41: Henrik Karlsson: Strolling Through Life's Labrynths

37:16I don't think about analogians at all when I'm in my notebook. And I'm very, like, I could, I think it would be valuable to publish parts of it. But as I write it, I don't think about the audience at all. And I couldn't do it. If I go back and read my diaries from when I was like 17, 20, something like that, I can clearly see like I'm young and I have hubris and that I think that like this is going to be read. And hopefully not. But if I read my diaries from, let's say, around when I turned 30, I can definitely, there's been some shift in my stance where I can clearly feel like this person does not, no longer think anyone's going to read.

38:04Are you writing to yourself in the future? Or are you writing to yourself in the future? Yes, exactly. I think the big change that happened for me in 2019, which was like a precursor to that led to the final sort of breakthrough with the writing, public writing, was that I started indexing my diaries. So like once a week, I would go through and I would number the pages. And then I would do an index on the front page where I would write like on pay, on fold up two. I talk about Ivan Illich and then also on fold up 18. right so i would list them this is the re-encoding again by the way the retracing re-encoding and then the idea for that was just to uh make sure that i would re go back to it and and and kind of enter into dialogue with my past self and like not have all of these thoughts ways that they would be searchable but what happened i think when i did that was that i became my own audience because prior to that i almost never reread my stuff and then i started reread, it became real.

39:06Like you, you knew the audience. One of the things I like to talk about is, um, it's really easy to write a letter because you know exactly who the audience is, but also, you know, you have extreme confidence. The person will read it because if you write anyone a letter, at least if you know them, they're probably going to read it. And so it's almost a, what I'm hearing you describing almost as a trust of your reader to actually follow through. You got into a pattern where future you actually would go back and read it. So it made the stakes more serious yeah and i guess i can't like i'm speculating here but i suspect early on when i did that i would read things go back and read things and i noticed like oh that's cringe like i am posting i am doing these things and and that would be embarrassing in front of the audience of myself and so i would like i'll learn that close right it's almost like a ballerina in front of a mirror like looking at the movement of the leg and knows i was like that's the wrong movement of the leg because that's posing that's that's um cringe and and i guess i kind of without even thinking about it how that kind of reinforcement look which helped me get into the right post so so whenever i write in the notebook now i i always like immediately go into the right post where i'm like open creative uh willing to linger in confusion and so on whereas in other mediums Like if I open the sub stack editor, like I'll, like I can't write it.

40:34If I try to write in Google docs or if I write it, like I'll enter into different stances, like if I write an email being one stance that I'll, you know, WhatsApp or different stance. So, but I have through practice, like encoded a very good stance around my notebook, so I can always go there. Yes. It's an environmental priming that is like, I know what we do here. Boom. I'm in that. There's a little thread I think that relates to this in terms of how we sort of talk to ourselves and ask ourselves questions. An old thing on, I think it was old, on Nick Cave. And maybe almost like a thesis of one of the things the notebooks can do.

41:10You're talking about this woman, Kelly, who is writing into Nick Cave for advice on how to be creative. And she's struggling. She's blocked. You say, another way to make a distinction between them, Nick and Kelly, is to say that Cave is trying to figure out what his voice is trying to say right here, right now. while Kelly wants to hear her voice, tell her what is true about her across time. But they are both introspecting in the sense that they want to know what a voice inside them says if they block out the expectations of Broken Father's society of the audience. Cave is more modest than Kelly here.

41:41He is asking not who he is, but in a roundabout way, who am I in relation to this song, this book, this tour? Is there potential in this song? How can I open it up? What does it want? Those questions are hard, but not as hard as who am I? and can often be solved in a few hours at the desk. And so I guess my question is, is the secret in part to maybe what you were just describing, this good, healthy kind of productive conversation with ourselves just to maybe ask simpler questions or to be more specific? Well, if I think about my own notebook, I think another shift, I don't remember exactly when that happened, but maybe around the same time is that I shifted a lot of it away from myself.

42:26Like I used to use my diary to sort of deal with my frustrations. And so I still do that for a little bit, but I started to attend outwards. Listen, my notebook was just filled with like reflections about things I wrote, things I saw that my kids were doing, things that happened in nature, conversation that's happened. So I started to attend outward. I made a note about that recently where, where's this, it's almost like you can know yourself as an object. And I think that was what Kelly wanted to do. Like, what kind of person am I? Who am I? Who am, like, and almost drawing a narrative around yourself as well.

43:12And that's very complex. Like, I have no idea who I am. Like, that's, like, we're such extremely complicated objects. like even even like saying like what is hamlet or like a short book is very hard but we're like that times a thousand like we're going around having different experience and spots every moment and like trying to like define down what that is it's very hard it's very hard to have good understanding of yourself as an object and and and i think a lot of people try to turn toward that and that can just be confusing and navel grazing and so on and but but when i try to attune to things outside of me like to my kids or to a book or to nature um i also have to you're in that you're in myself but i'm connecting to myself as a subject yes i'm going to connect him to myself as like a person paying attention and like what am i noticing here what am i getting frustrated with or what am I curious about?

44:20And all of that is also like information and you can understand that kind of subjective perspective of yourself. And if you look at someone like Rick Rubin or Nick Cade, they have extreme confidence in their subject. They know themselves as subjects really well. They know the pieces in the circle. They know the debris more so than they are like looking for the boundary shape in a way. Yes. Yes. I think those things or maybe another way of putting it would be like they're seeing the pixels deeply they have an incredibly high resolution on the pixels but they're like less concerned with what the like image the holistic image is yes they do yeah so yeah they are on a derivere right they are making uh it like yeah it's it's like with someone like nick cave it's not clear at all like where he's going obviously music is very important to him as it's been for like 40 or 50 years but the way that music evolves and the different kinds of like films and books and art projects he does along the way right he's making his like small ceramic figurines like all of that is like very drifting very much in just like if you were trying to understand Nick Cave as an obvious but let's say you were his management and you were trying to like a cool what is the nick came brand yes you would never like go like we should do porcelain figurines of the death though right i don't know where i'm getting here but i think it's telling that the world today is very we are trying to put ourselves into brand shapes let alone algorithm shaped holes like we are we are trying to make ourselves legible the the modern certainly the internet is about making yourself legible in a way that is like cohesive enough and small enough and contain enough that it can be like replicated externally and so i i do think it's telling that there's some kind of external pressure to be that way and and by the way maybe less with nick but like people love to like draw some guru box around rick rubin and then poke fun at it and i i think rick just doesn't care because he's just like i like these pixels or i like these little shapes yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly like that the understanding that people have of rick from the outside is as probably very divorced from from what he is from the inside i think they're observing him far more than he's observing himself yeah yeah yeah and also like the stereotypes of him like just being a guru like where he's actually a very very intellectual person and like spends enormous times reading and so on like that's not what will thing on right this i think relates to a thing that relates to also to what we were talking about at the top which i i would call a broad thing around being unpredictable um and i think that extends into taking risks and agency and a handful of other things you say i have such difficulty hearing what i feel when there are strong external reasons to do something we were speaking about that and as a result you kind of need to um create the space to become more unpredictable You're talking about AI.

47:26You say, a language model basically analyzes a string of words and completes it by predicting how the text would have continued if it was a sentence on the internet. Your job, on the other hand, is to write the least predictable thing that still makes sense. And then you say, once you learn that grass is supposed to be green, it becomes almost embarrassing to make it blue, even though real grass is often blue, as good painters learn when they start to pay closer attention to reality. My sense here is that there is being unpredictable for its own sake, which I think the wrong reading of how do I make myself irreplaceable to AI?

48:00Or like you could imagine someone just trying to be chaotic. And using unpredictability as a path to getting towards, I'm not sure what the right word is here, like where you want to go or to the place that is right or to a place that is ours, maybe something that is true. how do you know how do you know the difference whether it be in a stylistic choice in creativity and writing or in a life decision choice i i could imagine there would be a a risk of just being unpredictable for its own sake yeah uh yeah i think maybe i'm gonna push back on that in terms here i think i don't think having as a goal to be unpredictable i think that is again playing to the audience like I am trying to fight the AI or something I think think they're again better to like trying to orient like what what is exciting or what is alive and so on like is it made more for what I would say is what to aim for I was speaking about like when it comes to constraints and unpredictability was thinking about cage young cage and lost a year so they're both do very unpredictable work and we both use constraints a lot in the process.

49:24So like Young Cage, he has this piece, I think, where he set up a system and then he's using Aixin or like some endices and so on to like make all the decisions. So the music is total chaos, right? It's like the timing of the notes, the pitches, everything is like decided through this random system yeah i find i mean that's that's a fun experiment but it's it's horror to listen to in my ears it's like it can be interesting for a few minutes to it's a hack it's a hack to um funnily enough cyan rolls dice to decide to do things in her life but i don't think she's she's using it to get to a place of kind of openness or derive or original seeing versus using it as a way to like get to the finished product which maybe is the difference yeah yeah Yeah, because, yes, exactly.

50:18Because randomness can produce all sorts of, it will get you out of the habitual. It will get you to places, combinations you would have never seen before. But Young Cage, in that at least, he doesn't then apply his own taste diet. He just says, okay, so the system has run its work. now we have random chaos here we go and that that's one kind of experiment and then you have um well i was gonna go with lorchon free but we could go with brian eno is maybe closer he also does uh these things where he has a system i think that runs in his house where he has he has you know 10 000 sonic landscapes that he's made across the years uh that has never amounted to anything and then his system will pick two at random and play them at the same time in his loudspeaker and then he can just like push a bottom and it will change it to a different combination and then he can push another bottom and it saves that combination.

