19: Henrik Karlsson - Cultivating a Life that Fits

Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 19 with Henrik Carlsson. This is a special one. It's rare that you find someone whose writing moves you, and even rarer to find someone whose writing consistently moves you, that you find yourself coming back to and recommending again and again. And yet it's even rarer still that despite that person living on a small farm on a remote island halfway across the world from you, you find yourself passing through Copenhagen at the same time and get the chance to have a conversation. Fortunately, I got to do just that with Henrik.

Two of the essays I've most recommended in the last couple of years are Henrik's. The first, titled "Everything That Turned Out Well in My Life," followed the same design process. In it, he references the unfolding idea of Christopher Alexander and how the way we get to an ideal life is not through some grand vision, but by iterating along with the context, trusting that if we experiment and attune ourselves, we'll get closer and closer to a life that fits us. And the second, the first of his that I ever read, is called Looking for Alice, in which he describes how he found his partner Johanna.

It's romantic and invigorating and full of so much life. As I mentioned, Henrik lives on a small island in Denmark where he moved with his wife and daughters from Sweden. So that they could homeschool, as homeschooling is illegal in Sweden. As of recently, he writes on Substack full-time and thus lives this strange life, one that is offline and intimate with his family, and the other where he reaches tens of thousands of people with his incredible writing and connects with strangers like me all over the world. I focused the conversation on two core themes.

The first is self-cultivation, or creating a life that fits you. And the second is about relationships, how to find your partner, how to meet other people and use the internet as a serendipity machine, what it's like to meet spheres, as Henrik calls them, or people who totally expand your world, and lots more. I hope you enjoy the episode, but more importantly, I hope you go read Henrik's incredible writing. If you enjoy Dialectic, please share it with a friend. Now, here's Henrik Carlsson. Henrik, thank you so much for being here. Speaker B: Yeah, thank you, Jackson.

So fun to be here. Speaker A: A nice little bit of serendipity. Crossing over the same part of the world, and I, I don't do these interviews over Zoom, so I don't know if I'd normally be able to get you. It's great to be with you. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's, it's really nice. Yeah, I think you're the first person who has hunted me down. Speaker A: You, you put in some effort to, uh, make it work for me too, so I appreciate it. It's funny, you've described much of what you write about is like self-cultivation, and I see you as someone who has very much curated and designed a specific life for yourself.

That is partly exemplified by— I was texting you some long instructions for where we were going to meet up today, and it literally didn't go through because your Nokia phone doesn't receive MMS messages. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: How old is your phone? Speaker B: I don't know. I have like a version of Nokia phone that I own, like bought. I have a stack of them. So, so I I keep changing them. Yeah, I've had that phone, the same model for 20 years or something. Speaker A: Amazing. Well, we'll get into all of the ways I think your life is unique.

I want to start with maybe hilarious or at least odd comparison or contrast really, which is funny, I think, given you're working in an art gallery. There's a piece in The New Yorker from a few years ago on Larry Gagosian. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. A great piece. Speaker A: Amazing piece. And there's a part in there that always stuck with me. And I wasn't sure why, if it was partly because it made me feel insecure or because it made me realize what I didn't want, but it was just such an interesting contrast to how I live my life.

It says, in Michael Schneider's 2019 book Boom, a director recalls asking Gagosian if he might write a memoir. Gagosian's response was that he avoids self-reflection because that is how you, quote, lose your edge. The late art critic Peter Schjødal once observed, we think of genius as being complicated, but geniuses have the fewest moving parts. Gogol is simple. He is basically a shark, a feeding machine. Meanwhile, you seem to be a shining example of someone who is deeply introspective and yet is simultaneously full of action and has, with a word that we'll talk more about, that's very popular these days, taking a great deal of agency to use your introspection to design a very specific life for yourself.

And I have to admit, if I were going to choose between two lives, I would choose yours over Gogosian's a thousand times out of a thousand. But I thought it was interesting to see that contrast. And as someone who I think has always had a lean toward introspection and wondered how useful or meaningful it is, your writing has been really empowering for me. And so my first question is, what does it mean to be introspective? And how have you gotten better at not protecting yourself or not lying to yourself? Speaker B: Mm-hmm.

A great piece. Speaker A: Amazing piece. And there's a part in there that always stuck with me. And I wasn't sure why, if it was partly because it made me feel insecure or because it made me realize what I didn't want, but it was just such an interesting contrast to how I live my life. It says, in Michael Schneider's 2019 book Boom, a director recalls asking Gagosian if he might write a memoir. Gagosian's response was that he avoids self-reflection because that is how you, quote, lose your edge. The late art critic Peter Schjødal once observed, we think of genius as being complicated, but geniuses have the fewest moving parts.

Gogol is simple. He is basically a shark, a feeding machine. Meanwhile, you seem to be a shining example of someone who is deeply introspective and yet is simultaneously full of action and has, with a word that we'll talk more about, that's very popular these days, taking a great deal of agency to use your introspection to design a very specific life for yourself. And I have to admit, if I were going to choose between two lives, I would choose yours over Gogosian's a thousand times out of a thousand. But I thought it was interesting to see that contrast.

And as someone who I think has always had a lean toward introspection and wondered how useful or meaningful it is, your writing has been really empowering for me. And so my first question is, what does it mean to be introspective? And how have you gotten better at not protecting yourself or not lying to yourself? Speaker B: Yes, a bunch of interesting things there. So first of all, like with Gagosian and that stuff, I would probably obviously be a lot more successful if I didn't introspect as much. I've definitely been many times in my life where I've turned down like a path that could have led to greater success because it didn't align with what I believed in or felt inside.

Yeah, like how do I— I think I've always had a great touch with myself, like comparatively. I think that has to do with like where I grew up. I grew up like in the middle of the woods in Sweden. It was a small village, like 672 people when I was growing up. And so it was like a very protected kind of space and we were like roaming the forests. So it was like a very playful space. I think I just kind of kept going with that. It feels like that's what I'm still doing, you know.

We would find like abandoned houses deep in the woods and we'd turn, like we'd have computers there and like pick them apart or we'd make movie studios and renovate the houses and like learn things like that. And it just feels like I've kind of kept going with that. And I think that has, I think a lot of people have some, the type of introspection that I like. I often talk about like introspection for doing. It's not like you don't— I try to avoid sitting down too much and just reflecting on my feelings and ruminating, but just taking a few minutes here and there to sort of notice what pulls on me and then just go out trying things and then you get feedback.

And I think a lot of people do that as kids, you know, you get just something, look, a house, it's like abandoned, you want to climb into it and then you just do that and then you discover things and you just keep doing things. So I think it's mostly like just protecting something that I think a lot of people have as kids. Speaker A: I think it's funny, there's, I might be reaching here, but there's almost a slight similarity. Maybe there's, this is kind of dumb, but maybe there's like the bell curve meme here, which is to say, it ultimately, maybe Gagosian and you, in some sense, are on similar, like on the ends of the bell curve around getting back to the simple thing.

And the fear of too much introspection in a negative way is that you're stuck there and you don't do anything with it. But it's interesting that you came back to something quite simple, even though I think you're very attuned and you spend a lot of time thinking about big ideas and what you want out of your life. It comes back to something, as you say, like almost childish of what makes me feel alive. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very that Midwitt kind of thing. And I used to, so when I worked at an art gallery, I would have sometimes like mentor art students and they were always so fun.

They like, they come with, they're often very attuned to themselves and like really crazy creative people. But then when I was interacting with them, I had to take this sort of Gagosian kind of role and like explain to them like that they need to like fashion a brand out of themselves and figure out how to— Speaker A: Be commercial. Speaker B: Network and do that because you have to have both of those things. And that's the really hard part. And if you don't have introspection like a Gagosian and you just go for it and just optimize for agency and optimize for growth and whatever, you can go really fast and far and have a terrible, painful life.

But it's really nice, like if you have someone who's like an art student and they're really connected to their creativity and then also kind of learn how to be agentic. When you can have that combination, it's a very rare But that's such a beautiful thing when that comes together. Speaker A: Yeah, I want to talk more about that. For you, I think it starts with writing, and obviously writing and thinking, as you've written extensively about, go together. There's one bit where you say, at a certain level, the rate limiter of how well you can write is introspection.

The whole point of writing is to show the inside of your head. And then you've called writing sort of like putting your thoughts in order. It reminded me of Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, says writing converts your ideas from vague to bad, which is another one of my favorites that feels very aligned with you. You go on to say at another point, good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. It often requires breaking old ideas. This is easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page.

In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, well, I didn't mean it like that, or rely on the fact that your short-term memory is too limited for you to notice the contradiction between what you're saying now and what you said 12 minutes ago. And so there's— it's interesting, there's a sort of interpretation of that that paints introspection as maybe much more scientific than most people's feeling about it might be. I'm curious for you, why is structure and process so important to understanding yourself? Speaker B: Yeah, but that gets an interesting thing because we often, there's often this kind of distinction, like some people are more into logic and process and reasoning.

And then there's like the feel the feeling kind of people who are intuitive. And I think that's like a false dichotomy. I'm really inspired by John Stuart Mill, who was the philosopher and he wrote On Liberty and like the strongest arguments for free speech in many ways and so on. But what was really interesting about Mill was that he was like a rationalist super baby in a sense because his father and Jeremy Bentham sort of collectively had this idea of raising a super genius who would push philosophy forward and utilitarianism and create modern government and so on.

So they raised him like that in a very disciplined way. So he had that internalized logic and he would study the classical Greek logicians and so on. When he was like 8 years old or something. But then he's interesting because then eventually at some point he— this was during the Romantic era. So he was then when he was in his 20s, sort of got in touch with the Romantics and this whole idea that there is some kind of mysterious core to you that you're supposed to manifest in the world. And all these ideas that we're still living in the midst of, we're in a very much of a sort of Romantic era of this idea of authenticity and all that.

So he came in contact with that and he felt that there was something true to to that sort of romantic idea. But then he was sort of able to integrate those two things and like think about that in a deep way. And I resonate with that, this idea that they go together. Like you can use logic and reasoning as a way to sort of figure things out, but you also need to use intuition. And it's not like not straightforward how those things go together, but you you can try to push both things forward.

There's this, I saw a meme, it's like the Pareto frontier. So a lot, often people say, you know, like there's a, you talk about trade-offs, like trade-offs between process and reasoning and intuition, right? And that's only true if you're on the Pareto frontier, right? So the proper answer to that, let's do more of both. Because we're not at the frontier yet. And I think what philosophy does is like, if you go back to the, like, ancient Greece and so on, like real classical philosophy is that process. They're sort of starting from moral intuitions and so on, but then they're using logic and Socratic dialogue and so on to sort of unpack that see the false assumptions and so on.

And often I find that I have several intuitions. So then you can't really follow your intuition. You have to sort of unpack which is the real intuition. And then there's this kind of back and forth between reasoning and intuition. So I might articulate my intuition about what I should do, and then I can start using logic and reasoning to sort of unpack that and critique that. And then refine my intuition and then, you know, it goes back and forth. Speaker B: Yeah, but that gets an interesting thing because we often, there's often this kind of distinction, like some people are more into logic and process and reasoning.

And then there's like the feel the feeling kind of people who are intuitive. And I think that's like a false dichotomy. I'm really inspired by John Stuart Mill, who was the philosopher and he wrote On Liberty and like the strongest arguments for free speech in many ways and so on. But what was really interesting about Mill was that he was like a rationalist super baby in a sense because his father and Jeremy Bentham sort of collectively had this idea of raising a super genius who would push philosophy forward and utilitarianism and create modern government and so on.

So they raised him like that in a very disciplined way. So he had that internalized logic and he would study the classical Greek logicians and so on. When he was like 8 years old or something. But then he's interesting because then eventually at some point he— this was during the Romantic era. So he was then when he was in his 20s, sort of got in touch with the Romantics and this whole idea that there is some kind of mysterious core to you that you're supposed to manifest in the world. And all these ideas that we're still living in the midst of, we're in a very much of a sort of Romantic era of this idea of authenticity and all that.

So he came in contact with that and he felt that there was something true to to that sort of romantic idea. But then he was sort of able to integrate those two things and like think about that in a deep way. And I resonate with that, this idea that they go together. Like you can use logic and reasoning as a way to sort of figure things out, but you also need to use intuition. And it's not like not straightforward how those things go together, but you you can try to push both things forward.

There's this, I saw a meme, it's like the Pareto frontier. So a lot, often people say, you know, like there's a, you talk about trade-offs, like trade-offs between process and reasoning and intuition, right? And that's only true if you're on the Pareto frontier, right? So the proper answer to that, let's do more of both. Because we're not at the frontier yet. And I think what philosophy does is like, if you go back to the, like, ancient Greece and so on, like real classical philosophy is that process. They're sort of starting from moral intuitions and so on, but then they're using logic and Socratic dialogue and so on to sort of unpack that see the false assumptions and so on.

And often I find that I have several intuitions. So then you can't really follow your intuition. You have to sort of unpack which is the real intuition. And then there's this kind of back and forth between reasoning and intuition. So I might articulate my intuition about what I should do, and then I can start using logic and reasoning to sort of unpack that and critique that. And then refine my intuition and then, you know, it goes back and forth. Speaker A: Totally. The interview before this, I interviewed this guy, Tom Morgan, who's very interested in Iain McGilchrist and like left brain, right brain.

There's a similarity here, I think, which is to say intuition isn't necessarily vague or fuzzy so much as it's just not necessarily verbal. And what I think is powerful about writing in the way you talk about it too is that writing in some sense, you say it like allows you to order your thoughts. It allows you to put everything on the table and sort of just look at it a little bit more clearly, or at least know what, know what the known knowns are. And so I think people who bias towards intuition on one end, it's maybe almost like a cop-out.

They can say, oh, it's intuitive. I'm not, I don't need to put parts of this in order. I don't need to make parts of this structured. It's just all intuitive. Whereas I think the best intuitive people are the people who make the best gut decisions. They do so with plenty of structured inputs. And by, by actually making their inputs more structured, they can result in a nonverbal, intuitive, wise choice or decision or whatever it might be in a way that they might not be able to explain explicitly to somebody, but at least the inputs are structured.

And I find that, that, that almost like flywheel that you describe is really is really powerful for almost all of my thoughts. And I end up copping out if I just say, oh, it's a gut thing, it's not a rational thing, it's not a reasoning thing. I can still put some of these, I can still make some of these inputs more objects so I can play with them and turn them around. Speaker B: Yeah, and you have to sort of think about in which domains is, like, so I have a very sort of rationalistic take on what intuition is, it's just kind of pattern matching.

So I don't think there's any divine thing, but that would be really great if it was. And if you, if you think that it's pattern matching, then you have to understand that there's like certain domains where it's even possible to have intuition. So, so like an experienced firefighter is going to have great intuition for when to evacuate a burning building. But like a lot of the times people are like picking stocks or something might not even have any intuition. Or when you're— if If you are 19 years old and are going to pick your major, you're not going to have an intuition because you have not had any feedback to develop a pattern matching capacity.

Whereas maybe someone who's like a wise mentor figure who has seen like thousands of young people kind of grow into competent versions of themselves might be able to look at some person and say, well, you should really go into software or something. So it requires, you can't have intuition without like tight feedback. Speaker A: Totally, totally. You have an amazing piece and it comes up in a few different areas around using conjecture and what you might call almost like takes or strong opinions and error correct. This is a different section, but I thought it connected.

I wrote about the thoughts that passed through my head as if my thoughts mattered unironically. I think that's actually from Looking for Alice. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: But I thought it was interesting the way it connected. It's the piece where you talk about growth and deek and you say forcing the diffuse ideas and impressions in your head into a definite statement is an art form. You have to grab hold of what is floating and make it rigid and sharp. It can feel almost embarrassing, revealing your ignorance with as much vulnerability as possible.

And you go on to talk about this idea of like increasing the surface area for, for beliefs you might have so that they can be pressure tested. It's this really interesting notion that like perhaps we would all benefit to have more strong opinions if we are willing to hold them with a loose enough grip or willing to update them. Put it another way, maybe to reframe the question. We live in a world with lots of strong opinions. In a media world in particular, where the incentive is to just broadcast, to shout your opinions as confidently as possible and never correct yourself.

