Chris (3:59)

please give it a review or a

Axel (4:01)

like, thumbs up, whatever it might be, or subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. Before we start the conversation, I'd like to thank Notion Dialectic's presenting partner. I've been full time on the project for a few months now, thanks to their support. Notion is a creative tool for your life's work, and it can be used as an individual or with teams big and small. The last year of Notion has been all about the ways they have integrated AI into how you can work. The great thing is that Notion is already where all of your documents, tables, ideas live. Notion is tremendously thoughtful about how they integrate AI in a way that actually enables you to focus on more of the important work and delegate or automate the busy work. For me, it's really two things that I want to spend all my time on. The first is immersing myself in the minds of the people I'm going to speak to, just trying to, like, get inside their brain for a little bit before we talk. And the second is the actual conversation, getting to be truly present with them and explore all of the ways their mind works. It's been amazing to see how Notion AI and agents can help me with everything on both sides of that. Custom Agents, which just launched a few weeks ago, expand this even more. Essentially, you can take something really small, a simple bit of information that everyone on your team might need to query, or something large like, how do I end? Prep a dialectic episode for release. Again, I don't want to delegate the actual research, but even being able to get a primer on the first things I should know for whoever I'm going to speak to, or afterwards be able to speed up the process of compiling the transcript and notes and timestamps and everything else allows me to focus on more of what really matters. Notion AI is also just an amazing way to identify patterns that come up across individual episodes and across all of the body of work in this kind of curriculum or project I'm creating here at Dialectic. In many ways, this is an ongoing discovery of the most interesting minds I can find on the Internet. And Notion is my partner along the way. If you don't use Notion or haven't tried it in a while, you can check it out@notion.com dialectic with that, here is my second conversation with Henrik Carlson.

Chris (5:59)

Henrik Carlson. Here we are. We're back.

Henrik Carlson (6:02)

Yes, we are.

Chris (6:03)

Round two, in the flesh. Knock on wood. On. On video. Exactly. Nice to be with you. We are not in your home. I should establish right up front, so you are not obligated to any of the aesthetic choices. Although I think this is a fun room to be in.

Henrik Carlson (6:17)

Yeah, yeah, it is. It's an old Mill. And I do live in an old mill, so it's almost right spiritually.

Chris (6:23)

Wrong island or wrong landmass, but right corner of the world. So we'll take it. We're back in Copenhagen. Okay. I want to start with maybe two not obviously related ideas. You have somewhere where you say that in English we spend attention, in Spanish we lend attention. And in Swedish, as I understand it, we are attention. Yeah, hopefully I don't have that. Totally wrong. Rough. At least directionally. You also tweeted recently a couple of. Couple of things I liked. First, the most useful piece of writing advice you can squeeze into three words is don't think. Look, that's Wittgenstein. So much bad writing comes from people moving words about on the page instead of staring at the real thing and then adjusting their words to fit. And then you also wrote, this is in a piece where you're reflecting on the ways that children lose the magic. Maybe you say, when children learn to draw, they tend to make more and more interesting images for several years until around age five when they learn to be boring. Most people never learn how to draw anything interesting. Again. This tends to happen in all domains of our lives. We figure out how to do things well enough and then get stuck. And as I reflected on your writing, you actually come back again and again to a. There might be different ways to describe it, but what I might call cultivating the feeling or experience of being bored, coming back to boredom and maybe specifically this notion that boredom is important in developing attention. And so my slightly cheeky first question is, how does practicing boredom keep us from becoming bored? Or excuse me, keep us from becoming boring?

Henrik Carlson (8:20)

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

Chris (10:47)

Yeah.

Henrik Carlson (10:48)

Or something like that.

Chris (10:48)

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

Henrik Carlson (12:03)

But yeah, it's interesting. I love the interview with Xian always. She's so interesting. She's not boring at all. They leave. I was in Spain recently with my kids and we were, we were in Malaga and like the first day we're there, I had some plans because, because it was just me and the kids because Johanna has her legs so she was in the apartment the day after I had to like entertain the kids in the evening again and I didn't have any plans and, and so I just told them like they were doing a De Revee.

Chris (12:39)

Right, that's better pronunciation mine by the way.

Henrik Carlson (12:43)

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

Chris (14:05)

Yeah, it's a state of attention. I, I can't remember. It's possible we even spoke about this last time. But in the, in the Robert Irwin biography, he and Terrell and some guy at NASA like go into the sensory deprivation room and they sit in there for like eight hours. It's not even, it's not even a

Axel (14:20)

water tank, it's just dark.

Chris (14:21)

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

Henrik Carlson (15:55)

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

Chris (16:48)

of it was almost.

Henrik Carlson (16:49)

Yeah.

Chris (16:50)

Because what I. What I hear in this by the Way I'm not. Sorry to interrupt you is maybe I'm over focusing on the metaphor. But it's about balance. I think so. More so than even leaning one way or another way.

Henrik Carlson (17:02)

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

Chris (17:51)

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

Henrik Carlson (19:19)

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

Chris (20:26)

Right. You had debris.

Henrik Carlson (20:28)

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

Chris (20:50)

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

Henrik Carlson (20:55)

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

Chris (21:25)

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

Henrik Carlson (21:37)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris (21:38)

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

Henrik Carlson (21:41)

Yes, exactly, exactly. Because those that like, doesn't fit in, that confuse him, like his, his mind's very good at filtering that. And all their minds are very good at that.

Chris (21:49)

Yes, it's. It bounces off.

Henrik Carlson (21:51)

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

Chris (23:31)

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

Henrik Carlson (25:16)

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

Chris (26:32)

Oh, so painful, though.

Henrik Carlson (26:34)

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

Chris (26:57)

The circle is as simple as the square, perhaps.

Henrik Carlson (27:00)

And that can be humiliating, too, because people read it as, like, yeah, of course, like, this is obvious. But, like, I have spent pretty much getting there. And so. So there can be also temptation maybe to, like, shy away from it, from that. Like, I want to keep it complex. Looks more.

Chris (27:15)

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

Henrik Carlson (27:46)

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

Chris (29:09)

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

Henrik Carlson (29:33)

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

Chris (30:52)

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

Henrik Carlson (30:58)

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

Chris (31:33)

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

Henrik Carlson (31:40)

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

Chris (32:01)

Do you delete them?