51:22So he's like exposing himself to a lot of dissonance but then he's applying his taste like, nah, it's a cue. Yeah. So then he gets outside of his habitual space of ideas but he then picks the ones that are interesting and then reworks them and improves them into something that works so that that's a difference between him and cage and i would say then again that large from tree what he's doing when he's applying constraints on himself is something similar he's he's applying constraints that limit him from doing the things that are easy and that he's that he knows will work right he's very he's a very very talented uh with like framing and i mean if you look at the films he made in 80s that they look like golden age Hollywood it's like so crisp everything is like so beautifully choreographed everything and then he very consciously said like I'm going to forbid myself from doing all of those things that I am famous for and that I do well so I'm only going to use handheld camera there's going to be like for a period where there's even no artificial lightning and then he brought that back in but and he has all these constraints that is forcing him to like remove all of that and that but but then he's not just like making shitty films he's acting like within that realm now that i can't do the normal interesting things that i like i'm going to have to go in a new direction and there's something new interesting that i haven't tried before and he actually ends up finding novel things that but they're not only novel they're also more powerful they are resonating with us as an audience at a deeper level and that's what matter it doesn't matter that it's null but it matters that it shakes us so the the tension here i was going to say is um it feels sort of like he's using unpredictability to go back to the earlier point as a tool to unlock more aliveness or maybe unpredictability is still the wrong word but he's using these constraints i guess the question you you you write a lot about you know um in the ways that you know is really good at just like risking everything over and over again and you also I think critically make the stipulation that like he has like upped his level of risk taking gradually over time.

53:35I think at one point you say if you have a hit and can build up some savings that is meant to fund bigger risk going forward not keeping up with the Joneses. Am I habitually doing what I had to do to get here rather than looking clear-eyed at the possibilities that actually exist now? The question here I think to maybe go back to Von Traer is like do we know are his films actually better maybe maybe to better ground it with you like last time we spoke you talked about how if you could you'd spend a year just writing about Bergman's diary and is that the best thing for you to work on is the most is more love and relationships lists as we joked about last time like maybe go back to the mental proprioception it's about this like balance in yourself and with the world that like has some space between it that allows you to be chase what you're alive to and be responsive with the world and there are these hacks that maybe the most truly attuned person wouldn't even need to use the hacks and they would just purely make lars is using these constraints because he knows that his tendency will be to i think well we'll start with an image again can you imagine that we're like moving through uh like giant labyrinth a mace and uh when it's not even like the normal labyrinth it's like a high dimensional it's going in like a hundred dimensions at the same time and inside this labyrinth we're gonna have good artworks we're gonna have good essays we're gonna have good startups we're gonna have good research ideas somewhere in there and and our job is like to take the right path through this labyrinth uh to find the good stuff that that's sort of what we're doing when we're creating new things we're and and um and these different constraints and different stances are like uh ways rules of thumb for how to navigate this labyrinth so for example if you're applying constraints you're saying that i'm not allowed to do this and that you're you're blocking off uh big parts of the labyrinth the majority of labyrinth are saying i'm gonna only work in this direction and then you're forced to maybe go further down in that direction and you'll find new stuff but I don't think we can know beforehand that like where in the labyrinth will the good stuff be right so sometimes maybe going very pop like Coldplay I think Coldplay had done some extraordinary art but I think I'm not sure but I think they have thought very hard about what the audience wants and they've like optimized and gone down the labyrinth very very hard in that direction and they ended up finding some good things yeah and other people said you can't know in the forehand and if you look at large from trigger it's very clear that he's always like playing these rules on himself and more than half of the time he abandons the projects because it turns out that that part of the labyrinth is Barbarian, right?

56:39Yeah, it's an explorer exploit a bit in some sense, yeah. Because he had a project where he was, that he started, I think, in the early 90s where he was going to film for three minutes every year for 30 years and there's going to be a film. So that's like a strange constraint. Turned out that was a terrible film, so he's not working on that anymore. So he's done many of those. So I guess you just have to try different parts of the labyrinth and yeah, I don't think there's like a run stats. I like that a lot. It's funny that the arbitrary constraints to unpredictability or the hacking it or whatever, that's one version.

57:15Another version that maybe fits into that model is you talk about the context of Herzog, but it reminded me of the Steve Jobs thing as well. It's this thing about Herzog just like being upset about doing things the proper way. uh one short tiny segment of it is the professionals having too many preconceived ideas of how to go about things wasted resources and missed the light in the trees they're like worried about the makeup and they he's obsessed with the golden light steve jobs speaks about this at some point and i think it's like the 80s and he's talking about how um they had some way of doing accounting for hardware and you basically flub the numbers because there's no way to get the numbers exact and he it's just like that seems dumb like we should just change it and he his point is he calls this like um business folklore it's just like the way things are done the way things have to be done and it feels like that's another version of reasons you might not look in a certain part part of the labyrinth um and you're like you come across a certain kind of like solution uh 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 the original opening around unpredictability is that unpredictability almost feels like deliberately just being unpredictable rolling the dice is a very low dimensional way of doing this broader thing that you're describing yes yes dice is just an example of a constraint uh and the thing you're talking about there with like her sog uh not wanting to do film like he's he's irritated with the crew because they're going through the motions and doing all of normal whole which stuff and he doesn't feel like that's necessary because he'd rather catch these accidents and the beautiful light that comes on at some point and and and that is the tile again right they are like this is how you they have a tile This is how you make film.

59:16And when you're dealing with Bernard Herzog, like the normal Hollywood tile is the wrong shape, right? You have to be able to break that apart and go like, I'm going to put this together in a new way. I'm going to be open to the fact that maybe we're not going to do makeup in this scene because we'd rather feel like right now the morning lights, and be open for that because that's the right thing for Asesthetic and his kind of ethics of film. but they couldn't because they were so locked in they had this kind of northern shield again right so if we don't get the makeup we won't have the tile that makes this a square and we have to make it a square that's what that's the that's the thing they're saying yeah yeah they're just like reapplying the same idea that they have framework like this is how we do it it's gonna be a b c it's gonna be the same over and over again whereas if you're gonna do really good work You have to be just open to this thing right now.

1:00:14Right. Like the film they were making in that case, it's like a very gritty handheld Vietnam film where it's supposed to be very like claustrophobic. You don't need makeup for that. Like if you pay attention to the film you're making, that is not necessary. But the other way. Yeah. But they're so like, we're supposed to do it that way. so but to make good art you have to like try to be like naive or innocent and like this is the situation like and so if we're filming like what kind of karma movements do we need here what kind of stuff do we need here and and not do the habitual thing and just like make the mosaic specifically for this piece of work how do you think someone like that the counter argument to this framework would be that breaking away breaking apart all the tiles every time is obviously not tenable um and to your point earlier um the more you break them the better you get at rebuilding them and someone like herzog on some level probably like very comfortable in the broken debris space he's very comfortable in ambiguity i think that might be a trait of what you would call someone with high agency um but also like that is fundamentally like there's a reason we have the consistency of the models.

1:01:30And so like, is it just about getting more comfortable in ambiguity so you can speed run that faster? Like, how do you know when to, maybe this is again, going back to the unpredictability thing. Unpredictability is the goal is in and of itself leads you, leads you astray, leads you to overrating doing things from first principles, perhaps. And that's not the point. The point is to do things from first principles. The point point is to find the new place in the labyrinth. Maybe it's just attunement as we keep coming back to. But, I mean, you said a part of your talk about like it's very costly to do it that way.

1:02:09And yes, that is the case. But like if what we're talking about now is not like how to run your accounting bureau that is doing the same thing over and over again, then you shouldn't apply this way of thinking. This is not like, and when you're doing it, the feeling, the podcast, like setting up the, you probably shouldn't reinvent that every time. And let's make that an entire artistic thing, because the thing you're trying to maybe, if the focus for what you're doing with podcasts is like trying to push the conversations into a better space. So, so maybe around that part where, where, where it really matters, it's worth like putting in that effort.

1:02:51I get what I'm trying to say yes it's like if you just want to get a result fast then just tires yeah it's the same as if you're building a house if you have like these floors that are the I don't know what it's called like you just click them in yeah and then it looks like a fake wooden floor it's very fast like it's sort of a tiling but if you want to make a really nice house of course you're going to have like a carpenter and hand carve every little part of it and um it depends on what business you're in and if you're in the business of like creating new ideas for a startup or or art or essays like yes it's it's a very costly kind of research cost so if these are costly projects but but it's the only way we know how to like get to these powerful new experiences and products and artworks.

1:03:47One last thing here. You have this, I think you wrote it shortly after we last spoke and we talked about some similar themes last time, but you wrote about agency. At the beginning of that, you had this little excerpt that kind of prompted it about Maude. I wish I had a book that I could put in her hands and it helps her learn what many never learn or learn too late, namely that the possibilities are much bigger than you think, that you can live more deeply and truly and that you can solve almost any problem if you put your mind to it. A book about how to handle being sentenced to freedom and to handle it effectively and authentically and responsibly.

1:04:24You go on in that piece to talk about autonomy and efficacy as these kind of two components of agency, the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. The thing I was thinking about in the context of all this is like, maybe it's similar to cost, is risk. What is the relationship between agency and risk? And how do you think about, along the lines of everything we just spoke about in trying to do truly new creative things in that labyrinth, how do you think about updating your model of risk? Maybe specifically in the Eno sense of how do you use the current success to unlock the new unknown thing versus playing the hits?

