's why you kind of end up being more interesting. [10:29] if you care about that. [10:33] Feels like maybe that's like the wrong way to frame it, like being not boring or... [10:37] interesting because that feels like it's [10:40] for other people. [10:42] I think it's like [10:44] Better to think about like it will make you feel more alive. Yeah. Yeah. [10:48] 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... [10:56] had a conversation. I interviewed Sian Bannister and the first time I ever met Sian before I interviewed her, [11:02] we had a conversation about boredom and she said, [11:06] said something along the lines of like, I never bored, like I try never to be bored. And we I was kind of debating over this, because I think we were having a similar disagreement, that wasn't really a disagreement to what you and I are talking about now, which is this kind of boredom that [11:20] Thank you. [11:21] leads to all the things coming in. It's actually more like space. [11:25] cyan and it was funny i was reading some of some other writing of yours and cyan uses this word that you also use which is dereve and this kind of

[11:36] not totally aimless, but semi-intentional drift captures a little bit of the same thing, which is like, [11:44] I'm calling that boredom, which is like meandering or walking or just sitting and wondering and daydreaming. [11:51] But to your point, [11:53] that is actually about [11:56] letting all kinds of things in that are going to surprise you or not necessarily like let you. But it's interesting. I loved our interview with Xi'an. [12:06] I was... she's so interesting. She's not boring. [12:11] at all. They leave. I was in Spain recently with my caves and, um, we were, we were in Malaga and, uh, [12:18] Unlike the Feste where they're [12:21] Uh... [12:22] I had some plans because it was just me and the kids because Johanna has working at Lick, so she was in the apartment the day after. [12:29] I had to entertain the kids in the evening again, and I didn't have any plans. And so I just told them they were doing a derivative, right? [12:39] Much better pronunciation than mine, by the way. I don't know French, so I'm also digging. And the age-year-olds are like, what's the name of me? And I said, we're just going to go off an 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 until we can't see anything more, and then we, you know. [13:00] And then you decide again. And it was very interesting to notice how alive they came. [13:06] 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 construction sites and finding all these nooks and crannies.

[13:16] And it just made us so much more alive than when we were going to these places. [13:21] 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, [13:28] Where do I actually want to go now? [13:30] Oh, [13:31] 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. [13:45] to figure out what would be most interesting. So you could see that you just started galloping down the street, like the kids just came alive. [13:53] And I felt the same, but you see it in the kids some more because they... [13:56] It's in the bodies. But I think we all kind of have that sense of like, you're talking about a dance down this week when you... [14:02] take that con to like a change yourself. [14:05] Yeah, it's a state of attention. I can't remember. It's possible we even spoke about this last time, but in the [14:11] In the Robert Irwin biography, he and Terrell and some guy at NASA go into the sensory deprivation room. [14:18] And they sit in there for like eight hours. It'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... [14:28] Everything is so, and 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. Yeah. [14:44] maybe the painters have know it best, which is just look and really see, look and really see. And you will be quite surprised by what is actually there. I'd like to talk about something that you've

[14:56] 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. [15:08] My job as an essayist consists to a large extent in putting myself in the right state for the thoughts to come out right. That's something you continue to come across, come back to over and over again, this form of exhaust. [15:21] 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. [15:37] 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. [15:52] Thank you. [15:53] I [15:55] 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 isn't it working? And I was feeling all this resistance, and [16:14] And, um, [16:15] It wasn't fun at all. [16:17] And then, like, I guess two days ago, I decided, like, I'm going to... [16:21] put the thing I'm working on aside, which felt like a very good and important essay such as that.

[16:27] I had made some good progress on and I'm just going to work on this thing that no one cares about at all. And all of a sudden everything came loose and that turned out very lovely and it was just so easy. So again, I had sort of what I realized was that I tricked myself up and like, [16:41] thinking that the essay I was working on would be [16:44] a big, important essay. [16:46] 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... [16:53] Maybe I'm over focusing on the metaphor, but it's about balance. [16:57] I think so. More so than even leaning one way or another way. [17:02] Yeah, it feels like, I mean... [17:05] putting the weight in different parts of my body or something. It's like, it's, [17:10] Yeah, it's very tricky to talk about. It sounds like almost wool when you try to talk about it. But the felt sense of it is that... [17:17] my [17:18] my motivation or where I'm [17:20] writing from is like in some different part of my body. I'm like too low in the body or something. I don't know. Like it's just [17:27] I feel heavy. [17:29] And then when I get it right, there's a certain kind of nimbleness, a certain lightness, a playfulness. Like, again, as... [17:36] I feel like the kids when they're galloping down the street. It's just like I get... [17:40] this kind of fluid movement in my body. [17:42] it's very closely related to posture and stance and like [17:48] balance somehow. [17:50] Yeah. [17:51] One of the things that comes up over and over, um, [17:55] especially as you kind of seep into...

[17:58] the ways you write about other people is you're just kind of obsessed with this [18:04] 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. [18:16] 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 Grothendijk, 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. [18:46] known and the pattern i kind of you call it a building up ability to perceive evolution of their own thought but what i see this almost as and it may be it's ties to some other things you've written is like this like wading into the confused space or maybe even the unbalanced space to steal from the earlier metaphor um [19:06] I guess my question is, like, what... [19:08] 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? [19:19] Well, I... [19:20] Maybe I can try to get out a sort of an image. [19:24] First, right, it's sort of, let's say you're trying to make like a mosaic, however you say that, like you're trying to fit some tiles.

[19:33] 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, [19:42] You're going to make a square. You're not going to make it wrong because you can't do that. And you actually have to sort of break it. [19:48] the tiles in order to [19:51] 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 you're... [20:00] we have any less mental models of all the situations, and they are a little bit like square tiles sometimes. So you get a new situation, and it might apply a little bit, [20:10] But if you just apply it straight off, [20:13] It won't fit perfectly, but if you kind of get into that confused stick, it's like your great game. [20:19] 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? You had debris. Yeah, and that part scares most people. And it's very overwhelming. It's like cognitively taxing to be sitting there like how... [20:36] Like five minutes ago, I understood this. Now I don't understand anything. And people try to like escape from that and like have all sorts of, [20:45] Um... [20:47] like inbuilt desires to like reach cognitive plurals. We would just see the world as like 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, like the classic sample. Like, you have to go like, "Oh no, my square is actually correct. Like, I'm just gonna find things that confirm that."

[21:05] or [21:06] Or, yeah, you'll get angry. There's all sorts of reactions. And also, like... [21:11] Like, Darwin made a marvelous observation... [21:14] But [21:15] He said he has to write down everything that sort of disconfirms him. [21:19] everything that doesn't affect his mental models because he'll forget them. [21:23] And I think that's true of all of us. I misread that when I originally read it. I didn't totally catch what that... [21:28] The importance of that is it's actually rejecting your body, your mental immune system to shy away from the things that, [21:36] don't fit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because Jordan Mews is 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 of him. Yes, so, so, so we have a tendency to want to protect our squares, and like, in a, a, a, a, [21:55] in in in sort of cognitive [21:58] I don't remember, but is this a character clone maybe? Where they do research, they talk about like knowledge shields. [22:06] 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 world correctly. You want to see it well enough that you can manage, right? And that means that at some point when they are, like... [22:33] 95% correct or something, it's going to differ

[22:36] for everyone, but when they're good enough [22:39] your brain is going to start to filter stuff. [22:42] And then you're going to converge on a mental model, which is not the correct understanding of the situation, but it's good enough. And when we get to that point, you start taking in new data. [22:54] Everything new that just doesn't fit just gets... [22:57] And that's why it's a shield, like a knowledge shield, because it shields you from new information. And so a lot of work when you're doing expertise training in the military and so on is finding ways of breaking these shields. How do you make sure that you break their understanding so they end up confused again? So they end up breaking their tiles. Because... [23:21] Again, like to get back it off. Once you get the tiles apart, that's like the first step toward piecing together a better one. [23:30] And then you have to break it down. Well, and not only that, there's an element that I think you've written about, which is like when you're sort of sitting there and you've done the initial work, which is you've broken everything up. You briefly just spoke about this. And you're sitting there with your pile of shapeless debris and you're just like. [23:46] almost at like rock bottom of understanding. Like there's no coherence. [23:53] 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 – [23:58] Nosgad on Twitter. [24:00] 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.

[24:30] 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. [24:42] And I know you're... [24:43] you're enamored with those in particular, as well as among a number of these notebooks. [24:49] 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? [25:02] to gradually put these pieces together and maybe... [25:06] still in this sort of circle. Because that is a very cognitively uphill, emotionally uphill experience. [25:16] Yeah, well, yeah, it is. It is demanding, very demanding. I remember I... [25:22] I think I already talked with Michael Nielsen. [25:26] 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 [25:35] get the right stance, so to speak, around this. Because I was sort of complaining that when I was working on my essays, [25:42] Like they would be good and then they would [25:44] gradually sprawl and and then and then at that time i would like [25:49] be sort of afraid like about that and i would try to stop them so like i would start that sport at some point and like clean it up [25:56] And because I felt like if I just keep going, this is going to sprawl endlessly. It's going to fall apart.

[26:01] 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... [26:13] this work I admire, tell me that this thing that to you, to me, felt like everything falling apart, [26:21] that I'm just wasting my wild reaction. Yeah, I'm lost in the woods. [26:25] Yeah. [26:26] 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 Grothendek was the first one where I was like, I'm going to go through the entire woods. And Johanna and I worked on that for, like... [26:47] three months or something, it ends up being a very simple piece in a way because that's what's happened on the other side of it. You end up with something quite simple again usually. Yeah, yeah. The circle is as simple as the square perhaps. And that can be humiliating too because people read it as like, yeah, of course, this is obvious, but I have spent... [27:06] pretty much getting there. And so... [27:09] So there can be also temptation maybe to like shy away from it from that. Like I want to keep it complex. It looks more... [27:15] 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 it can seem easy to write. But what it's actually doing is it's sort of giving you the words. [27:29] for something you've kind of felt or acknowledged but didn't know how to

[27:32] it's almost a version of this. I find, I find that so much of the, that's why so much simple writing can be so elegant is, and maybe you don't get quite as much credit for it. Cause some people will be like, Oh yeah, I've been saying this, but that's, that is the work that's inside there. Yeah, exactly. Uh, [27:48] Because it might be fun to think about that particular essay. [27:52] Because it actually sort of started out in some ways... [27:56] 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 [28:08] an interface between you and the outer world and like... [28:11] how you arrange that interface is going to like blah, blah, blah, right? So this is quite a complex idea. And I wrote this piece about it. And my wife, Johanna, she looked at it and said, well... [28:20] I kind of liked that one line where you said... [28:23] that like being [28:25] board is important. And it's like, oh, and I had to throw out like this entire [28:30] complex apparatus I have built of theory. [28:33] And I just take this line, and I remember feeling that that line, like that boredom is important, perhaps it's just so obvious, right? [28:39] And then to build up from that to something deep and interesting, I had to go read like 10,000, no, like 1,000 pages of Rothenjeks' wild notes, and I had to read like 40 years of Bergman's Notebooks. It was an extremely long process, and then I kind of ended up with something that is, in some ways... [28:57] obvious, but it was a fairly long process and ended up [29:01] To get back to the question, I don't think we answered your question. It was something like, how do you...