Henrik Carlson (32:02)

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

Chris (34:16)

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

Henrik Carlson (35:48)

Yeah, which, let's not dwell on that.

Chris (35:52)

That is it. That is a dark.

Henrik Carlson (35:54)

Yeah, imagine like having agreed to publish that also.

Chris (35:57)

He did.

Henrik Carlson (35:58)

Yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah, it's in book two of my struggle. And he's doing it like in the middle of like this being a controversy. So he knows that like 500,000 people, like 10% of the population in Norway is going to read this and Then he spends 24 hours writing 25,000 words about like meeting and falling in love with his wife and like in a very intense and like painful way. Yeah, let's not do that.

Chris (36:23)

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

Henrik Carlson (37:16)

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

Chris (38:03)

going to read are you writing to yourself in the future or are you writing to yourself in the future?

Henrik Carlson (38:08)

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

Chris (38:39)

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

Henrik Carlson (38:42)

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

Chris (39:06)

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

Henrik Carlson (39:36)

Yeah, and I guess I'm speculating here, but I suspect early on when I did that I would read things, go back and read things. And I noticed like, oh, that's cringe. Like I am posing. I am doing these things. And that would be embarrassing in front of the audience, of myself. And so I would like unlearn that course.

Chris (39:57)

Right.

Henrik Carlson (39:58)

It's almost like a ballerina in front of a mirror, like looking at the movement of the leg. And no, it's all like, that's the wrong movement of the leg because that's posing. That's. That's cringe. And I guess I kind of, without even thinking about it, had that kind of reinforcement loop, which helped me get into the right post. So. So whenever I write in the notebook now, I always like immediately go into the right post where I like, open, creative, willing to linger in confusion and so on. Whereas in other mediums, like, if I open the substack editor. Like, I'll, like, I can't write if I try to write in Google Docs or if I write. Like, I'll enter into different stances. Like if I write an email, being one stance that are in the WhatsApp all different stance. So. But I have, through practice, like, encoded a very good stance around my notebook. So I can always go there and

Chris (40:49)

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

Henrik Carlson (42:15)

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

Chris (43:05)

Who.

Henrik Carlson (43:05)

Who. Who am I? Who am like.

Chris (43:09)

And almost drawing a narrative around yourself as well.

Henrik Carlson (43:12)

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

Chris (44:35)

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.

Henrik Carlson (44:43)

Yes, yes. I think those things, or maybe another

Chris (44:45)

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.

Henrik Carlson (44:57)

Yes, they do. Yeah. So, yeah, they are on a deadly bear, right? They are making. Yeah. It's like with someone like Nick Cave, it's not clear at all, like, where he's going. Obviously, music is very important to him and has 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. Can just like, if you were trying to understand Nick Cave as. As an obvious. But let's say you were his management and you were trying to, like, what is the Nick Cave brand? Yes. You would never, like, go, like, we should do porcelain figurines of the data. Right. I don't know where I'm getting here, but.

Chris (45:46)

Well, 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 modern, certainly the Internet is about making yourself legible in a way that is like cohesive enough and small enough and contain enough that it can be like replicated externally. And so I do think it's telling that there's some kind of external pressure

Axel (46:12)

to be that way.

Chris (46:13)

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.

Henrik Carlson (46:29)

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

Chris (46:40)

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

Henrik Carlson (46:43)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also like the stereotypes of him like Justina Guru, like, like where he's actually a very, very intellectual person and like spends enormous times reading and so on. Like that's not what they.

Chris (46:56)

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

Henrik Carlson (48:38)

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 that, again, better to try to orient what is exciting, what is alive and so on. 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 Larson Tier. So they both do very unpredictable work and we both use constraints a lot in the process. So, like Young Cage, he has this piece, I think, where he. He's set up a system and then he's using Aishing or like salt and dices and so on to make all the decisions. So the music is total chaos, right? It's just like the timing of the notes, the pictures, everything is decided through this random system. I find that's a fun experiment, but it's horror to listen to in my ears. It's like it can be interesting for a few minutes to.

Chris (49:53)

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

Henrik Carlson (50:13)

Yeah, yeah. Because. Yes, it's exactly. Because randomness can produce all sorts of. It will get you out of the habitual, it will get you to places, combinations you would have never seen before. But Young Cage, in that, at least he doesn't then apply his own taste diet. He just says, okay, so the system has run its work. Now we have random chaos. Here we go. And that's one kind of experiment. And then you have. Well, I was going to go with Laosh and Fee, but we could go with Brian Eno is maybe closer. He also does these things where he has a system, I think, that runs in his house, where he has, you know, 10,000 sonic landscapes that he's made across the years that has never amounted to anything. And then his system will pick two at random and play them at the same time in his loudspeaker. And then he can just like push a bottom, but. And it will change into a different combination and then it can push another bottom and it saves that combination. So he's like exposing himself to a lot of dissonance, but then he's applying his taste. Like it's a smart.

Chris (51:28)

It's a cue.

Henrik Carlson (51:28)

Yeah. So then he gets outside of his habitual space of ideas, but he then picks the ones that are interesting and then reworks them and improves them into something that works. So that's a difference between him and Cage. And I would say then I get that Larsen trigger. What he's doing when he's applying constraints on himself is something similar. He's. He's applying constraints that limit him from doing the things that are easy and that he knows will work right. He's a very, very talented with like framing. And I mean, if you look at the films he'd made in 80s that they look like golden age Hollywood. It's like so crisp. Everything is like so beautifully choreographed. Everything. And then he very consciously said, like, I'm going to forbid myself from doing all of those things that I am famous for and that I do well, so I'm only, only going to use handheld camera. There's going to be like for a period where even no artificial lightning. And then he brought that back in. But. And, and he has all these constraints that he's forcing him to like remove all of that and that. But, but then he's not just like making shitty films, he's act 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 something new interesting that I haven't tried before. And he actually ends up finding novel things that. But are not only novel, they're also more powerful. They are resonating with us as an audience at a deeper level. And that's what mattering. It doesn't matter that it's novel. It matters that it shakes us when.