1:05:08yeah it's it's that that part is is hard it's it's like uh our sense of self and our mental models are always sort of a sort of lagging indicator or something it's they are slow to update uh i struggle with that a lot um because the rate of change for me has been quite rapid like i went from like literally like being totally on my own and like isolated on the island off with move that was like six years ago and then maybe three years ago someday i started to have some success and now like it's my job and then like and and when you have that kind of almost exponential uh change in your life it's very very hard to like update because i still kind of feel like the person i was like four years ago or something which is is is is not who i am now and and so so i probably get back to risk like i probably take way too little risk i think all of us do almost overwhelmingly maybe not elon but yeah and peter thiel but like but but specifically like in my case it's like i'm still i haven't like updated that like i'm actually like not struggling with money that are anymore right but that used to be like a terror for me with with money for for many years and until me like less than a year ago and so i still think that way even though it's not true and that's making me make not the optimal decisions i could be make it because like if i it's a scarcity mindset that is seeping in yeah and i'm not looking at this equation clear-eyed like i'm not like noticing but like the situation is actually like this like that the amount of money i could invest into a project is is higher now i could deal with this and that i'm not noticing that and because i'm not noticing i'm actually not making the best decisions and i don't know how to actually make that uh faster that update i yeah well someone tell me uh i would love to know but i do think another thought that came up when you talked about risk is and which kind of gestered that in my last answer was that it kind of helps to think a little bit like a vc or something you're you're you're making a bunch of bets in your life and like every time i'm writing an essay i'm making a small bet like i'm betting that this will be a valuable thing for me to spend 50 hours working on i'm betting on these conversations and betting on things i find it's usually the case that it's not worth like doing due diligence on everything and that it's a good idea to like not take risk in most domains of your life so that you can play very risky in some domain because it's it's the bold risky moves that have high payoff but in order for them to have high payoff you have to do due diligence you have to actually think things through and like position yourself correctly so that your experiments have some likelihood of paying off like most of them will fail but but you you want like 10 percent 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 you have almost overwhelmingly concentrated on a few fairly risky things that maybe are less risky than they look on the outside or whatever, but you don't have a diversified basket on a relative basis.

1:08:58Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And you see that when Albert Maslow did his research on people who are highly self-actualized, you see that they're making concentrated vets in certain domains, and they're not like taking a lot of risk in their entire life. Usually they are like selected conformists. Like some people who are very like self-actualized in his opinion, right? They tend to dress very conservatively. They tend to have normal haircuts. They tend to like in all sorts of way because they're trying to minimize needless friction, right? Because if I'm wearing a funny t-shirt, that's going to cause some friction in certain situations.

1:09:45And do I really want to spend my limited amount of energy and like time, money, everything on the friction of my T-shirt? Or do I rather spend it on like my relationships or my creative work? And so. You keep talking about clothing too long. You're going to sound like Mark Zuckerberg. You got to be careful. I think the point is well made. Yeah. But it's a point I often make. It's like priorities. Like what? That's the wrong thing. Yeah. Yeah. What's the thing you're trying to do? And then you, yeah, I guess, Steve Jobs again, like to get back to clothes, like be your sport, the same clothes every day because dad doesn't have to think about that.

1:10:24And there's no friction. Like it's very. What about, maybe we'll talk about this later, but like there's another thing that's sort of like don't get cute. Like if you found a thing that works, like really, really, we talked about this last time. You were like, great. you wrote a couple of good essays like that's cool let's see if you stick around like i'm four years into this now you're five years into this like what about 50 years and i i think about this like i'm working on this project and i'm very early in i'm a year and change um and it has more success than i had before and so like am i how wide is my aperture am i taking enough risk am i trying enough other things should i do i do i just keep doing this thing like and really really like and I think I'm drawing a false comparison but I'm not totally sure how to think about risk in the context of like opening up the aperture to planting other seeds versus like don't get cute like you found hit the ball like keep hitting the tennis ball I don't know like if I think about myself like how much choice I have it's like because I keep thinking that light you know maybe there are some very big very valuable things i could be doing if i just like doubled and tripled down on certain things that would be very very valuable for other people i could make and and then and i would also probably earn a lot of money by doing those things and sometimes i think it's like maybe i should do that like and then i could have a bunch of money that i could donate and i could like have much more impact and do and i just can't i can't do it it's uh uh and and i think it's just sort of a personality trait right i am someone who's seeking and trying fix um but to some extent i think it's a valuable thing to sort of think about at times like this is a period where i'm locking down and like uh not changing plans all the time because i mean there are certain things i have 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 because otherwise I just rebel and quits the whole thing but conversely um you've talked about a world where like the essays are the exhaust of the life you've cultivated or the state of mind you've cultivated or even the milieu you've cultivated like um you've alluded in your writing to a world where in the future there you threw out a whole bunch of ideas, whether it's like doing more investigative kind of like work or interviews, bringing people to the island, making films.

1:13:10It's easy for me to imagine a future for you that is like Henrik wrote essays in the barn for 20 years. And maybe the output of that, among other things, is that you write, as you say, a few good essays. and there's a different version of you that is like the world of henrik or the world of escaping flatland has many more i think about this a lot in terms of what i'm doing like especially as someone who also has a tendency to want to like i like novelty and shiny objects and variety like how do you along this maybe to tie it all the way back to this earlier theme of proprioception and balance.

1:13:53Like what is the, when you are attuned to yourself around what to do next, how are you attuned to the ways you lean in that way? We're very much at the edge of my thinking because I'm going to be incoherent. That's hopefully the goal with a little bit of this. Yeah. And yeah, I'm struggling with these thoughts a lot. And I think like one promising direction for my like personal work is to, I've had a period where I've locked down very much and done my thing in order to get where I am now. I had to like, this works and this is like very aligned with what I value. So I'm just going to double and triple down on that for a few years.

1:14:38And for the last year, I've been like, what's the next step for that? And I haven't figured that out. But I think one thing that could be valuable is to making sure that I put myself in interesting situations, work on interesting projects, such that essays kind of happen of themselves. And trying to put myself in a situation where I free up more time. Because right now the blog is taking everything for me and and that'd be interesting to like carve out so that i work on the blog three days a week and the rest of the time is me doing related work which is putting me in interesting new situations that feeds the blog right so so because i also can't keep going doing what i'm doing now because then i'm just gonna because if now i'm basically spending six days a week on the blog at some point I'm going to get very boring because I am not having enough new experiences so I probably need to like start making films or start a podcast or start traveling more I need to probably to do those things in order to like feed the main things I guess I'm maybe trying to find some way of making those things work together and I haven't figured that out because but you have to see that threat like the root of the question hilariously is actually just like really trying to figure out what is more risky.

1:16:09Is it riskier to stay focused and like not get distracted, not get cute? Or is it riskier to try all these other things and like lose the plot? And I think that the root of it, at least how I would relate to it and what I, my reading of you is very attuned. You are very attuned to knowing that you at some future point will, like there is forgive the maybe crass metaphor it's almost like there's a tumor or something and there's like a little seed of something that's like well it's really working to do the essay six days a week right now but I probably won't be able and so I need to unfold or I need to that's how I see it One thing that comes to mind when I'm talking about this topic and I think seeing it maybe a little bit more clearly as we talk is that I think I have this from some of Taleb's books.

1:17:09I've seen Taleb where he talks about, maybe in Andrew Fragile he talks about, in certain kinds of jobs, like if you have a normal 9-to-5 job, it's going to look very stable. And then one day you're going to get fired and then your income is going to go to zero. Whereas if you drive an Uber, your income is going to be up and down a lot more, but you're actually more resilient or anti-fragile because you're planning buffers in your spending and so on to handle swings. And if there's a downturn, your salary is only going to get cut 20%. You're not going to get cut 100%. And that idea, I think, maybe applies to my situation too, is that I could double down on the things that work.

1:17:57And there's a lot of people failing me that I should do. and that I should, like there's these book deals I could do and so on. And that would earn me more money. It would have more impact short term. But it's like putting all the eggs in one basket. And the risk is that I'll burn out. I'll get bored. Other people get bored. I'll be locked in. And so actually that's probably my, it's going to look safer and more stable right now. But over 50 years time, it's probably riskier because I'm locking myself in. So actually trading off like 30 % of my time, 50 % of my time into more kind of illegible, diverse bets that that will make my situation now more unstable.

1:18:40My income go to up and down and so on. But it's probably over time a less risky path. Oh, but yeah, that's, that's my current slot at this very hour. It relates to a finance idea, which is the number one thing is to stay in the game, is to keep playing the game, optimize to be able to keep playing the game, not to hit zero. And I think there's a sort of energy curiosity version of that. Yeah. And I've had that thought like on and off for a long time because I think I could have gone like go pro, so to speak. I could have become a full time writer a year earlier, maybe even sooner. But as soon as I saw that that was possible, I was kind of afraid because I feared that if I were just to spring to that goal, quit my job, not be completely reliant on this income, and that might be just a terrible situation for me.

1:19:45It might be very stressful. I might feel very locked in and having to deliver sort of things. So I like consciously started to be a little bit unpredictable, a little bit. Like I would drop my cadence. I would go silent for a month. I would like throw curveballs and breakballs, different stuff. And that just slowed my growth quite a lot. And I shurned a lot of subscribers. but it meant that I had the permission a year later when I could, like again, in that slower path, get to the point. Now I knew I had the permission. Like I can go silent for a month. I can throw - It enabled you to go farther and to go longer.

1:20:25And because, yeah, because I was afraid. Otherwise I'd just be too afraid. So I do already have a lot of latitude in my right. But the question is, do I need even more? Well, and the challenge with all of this is that you could have read, and it's possible it actually was risk aversion then but the challenge is risk aversion could actually like it can kind of sit next to like knowing yourself well enough to know that you have to go slow to go longer or something and i think the yeah the challenge it's it's i'm i'm trying to build up and attune in myself to like better identify just fear and risk aversion when that's all it is because you can when you're an analytical person or introspective person you could talk yourself to a lot of things oh i'm just i'm i'm publishing slower because which is why the the very silicon valley invest which advice which is just like go faster more be more agentic is i think generally tends to be pretty good but the the challenge then too is silicon valley is not um in that mentality broadly doesn't tend to build the most enduring things yeah it's interesting with risk aversion too right because what i noticed in that situation was i know that i am risk averse i am risk averse like and i have to be because like i i am the sole provider of my family like i have to be risk averse i can't take those kinds of bets and and knowing that like planning in enough buffer and enough like creative freedom but that probably makes you realize how really risk averse you were before you had a family what do you mean um well maybe i'm projecting or assuming but um my assumption would be in the same way that i think i don't have that much time and i if you spend a day in my life you would be like laughing about how much time i have and i suspect there's a similar amount of like the amount of risk that you can take when you're 25 or whatever like and don't have a wife and kids is so dramatic i'm sure like you my assumption would be that if you were in your 25 year old shoes you'd be like oh my gosh dude you're not taking enough risk yeah maybe i think i was pretty calibrated when it came to risk i think my problem was more um lack of knowledge and and as a lack of uh good habits yeah uh maybe i could have taken i could have taken even more risk but But I took more risk then than I do now, let's say.