[29:07] 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... [29:13] broken all the Legos apart and you're sitting in your pile of broken pieces and you're like, 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 to. [29:33] I think, [29:34] The two things have made that easier for me over time. [29:38] Uh, [29:39] Because that project, when I wrote that, and that essay is called Cultivating a State of Mind When You, I guess, Are Born, I think. And when I wrote that, that was terror. That was like three months of sheer terror. But it kind of was like this... [29:54] baptismal fire almost where I like, [29:57] I learned to write the new way. Um, [30:00] But I think the thing I did wrong there was that I had sort of the outcome plan [30:05] in mind. I was clenching. I wanted this to cohere, to show if you can instead [30:12] Um, [30:12] It's a bit like if you're lost in the woods. If you're clenching and panicking, I was like, I need to get out of this woods now. It's going to be... [30:21] a terrible experience, but if you're instead like [30:23] Well, I guess I'm... [30:24] In the woods, I don't really know where I am, but it's kind of beautiful here. I'm just going to... [30:28] stroll around, notice things, and trust a similar label, I'll end up on a path, then that can be easier. So you're kind of unclenching and being like,

[30:40] There's no deadline on this. Like when things fall apart, you might have to trust that doc. [30:46] can take time and it will end up looking like something completely different. You just like haven't let go of all things. [30:52] Well, it's not seeing the thing you were hoping to see, to tie it back to what we were talking about earlier. It's being open to seeing something else. Yeah. Yeah. [30:59] 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. [31:06] Because it's just like, the other day, because the first few times I went for the woods, it's like, [31:11] With the... [31:12] can't literally be anything on the other side of this because this is just confusion this is terror and uh and then oh [31:19] Lo and behold, I ended up with much more clarity and [31:23] understood things that are important to me and I end up writing an essay I like. And doing that a few times [31:29] Kind of. [31:30] change the emotions around it. [31:33] Confidence is the memory of success, as my friend Jason likes to say. Do you keep notebooks in this way? [31:40] Yeah, I do, from time to time. Uh... [31:44] I said alternate, but yeah, I do write [31:48] Several hundred thousand words of journals in a year where I... [31:53] like it can difference but like some months i'll write 60 000 words in a month like where i'm just [31:58] endlessly sprawling and going, do you delete them? [32:02] Now I have, I have them, um, [32:04] 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. Cause like to take the notebooks for, from the last five years as a Britain, the essays are like,

[32:18] So this is kind of the process behind the life and the frustrations. [32:23] Yeah, I do find them very valuable. Often I find that... [32:26] As I write them again, [32:29] a sense of just being lost in a moment. But what I find valuable is to... [32:35] 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. [32:46] And then I'll go back to them maybe a few months later, and then I'll see, like, that was really good. And I'll find... [32:53] 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 clench. So I'll just go around. And then when I look back, I find these kind of beautiful essays in there. [33:12] I actually was rereading some diaries I wrote... [33:16] from maybe like two years before I started the blog. [33:19] 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. [33:28] And the fun thing when I was rereading them was that, like, one, they were much better than I remembered, and two... [33:35] uh... [33:36] I had actually written almost word by word two or three essays that I wrote three years later. [33:42] So I had already done them in there, but I just didn't notice it and I didn't have the confidence to see it. So actually that wandering. So if I can go. So now I try to be more persistent about going back. Right. Returning to those wandering. But like, yes, I guess I try to. It's again a little bit like that.

[33:58] sort of being a child and then like editing, writing drunk and editing sober is a little bit like that. Like, [34:05] being a kid on a WV, going around in the woods, and then... [34:09] getting back to it, like, a few months later, being, like, sort of a, maybe a connoisseur of this, like, [34:14] I'm going to pick out the best box of this. Yeah, it's funny. [34:18] 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 the other. Yeah. The other thing that's funny about it is on some level. [34:43] Writing itself is this practice of doing this often for the experience of living. You go on a derivouac or whatever. [34:52] In my experience, unless I spend some time meditating on it and ideally writing about it, [34:58] 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... [35:06] It like gets to work. The other part of this... [35:11] 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. If I'm, [35:19] successful enough or like one of the points you make about the notebooks is that it's [35:23] It's the one place where Bergman isn't being observed. [35:27] I guess I'd like to tie to another point you make, which is you talk about sort of

[35:32] constraining oneself i think it's with um von trier or vinterberg like tying your hands behind your back finding ways to sort of create in ways that are deliberately constrained now's guard 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 but that is it that is a dark yeah imagine like having agreed to publish that also [35:57] He did? Yeah, yeah. It's in book two of my struggle. [36:02] And he's doing it in the middle of this being a controversy. So he knows that 500,000 people, 10% of the population in Norway is going to read this. [36:11] And then he stands so much for hours for I didn't try to [36:14] 5,000 words about like meeting and falling in love with his wife and like in a very intense and like painful like [36:21] Yeah, let's not do that. [36:23] The point, I think, is... [36:25] 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... [36:35] 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, [36:43] Spending one week... [36:45] literally writing, [36:46] And it all has to be deleted at the end of the week. Maybe another week where you like... [36:50] The whole point of it is just to make it as pop as possible, or most audience-oriented as possible. Maybe you haven't done those examples specifically, but I'm curious how much you play with those types of things. Or even think about this in the case of The Notebook, which is like...

[37:04] Is there ever a version of writing that if I truly promise to, [37:08] permanently delete afterwards versus putting my... [37:11] back catalog of notebooks, how it would change. [37:16] I don't think... [37:17] 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. [37:26] 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... [37:36] 17, 20, something like that. I can clearly see [37:40] like I'm young and I have hubris and, and that I think that like, this is going to be a red and hopefully not. [37:50] Uh, [37:50] but if I read my diaries from, let's say, around when I turned 30, I can definitely, there's been some shift in my stance where in clear it felt like, [38:00] This person does not... [38:02] no longer think anyone's going to read it. Are you writing to yourself? [38:05] in the future or are you writing to yourself in the future? Yes, exactly. So I think the big change that happened for me in 2019 [38:14] which was like a precursor that led to the final sort of breakthrough with the public writing, was that I started indexing my diaries. [38:22] 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 to, I talk about Ivan Illich and then also on.

[38:37] 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... [38:45] make sure that I would [38:46] go back to it and kind of enter into dialogue with my past self and not have all of these thoughts ways that they would be searchable [38:55] But what happened, I think, when I did that was that I became... [38:59] My own audience. [39:01] 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. [39:17] 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. [39:29] 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 guess, [39:37] 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... [39:47] posting, I am doing these things, and that would be embarrassing, [39:52] in front of the audience of myself. And so I would like... [39:55] I'll learn that close. It's almost like a ballerina in front of a mirror, like looking at the movement of the leg and knows, oh, like, that's the wrong movement of the leg because that's posing, that's... [40:07] That's...

[40:08] cringe. And I guess I kind of [40:11] without even thinking about it, how that kind of reinforcement loop [40:15] which helped me get into the right post. So whenever I write in the notebook now, I always like immediately go into the right post where I'm like open, creative, open. [40:24] willing to linger in confusion and so on. Whereas in other mediums, like if I open the Substack Editor, like I'll [40:32] Like, I can't write... If I try to write in Google Docs or if I write... Like, I'll... [40:37] entering the different stances, like if I write an email, being one stances in WhatsApp, all different stances. But I have, through practice, encoded a very good stance around my notebook. So I can always go there. Yes, it's an environmental priming that is like, I know what we do here. Boom. I'm in that. Hmm. [40:54] 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. [41:03] 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. [41:33] that they want to know what a voice inside them says if they block out the expectations of Broken Father's 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...

[42:02] in part to maybe what you were just describing, this good, healthy, kind of productive conversation with ourselves, just to maybe ask questions. [42:10] simpler questions or to be more specific. [42:15] Well, if I think about my own... [42:17] notebook. I think another shift, I don't remember exactly when that happened, but maybe around the same time, is that I [42:23] shifted a lot of it away from myself. [42:26] 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... [42:35] attend outwards. My notebook was filled with reflections about things I wrote, things I saw that my kids were doing, things that happened in nature, conversations that happened. So I... [42:48] I started a tent out where [42:51] um [42:52] I made a note about that recently where – [42:55] Whereas this, it's almost like [42:58] You can know yourself as an object. And I think that was what Kelly wanted to do. Like, what kind of person am I? [43:05] Who am I? [43:08] Who, like... [43:09] And almost drawing a narrative around yourself as well. [43:12] And that's very complex. Like, I have no idea who I am. Like, that's... Like... [43:18] We're such... [43:20] extremely complicated objects. Even like... [43:24] saying like what is Hamlet or like a short book is very hard, but we're like, [43:30] that times a thousand. We were going around having different experiences in sports every moment and trying to

[43:37] define down what that is, [43:40] It's very hard to have a good understanding of yourself as an object. [43:45] And I think a lot of people try to turn toward that, and that can just be confusing and [43:50] needle greasing and so on. [43:52] But when I try to [43:55] attuned to things outside of me, like to my kids or to a book or to nature. [44:01] uh [44:03] I also have to [44:04] You're in that you're in myself, but I'm connecting to myself as a subject. Yes. [44:08] I'm going to connect him to myself as like a... [44:11] a person paying attention and like, what am I noticing here? What am I noticing? [44:16] getting frustrated with or what am I [44:19] curious about and all of that is also like information and you can understand that kind of subjectives [44:25] perspective of yourself. And if you look at someone like Rick Rubin or Niccate, 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. [44:43] 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... [44:53] concerned with what the holistic image is. Yes. [44:58] They are on a derivere. They are making... [45:02] Yeah, it's like with someone like Nick Cave, it's not clear at all where he's going. Obviously, music is very important to him as it's been for 40 or 50 years.

[45:13] But the way that music evolves and the different kinds of films and books and [45:18] art projects he does along the way, right? He's making his small ceramic ingredients. All of that is very drifting, very much getting just [45:26] it like, [45:28] If you were trying to understand Nick Cave as an object, let's say you were his management and you were trying to, what is the Nick Cave brand? Yes. You would never go, we should do porcelain figurines of the dead, right? [45:45] I don't know where I'm getting here. I think it's telling that [45:48] 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 modern is certainly the Internet is about making yourself legible in a way that is like cohesive enough and small enough. [46:04] and contain enough that it can be like replicated externally. And so, [46:09] I do think it's telling that there's some kind of external pressure to be that way. [46:13] And by the way, maybe less with Nick, but like people love to like, [46:18] 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. [46:28] Yeah, exactly. [46:32] The understanding that people have of Rick from the outside is... [46:35] It's 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.

[46:44] Yeah, and also the stereotypes of him, like just being that guru, where he's actually a very, very intellectual person and spends enormous time reading and so on. That's not what I'm very... [46:56] This, I think, relates to a thing that [47:00] Relates to also to what we were talking about at the top, which I would call a broad... [47:04] thing around being unpredictable. And I think that extends into taking risks and agency and a handful of other things. [47:11] 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. [47:19] As a result, [47:20] you kind of need to create the space to become more unpredictable. [47:25] 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 the 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. [47:55] sake, which I think the wrong reading of [47:57] "How do I make myself irreplaceable to AI?" You could imagine someone just trying to be chaotic. [48:04] And, [48:05] Thank you. [48:06] using unpredictability as a [48:09] path to getting towards, not sure what the right word is here, like [48:14] where you want to go or to the place that is right or to a place that is ours, maybe something that is true.

[48:22] How do you know... [48:24] How do you know the difference? Whether it be in a stylistic choice in creativity and writing or in a life [48:30] decision choice. I could imagine there would be a... [48:33] a risk of just being unpredictable for its own sake. [48:38] 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 – [48:47] playing to the audience like I am trying to fight the AI or something [48:52] I think they're... [48:54] Again, better to try to orient... [48:57] what is exciting or what is alive. [49:00] and so on. It's made more, what I would say is, is, is, [49:04] what to aim for. I was speaking about when it comes to constraints and unpredictability, [49:10] I was thinking about Young Cage and Lashantier. [49:14] So above [49:17] do very unpredictable work, and we both use... [49:22] constraints a lot in the process. So like... [49:25] Young Cage, he has this piece, I think, where he... [49:28] He's set up a system and then he's using it. [49:31] Aixin or like sell and dice since I want to like make all the decisions so the music is [49:37] total chaos, right? It's like the timing of the notes, the pictures, everything is like decided. [49:43] through this random system. Yeah. [49:46] 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...

[49:56] Funnily enough, Sian rolls dice to decide to do things in her life. But I don't think she's... [50:02] She's using it to get to a place of kind of [50:06] 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, it's, [50:15] Exactly. [50:17] Because... [50:18] randomness can produce... [50:20] I'll search off [50:23] It will get you out of the habitual. It will get you to places, combinations you would have never seen before. [50:30] Um... [50:31] But... [50:32] Young Cage, in that at least, he doesn't [50:36] then apply his own taste on it. [50:39] He just says, okay, so the system has run its work. Now we have random chaos. Here we go. [50:44] And that's one kind of experiment. And then you have... [50:48] I was going to go with Lotion Free, but we could go with Brian Enois maybe closer. He also does [50:54] These things where he has a system, I think, that runs in his house where... [50:59] He has... [51:00] you know, [51:01] 10,000 sonic landscapes that he's made. [51:04] across the years. [51:06] that has never amounted to anything. [51:08] And then his system will pick two at random and play them at the same time in his loudspeaker. And then he can just push a bottom and it will change it to a different combination. And then he can push another bottom and it saves that combination. [51:21] 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.