Chris (53:05)

So the, the tension here, I was going to say is it feels sort of like he's using unpredictability to go back to the earlier point as a tool to unlock more aliveness. Or maybe unpredictability is still the wrong word, but he's using these constraints. I guess the question you, you write a lot about, you know, in the ways that you know, is really good at just like risking everything over and over again. And, and you also, I think critically make the stipulation that like, he has like upped his level of risk taking gradually over time. I think at one point you say if, if you have a hit and can build up some savings that is meant to fund bigger 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. To maybe go back to Von Trier 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 in 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,

Henrik Carlson (54:41)

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

Chris (56:39)

Yeah, it's an explore exploit a bit, in some sense. Yeah.

Henrik Carlson (56:42)

Because, like, he had a project where he was. That he started, I think, in the early 90s where he was going to film for three minutes every year for 30 years and there's going to be a film. So that's like a strange constraint turn out that was 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 R1 stats.

Chris (57:06)

I like that a lot. It's funny that the arbitrary constraints to unpredictability or the hacking it or whatever, that's one version. Another version that maybe fits into that model is. You talk about the context of Herzog, but it reminded me of the Steve Jobs thing as well. It's this thing about Herzog just like, being upset about doing things the proper way. One short, tiny segment of it is the professionals having too many preconceived ideas of how to go about things. Wasted resources and missed the light in the trees. They're 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 in, like the 80s. And he's talking about how they had some way of doing accounting for hardware and you basically flubbed the numbers because there's no way to get the numbers exact. And he. It's just like. That seems dumb, like we should just change it. And he. His point is, he calls this like, business folklore. It's just like the way things are done, the way things have to be done. And it feels like that's another version of reasons you might not look in a certain part of the labyrinth. You're like. You come across a certain kind of like, solution 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.

Henrik Carlson (58:42)

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

Chris (59:47)

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.

Henrik Carlson (59:55)

Yeah, yeah. They're just like, reapplying the same idea that they have framework. Like, this is how we do it. It's going to be abc. It's going to 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. Right. Like the film they were making. In that case, it's like a very gritty, handheld Vietnam film where it's supposed to be very, like, claustrophobic. You don't need makeup for that. Like, if you pay attention to the film you're making, that is not necessary. But the other way. Yeah, but they're so like. We're 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.

Chris (61:00)

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. And to your point, earlier, the more you break them, the better you get at rebuilding them. And someone like Herzog, on some level, probably, like, very comfortable in the broken debris space. He's very comfortable in ambiguity. I think that might be a trait of what you would call someone with high agency. Um, but also, like, that is fundamentally, like, there's a reason we have the consistency at the models. And so, like, is it just about getting more comfortable in ambiguity so you can speed. Run that faster? Like, how do you know when to. Maybe this is again, going back to the unpredictability thing. Unpredictability is the goal 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 is to find the new place in the labyrinth. Maybe it's just attunement, as we keep coming back to.

Henrik Carlson (62:02)

But I mean, you said a part where you talked about, like, it's very costly to do it that way. And 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, filling the podcast, like, setting up the. You probably shouldn't reinvent that every time. Let's make that an entire artistic thing. Because the thing you're trying to maybe is 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. I get what I'm trying to say. Yes. It's. It's like if you just want to get a result fast than just tires. Yeah. It's the same as if you. You're building a house if you have, like these floors that are. I don't know what it's called. Like, you just click them in. 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 it depends on what business you're in. And if you're in the business of like, creating new ideas for a startup or art or essays like, yes, it's a very costly kind of research cost. So if these are costly projects, but it's the only way we know how to get to these powerful new experiences and products and artworks.

Chris (63:47)

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

Henrik Carlson (65:09)

Yeah, that part is hard. It's like our sense of self and our benchmark models are always sort of a sort of lagging indicator or something. They are slow to update. I struggle with that a lot because the rate of change for me has been quite rapid. Like, I went from, like, literally, like, being totally on my own and, like, isolated on the island. Off with move. That was like six years ago and then maybe three years ago, suddenly I started to have some success. And now, like, it's my job. And then, like, and. And when you have that kind of almost exponential change in your life, it's very, very hard to, like, update because I still kind of feel like the person I was like four years ago or something. Which is not who I am now. And so I probably to get back to risk. Like I probably take way too little risk.

Chris (66:14)

I think all of us do almost overwhelmingly. Maybe not Elon, but Peter Thiel, but

Henrik Carlson (66:18)

like, but specifically like in my case, it's like I'm still, I haven't like updated that. Like I'm actually not struggling with money that far anymore.

Chris (66:30)

Right.

Henrik Carlson (66:31)

That used to be like a terror for me with money for many years and until less than a year ago. And so I still think that way even though it's not true. And that's making me make not the optimal decisions I could be making. Because if I.

Chris (66:50)

It's a scarcity mindset that is seeping in.

Henrik Carlson (66:52)

Yeah. And I'm not looking at the situation clear eyed. Like, I'm not like noticing that like the situation is actually like this. Like the amount of money I could invest into a project is higher now. I could deal with this and that. I'm not noticing that. And so, and because I'm not noticing, I'm actually not making the best decisions. And I don't know how to actually make that faster. That update. Yeah. Well, someone told me I would love to know. But I do think another thought that came up when you talked about risk is and which kind of gestured at. In my last answer was that it kind of helps to think a little bit like a VC or something. You're, you're, you're, you're making a bunch of bets in your life. And like every time I'm writing an essay, I'm making a small bet. Like I'm betting that this will be a valuable thing for me to spend 50 hours working on betting on these conversations and 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 you want like 10% of them to succeed and therefore you like to do that. You have to be okay with like, I'm not like, I don't think too much about like my clothes or things like that. Like, I try to Simplify many parts of my life in order so that

Chris (68:43)

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

Henrik Carlson (68:58)

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

Chris (70:00)

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

Henrik Carlson (70:08)

Yeah, but it's a point I often make is like priorities. Like what?

Chris (70:12)

Sacrifice the wrong thing?

Henrik Carlson (70:13)

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

Chris (70:27)

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 and it has more success than it had before. And so like, am I, how wide is my aperture? Am I taking enough risk? Am I trying enough other things? Should I do I do I just keep Doing this thing, like, and really re. Like. And I. I think I'm drawing a false comparison, but I'm not totally sure. Right, 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.