1:23:01But I definitely squandered my time in a way that kind of makes me fry now. It's like I had so much time and I accomplished almost nothing. And now I have a bit more time again. But for many years, I had no time at all. And I had to get up at 5 in the morning and write and stuff. And they were sitting there 5 in the morning and you're super tired. Like, why didn't I do this? before I get it soon. One little thing this week, a friend asked me about what I want. And it's very like specifically like desire. And I'm curious how you think about that as it relates to attunement. In the specific sense of sort of like really wanting something.

1:23:50Almost like, I'm not quite even sure. It kind of caught me off guard in my inability to answer her question. When you think about maybe everything we just spent the last 20 minutes talking about, how, whatever. Some people really want money and they get money. Maybe they're not fully aware how bad they want that. But I like the word desire. I think that word in itself does a lot of good work here. Chris, I think, at least for me, and I mean, this doesn't apply if your goal is to make as much money as possible. This only applies to a weird person who wants to write essays. and so on. Or it's up to you to see if it transfers to any other domain.

1:24:32But I find that it's very important that it should feel like desire. It should feel bodily. It should feel like my kids when they are galloping down the road, right? This is it. It should be. And I treat myself again. The reason I talk about these things is because I find them hard. I treat myself all the time. So I have a bunch of very intellectual friends who are always reading hard books and so on. And sometimes I'll be like, oh, I'm going to do an essay with all my reflections on the Brother Karamasu. And then I stop working on that. And then I was like, no, I'm actually just going to try to do first-day friends.

1:25:16I'm actually not excited about Brother Karamasu. I'm actually excited about the things that are feeling light, open, playful, like galloping down the street. We're different. And I'm trying to, in order for me to do good work in my line work, is that I have to get back to that thing. And it's very hard. I miss it all the time. I get like I get these ideas that sound like good ideas and there are projects that I admire from afar like I'd love to read that essay I'd love to read that book but it's it's like from from the heads it's like I can I can calculate that that's a good thing to do and I sometimes think that I want that as but but the thing I want is the thing that that makes me like feel playful and losing my body and yeah and they're sort of often like almost embarrassing in some sense those things um so as i like that word sorry like what what is like making your blood boil a little bit yes uh and uh and often i find that they are hard to explain it's like certain ideas like the ideas that i get in my head are usually better elevator pitches because yes what should i want to want is the meta thing that is actually running here that can crowd out the desire.

1:26:46Yeah. I'll give an example because I'm talking in the abstract like I was reading Sunbei Bala book six on the calculation of volume. This is the repeating day. Yeah, exactly. I was reading book six of that and there was a segment where she was talking about Plato and there's a dialogue with Socrates where they're talking about that like in the past the kind of used to go in the opposite direction. And I was like, and I got in my head, I was like, what would that feel like? And I started imagining living your life backward. And you'd go around visiting different funerals and noticing how sad you were at them to find your friends.

1:27:28Because the sadder you got at funeral, the closer friends. And then at some times you would have to try to find some parents if you were living backwards. and like, because eventually we'd have to climb back into a woman who would like carry you further into the past and can travel yourself. This is a very strange thing, right? But I got very excited about that idea. And it's not like an obviously good idea, right? In some sense, in my line of work, it's like, that's not like, what is thought? It's a new part of the labyrinth that you've never been in before though. But I know that idea for some reason, I mean, now I give it a lot of space.

1:28:06It's just like a small thought that happened for three minutes in my head, but I got excited about it. There's a lift. Yeah, there's a lift. And I can't explain, like that's not an obvious escape in the flat land essay or something. I don't know where that's going and maybe 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, and I'm trying to more and more trust that just that excitement. Like if I travel down this and let that, again, go into confusion, like, because I don't know, like what, how could this work this this idea what is this trying to do and if i go down there i might end up with a story from my childhood and it would be like it would be something completely different but i'll just trust that this is some interesting part of the library it's a nice compliment to aliveness which is a word you use so often and talking about the writing you you talk about like a lightning bolt in your body but it it feels like those two things are operating in a similar parts of our inner space, maybe.

1:29:09Yeah, yeah. I guess aliveness is like the catchphrase for that. 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... It's funny too with things like this. There's something so true it's pointing at and yet if you use the same word out with it too many times it sort of gets dulled yeah it's like important to find new new ways to hold it it's it's a i don't know if i've told this story before but it's a it's a lovely sort of apocryphal story about um mental institution in copenhagen i think so and then it was called yeah it was called like mental institution right and at some point they started feeling that was maybe a little bit old-fashioned like cold words or how they they wanted to change it to psychiatric hospital or something i don't know uh but they had this beautiful card stone in front of the house uh where it said mental institution and it's like what you would do and then at some meeting someone had the brilliant idea we can just like flip the stone over and we can write the new name on the other side it's like that's a brilliant idea they went out flip the stone and then it said idiot asylum uh because like words will get destroyed so there was like this in this continual noob of how to rename this place because whatever name they picked for it should be drag of the dirt uh uh funs to a lot of things that's good um i'd like to talk a little bit about remoteness or space and i think there are different ways that i guess i mean different things i mean by that but a place to start from ingmar bergman's workbook april 5th 1955, The Night.

1:30:58As you know, I am afraid of emptiness, desolation, and stillness. I cannot bear the silence and isolation. Death, emptiness, is a mirror turned to your own face. And this is you. Almost everything that makes up our world first appeared in a solitary head. The innovations, the tools, the images, the stories, the prophecies, and religions, it did not come from the center. It came from those who ran from it. Why is some form of isolation so foundational to being creative? Well, if we're going to get technical, and I decide, so let's go technical. When you have a larger population, as you had in the center, in the big city, in the mainstream, they are going to filter harder.

1:31:47They're going to be like a bandwidth pass. So it's very, very hard to get an idea to catch on in a big population because you have to make everyone believe it. So it has to be really good. You have to reach a critical mass. Yeah. And for that to work, it is very hard. And the good thing about that is that the mainstream will filter the bad ideas. So the mainstream are not like the anti-vaxxers and so on. The mainstreams have fairly reasonable understanding of like how vaccines work. Right. But they're also not like a good understanding of vaccines either. So big populations filter ideas very hard.

1:32:28So they kill the best and the worst ideas. Smaller populations, because there are fewer people to convince, will filter less hard. So if you go into like a Discord or like a group chat, the ideas that can float around and get accepted are going to be much more extreme. Yeah. In both directions, it's going to be worse and better. And so the way society is, well, when it's functioning well, is organized in this kind of hub and spokes kind of form where you're having the fringes, where you have the research labs or the solitary researchers, and then they're having some idea in the fringe where there's no filtering, where the ideas are allowed to be extreme and in all directions.

1:33:07It's like pace layers, similar idea. Yeah, exactly. And then it gets passed on to a scene where it gets filtered a little bit and improve by them and then it gets passed on to bigger and bigger populations uh so therefore like almost all the good ideas needs to start out in the friendship because if in the middle it would be censored in the middle it wouldn't catch on and of course like we can all be in the center and the fringes at the same time and go back and forth uh but but yes we need the fringes we need to protect these spaces where people are allowed to become radicalized and allowed to have extremely bad ideas and the internet by the way i should add is in theory really good for this but in practice kind of actually bad for this yeah i hard to tell i think nadia we interviewed and nadia osperova made like an interesting point in her book antimemetics which talks about like the evolution of the internet like you had until like 2016 or whatever you there's this gradual centralizing force towards social media and then of course that blew up in massive, crazy ways.

1:34:11And then you've had this gradual trickle into group chats. And what God does is sort of supercharging nematic evolution. Because you're having people connected to the main 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 like when you're in a laboratory and you're having a bacteria and you want to have maybe have it evolve certain characteristics, then the way to do that is to accelerate the rate of evolution.

1:34:58You can change the topology of the groups. If you put everything in a big blob in the middle, it's going to be very slow would agree 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 antifier of natural selection because if you're structurally precisely right, you can dial up the speed of evolution. And it could be argued. I'm not sure that's the case. What's happening on the internet is that we've now, with group chats, dialed up the rate of evolution by having these evolutionary breeding lagoons where you're having like a most like bizarre notations in group chats and like then they're getting spawned back into the feed and back and forth and it goes into different group chats and i guess that depends on like how much time spent people spending group chats versus the feed and and so on i i really find that to be a very interesting idea generally speaking that we can by thinking about the structure of our networks by like altering the connections in the network in a delivered way, you can steer the evolution of ideas in that network.

1:36:10You can like make a network that is producing more ideas faster by just changing who talks to do. We could do so interesting things with that on the internet, like having, because now we're just having these big blobs, but like if we could create these more structured spaces. Are you not building something that could be the very early, you talked about like a blog being like your like little room it's like your little cafe on the internet and as you build maybe it starts off as like a little book club and as it scales it becomes more of a cafe or a church or i don't know what the right metaphor is the notion that there are sort of various coalitions of probably necessarily in the modern internet like personality-led clusters i don't know there's the venkatesh rao part of the island and the henrik part of the island and nadia and so on i think so And then, and then obviously like there are many tools for this, like a discord and sub-statcast their own like chat apps.

1:37:07And then I use like the chat with, with the people who are like behind the paywall. I still think we would lack the proper tools, but I can't figure out like, what would be the correct shape for this. It's cause it's a very tricky thing of like, you want to have high hierarchy in these days. And, and you're questioning at that. Like I, there's a, there's a hierarchy like around my blog where I am sort of the alpha male of my blog and I have much more reach and I can affect that community much more than anyone else. But I think we need to have more, some better few tools for creating hierarchies because how to put this, but like people are going to contribute in, in at different levels.