And there's very little learning, but you sort of advocate for this world where you, it's actually beneficial to have a strong opinion, even if you're wrong. So long as you are actually willing to update it when you, when you are wrong, you give I think it's like this analogy of, or you give an example, you were asking somebody if the dynamic between Greek, the Greeks and the Romans is similar to the Japanese and the Chinese, and you acknowledge being wrong, but it actually created an opening for you to learn. And so the root of the question is, how do you balance this strong take-oriented, high opinionatedness, but also not get too lost in your own confidence.

Does that make sense? Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: But I thought it was interesting the way it connected. It's the piece where you talk about growth and deek and you say forcing the diffuse ideas and impressions in your head into a definite statement is an art form. You have to grab hold of what is floating and make it rigid and sharp. It can feel almost embarrassing, revealing your ignorance with as much vulnerability as possible. And you go on to talk about this idea of like increasing the surface area for, for beliefs you might have so that they can be pressure tested.

It's this really interesting notion that like perhaps we would all benefit to have more strong opinions if we are willing to hold them with a loose enough grip or willing to update them. Put it another way, maybe to reframe the question. We live in a world with lots of strong opinions. In a media world in particular, where the incentive is to just broadcast, to shout your opinions as confidently as possible and never correct yourself. And there's very little learning, but you sort of advocate for this world where you, it's actually beneficial to have a strong opinion, even if you're wrong.

So long as you are actually willing to update it when you, when you are wrong, you give I think it's like this analogy of, or you give an example, you were asking somebody if the dynamic between Greek, the Greeks and the Romans is similar to the Japanese and the Chinese, and you acknowledge being wrong, but it actually created an opening for you to learn. And so the root of the question is, how do you balance this strong take-oriented, high opinionatedness, but also not get too lost in your own confidence. Does that make sense?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a very peculiar state of mind to— so I imagine we could do like a typology of different types of people. So there's like the people who have strong opinions, hot takes, and are just never updating. And then perhaps like a really large group are people who are really good at critiquing and taking things apart. And that's really important. That's a really important part of the process. But the problem is you can't only critique, you have to have something to critique. So A wonderful thing about Grothendieck, who you mentioned, is that, so I mean, he was an absolutely marvelous mathematician, but he had this childish wonder.

Whenever, if someone started to come to him and talk about some new area of mathematics he had never heard about, then the person would talk for 30 seconds explaining that area and he said, "Oh, it has to be like this." And he'd just be so Immediately you like say, it has to be like this, and then someone said, no, it's not. And then he said, oh, it's not, like why? And then they say something, oh, then it has to be like this. No, it's not. But to have that capacity to be like stupid and just articulate something, because if you're not articulate, because you're having that thought anyway.

Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: In some unarticulated sense. So I'm like, as we're having this conversation, I probably have a bunch of like assumptions about like who you are or what you're getting at. But as long as they're in my head, like, and if I'm not articulating them, you can't correct me. So it takes, and especially like now that I've gotten to like a larger scale, so I have like a professional army of people telling me when I'm stupid. It can be very frightening and it's very tempting to like, retreat back into like making foolproof arguments and like filling in all the holes.

But that slows down the rate of learning. And to just be willing to like, I'm gonna put this and then it's gonna go up on Hacker News and I'm gonna have like 137 programmers tell me I'm stupid. And then I can read that and I can learn. And that's such a useful process because But to get back to your question, so this is somewhat intuitive and logical when you say it like this, but it's a very peculiar state of mind to inhabit because it's so easy to sort of either fall into like protective and all the critiquing ideas and only looking for flaws, or if you're putting something out in a way to protect yourself, you start to have confirmation bias.

So it's a very delicate thing. And I think it's, with all of these very delicate states of mind, I think they can only sort of be cultivated in sort of communities of practice, I think. You have to have— Yeah, yeah. You have to observe people do this and kind of interact with them and to get that sense because it's not something that's gonna like spread mimetically or something. It's too complex to summarize. It's a very peculiar like a way of orienting inside yourself emotionally, but to like start to feel a certain joy in being wrong.

Like, how can I be more wrong faster? And to like recode the shame of being wrong. Speaker B: In some unarticulated sense. So I'm like, as we're having this conversation, I probably have a bunch of like assumptions about like who you are or what you're getting at. But as long as they're in my head, like, and if I'm not articulating them, you can't correct me. So it takes, and especially like now that I've gotten to like a larger scale, so I have like a professional army of people telling me when I'm stupid.

It can be very frightening and it's very tempting to like, retreat back into like making foolproof arguments and like filling in all the holes. But that slows down the rate of learning. And to just be willing to like, I'm gonna put this and then it's gonna go up on Hacker News and I'm gonna have like 137 programmers tell me I'm stupid. And then I can read that and I can learn. And that's such a useful process because But to get back to your question, so this is somewhat intuitive and logical when you say it like this, but it's a very peculiar state of mind to inhabit because it's so easy to sort of either fall into like protective and all the critiquing ideas and only looking for flaws, or if you're putting something out in a way to protect yourself, you start to have confirmation bias.

So it's a very delicate thing. And I think it's, with all of these very delicate states of mind, I think they can only sort of be cultivated in sort of communities of practice, I think. You have to have— Yeah, yeah. You have to observe people do this and kind of interact with them and to get that sense because it's not something that's gonna like spread mimetically or something. It's too complex to summarize. It's a very peculiar like a way of orienting inside yourself emotionally, but to like start to feel a certain joy in being wrong.

Like, how can I be more wrong faster? And to like recode the shame of being wrong. Speaker A: Turn that into like a dopamine. Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that just takes a lot of practice because like the first 800 times you're going to feel shame, but then Eventually, you know. Speaker A: Yeah. Well, there's something deep inside of that that is a disposition to actually listen to, to say something with an opinion to take, but then most of us, the temptation, if you are confident, is to not listen.

It's also funny how much this is an embodiment of the silly sort of, if you want to get an answer to something quick, just say the wrong thing. Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. That's Cunningham's Law. Yeah. Speaker A: Yeah. You have another frame of this that you started to maybe talk about a little bit, which is this framing of resisting what you call not that. You say this way of formulating it, not that, is a bit vague as it only defines where not to look for the solution. It is useful to also attempt a positive formulation.

And I think you're talking about the, what you had brought up, that the disposition to critique, which is that many people run through the world sort of not that-ing everything. It's the opposite of the take person. Why is having a positive formulation, as you say, so important? Speaker B: But it's somehow the positive formulation is, that's a probe, that's something that's reaching out toward the world. Like saying, what car are we gonna get? I'm not gonna get a Tesla because I hate Elon, right? Yeah. That, okay. And let's not get that.

But then you can't really critique that option. Okay, so we have no car here. What should we talk about, right? So there's no data, like we can't look at that non-car. You have to say, so I think I'm gonna go for like a Chinese car. And then you can start talking about like, oh, do you really want to do that or whatever? Should it be electric? And it's a much harder, and I think here's like where like, it almost makes sense to talk about the divine and intuition because there's something almost mystical about how the positive formulations come about.

So especially in very creative domains. So I was with some friends and we were producing music yesterday and we were like, I had like a song and we're like, not that, you know? And to go from, maybe we have, yeah, we like the chorus, we like the verse, but we're not sure about like what to have as a bridge. And then we only know what shouldn't be there. And then to go from there and then just like to somehow from some part of yourself, like pull out maybe this, like maybe we should go with this thing.

It's such a like, where do these things come from? And a lot of people struggle with pulling that thing. Like if you're sitting with a chorus and a verse And to just be able to throw out a melody that would be the bridge. Like, that takes a stupid bravery to do that. And that's, but it's so important because until someone, you know, we were there, like we were 4 guys, until someone puts out like an interesting idea, that's when we can start talking about it. Speaker A: That's the beginning. Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. So without that step, there's like nothing to react to. There's like no feedback. There's no data. There's no, emotional reaction, like all of that kind of flow of information that leads to new insight starts with like someone saying, maybe this, maybe this. Speaker A: Yeah. It's a beautiful, it's not exactly the same, but it's a little explore exploit. Not that and maybe this are almost two totally different modes that you, it's like, it would be more helpful if you could put on it, at least in the music sense, like we're in the maybe this part of the session.

And then at some other point, It's— or maybe it's even like write drunk at it sober. There's an element of this total phase shift. You have a beautiful framing around criticism of your own ideas and learning and updating the model. You say the original idea remains the seed, no less valuable for having been wrong. It takes creativity and boldness to leap out and form a conclusion, and the part that criticizes must understand how dependent it is on the part that throws ideas at the wall. It is often easier to criticize than to synthesize a new position.

Again, part of what we were just talking about. How do you maintain or even cultivate kindness and generosity with yourself and your former ideas to create this sort of loose, open environment where you maybe are free or willing to do the maybe this before you get into not that mode? Speaker B: Yeah, again, it's practice. So like concretely, tactically, day to day, it's you have to sort of figure out what, or I have to figure out like what makes me get into that creative flow zone. And for me, it's a lot of like walking up and down the farm and like using like transcription and talking.

It's just kind of get my because when I can't see what I've typed, then I can't critique it, so I just keep going, I keep going. And that works for me. And I also try to, for most of the week, try to block all notifications so I don't see, so I can go in like and look at the critiques that I get on Twitter and on Substack. I can look at that like at specific times. I don't have that in the back of my head all the time. So that's like, you have to figure out like what works for you, what puts you in that kind of playful state and to be able to protect that because it's, It's really hard to protect.

There's so many forces that are pulling you down, both distractions. You have to be in a very open space of mind, but also you have to be unprotected. Yeah, so it gets better with practice. So I've been writing very hard for like 4 years now. And that's been so interesting because when you go through this, it's like you do gradient descent on your own mind in a sense. So I've updated so many of my mental models, and how I think. And it's also like, I guess, rewired my brain in some sense and my, like, what I get rewarded for internally.

So I kind of feel that phrase where like, you have to feel love for to see like the way you were wrong. Like, I feel so much like that now, especially like looking back, there are things, you know, things I did or said when I was like 17, it was super stupid. And I used to be like, oh, why did I do that? And now I'm like, yeah, but how was I supposed to get I'm now if I hadn't done that. You know, like as a 35-year-old, I can see there were better ways of doing it, but like that was my best guess.

So I have to love that because making that bad guess taught me things and like let me grow as a person into being the type of person who could critique it and see what's wrong with it. And then so now I like look at that, I'm like that person who did all the stupid things and like amazing Henrik, you're like so beautiful, stupid things you did. So, so you, so yeah, I think you, I think you, I've kind of rewired my brain into sort of just feeling a lot less shame around being stupid.

Hmm. Speaker A: Speaking of maybe a younger version of you, you've got quite an eclectic past and I'm sure I'm not even covering anywhere near the whole of it, but a few categories, poetry, I know you were doing for a while, software engineering, music, maybe a little bit of that this past weekend too. How do you think those, either those or others, that kind of eclectic mix has shaped you as a writer, especially across pretty concretely different mediums of software, poetry, and music? Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that's one of those things which I could feel shame for early on.

Like I was drifting, I was trying things and I was moving and I was like, oh, I'm so stupid. Like, why can't I just settle on something and just keep like poetry thing was going well and I had my writing workshops and I had a book deal and I was like, why do I have to throw this away? And then do something else. And I had like, was doing programming and then I had like a consultancy and then I threw that away. Like, why am I doing that? But again, it's just intuition.

Like I went there and I was learning things and like now in retrospect, I can see like, I'm obviously pulling a lot on like mental models I got from computer science when I, as I write, I'm obviously using techniques I learned from poetry as I write. I'm obviously like all sorts of things. I used to work in a, in a like a shipping, packing medicals when I was a teenager. Like, and I use those techniques I learned there when I'm packing and sending artworks at the art gallery. And like, you know, like, so everything comes back in.

And now I'm at this stage, like a lot of the writing I do now is just like, I'm kind of looking back at all these things that I were sort of ashamed of, like felt like dead ends. And now I'm like looking at that and seeing there's a lot of wisdom there and things I learned. So it's just like a really like a wealth of experience from that. And there's something beautiful now looking back of like working in different industries for like 6 months. Yeah. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Because you can, you can do like you can learn quite a lot in like 6 months if you're like, I worked at a bio lab for like 6 months when I was 19.

So, and I know a whole lot about like DNA sequencers and enzyme extraction and things like that. It's just like, I'm not good at that, but it's really interesting to understand that's now like, if I'm talking to someone who has a, in a bio startup or they're researching some HIV vaccine, like I sort of know what you're talking about. I understand what the machines look like. I understand what it's like to be in a lab like that. So it's just really fun to have a highly textured tapestry of reality. Yeah.

Hmm. Speaker A: You have this piece summarizing your, your work from 2024 and you have, you open it with this beautiful kind of frame around all of the ways the themes sort of became available to you in hindsight. Or at least started to resolve in hindsight. And it's funny how it seems that our lives seem to be a bit like that too. There's the classic sort of Steve Jobs idea, the dots only connect in reverse. But I think especially in creative fields, for some reason we take this notion that like, oh, you did all those other things and those are like time blocked and now you've become as a— begun as a writer and you're like starting anew.

And maybe you are in some sense, but how could they not? How could that mix for 20 years or whatever it might be, not be kind of deeply informing. Speaker B: Yeah. To get around. Yeah, I think if you want to be a writer, I think that's a good idea to do too. Like, I don't remember who, but it was someone who came to Osip Mandelstam, who was a Soviet poet. And he sort of asked Mandelstam like what he should be doing because he wanted to, he was a young poet and he wanted to learn how to get Well, and he said, don't write anything for 10 years, you know, go out to a mine, go out into the woods, you know, just fill yourself.

Speaker B: Yeah. To get around. Yeah, I think if you want to be a writer, I think that's a good idea to do too. Like, I don't remember who, but it was someone who came to Osip Mandelstam, who was a Soviet poet. And he sort of asked Mandelstam like what he should be doing because he wanted to, he was a young poet and he wanted to learn how to get Well, and he said, don't write anything for 10 years, you know, go out to a mine, go out into the woods, you know, just fill yourself.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Speaker B: Literally with lived experience and then you can write. So I really wanted to be a writer for all of those years when I was doing all those things. But I couldn't have been because I could string sentences together, but they didn't have that sort of light behind them that real writing is supposed to have, which can only, I think, come from lived experience. Speaker A: I think it's a good transition. You, to go back to introspection, you talk about introspection by doing. There's this— I, I found kind of initially shocking, and the more I've thought about— really powerful frame as introspection and agency being the internal and external frames of the same idea, which I think is pretty non-intuitive.

And you have a, you have a piece you wrote about agency that frames it as a little bit— maybe the more common frame of agency being very— I don't mean this word totally in a loaded way, but somewhat exploitative or, um, competitive. This sort of orientation toward the world of seizing opportunity wherever it gets. And you frame it as a little bit more about an attunement to yourself and perceptiveness around yourself. There's one little sentence that I loved. You were talking about the idea of writing a book. For your daughter, Maude, on agency, you say a book about how to handle being sentenced to freedom and to handle it effectively, authentically, and responsibly.

Sentenced to freedom is an amazing— Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's maybe Sartre. Speaker A: Maybe, maybe getting ahead or maybe subverts my question, but I was going to ask why, if not, I didn't realize that was Sartre, but in either case, why is that set of words so resonant or meaningful? Speaker B: Yeah, I think maybe it's like the Nordic melancholia that I have, but I think having freedom is a very, very heavy burden. And sort of what he was getting at when he used that phrase, if I remember the context correctly, is basically that, and Kierkegaard is talking about the same thing, is that You can sort of pretend that you're not free.

You can pretend that like you have to follow norms and rules and you can pretend that there's like group pressure and so on. But that's you deciding to do that. So you can never outsource. So even like you're a Christian and you believe in God, like that's you deciding to believe in that. So you can never get away from— you're the one making the decision. And that's a pretty horrifying thought when you realize, because I'm probably doing a lot of harm to other people. But you know, that's the incentives and that's how the world is.