Henrik Carlson (71:31)

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

Chris (72:45)

But conversely, you've talked about a world where like. Like the essays are the exhaust of the life you've cultivated, the state of mind you've cultivated, or even the milieu you've cultivated. Like, you've alluded in your writing to a world where in the future, there. I mean, you threw out a whole bunch of ideas. Whether it's like, doing more investigative kind of like, work or interviews, bringing people to the island, making films. It's easy to imagine for me, to imagine a future for you that is like, Henrik wrote essays in the barn for 20 years. And maybe the. The output of that, among other things, is that you write, as you say, a few good essays, 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. All the way back to this earlier theme of proprioception and balance. Like, what is the. When you are attuned to yourself around what to do next? What, how.

Axel (73:59)

How are you.

Chris (73:59)

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

Henrik Carlson (74:03)

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

Chris (74:07)

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

Henrik Carlson (74:09)

Yeah. And yeah, I'm struggling with this thought a lot. And I think, like, one promising direction for my, like, personal work is to. I've had a period where I've locked down very much and done my thing. In order to get where I am now, I had to like, this works. And this is like, very aligned with what I value. So I'm just going to double and triple down on that for a few years. And for the last year I've been like, should. What's the next step for that? And I haven't figured that out. 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 the essays kind of happen of themselves, and trying to put myself in a situation where, where I free up more time. Because right now the blog is like taking everything for me and that'd be interesting to like, carve out so that I work on the blog 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.

Chris (75:23)

Right.

Henrik Carlson (75:23)

So because I also can keep going, doing what I'm doing now because then I'm just gonna. Because if now I'm basically spending six days a week on the blog, at some point I'm going to get very boring because I. I'm not having enough new experiences. So I probably need to like, start making films or start a podcast or start traveling more. I need to probably to do those things in order to, like, feed the main things. I guess I'm maybe trying to find some way of, of making those things work together. And I haven't figured that out because.

Chris (76:01)

But you have to see that threat. Like, the root of the question, hilariously, is actually just like, really trying to figure out what is more risky. Is it riskier to stay focused and like, not get distracted, not get queued? Or is it riskier to try all these other things and like, lose the plot? And I think that it. The root of it, at least how I would relate to it, and what I, my, my reading of you is very tuned. You are very attuned to knowing that you at some future point will like there is, it's, 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 that to do the essay six, six days a week right now. But I probably won't be able and so I need to course I need to unfold or I need to. That's how I see it.

Henrik Carlson (76:56)

One thing that comes to mind when I'm talking about this topic and I think I see it maybe a little bit more clearly as we talk is that I think I have this from some of Taleb's books, Nassim Taleb, where he talks about maybe an anti fragile talks about in certain kinds of jobs, like if you have a normal 9 to 5 job, you're gonna, it's gonna look very stable and then one day you're gonna 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, because, because you, you, you, you planning buffers in, in your spending and so on to handle swings. Yeah. So if there's a, and if there's a downturn, go salary is only going to get cut 20%. You're not going to be cut 100%. And that idea I think maybe applies to my situation too is that I could double down on the things that work. And there's a lot of people telling me that I should do and that I should like there's these book deals I could do and so on and that would earn me more money, it would have more impact short term. But it's 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 my 30% of my time, 50% of my time into more kind of eligible diverse bets that, that will make my situation now more unstable. My income go to up and down at best, so on but it's probably over time a less risky path. But that, yeah that's, that's my current thought at this very hour.

Chris (78:52)

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

Henrik Carlson (79:10)

Yeah, and I, I've had that thought like on and off for a long time because I think I could have gone like go pro, so to speak. I could have become a full time writer a year earlier, maybe even sooner. But as soon as I saw that that was possible, I was kind of afraid because I feared that like, if I, if I were just like to spring to that goal, quit my job, not be completely reliant on this income and that might be just a terrible situation for me. It might be very stressful. I made my 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 break those different stuff. And that just slowed my growth. Yeah quite a lot. And I shar a lot of subscribers. But it meant that I, I had the permission a year later when I could like again in that slower path, get to the point. Yes, now I knew I had permission. Like I can go silent for a month, I can probe.

Chris (80:22)

It enabled you to go farther and

Henrik Carlson (80:24)

to go longer and because, yeah, because I was afraid, otherwise I'd just be too afraid. So I, I do already have a lot of latitude in a. Right. But, but, but the question is, do I need even more?

Chris (80:37)

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, is it can kind of sit next to like knowing yourself well enough to know that you have to go slow to go longer or something. And I think the, yeah, the challenge, it's, it's. I'm, I'm trying to build up an 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, I think generally tends to be pretty good. But the, the Challenge then too is Silicon Valley is not in that mentality broadly doesn't tend to build the most enduring things.

Henrik Carlson (81:36)

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 with guys. I can't take those kinds of bets. And, and knowing that like planning in enough buffer and enough like creative freedom,

Chris (81:59)

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

Henrik Carlson (82:04)

What do you mean?

Chris (82:05)

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

Henrik Carlson (82:36)

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

Chris (83:29)

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

Henrik Carlson (84:07)

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

Chris (84:44)

This is it.

Henrik Carlson (84:44)

It should be. And I treat myself, again, like, the reason I talk about these things is because I find them hard. I trick myself all the time. So. So I have a bunch of, like, very intellectual friends who are always reading, like, hard books and so on. And sometimes I'll be like, oh, I'm gonna. I'm gonna do. And I say, with all microflections on the bronze, grandma. So. Right. And. And. And then I stopped working on that. And then I realized, like, no, I'm actually trying to impress our friends. I'm actually not excited about.

Chris (85:18)

Right.

Henrik Carlson (85:18)

But brother karma. So, like, I'm actually excited about, like, the things that are feeling light, open, playful, like, galloping down the street. I just were 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 lick. I get these ideas that sound like good ideas, and they are projects that I admire from afar. Like, I'd love to read that essay. I'd love to read that book. But it's like from. From the head. It's like, I can. I can calculate that that's a good thing you need 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 loose in my body and. Yeah. And they're sort of like, almost embarrassing in some sense, those things. So as I like that word desire, like, what is like making your blood boil a little bit? Yes. And often I find that they are hard to explain. It's like, certain ideas. The ideas that I get in my head are usually better. Elevator pitches. Yes.

Chris (86:41)

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

Henrik Carlson (86:46)

Yeah. I'll give an example because I'm talking in the abstract. Like I was reading book 6 on the calculation of Molio.

Chris (86:56)

This is the repeating day.