1:37:50And the problem like with, with the open comment section, for example, is that it tends to like drag the quality a little bit down because people yeah certain people we very like reaching out and want to connect and and they might not be the people that should have you want to have them there but maybe they are not the ones that should be front and center but when they start commenting because they are trying to reach out they don't have any friends maybe then the more people that could contribute more feel like this is maybe less amateur hour i'm not gonna contribute there and then they instant email me.

1:38:22So I have like the interesting conversations how to also email instead of in the comments. And so you hosted an event and you pulled like the actually interesting people into a back room afterwards or the after party or whatever. And there has to be some structure where like the main conversation is maybe by the people who are having like the most high quality conversations or like we have a hierarchy. But I don't know what the structure of that is. And it's probably gonna be controversial for some people that you're ranking people. But I think it's important that you can control those things, the flow of information.

1:38:58And we don't really have the right tools or that it's not easy to do. I think it's quite interesting that we have a very good structure for the very vertical creator audience relationship. And we have very good wide open egalitarian kind of horizontal. but yeah there's very little resolution in that space between in the like vertical and the horizontal maybe you write wrote about um and i'm using space in a different way here but like uh like almost like air gaps in time between publishing work uh you said i expect many of my friends who write and publish rapidly are shortchanging themselves they generate text filled with hidden doors and move on before they've opened them another metaphor that i use is that my drafts are rooms I go to when I want to think, and when I publish, I throw away the key, keep the key for a little while.

1:39:48Say more about that. It's that forest of confusion again. When I write the first draft of something, and ideally the first draft of it is just nil to myself in my journal, that's just me exposing what I already think. That's usually basically a tide. That's basically, this is already what I think. But then the next step for me is to what I'm saying there with the hidden doors. It's like, once I have that thing on the table, I'll notice first some open questions or some things that do not fit. And if I just publish it and move on, I'm not actually going to get the real value from that draft. Because the real value is when I go like, this isn't really making sense.

1:40:38and like maybe I need to go and do some more research or maybe I should go talk to this person or whatever and start smashing it to pieces. It's in that process where I'm actually updating how I think, how I actually get closer contact. I guess my assumption was that, what you described totally makes sense. It's sort of like a piece is 80 % there and you could publish it, but like you have an itch or something. Like I guess my assumption, and maybe this is naive, was like you're sort of you have things that you're like this is good and i'm gonna hold it yeah i'm gonna put it in there you talk about holding things for a year which my sense is probably closer to the previous example but but it's that's the part is also true because and it comes back to well there's something about my brain that when i publish something it's it's like gone from my life which which is that metaphor right it's it's and i that sucks a little bit because like it means i i can almost like never like rest on my laurels so speak like because whenever i write a good essay like i'm putting in hard work i'm like yeah i'm finally going to shoot something and then i polish it okay now i have nothing uh that's the feeling right and i never get to like feel like oh i've built such body of work like that's never how it feels to me it's always like well that i i wish i had that interesting room i was hanging out it and now i've abandoned it and now i need to build find some other interesting room that will make me come alive so so they are valuable to hold for that reason because it's like nice to have a nice room that i can hang in almost selfish yeah and and also because when i am in that room i am thinking about things that are valuable to me that way framing certain ideas those stories are putting me in a mind state where i am able to like get closer to certain things that i that are meaningful in my life if i'm writing an essay about my kids i'm going to be a more present father during that project right and then as soon as i close that door and i'm i would have usually become a better father than i was before but i'm i'm even better it's like an active lens you you write somewhere about like writing about things almost like butchering it but like pulling the world into you or something yeah and it's like you've got like a vacuum or i don't know what the right 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 thought was going to be like, man, I really worry if you write a book.

1:43:24Yeah. Why? Because a book is this experience, but like in a much more totalizing way. Like I just spent a year on this. I mean, presumably if you were to write a book, it would have to be something that was so, so foundational, something you could have written 50 essays about or something. And so like, I imagine something akin to far less extreme, but akin to a mother seeing their child go off to college or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And if you spend a year or three years on a party, it's going to be a part of your life. That was when my kids learned to bike and like everything is in that book.

1:44:01Yeah, I'm not born on a book. So, well, I don't know. But I think that is to some degree like the core is not right. It's just like sort of a meditative practice. Because if you meditate, you're going to put yourself in a certain state. And as you say, the NASA people, they were sitting in a deprivation tank. They get out. They see the flowers. The essays are like that for me, right? If I spend some time writing about my kids, I go out and then I notice everything about them. And that's very lovely. and I get to like prime my own mind. Yes. Toward both being more present and also like understanding at a deeper level.

1:44:41And the presence kind of goes away after the project, but the deeper insight stays. Priming your own mind is a really, really wonderful way of putting why some creative thing might be worth it, independent of anything else. You wrote, I'm shouting at myself here briefly, You wrote about Johanna reflecting on, I guess she was reading the transcript of 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 that you really, really love talking to people.

1:45:22And for what it's worth, we have the internet. You have a great binary in that way. Do you get lonely? No. No. Is it maybe a better question would be, is it, do you, do you worry at all about the pressure of one person being so foundational to how you can think aloud? And I don't mean it in like, she's not enough. Like clearly you've talked, we talked last time about the ways that you're compounding into the 20 ,000 hours or whatever, but just the, it's a lot to hold. no that is that is something Johanna and I talk about and it's maybe even more acute for her than for me because like if I we talk about the like but if I were to like be hit by a bus right I am we're homeschooling together and well like with the first I am the sold income and like like her like would be very very difficult to have that happen and and so it's important like both to like plaid for that eventuality but that could happen but also to make sure that she has her own things and her own social network that she can rely on in those situations and that's also true for me but it's a little bit easier for me since I naturally end up having a lot of connections with people through the writing and so I have collaborators and friends yeah it's always good to have multiple lives to stand on but as you say it is something we like think about uh all the time like should we would it be better for us to be in a city be surrounded with like more of a scene i think it's like valuable to like try to weigh these things like how are we constructing the context the environment around ourselves of like because like when we made a decision where we live now we didn't think we would ever like earn any money we were we wanted a homeschool so it had to be cheap like and now we can see about like maybe we could actually live in a city and actually afford to homeschool and like so maybe we should update so yeah it's important to like for a time ago go through these like so now that the situation is different like does it still make sense for us to live on a cheat farm on an island or not and i think where we have landed on that is that yes it does make sense for us because the way we're sort of wired uh and i mean we have we like the local community there and we like nature and And especially we just like to have a lot of time on our own.

1:47:52A lot of space. Come back to it. Because I remember like when we lived in the city, like both of us, but especially me, I'm just like a yes man. Like if I, I remember like, I was just, I knew everyone in town, right? Like I couldn't go through the city because it was like a city of 200 ,000. I couldn't go through the city without like running into someone. And so there was always keep getting dragged into cafes and then there'll be a party. Like I can't say no to things. I like there's so many exciting things and I'm always talking. So yeah, I constrain myself like I'm in this place. And because when you're in the country, you have to like actively decide like where I want to go, talk to someone, I want to travel and visit someone.

1:48:29And then you have to actually go through and make it priorities. Like who am I actually, would I actually like to spend more time with and so on. And I like to be, have to be deliberate about my choices like that. I think there's a thing here that I've thought a lot about, which is like life is a constant fight against inertia and the point isn't to just change things but the point is to build a and i think this is something you do really well across so many of these contexts we've spoken about which is just build a habit of re-evaluating i think most most of us the temptation is like i don't know if i can make a change i don't know if i can make a change why we're so hesitant by the way to unfold and explore the possibility of something else and then if we do make the change it's like all right now this has to be how it is and it's like maybe it comes back to a lightness um or a loose grip or something that is not about a lack of conviction but a openness to the thing that was true for me then very well might still be true for me and it could change in a year and that could be true about the work or the where you live or much smaller things but it's it's like there's a tension there's a temptation to just hold once you get something just hold it keep holding it let the other i find that meeting new people is a very good way of unclenching that fist especially if they are like curious agente people who are like doing different things and are like made a little bit disagreeable can push on you.

1:49:58It's the spheres. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's fun because they're all so different. I have different people who are like, I don't know, mentors, peers whatever to call them. But with people I turn to you for perspectives advice and they say like their opinions go in completely like different directions like they're sorry again i get confused by talking they're like one i'll be super excited because i also always want to do the thing that whoever i talk to say so it's very good for me to have people who are like saying the opposite thing yeah because that just like blows my head open and i get confused and then i can like maybe maybe i'll do i'll try a little bit of that and a little or that or something in between i think i've relied i used to rely a lot on solitude for that work and now i have the luxury of relying more on peers because i found people who can do that to my mind previously like the people i had access to were maybe not right right prining me in the right way they were maybe a little bit too conservative so then i would have to retreat into solitude which might be the best thing but it's also sometimes i find that solitude is like is maybe slower but better and sometimes i just want to make fast people or make fast decision then they have to just talk to three different people i think you want to cycle through the different modes too yeah something quick but i i just really liked it um you talked about good and bad consumption and another kind of theme of this the space theme showing up and how certain art or information or content perhaps can be good consumption and certain can be bad.

1:51:38Maybe it's a little obtuse, but the essence of it being about how close you feel to yourself. You say, Johanna and I sometimes open a page in an art book and look at it for 10 minutes. We can't do it for much longer than that. Paintings, unlike reading the internet, spit us back out after a while. And And despite having allowed ourselves to get completely absorbed by something external, when we close the art book, we feel more attuned to ourselves. And you go on to talk about Philip Glass and the way he thinks about composing music for films and leaving space versus the internet, most parts of the internet or maybe a TV series or something where there are certain forms of art where you come out of it, maybe it's really engaging, but you come out of it and you don't really feel super close to yourself.