And yeah, no, that's what you decided. And once you realize that, because you can always make a choice and that's a pretty heavy burden to realize. And I guess for me, it also goes like further because it connects back to the sort of romantic idea. I also think there's some set of like your genetics and your experience is going to enable certain types of things to happen in the world if you kind of unblock and stay attuned to and both like in a Hayekian sense, right? You're gonna be in certain positions, you're gonna see certain business opportunities or arbitrage, and that's gonna provide value to the world.

And if you're not acting on that information that you have about like how a certain logistical problem can be solved, then it's not gonna be solved because you're the only one has that information. And then also like in an artistic sense that you might have a sort of attunement for essays or a certain attunement for particular relationships. And if you are not, paying attention to that information that is flowing for you because of where you've been and what your genetics are, then you're kind of not taking your responsibility there. Speaker A: There's a stewardship there.

Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Duty. Speaker B: I don't know if those ideas kind of go together, but somehow they're pointing to the same landscape that freedom, I guess freedom to some extent is attunement, like being attuned to like, like, like if you can pay very close attention to what you are seeing and sensing and like acting on that information in the best way that you can do it like that, then you're handling your response freedom responsibly. And that's a very hard thing to do because it gets back to agency and it gets back to introspection because to really handle it well, you have to understand how the world works and how to sort of get stuff done and how to be agentic.

But if you're only doing that, and I sort of can feel some sort of disgust for a certain type of sort of romanticism around agency because it's kind of ethically unmoored because— Speaker A: I hear you, yeah. Speaker B: Not everyone uses the word like that, but I think like I've thought about this and tried to sort of, I think we have to sort of reserve, it makes sense to reserve agency for just power. It's just basically capacity to get stuff done. And that's morally neutral. And if you're doing that without having the attunement to sort of the ethics and the curiosity and whatever is kind of flowing through you, then that can end up in some really dark places.

Speaker A: Totally. Maybe the other side of that, and I, it's not obvious that what is attuned to yourself always is what is attuned to the world, although I think my sense is that they, they become more likely. You have this really big idea of, of finding fit. Speaker A: Totally. Maybe the other side of that, and I, it's not obvious that what is attuned to yourself always is what is attuned to the world, although I think my sense is that they, they become more likely. You have this really big idea of, of finding fit.

Speaker B: In the world. Speaker A: One of my favorite essays you've written is, is the piece on unfolding. I think it's like, everything that good in my life followed the same design process. I'm sure I'm slightly butchering the title, but I'll link it. You say, this is true of relationships and essays and careers. You want to find something that fits. Self-actualization means, at least partly, that you have designed a life that fits you, that allows you to express your, your human potential. If you want, you can talk more about what fit is, but I'm more curious what does fit feel like as someone who has maybe been moving up that— in many ways, it seems that you have, like someone who is deeply introspective and agentic, you have followed your own advice.

What does fit feel like? Speaker B: It feels good. It's like I'm a quite sentimental person, but like, yeah, so we are— I mean, I live in a nice little farm with my kids and like I can see they are having such a, like a good life and I'm so proud of that and I'm getting to have like time to discuss ideas with my wife and talk to Jackson and like, you know, I have a really interesting life and I'm close to the sort of edge of my ability of like being following my ethics and all of those things and you know, sometimes you just look out, you get tears in my eyes.

It's really good. I feel very alive. I feel very grateful. I was talking about earlier, like when I was flying out, I just look at people, I feel love. It's a very kind of expansive feeling because I don't feel needy at all because I feel held by my life. I feel held by my readers and my family and nature around me. I feel held. By all those things. And that means it's much easier for me to just feel gratitude and love to everything. Like, basically everyone. I just like look at people on the street and say, so nice that you're here, you know?

So I think, I mean, there's heaviness to it too, because it means like trying to turn toward hard things. And I'm 35 now, so I'm getting into that like middle, early middle age where like relatives and loved ones are getting sick and people are dying and there's like hard things and to stay attuned to that. So there's a heaviness, but there's also deep love in that. So, so, so yeah, it feels alive. Speaker A: And yeah, it reminds me of that amor fati, this sort of to be in love with your own fate.

It's sort of a— there's a, there's a framing that I think maybe came up in something you were writing, but I probably initially came across it in Anthony de Mello in his book Awareness. But it's this idea that it's not that you don't care about the outcome, you do care about the outcome, but you are okay with either outcome. This sort of, um, Zen-like approach to being very okay in settling in into your life. In that piece I mentioned, you talk about unfolding and you talk about form and context and the root of this to me.

Well, first I should say there's, there's two little excerpts that I think illustrate the core ideas from Cristóbal Alexander you're talking about. You say the context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it, which is an awesome framing. And then you say you have lost track of all the experiments and insights that led you to a fit. But the good news is that you don't have to remember it. The form does, which I love. This idea of unfolding inside of it, I think, is at root experimentation.

Or iterating with the context, as you say. You, you say extracting info from the context and baking it into form to create a process that produces a design that's smarter than you. You've also written about like the multi-armed bandit problem and exploitable exploit and a lot of these different ideas. This is you on experiments, and then I promise I'll finally ask a question. You say, perform experiments. By this, I don't mean do random things. I mean, state your assumptions and find ways to test if they are false. Most of the time, the slot machine of an experiment yields nothing, but that's okay.

A few will rearrange the world around you by increasing the speed at which you can act on the context. Trying new things will become cheaper for you, and so you will take more risks and extract more information from the context. Write faster, prototype faster, ask for feedback faster. Velocity is underrated. There's a frame here that you used around collision with reality. What makes for a good experiment that allows you to collide with reality, specifically across different scales? So you can imagine an experiment that is like, do I like this hobby?

Do I like jiu-jitsu? And you can imagine an experiment that's like, should I move from my home country to an island in Denmark so I can homeschool my daughters? Is there a through line across experimenting across those different modes? Speaker B: Yeah. So, so an example of like how, because it's, it's very straightforward and basic and people do it more or less. So say when I started working at the art gallery, then I, one of the first things I was thinking about was how to sort of rebrand it because can we make it more intuitive to people what kind of value we're providing and why they should go here and can we sort of get more people in through the door.

And then the fast and simple way I found to do that was just to go talk to everyone who went in the store. And I tried different ways of framing, explaining who we were. And then you start to notice, oh, people's eyes light up when I tell that story or that framing or that phrase. And then I tried to say that same story slightly differently. And then I do that 300 times or 400 times. And then I kind of just intuitively just try different variations until I I find something and then, oh, this is a good first draft of our new branding.

And then of course, over time, run new experiments and test it. And the mistake people would do is that they would have like, or like there'd be a committee or something and they'd talk about it or they would sit around in some PowerPoint slides and think about like, but it's so fast to just go up to someone and then just like do a like improvised version of your new like press release or whatever. And then just, it takes 15 seconds. And with bigger decisions, like, so we moved, left Sweden and moved to Ireland.

That was a really big decision. Those things, of course, take longer time. And we were thinking about that maybe for 4 years. And we didn't know where we were going, but we knew we wanted to leave Sweden to homeschool and where should we go. So we just would, whenever we had some money left over, we would travel to places that where we could reasonably live. And then we just went from place to place and we would contact people who might have information and ask which villages have more homeschoolers and start mapping that out and just figuring out, okay, so that's kind of close to home, and then you make a guess at these 3 places seem most promising, and then you try to as rapidly as possible go there and just experience how it's like to be there.

But just, yeah, getting information as soon as possible and kind of Yeah, honing in, like, I mean, because yeah, we're gonna move somewhere probably in Europe, like that's too broad. You can't just randomly go to random places. You have to have some criteria, like you start listing constraints, like we want to have, it should be fairly easy to travel home. It should be, we should afford it. We should, you know, all these things. And then you start listing constraints and mapping out potential solutions and then you Yes, take the first best idea and try that, and then the second best, and keep going and surfacing.

And then as you do that, you surface more and more constraints, and you go there, it's like, yeah, but maybe we also want the nature to look nice, not this pine forest shit. Speaker A: There's two follow-up questions I have there. One is, the first example, can I test a bunch of different ways to pitch this art gallery? In that multi-armed bandit piece, I think you do a great job of, of talking about the classic explore-exploit idea from computer science. I think most people will try something 3 times or 5 times, and then they'll choose the one that works the best of those, or they'll find anything that kind of works and they'll just stick with it.

It takes a certain kind of like energy to try something. Maybe you didn't literally mean 300, but I don't know, our mutual friend Ava talks about this with therapists or dog walkers. She's like, yeah, you should try 30 therapists, like, because eventually you'll find one. And I think most people are either on the end where they don't have the energy to try a whole bunch of things, or they swing to the full opposite end of the spectrum, kind of like we were talking about earlier, which is they're sort of Peter Panning through life and just sampling everything and never settling anywhere.

Speaker B: Yeah, you have to decide how important— you can't do everything properly. You have to have your priorities. And that's why it matters to really think hard about sort of your goals and values and so on, because you're going to have the rank order. But my kind of philosophy is that I'd rather do a few things really well. And that comes back to Attunement. There's like a certain pleasure or something to going in very close combat with reality and just going really deep on a few things. So I try to think really hard about what I value and then I just cut away all of the things.

As I mentioned, like I don't have a smartphone because I cut away a lot of things that I don't want to have in my life. And then I don't have to think about like, which smartphone should I get? Like I have the same Nokia that I've had for 20 years. Like I looked at like, that's a nice enough phone. I'm just gonna keep using the same phone forever until they stop doing them. And then instead I'm going to spend like ridiculous amounts of time figuring out like where to raise my kids or like at the art gallery.

Like if we can't get the branding right and get like people to know how to explain who we are to people and get people in through the door, then nothing else matters. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: So then 300 times is like the least you should do. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: Whereas like What color should the homepage be? I don't know, white? Like, just spend 5 seconds. Speaker A: Those are spread very thin. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Yeah, that's a painful realization. On the note of fit, especially around your work, presumably you were doing some unfolding as you did poetry and music and computer science.

Perhaps it's not exactly the right question, but what feels different about writing in this phase than those previous things, which were also creative and in the poetry case was even writing. Is it about the outside world reception of it? Is it purely internal? Is it both? Speaker B: It's both, but the big sort of conceptual breakthrough for me, which is like an obvious thing in retrospect, is that I should have a blog and it should be in English. Like, because I always wanted to write, but like, As a Swedish person, it's not obvious that you should write in another language.

Most people don't do that. Most people write in Swedish and that just limits your— like once I realized that, like, oh, that's so stupid. Like, why would I write in Swedish? You know, because the audience is like 1% of the English-speaking audience. So, which means you're so much more limited in what you can do and what there are like addressable markets of. So it's never, you're never going to be able to fund anything interesting if you write in Swedish. Like impossible to do. It's just mathematically impossible. So yes, something clicked in place for me there.

Like with the blog, it's such an open-ended vehicle because I can— there's such a large market, or so to speak, of people who read it and are willing to fund it that I can steer it in ways that are just not possible in any of the other things I've tried to do. Like I was— when I was doing programming, it was just very limited. I mean, maybe if I'd done a startup or something, I would have had more, but I was doing consulting. So it was very limited in— I could steer it, but like there were not that many degrees of freedom.

Writing for magazines, almost no degrees of freedom. Blog is just like— Speaker A: Yeah, it's a good vehicle. Speaker B: Yeah. And that makes it very unfolding friendly. It's just I can see myself doing it for 50 years, you know, because I can. And maybe, you know, In year 30, it's going to be all about Sudoku, right? And that would work too. Speaker A: Yeah, I think great, great containers, vehicles, tools, they adapt along with us, which is, which is powerful. You mentioned the switch from, and maybe the unlock from going from writing in Swedish to English.

You've, you've also written broadly quite a bit about blind spots and sort of seeing through things, seeing through abstractions. Map versus territory, even like a hacking orientation to things. Two little bits. You say, my preconceptions are a filter that reduces the amount of information I get from the context. How can I filter less? And then when the context thrashes one of your ideas, you want to say, oh, that's interesting. It takes practice, but it's worth getting better at. Reality is shy. It only reveals itself to those who, like honest scientists, do not wish it to be something else.

And then one last bit, you're talking about sort of how we bundle things. You say a career is made up of a bunch of different things like a salary and identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. Obviously, that's not necessarily the exact same as switching from Swedish to English, but they're all circling the same idea. I think the, the types of things you look back and you just say, oh my gosh, duh. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: What are the most critical— maybe, and maybe that is one of them, the Swedish bit, but what are the most critical preconceptions or ideas that you used to hold really firmly that you have, by dropping, have enabled you to act more freely or see more clearly?

Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: What are the most critical— maybe, and maybe that is one of them, the Swedish bit, but what are the most critical preconceptions or ideas that you used to hold really firmly that you have, by dropping, have enabled you to act more freely or see more clearly? Speaker B: Well, so with a concrete example, so I write essays for a living now, and I think I knew if I'd listened to myself, I knew that was what I wanted to do. When I was like 20 years old.

I remember when I wrote a bunch of pretty good essays when I was— yes, I met my wife when she read one of my essays. So we connected over that. And I just remember when I wrote those pieces, just like something came alive in me. And she kind of makes fun of me because she was saying like, you should write essays because you love writing essays. And I was really stupid. I was saying like, but no one reads essays in Sweden, right? There's not a, like, compared to Germany or the US, like in Germany or the US, there are magazines that publish essays.

There's nothing like that in Sweden. We have no tradition of essays in Sweden. So it's just like, you can't, there are no one writes essays for a living in Sweden. You can't do that. And so I, then I didn't explore that. And that's so stupid because if you get a signal that something is alive, than just like, I should have just done that. And then I should have figured out a way of funding it, which it could have been, you know, having a software consultancy or whatever. Like it was so stupid of blocking off an avenue that was the right one.

Like in retrospect, I didn't go down there because there was like no established road to go there. Speaker A: It's like the rational mind was on the side of fear versus the side of What you knew. Speaker B: Yeah, but it's such a stupid argument. Like if you describe like this feels alive, the only job you have or I have is to like figure out what feels alive and then figure out how to fund that, right? It's like, and they're not the same problem. Like now I'm lucky that the thing that feels alive to me pays my bills, but like that's not necessary.

That's the important thing is to feel alive and to have food on your table. And they're not the same problem. Necessarily, but I treated them as the same problem. Speaker A: I bundled them. Speaker B: That I figured I had, I want to be a writer, but I want to pay my bills doing writing and you can't do the kind of writing I want to do. So I'm not going to do it. So stupid. And if I don't— Speaker A: Oh, and impatient. Speaker B: Yeah, impatient. Yeah. But when I unbundled, like eventually later I unbundled it and I said, I'm not going to be a writer.

This will never work out because the stuff I want to write, no one would ever pay for. So then I started a software consultancy. I did other things. I worked at the art gallery and so on. And I just wrote for myself because then I just carved out space and I unbundled it and suddenly, you know, I could just like live in my writing. And then of course I got much better at it and I grew and I got an audience. And then like from a magical backdoor that I could have never predicted, it became a livelihood.

But I couldn't have gone there by figuring, thinking about the funding. So that's like, yeah, one of those examples where I like to look back and I was like, oh, this is so conventional-minded, Henrik. You should have just You listen to your instinct there. But yeah, many of those, like homeschooling for us too, like homeschooling, super taboo in Sweden. It's funny to look back because we knew we didn't want to have our kids in school. And we spent so many years like trying to, like avoiding saying that we should homeschool.

That's like, could we start working at a school and like maybe push it in the right direction? No, that doesn't work. Could we start a school? No, that doesn't work because of legal things in Sweden. Could we move to another another country and start a school, you know, like, you know, we're going around the whole list just to avoid because it was so painful to say homeschooling because that is less like it's child abuse in Sweden. Like emotionally it felt like saying, oh, we're going to abuse our kids, you know, like it would, and it's just so stupid in retrospect.

Like, no, it's like you can do it nicely. So many, many of the really important things in my life, have come from me, like, switching a position like 180 degrees. Speaker A: There's a classic advice that comes up and is so frustrating to hear, and yet it seems to continually be true, which is, you know what you need to do, but we just do about the amount of gymnastics we do. Speaker B: You gotta— Speaker A: I, I also think it's amazing that on the idea of bundling or unbundling The world has a certain way of sort of rebundling and rearranging itself when you do do the thing that, that Joseph Campbell— that the doors will open where there are only walls.