[51:29] 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. [51:39] So that's the difference between him and Cage. And I would say then I get that large from Trio, what he's doing. [51:44] when he's applying constraints on himself, is something similar. He's [51:47] 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 person. [51:58] with framing and [52:01] I mean, if you look at the films he made in the 80s, they look like Golden Age Hollywood. It's like so crisp. Everything is like [52:07] so beautifully choreographed, everything. And then, [52:11] He very consciously said, "I'm going to forbid myself from doing all of those things that I am famous for and that I do well." [52:19] So I'm only going to use handheld camera. There's going to be [52:23] 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... [52:32] remove all of that. But then he's not just like making... [52:37] shitty films. He's acting like within that realm, [52:40] 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 do something new interesting that I haven't tried before. [52:49] And he actually ends up finding... [52:51] novel things that [52:52] But they're not only novel, they're also more powerful. They are resonating perfectly. [52:57] 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...

[53:12] tool to unlock more aliveness, or maybe unpredictability is still the wrong word, but he's using these constraints. I guess the question, you write a lot about Eno in the ways that Eno is really good at [53:24] just like, [53:25] risking everything over and over again. And you also, I think, critically make the stipulation that like, [53:31] He has like 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? [53:49] The question here, I think, to maybe go back to Von Trier, is like, [53:54] Do we know... [53:56] Are his films actually better? [53:59] 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. [54:07] And is that the best thing for you to work on? Is the most, is more love in relationships list, as we joked about last time? Like, maybe go back to the mental proprioception. It's about this, like... [54:17] balance in yourself [54:20] 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. [54:28] 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... [54:41] I think...

[54:42] Well, we'll start with an image again. Can you imagine that we're moving through giant... [54:51] Labyrinth. A mace. [54:54] And when it's not even like a normal labyrinth, it's like a high dimensional. It's going in like... [55:00] 100 dimensions at the same time. And... [55:02] Inside this labyrinth, [55:04] we're going to have good artworks. We're going to have... [55:06] good essays we're going to have a good startups we're going to have good research ideas [55:11] Somewhere in there. And our job is to take the right path through this labyrinth [55:16] to find the good stuff. [55:19] That's sort of what we're doing when we're creating new things. [55:23] And... [55:24] And these different constraints and different stances are like ways, rules of thumb for how to navigate this labyrinth. [55:32] So for example, if you're applying constraints, you're saying that I'm not [55:35] allowed to do. [55:36] this and that, you're blocking off [55:40] 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. [55:50] Uh, [55:52] But... [55:53] I don't think we can know beforehand that, like... [55:58] Where in the labyrinth will the good stuff be? Right. So sometimes maybe... [56:03] Going... [56:04] very pop, like Coldplay. I think Coldplay had done some extraordinary art [56:10] But I think, I'm not sure, but I think they have...

[56:14] thought very hard about what the audience wants, and they've 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, [56:27] it's very clear that he's always like applying these things [56:30] rules on himself and more than half of the time he abandons the projects because it turns out that that part of the labyrinth is barbarian right yeah it's an explorer exploit a bit in some sense yeah because like he had a project where he was that he started i think in the early 90s where he was gonna film for three minutes every year for 30 years and there's gonna be a film [56:51] 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... [57:01] different parts of the labyrinth. [57:03] I don't think there's like a one stats. I like that a lot. [57:07] It's funny that the... [57:11] arbitrary constraints to unpredictability or the hacking it or whatever. That's one version. Another version that maybe fits into that model is... [57:19] You talk about it in the context of Herzog, but it reminded me of the Steve Jobs thing as well. It's this thing about Herzog just 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, I think it's in the 80s, and he's talking about how

[57:46] They had some way of doing accounting for hardware, and you basically flubbed the numbers because there's no way to get the numbers exact. [57:52] 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, [58:03] reasons you might not look in a certain part of the labyrinth. [58:08] And you're like, you come across a certain kind of like solution, a dilemma in the labyrinth. And it's just like, well, all conventional wisdom says that when you run across a set of options, A through C, you choose door C or B because door A tends to lead the wrong way. Like it is about kind of like getting yourself, maybe this is what I was coming back to with, [58:30] 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. [58:42] Yes, a dice is just an example of a constraint. Yeah. [58:47] And the thing you're talking about there with like Kersog... [58:50] not wanting to do film. 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... [59:04] accidents and the beautiful light that comes on at some point. [59:08] And that is the tile again, right? They are [59:13] Like, this is how you... They have a tile. This is how you make film. And when you're dealing with Werner Herzog, like...

[59:20] 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 it right now with the morning lights. And be open for that because that's the right thing for Ace Aesthetic and his kind of ethics of film. [59:41] But they couldn't because they were so locked in. They had this kind of northern shield again, right? [59:47] So. [59:48] If we don't get the makeup, we won't have the title that makes this a square, and we have to make it a square. [59:53] That's the thing they're saying. Yeah, they're just like reapplying the same... [59:58] 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 [1:00:06] over and over again. Whereas... [1:00:08] If [1:00:09] You're going to do really good work. You have to be just open to this business. [1:00:13] thing right now, right? Like the film they were making in that case is like a very gritty, handheld Vietnam film where it's supposed to be very like... [1:00:23] Claustrophobic You don't need makeup for that If you pay attention to the film you're making [1:00:29] That is not necessary. But the other way. Yeah. But they're so like, we're supposed to do it that way. [1:00:35] So. [1:00:36] But to make good art, you have to like [1:00:38] try to be... [1:00:40] like naive or innocent. And like, this is the situation like, and, [1:00:45] So if we're filming, like, what kind of... [1:00:47] Karma movements. [1:00:49] do we need here? What kind of stuff do we need here? And not do the habitual thing and just like

[1:00:55] make the mosaic specifically for this [1:00:59] piece of work. How do you think someone like that, the counter argument to this framework would be that breaking apart all the tiles every time is obviously not tenable. And to your point earlier, [1:01:10] The more you break them, the better you get at rebuilding them. And someone like Herzog, on some level, is probably very comfortable in the broken... [1:01:18] 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... [1:01:31] Is it just about getting more comfortable in ambiguity so you can speed run that faster? Like, how do you know when to... [1:01:38] Maybe this is, again, going back to the unpredictability thing. Unpredictability is the goal in and of itself leads you [1:01:44] leads you astray, leads you to overrating doing things from first principles, perhaps. [1:01:51] 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. [1:01:58] Maybe it's just attunement, as we keep coming back to. [1:02:02] But, I mean, [1:02:04] You said... [1:02:05] A part of you talked about, like, it's very costly to do it that way. And yes... [1:02:10] That is the case, but if... [1:02:13] If [1:02:14] What? [1:02:16] What we're talking about now is not like how to run your accounting business. [1:02:20] Bureau. [1:02:21] that is doing the same thing over and over again, then you shouldn't apply this way of thinking. This is not like... And when you're doing it, the feeling of the podcast, like setting up the... You probably shouldn't reinvent that every time and make that an entire artistic thing because the thing you're trying to maybe...

[1:02:35] if the focus for what you're doing with podcasts is like trying to push the conversations into a better space. So, so maybe you, [1:02:44] Run that. [1:02:46] where it really matters... [1:02:49] It's worth... [1:02:50] Like putting in that effort. [1:02:52] I get what I'm trying to say. Yes, it's like if you just want to get a result fast, fast, fast, [1:02:57] than just tires [1:03:00] Yeah, it's the same as if you're building a house, if you have these floors that are, I don't know what it's called, like you just... [1:03:08] click them in and then it looks like a fake wooden floor. It's very fast. It's sort of a tiling. But if you want to make a really nice house, of course, you're going to have a carpenter and hand carve every little part of it. [1:03:20] And it depends on what business you're in. And if you're in the business of creating... [1:03:26] new ideas for a startup or art or... [1:03:30] essays. Like... [1:03:32] Yes, it's a very costly kind of research cost. So these are costly projects, but it's the only way we know [1:03:40] how to like get to these powerful new experiences and products and artworks [1:03:46] Mm-hmm. [1:03:47] One last thing here. Um, [1:03:49] You have this, I think you wrote it shortly after we last spoke, and we talked about some similar themes last time. You wrote about agency. At the beginning of that, you had this little excerpt that kind of prompted it about Maude. [1:04:01] 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.

[1:04:16] a book about how to handle being sentenced to freedom and to handle it effectively and authentically and responsibly. [1:04:23] Thank you. [1:04:24] 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. [1:04:36] The thing I was thinking about in the context of all this is like, [1:04:39] maybe it's similar to cost, is risk. What is the relationship between agency and risk? [1:04:45] And how do you think about it? [1:04:47] along the lines of everything we just spoke about in trying to do truly new creative things in the labyrinth, how do you think about updating your model of risk? Maybe specifically in the Eno sense of... [1:05:00] How do you use the current success to unlock the new... [1:05:04] unknown thing versus playing the hits. [1:05:09] 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. [1:05:22] I... [1:05:23] struggle with that [1:05:25] lot and [1:05:28] Because... [1:05:30] the rate of change for me has been quite [1:05:33] Rapid. Like I went from... [1:05:36] Like, literally, like, being totally on my own and, like, isolated on the island off of Wigmu. [1:05:42] That was like six years ago and then [1:05:46] Maybe three years ago, someday I started to have some success and now like it's my job and then like...

[1:05:51] And when you have that kind of almost exponential, [1:05:54] change in your life, it's very, very hard to update because I still kind of feel like the person I was like four years ago or something, which is [1:06:04] is not who I am now. And so I probably... [1:06:10] to get back to risk, like, I probably take way too little risk. I think all of us do, almost overwhelmingly. Maybe not Elon, but, and Peter Thiel, but, like, but specifically, like, in my case, it's like, I'm still, [1:06:23] I haven't updated that I'm actually not... [1:06:28] struggling with money that bar anymore, right? But there used to be like a... [1:06:33] terror for me with money for many years until... [1:06:38] like less than a year ago [1:06:40] 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... [1:06:50] So scarcity mindset that is seeping in. Yeah. And I'm not looking at this equation, clear eyes, like I'm not, [1:06:56] like noticing that like the situation is actually like this. [1:07:00] like the amount of [1:07:02] 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. [1:07:12] And I don't know how to actually make that faster. [1:07:17] that update. [1:07:19] Well, someone told me. I would love to know.

[1:07:24] But I do think another... [1:07:26] thought that came up when you talked about risk is, which kind of gistered that in my last answer was that, [1:07:33] 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 them. [1:07:47] Betting on. [1:07:48] these conversations and betting on things. [1:07:51] I find it's [1:07:53] usually the case that it's [1:07:55] not worth doing due diligence on everything. [1:08:00] And it's... [1:08:01] a good idea to not take risk in most domains of your life so that you can play very risky. [1:08:07] in some domain. [1:08:09] Because it's the bold, risky moves that have high payoff. But in order for them to have high payoff, you have to do due diligence. You have to actually think things through and, like, [1:08:21] position yourself correctly so that your experiments have some likelihood of, of, [1:08:26] paying off like most of them will fail but but you you want like 10 of them to succeed and therefore you like 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 you have almost like overwhelmingly concentrated on a few fairly risky things that maybe are less risky

[1:08:56] on a relative basis. [1:08:58] Yeah, exactly. We... [1:09:00] And you see that when Albert Maslow did... [1:09:04] is research on like people are highly self-actualized. [1:09:08] Uh... [1:09:09] You see that. They're making... [1:09:12] concentrated vets in certain domains and they're not taking a lot of risk in their entire life. Usually they are selected conformists, people who are very... [1:09:26] Self-actualized. [1:09:27] In his... [1:09:28] opinion, right? They tend to [1:09:30] dress very conservatively. They tend to have normal haircuts. They tend to, like, in all sorts of ways, because they're trying to minimize... [1:09:38] need less 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... [1:09:51] time money everything on on on the friction of my t-shirt or do i rather spend it on like yeah [1:09:58] my relationships or my creative work. And so... [1:10:02] You keep talking about clothing too long, you're going to sound like Mark Zuckerberg. You've got to be careful. I think the point is well made. [1:10:08] Yeah, but it's a point I often make. It's like... [1:10:10] priorities. What's the thing you're trying to do? And then Steve Jobs again, to get back to clothes, like be your sport is staying closed every day because dad doesn't have to think about that. [1:10:23] And there's no friction. Like, it's very...