1:52:21and then other forms of art um where you're as i read you almost like it's about this it has enough space for you to put yourself into it what are the patterns of the art that to you i mean obviously part of this is just the mediums as you allude to in the painting but what are the patterns of the types of art that has this kind of space um at least for you that makes you really learn about yourself or get closer to yourself well i think um is it empson and it's about like the seven types of ambiguity because I think that's one way to think about it. It's the type of art I'm talking about has ambiguity.

1:52:58It has space. There's some, it's not reaching closure in itself. Like a commercial, it's like a perfectly close, like everything fits together. And the message is like super clear. It's like propaganda. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The propaganda commercials, like they know exactly what they want you to feel. lenders, everything is designed for stop message that there's like, no, they don't want you to know interpretation. Yeah. Whereas like when you, you start removing things and like creating some, uh, space for interpretation, the, the viewer has to fill those spaces to make the artwork meaningful. So, so, so like famously, uh, Shakespeare, when you read, uh, the place, they are often based on like historical things that have actually happened.

1:53:47and and often if you compare what actually happened to what he writes he's gone through and like removed the motivations for behaviors so like you you actually in the historical record we know exactly why that person did that thing but he goes through and like deletes that because that then because then you have like why is he you know killing his wife or whatever you don't know that and when you don't know there's everyone can like project different things in it and and and different actors can play this place in different ways and there's like so much space for for for reflections and emotions to be pushed into shakespeare's work which wouldn't have been there if we knew exactly how to interpret it that's often the case that the when there's those things that you need to fill with yourself, then in that act of filling in with yourself, the way you fill it is by listening inward.

1:54:45Like, so why do I think he killed his wife? Like, I noticed the way he turned his head. I think he was lying there, blah, blah, blah. And the thing you're attuning to there is yourself. Yeah. So therefore, but it also spits you out because like if you've ever read like Shakespeare, it's like, it's hard work. because it's like you have to stop at every other line and fill in and like what does that word mean and like how should i interpret that so it's like exhausting to fill in now to read uh anguist work compared to like propaganda or like twitter or something where there's less of that and uh so it has those like twin things of like it will spit you out because you'll get tired and then you'll just lean back in the sofa and like, I'm just, I'll be with myself now.

1:55:32But you will also be close to yourself because you have been forced to pull from yourself. That's my read on what is happening in those situations where piece of art or piece of writing brings speed back to myself. I love the spitting out because it's such a great way to articulate the thing that has friction. And that, by the way, the majority of incentives in culture today are incentivizing all media to not have that affect. If you really think about, like, people talk about people reading less, like, one of my favorite ideas is that a reading is a co-collaborative act. More so than most other mediums we spend a lot of time with today.

1:56:14Obviously, painting is an extreme example on the other end. But a reading, like, no person reads the same book. I have to put myself into and maybe a truly remarkable novelist or whatever is really good at projecting something very specific but usually the other way around usually the skill as with Shakespeare as with Kafka the skill is removing yes it's almost like this game of like what is it called like there's this game where you have like these blocks and like a good 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 but it's somehow still standing which by the way it's no surprise that many of these worlds we we adore so much are the ones that you can put yourself into and imagine yourself in yeah so so whereas like weak weak writers can do like build a very compact thing where there's a whole set jenga block of of narrative writing that's the usa so i like that i like that a lot but but he something that okay again another thought is like on the edge of my my thinking is what you're saying because there's a very strong incentives uh today it to to write in in ways that feel all the holds to write propaganda to write like these obvious things if you look at what's trending on sub stack or whatever your ass is yeah yeah yeah it's it's all like these these cliches that get like filled up with fluff words and just like reinforcing what people order think there's no space to to fill in that and and i noticed that myself like um if i if i use if i were to use like the techniques that kafka or shakespeare use like of making things like gnarly and like hard to interpret and the ways they did it i wouldn't have any readers and so there's like a tension because i want to provide that space but at the same time i in order to have readers i need to make my writing very clear very easy to read on your phone on the toilet yeah and like very like if it's going to spit you out it needs to be very easy to get into yeah uh and and there's an obvious tension because the easiest way to make something that is ambiguous is to reflect sort of more like modernist poetry or something but that i'm not but again it's like a constraint I'm not allowed to use those tricks I'm not allowed to like Mary's duties if elliptical kind of brain and the tension is like how do I write something that is on the surface very clear very easy to read almost like a twitter article and at the same time opens those spaces I'm not sure I always succeed but I think it's an interesting challenge it's like without using obscure language.

1:59:11Yes, 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 the biggest topics can be really boring to write about. It's not exactly the same idea. and like the trick is like how do you how do you talk about these sort of things that people are so romance or whatever figuring out how to do it like how do you talk about these things in a fresh way because that is so electrifying but it's so hard to get there because the temptation is to just make it overly obscure or really basic yeah yeah again it's it's it's um one way i think about it is sort of like as if you're playing jazz or something you want to you can like when they're playing jazz they'll they take some like classic chord progression and then they're improvising on top of it and adding like this harmonies on top of it and like can you can you like a lot of it is just like taking something that's quite kind of simple and adding these interesting juxtapositions and interesting shifts in it like bringing in like if I write above like love or emotions it's interesting to like i'll bring in some polstoy and some machine learning like because they're like from different domains and if i can like weave them together yeah uh i can write them quite simply i can see a few simple things about machine learning a few simple things but the way they kind of clash produces this kind of these resonances that are bigger uh And I think that's one way I try to create these spaces while using simple leverage by juxtapositioning ideas from different fields and so on.

2:01:07And another good thing about it that I've found is that it helps bridge those domains. So I have a lot of my readers who are like programmers and they can then maybe resonate and understand what Tolstoy is. Yeah, because you're connecting that and then vice versa, right? So it's valuable.

2:01:30There is a thread that I find myself coming to, maybe two words that stand out. One is sort of, and I realize this one's especially hard to pin down, but like something towards like being true, being true to yourself, being true to your feeling. The other word is conviction. And one of the points that I read your kind of like big essay on agency, it kind of culminates in this. My takeaway was like agency is basically actually about your values and your desires and like taking a stand. And like if you have enough conviction, agency is actually quite easy. I think it's at the end of the piece and it's very, very powerful.

2:02:15You're writing about Maude. You say, the reason having Maude in my life made me more agentic was that it was the first time I experienced what it means to surrender to my values. I had a lot of idiosyncratic opinions and values when I was younger, too, but I held them in a rather flimsy way. Whenever things got too hard or people disapproved of what I was doing, I tended to give up and do the normal thing instead. If I had experienced it before Maude, I would have caved in after 30 seconds, but in this case, caving in was unforgivable. I must never fail Maude.

2:02:48I don't mean to trivialize it, but in the cases of, like, that's such a powerful example, and it's also, like, it's an impenetrable example. In the cases that are maybe, like, less biological, where do you think this type of conviction comes from? Maybe this relates a little bit to our conversation about desire in a more serious way. maybe this is also what I'm pointing at when I talk about this trueness in search of trueness Yes, let's stay with conviction. I think that can probably come from multiple directions. I mean, it's personal people that just easier. They're kind of disagreeable people and it comes easy.

2:03:40For me, as you said, it was like having kids and like feeling that I had to stand up for them and act on that, And the good thing about that was it was sort of happy duration in the good sense that I, but being forced to stand up for my convictions, I had to like go through this entire process of the pain of doing what I wanted to do. And I came out on the other end and I was like, that's kind of okay. and so it was like again some of it's like being held by the hand or like being forced it's like going into the marines or something like you get forced to do more sit-ups than you've ever done in your life and you realize i can actually do that and it can probably be in different ways it can be like i guess like a lot of being in a like startup incubator can be like that too like you get these external pressures like you have to live up to your mentors and people are even invested in you and that kind of social pressure forces you to do things that are uncomfortable for you it's like a constructed stakes yeah so so so i think yeah having investors having kids like there are different ways across our indo states another way of like securing your conviction or acting on what you believe that's induced a lot historically is like to to say that like if I do not do this, I betray God.

2:05:07I wrote that down. You said, thinking of the work in religious terms as a service to or a search for God. Bergman, Grothendieck, and Pascal all do this. It might be easier to summon the awe and daring necessary to push out into the unknown and against social pressure if the alternative is failing God or a fetish muse. Yeah. So, and I mean, that's, if we're going to be like, I'm atheist, I'm going to be like very like crass about what that mental move is doing. is just like hijacking or conformity bias. Like we have a tendency to like want to bow our heads to authority. And then if you just like invent an authority, which is all seeing and all powerful, and then you give them your idolized values, then there's a hijacking your innate drive to like submit to authority or to like fit in.

2:05:59so you're kind of hijacking that kind of monkey brain thing we have I mean one shouldn't explain that because it works less well if you understand that that's what you're doing I struggle to do that myself since I don't believe in God and so then I would know that I was like tricking myself I was just using God as a prop what do you believe in? that's a good question I believe

2:06:32it's something like maybe something like that we all it sounds cliche but like we all have something we can contribute to like we the universe itself is just so extraordinary like with everything like quantum particles and black balls and evolution it's just like we get come here and explore and take part in this unfolding creation. And that's just like so remarkable and so big in itself. And then on top of that, because of like the accident of your genetics and the place you're born, there's going to be certain things that will only be possible for you. Like there will be certain things that only you will be in a position to care for.

2:07:20And so I'm not sure why, But for some reason it feels imperative to me that like you should protect and like be a guardian of that possibility. And like make sure that you leave the universe a like better place. That you are like maybe sort of forced toward higher complexity. That like when you leave the planet like the fight against entropy has like been won. civilization is a little bit more coherent we have better theories of the world we have which are relationships we have more diversity and perspectives I don't know it's like being a force whereas it feels it would be super boring if the universe was just like rocks floating in dead space because that wouldn't have as much complexity as biobotical evolution so you're just like being a force for increasing the complexity, something like that.