It's telling that you set out to do the writing and now the world is starting to— the pieces are coming together. On that last note of blind spots, you write about the ways that our mental models seek to make the world predictable. And how part of the opportunity to see blind spots and learn is by making things less predictable or seeking unpredictability. Do you have a sense of how we can make reality less predictable within reason? Speaker B: So I noticed there are certain practices that I use. So for example, I try to seek out when I'm writing, like I've gradually over time So I started out more in the sort of kind of LessWrong kind of blog post, very cerebral, very abstract.

And I had insight maybe 2 and a half years ago that that's a really stupid way of doing it. But it was kind of embarrassing because I kind of had gone to that because sort of escaping from the literary world, and I felt like It's really nice to have people who are actually trying to think. So that's just like, ah, so nice. Some people are thinking. And there are people on LessWrong who are doing really good work too, I should say. But then I realized like, no, I need to be telling stories.

I need to be talking about like specific situations, specific people. I need to do kind of literary things. And that was kind of embarrassing because it's like in those circles, low status to do kind of literary things. So that was also like something I had to flip in my mind. But the good, like the thing about doing, and that doesn't have to be writing, but instead of saying sort of, now we're talking like abstractly, or you ask a question like abstractly about bundling and unbundling, and you can have talk about theory for a long time, but it's so much more interesting to take like a specific, like how did Spotify like unbundle and rebundle the music market?

And what kind of consequences did that have for smaller artists and larger artists and labels and how did people, you know, you start and then you realize there is so much more detail to this unbundling, rebundling thing. And then you look at like how it happened in some other industry or in your life. And you notice that there's, it's much more complicated than the theoretical framework. And then often when that happens, often when I write pieces, I'll start with, you know, maybe from I'll just put out a thought, like a mental model or an explanation for how something works.

And then I'll try to think of like examples of that. And then I try to think through things in a lot of messy details and look for case studies that do not fit the pattern. And like, so that's one, like just go look for case studies, look for really messy examples and think through those. It's okay if you can't formulate it up into any neat kind of framework, because usually, if you start looking, maybe, I bet if we start looking really closely, that unbundling-bundling framework would break down. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Because it's too simplified. But I haven't done that exercise, so I don't know what the alternative is. And sometimes you'll find another mental model that comes out of that, and sometimes you'll just end up with some kind of vague intuition. But that's a useful way of this turn toward more messy examples. And another thing is the thing we've talked about all the time, just articulate what you think, right? Yes. It's really interesting in conversations, how you could lock like two people, like that's basically my marriage, is like lock two people in a room for five years and they talk to each other and it's like there's almost no external output.

We spent a lot of time together, Johanna and I, and it's so interesting, like you can have just two people in a room for like years almost, and it keeps surfacing more and more information. It's just like it doesn't stop. Yeah, because you get into this loop where, well, you and I are talking here and you'll say something and I'm going to react to it. And if I'm able to sort of surface my genuine reaction and my genuine thoughts, then you can react to that and say, oh, well, I have actually an example that doesn't fit the way you said, or no, you misunderstood me.

And then it's always so interesting. Like if I'm talking with— this happens mostly with my wife and she'll say something and I'll say, oh, did you mean— oh, you're saying that? And that's just— no, I didn't. What? Like, like there's these ideas to me look like the same, but they're not. What? And then there's like a crack and like now I'm confused. Like, what do you mean? And then you can like spend 2 hours trying to go into that crack and things will there'll be a lot of information and surprise and complexity.

So just staring toward the situations where you get confused or wrong. Someone says, they're so common, people say something and you get a lot of confused, but you assume you know and you just keep talking. But if you stop, like, wait, what did you say there? Like, what? And you do that and then you try to sort of be like a dog sniffing for all the times you're confused or all the times you're wrong and like trying to to rearticulate and surface all that so other people or the world can sort of react to that.

Speaker A: Yeah, it reminds me, I'll be listening to these interviews back while I'm editing, and I think a lot of times I do a good job. I think I've generally improved as a listener quite a bit over the last 10 years, but sometimes I'll catch myself and just realize like, oh my gosh, I wasn't listening there. Like I traversed into the thing I wanted to say. And only hearing it back now a second time do I realize, oh my gosh, they were saying something so different. There's a degree here of like— Speaker B: But that's an interesting exercise you're doing too.

Like, I mean, I've been on a bunch of podcasts now. It's really interesting to listen back and you notice those sorts of things. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: That I'm actually missing. And then you can start to, or I do at least, like I listen and it's like, I'm going to practice that next time. I'm going to I'm going to not do that thing. I'm going to stop longer. And you know, like, and you get this feedback by just creating a feedback loop as you're doing when you're tracing back. Speaker A: Yeah.

Yeah. Tracing those groups. I think there's also a degree of like, it's easy for low resolution things to be predictable when you're dealing in low resolution and abstraction. It's easy, predictable to go back to the first thing you were saying and you dial up the resolution and it turns out there's just way more, including way more that will be surprising. And, and, and that I think is what you write so well about, which is just like, we're really good at sort of just like doing the thing you said with Joanna, like just, oh yeah, I got it.

I got, I got the shape of what you're saying. I can make out the picture. My, my last, uh, little note on, on, on this theme, you have this line that I've quoted to many people since reading the piece. The opposite of unfolding is a vision. This sense of like, if only if I was in another context comes up a lot, which is this idea of the vision, the idea that I'm just going oh yeah, life would be so great if I lived on this Danish island instead of where I live now, or life would be so great if I was a writer and didn't have my job, or life would be so great if I quit my job and traveled the world for 12 months or whatever.

I think you very rightly disassemble the virtue of the vision, at least in the pie-in-the-sky sense, but I also don't think you discredit it entirely. What role do goals and vision play and how do you use them in this like loose graphs sense? How do you use them to still provide some sense of long-term direction? You, you, you're an embodiment of this unfolding and yet you don't seem to be someone who's just like doesn't think about the future at all. Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's, that's something I think a lot about.

Like it, it's one of the parts of that essay that I feel like is a little bit unresolved in my head because like it could well be that I just am not very good at setting goals. You know, like it might be a skill issue that like unfolding works well for me because it's the only tool that I know how to do. Because I— something— Speaker A: You and Gagosian in totally different ways. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And maybe I like, because I think about that now, like now I'm writing full-time, like Maybe I should have another, like, because that was sort of a goal in a sense that I wanted to write full-time.

Now I'm doing that. Like, what should I, like, I don't know, like, what should I do now? And that I find that really hard to like articulate, like, because all the things that comes to my head feel like silly. Oh, I should have more subscribers. Like, I don't care. Like, that's such a boring goal. Like, I should have more money. Who cares? More, like, but like, what would be an exciting goal? Like, I find that hard. Maybe that's a skill issue for me. Because I do think goals kind of lightly held can help prioritize because you're gonna, when you're unfolding, when you're moving through life and there's so many opportunities, you have to have some way of rank ordering them.

And I think goals, I think of it like we have sort of a value structure, we have some sort of utility function in ourselves that helps us rank order things if we kind of tune into it. And that utility function is like a very complex thing which has like our ethics or career curiosity, how we're wired, and goals are a part of that. Like, because you're sitting there, there's so many things you could be doing and you have to pick one or two or three. And so goals can really help there in just like, because there's obviously something to— so I've chosen to limit my life.

It's not exactly the same thing as goals, but I've limited my life. So I focus very much on the writing and I've mostly given up music. I've mostly given up programming. And that's obviously because in some sort of goal sense, I have the idea that I could become a good writer if I do that. And I realized being a good writer is more important to me than being a good musician or being a good programmer. So that's some sort of goal. And that helps create a sort of coherence that I get like more rapid feedback loops because I'm obsessing and being very sort of monomaniacal about it.

So goals can really help in that sense. And I think there's also, there's this idea, and this is just like, I have no experience about this, but I see some people who have that skill, like some really good startup people where they're able to articulate these really fantastic extreme goals. Like we're going to go to Mars or we're going to build, you know, AGI. And then the cool thing when you have a goal like that is that you can do sort of reverse induction or something where you start like, okay, so if I want to be on Mars in 2040, what has to happen?

Right? What has to happen in 2039? And for that to happen in 2039, what needs to happen in 2038? Right? And that can really, like, if you, and then you roll the way all the way back to where you are now, then you, I mean, I haven't done this, but then I guess you realize that I should probably be doing something radically different. And that maybe looks really strange. Like maybe you roll all the way back and you figure out you should become a stamp collector or something. I don't know.

Speaker A: But also decisions today compound very hard over a decade or 15 years. Say what you want about Elon, he's very good at this. Speaker B: Yeah. And so I think like it's something I've been like playing around in my head. Like, could I learn how to do that? But I don't know how to do it. Like sometimes I think like, like, maybe I should do an opera. Like, uh, you know, like, what would have to happen for me to, like, make an opera in 5 years? You know, I don't know, but I haven't found a goal that resonates with me enough.

Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense. I, I mean, I, I think this applies in really big-scale ways. And also, I mean, I think last year my goal with running was to, like, run more or run a couple times a week or something. And this year my goal is to run the marathon, and that is a very different goal. And I don't think, to your point, it's always helpful to have that level of specificity, but it can be very empowering if only on the notion of like belief of like, uh, knowing the direction I want to run.

It's, it's a little bit clarifying. And I would argue, I know I think maybe it's not quite the same now, but at some place you said your goal is to write a few good essays, which in some senses is vague, but I think you also know what you mean by that. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean something very extreme. Speaker A: Clear point on the horizon, which I think is powerful. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Now a quick break from the episode to talk about something for dialectic listeners from Hampton.

Hampton is a membership for founders and entrepreneurs that provides both in-person and online community for support, advice, and accountability in the founder journey. One critical part of being an entrepreneur is managing your own financial life. I think unfortunately for most of us, talking about finances, even with close friends, is a little bit taboo. Let alone getting a more holistic view from a wider set of peers or people. So fortunately, Hampton surveyed over 100 of their members with net worths from $1 million to over $100 million and asked them a wide range of questions about their money, how they spend it, how they're doing with regard to their financial goals, what their quote-unquote number is, how close they are to it, the timeline to get there, tactical stuff like risk tolerance, a breakdown across their investment portfolios, how much they're in cash relative to the year before, how much they pay themselves, how much they're burning monthly at each of those wealth ranges, even stuff like estate planning and philanthropy.

It's a fascinating dataset that Hampton's added editorial and commentary over the top on too. And it takes a topic that is typically opaque, or at the very least you'd only have a small handful of data points on, and gives a much more transparent look at it. I found it really valuable to look through. And if you're interested, I've linked Hampton's 2024 Wealth Report in the description. You can also just go to com, click reports in the menu, and fill out some basic information to get the report. Thanks again to Hampton for supporting Dialectic.

Now back to the episode. We spent most of the conversation talking about, uh, this self-cultivation idea across a whole bunch of different frames. I now want to talk about other people in the world, the external world. I want to start with the name of your blog, Escaping Flatland. You say Flatland is a reference to Edwin Abbott's 1884 novel about a square who lives in a two-dimensional world and makes contact with the sphere from Spaceland, the three-dimensional world. You go on to say, I now recognize a deep longing in this name.

To escape Flatland is a dream of making contact with people and ideas that could expand and alter my understanding of reality into something richer, more full, more roundedly human. What does it feel like to collide with a sphere, whether a person or an idea? Speaker B: Yeah, it's a continually kind of evolving situation, but it's been a very strange journey for me. So I started writing, it's almost to the day 4 years ago, and Looking back, I realized I was so lonely, you know, like we'd left Sweden, we didn't know anyone, you know, like it was this very kind of dark night of the soul kind of place.

But when you're in a place like that, you can't really admit that to yourself. You have to just like, this is, you know, and you keep working. And I did. And then it started to bring in people into my life. And, you know, like I've made friends with people I used to admire and like, and when you, there happens several things with that. There's like the validation. I met people who are like, you are so radically underestimating yourself. And he's like, what do you mean? Like, tell me more about that.

And that's it. It's really changing my, the context of people that I was interacting with really changed like my ambition and my level at like how far can you take this project of like trying to be yourself and a good person and like realize because you're, you, you live by the sort of references of people you've seen and I've met some amazing people in my life and I love— but when you meet someone who's like pushed to the very edge of like thinking and writing, for example, and you're like, oh, that's something else.

Like I didn't even know that league existed. And that can be like an existence proof, right? You realize that could be done. And that's sort of a goal too. You can look at these people and you're like, it's possible to become like that if I keep doing this for 15 years. So that's a to get like a high-resolution image of what kind of character you can cultivate. And then of course, there's all sorts of tacit knowledge. It's so useful to get to talk to people and get like pointed feedback. And like, I have a writer I used to admire, I still admire him a lot, but, and he'll write these like very, he can sometimes write fairly nasty emails to me.

But from a place of love, but he's like very direct with me and just giving me that sort of feedback and to get like hard direct feedback from people you admire and who are at the very like peak of the game. That's a very high resolution signal. So yeah, it really kind of transforms and just created this kind of motivation and momentum. So my inner world feels like like 10x more high resolution. I don't know the number, but it's just my thoughts and feelings feel much more high resolution and my capacity.

It's just, it's a very interesting internal experience because it's this kind of self-writing, it's this kind of self-cultivation thing. So the project I'm doing is basically turning myself into a certain type of person who is able to have these thoughts. And the project, so the essays are kind of just exhaust from the process. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker B: The work is growing emotionally and intellectually in such a way and just going out into the world, talking to people, reading, looking at things, and like becoming the kind of mind that can have these thoughts.

That's the real work. And again, it's, it's, you don't know what you don't know. I did like, I was curious. I had a rich one for life before too, but just like, oh, like there's another level. That I didn't even know. Speaker A: There's another dimension, to extend the metaphor. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's a part of the thing. But the beautiful thing too, like where I feel like where I'm at in this stage now, I think maybe since I started like writing full-time, I've felt like I jokingly call the current era of the blog is like return to Flatland.

Because it's like I went out on this big journey of like trying to prove myself, trying to like meet my heroes and like go on an adventure. And I grew a lot from doing that. And now I like turn back and I spend a lot of— just came back from like being with my grandfather. And, you know, I return back to like my village where I grew up. I turn back to my parents and my— like, I really appreciate that from the space of having become the kind of person who can more richly appreciate the beauty of like the everyday life that I have around me.

So there's this kind of I really love Flatland now. Speaker A: Yeah, reminds me of many things sort of combine high and low at the same time. Speaker A: Yeah, reminds me of many things sort of combine high and low at the same time. Speaker B: And there's a little bit of that in there, I think. Speaker A: You've said that you can shape yourself by reshaping your relationships. Speaker B: I think an important part of that, like to get back to Flatland, was something I appreciate more and more is that, so just this night, like good first first approximation to that idea, which you see a lot on Twitter and so on.

Like, you know, you're the average of the 5 people you have around you. And that's a good first approximation of the idea. But what I realized more and more is that, no, you're the average of like the 5 persons that you interact with. And by that, what I'm trying to get at is it matters how you talk to them. So you can have the same 5 people around you, but you change how you talk to them. and suddenly you have 5 new people around you. So, so it's not, it's not necessarily that you need to have new people.

It might just be that you need to interact with them newly. Speaker A: That's really interesting. My next question was going to be what makes someone a sphere or sphere-like. You have a list in that initial piece where you're listing off various friends and people who have been influential. Perhaps a better version of that question that I think ties into another piece you wrote about your friend Torbjörn and the way you kind of saw him differently. But yeah, what goes into— perhaps the person who's a sphere to you is not a sphere to me— what goes into having relationships and interactions with others that actually expand you and increase your dimensionality and, and cause them to shape you really deeply?

Speaker B: I mean, there's definitely going to be some people who are more sphere-like or who Like it's even, it's a sort of, to use like a silly metaphor, like it's, you know, there are different states of matter. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And you can have phase shifts between them. Yeah. And it's like people have also different states. Right. So you can phase shift the person, like so someone can be, you know, a square and then you can turn them into a sphere with the right kind of prompt or the right situation.