[1:10:27] What about, um... [1:10:29] Maybe we'll talk about this later, but like... [1:10:32] There's another thing that's sort of like, don't get cute. Like if you found a thing that works like really, really, [1:10:39] We talked about this last time. [1:10:41] You were like... [1:10:43] "Great, you wrote a couple of good essays. "That's cool, let's see if you stick around. "I'm four years into this, now you're five years into this. "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? And really, really, like, [1:11:10] And I think I'm drawing a false comparison, but... [1:11:14] I'm not totally sure how to think about [1:11:18] risk in the context of like opening up the aperture to planting other seeds versus like [1:11:26] Don't get cute. Like you found, hit the ball. Like keep hitting the tennis ball. [1:11:31] 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... [1:11:39] You know, maybe... [1:11:41] There are some [1:11:43] Very big, very valuable things I could be doing if I just like doubled and tripled down on certain things that would be very, very valuable for other people I could make. [1:11:53] And I would also probably earn a lot of money by doing those things.

[1:11:57] And sometimes I think, like, maybe I should do that, like, and then I could have a bunch of money that I could donate and I could, like, have much more impact and do – and I just can't. I can't do it. It's – [1:12:09] And Afdhavik is just sort of a personality trait, right? I am... [1:12:14] someone who's seeking entry fix. Um... [1:12:18] 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... [1:12:27] 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 that's just rebellion, quits the whole thing. But conversely, you've talked about a world where, like, [1:12:48] the essays are the exhaust of the life you've cultivated or the state of mind you've cultivated, or even the milieu you've cultivated. Like, um, [1:12:57] you've alluded in your writing to a world where in the future there, I mean, you, you threw out a whole bunch of ideas, whether it's like, [1:13:03] 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... [1:13:14] for you that [1:13:16] is like Henrik wrote essays in the barn for 20 years, and maybe the output of that, [1:13:23] among other things, is that you write, as you say, a few good essays.

[1:13:28] And there's a different version of you that is like, [1:13:31] the world of Henrik or the world of Escaping Flatland has many more [1:13:36] 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, [1:13:45] How do you along this, maybe to tie it all the way back to this earlier theme of [1:13:51] proprioception and balance? Like what is the... [1:13:55] When you are attuned to yourself around what to do next, what, how, how are you, how are you attuned to where the ways you lean in that way? [1:14:02] We're very much at the edge on my thinking, because I'm going to be incoherent. That's hopefully the goal with a little bit of this. Yeah. [1:14:11] Yeah, I'm struggling with these thoughts a lot. [1:14:16] And I think... [1:14:19] Like one promising direction for my personal work is to... [1:14:23] I've had a period where I've locked down very much and done. [1:14:28] my thing in order to get where I am now. I had to like, this works. [1:14:32] And this is like very aligned with what I value. So I'm just going to, [1:14:36] Double and triple down on that for a few years. [1:14:38] And for the last... [1:14:41] year, I've been like, "What's the next step for that?" and I haven't figured that out. [1:14:46] But I think one thing that could be valuable is to [1:14:50] making sure that I [1:14:52] put myself in interesting situations, work on interesting projects such that,

[1:14:59] 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. [1:15:13] And the rest of the time is me doing related work [1:15:18] which is [1:15:19] putting me in interesting new situations that feeds the blog. Right. So, because... [1:15:26] I also can't keep going doing what I'm doing now because it, [1:15:30] Because now I'm... [1:15:32] Basically spending six days a week on the blog. At some point, I'm going to get very boring because I'm not having enough new experiences. [1:15:40] So I probably need to, like, start making films or start a podcast or start traveling more. I need to probably do those things in order to, like, feed the main things. I guess I'm maybe trying to... [1:15:54] Find some way of [1:15:55] of making those things work together. And I haven't figured that out because... [1:16:00] But you have to see that threat. Like the root of the question, hilariously, is actually just like, [1:16:06] really trying to figure out what is more risky. Is it riskier to stay focused? [1:16:12] and not get distracted, not get cute? Or is it riskier to try all these other things and lose the plot? And I think that the root of it, at least how I would relate to it, and my reading of you is very attuned, [1:16:24] you are very attuned to [1:16:28] Knowing that.

[1:16:29] that you at some future point [1:16:33] Will... [1:16:35] Forgive the maybe crass metaphor. It's almost like there's a tumor or something. And there's a little seed of something that's like, well, it's really working to do the essay six days a week right now, but... [1:16:47] I probably won't be able. And so I need to course, I need to unfold or I need to, [1:16:52] That's how I see it. [1:16:56] One thing that comes to mind when I'm talking about this topic, I'm like, I think a [1:17:00] seeing it maybe a little bit more clearly as we talk, is that... [1:17:03] I think there's a... [1:17:05] I think I have this from some of Taleb's books. I've seen Taleb where he talks about [1:17:11] Maybe in Andrew Fragile, it talks about [1:17:14] um, [1:17:15] In certain kinds of jobs, like if you have a normal 9-to-5 job, [1:17:20] it's going to look very stable... [1:17:23] 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... [1:17:29] Your income is going to be up and down a lot more, but you're actually more... [1:17:33] resilient or anti-fragile because because uh [1:17:37] Uh, [1:17:38] 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%. [1:17:49] And. [1:17:50] And that idea, I think, maybe applies to my situation too, is that I could double down [1:17:56] on the things that work. And there's a lot of people telling me that I should do and there's these book deals I could do and so on. And that would...

[1:18:04] earning more money, it would have more impact. [1:18:07] short term [1:18:08] 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 a few years' time, it's probably riskier because I'm locking myself in. So actually trading off. [1:18:30] like 30% of my time, 50% of my time into more kind of [1:18:34] eligible diverse bets. [1:18:36] that [1:18:37] That will make my situation now more unstable. My income goes up and down and so on. But it's probably over time. [1:18:45] unless we see the path. [1:18:47] Ciao. [1:18:49] But yeah, that's my current slot at this very hour. It relates to a... [1:18:55] A finance. [1:18:56] idea, which is the number one thing is to stay in the game. [1:19:00] 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. [1:19:10] Yeah, and I've had that thought on and off for a long time, because I think I could have gone GoPro, so to speak. I could have become a full-time writer. [1:19:20] A year. [1:19:21] earlier, maybe even sooner. But as soon as I saw that that was possible, I was... [1:19:27] kind of afraid. [1:19:29] Because I feared the dad. Like, if I... [1:19:32] If I were just like to... [1:19:34] spring to that goal

[1:19:36] quit my job, now be completely reliant on [1:19:39] on [1:19:40] There's income. [1:19:42] And, uh... [1:19:43] That might be just a terrible situation for me. It might be very stressful. I might feel very locked in and having to deliver sort of things. So I like consciously... [1:19:52] started to be [1:19:54] A little bit. [1:19:56] unpredictable a little bit [1:19:59] I would drop my cadence, I would go silent for a month, I would throw curve balls and right-to-left and stuff. That just slowed my growth quite a lot and I shurned a lot of subscribers, but it meant that I had the permission. [1:20:14] A year later when I could, again, in that slower path, get to the point. Now I knew I had permission. I can go silent for a month. [1:20:21] It enabled you to go farther and to go longer. Because I was afraid. Otherwise, I'd just... [1:20:28] be too afraid. So I do already have a lot of latitude in here. Yeah, right. But – [1:20:34] 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... [1:20:54] Yeah, the challenge, it's, I'm trying to build up an attune in myself to like, [1:20:59] Better identify just fear and risk aversion when that's all it is. [1:21:04] Because when you're an analytical person or an introspective person, you can talk yourself through a lot of things. Oh, I'm publishing slower because da-da-da-da-da. Which is why the very Silicon Valley advice, which is just like go faster, more, be more agentic.

[1:21:20] I think generally tends to be pretty good, but the challenge then too is Silicon Valley is not – [1:21:30] And that mentality broadly doesn't tend to build the most enduring things. [1:21:36] Yeah, it's interesting with risk aversion too, right? Because... [1:21:39] What I noticed in this situation was that I know that I am risk averse. I am risk averse. And I have to be because, like, I... [1:21:48] I am the sole provider of my family. Like, I have to be with scourge. I can't take those kinds of beds. And knowing that... [1:21:55] 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. [1:22:04] 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, [1:22:14] if you spend a day of my life, you would be like laughing about how much time I have. And I suspect there's a similar amount of like, [1:22:20] the amount of risk that you can take when you're 25 is, [1:22:25] or whatever, like, and don't have a wife and kids is so dramatic. I'm sure like you, my assumption would be that if you were in your 25 year old shoes, you'd be like, oh my gosh, dude, you're not taking enough risk. [1:22:36] Yeah, I... [1:22:37] Maybe. I think I was... [1:22:40] pretty calibrated when it came to a race. I think my problem was more... [1:22:45] Um, [1:22:46] lack of [1:22:48] knowledge and lack of good habits. I'll

[1:22:54] Maybe I could have taken even more risk, but I took more risk then than I do now, let's say. 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. [1:23:11] And now I have [1:23:12] Oh, now I have a bit more time again, but... [1:23:15] for many years. I had no time at all. And I had to, like, get up at 5 in the morning and write and stuff. And I was like... And they were sitting there at 5 in the morning and they were super tired. Like, why didn't I do this before I had kids? And... [1:23:28] One little thing. [1:23:30] This week, a friend asked me about what I want. [1:23:35] And it's very, like, specifically... [1:23:38] like desire. [1:23:41] And I'm curious how you think about that as it relates to attunement in the specific sense of sort of like. [1:23:47] Really wanting something. [1:23:50] 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 that how bad they want that. But I like the word desire. [1:24:09] I think that word in itself, like... [1:24:12] There's a lot of good work here. [1:24:15] Because I think... [1:24:17] At least for me. And I mean, this doesn't... [1:24:19] apply if your goal is to make as much money as possible. This only applies to the Bureau of [1:24:24] weird person who wants to write essays and so on. Uh...

[1:24:28] or [1:24:29] It's up to you to see if it transfers to any other domain. But I find that it's very important that... [1:24:36] Yeah, that it should feel like the start. It should feel... [1:24:39] It should feel like my kids when they are galloping down the road, right? [1:24:44] This is it. It should be... [1:24:46] And I treat myself again. The reason I talk about these things is because I find them hard. [1:24:51] I trick myself all the time. So, [1:24:54] Um... [1:24:55] So I have a bunch of very... [1:24:57] intellectual friends who are always reading like hard books and so on. And sometimes I'll be like, oh, I'm going to [1:25:05] I'm going to do... [1:25:06] An essay with all my reflections on the brother's grandma, so I... [1:25:11] And, and, and, [1:25:12] And then I stopped working on that. And then I was like, no, I'm actually just going to try and do first-day friends. I'm actually not excited about Brother Kurama. So, like, I'm actually... [1:25:21] excited about like [1:25:23] The things that are feeling light, open, playful, like galloping down the street... [1:25:28] We're different. And I'm trying to... [1:25:33] And in order for me to do good work in my line work is that I have to get back to that thing. [1:25:41] And it's very hard. I miss it all the time. I get like... [1:25:45] I get these ideas. [1:25:47] That sound like good. [1:25:49] Ideas. And they are... [1:25:50] projects that i admire from afar like i'd love to read that essay i'd love to read that book [1:25:56] But it's like from the head. It's like I can...

[1:26:00] I can calculate that that's a good thing for you to do. [1:26:04] And I sometimes think that I want that. But the thing I want... [1:26:09] is the thing that makes me feel playful and loose in my body. [1:26:14] Yeah, and there's often like [1:26:16] almost embarrassing in some sense. [1:26:18] No, thanks. [1:26:20] So as I like that word, sorry, like what, what is like making your blood boil a little bit? Yes. Uh, and, uh, [1:26:27] And often... [1:26:28] I find that they are hard to... [1:26:31] Explain. [1:26:32] It's like... [1:26:35] The ideas that I get in my head are usually better elevator pitches. [1:26:40] Yes. What should I want to want is the meta thing that is actually running here that can crowd out the desire. Yeah. [1:26:47] I'll give an example, because I'm talking in the abstract. Like, I was reading Sun Bay Bala, book six, [1:26:54] Alpha on the calculation of Mollier. This is the repeating day. Yeah, exactly. Which we did in book six of that. And there was... [1:27:01] segment where she was talking about Plato and there's a dialogue with Socrates where they're talking about that in the past, they kind of used to go in the opposite direction. [1:27:11] And I was like... [1:27:13] And I got in my hair. It's like... [1:27:14] What would that feel like... [1:27:16] And I sort of 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 are like...