2:08:26Is it fulfilled potential? Is that too simple? Yeah, that's a good way of simplifying it down. But not only for yourself. Because I am not all that important in myself. Of course, I value myself because I have to live in my body. But what matters more to me is just this continual unfolding that my ancestors are behind me. And how can I play a part in this ongoing evolution dance and make sure that... It's like we're in this big jam session. And how do I make sure that when I leave the stage, the song is... The music was going on. It kept going. Yeah, and was hopefully going in an even better direction because people around you had to grow.

2:09:19and that were played in one just in things and so on. We talked about this a bit last time, but it is being a good steward of being sentenced to freedom. That's how I hear it a little bit. You were writing about 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 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.

2:10:05And you need to do this while keeping your heart soft for the beauty that makes it all worthwhile. Maybe you could replace hard and soft with like bravery and openness. Does that resonate with you? Is there anything in that thread that resonates? Yeah, I think that's part of it. But it's interesting when we have these conversations because it's all the same topic all the way through. Because the reason you need to be both hard and soft when interfacing with the world is that the world can be a quite horrendous place many things big and small are terrible and you want to see them with clear eyes because you want to see all of reality as creamy as you can and we don't have to think about the big horrible things but just like in your life in a relationship you want to be able to see the ways you are failing as a father or husband.

2:11:12You want to see the friction. You want to be able to like sit with those uncomfortable things. And that requires a certain hardness. I don't know if that's the right word, but it requires a certain like non naivety. It's a certain forcefulness and strength and just like facing these painful things because 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. But you also need to be soft, and the reason soft is gesturing out is that

2:11:59thing that is going to guide you through this world. So the hardness is letting you see the labyrinth, letting you see the world, but it's not telling you where to go. And the softness is what tells you where to go because you also at the same time, because the risk, the risk if you're just very hard is that you get like stoical and you just close down and you're tense and like the world is 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, of have to get back to that galloping down the road, being playful, being soft, because it's those like small intuitions from the inside, what feels alive, what feels good, that is going to guide you where you should walk in this realities.

2:12:47And we've talked about it in terms of creative work, that it's connecting to these 12 senses that lets you do good creative work. But it's also true in all the mates. Like when we were having, when you're having a conversation, it's that ability to like feel inside yourself when something is right. That's gonna, if you can tap into that, be vulnerable with that and share that, that's gonna make the conversation come alive. It's the same thing as with creative work. And I think it's the same thing if you're designing a house, if you're building a company or whatever. because like i noticed like when i was mentioned that i didn't believe in god you you got curious there you stopped and you went off script and asking so what do you believe in that was sort of because you were genuinely curious about that and and it felt like it was a little bit of an opening up in the conversation when that happens and like there's been several of those in the conversation here so and and so yes you want to be both hard and soft if we like there's no great words for it but like you need to see it be stoical enough so you can see reality and like shyness are playful enough so you can decide how to walk in through that world and they are not easy to combine yeah it's like assertive and receptive i was going to say the same thing it's so i mean i you brought it up like even this what i do is so hard to, and there's, I could, I could do this show with no notes and I could just like be maximally receptive.

2:14:26And like, we would probably have a pretty generative conversation and I should probably try more of that, but I also don't think we would cover as much ground and I tend to drift and whatever. And I could also just come and like read off a teleprompter and it's so hard. And obviously all wonder comes, and that's a trivial example, but everything good comes from that marriage but it's it's like it's this balance again it's like can i can i stay right in the middle of this like asserting receiving yeah but so much about it feels like we're coming back again and again to sort of um phenomenology of navigating yeah in in murky spaces it's like how how does how does this post is your feeling the body what kind of rules of thumb how are you gonna put your feet and how you're gonna feel inside, um, where to go.

2:15:16And, and it's, yeah, it feels like basically everything good talks about like different aspects of, of that. Those felt senses. I think that's, that's one of the, the kind of primary readings I have of your work, um, is, is something that you are not always staring directly at, but you are, you are circling around. And one of the reasons I find the writing to be beyond beautiful or compelling or entertaining, but to be useful, is I think that's a worthy thing to pursue. I have a few more things. A couple of just quick miscellaneous things. Your essays are short.

2:16:04Very readable in a way that must be quite deliberate, I guess, is my reaction. even compared to other things on Substack. Yeah, they've gotten shorter. I think I used to sort of average 4 ,000 words. Now I probably average 2 ,000 words. I think that's a nice length. It's like enough that you can do it in one sitting. I think I used to be more like allowing myself to sprawl everywhere, but just like I want to make sure that each essay is its own little small room and like not having. because if I look at my moldwriters they are actually like three groups cut together because I didn't feel like it was enough and just like trusting that this one thing is enough and also simplifying it's like I prune my writing a lot like I yeah when I read a lot of other writers there's much more fluff and that can be good because it can be a way of like when it's done well it can be a way of like putting you in a state more because you they repeating the same idea from different perspectives over and over again but i try to keep it a little bit more trimmed to maybe hopefully well hopefully it's easier to get through it but also leave some more space to because i think most people obviously just read through my essays very rapidly and that's probably hopefully a pleasant experience.

2:17:35But 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 was actually a lot to unpack, even though the sentences are like written in a way that it should flow very easily. But I say, I want, yeah, it's again that that will lead. Yeah, it's the Jenga tower too. I want to be, you should just be able to scroll through it and read it and be sure. But you should also be able to read it. I mean, I have some people have told me the red center of my ass is like 50 times. And that's wonderful if you can create something that people can come back to and see there's more and more layers to it.

2:18:12How is reading like running? Reading is like running in that it is, well, it's a skill. It's to be able to run, you need to build up many parts of your body, your muscles in your legs, your heart. If you want to be a good runner, you have to develop your mental wellness and understanding of, you know, you taught me about the pacing and things like that. So there's this whole thing. If you're going to run a marathon, it's just like you're not just going to go out and do it. You have to become the kind of person that can run a marathon, right? And that takes six months at least, probably several years.

2:18:58And the same thing is true, riding, reading. Right. But reading, and I think a lot of people kind of misunderstand that because they can read a little bit and then they think like, this is the year, but I can't really read it. And I'm like, I'm going to do Alec Arena now. And it's like, that's like saying I'm going to do a marathon on my first training run, right? And everyone runs too fast and too far when they start. exactly and and and enough you get the same and it's just like trusting that you what matters in reading is just like gradually gilding up your capacity to to process words your references understanding like if you're reading Dante like there's going to be references to a million things and poems going to do much better if you understand those references and so on like so so it takes time to build up those things to to to actually do it so it's like a good idea is just like to start slowly and steadily and just making it fun and and gradually pushing yourself a little bit because reading anna carina is supposed to be very easy right it like it's not a hard book if you are prepared for it it's a very readable easy book but i remember that the first time when i was like 17 i thought it was very hard to read and now i read it and it was like this is like a romance novel it's very easy but that's because i've built up the capacity I think about how more and more in like all domains I used to think you know it's like you just need to explain certain ideas to people and I think that's like a big part of why I've started writing publicly so it's like oh I figured this thing out I should just write down how to do this thing right and then you realize that's not how it works right because like I used to write a bunch of essays about how I write my essays I'm thinking I could teach other people that way.

2:20:52Because to me, it's obvious. It's actually these things I'm doing. But obviously, the reason I can write the way I write is because I've spent 15, 20 years becoming the kind of person who can write them. And my entire Mervis system has been redesigned for the purpose of writing essays. And so you probably, if someone tried to do what I do, it'd take at least five years of like deliberate hard effort of like becoming because it's yeah you have to like literally rewire your entire brain and and i think that's sort of under appreciated also and again with agency like people say like you can just do things like but if you are the kind of person where your parents abused you and no one's ever believed in you and you get like an intense anxiety at the thought of like putting foot forward you can you can't just do things it's gonna be a very long process of like rebuilding yourself into the kind of person who can just do things but but it's also a hopeful image like because basically everyone can run a marathon and basically everyone can become a good reader or become a good writer you have to show up you have to show up you have to do it again and again for many years and you have to like not burn out by expecting too much of yourself uh but that kind of gradual uh increasing of of um strength and the little practice yeah i found an old uh draft of looking for alice that you linked to in a footnote a couple a couple excerpts instead i've done it by chaining myself to someone who grew weird in ways synergistic with me.

2:22:37And then that word, unpalatable, is interesting. What is palatable and what is not is often a question of context. I'm going to preface this, but this is a weird one, so I had to pull it out. A Westerner sees someone eat a dog and feels revulsion. The revulsion isn't in the dog. It is in the context. To understand the delicacy of the dog, you must inhabit another world. That can be very hard. Maybe you figure out how to place yourself in the context where dogs are tasty, and now you're munching on one. Along comes your mother. I just had a revelation, you say, let me tell you. But all she sees is the paw on your plate.

2:23:10I think love is a lot like that. I just forgot that one. Yeah, that was cut from that one that I said. Why is love a lot like that?

2:23:26Because love, as compared to a life in a calculation or something, is a deep knowledgeable appreciation of another person it's like you can't love one in sort of the erring from sense of that word or something unless you're so intimate with that person if you actually like have looked at them and understand them and I find personally that many or my closest relationships with people that I feel deepest love for are almost like acquired tastes like they're almost like well it's not that's not strictly the right way of saying it like I think a lot of people fell in love with Johanna around the time when we met because she was very lovely in some easy to read ways uh but the important part of her personality the parts that i truly love now and that are like the core for they didn't see and uh didn't appreciate and uh so it's where i'm going it's it's um to really deeply love someone for who they are you have to see them very deeply and you have to be very yeah and that requires a lot of context and and and so like it's so almost like acquiring the skill of loving someone and then if you sometimes if you show that to someone else it might not make sense right like you you take like let's take some very obvious example like say some people have an open relationship because like they look deep at each other and they realize that we're totally okay with each other sleeping with other people.