Henrik Carlson (86:57)

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

Chris (87:58)

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

Henrik Carlson (88:01)

But I noticed that idea for some reason. I mean now I gave it a lot of space. It's just like a small thought that happened for three minutes in my head. But I got excited about it. Yeah, there's a lift and I can't explain, like that's not an obvious escape in the Flatland essay or something. I don't know where that's going. And maybe it will end up. Most likely 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 you start excitement. Like if I travel down this and let that again go into confusion, like, because I don't know, like what. How could this work? This, this idea? What is this trying to do? And if I go down there, I might end up with a story from my childhood and it would be like. It would be something completely different. But I'll just trust that this is some interesting part of the labyrinth.

Chris (88:53)

It's a nice complement to aliveness, which is a word you use so often in talking about the writing. You.

Axel (88:59)

You talk about like a lightning bolt

Chris (89:00)

in your body, but feels like those two things are Operating in a similar part of the. Of our inner space. Maybe. Yeah.

Henrik Carlson (89:10)

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

Chris (89:23)

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

Henrik Carlson (89:37)

Yeah.

Chris (89:38)

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

Henrik Carlson (89:40)

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 mental institution in Copenhagen. I think so. And it was called. Yeah, it was called like mental institution. Right. And at some point they started feeling that was maybe a little bit old fashioned, like cold words or how they. They wanted to change it to psychiatric hospital or something, I don't know. But they had this beautiful carved stone in front of the house where it said mental institution. And it's like what you would do. And then at some meeting, someone had the brilliance idea. Can you just like flip the stone over and we can write the new name on the other side? I was like, that's a brilliant idea. They went out, flipped the stone and then it said idiot Asylum because like words will get destroyed. So there's like this. In this continual loop of having to rename this place because whatever name they picked for it would be drag of the dirt

Chris (90:40)

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

Henrik Carlson (91:32)

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

Chris (92:01)

You have to reach like a critical mass.

Henrik Carlson (92:03)

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

Chris (93:08)

Similar idea.

Henrik Carlson (93:08)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then it gets passed on to like a scene where it gets filtered a little bit and improved by them and then gets passed on to bigger and bigger populations. So therefore like almost all the good ideas needs to start out in the fringe shift because if in the middle it would be sensor in the middle it wouldn't catch on. And of course we can all be in the center and the fringes at the same time and go back and forth. 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.

Chris (93:41)

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

Henrik Carlson (93:48)

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

Chris (96:25)

Are you not building something that could. Could be the very early you. 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.

Henrik Carlson (97:01)

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

Chris (98:28)

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

Henrik Carlson (98:33)

And there has to be some structure where like the main conversation is maybe backed by the people who are having like the most high quality conversations or like we have a hierarchy and But I don't know what the structure of that is and it's probably going to be 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 and we don't really have the right tools for dire. It's not easy to do.

Chris (99:01)

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

Henrik Carlson (99:50)

It's. It's. It's that forest of confusion again whenever I get first draft of something. And ideally the first draft of it is just not 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 sort of next step for me is to. What I'm saying there with the hidden doors is like, once I have that thing on the table, I'll notice first, like, some open questions or some things that do not fit. And if I just publish it and move on, I'm not actually going to get the real value from that draft because the real value is when I go like, this isn't really making sense and maybe I need to go and do some more research or maybe I should go talk to this person or whatever and. And start smashing it to pieces. It's in that process where I'm actually updating how I think that how I actually. Yeah. Get into closer contact.

Chris (100:55)

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 going to hold it. Yeah, I'm going to put it in there. You talk about holding things for a year, which my sense is probably closer to the previous example.

Henrik Carlson (101:20)

But yeah, it's. That's. The part is also true because. And it comes back to. Well, there's something about my brain that when I publish something, it's like, gone for my life, which is that metaphor.

Chris (101:35)

Right?

Henrik Carlson (101:35)

It's. And that. That sucks a little bit because, like, it means I. I can almost like, never, like, rest on my laurels, so to speak. Like, because whenever I write a good essay, like, I'm putting in hard work and like, yeah, I'll finally achieve something and then I polish it. Okay, now I have nothing. That's the feeling, right? I never get to like, feel like, oh, I've built such body of work. Like, that's never how it feels to me. It's always like, well, that I. 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 the half reason because it's like, nice to have a nice room that I can hang in.

Chris (102:17)

It's almost selfish.

Henrik Carlson (102:18)

Yeah. And also because when I am in dark room, I am thinking about things that are valuable to me that way. Framing the new ideas that those stories are putting me in a mind state where I, 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, I'm, I'm. I would have usually become a better father than I was before, but I'm. I'm even better.

Chris (102:55)

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

Henrik Carlson (103:02)

Yeah.

Chris (103:02)

And it's like you've got like a vacuum or I don't know what the right amount of heart 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.

Henrik Carlson (103:13)

1.

Chris (103:13)

Something great about that because it's being compressed and offered, but there's something. Yeah. I really, my thought was going to be like, man, I really worry if you write a book.

Henrik Carlson (103:24)

Why?

Chris (103:25)

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, I imagine it's something akin to. Far less extreme, but akin to a mother seeing their child go off to college or something.

Henrik Carlson (103:48)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And, and, and, yeah. And if you spend a year or two years now on a project, it's gonna be a part of your life. Like, that was when my kids learned to bike and like, everything is in that book. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not working on a book, so. Well, I don't know. But I think the funk that is to some degree like the core reason I write. It's just like sort of a meditative practice because if you meditate, you're going to put yourself in a certain state. And as you say, the NASA people that were sitting in a deprivation tank, they get out, 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, yes. Toward both being more present and also like, understanding at a deeper level. And, and the presence kind of goes away after the project, but, but, but the deeper insight stays.

Chris (104:50)

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

Henrik Carlson (105:29)

Now?

Chris (105:30)

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.

Henrik Carlson (105:56)

No, that, 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 furnace that I am the sold income. And like, like her life would be very, very, very difficult that after that happened and, and, and so it's important, like, both to like, plan for that eventuality or for. But that that could happen, but also like, to make sure that, like, she has her own things and her own social network that she can rely on in those situations. And that's also true for me. But, but it's like, a little bit easier for me since I like, naturally end up having a lot of connections with People through the writing. And so I have collaborators and friends. Yeah, it's always good to have multiple lives to stand on. But then as you say, like, it is something we like, think about all the time. Like, should we. Would it be better for us to be in a city, be surrounded with like, more of a scene? I think it's like, valuable to like, try to weigh these things. Like, how are we constructing the context, the environment around ourselves? Like, because, like, when we made the decision where we lived now, we didn't think we would ever like, earn any money. We wanted a homeschool, so it had to be cheap. Like, and now we can see a path. Like, maybe we could actually live in a city and actually afford to homeschool and like, so maybe we should update. Yeah, it's important to, like, go through this. Like, so now that the situation is different, like, does it still make sense for us to live on a cheap farm on an island or not? And I think where we have land on that is that, yes, it does make sense for us because the way we're sort of wired and I mean, we have. We like the local community there, we like nature and especially we just like to have a lot of. Of time on our own, a lot

Chris (107:52)

of space to come back to it.