[1:27:33] And then at some times you would have to try to find some parents, you know, if you were living backwards. Because eventually you would have to climb back into a woman who would carry you. [1:27:42] further into the past and you can travel yourself out. [1:27:45] This is a very strange... [1:27:47] thing, right? But I got very excited about that, really, and it's not like an obviously good idea, right? In some sense, in my line of work, it's like, [1:27:56] That's not like what he saw. It's a new part of the labyrinth that you've never been in before though. But, but, but I know that idea for some reason, [1:28:04] I mean, now I give it a lot of space. It's just like a small thought that happened for two minutes in my head. [1:28:09] I got excited about it. There's a lift. Yeah, there's a lift, and I can't explain... [1:28:13] That's not an obvious escape in the flatland essay or something. I don't know where that's going. And maybe... [1:28:18] it will end up, most likely it will end up as nothing, or it might end up as something completely different that doesn't look like this at all. But there's some seed there that is... [1:28:28] 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, [1:28:36] Because I don't know, like... [1:28:38] How could this work? This idea, what is this trying to do? And if I go down there, [1:28:43] I might end up with a story from my child and it would be something completely different but I'll just trust that this is [1:28:50] some interesting part of the lab. [1:28:53] It's a nice... [1:28:54] complement to aliveness, which is a word you use so often in talking about the writing. You talk about like a lightning bolt in your body, but it [1:29:02] It feels like those two things are operating in a similar part of our inner space, maybe.

[1:29:10] Yeah, I guess a lot of this is the catchphrase for that. [1:29:15] But yeah, today I'm feeling galloping down the street. It's better because it's more visceral, because alive is like a little bit of a dead word. Well, I don't think I need to ask. I think that is... [1:29:28] It's funny, too, with things like this, there's something so true it's pointing at, and yet... [1:29:34] If you use the same word with it too many times, it sort of gets dulled. Yeah. [1:29:38] 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... [1:29:47] mental institution in Copenhagen. [1:29:50] I think it was called, yeah, it was called like mental institution, right? And at some point, I started feeling that was maybe a little bit old-fashioned, [1:29:59] like, Cold War, so how they wanted to change it to... [1:30:03] It's like you're at the hospital or something. I don't know. But they had this beautiful carved stone in front of the house where it said mental institution. And it's like what you would do. And then at some meeting, someone had the brilliant idea. Can you just like flip the stone over it? [1:30:17] and we can write the new name. [1:30:20] on the other side. I was like, that's a brilliant idea. They went out, flipped the stone, and then it said, idiot asylum. [1:30:28] Because like, words will get destroyed. So there was like, this continual noob of having to rename this place because whatever name they picked for it should be dragged in the dirt. [1:30:39] uh, find still a lot of things. That's good. Um,

[1:30:44] 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, um, [1:30:54] 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. [1:31:22] Why is some form of isolation happening? [1:31:26] So foundational to being creative. [1:31:30] Um, [1:31:32] Well, if we're going to get technical, then I decide, so let's go technical. [1:31:37] When you have a larger population... [1:31:40] as you have in the center, in the big city, in the mainstream area. [1:31:45] they are going to filter harder. They're going to be like a bandwidth pass. So it's very, very hard to get an idea to catch on in a big population. [1:31:55] Um, [1:31:56] Because they are... Because you have to make everyone believe it. It has to be [1:32:00] Really good. You have to reach a critical mass. Yeah. And for that to work, it is very hard. So... [1:32:06] And the good thing about that is that the mainstream will filter... [1:32:10] The bad ideas. [1:32:11] So the mainstream are not like the anti-vaxxers and so on. The mainstreams have fairly reasonable understanding of how vaccines work. But they're also not...

[1:32:23] a good understanding of vaccines either. So big populations filter ideas very hard. So they kill the best and the worst ideas. [1:32:30] Smaller population, because there are fewer people to convince, will filter less hard. So if you go into a Discord or a group chat, [1:32:39] 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 the way society is, well, when it's functioning well, is organizing this kind of hub and spokes movement. [1:32:53] kind of form where you're having the fringes, where you have like the research labs or the solitary researchers, then they're having some idea in the fringe where... [1:33:02] 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 – [1:33:23] 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 fringes at the same time and go back and forth. Yeah. [1:33:33] But yes, we need to protect these spaces where people are allowed to become radicalized and allowed to have extremely bad ideas. [1:33:41] 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. [1:33:48] Yeah, hard to tell. I think Nadia, who you interviewed, Nadia Ospedova, made an interesting point in her book, Antimimetics, which talks about like...

[1:33:59] the evolution of the internet like your heart. [1:34:02] 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… [1:34:14] group shafts. And what I'm [1:34:16] Dulles is sort of supercharging the evolution because you're having people connected to the main [1:34:23] population to be grouped on Twitter or whatever. But then they're 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 when you're in a laboratory and you're having a bacteria and you want to maybe have it evolve... [1:34:48] certain characteristics, right? Then [1:34:51] The way to do that is... [1:34:53] to accelerate the rate of natural [1:34:57] of evolution, you can change the topology of the group. So if you put everything in a big blob in the middle, it's going to be very slow for that group to adapt. But if you instead make these hubs and spokes where you have these smaller things that I described on the sides, then that structure is called an amplifier of natural selection because if you're structurally precisely right, you can dial up the speed of evolution. [1:35:27] that's the case. What's happening on the internet is that we've now with group chats like dialed up the rate of evolution by having these like evolutionary breathing lagoons where you're having like

[1:35:39] most bizarre notations in group chats, and then they're getting spawned back into the feed. [1:35:46] And that goes forth and it goes into different group shots. And I guess that depends on how much time people spend in group shots versus defeat and so on. I really find that to be a very interesting idea, generally speaking, that we can buy people. [1:35:59] Thinking about the structure of our networks. By altering. [1:36:04] the connections in the network in a delivered way, you can steer... [1:36:08] the evolution of ideas in that network. You can make a network that is producing more ideas faster by just changing who talks to do. We could do some interesting things with that. [1:36:19] on the internet, like having, because now we're just having these big blobs, but like, [1:36:23] If we could create these more structured spaces... Are you not building something that... [1:36:28] could be the very early... You talked about like... [1:36:32] a blog being like, [1:36:34] 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. [1:36:44] the notion that there are sort of various coalitions of... [1:36:49] probably necessarily in the modern internet, like personality led, uh, [1:36:54] 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 there are many tools for this, like Discord and Substack has their own chat apps. And then I use the chat with the people of art 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

[1:37:22] you want to have a hierarchy in these things. And you're questioning that, like, [1:37:27] There's a hierarchy around my blog where I am [1:37:31] sort of the alpha male of my blog, and I have... [1:37:34] much more reach and I can [1:37:37] effects that. [1:37:38] community much more than anyone else. [1:37:41] But I think we need to have more, some better fuel tools for creating hierarchies, because, how to put this, but, like, people are going to, [1:37:47] contribute at different levels. And the problem with the open comment section, for example, is that it tends to... [1:37:56] dragged quality a little bit down because people, yeah, certain people, we... [1:38:01] very like reaching out and want to connect and they might not be the people that should have [1:38:06] 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. [1:38:14] Maybe then the more people that could contribute more feel like this is maybe amateur hour. I'm not going to contribute there. And then they instant email me. So I have like the interesting conversations. I also email instead of in the comments. And you hosted an event and you pulled like the actually interesting people into a back room afterwards or the after party or whatever. Yeah. [1:38:34] 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. And it's probably going to be, it's a controversial for some people that you're ranking people, but I think it's, it's, [1:38:52] important that you

[1:38:53] can control those things. Um, [1:38:56] 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... [1:39:05] good structure for the very like vertical, like creator audience relationship. [1:39:10] And then we have very good, like, wide-open egalitarian, kind of like horizontal. [1:39:15] Well, yeah, there's very little resolution in that space between, in the vertical and the horizontal, maybe. You wrote about... [1:39:23] and I'm using space in a different way here, but like, [1:39:26] almost like air gaps in time between publishing work. You said, "I expect that many of my friends who write and publish rapidly are shortchanging themselves. They generate texts 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. [1:39:48] Say more about that. [1:39:50] It's that forest of confusion again. We... [1:39:54] When I write the first draft of something, and ideally... [1:39:58] The first draft of it is just null to myself in my journal. [1:40:02] That's just... [1:40:03] me exposing what I already think. That's usually... [1:40:08] Basically a tide, right? That's basically, this is already what I think. [1:40:12] But then the next step for me is to... [1:40:15] What I'm saying there with the hidden doors is like once I have that thing on the table, I'll notice things. [1:40:22] First, like some open questions or some things that do not fit.

[1:40:26] And if I just publish it and move on, [1:40:30] I'm not actually going to get the real value from that draft because the real value is when I go like, [1:40:36] 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 I start smashing it. [1:40:47] To pieces. [1:40:48] It's in that process where I'm actually updating how I think, how I actually... [1:40:53] Yeah, get his closer contacts. I guess my assumption was that what you described totally makes sense. It's sort of like... [1:41:00] a piece is 80% there and you could publish it, but like you, you have an itch or something like, [1:41:06] I guess my assumption, and maybe this is naive, was like you have things that you're like, this is good. [1:41:12] And I'm going to hold it. [1:41:14] - 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, [1:41:20] That part is also true, because... [1:41:26] And it comes back to... [1:41:29] Well, there's something about my brain that when I publish something, it's like gone from my life. Which is that metaphor, right? It's... And I... That... [1:41:37] Sucks a little bit because like... [1:41:40] It means I can almost never rest on my laurels, so to speak. Because whenever I write a good essay, I'm putting in hard work. I'm like, yeah, I'm flying to shoot something and then I polish it. [1:41:52] 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 it.

[1:42:08] find some other interesting rule in that world. [1:42:10] Make me come alive. [1:42:11] So they are valuable to hold... [1:42:14] For that reason, because it's nice to have a nice room that I can have 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. [1:42:25] that way framing center ideas those stories are putting me in a mind [1:42:31] state where I [1:42:34] I'm able to, like... [1:42:36] get closer to certain things that are meaningful in my life. If I'm writing an essay about... [1:42:40] my kids, I'm going to be a more present father during that project, right? And then as soon as I [1:42:46] close that door, I would have usually become [1:42:50] by the Father. [1:42:51] than I was before, but I'm, I'm, [1:42:53] even better. It's like an active lens. 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's, there is both one, something great about that because it's being compressed and offered, but there's something like, yeah, I really, my, my thought was going to be like, man, I really worry if you write a book. [1:43:24] Why? Because a book is this experience, but like... [1:43:28] 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 it's 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...

[1:43:52] a year or two years on a party, it's going to be a part of your life. That was when my kids learned to bike, and everything is in that book. [1:44:01] 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... [1:44:11] It's sort of a meditative practice because if you meditate, you're going to put yourself in a certain state. And as you say, the NASA people, they were sitting in a deprivation tank. They get out. They see the flowers. [1:44:23] the essays are like that for me right if i [1:44:26] spend some time writing about my kids. I go out and then I notice everything about them. [1:44:30] And that's very lovely. And I get to like... [1:44:33] prime my own mind toward both being more present and also understanding at a deeper level. And the presence kind of goes away after the project, but... [1:44:45] but the deeper insight stays. [1:44:48] Hmm. [1:44:50] 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... [1:45:00] I'm shouting at myself here briefly. You wrote about Johanna reflecting on, I guess she was reading the transcript of my interview with Nadia. And she asked you, like, are we making a mistake being so isolated? We could be people who go to dinners and talk to interesting people and whatever, have these conversations. You've said elsewhere. [1:45:19] You really, really love talking to people. And for what it's worth, we have the Internet. You have a great binary in that way.

[1:45:27] Do you get lonely? [1:45:29] No. No. Is it, maybe a better question would be, is it, do you... [1:45:34] Do you worry at all about the pressure of... [1:45:38] one person being so foundational to... [1:45:43] 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, [1:45:51] 20,000 hours or whatever, but just the... [1:45:54] It's a lot to hold. No, that is something Johanna and I talk about, and it's maybe even more acute. [1:46:02] For her than for me, because... [1:46:05] Like if I... We talk about the like... But if I award you like being hit by a bus. Right. I am... [1:46:11] we're homeschooling together and [1:46:14] Well, like with Dick Sternstein, I am the sold income and let... [1:46:17] like her life would be very, very, very difficult to have that happen. And, and, um, [1:46:21] And so it's important, like, both to, like, plan for that eventuality, or, but that could happen, but also, like, to make sure that, like, she has... [1:46:31] her own things and her own social network that she can rely on in those situations and that's also true [1:46:36] for me. [1:46:37] But it's a little bit easier for me since I naturally... [1:46:41] I end up having a lot of connections with people through the writing, and so I have collaborators and friends. [1:46:47] Yeah, it's always good to have multiple lives. [1:46:50] to stand on. But then as you say, like it is something we like think about all the time. Like should we, would it be better for us to be in a city and be surrounded with like more foreseen,

[1:47:00] I think it's like Valley Vault is like... [1:47:03] Try to. [1:47:03] way these things? How are we constructing the context, the environment around ourselves? [1:47:09] Because when we made a decision where we live now, [1:47:12] We... [1:47:13] didn't think we would ever, like, earn any money. We were, we went to the homeschools. It had to be cheap. Like, and now we can see if I was like, maybe we could actually live in a city and actually afford the homeschool. And, like... [1:47:24] 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... [1:47:33] 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 [1:47:42] And we have [1:47:44] We like the local community there. We like nature. And especially we just like to have a lot of time [1:47:51] on the road. A lot of space. To come back to it. Because I remember like when we lived in the city, like both of us, but especially me, I'm just like, yes, man. Like if I, I remember like, I was just, I knew everyone in town, right? Like, [1:48:03] 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 there would be a party. I can't say no to things. There's so many exciting things and I'm always talking. [1:48:19] Yeah, I constrain myself. Like, I'm in this place. Because when you're in the country, you have to, like, actively decide, like, where I want to go. [1:48:26] talk to someone, I wanna travel and visit someone, and then [1:48:30] 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.