2:25:23And that feels very beautiful and fragile and close for them and totally respecting each other's egocentric feelings and so on. Another person might look like that and say that that seems like a very toxic way of living. It's like, well, have you actually... Inhabited this world. Yeah. Have you actually paid attention to what we feel inside when these things happen? And that's a very obvious one. But the soup often subtle versions of that in all relationships, if you're actually allowing that relationship to grow into a shape that is fitted to the people involved. You write about authors as your friends.

2:26:03Authors are our friends. They are odd people who talk to us, sometimes from across the grave. When Joanna and I talk, we'll say Tomas and mean Transtroma. Pardon my pronunciation. He is one of our mutual friends and we gossip lovingly about him. And then when I read the biographies of people, exceptional people's early lives, it feels a little bit like getting new peers, their way of being works on me. Gradually, I raise my aspirations. Who do you feel closest to in this way? It doesn't have to be an answer for all the time, but it could be current.

2:26:37i i mean i've been in i always turn to different authors at different points in my life where i'm struggling with sort of things so like as i talked about earlier i've been like struggling with like what's the next step of my creative journey so then it's been natural for me to turn to people love brian you know and feels like you know you read his diaries you read listen to interviews he's done and like his biography and trying to piece together how he's done it and and that you know you can see some models and and it feels like in some ways it's like easier for me to talk to him because it's like the situation i'm in right now like it's not that many people who have been in that situation like none of my friends have yes so like it's it's hard to talk about these things but i feel like i can sort of bounce against his experiences and i don't think i'll you know do the same thing as he i don't we don't disagree if like but but it does feel like uh i can sit there like talk with him and i think i always have that feeling i can i get this impression a lot of people put like authors on like pedestals and i see people even do that with myself which is like super weird to me because like i'm as i I don't know, like, obviously, you're just like a guy.

2:27:58And it's like very strange when people do that. It's because I'll even see it in comments. People write about me in like third person and as if I'm like some kind of thing. And I'm like... You are the dictator of the blog, but... Yeah, sure, I am. But it's so strange when some people write about me as if I'm some famous person, then like the writing for a person. I was like, 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 hate to put me up there and I think the same is true and if you approach people like that, if you approach Dostoevsky like that which you realize like they're all very Yuba, they're all very like relatable and open in their writing in their strange ways and you can really see eye to eye with them and I think it's very healthy to just bring them down there's like nothing that i mean they they are weird they've gone extreme things in their lives they are very skilled at specific things but they're just people and and they can be interesting to talk to because they have interesting experiences and they pushed further into that than many others but but it's it's like nice to just like put them down here and and play with them you wrote about your i think maternal grandfather who passed away last summer Niels.

2:29:23Life is not a story that builds to a climax. It is a story that meanders. Every single moment in life is as worthy of care and attention as the climax of a story. What I grieved wasn't his, Niels, worn out body finally giving up. That felt good, actually. It was relief for him. What I grieved was all the moments that were gone. Even more, I grieved all of the moments he had been alive to himself. All of the moments that no one else will ever remember the feeling of sun on his skin the long nights in the snow plow clearing the roads through the pine forests the feeling if any his last night when Maude the elder held his hand and he seemed for a moment to slide out of his dementia into sleep and smile it was the gone-ness of all of those moments that hurt are there any other moments that come to mind that you would like the world to know about Niels?

2:30:22He was a very special man meant a lot to me. I would say he's had a very, very close relationship, close and done with most people have with their grandparents, I think. He retired. He was a road worker, so he retired and he was 60. And that was the same year I was born. So he spent a lot of time sort of caring for me. when my mom started working again so he would come there and be with us and so as I sort of grew up very close he would take me camping and he was a very down to earth kind of person so those moments are usually a very important thing and maybe not so typical for the cultural milieu that he came from he came from very very very poor circumstances grew up without electricity and everyone was like very martial and so on and to be like grow up to be the kind of person who takes care of kids and like is very soft in many ways but it was also very very hard.

2:31:32Oh there's so many interesting things about him there's one beautiful little story about like the sense of love about how he was when he was I think he was four years old he on Saturdays they would get sugarcuk and I would put it over fire to make it like a caramel and he did that and I put it in and then it slid down his throat so he couldn't breathe and he was so sensitive so he didn't want to disturb anyone so he just went around like hugging his mom, his dad his seven siblings and then he went out lay down on the meadow and like prepared to die and then it melted and slid down so he was a very very special person and yeah not the most targeted person but I'm very extremely determined to do well to help people like even during COVID and at this point I mean he was 92 or something and he was basically not holding together anymore but he would still like take his what he called was rolling shares and and he would walk like 500 meters down to the house where the elderly people stayed and he would go from window to window and talk to all of the old people who were like in isolation and and so he would always like try to find some way that he could be of use and and toward the very end he he couldn't speak he was you know almost completely lost i don't think he recognized almost anyone but he still it was still the same person because one of them nurses told us that there was another elderly woman in a wheelchair who had uh who was sort of having a panic attack i guess that she was afraid of death and dementia and so she was just acting out and throwing stuff and and he saw that and like couldn't speak and do anything but he just got up and like moved slowly over and like took her head and then he just sat there like for two hours just holding her hand because he could still sense that like she was getting calm by him holding her hand so like to the very end he was just doing was always looking for ways of like being of use to other people and and never cared at all about him like um he was never self-centered in any way whatsoever and and like when he he he died um he instructed that like he wanted didn't want a grave he wanted to be just put in the communal grave and like without any placacy.

2:34:34I think he just felt like his work was done. Now he'd like he was here to be of service and he too also like I think made it the atheism pumped from him like he didn't believe in a life after this. He just believed with like being of service being abused and then like disappearing into the night. So he formed me in so many ways and when I met Johan we bought their house and when they moved to like a seer apartment next door basically and that was set up so they would have some time to say goodbye through life in a gradual way so during those years when we lived there we hung out well in the beginning every day he would just like barge into the house all the time and it could always fix things and uh and then gradually less and less but it was always and you should you always had to do the good work i remember we were going to a party at suit on and he came it's like it's the day for the potatoes you know it's like yeah but we can do that tomorrow maybe because i'm going and he was 87 or something And he's like, no, it's the day of the potatoes.

2:35:59And so he just goes out and starts, Hans, like, I can't let the 80s of New York plant all the potatoes. So, like, standing there with us the suet on or plant the potatoes. It's just, yeah, he wanted to do the right thing all the time. So that was very important to, it was a special experience. We spent three years where he was, like, the closest friend I had. Like, I spent more time with him than anyone else. And that was between 25 and 28, like a very formative period in my life. And I do think that also sort of helped me shape together some sort of value system.

2:36:41There's a line from, I think it's from Herbert. I could be mistaken, so forgive me. Repeat words stubbornly. repeat all the incantations of humanity, fables, and legends because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain repeat great words, repeat them stubbornly is there anything that you find yourself repeating? I have some poems that I often return to, some of I like to tell a spurner yeah, there's certain usually they're not like there's a few lines that I like to repeat where like a sentence where it like encapsulates like a simple time and an important thought. But many of the ones I'm trying to are more like a mood almost.

2:37:34There's one that I often return to and I think I have never eyes in Swedish which is called the, I don't know, in English it's maybe like a short pause in the organ concert by John Sternler, which is this beautiful kind of rendition of him going into a church and experiencing a certain connection to the human condition that comes out very strongly in that scene where he's standing in the church. And I think there's certain lines in there where he's talking about of how the book inside every person gets rewritten every second. It's like a big, majestic book, but it's with so many pages that's still with air between them and that there's like waves going through it all the time.

2:38:33Imaging changing. I'm butchering the images, but there's something about that poem, which you should link, that puts me back into a sense of... all and care for the human being and for like, um, the condition we're in and like the, how fragile we are and how small we are and how meaningful still. I got one last thing. It's not a question. It's something I wanted to read. If you have a reaction, you do. Um, but it was one of my favorite things you wrote recently. You were writing about a sculptor on the island. If you look at the cliffs that have been carved by the glaciers during the Ice Age, he wrote, you can still see the carvings there 10 ,000 years later, so these shapes will live on for a long time.

2:39:22And this is you. The feeling of a hand in 1972 made into an object that will stand for millennia. It is hard not to see a parallel to some of the oldest preserved cave paintings, which are hands that have been held up against the cave wall and preserved as silhouettes by color pigments blown at the hand. we were here we felt this yeah I think that is a lot of what it comes down to because we're doing there's so much work to be done there's so you know hospitals to be manned and companies to be started and roads to be cleared and there's so much work to be done but sort of what to me it all amounts to what the point of it all is like these human experiences that that enables and and and when you see those like i think it's from argentina you know the hundred gatherers have like blown colored pigments on their hands leaving those on the wall that's just kind of you know it's a reminder to that the feeling it's like yes we have to you know gather roots we have to kill lions we have to eat we have to mate but like it all sort of calms down eventually.

2:40:37It's like, we're here. This is happening. Remember. Thank you, Henrik. Thank you, Axel. Thanks again for listening to my conversation with Henrik. And before I leave you, I would like to thank Notion one more time. Notion is how it's all possible here at Dialectic, especially in the small ways that I use Notion to build out this world, to make sure I have a sense of all of the various aspects of this person that are bouncing off as I read or consume or listen to their various work before the conversation, how I make sense of that in my prep. And then more importantly, afterwards, the patterns, the lessons, the ideas that I can synthesize thanks to Notion AI, the things I might be missing, as well as just a integrated place where all of that lives, not just individual episodes, but the entire body of work at Dialectic.

2:41:29My site, dialectic.fm, is hosted on Notion, and you can check out more there, whether it be the transcripts, the links, individual lessons I pulled out across the episodes, and more. And as a reminder, Notion recently launched Notion Agents, so you can build a whole suite of little guys in your Notion database, whether it be solo or your entire team, that you can work with for big and small tasks. So little trivial things like reminders or spinning up documents or whatever that might be, or you might even imagine creating a full-on research assistant to help you work through the problem you are working on.

2:42:00Thanks again to Notion, and I will see you next time.