Henrik Carlson (107:54)

Because I remember like, when we lived in the city as like both of us, but especially me, I'm just like, yes, man. Like, if I. I remember, like, I was just. I knew everyone in town, right? Like, I couldn't go through the. The city because it was. This is like a city of 200,000. I couldn't go through the city without, like, running into someone else. It was always getting dragged into cafes and then it'll be a party. Like, I can't saying no to things. Like, there's so many exciting things and I'm always talking. So, yeah, I constrain myself like, I'm in this place and. Because when you're in the country, you have to like, actively decide, like, where I want to go, talk to someone, I want to travel and visit someone. And then you have to actually go through and make the priorities like, who. 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.

Chris (108:41)

I think there's a thing here that I've thought a lot about, which is like, life is a constant fight against inertia. And the point isn't to just change things, but the point is to build a. And I think this is something you do really well across so many of these contexts we've spoken about, which is just build a habit of reevaluating. I think most. Most of us, the temptation is like, I don't know if I can make a change. I don't know if I can make a change. Why we're so hesitant, by the way, to unfold and explore the possibility of something else. And then if we do make the change, it's like, all right, now, this has to be how it is. And it's like, maybe it comes back to a. A lightness or a loose grip or something that is not about a lack of conviction, but a openness to the thing that was true for me then 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.

Henrik Carlson (109:39)

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

Chris (109:58)

It's the spheres.

Henrik Carlson (109:59)

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

Chris (110:29)

Yeah.

Henrik Carlson (110:30)

Because that just, like, blows my head open and I get confused. And then I can like, maybe. Maybe I'll do. I'll try a little bit of that and a little bit of that or something in between. I think I've rely. 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 nice. Right.

Chris (110:55)

Right.

Henrik Carlson (110:56)

Priming me in the right way. They were maybe a little bit too conservative. So then I would have to retreat into solitude, which might be the best thing. But it's also. Sometimes I find that solitude is like, it's maybe slower but better and Sometimes I just want to make fast pivot, make fast decision. Then they have to just talk to three different people.

Chris (111:15)

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

Henrik Carlson (112:47)

Well, I think. Is it amps when it talks about like the seven types of ambiguity? Because I think that's. That's one way to think about it. It's the type of art I'm talking about has ambiguity. It has space. There's some. It's. It's not reaching closure in itself, like, compared to like a field Pass makes the distinction between like a commercial. It's like a perfectly close. Like everything fits together and the right. And the message is like super clear.

Chris (113:13)

It's like propaganda.

Henrik Carlson (113:14)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The propaganda commercials, like, they know exactly what they want you to feel. And there's. Everything is designed for that message that there's like, no, they don't want you.

Chris (113:24)

No interpretation. Yeah.

Henrik Carlson (113:25)

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

Chris (115:47)

I love the spitting out because it's such a great way to articulate the thing that is has friction. And that by the way the. The majority of incentives in culture today are incentivizing all media to not have that affect. If you really think about like people talk about people reading less. Like one of my favorite ideas is

Axel (116:08)

that a reading is a co collaborative

Chris (116:10)

act more more so than most other mediums we spend a lot of time with today. Obviously painting is an extreme example on the other end. But reading 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

Henrik Carlson (116:26)

very specific, but we usually are the other way around. Usually it's the skill. As with Shakespeare, as with Kafka, the skill is removing.

Chris (116:36)

Yes.

Henrik Carlson (116:38)

It's almost like this game of, like. What is it called? Like, there's this game where you have, like, these blocks and Jenga and like, a good novelist or something is someone who can pull the Jenga box and build it really, really high. And it's like, how could that even stat.

Chris (116:55)

Yes.

Henrik Carlson (116:56)

But it's somehow still standing.

Chris (116:58)

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

Henrik Carlson (117:03)

Yeah. So whereas, like, weak writers can do, like, build a very compact thing where there's the whole set.

Chris (117:11)

Django block of narrative writing.

Henrik Carlson (117:13)

That's usa.

Chris (117:15)

So I like that. I like that a lot.

Henrik Carlson (117:19)

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

Chris (118:25)

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

Henrik Carlson (118:29)

Yeah. And there's an obvious tension because the easiest way to make something that is ambiguous is to refer sort of more like modernist poetry or something. But again, it's like a constraint. I'm not allowed to use those tricks. I'm not allowed to, like Mercedes 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, can I use simple sentences?

Chris (119:13)

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

Henrik Carlson (119:16)

Yeah. And I think someone like Hemingway does that. Well, very simple sense. Maybe some of his senses are obscure, but. But it's quite simple language and somehow it still creates these things. But. Yeah, well, you.

Chris (119:28)

You talk about this a little bit when you talk about, like, the. The biggest topics can be really boring to write about. It's not exactly the same idea. And like, the trick is, like, how do you. How do you talk about these sort of things that people are so romance or whatever, figuring out how to do it? Like, how do you talk about these things in a fresh way? Because that is so electrifying, but it's so hard to get there because the temptation is to just make it overly obscure or overly basic.

Henrik Carlson (119:55)

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

Chris (121:30)

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

Henrik Carlson (123:21)

Yes, let's stay with conviction. I think that can probably come from multiple directions. I mean, it's personal people that's just easier. They're kind of disagreeable people. And it comes easy. For me, as you said, it was like having kids and feeling that I had to stand up for them and act on that, which. And the good thing about that was it was sort of habituation in the good sense that I, by being forced to stand up for my convictions, I had to 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 is like being held by the hand or like being forced. It's like going into the Marines or something. Like you get forced to do more sit ups than you've ever done in your life and you realize, I can actually do that. And it can probably be in different ways. Can be like, I guess like A lot of being in a startup incubator can be like that through like you get these external pressures like you have live up to your mentors and people are even invested in you. And that kind of, of social pressure forces you to do things that are uncomfortable for you.