[1:48:41] I think there's a thing here that I've thought a lot about, which is like... [1:48:45] Thank you. [1:48:46] 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, [1:49:02] 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, [1:49:13] Maybe it comes back to a... [1:49:15] a lightness 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 and, [1:49:24] 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, [1:49:32] it's like there's a temptation to just hold. Once you get something, just hold it. Keep holding it. I'll find that. [1:49:41] meeting [1:49:42] new people is a very good way of [1:49:45] unclenching that fist uh [1:49:49] Especially if they are like... [1:49:52] curious agent to 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 it's, [1:50:02] fun because they're all so different. I have different people who are like [1:50:06] let alone mentors, peers, whatever you call them, but with people like Tron Chief or [1:50:11] perspectives, advice. And they say, like...

[1:50:14] their opinions go in completely different directions. Sorry, again, I get confused. By talking, 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 [1:50:40] Solitude. [1:50:42] for that work. [1:50:43] And now... [1:50:44] I have the luxury of relying more on peers because I found people who can... [1:50:50] do that to my mind. Previously, like, the people I had access to were maybe not. [1:50:55] priding me in the right way, they were maybe a little bit too conservative, so then I would have to retreat into solitude, which... [1:51:02] It might be the best thing, but sometimes I find that Saw 2 is maybe... [1:51:06] slower but better. Sometimes I just want to make fast decisions and then they have to talk to three different people. [1:51:15] You want to cycle through the different modes too. Yeah. [1:51:19] Something quick, but I just really liked it. You talked about good and bad consumption, another kind of theme of this space theme showing up, and how... [1:51:29] Certain art or information or content perhaps can... [1:51:34] B. [1:51:35] good consumption and certain can be bad. Maybe it's a little obtuse, but [1:51:41] 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.

[1:51:51] 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. [1:52:10] most parts of the internet or maybe a TV series or something where there are certain forms of art where [1:52:16] 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, [1:52:23] Um, [1:52:24] where you're [1:52:25] as I read you almost like it's about this, it has enough space for you to put yourself into it. [1:52:30] 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? [1:52:38] that has this kind of space, at least for you, that makes you really – [1:52:43] Learn about yourself or get closer to yourself. [1:52:46] Come on. [1:52:47] Well, I think... [1:52:49] is it empty so I need to talk about like the seven types of ambiguity [1:52:53] Because I think that's one way to think about it. [1:52:55] The type of art I'm talking about has ambiguity. It has space. There's some... It's not... [1:53:02] reaching closure in itself. Like, compared to like, a filth bass next to the stage, like a commercial. It's like, a perfectly close, like everything fits together, and the, [1:53:11] And the message is super clear. It's like propaganda. Yeah, the propaganda commercials, they know exactly what they want you to feel and everything is designed to enforce that message. There's no...

[1:53:23] They don't want you to... No interpretation. Whereas when you start removing things and creating some [1:53:31] Oh, [1:53:32] space for interpretation. [1:53:33] The viewer has to fill those spaces to make the artwork meaningful. [1:53:39] So like famously Shakespeare, when you read the plays, they are often based on like historical things that have actually happened. [1:53:48] And often if you compare... [1:53:51] what actually happened to what he writes, he's gone through and like removed the motivations for the haters. [1:53:59] You actually, in the historical record, we know exactly why that person did that thing. But he goes through and like deletes that. Because then you have like, why is he, you know, killing his wife or whatever? [1:54:12] you don't know that. And when you don't know, there's, [1:54:16] Everyone can project different things in it, and different actors can play this place in different ways, and there's so much space for reflections and emotions to be pushed into Shakespeare's work. [1:54:29] which wouldn't have been there if we knew exactly how to interpret it. That's [1:54:34] often the case that when there's [1:54:37] Those. [1:54:38] 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...

[1:54:57] But it also spits you out. Because if you've ever read Shakespeare, it's hard work. [1:55:03] Because it's like you have to stop at every other line and fill in. I'm like, "What does that word mean?" and I'm like, "How should I interpret that?" [1:55:11] So it's like exhausting. [1:55:13] to fill in now. [1:55:14] to read an curious work compared to like propaganda or like Twitter or something where there's less of that [1:55:22] And so it has those like twin things of like it will... [1:55:26] spit you out because you'll get tired and then you'll just lean back on the sofa and like, I'm just going to be with myself now. But you will also be close to yourself because you have been forced to pull from yourself. [1:55:38] That's my read on what is happening in those situations where piece of art or piece of writing... [1:55:44] Uh... [1:55:46] bring Speedy back to my shop. [1:55:47] I love the spitting out. [1:55:49] Because it's such a great way to articulate... [1:55:53] the thing that has friction. And by the way, the majority of incentives in culture today are incentivizing all media to not have that [1:56:03] affect is 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 [1:56:21] I have to put myself into, and maybe a truly remarkable novelist or whatever is really good at projecting something very specific, but... We usually are the other way around.

[1:56:29] Usually, it's the skill, as with Shakespeare, as with Kafka. The skill is removing... [1:56:36] Yes. [1:56:37] It's almost like this game of like... [1:56:41] What is it called? There's this game where you have these blocks. Jenga. [1:56:44] And like a good... [1:56:48] novelist or something, someone who can pull the Jenga box and build it really, really high. And it's like, how could that even stat? Yes. Yes. [1:56:56] But it's somehow still standing. Which, by the way, it's no surprise that many of these worlds we adore so much are the ones that you can put yourself into and imagine yourself in. [1:57:04] So where else? Like weak? [1:57:06] Weak writers can't do, like, build a very compact thing where there's stuff all set. Jenga block of narrative writing. That's the USA. [1:57:14] So [1:57:16] I like that. I like that a lot. [1:57:19] But something that, okay, again, another thought is on the edge of my thinking, as to what you're saying, because... [1:57:26] There's a very strong... [1:57:29] incentives, [1:57:32] today to write in ways that fill all the holes, to write propaganda, to write like [1:57:40] these obvious things, if you look at what's trending on, Substack or whatever. Your assets, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's all like these cliches that get like filled up with fluff words and just like reinforcing what people ought to think. There's no space to... [1:57:54] And I noticed that myself. Like, if I were to use, like, the techniques that Kafka or...

[1:58:03] Shakespeare use, like of making things like [1:58:06] gnarly and like hard to interpret and the way they did it, I wouldn't have any readers. [1:58:13] There's like attention 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. [1:58:22] Very easy to read on your phone on the toilet. Yeah. And like... If it's going to spit you out, it needs to be very easy to get into. Yeah. [1:58:30] And there's an obvious tension because the easiest way to [1:58:34] make something that is ambiguous to sort of, [1:58:37] 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, do these. [1:58:46] elliptical kind of brain. And the tension is like, how do I write something that is [1:58:53] On the surface... [1:58:54] Very clear, very easy to read. [1:58:56] almost like a Twitter article, and at the same time opens those spaces. [1:59:03] I'm not sure I always succeed, but I think it's an interesting challenge. It's like, [1:59:08] 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.

[1:59:33] It's not exactly the same idea. And the trick is how do you [1:59:37] 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. [1:59:55] Yeah. [1:59:56] Yeah, again, it's... [1:59:58] One way I think about it is sort of like... [2:00:01] So if you're [2:00:03] playing jazz or something. He went out... [2:00:06] When they're playing jazz, they'll take some classic chord progression and then they're improvising on top of it and adding disc harmonies on top of it. Can you... [2:00:16] a lot of it is just like taking... [2:00:19] something that's quite kind of simple and the padding, these interesting juxtapositions and interesting shifts in it, like bringing in like, like, [2:00:27] If I write above, like... [2:00:28] love or emotions, it's interesting to like, I'll bring in some Polstoi and some machine learning, like, because they're from different domains. And if I can like weave them together. Yeah. Yeah. [2:00:38] Uh... [2:00:39] I can write them quite simply. I can say a few simple things about machine learning, a few simple things about Tolstoy, but the way they kind of clash... [2:00:48] produces this kind of experience. [2:00:50] these resonances that are bigger, uh, [2:00:54] And I think that's one way I try to create these spaces while using simple average by like...

[2:01:03] juxtapositioning [2:01:05] ideas from different fields and so on. And another good thing about it that I've found is that [2:01:11] It helps reach those domains. So I have a lot of [2:01:15] my readers who are like programmers and they can then [2:01:18] maybe resonate and understand what Tulsa is here in the world. Yeah, because you're connecting that and vice versa, right? So it's valuable, you know, which is... [2:01:28] Hmm. [2:01:29] Yeah. [2:01:30] There is a thread... [2:01:32] that I find myself coming to... [2:01:35] maybe two words that stand out. Um, [2:01:39] One is sort of, and I realize this one's especially... [2:01:42] hard to pin down, but like something towards like being true. [2:01:47] being true to yourself, being true to [2:01:49] The other word is conviction. [2:01:52] And one of the points that I read your... [2:01:56] kind of like [2:01:57] big essay on agency, it kind of culminates in this [2:02:01] 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. [2:02:10] 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."

[2:02:35] If I had experienced it before Maud, I would have caved in after 30 seconds, but in this case, caving in was unforgivable. I must never fail Maud. [2:02:46] Um, [2:02:48] I don't mean to... [2:02:51] trivialize it, [2:02:52] But in the cases of like, that's such a powerful example. And it's also like... [2:02:58] it's an impenetrable example in the cases that are maybe like, [2:03:03] less biological. [2:03:05] Um, [2:03:06] 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. [2:03:13] Um, [2:03:15] Maybe this is also what I'm pointing out when I talk about this trueness and search of trueness. [2:03:21] Listen, let's stay with conviction. [2:03:25] I think that can probably come from multiple... [2:03:29] directions. [2:03:31] It's personal people that just easier. They're kind of disagreeable people. And it comes easy. [2:03:37] Ah... [2:03:40] For me... [2:03:42] As you said, it was like having kids and feeling that I had to stand up for them and act. [2:03:49] And the good thing about that was it was sort of arbitration in the good sense that I... [2:03:59] stand up for my convictions. I had to like go through this entire process of the pain of doing what I wanted to do.

[2:04:10] And I came out of an boundary and... [2:04:12] And I was like, that's kind of okay. [2:04:14] And so it was like... [2:04:16] 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. [2:04:31] being in a 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, [2:04:40] Social pressure forces you to do things that are uncomfortable for you. [2:04:44] It's like a constructed stakes. Yeah. [2:04:47] So I think, yeah, having investors, having kids, like there are different ways to construct in those states. Another way... [2:04:54] Off. [2:04:56] like securing your conviction or acting on what you believe, [2:05:01] That's been used a lot historically to say that, like, if I do not do this, I betray God. [2:05:07] I wrote that down. You said, um, 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. [2:05:24] Yeah. And I mean, that's... If we're going to be... [2:05:28] I'm atheist, so I'm going to be very crass about what that mental move is doing. It's just hijacking people. [2:05:35] or... [2:05:36] conformity bias. [2:05:38] like, we have a tendency to, like, want to bow our heads to authority. And then if you just, like, invent an authority, which is all-seeing and all-powerful, and then you...