Certain people are much easier to make that phase transition. And that's usually, they usually, quite secure people, people who are sort of open-minded and curious and like outward directed and like attuned to the world, like who are so, so for me, it's been, I've always felt it very easy to sort of commune with artists and researchers and like founders and entrepreneurs, like people who are in that mode where they, I guess they're like kind of genetically disposed to be interested in colliding with the world and being curious. So some people have that and those people are quite easy to turn into spheres.

Like there are spheres basically all the time. They may be only when they're like talking with the IRS, they turn into squares. But the rest of the time they're spheres. And some other people are like squares almost all the time, but then maybe, you know, you're like in the same space during 9/11 and suddenly they, you know, they switch and they turn into spheres and you see the full humanity of them and a bond can be created like bands of brothers that sort of thing. Yeah. So, so, so, so. Speaker A: Environment matters a lot for many people.

Speaker B: Yeah. It's really nice to find these like natural spheres who are like that all the time because yeah, that's so easy and nice and relaxing. But it's also like you can get more skilled at inducing sphere-ness in people. And, and that often comes from just like becoming more grounded and un-needy. I think, because like if you feel very secure and you're not like needing validation from other people, it's much easier to just like be open with them because you can like share things because there's something that like we're, people are such good readers of like subtle emotional cues.

So maybe this is like easiest to see like in dating when I met my wife, like I was quite open and like, and like we went really fast and like shared everything really rapidly. And, and in our context, she was kind of holding the handbrake, but I was so secure and grounded that like I was fine that she was holding the handbrake and there was like no tension. So I was comfortable. Like, I really like, like, I really, really like you. And it's totally okay that you're holding the handbrake and this can take A year, like, and if you're coming from that place, like, because a lot of people will be afraid in that situation of like showing that they care about someone.

But if you— Speaker A: Or we pull back when other people pull back. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you feel like, because I was genuinely like, if she doesn't want me in her life, that's fine. Like, that's like, she's just an amazing person. Like, I want her to have an amazing life. I hope I get to be there. But I generally felt that way. And when you're coming from that place and you're saying, you're an amazing person, I want to hang out with you. Then that's not like threatening.

Speaker A: Or we pull back when other people pull back. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you feel like, because I was genuinely like, if she doesn't want me in her life, that's fine. Like, that's like, she's just an amazing person. Like, I want her to have an amazing life. I hope I get to be there. But I generally felt that way. And when you're coming from that place and you're saying, you're an amazing person, I want to hang out with you. Then that's not like threatening. Speaker A: It's a little more abundant too.

Speaker B: Yeah. So that's an extreme example. But I think a similar thing goes on in relationships because if you come in and you're very confident and calm and then you start sharing, it's like, oh, you have such a wonderful laughter. You know, you just say whatever's on your mind, if whatever you like about the person or if like the way you're— it doesn't feel like you're listening now. Could you just take 5 seconds after I've answered. Listen before you answer, because I think that would— like, and you can start saying all these things.

And when you're able to be more honest like that, you can induce fairness, right? Speaker A: It's a great answer. It's a little related. I have a couple of excerpts from that. I think it's the piece on Torbjörn that I mentioned. You say you can only ever know another individual if you meet them in open dialogue, if you treat them as unfinished, as capable of surprise. If someone seems boring to you or a bad fit, it might be that you don't know how to prompt them, that you haven't seen them react to the context that brings out their full, full being.

A nice pairing with what you just said. In that piece, you described the most important friendships as being friendships of virtue, as opposed to, I think, pleasure or utility is the two other modes. Maybe on that last note of how do you convert people into being spherical, What are the types of virtue that are often more illegible? And what does it look like or feel like when the light cracks through with those types of people? I maybe am specifically thinking of how you talk about Torbjörn in that piece, but it might show up in any number of ways.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, I mean, so his, his, his like big virtue is, is responsiveness. And like, which is attunement, right? He's totally there when you're in a conversation with him. It's very fast. He's like really good at improv, kind of like throwing jokes and then that kind of sort of verbal dexterity. And as I talk about in that essay, I kind of misread that as him being funny. And you know, funny, that's nice. But like, I don't need necessarily funny people to be my close friends. But I, misread that skill or that virtue for being funniness.

There are other sorts of things that certain types of virtues you can only see in adversity. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: So you need to see how they handle when they really need to show up or when they're in deep pain. And that can really, I mean, really change how you see a person. Because in those moments, like a different layer of their personality shine through. And all of it, then you can never see them the same way again because you know there is this process running deep inside them. And now you've seen that, and now you know how to sort of maybe access that more.

And so a lot of it is just seeing people in different and often like hard situations can really bring things out. A lot of Virges are kind of long-term, like a lot of Virges is just like things like trust, like showing up, like putting in the work, like certain— I mean, when I'm writing online, I interact with a lot of other people who are having podcasts and who are writing and blogging and doing things. And there's like this sense that you're like, the first time you talk to them, like if there's someone new, there's always fun when there's a new one on the scene and you check on them.

But you're also kind of like, let's wait 2 or 3 years. Because there's like, there's this, if you're going to like do a good body of work, you just need to show up in hard times and good times. And you just can't know until they've done it. Speaker A: Yeah, did they write one looking for Alice? Are they still crushing 3 years later? Speaker B: Yeah. So, but that's like a common joke. Like we tell each other like, well, we'll see you in 50 years. You know, like when I'm talking to other people who seem like kind of long-term players who are really dedicated, but it's like you can't communicate it.

Like you have to do it for 10 years to show that you're the type of person. Like even I, like I'm 4 years in, I'm still like, you still don't know if I'm gonna like cash out at some point or like sell out or do whatever or give up or you don't know that yet. It's 4 years is not enough to like, let's get back in 10 years and then that you're gonna know if I'm still doing it in 10 years, that's gonna say something about my disposition. Speaker A: Reminds me of Visakan has that piece on seriousness that I assume you've read, and he talks about seriousness in the same way.

Like, it's the only measure of it is time. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: One of my favorite ideas that I've called, like, cached conversations or breaking past the cache. You have this amazing, amazing anecdote about in Looking for Alice about Herzog and the squirrel. It's this anecdote about how a, I think it's a priest, is going to have to speak to a young boy who's about to be taken to, to be to be killed as punishment, and he is sort of going through the motions, and then he starts talking about the squirrel.

He's prompted by Herzog to talk about the squirrel in this very authentic way that kind of brings him to tears. And you say, he is no longer saying versions of things he has said before. He's not protecting himself. He's just there. From that point on, it takes about 10 seconds before he's crying. If you want to prompt someone to be authentic and playful and generative, you usually need to ask them something where they have a rich experience to pull from, but have never pulled an answer from that experience before. If you ask 2 or 3 increasingly detailed questions about something they tell you, you get there.

I just love that. Speaker B: Yeah, I just say like, I think, so that's the scene you're describing is the opening scene from Into the Abyss. Yes. I think Into the Abyss is on YouTube, so I really recommend everyone just go look at the first scene in that film. It's, it's such a remarkable to see that switch from, from, from like this kind of surface level cached talk into like genuine interaction and the way it just comes from surprise. It's such a beautiful scene. Speaker A: The way you frame it too is I've brought this up in so many conversations in that people don't necessarily have an intuitive sense of what makes a truly great question.

And a truly great question is, as you say, allows for someone to pull something It's actually quite easy for them to pull, but it's also new or it's also surprising. Anyway, my question is who— I think it would be a little unfair to use her. So who outside of Johanna is best at pushing you past your cache in this analogy or getting you to pull new things? Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's an interesting question. I, I, I do try to talk to a lot of people. I, I really, really like talking to people.

So I talk to a lot of people I meet from my blog, and it's always so interesting to see like where the different conversations go and like what people are resonating with or struggling with. And I know I'm just trying to sort of bias toward talking to people like from Nigeria or Vietnam. It's just like so fascinating to me to talk to like people from radically different lives and like connect over ideas. And it's just like, everyone has something they're bringing out. Like every conversation is unique. Everyone, so it's really interesting to just move between like different conversations.

It's just always very beautiful. But there are obviously certain people who are like, again, like more sphere, like more have a really good skill. I think Alexander Obenauer and I have a conversation like that. He's like an independent researcher. Where we just end up in really interesting, strange places. But it's interesting, everyone is like a different flavor. So his flavor is very different from Johanna. And then Torbjörn, my best friend, is also like that, also very different flavor. It's just, they are both, Alexander and Torbjörn are more kind of yes and people.

So I have like, I go to them and like, I, talk and they're really excited and like their brain goes in interesting directions and I always end up with like a bunch of new ideas and then I go to Johanna and then she'll like take a hammer and like smash half of them. So you like have different people for different things. I guess it's hard to like, it's unfair to compete with Johanna because like we've spent, you know, 12 years or something building up a certain trust and she's also wired in a strange way.

So, So we can have like such brutal conversations with love, which like you can't expect. Like I can't expect you to like go at me like that. And maybe I'd just leave the room if you did. Speaker A: I hope we can all find something like that. The pressure cooker. Or one other part of other people that you've written extensively about, beautiful metaphor of the whistling in an orthogonal direction. Put another way, sort of like the bat signal on the internet. And you framed the internet as this like beautiful niche matching machine to find you sort of your people.

2 or 3 little excerpts. You say the internet had rearranged itself around me and then it is crazy beautiful to have a stranger arrive in your inbox and they're excited by exactly the same things as you. You start dropping the most obscure references and they're like, yeah, I've read that, love it. The first handful of times it happened, Johanna asked me what was wrong. I was crying in the kitchen. Those were tears of homecoming. I've asked you a few questions in this vein, but yeah, what does it feel like or why is it so beautiful to be seen or known by strangers on the internet?

Speaker B: But the strangers are people, you know, like, it's, but there's something, but almost a little bit like, I said that like about like 9/11 and you're close to someone and that kind of creates a bond because you have like a really complex, in that case, painful situation that is a shared context that is like luring out a lot of humanness from you. And something similar, but often in a more positive vein, but not always. Sometimes it's really dark stories I bound with people over. Like I get a lot of email from people like talking about like their wife dying in cancer, or I get a lot of things like that too, because I write about relationships and I guess I sort of project that I'm the sort of person you can tell about death in the family.

But where I'm going is that when you have a rich, shared, deeply human context, either like a tragedy or a certain old poet that you both loved or similar ideas, that's such a rich context that lures out a lot of humanness. And so it's like you're jumping straight in to having these very deep conversations. I mean, like you and I right now. The deep end of the pool. And we've known each other for what, like 2 hours? So there's like something really, really beautiful about like to jump straight in because in most situations, it just takes a long time to get there because you like, you have to build a lot of context and like maybe it's like after 5 years you can have those conversations, but it's something really special about And there's also something, two things.

It's like when I'm, it's people I've met through the blog. First of all, like we kind of assume that we'll probably never meet in real life and our lives are not getting checked. So you can like tell everything, you know, it's like I'm their therapist and they're my therapist. Like, so we just say everything because it doesn't, it can't hurt us. And so it's just like, there's no risk. So that's another lovely part of it. Speaker A: Well, don't get cash fished, but yeah, otherwise. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I am more, I don't share as much as people share with me because— Speaker A: Beautiful though.

I mean, think about what a service that you can provide someone who doesn't necessarily have someone else they can talk to. Wow. Speaker B: Yeah, no, I really hope that, I mean, I think I know a few people have had like great benefit, like just like And it can just be basic things. You just don't know. Like, I'm in a different situation. I've met and talked to more people and just tell, oh, you could go, you know, you could just go to that place or talk to that person. You know, you know, there's something like less wrong for people like you.

Speaker A: And I'm like, yeah, yeah, here's your blind spot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker B: Just some things that are really easy and obvious for me to say can be really helpful for another person. And then of course, there's something like a little strange that happens. So of course, like everyone who reads my blog is basically a version of me, you know, like, yeah, we're talking like, you're almost like me, you know, like we could be cousins or something. Yeah, that's such a strange thing, you know, like everyone I talk to is like basically like me, you know, or not like when I'm talking to people through the blog and they know so much about me because I've written way too much about myself and that just means like there's just just, yeah, this like immediate camaraderie, right, where we can assume so much about each other.

Which, yeah, it makes it very easy to just go really fast in interesting directions. Speaker A: Yeah, it's like you get to start at a much kind of higher level, at least in some ways, obviously not in all. It's not gonna be the same as something you went to, somebody you went to school with, but it's almost like different modes of knowing. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And actually you should like I'd say, because like, to clarify, like, this does not require that you have, like, I'm, like, I have a pretty big blog now.

It doesn't require that at all. I think, like, thinking back to it, like, I think at the point where I had like maybe 70 subscribers, I was almost already like, like filled out, you know, because like, after, like, there's only so many people you can talk to. So, so like, I, like by the time I had like 70 people who read my blog, there was like 5 really cool people among those people that I, and some of them I'd still talk to like. Speaker A: Wow. Speaker B: And it's just like, so I don't, I would have been fine at that level.

That like the big like life transition for me happened at like 70 subscribers. Wow. So you don't like need to go to 10,000. You're the minor. So I had like what, like 4 blog posts and 70 subscribers. So I think it's a very low bar And it's the same thing, like if I'm gonna talk to people, I have to prioritize who I'm gonna talk to. So if you have a blog, and even if it's just like a blog where you have one blog post and you have listed your favorite books, like so few people do that.

But like, if I'm gonna decide, like there's still maybe 10 people who want to talk to me, and one of them has written like a pretty interesting blog post about how it's to grow up in Sri Lanka, and they have good taste in books, like I'm gonna go with that person. Speaker A: Yes. Yes. There's a guy you mentioned somewhere, so maybe you've read some of his work, uh, C. Thi Nguyen, and he writes about games and agency, but he has another piece on sort of like the way that different communication mediums totally collapse or expand context.

So he gives the example of like a teacher in a classroom who says something to 30 students and 29 eyes glaze over and one of the students' eyes light up. There's so much fidelity there compared to a tweet. You could have 300 likes and it means that that 300 people thought it was like totally mediocre plus one, or you could have a tweet with 3 likes that 3 people totally loved and no one else cared about. And that's not packaged in there. I think you do an amazing job of writing about why blogging specifically and Substack specifically are so powerful in the opposite way.

And in terms of enabling or empowering niche, you've called part of what you've tapped into like a subterranean internet, which I think is a beautiful metaphor. And then in your kind of classic iconic post on, on a blog post as a search query, you say you write to find your tribe. You write so that they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people. What goes into this, like, ability to embrace niche and writing with, like, a really intense amount of detail?

That produce— you either write it, or at least I felt it like this, this image of like one person jumping out of their chair as they read your blog post. You so clearly do that and you've written about the sort of method of that, but that's so not intuitive. Most of us are writing for the imaginary large audience. And why, yeah, why is niche so important? Speaker B: Yeah, but it's hard for me too. It's, and like, in some senses even more now that it's my job because like, there is an obvious tension between like being precise and going deep and getting a large audience and getting a lot of these kind of superficial metrics of success.

And some of them are not superficial, like funding. Like if I go, if let's say I got super into like Ingmar Bergman's diary and I decided the rest of the year is going to only be about Ingmar Bergman's diary, that would be pretty fun for me. And like, probably like 100 or 200 people, but I would have to get a job, you know, because I couldn't do that. So there's obviously tensions like that. And then it's not easy to navigate those things, but you're like trying to always are on the side of like being too specific and going too far to compensate for that, like fear that, yeah, like people will laugh at you or you're going to only get like 2 likes and all those things that can be socially awkward or painful.

The way I try to think about it, like now, like, because I'm in a hard mode of this since I need to write things that people want to support financially, which makes it much harder because if I had a job, I would do like a year on Ingmar Bergman's Diaries, but I can't. So I have to like try, but like the thing I try to do is that at every step of the way, I'm like trading away more and more growth because like at some point I had, I needed to have some kind of growth to get to a place where I could fund it.