Chris (124:44)

It's like a constructed stakes.

Henrik Carlson (124:46)

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

Chris (125:07)

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

Henrik Carlson (125:24)

Yeah, so, and, and, and I mean that's, that's if we're gonna be like, I'm atheist, so I'm gonna be like very like crass about what, what that mental Lou is doing. It's just like hijacking or conformity bias. We have a tendency to want to bow our heads to authority. And then if you just invent an authority which is all seeing and all powerful, and then you give them your idolized values, then you're hijacking your innate drive to submit to authority or to fit in. So you're kind of hijacking that kind of monkey brain thing we have. 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 like, 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.

Chris (126:21)

What do you believe in?

Henrik Carlson (126:25)

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

Chris (128:26)

Is it fulfilled potential? Is that too simple?

Henrik Carlson (128:30)

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

Chris (129:13)

The music was going on. It kept going.

Henrik Carlson (129:15)

Yeah. And was hopefully, like, going in an even better direction because people around you had to grow and we're playing more interesting things and so on.

Chris (129:22)

We talked about this a bit last time, but it is being a good steward of being sentenced to freedom. That's how I hear it a little bit. You were, you were writing about spign of 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, 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, in the Herbert essay, you said you have to see the world for what it is, in all its brutality. And you need to do this while keeping your heart soft for the beauty that makes it all worthwhile. Maybe you could replace hard and soft with, like, bravery and openness. Does that Resonate with you. Is there anything in that thread that resonates?

Henrik Carlson (130:20)

Yeah, I think that's part of it. But it's, 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 quite horrendous place. There's like many things, big and small, they're terrible and you want to see them with clear eyes because you want to see all of reality as cleanly as you can. Like, and we don't have to think about like the big horrible things. But just like in your life, in a relationship like you, you want to be able to see the ways you are failing as a father or a husband. You want to see the frictions. You want to be able to like sit with those uncomfortable things. And that requires a certain hardness. I don't know if that's the right word, but it requires a certain like non naivete. There are certain forcefulness and strength and just like facing these painful things because unless you can't can do that, you're not going to see reality clearly. And if you're not seeing reality clearly, you're not going to be able to short. Yes, 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 thing that is going to guide you through this world. So, 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. Yes, because the risk, the risk if you're just very hard is that you get like stoical and you just close down and you're tense and like the world is terrible place. I'm not going to trust anyone, whatever. And, and that's not going to help you navigate. You also at the same time have to get back to the galloping down the road, being playful, being soft. Because it's, it's those like small intuitions from the inside, what feels alive, what feels good that is going to guide

Chris (132:42)

you

Henrik Carlson (132:44)

where you should walk in this reality. And 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 right 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 or if you're building a company or whatever. Because, like, I noticed, like, when I was mentioned that I didn't believe in God, you got curious there, you stopped and you went off script and asked himself, what do you believe in? That was sort of. Because you were genuinely curious about that. And it felt like there was a little bit of an opening up in the conversation when that happens. And like there's been several of those in the conversation here, so. And so, yes, you want to be both hard and soft. Like, those are not great words for it. But like, you need to see it be stoical enough. You can see reality and like Shiloh is a. Playful enough so you can decide how to walk in through that world. And they are not easy to combine.

Chris (134:12)

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

Henrik Carlson (134:56)

Yeah. But so much of it feels like we're calling back again and again to sort of phenomenology of navigating in murky spaces. Is that like, how does. How much is supposed to feel in the body? What kind of rules of thumb? How are you going to put your feet and how are you going to feel inside? Where to go? And it's. Yeah, it feels like basically everything good talks about, like, different aspects of. Of that. Those felt senses.

Chris (135:27)

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

Henrik Carlson (136:13)

Yeah, that gotten shorter. I think I used to sort of average 4,000 words. Now I probably average 2,000 words. I think two. That's a nice length. It's like, enough that you can do it in one sitting. I think I used to be more, like, allowing myself to sprawl everywhere. But just like, I want to make sure that each essay is its own little small room. And like, not having. I usually. Because if I look at my older essays, they are actually like three groups put together and because I didn't feel like it was enough and just like trusting that this one thing is enough. Yeah. So. And also simplifying. It's like I prune my writing a lot. Like, I. Yeah. When I read a lot of other writers, there's much more fluff. And that can be good because it can be a way of, like, when it's done well, 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. But I try to make them so that if you slow down and actually, like, what would this mean if I applied it to my lab? How does disconnect. What does this actually mean? That there was actually a lot to unpack. Even though the sentences are, like, written in a way that it should flow very easily. But I say I want. Yeah, it's again, that W lead.

Chris (137:52)

Yeah, it's the Jenga Tower, too.

Henrik Carlson (137:54)

Yeah. 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 that they've read certain of my essays, like, 50 times. And that's wonderful if you can create something that people can come back to and see there's more and more layers to it.

Chris (138:12)

How is reading like running?

Henrik Carlson (138:16)

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

Chris (139:19)

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

Henrik Carlson (139:23)

Exactly. And enough, you get the same. And it's just like trusting that what matters in reading is just like gradually building up your capacity to process words, your references, understanding. Like, if you're reading Dante, like, there's going to be references to a million things and poem's going to do much better if you understand those references and so on. Like, so. So it takes time to build up those things to actually do it. So a good idea is just to start slowly and steadily and just making it fun and gradually pushing yourself a little bit. Because reading Ana Karena is supposed to be very easy. 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 toy hand when I was like 17, I've thought it was very hard to read. And now I read it and it was like, this is like a romance novel. It's very easy. But that's because I built up the capacity, I think about 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 started writing publicly. So I was like, oh, I figured this thing out. I should just write down how to do this thing, right? And then you realize, like, that's not how it works, right? Because, like, I used to write a bunch of essays about how I write my essays. And I thinking I could teach other people that way, because to me it's obvious like, it's actually like these things I'm doing. But obviously the reason I can write the way I write is because I've spent 15, 20 years becoming the kind of person who can write them. And there's like, my entire nervous system is like been redesigned for the purpose of writing essays. And so you probably, like, if someone tried to do what I do, it take at least five years of like deliberate hard effort of like, becoming. Because, yeah, you have to like literally rewire your entire brain. And 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 going to be a very long process of like, rebuilding yourself into the kind of person who can just do things.