[2:05:49] give them your idolized values. Then there's a pie jack in your [2:05:53] innate [2:05:54] drive to submit to authority or to like fit in. So you're kind of hijacking that kind of monkey brain thing we have. [2:06:04] And... [2:06:06] I mean, one shouldn't explain that because it works less well if you understand that that's what you're doing. [2:06:12] I struggle to do that myself, since I don't believe in God, and so... [2:06:17] then I would know that I was like tricking myself. I was just using God as a prop. What do you believe in? Um, [2:06:25] That's a good question. I believe... [2:06:29] Um... [2:06:32] It's something like... [2:06:35] Maybe something like that. [2:06:38] we all, it sounds cliche, but we all have something we can... [2:06:43] contributed like we... [2:06:44] The universe itself is just so extraordinary with everything, like quantum particles and black holes and evolution. It's just like we can come here and explore things. [2:06:56] and take part in this unfolding creation. And that's just like... [2:07:00] so remarkable and so big in itself. And then, [2:07:04] On top of that, [2:07:05] Because of the accident of... [2:07:08] your genetics and the place you're born, there's going to be certain... [2:07:13] things that will only be possible for you. Like there would be certain things that only you will be in a position to care for. And, and, uh,

[2:07:22] And so... [2:07:23] I'm not sure why, but for some reason it feels imperative to me that, like... [2:07:28] You should protect and be a guardian. [2:07:33] all of that. [2:07:34] possibility and like make sure that you [2:07:38] the universe are like [2:07:40] Better a place that you are like all. [2:07:43] maybe sort of forced toward a higher complexity that like when you leave the planet like if [2:07:50] Mm-hmm. [2:07:51] the fight against entropy has been won. Like, civilization is a little bit more coherent. Like, we have better theories of the world. We have richer relationships. We have more diversity and perspectives. I don't know. It's like... [2:08:06] being a force for like... Whereas it feels... [2:08:10] It would be super boring if the universe was just like rocks floating in dead space. And like because that wouldn't have as much complexity as biobotical evolution. So you're just like being the force for. [2:08:23] increasing the complexity, something like that. Is it fulfilled potential? [2:08:28] Is that too simple? [2:08:30] Yeah, that's a good way of simplifying it down. But not only for yourself. It's a pathetic. [2:08:37] Because [2:08:39] I am not... [2:08:43] All that important in myself. Of course, I value myself there. [2:08:48] because I have to live in my body, but [2:08:51] But what matters more to me is just this continual unfolding that, like, my ancestors and they're all behind me. And, like, how can I play a part in this, like, ongoing...

[2:09:02] 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 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 i were playing more interesting things and so on [2:09:22] We talked about this a bit last time, but it is... [2:09:24] Being a good steward of being sentenced to freedom. That's how I hear it a little bit. [2:09:31] You were writing about a... [2:09:33] Spigniew Herbert, forgive my pronunciation, 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. [2:09:51] Thank you. [2:09:51] hard and soft together. So like 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. [2:10:10] Maybe... [2:10:12] you could replace hard and soft with like bravery and openness. [2:10:17] Does that resonate with you? [2:10:18] Is there anything in that thread that resonates? Yeah, I think that's part of it. [2:10:24] But it's interesting when we have these conversations, because it's all the same topic all the way through. [2:10:31] Because the reason you need to be both hard and soft when...

[2:10:36] interfacing with the world is that [2:10:40] Uh... [2:10:41] The world can be a quite horrendous place. There's like many things big and small that are terrible. [2:10:50] And you want to see them with clear eyes, because you want to see... [2:10:54] all of reality as cleanly as you can. Like... [2:10:57] And we don't have to think about like the big horrible things, but just like in your life, [2:11:03] in a relationship, like you want to be able to see [2:11:08] the ways you are failing as a father or husband. You want to see the friction, you want to be able to sit with those uncomfortable things. [2:11:17] Uh... [2:11:18] And that requires a sudden... [2:11:21] hardness. I don't know if that's the right word, but it requires a certain, like, um, [2:11:25] non-naidity, it's a certain forcefulness and strength. [2:11:30] And just like facing these... [2:11:32] painful things [2:11:34] because, uh, [2:11:36] Unless you can't 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 the most ethical, good, interesting path for the labyrinth. [2:11:49] and [2:11:51] But you also need to be soft. And the reason soft is gesturing out is that [2:11:56] Um... [2:11:59] Yes.

[2:12:15] Because the risk... [2:12:18] The risk if you're just very hard is that you get like stoical and you just close down and you're tense and like the world is a terrible place and not going to trust anyone, whatever. And that's not going to help you navigate. Yeah, also at the same time, I have to get back to that. [2:12:32] galloping down the road, being playful, being soft, because it's those small intuitions from the inside, what feels alive, what feels good, [2:12:41] that is going to guide you [2:12:43] Uh... [2:12:45] where you should walk in this realitas. And we've talked about it in terms of creative work, that it's... [2:12:53] connecting to these 12 senses that lets you do good creative work. But it's also true... [2:12:59] In all the myths, right, when [2:13:02] we were having... [2:13:04] when you're having a conversation, it's that ability to like... [2:13:10] feel inside yourself when something is right that's gonna uh [2:13:15] If you can tap into that... [2:13:17] be vulnerable with that and share that, that's going to make the conversation come alive. It's the same thing as with creative work. I think it's the same thing if you're designing a house or if you're building a company or whatever. [2:13:29] Because, like, I noticed, like... [2:13:31] when I was mentioned that I didn't [2:13:35] believe in God. You got curious there and you stopped and you went off script and asked him, what do you believe in? That was sort of [2:13:42] Because you were genuinely curious about that. And it felt like. [2:13:45] It was a little bit of an opening up.

[2:13:47] in the conversation when that happens. And like there's been several of those in the conversation here. [2:13:52] So, yes, you want to be both hard and soft. There's no great words for it, but like, [2:13:59] You need to see it bestoical enough so you can see reality and like Shire is playful enough so you can decide how to walk through that. [2:14:07] world. [2:14:09] 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... [2:14:16] 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. [2:14:37] And it's so hard. And obviously all wonder comes, and that's a trivial example, but everything good comes from that marriage. [2:14:45] But it's like it's this balance again. It's like, can I stay right in the middle of this, like, asserting, receiving? [2:14:54] Hmm. [2:14:56] Yeah, but so much about it. It feels like we're coming back again and again to sort of... [2:15:01] phenomenology of navigating in murky spaces. It's like... [2:15:07] How does this post is your feeling about it? What kind of [2:15:10] Rules of FAMP, how are you going to put your feet on, how are you going to [2:15:14] feel inside where to go. And it's, yeah, it feels like basically everything. You talked about different aspects of

[2:15:23] of that [2:15:25] Hochfeld census. [2:15:26] I think that's one of the kind of [2:15:30] Primary [2:15:31] readings I have of your work is something that you are not always staring directly at, but you are [2:15:39] You are circling around. One of the reasons I find the writing... [2:15:42] to be beyond beautiful or compelling or entertaining, but to be useful, um, because I think that's a worthy, um, [2:15:50] More of you think to pursue. [2:15:52] Thank you. [2:15:54] I have a few more things. [2:15:55] A couple of just quick miscellaneous things. Your essays are short. [2:16:01] Um, [2:16:03] very... [2:16:04] Very readable in a way that must be quite deliberate, I guess, is my reaction, even compared to other things on Substack. [2:16:13] Yeah, they'd gotten shorter. [2:16:15] I think I used to sort of average 4,000 words. Now I probably average 2,000 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 [2:16:33] make sure that each essay is its own little small room and like not having, I usually, cause if I look at my mother's, they are actually like three groups. [2:16:40] Because I didn't feel like it was enough. [2:16:44] And just trusting that this one thing is enough. [2:16:49] And also simplifying. It's like, I... [2:16:51] prune my [2:16:53] writing a lot. Like, I...

[2:16:57] Yeah, when I read a lot of other [2:16:59] writers, there's much more fluff. And that can be good because it can be a way of [2:17:05] like when it's done well... [2:17:07] It can be a way of like [2:17:09] putting you in a state more because they're repeating the same idea from different perspectives over and over again, but I try to [2:17:15] Keep it a little bit more trimmed. [2:17:18] Hopefully it's easier to... [2:17:21] get through it, but also leave some more space to... [2:17:26] Because I think most people obviously just read through my essays very rapidly and... [2:17:31] That's probably, hopefully, a pleasant experience. [2:17:35] 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 said, I want, yeah, it's again that double lead. 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 sure. [2:17:58] but you should also be able to read it. I mean, some people have... [2:18:01] told me that the red sign of my S is like 50 times. [2:18:05] And that's wonderful if you can create something that people can come back to and see there's more and more layers to it. [2:18:12] How's reading like running? [2:18:16] Reading is like running in that it is... [2:18:21] Well, it's a skill. It's – [2:18:26] To be able to run, you need to build up

[2:18:29] Many parts of your body, your muscles in your legs, your heart, [2:18:35] If you want to be a good runner, you have to develop your mental knowledge and understanding of, you know, you taught me about the pacing and things like that. [2:18:44] So there's this whole thing If you're going to run a marathon You're not just going to go out and do it You have to [2:18:51] you have to become the kind of person that can run a marathon, right? And that takes six months at least, probably several years. [2:18:58] And the same thing is true, writing, reading and writing. [2:19:02] I think a lot of people misunderstand that because it's a lot of people. [2:19:06] they can read a little bit, and then they think, like, this is the year of the last... [2:19:11] I can't really add a parada. And I'm like, I'm going to do Alakaren or not. And it's like, that's like saying I'm going to do a marathon on my first training run, right? [2:19:19] And everyone runs too fast and too far. [2:19:22] When they start. [2:19:23] Exactly. And enough, you get the same. And it's just like trusting that what matters is [2:19:29] In reading... [2:19:30] It's just like gradually gilding up. [2:19:34] your capacity to process words, your [2:19:37] references, understanding, like if you're reading Dante, like there's going to be references to a million things. [2:19:43] Poems are going to do much better if you understand those references and so on. [2:19:47] So it takes time to build up those things to actually do it. So it's like... [2:19:51] A good idea is just like to start. [2:19:54] slowly and steadily and just making it fun and gradually pushing yourself a little bit

[2:20:00] Because, [2:20:01] reading Anna Karen are supposed to be very easy, right? It, like... [2:20:05] 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. [2:20:14] And now I read it and it's like, this is like a romance novel, it's very easy. [2:20:19] but that's because I've built up the capacity. Um, [2:20:24] I think about how more and more in all domains... I used to think... [2:20:29] 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. [2:20:37] publicly so it's like oh I figured this thing out I should just write down how to do this thing right [2:20:42] And then he realized, like, that's not how it works, right? Because, like... [2:20:46] I used to write a bunch of essays about how I write my essays, and I think I could... [2:20:51] 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 [2:20:59] 15, 20 years becoming the kind of person who can write them. And there's, like, my entire Merva system is, like, [2:21:07] been redesigned for the purpose of writing essays. Okay. [2:21:10] And so you... [2:21:12] Probably like... [2:21:14] if someone tried to do what I do, it'd take at least five years of like deliberate hard effort of like becoming a, [2:21:21] Because you have to literally revire your entire grain. And I think that's sort of underappreciated. [2:21:29] Again, with 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 a foot forward...

[2:21:46] You can't just do things. [2:21:49] it's going to be a very... [2:21:51] long process. [2:21:53] of like rebuilding yourself into the kind of person who can use two things. But it's also a hopeful image, like because... [2:21:59] basically everyone can run a marathon. And basically everyone can... [2:22:04] become a good reader or become a good writer. You have to show up. You have to show up. You have to do it again and again for many years. And you have to like not burn out by expecting too much of yourself. Uh, [2:22:17] but at that kind of gradual... [2:22:20] increasing of strength and strength. [2:22:24] The literal practice. Yeah. Hmm. [2:22:26] 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. [2:22:40] 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 [2:23:10] love is a lot like that. [2:23:13] Hansburg got them that fun. [2:23:16] Yeah, that was cut from that fun. And I said, why is love a lot like that?