I have like a, not a good salary, but I have a salary that I can live off now. And if I would to work equally hard and grow it as fast, then I would have two salaries in two years from now, right? I don't need two salaries. That's pointless. So, so like now I'm like, can I, I still want to have a little bit more money so I can put away some like retirement savings and so on. But mostly right now I'm trying to trade off more and more toward like, can I on the margin switch to being more and more obscure, like doing the Radiohead career arc, you know, like, so like in 5 years it's going to be like a full year on Ingmar Bergman's Diaries, you know.

Speaker A: It will come eventually. Speaker B: You know, like, but so you can always kind of trade those things because like as a blog grows or something, you get more degrees of freedom. And then I'm trying to like not trade in those degrees of freedom in money or status and instead trade them for like doing weirder shit. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker A: But I guess also on some level, I mean, it's all relative, but on some level you are already doing something quite a bit more niche than the average person.

Maybe that's the shape of Substack and it's the nature of the medium. But I would argue some of what has made you successful is the fact that it isn't too, so generic. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I very consciously sort of avoided like the best practices and that has cost me things like, you know, having a cadence. Speaker A: Yeah, you could write some more lists. Substack loves lists. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I could. Yeah, yeah, I could. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, exactly. If I wrote a list a week on only love and relationships.

Yeah. Like I'd be, you know, level K now. Speaker A: Okay, well, we'll know. We'll know You're buying something nice for the family when you start doing relationship lists. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: You have one other bit about this where you talk about sort of like this, almost like the topography of the internet as this, like, this like river flow, this like Grand River Delta. You say that this is what online writing is at its limit, the summoning of a new culture as well. I might be reaching here, but is there— do you have a sense of either like where in this river you sit, or if not that, like what culture you are a part of summoning or creating.

Like, what is the place of the internet? Where on the map of the internet are you sitting? You're in this like interesting place of Substack and you tap into parts of LessWrong and stuff like that in the past. Maybe that's not the right way to think about it, but I'm curious if you have any sense of proximity. Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. No, I mean, definitely like I am like a post sort of rationalist or not. No. That's wrong. That's a specific group. But I'm like a child of the rationalist movement in a sense, and I've kind of branched off from that.

And like, I think a lot of the way the internet works and like when you're growing whatever, the way I think like my subscriber list and so on is like a social graph that I'm growing, is that you start in proximity to some place. Like you have to find like where people who are almost right, like Ideally, you find some place which just feels like home already. Someone's already built it and you can just go there and you can just contribute and write comments or a guest blog or whatever. That's the ideal world.

But usually most people are not exactly the same. So everyone needs a new place. So like, yeah, I liked LessWrong, but I'm not exactly a LessWrong person. And the more I lean into the way I'm not, like now, I think a lot of people would look at what I'm doing in LessWrong and say like, what are you from there? You know, it doesn't look the same at all because I've leaned into what I'm doing. And that's evolved over several years into something that's very, very different from the average LessWrong post.

But you have to start somewhere because you can't just scream into the void. It's really nice to find like, this is almost where I want to be. Here, this is like a cafe on the internet where people hang out. I can start here and I can make connections and friends and it will snowball from there. But then it's, so you kind of attach yourself to like a big node in the network. And then you kind of, if you are in weird person like I am and like to put a lot of your thoughts online, you will kind of start to grow into a bigger and bigger node and start to kind of pull in first people here.

And then you're going to start pulling people from all sorts of places and you yourself become sort of a node. And that node, if you are really careful and like avoid like audience capture and optimizing for stupid things, you can turn that node into like a expression of yourself, but also like a creation engine for yourself. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're on a little island. Speaker B: So it's like this autocatalytic process where like I'm pulling in people that tell me things and we mirror each other. And like we, I guess this is like radicalization in a sense, like, but in a good sense, like we, you find like-minded people and you become like more confident and radical in your positions.

Hopefully. Those are sound positions. But then eventually, like now I've grown to the size where I'm starting to feel like I'm to some extent like having an effect on some people. Like there's a lot of people who read and some of them are going to take what I'm writing seriously and like sit and think about and then maybe make life decisions based on it. And then there's a certain responsibility that comes from that. So then I guess I have to think a little bit more like on what kind of culture, like this is my corner of our civilization and how do I want to tend it.

And I guess like one of my role models is like the idiot from Dostoevsky. So I want to be the idiot because he's, I guess he must be autistic or something, but he's this very Prince Myshkin. He is a character who, I guess he comes to Moscow, St. Petersburg, And he's like very optimistic and attuned and like sharing. And he's like not involved in the power games and like anything. And it becomes chaos because like he kind of crashes into everything because he's just so pure and naive. And I'm like, I'm not that.

Like he's like a Jesus. He's a version of Jesus. And I don't think I'm Jesus. But like, I think it's a good north star of like trying to be that naive person. Because like the internet is so jaded. And like trying to be a person who's just like, I'm okay with being stupid. Like, I'm okay with loving the world. I'm okay with like, and I'm going to say things and I'm going to have people throw eggs in my head and I'm not going to, I'm going to turn the second cheek to it.

Like being that kind of person and like, because we, that's such a human way of being, of like being very open and like loving toward the world. And because of the dynamics of like social media and so on, it's not a natural role to take. The natural path is to become jaded and calculating and all those sorts of things. And that can create a very perverse culture. So if you're like a lot on Twitter or something and everyone is very calculating and everyone is like seeking outrage and so on, that can give you a very jaded perspective on reality and like how up making you internalize some really nasty values.

So just like trying to not become jaded, like trying to be like, I'm gonna not be pulled into this and try as hard as I can to just be like a normal person who likes to play and who loves my kids. And, you know, like trying to remain as like complex and roundedly human as possible as an end in itself. I think that's like an important cultural, we need to have of people who are just like complex and not jaded or calculating. And yeah, I think that's a way of caring for your corner of the culture to just like be that sort of person.

And then I guess that's what I'm trying to be. Speaker A: Yeah, there's some maybe this energy in that rather than not that, which the internet is pretty defined by. I can't remember which part of the essay I found it from, but you, you talk about what you've done and, and making time to expand yourself. You say, I can't strongly enough recommend setting off 20 hours a week to work on a project that forces you to learn and grow and meet new people. Most of us are awake some 110 hours a week, so 20 hours is not impossible, but it adds up in a surprising way if you keep at it for 3 years.

I feel like I've grown into my body. I feel [redacted address]. One, just a a really beautiful way of framing what you, what you've done and what I think many people, what I've certainly benefited from, what I think others might too. It's hard. How could you have started this sooner? Put another way, like, do you have any advice for somebody who is listening and is busy but lonely and wants to take the first step to doing something like that? Speaker B: I mean, yeah, it's a, it's a muscle, right? You have to just just start doing it.

And, and so the muscle, you can also think about it as sort of, uh, I like to think about my life a little bit like that I'm running a software that I'm writing. If you want the software in your life, you know, to, to have as one of its outputs, uh, that you spend 20 hours a week growing, you can put that on your like Trello card, uh, and then, and then you try, and then you notice, oh, it's failing because of X, Y, And then you run a backlog and then you look, okay, so I run this a week, I managed to do 5 hours, I failed because I was looking at my phone, I was too tired, you know, like, okay, so next week I'm gonna maybe lock my phone away when I get home.

Speaker A: Get a Nokia phone from— Speaker B: Yeah, maybe I'll get a Nokia phone, try that for a week and maybe I'm gonna start working out. A little bit more. So I get the stamina to like work in the evenings or in the mornings before work. And I'm going to try that. And then you do that for a few weeks and you bug log out. No, I'm still— doesn't work because of this and that. And then you adjust and then you adjust. And then gradually you kind of reshape your life by running a bug log and like removing the bugs.

And then you build the muscle. Speaker A: Maybe to earlier combo, it starts with a goal. Start with— or put another way, it starts with with real honest prioritization. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: What am I actually willing to give up? Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing. And for me, the big thing was like having kids. And I'm here like talking to the people. So you don't have to have kids before you do this. But it's just like, once I had kids, I was like, yeah. Because before that, I thought I was like impossible.

I could just do everything, right? So I would say yes to everything. Like, oh, Oh, a party, that and that and that and that. I said yes to everything because it felt like I had unlimited amounts of time. I didn't, but I had enough time that it felt like I did. And then I went nowhere and then had kids. And then, you know, if I calculate really closely, like I'm working, I have kids, I have like in the best of worlds, like 20 hours a week that I could carve out to other stuff.

Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: So I own that. That's not much. Like, and once I see that, 20 hours, that's almost nothing. Then you're like, okay, so I can only do like maybe, okay, so I can talk to my parents like maybe every 10 days and then I'll talk to a friend once a week and okay, so now I have like 17 hours left, you know, then I can only do one thing. There's a, then I realize I can only do one thing. So then I'm going to write 17 hours a week, you know.

Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: So I own that. That's not much. Like, and once I see that, 20 hours, that's almost nothing. Then you're like, okay, so I can only do like maybe, okay, so I can talk to my parents like maybe every 10 days and then I'll talk to a friend once a week and okay, so now I have like 17 hours left, you know, then I can only do one thing. There's a, then I realize I can only do one thing. So then I'm going to write 17 hours a week, you know.

Speaker A: But that starts actually with honesty. Yeah, about what? Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Because, but yeah, you have to face that down. Like, and because, yeah, you can only like, and it's fine. Like whatever you want to get better at cooking or, but I think it's really nice to just pick a few things and do them well. I think, or rather, I think life goes through eras. Like there are going to be some eras where you're exploring. Yeah. And then you should like, but then it should be clear about that and like say, Now I'm in a phase, I don't know what my next chapter is going to be.

I feel like I've been doing this thing for a few years. I'm still feeling stuck in a rut. Now I'm going to optimize for like finding the next thing. So I'm going to try 3 new things every week and I'm going to spend 20 hours a week trying new things, talk to new people, and I'm going to do that for 6 months. So you're like, it's good to be clear about like what's the problem in your life and then using the limited resources to work on that. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: And it makes such a difference.

Like if you, I mean, it's not like I'm anywhere near close optimum here, but like if you get reasonably good at figuring out like what's the bottleneck, what's the real problem in like, I don't have money, I don't have time, I don't have the right habits. If you can figure out like what's the biggest thing and then you always kind of work on improving one of your weakest spots, then you can move really fast. So, so, you know, because it's like if you are addicted to your phone and then you get a Nokia, like, oh yeah, there's 40 hours.

Yeah. Overnight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then that's a lot. And then, then you have all those hours, then, then you can start working on, on, on running and getting into a riding habit. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It becomes this like positive loop where you get more resources and more time to put into things. But yeah, it starts with like, it's so easy to get into these modes where you, I'm talking about myself here. So it's easy for me to get into these things where I like to tell myself that I'm working and I make up like fake bullshit things.

You know, I'll, maybe I should change my color background on my blog, you know, and I'll sit like spend 3 hours doing it. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: And it makes such a difference. Like if you, I mean, it's not like I'm anywhere near close optimum here, but like if you get reasonably good at figuring out like what's the bottleneck, what's the real problem in like, I don't have money, I don't have time, I don't have the right habits. If you can figure out like what's the biggest thing and then you always kind of work on improving one of your weakest spots, then you can move really fast.

So, so, you know, because it's like if you are addicted to your phone and then you get a Nokia, like, oh yeah, there's 40 hours. Yeah. Overnight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then that's a lot. And then, then you have all those hours, then, then you can start working on, on, on running and getting into a riding habit. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It becomes this like positive loop where you get more resources and more time to put into things. But yeah, it starts with like, it's so easy to get into these modes where you, I'm talking about myself here.

So it's easy for me to get into these things where I like to tell myself that I'm working and I make up like fake bullshit things. You know, I'll, maybe I should change my color background on my blog, you know, and I'll sit like spend 3 hours doing it. Speaker A: I'm gonna try a new note-taking tool. Speaker B: Yeah. You're like, yeah, but is this really the bottleneck in your life right now? And usually like the bottleneck is like painful in some way. But like if you can and you don't need to spend like every waking hour working on the bottleneck, but if you make some progress on the bottlenecks, like if the bottleneck is your discipline, like if you get a little better every week on that thing and then you solve that bottleneck and then the bottleneck is something else and then you move to that and trying to be like a little bit brutal about like like, now I'm just doing bullshit work and the real thing I should be doing is this.

Speaker A: I'm gonna try a new note-taking tool. Speaker B: Yeah. You're like, yeah, but is this really the bottleneck in your life right now? And usually like the bottleneck is like painful in some way. But like if you can and you don't need to spend like every waking hour working on the bottleneck, but if you make some progress on the bottlenecks, like if the bottleneck is your discipline, like if you get a little better every week on that thing and then you solve that bottleneck and then the bottleneck is something else and then you move to that and trying to be like a little bit brutal about like like, now I'm just doing bullshit work and the real thing I should be doing is this.

Speaker A: Well, so you, anytime you have pressure on either end, either the end of constraint, deadline, necessity, whatever, or pressure on the end of like how bad you want to do something, it starts to happen, which is illustrative of what you're making. Speaker B: Yeah. And that's one of the good things about also meeting, like we were talking about earlier, a lot of meeting spheres, like meeting interesting, cool people that I've met through the blog is that you realize like, like a lot of the stories that I've been telling myself is bullshit.

Then I'm like, oh, I need 3 months to write an essay. You know, like, no, you don't. Like, you just don't have a good method. You start to see like there is like a 10x improvement in most domains that could be done. And that's really nice to see that that could be done. And once you see it, then you're like, oh wait, like, and then you did a backwards induction, like, wait, how could I write I write like an essay that is like the best essay I've ever written, but I write it in 3 days instead of 30 days.

Like how, what would need to happen for that to be true? And I think I'm like getting close to that. Like I used to need, like if you look at the first year of the blog, I had a baby then also, so I should blame her, but I wrote 5 or 6 pieces and now I write like, maybe I'm going to write like 40 pieces this year. So I'm like making progress and building that muscle. So you realize that, so that's, I mean, I have some more time, but it's mostly the muscle.

It's mostly like I've optimized my process, I've grown. So that's at least like a 5x improvement in like, and the pieces are better too. I write them 5 times faster and they're like at least twice as good. So the roof is high. Speaker A: One of my favorite pieces of yours that the first I ever read Looking for Alice, where you talk about meeting your wife and give some good advice for, for finding a person rather than a category or something. Just one excerpt from it. You say, that is perhaps the most solid dating advice I have.

By the way, show the inside of your head in public so that people can see if they would like to live in there. The type of person I'm assuming we're looking for here is one, someone that you will find fascinating to talk to after you've talked for 20,000 course. Two, you feel comfortable with them talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life. And three, the conversation is wildly generative for both of you and that it brings you out, helps you become. I think so much of other stuff we were talking about earlier in the conversation hits there.

My question here is perhaps a little bit selfish, which is I'm single. Uh, what does this feel like at the beginning And how much do you think about the initial spark and excitement? Put another way, like, how obvious should it be? There are people maybe along the lines of what we were talking about earlier. There are people who take much longer to sort of see them in the ways that really make them shine. But at least in this context specifically, and it seems like for you it was pretty quick and obvious.

Yeah. Curious how you think about that. Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think sort of later pieces I've written, like the Torbjörn piece you mentioned, like trying to sort of compensate for, I notice like some people read Looking for Alice and like take away that like you just find like a, you know, what do you call it, manic pixie dream girl and everything's going to be magic and, you know, you deserve everything and you shouldn't work at all. And that's not the point. So I think it's For me, it was obvious.

It wasn't obvious for my wife. So I'm smarter than she was. And it goes back to, it's interesting, goes to the thing you quoted about like showing the inside of my head. So what happened was we met in a bookstore. I fairly quickly figured out that she was really cool and interesting and she didn't understand that. And I guess I was I was doing the way you talk if you meet someone in public. And I guess I was trying to be courteous and funny and so on. And I didn't show other sides of myself.

And then she read an essay I wrote, where I wrote a really long essay about a poem by Adrienne Rich, which is a very nerdy topic. And it's a very emotional and deep piece. And she's like, wow, you write this? Yeah, I bet it is. It's in Swedish. It's in a magazine somewhere. And then she realized, like, she saw a different perspective of me. Like, because, like, if you meet someone, like, we'd run into each other in the supermarket, like, you won't go into, like, a 15-minute monologue about, like, poetry.