Chris (141:57)

But.

Henrik Carlson (141:57)

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.

Chris (142:08)

You have to show up.

Henrik Carlson (142:09)

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

Chris (142:27)

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

Henrik Carlson (143:16)

Yeah, that was cut from that final lesson.

Chris (143:18)

Why is love a lot like that?

Henrik Carlson (143:24)

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

Chris (146:00)

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

Henrik Carlson (146:37)

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

Chris (148:07)

And I'm like, you are the dictator of the blog.

Henrik Carlson (148:09)

But, yeah, you Sure I am. But. But it's so strange when some people write about me as if I'm some famous person. Then, like, the writing purpose. And I was like, I'm Peter. Like, I. I need 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 need to put me up there. Like. And I think the same is true. And if you approach people like that, if you approach Dostoevsky like that, if he's a butch, you realize, like, they were all very Yuba. They're all very, like, relatable and open in their writing in their strange ways. And. 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 are weird. They've gone extreme things in their lives. They are very skilled at specific things, but they're just people. And they can be interesting to talk to because they have interesting experiences and they pushed further into that than many others. But it's nice to just put them down here and play with them.

Chris (149:18)

You wrote about your, I think, maternal

Axel (149:21)

grandfather who passed away last summer.

Chris (149:22)

Niels, Life is not a story that builds to a climax. It is a story that meanders. Every single moment in life is as worthy of care and attention as the climax of a story. What I grieved wasn't his Neil's worn out body finally giving up. That felt good actually. It was relief for him. What I grieved was all the moments that were gone. Even more I grieved all of the moments he had been alive to himself. All of the moments that no one else will ever remember. The feeling of sun on his skin. The long nights in the snow plow clearing the roads through the pine forests. The feeling if any, his last night when Mod the elder held his hand and he seemed for a moment to slide out of his dementia into sleep and smile. It was the godness 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?

Axel (150:20)

Niels?

Henrik Carlson (150:22)

Hey Mo. Very special man. Meant a lot to me. I would say he's had a very, very close relationship. Closer than most people have with their grandparents. I think he. He retired. He was a road worker. So he retired and he was 60 and that was the singer I was born. So he, he spent a lot of time sort of caring for me when my mom started working again, saying he would come there and be with us. And so as I sort of, yeah, grew up very close, he would take me, you know, camping and he would. He was a very down to earth kind of person. Very so. So those moments are usually a very important thing and maybe not so typical for like the cultural manure that he came from. Like he came from very, very, very poor circumstances. Grow up to like without electricity and everyone was like very Marshall. And so I wanted to be like grow up to be the kind of person who's. That takes care of kids and like is very soft in many ways, but it was also very, very core. There's so many interesting things about him. There's one beautiful little story about like the sense of love, about how he was with. When he was, I think he was four years old, he. On Saturdays they would get sugar cuke and they 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, he escaped. Seven siblings. And then he went out, laid down on the meadow and like prepared to die. And then it melted and slid down. So he was a very, very special person and yeah, not the most talkative person, but very, very, extremely determined to do well to help people. Like even during COVID and at this point, I mean he was 92 or something and he was basically not holding together anymore, but he would still like take his, what do you call those rolling shares and he would walk like 500 meters down to the house where the elderly people stayed and he would go from window to window and talk to all the old people that 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 it recognized almost anyone. But he still, he was still the same person because one of them nurses told us that there was another elderly woman in a wheelchair who had, who was sort of having a panic attack. I guess that she was afraid of death and dementia. So she was just acting out and throwing stuff. And he saw that and like couldn't speak and do anything, but he just got up and like moved slowly over and like took her hand. And then he just sat there like for two hours just holding her hand because he could still sense stuff 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 he never cared at all about him. Like he was never self centered in any way whatsoever. And, and like when he, he, he died, 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, it just, I don't, I think he just felt like his work was daunt right now. He'd like he was here to, to be of service. And he too also like I think made the atheism punt from him. Like he didn't believe in a life after this. He just believe it like being of service, didn't use and like disappearing into the night. So, so, so he, he formed me in so many ways. And, and when I met you high, we bought their house and they moved to like a senior apartment next door basically. And that was the setup was, that was so they would have some time to say goodbye through life in a gradual way. So. So during those years when we lived there, it was. We were 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. 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 and it's like, it's the day for the potatoes. You know, it's like, yeah, but we can do that tomorrow maybe, because I'm going. And he was 87 or something, and he's a. No, it's the day of the potatoes. And so he just goes out and starts like, I can't let the 87 mural plant all the potatoes. So, like standing there with. Past the. Seal it on or planting the potatoes, it's just. Yeah, he wanted to do the right thing and all the time. So that was very important to the 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, like, shape together some sort of value system.

Chris (156:41)

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

Henrik Carlson (157:07)

I have some poems that I often return to. Several like to ask Donor. Yeah, there. There's certain. Usually they're not like. There's a few lines that I like to repeat where I like a sentence where it like encapsulates like a simple diamond. An important thought. But many of the ones I turn to are more like a mood almost. There's a one that I often return to and I think I have never. Ice in Swedish, which called the. I don't know, the in English is maybe like a short pause in the organ concert by Transdermer, which is 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. In that scene where he's standing in the church and. And I think there's like. There's certain lines in there where he's talking about, like the. How the book inside the Persian 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. Imagine changing. I'm butchering the images, but there's something about that, which poem, which you should link, that puts me back into sense of. Of awe and care for the human being and for, like, the condition we're in and like the. How fragile we are and how small we are and how meaningful.

Chris (158:58)

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

Henrik Carlson (159:45)

Yeah, I think. Yeah, I think that is a lot of what it comes down to because we're doing. There's so much work to be done. There's so the, you know, hospitals to be manned and companies to be started or roads to be clear, and there's so much work to be done, done. But sort of what, to me, it. All of it 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 100 Gabbars have, like, blown colored pigments on their hands. Leaving those on the wall. It's just kind of, you know, it's a reminder to. To that feeling. It's like, yes, we have to, you know, gather roots, we have to kill lions, we have to eat. We have to mate. But, like, it all sort of calms down eventually to, like, we're here. This is. This is happening, Remember?

Chris (160:44)

Thank you, Henrik.

Henrik Carlson (160:45)

Thank you, Axel.

Axel (160:49)

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