[2:23:22] Um... [2:23:24] Because... [2:23:26] Love. [2:23:28] As compared to the liking of conservation or something. [2:23:31] uh... [2:23:33] Peace. [2:23:36] a deep knowledgeable appreciation of another person. It's like you can't, [2:23:44] loved one in sort of the erring from sense of that word or something, unless you... [2:23:50] You're so intimate with that person if you actually, like... [2:23:53] have looked at them and understand them. And, um, [2:23:57] I find... [2:24:00] personally.f [2:24:04] Mayo my [2:24:05] closest relationships with people that I feel deepest love for are [2:24:10] almost like acquired tastes. Like, they're almost like... [2:24:15] *Hmph* [2:24:15] Well, it's not, it's not, that's not the strictly right way of saying it. Like I think a lot of people fell in love with Johanna around the time when we met. [2:24:25] because she was very lovely in some easy-to-read ways. [2:24:29] But the [2:24:30] 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. [2:24:40] And, uh, [2:24:42] So it's where I'm going. It's – [2:24:44] to really deeply love someone [2:24:47] for who they are. You have to see them very deeply, and you have to be very

[2:24:54] Yeah, and that requires a lot of context, and so, like, [2:24:58] It's almost like... [2:25:00] acquiring the skill of loving someone and then [2:25:03] If you... [2:25:04] Sometimes if you show that to someone else, [2:25:07] it might not make sense, right? Like, you take, like, let's take some very obvious example. Like, say, some people have... [2:25:16] an open relationship because they look deep at each other and they realize that we're totally okay with each other sleeping with other people. [2:25:23] And that feels very beautiful and fragile and close for them and totally respecting each other's egocentric views. [2:25:31] feelings and so on. Another person might look like that and say, that seems like a very toxic way of living. It's like, [2:25:36] well, have you actually... [2:25:38] 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 Shoup often... [2:25:48] subtle versions of that in all relationships if you're actually [2:25:52] Allowing that relationship to grow into a shape that is fitted to the people involved. [2:26:00] You write about authors as your friends. [2:26:03] Authors are our friends. There are odd people who talk to us, sometimes from across the grave. When Joanna and I talk, we'll say Tomas and mean Trance Stroma, 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.

[2:26:27] Who do you feel closest to in this way? [2:26:30] It doesn't have to be an answer for all of time, but it could be current. [2:26:36] I mean, I've been in... [2:26:39] I always turn to you. [2:26:41] different [2:26:42] Authors... [2:26:44] 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 on my creative journey? [2:26:52] So, [2:26:53] Then it's been natural for me to turn to people of Brian Eno and just like... [2:26:57] You know, you read his diaries, you read... [2:26:59] Listened to the interviews just on and... [2:27:01] like, [2:27:02] his biography, and trying to piece together [2:27:04] how he's done it [2:27:06] and I you know [2:27:08] gives you some models and it feels like, [2:27:11] In some ways, it's easier for me to talk... [2:27:14] To him? Because it's like... [2:27:16] The situation I'm in right now, like it's not that many people. [2:27:21] who have been in that separation, like, non-unlike friends have. Yes. So, like, it's hard to talk about these things, but I feel like in... [2:27:28] Sort of. [2:27:29] bounce against [2:27:30] his experiences and I don't [2:27:32] I think I'll do the same thing as he. We don't disagree if... [2:27:37] But it does feel like I can sit there and talk with him. And I think I always have that feeling... [2:27:44] I get this impression... [2:27:46] A lot of people put [2:27:48] like authors on like pedestals. And I see people even do that with myself, which is like super rare to me because like I'm, [2:27:55] as I know, like, obviously, he's, like, a guy...

[2:27:59] And it's like very strange when people do that. It's because I'll even see it in comments. People write about me in like third person. And as if I'm like some kind of thing. And I'm like... [2:28:07] You are the dictator of the blog, but... Yeah, sure, I am. But it's so strange when some people write about me and ask if I'm some famous person, then they're writing for a person. I was like... [2:28:17] I'm Peter. Like, I'm in a 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 [2:28:27] I hate to put me up there. And I think the same is true for a while. And if you approach people like that, if you approach Dostoevsky like that, which you realize like, [2:28:39] they're all very Yuba. They're all very, like, relatable and open in their writing in their strange ways. And [2:28:48] 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... [2:29:02] They're just people. [2:29:03] and they can be... [2:29:05] Interesting to talk to because they have interesting experiences and they pushed further into that than many others. [2:29:12] But it's nice to put them down here and... [2:29:17] and play with them. [2:29:18] You wrote about your, I think, maternal grandfather who passed away last summer. Niels? [2:29:24] Life is not a story that builds to a climax. It is a story that meanders. [2:29:28] Every single moment in life is as worthy of care and attention as the climax of a story.

[2:29:33] What I grieved wasn't his, Neil's worn-out body finally giving up. [2:29:38] 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. [2:29:52] 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. [2:30:10] It was the gone-ness of all of those moments that hurt. [2:30:15] Are there any other moments... [2:30:17] that come to mind that you would like the world to know about Niels? [2:30:23] Anyways, yo. [2:30:25] very [2:30:27] special man, meant... [2:30:29] Mm-hmm. [2:30:30] a lot to me. I always say he's [2:30:33] We had a very, very close relationship, close enough, my eyes. [2:30:36] people have with their [2:30:38] Brown Perns, I think. He retired. He was a road worker, so he retired and he was 60. [2:30:44] And that was the singer I spawned. So he... [2:30:47] He spent a lot of time sort of caring for me and I'll [2:30:50] when my mom started working again, so he would come there and be with us. And... [2:30:56] So I grew up very close with technique, camping, and it was a very... [2:31:02] down-to-earth kind of person, very...

[2:31:05] So those moments are actually a very important thing. And then maybe not so typical for like, [2:31:11] the cultural milieu that he came from, like he came from very, very, very poor, [2:31:16] circumstances, grew up without electricity [2:31:19] And everyone was like very... [2:31:22] Machal and Selena to be [2:31:24] like grow up, do you be the kind of person who's about takes care of kids and like, [2:31:28] It's very soft in many ways, but it was also very, very core. [2:31:32] Oh, there's so many interesting things about him. [2:31:35] There's one beautiful little story about how he was when he was... [2:31:42] I think he was four years old. On Saturdays, they would get a sugar tube [2:31:49] and I would put it over fire to make it like a caramel. [2:31:54] And he did that. And I put it in. And then it slid down his throat so he couldn't breathe. [2:31:59] And he was so sensitive, so he didn't want to disturb anyone. [2:32:05] So he just went around, like hugging his mom, his dad, his seven siblings, and then he went out, laid down on the meadow. [2:32:12] and like prepare to die and then it melted and slid down so he was a very very special person aww [2:32:22] Uh... [2:32:24] And, um... [2:32:26] Yeah, not the most talkative person, but I'm very... [2:32:31] very extremely determined to do

[2:32:35] well, to help people. Even during COVID, [2:32:41] And at this point, I mean, he was 92 or something. Uh... [2:32:46] and he was basically not holding together anymore, but he would still take his, what do you call those rolling shares, and he would walk like 500 meters down to the... [2:32:57] house where the elderly people stayed. And he would go from window to window and talk to all of the people who were in isolation and [2:33:06] So he would always try to find some way that he could be of use, and toward the very end, [2:33:12] He couldn't speak. He was... [2:33:14] you know, [2:33:15] Almost completely lost. I don't think it recognised. [2:33:18] almost anyone, [2:33:20] But it was still the same... [2:33:23] person because one of them [2:33:26] Narcissus told us that there was... [2:33:29] another elderly woman in a wheelchair who had a [2:33:33] who was sort of having a panic attack, I guess. That she was afraid of death and... [2:33:37] dementia. Um, [2:33:39] So she was just acting out and throwing stuff. [2:33:41] And he saw that and, like, couldn't speak, couldn't do anything, but he just got up and, like... [2:33:47] move slowly over and like cook her head [2:33:50] 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 hand. [2:33:58] So to the very end, he was always looking for ways of being...

[2:34:05] I've used other people and [2:34:09] and never... [2:34:11] cared at all about. [2:34:15] him like... [2:34:18] He was never self-centered in any way whatsoever, and [2:34:21] And like when he died... [2:34:24] He instructed that he didn't want to grieve. [2:34:28] You want to be just put in the communal grave and, like, without any plague, because it's just... [2:34:34] I think he just felt like his work was done, right? [2:34:37] Now he'd like... [2:34:39] He was here to be of service... [2:34:43] and he too also like i think made the atheism prompts from him like uh he didn't believe in a [2:34:50] with like being of service, thin views and then like, [2:34:53] disappearing into the night. [2:34:56] Well, [2:34:57] So he formed me [2:35:00] in so many ways and when I make you high [2:35:04] we bought their house. [2:35:07] Um... [2:35:08] And when they moved to like a seer, [2:35:11] apartment next. [2:35:13] door basically and that was the set of what they would have some time to [2:35:20] say goodbye through life in a gradual way. [2:35:24] So during those years when we lived there, we hung out. Well, in the beginning, every day, he would just barge into the house, all the time. [2:35:32] And it could always fix things and then gradually less and less.

[2:35:38] And you always had to do the good work. I remember we were going to a party at... [2:35:42] suit on [2:35:44] And he came, and it's like, it's the day for the potatoes. [2:35:47] You know, it's like, yeah, but... [2:35:50] We can do that tomorrow, maybe because I'm going... And he was... [2:35:53] 87 or something. [2:35:56] And he's like, no, it's the day of the potatoes. And so he just goes out and starts, like, I can't let the A.T.C.E. and you all plant all the potatoes. So, like, standing there with pasta, see it on, or plant the potatoes. It's just... [2:36:09] Yeah, he wanted to do the right thing and [2:36:11] all the time. [2:36:13] So that was very important to the special experience that we spent three years doing. [2:36:18] where he was like the closest friend I had. Like I spent... [2:36:22] more time with him than anyone else. And that was split between... [2:36:26] 25 or 28, like a very formative period in my life. [2:36:30] And I do think that also sort of helped me [2:36:33] like, [2:36:34] shaped together... [2:36:36] some sort of value system. [2:36:41] There's a line from... [2:36:44] I think it's from Herbert. I could be mistaken, so forgive me. Repeat words stubbornly. Repeat old 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. [2:37:01] Is there anything that you find yourself doing? [2:37:04] Repeating. [2:37:07] I have some...

[2:37:09] poems that I often return to you. [2:37:12] So, red light, Thomas Boehner. [2:37:15] Yeah, they're just sitting... Usually they're not off, like, uh... [2:37:20] There's a few lines that I like to repeat where I like, [2:37:23] A sentence where it encapsulates a simple time and an important thing. [2:37:29] thought. But many of the ones I'm trying to are more like a mood almost. There's one that I often return to and I [2:37:38] I think I have no Verizon Swedish, which is called the... [2:37:40] I don't know, in English it's maybe like a short pause in the organ concert. [2:37:45] by [2:37:47] John Stern there, which is... [2:37:51] It's a beautiful kind of rendition of [2:37:53] And going into a church... [2:37:56] And, um, [2:37:57] experiencing [2:37:59] certain [2:38:01] connection to [2:38:03] human condition that comes out very strongly in that scene where he's standing in the church and [2:38:12] I think there's like, there's seven lines in there where he's talking about like how the book inside of the person gets rewritten. [2:38:20] Every second, it's like, um... [2:38:22] big majestic thought, but it's a [2:38:25] with so many pages that's still with air between them. And, and, and, and, and that there's like, [2:38:30] waves going through it all the time, the image is changing. I'm butchering the images, but [2:38:35] But there's something about that which [2:38:39] poem, which you should link, that puts me back into a sense of

[2:38:46] awe and care for... [2:38:49] the human being of a leg on [2:38:52] the condition we're in and how fragile we are and how small we are and how meaningful still. [2:39:00] 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 you wrote recently. [2:39:08] You were writing about a sculptor on the island. [2:39:11] Thank you. [2:39:12] If you look at the cliffs that have been carved by the glaciers during the Ice Age, he wrote... [2:39:17] You can still see the carvings there 10,000 years later, so these shapes will live on for a long time. [2:39:22] 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. [2:39:40] We were here. We felt this. [2:39:45] Yeah. [2:39:46] I think [2:39:47] Yeah, I think that is a lot of what it comes down to because [2:39:52] We're doing... [2:39:54] There's so much work to be done. There's so, you know, hospitals to be manned and... [2:39:59] companies to be started or roads to be clear. And there's so much work to be done, but sort of what [2:40:05] To me, it all amounts to what the point of it all is, like... [2:40:10] these human experiences that that enables. And when you see those, like I think it's from Argentina,

[2:40:16] you know, the 100 gatherers have like blown [2:40:19] colored pigments on their hands, leaving those on the wall. That's just... [2:40:23] kind of, you know, [2:40:24] it's a reminder to develop a 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, [2:40:35] It all sort of calms down eventually. It's like, we're here. [2:40:39] that says this is happening. [2:40:42] Remember. [2:40:44] Thank you, Henrik. [2:40:45] Thank you, Axa. [2:40:49] 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. [2:41:19] 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, dialectic.fm, is hosted on Notion, and you can check out more there, whether it be the transcripts, the links, individual lessons I've 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

[2:41:49] 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.