So she didn't have the chance to see that side of me. And that's the good thing about writing things down. Giving people like the space to go into your head at their own leisure. And if they want to like listen to what you're saying, you can be super like obsessed and deep in a way that you just can't be with strangers around town. So that's a really useful thing. But that was a side note. So for me, it was obvious with her. But like, as I said, like with my best friend, that took me 15 years to figure out.

So, so I think it can really, it's a skill issue. So I think, I guess I had built the muscle when it came to romantic relationships at that point. And to the point, I guess I figured out that Tobias, my best friend, that he was cool around the same time. So I guess I had matured into— Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think sort of later pieces I've written, like the Torbjörn piece you mentioned, like trying to sort of compensate for, I notice like some people read Looking for Alice and like take away that like you just find like a, you know, what do you call it, manic pixie dream girl and everything's going to be magic and, you know, you deserve everything and you shouldn't work at all.

And that's not the point. So I think it's For me, it was obvious. It wasn't obvious for my wife. So I'm smarter than she was. And it goes back to, it's interesting, goes to the thing you quoted about like showing the inside of my head. So what happened was we met in a bookstore. I fairly quickly figured out that she was really cool and interesting and she didn't understand that. And I guess I was I was doing the way you talk if you meet someone in public. And I guess I was trying to be courteous and funny and so on.

And I didn't show other sides of myself. And then she read an essay I wrote, where I wrote a really long essay about a poem by Adrienne Rich, which is a very nerdy topic. And it's a very emotional and deep piece. And she's like, wow, you write this? Yeah, I bet it is. It's in Swedish. It's in a magazine somewhere. And then she realized, like, she saw a different perspective of me. Like, because, like, if you meet someone, like, we'd run into each other in the supermarket, like, you won't go into, like, a 15-minute monologue about, like, poetry.

So she didn't have the chance to see that side of me. And that's the good thing about writing things down. Giving people like the space to go into your head at their own leisure. And if they want to like listen to what you're saying, you can be super like obsessed and deep in a way that you just can't be with strangers around town. So that's a really useful thing. But that was a side note. So for me, it was obvious with her. But like, as I said, like with my best friend, that took me 15 years to figure out.

So, so I think it can really, it's a skill issue. So I think, I guess I had built the muscle when it came to romantic relationships at that point. And to the point, I guess I figured out that Tobias, my best friend, that he was cool around the same time. So I guess I had matured into— Speaker A: More to do with you than them. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I had matured into a certain level of capacity of reading people, which just came down to like, I had, that was during like my poet years.

I was like out doing readings And when you do readings, you're just going around shaking hands, talking to— I was on stage, maybe I did like 100 readings, 120 readings, and let's say I talked to 30 people every reading, that adds up to like 3,000 people that I had talked to, and then in other contexts too. So I just went around exposing myself to ridiculous amounts of people and talking, and since it was poetry readings too, it was a little bit like the blog because I was, you know, I went up and read like very emotional, deep and intellectual poetry.

And then I had these deep conversations. I got a lot of training data during that time where I was just talking to people. And then that made it. And then you can— and it gets back to what we talked like half an hour ago about like intuition, right? Like I talked to enough people that I was building the muscle, like the skill to pattern match. So I didn't need— so when I met my wife, I only had to speak to her like [redacted address] her face looked when she was thinking, like that she was really listening before she articulated a question.

I was like, and that's rare. Another really good trait. Like, and I, when I was 19, I wouldn't have noticed that. And I don't think I could have put words to it then either, but I had talked to enough people that I could notice that that was a good sign, and I could notice that her questions were very specific and trimmed to what I was saying, and all these subtle things and subtle cues for kindness. And some people know how to do this when they're 12. I figured out how to do it when I was like 22, which was probably pretty fast.

So it depends on skill and it depends on what kind of virtues you're drawn to. So some people will be easier than others. So I don't think necessarily you can tell right away if you are not, like, if you don't know what it's supposed to look like, you might need more time. But I think, I think like the simple and boring answer is just like talk to a lot of people and like in a non-goal-oriented way. Just like go around to talk to people like you're doing here. Like us talking right now probably helps on some part per million.

Speaker A: Yeah, more resolution. Speaker B: Yeah. So you're getting some, and yeah, just go around, talk to people. And I think a mistake people do is they go around in a too goal-oriented way and you just evaluate, is this the right person? Does it check my boxes? Yes. That doesn't matter. It's totally irrelevant. What is this person like? What's going on with this person here? And just like being curious. And because if it's the kind of person you should date, like you'll notice that too, right? You don't need to look for that.

You'll notice, right? If you just go around and like be curious, like, how's this person feeling? What they're into? How can I support them? And if you do that to like every old lady and every kid and everyone. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And you do that over and over again, like one day you're going to talk to someone and it'll be like you're just going to be supporting them in conversation, being curious. And then, wow, like now, and maybe it's the first time you talk to that person or maybe just, I enjoy talking to this person.

It was really cool. We're going to— we booked another meeting. I'm going to coach them on leadership or whatever. And then you talk and that's also a good conversation. And maybe you do that for, you know, for 4 months and then you figure out, oh, this is actually, you know, someone I should date. Like my best friend from high school, he had somewhat bad taste in women, so he struggled until some time in his early 30s of like meeting different people and always ended up in very dramatic relationships that fell to pieces in dramatic and painful ways.

So he didn't know what to look for. But then eventually he was living, like had a roommate who he lived with. I think they lived together for like 3 years. And she wasn't like his type, she was like that dramatic type, but she was, they really liked each other. They started working together and they like had such humor together and like he was just so stupid about it. And everyone else was just starting talking like, why are they not dating? Are they stupid? And then like eventually after like 3 years, like, now they're dating.

Speaker A: Yeah, so blind spot again. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: So you have an amazing little story in one of your pieces about the, the daughter of, or the mother maybe, of Helle, or maybe the Helle was the name. Speaker B: Yeah, Helle is the daughter. Speaker A: She, uh, after 20 years or something. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker A: She and her friend she got dinner with went on some trip and found it. Yeah, many such cases. Speaker B: Yeah, I guess, I guess I think your answer is you don't know.

Speaker A: She just talked to people, be interested in people. Yeah, this is the other thing that comes through there. You have a line somewhere, you say, as usual, the best ideas were Johanna's. Why is she such a wonderful collaborator to you? Speaker B: I think our minds are similar and dissimilar in productive ways. So, I mean, we have very deeply similar values. I think that's really important to like, we both value integrity and like open-ended search for life and all those sorts of things. Like if we didn't, like imagine me dating someone who wanted someone with a normal career or something that just wouldn't work.

So you have to have certain basic values together. But when it comes to our cognitive styles, we are very different. And that's like a complementarity. So I am more on the generative side. So I guess like we were talking about earlier, like like, don't throw shit in the head on the person who's like generating a new take. That's me like saying, don't throw shit at me because that's what I like to do. I'm really good at that. I'm always like having new ideas. I'm too fast, but I'm also a bit credulous.

Like you could probably like, if you wanted to like swindle me on money or something, you know, because I trust people. I trust the world. And that's a superpower in like seeing things and meeting people and growing connections. And she is more reserved, more analytical, more— she, it's like, I can't relate to it, but it's really cool-ish. Like she will not have a stance on something unless she has thought it through. So she's like, if you ask her about like— Speaker A: Can't relate at all. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. If I ask her about something, she'll say, I don't know, about almost everything.

Like if she's not like, and she'll say like, do you want to know what I think about that? Should I? Then I'll have to go sit down and think about it for 2 hours. Is it that important to you that I have a take on that? And I was like, no, no, you don't have to sit 2 hours. I just wanted to know if you like the flowers, you know? I'm kidding, but she's like that. And I saw this interview with Geoffrey Hinton, who was one of the fathers of deep learning, and he's like that too.

And he's like, never letting anything into your head unless you've like wedded it and like, you know that this piece, I trust this Lego piece in my head. And that makes this very robust and like you can build very robust structures and the thing with my way of associating really rapidly, it's kind of soft and mushy. And I used to write into to hammer that, but I also use Johanna a lot to like, she is just like very like tuned into like finding flaws and so on. So we have that kind of like, I'm generating ideas and she's evaluating them.

And yeah. Speaker A: Is there anything, if you think she was listening in on this conversation, is there anything you think she would have most critically chimed in on or added or corrected? Speaker B: Oh, there's probably a bunch of things where she says like, now you're just like generalizing from like a single case or that doesn't, yeah, yeah, she probably a bunch of places go like, there's that, yeah, you're missing details here. I don't, yeah. Speaker B: Oh, there's probably a bunch of things where she says like, now you're just like generalizing from like a single case or that doesn't, yeah, yeah, she probably a bunch of places go like, there's that, yeah, you're missing details here.

I don't, yeah. Speaker A: I need one of those. That's a good person to have around. Speaker B: The thing is like, I don't, I don't— I never know where those— yeah, yeah, I knew I'd probably correct myself, and I've gotten better, so I'm correcting myself more now. Um, but, but yeah, okay, I don't know. Speaker A: Well, if she's kind enough to listen, maybe I can get her notes. Um, you in a sense are living two types of lives at the same time. One is in some sense small but incredibly deep and rich, this kind of island life with your wife and your two daughters on a farm, pretty remote, with your Nokia phone.

And then the other is like big and wide, which is the— so much of what we talked about, this world on the internet and writing pieces that thousands of people will read and maybe a little like niche, little corner of the world sort of internet fame. And it's highly social. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: What, what does that contrast look like? One, is that characterization even correct? And two, what does it look Yeah, no, I think it's correct. Speaker B: I mean, it's a very sort of barbell approach. So I tell you, I have this like, I mean, my internet, it's probably 50-50.

So it's like the part you see online, that's like half my life, right? Like I put a lot of effort into what I'm doing with my writing. So it takes a lot of my mental energy. And that's extremely social, extremely like, like out there putting myself out and then I switch off the computer and like, and I go out into nature with my kids and it's really nice to have these very, I like having a very extremely barbeld situations. I mean, I have friends who are like bloggers and they live in San Francisco and that to me sounds like, oh, you know, like, cause like they go out to parties and everyone knows them from their blog.

And they all like, oh, that sounds like, because I go out, like I turn off my computer and then no one knows that I'm like, I'll go talk to my neighbor about like a tractor or like, you know, like. Speaker A: What do you say you do? You say you're an internet writer? Speaker B: Depends on who I'm talking to, like how strange I want to sound. Like sometimes I say I'm a freelance journalist if like they don't understand it or if it's old people. Or say, "I'm a writer." Like, yeah, it depends.

I have like various explanations, but mostly I like, a lot of people are not asking that much. Usually I don't try. I'm just that guy on, like I have my yellow bike that I ride around the ride and they're like, "Is that like weird?" Hopefully they think I'm kind, you know, I ride around, talk to people and yeah, it's just like the guy in the village. Like he used to work at the art gallery. Like, I don't know. You know, you don't have to, I've really tried, I mean, it's getting harder.

I'm starting to have more people in my real life that know I'm a writer and it's starting to bleed out because it's getting big enough. But for a long time, it was just totally separate. No one knew. And that was really nice. Just go down and you just talk about tractors or things like that and just have that very simple life. It's a really nice counterbalance to the whole kind of San Francisco super agency. Everyone is young and everyone is going to build an AGI and buy a galaxy when they're 40.

And it's just really nice to just, I especially hang a lot with old people. That's one of my things. Yeah, probably most of my friends on the island are like 70 plus. And it's a very nice counterbalance, just to have these conversations about life from someone who's lived for a long time. And there's, yeah, it's a really nice, really strange barbell. And it's so interesting to just see those two worlds and they are thinking about such different things. When you're hanging out with people who are in their 70s and 80s, all of their friends are dying.

And they have like opinions about like how to have a funeral in the best way, you know, like, and they're like gossiping about funerals and stuff. It's a very different world, but it's, I think I find it balancing to like spend time in that world and not get like fully caught up in that. Yeah. Like other world. Speaker A: There's a thread there that I want to pull on a little, I think, which is it actually came up. I think you were, I was listening to some other interview and you were talking about Ioana's gardening.

Gardening and how she was studying sort of all the world-class gardeners. And it made me think of ambition and like the bounds of ambition. It's interesting to think about gardening maybe specifically and sits inside the contrast you were just describing, which is it, it's sort of small, at least in one definition. Um, and yet she could absolutely on your little island, on your little farm, build a world-class garden. Um, it being world-class has nothing to do with the scale of its reach. Obviously writing is not quite so simple in that way, but I'm curious how you relate to scale and ambition, maybe as those sit next to the quality of your work.

Speaker B: Yeah, I, I, I, quality all every day. Uh, it's like, I need a, like, I need a certain scale so I can give my kids food and, you know, pay for a new roof on a farm. Beyond that, I don't think scale for what I'm interested in matters at all. There are certain things where scale matters, like you need a lot of capital because you're building some AI or you're like a car company or whatever. Like you need scale to get like economies of scale, but that's not how it works with art and with essays.

So like now when I'm at the point where I can pay myself a salary, like scale does not matter at all anymore. Only thing that matters is like the integrity of the work, the, like how far can I push my taste and my skills and like the internal complexity of like the objects that I create. And then I like the idea. That it's meaningful and so on for other people. But that, and I try to put some thought into like making sure that it's a good experience for people and meaningful for them.

But I like, but optimizing for that, it's like, it's now like an average piece of mine is read by maybe 20,000 people. That's a lot of people. Like it doesn't matter if it's like 30,000, like another 10,000 doesn't matter at all. Like, why would I care about that? But if I could make the pieces better and hopefully like downstream of that, that the emotional and cognitive states that I induce in the reader becomes richer, more transformative, more useful, leads to sort of rippling effects of good lives. That matters. Speaker A: I have just a handful of questions that are more lightning round miscellaneous before we, we turn the corner and wrap up.

We've talked about it a bit, but you clearly have a deep ability to focus, and inside of that, you've verbalized this, is ultimately about sacrifice. Does anything come to mind as the most painful thing you've had to sacrifice? At least within the bounds of choosing to prioritize and focus on the writing. Speaker B: I don't think I've felt any genuine pain for the sacrifices I've done for writing because I tried— writing is always second in order for me, like after my responsibilities to my loved ones. So when it comes to like the kids, like that there I've made like real painful sacrifices.

Like I'm very, very close to my grandparents. Like they're my best friends and we had to leave Sweden to homeschool, to care for our kids. There was like a real painful tension between like caring for my grandparents and caring for my kids. And then I chose my kids. So there I've made like real painful sacrifices, but when it comes to writing, yeah, I mean, I've had a complicated life. Like, I didn't have a car for 4 years and lived on a farm, and I had to bike and bike and bike and bike and get stuff.

And like, I biked in so many snowstorms, you know, and things like that. But that's, to me, that's not painful, you know? Like, that's, I mean, it sucks a little bit, but it's not painful the way, you know, like leaving behind my grandparents was painful. And I think a lot of people, like a lot of people think that was like a sacrifice they could never do, like not having a car and biking for hours in a snowstorm. But I think they just haven't tried. It's not that bad, you know, like a lot of things that we are afraid of sacrificing are kind of okay.

Speaker A: Little conveniences. Speaker B: Yeah, it's not painful. Speaker A: We were talking about it a little bit before we started recording. You have a great piece on pseudonymity and the way that playing with identity can actually sort of be a path to more authenticity, not less. If you had the time, speaking of which, you clearly don't, but if you had the time to pick up a new mask, to use your language, and write on some totally orthogonal topic for a little while with a different set of expectations, is there anything that would be fun Maybe aside from the diary.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think one sort of direction that where I'm going with my writing and where I might be a little bit limited is that I am trying to go more and more toward the personal and to the highly high-resolution writing about my relationships and so on. And there is like a limit how far I can go there because I I don't want to be Karlo Wicknauskot and like hurt my loved ones. And that limits what I can do. So like having like writing fiction or having a pseudonym where I could like go into more painful things or maybe write things that are painful for loved ones would be one thing.

I think that's probably an undersupplied niche of people writing with like like love in their heart and like an intention for clarity and insight, but like willing to wrestle deeply with like the flaws and shortcomings of themselves and their loved ones in a very deep and serious way. That would be really interesting to read a blog like that. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: But I can't do it. I've been trying to push as close to that as I can, but that's something I would love to do if I had the time.

But now I've said it, so now if there like arrives an anonymous blog, everyone's gonna figure out who it is. Speaker A: So, well, now we know you're not fault— I can attest that you are not, uh, the Henrik Carlsen that you describe in the blog does seem to exist. It could have been a whole separate podcast and maybe, maybe someday, but you've written and you clearly think deeply about what you call self-organizing systems and the way that that framework applies to so many things, but maybe especially education. And you thought a lot about school, both given your guys' backgrounds as teachers and now homeschooling your daughters.

And you talk specifically about sort of like interventions that strengthen the system's ability to self-organize and that being sort of the path to better systems. Why is self-organization so important to good systems in the broad sense? Speaker B: I mean, I guess it comes down to like a Hayekian point, like the knowledge, most of the knowledge in a system exists at the edges or at the grassroots of a system. So you want to build, like if you're doing an education system, there's going to be all sorts of knowledge that the child has or that the parent has or the teacher works closest to them have.

And that like higher levels of the hierarchy, you just can't ever get because it's too complex to compress that. So if you're able to design system that can better leverage the information that can't be centralized, you are gonna have a more efficient system that can, but there's obviously trade-offs because there's, things that are good about centralizing things too. But you want to use, you want the information to flow as freely as possible and use as much as the information as possible. And self-organizing systems, when they work well, are very— Speaker A: Capture that intelligence from the edges.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Speaker A: You've, I mentioned it briefly, you've spent a lot of time thinking about learning and education. I think it's actually, Somewhere along the line you said, um, to tie it back to the unfolding stuff, you say school systems are centered around visions, not unfolding. It's kind of like a central critique, open-ended, but maybe it ties in. What's the most important thing you've learned from homeschooling your daughters? Speaker B: Um, there's a bunch of things that I take into the homeschooling that I knew from beforehand and are maybe obvious, like that you want to have like concrete feedback loops with reality when you're learning.

You want to, you want the work to be meaningful and to like, to like interact with reality and run your own projects and that sort of thing, if done right, is incredibly powerful as a way of learning. And that's, a lot of people know that and that I knew even before I had kids, then it's a whole sort of sort of skill stack of how to do that well. But I really think that I'm not a big fan of sequential curricula where you're like, first you learn this and that. Because it's interesting, when they are doing accelerated expertise training in the military, they do not do it like that.

They start with complex, messy case studies. Speaker A: In the deep end. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And then you're just overwhelmed and it's chaotic and then you have to start to like pattern match. And then for certain things, obviously, like you can do some deliberate practice on specific subskills and so on, but like you can move so fast if you jump in the deep end. And so that's something I have with me into like having kids and trying to organize. Speaker A: In the deep end. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And then you're just overwhelmed and it's chaotic and then you have to start to like pattern match.

And then for certain things, obviously, like you can do some deliberate practice on specific subskills and so on, but like you can move so fast if you jump in the deep end. And so that's something I have with me into like having kids and trying to organize. Speaker A: I think you also read like pretty intense adult fiction to your 7-year-old or 8-year-old. Speaker B: Yeah, I wish when Maud I was 3 when we just moved to the island. She came to me and she said, like, I'm looking at reading the human book.

It's like, what are you talking about, the human book? And then she went out and I was doing the dishes and she came back and it was Spring by Karlovy Knausgård. And she opened it and it was like an abstract green painting on like one of the pages. I was like, that's it. Look, it's the human. I was like, that's an abstract green painting. But then I told her, like, do you want me to read it for you? And so we started reading, yeah, like that Knauzkort book, which is a really good book for kids actually.

I think it was Spring. It's because it's about a dad and his baby and a day in their life. But it's like, and they're wrestling with things. And it was really interesting to read a 3-year-old, like starts with, Karl-Ove wakes up in the morning and the baby is lying in the crib and screaming and our kids have never screamed at night, luckily, like when we've had them sleep, co-sleep with us. So that was really alien, like why is the baby in a crib? Like why is it screaming at night? Like what is the baby feeling that she's screaming?

So we could actually have these conversations around Knausgård and because he writes in this very concrete way and like now he's going into the kitchen, he's making tea, he's like carrying the baby and now he's putting the baby in the car and they're driving, you know, like reading books like that. So that was her idea, like to start reading that book, and that turned out to be a really fun, interesting challenge. Also, like, how do I reinterpret Gnausgård in a way that fits a 3-year-old? But it was really interesting. And so we kind of kept going like that, and now, I mean, now she mostly reads alone, but she's 7 now.

I mean, she's reading like the Harry Potter books, so she's like very getting pretty good at reading, and the nice thing about reading hard adult books— we also retold War and Peace for her when she was like 4. It's a brilliant book for kids. It's like princesses and love stories and wars, and it's a brilliant book for 4-year-olds. Someone should write a good children's book version of it. But the nice thing when you do that is that you have to reinterpret it and you have to sort of vocalize the things that are between the lines.

Because if I read it straight out, yeah, she won't understand it. So I have to stop. Oh, I think he's writing that, but he means this. And you know, like, well, I think what I think is going to happen now is this. And when you're doing that, you're actually forced to verbalize all of these strategies you yourself are doing, which can be really hard to explain to someone. But now, like, so I think when she was 5, she was at the level she could just like perfectly understand like Harry Potter, which is quite good for a 5-year-old.

But which, 'cause she had like apprenticed herself to my way of analyzing text. So she's like doing all of those things that I was doing aloud when I was reading books that were ridiculously hard for her. But mostly it was just, it wasn't something I pushed on her. Just fun. Like she thought that was fun. That was her idea. So, but I just like playing around like that. And I think the most important thing, so to get back to your question, which was like what I've learned is that education really is a matter of culture.

Like if you grew up in a, like so, so our daughter's grown up in us reading and writing and obsessing about reading words all the time. So obviously she is reading at a very high level. Really soon we haven't really had to like teach her how to do that. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: And so that means the thing to optimize for is like to become a competent role model. So like, how do we become the kind of person that will by osmosis turn her into the kind of person we want her to be?

Speaker A: You want her to apprentice to as well. Speaker B: So, so, so. And that's like a good forcing function to just deal with your own shit and grow. Speaker A: Yeah, there was this— somebody you mentioned in one of the spheres, Steve Krauss, who I think maybe you wrote Looking for Alice in part 4. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: I was browsing around and he had a tweet recently that was— there's this notion that Harvard lectures being online and education being democratized or accessible is proof, uh, it is motivation that is that which is scarce for learning.

And Krauss's argument was he said, no, it's not. This is, this is totally wrong. It's not desire or motivation or willpower, but positive contexts that are scarce. When you're in France, you speak French. When you're in Cambridge, you go to class. When you're at hackathon, you code. We need to scale the right kinds of contexts to inculcate the kinds of brilliant people we want in the world. And it made me wondering about, like, one certainly represents the ways that you could be critical of school in a way that creates maybe the context you don't want, but also the ways that I, I'm curious how you guys create context, especially to the extent you're creating multiple contexts for her.

And like, even just simple things down to like, oh, she's learning at home and home is not the— home, you know, she's not going into school. And like, the ways that changes between reading books and studying math or studying other things. Like, perhaps that's something you don't have to think about because it's so much about apprenticeship, but I'm curious how if at all you think about that, or even if it was a motivating factor in deciding to homeschool her in the first place. Speaker B: Yeah, it was definitely, I don't think I had this language to talk about it at that time, but I definitely had the language of that I want to individualize.

Speaker A: I got it. Speaker B: What she's doing. And then gradually I started to see it more as the project of like curating Amelia, but it comes back to 'Cause like a lot of people think like it must be so hard to homeschool and like there's so many things you need to do. But the thing is that you don't need to know everything when you start out. It's the same thing as what we've been talking about all day, right? About like self-cultivation, unfolding, right? I am simply being her mentor in her unfolding, right?

So what I'm doing all the time is like figuring out what is her bottleneck. And how can we remove that? So we put a lot of effort into cultivating Amelia where she would read a lot and we would spend enormous amount of time reading aloud to her and, you know, apprenticing and like doing all sorts of fun things and we're really disciplined about like trying to read in front of her and all of these things because we knew that like if she could start reading on her own at a high level, First of all, that would free up a lot of time for us.

So now we can just put it, give her Harry Potter and she's happy for 3 hours. So that's like a big win for us to like get over that. And now we've done that. And now, so now we don't have to think so much about reading and those things for maybe a few years because that's kind of like, she's doing well there now. Like in a few years, maybe we'll go back and do like a hardcore deep dive on like note-taking systems or whatever. But right now that's fine. So like, what's another And then we think about like, what thing, if we helped her overcome, would like make her life grow most?

And so we're like always looking for the bottleneck. So like, for example, we're not focused super much on mathematics. She's just doing fine in mathematics. She's like probably like a year ahead of her level, but like, I don't think I've had like a math lesson with her in too much or something because like, that's not a bottleneck. She's doing fine. It's okay. But like, whereas other things I can see, like if we could really do like a boot camp on, I don't want to go into details, but on her like challenges, but like things that she's working on, like if I can do a boot camp and like help her overcome her like big bottleneck, it's going to like transform her life.

Speaker A: Totally. Speaker B: And then again, and then again. So it's just this moving around from bottleneck to bottleneck and like amassing skills along the way. Speaker A: It's a really powerful frame for what what education I think maybe could or should look like. And not, not a point to overdo, but one of the ways that I think some of these LLM stuff could actually be really helpful for kids is like actually up close person. Hopefully they have a dad like you or a mom, but in some cases it's amazing to have that kind of attention.

Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: In one of your pieces, I think about, about an agency and just being kind of attuned to yourself and introspection, you say, you talk about writing as like giving other people a service. It helps them see in you what they do not dare see in themselves, which I thought was really beautiful. Is there anyone who immediately comes to mind whose writing has done this for you? Speaker B: I have many writers. I was reading Thomas Transtrømer when I was waiting for you earlier today. I've read him so many times.

He's just like someone who for me sort of embodies a certain kind of loving connection to reality and like ethical integrity and like a presence to life. Just like I read again and again and again as a way of like revitalizing that part of me and like growing that part of me. And I also find like sometimes, because I'm, I can be maybe a little bit like friendly, kind, soft person. So I find, I think, like surprisingly many of the authors that I resonate with are quite aggressive. It's like I get to experience that side of me.

Like I love Thomas Bernard, for example, who's just like, makes the rightest like crazy over-the-top rants for like 300 pages where he just hates on everything and everyone. And for me, that can be so nice to just go into that and like get to experience and hold that feeling of like, like sometimes it's people suck and just like to sit with that and just get to go on and on with that. So I just find that like all sorts of authors like provide me a space of like exploring different feelings and reflecting back and sometimes I like just, it's just an emotional discharge.

Sometimes there's a wisdom that I could bring back and that's some concrete thing that I could say, but it's just so interesting with all these different perspectives. Speaker A: We talked about it a little bit earlier, but I'd be curious for you to reflect on maybe across all three, writing, reading, and thinking in Swedish versus English. Obviously so much of that was just a hurdle to overcome initially. Speaker B: Yeah, now it'd be interesting to go back and write in Swedish. I only do, I write some sometimes in notes and so on in Swedish a little bit, but I haven't written seriously in Swedish.

It is obviously the language of home. There's a certain earthiness and like, it feels very different from English. English feels like a machine language in a way. And I think that has to do with the influence from Latin. Like when the English had such Latin envies, they kind of modeled and like their grammar on Latin, which like doesn't make sense. So the grammar is kind of odd. It's like added on top of the language. It's like this kind of logical system added on top of the language, which, whereas Swedish is much more fluid and organic in its grammar and the words to me, and that might just be like because it's the language of childhood, but I just feel more earthy.

The words and so on. So it's this emotional landscape that I can only access in Swedish. There's a certain sadness in that like English is increasingly like the language of my thoughts and like I, obviously like I'm training my brain to think in English because I'm writing in English all the time. But it's really interesting to just be able to move between languages and now I've like since I moved to Denmark I I can understand and speak Danish fairly competently now. And also Danish and Norwegian are very similar, so I can do that.

So it's really fun now that I can move between multiple languages and they all have their vibe. There's differences even between, from your perspective, maybe Danish and Swedish would be very similar, but if you get down to the details, they're different mentalities and you can see the traces of history and the sort of decisions that have been made through history. Embedded in the language. And there's all sorts of like, you get a sense for the sort of evolution of history when you look at languages. Speaker A: Fascinating. My final question.

There's a section of one of your pieces where you talk about a commitment you and Johanna made a long time ago. You say, in our 20s, Johanna and I stared for a long time into our souls and concluded that 3 things matter to us over everything else. Our relationship, being able to honor our curiosity, and giving our children the opportunity to do the same. There's another excerpt. You say, we have the same responsibility to the people we will be a year from now. Looking for limitations is about extending care to your future self.

And there's this theme that has come up in several places around sort of our past and future selves. And then a piece that I hope everyone will go read that I hadn't read until I was preparing for this called The Third Chair. It's very, very brief, but I read on the plane here and just kind of had chills. And my question is, how are you being kind and grateful to your past self? How are you being generous to your future self? And to what extent can you, or are you trying to model that orientation to your daughters?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think the first part we've sort of talked about, I think this sort of training and seeing mistakes as a first step to growth and just like rewiring myself by doing it over and over again has just changed my relationship to my past self. And I just feel immense gratitude to all of his mistakes and all of his successes. So that we've talked about. And yeah, and then the interesting consequence of that is then obviously, like, if I feel so much gratitude for what he sacrificed and did for me, like, then I, it's like my mom usually tells me, like, when she does something to help me, it's like, you don't pay back to me, you know, pay back to your kids, you know, like, because I can't pay back to the person I was when I was 20.

Like, he's gone. but I can pay back to the person I'll be when I'm 70 or, and so on. And I guess it just comes to a commitment to like always embrace a little bit of comfort in like pushing my limits and in staring at my flaws. Like it's because that, yes, that's a short-term pain. Like even if I feel less pain around that now than I used to, it's still a certain amount of pain. But by putting a few of my hours every week into doing that, I'm giving a gift to my future self, right?

Because like, if I am able to overcome this limitation or grow as a person, I know some future version of me is gonna bear the fruit of that. And all sorts of things, just like exercising, taking care of my relationships. All of these things are like nice to me now, but it's also like a way it can be quite useful to somehow visualize your future self, not as a goal, like not as I'm going there, but as a person that I'm going to be and that I should project some love toward and like what kinds of things would make his life not— it just could be small things like I can do the dishes tonight and tomorrow Henrik is gonna not have a terrible morning.

So it's small things and big things. By just like remembering that person. And often like the things, sacrifices you do now can be quite small, like the return because of the compounding. So you can make a small sacrifice. Yeah, they're leveraged. And if you do the, think about like explore-exploit, if you go around, so yeah, you're single. If you go, you may be, I don't feel like going out talking to people. But if you go out and talk to people and you find the right person, one, he's just like, the payoff for your future self is just like so immense.

He's like, yeah, like there's some maybe social anxiety that you have to deal with now. It's just, and yeah, so, and the payoff can be unbounded. So have some kind of, Tyler Cowen has this line where he says that like the first thing in the morning you should, when you decide what to work on first thing in the morning, you should zero discount rate, meaning you should like work if you value all future, the future equally as much as today, what would you do? So, and if you can like make the first 1 or 2 hours every day to work on things that just are not like putting out fires or gratifying yourself right now, but actually like making some progress on like the thing that's going to pay off in 100 years.

To like take a few of the best hours every day to like move a little bit there. And I guess one of the things I feel very privileged in getting to write full-time now is that I can work from home, which means I'm a much more high-fidelity role model for my kids because like my work is very much in this vein. A big part of my work is just like me reading books and me doing my Anki cards and like pushing myself and my kids get to see that and they get to see the fruit of my labor.

So that's important to me as I'm just modeling it. But we also talk about it a lot, like the importance of like removing our bottlenecks and like overcoming friction and like, yes, this is going to be painful, but it's— and yeah, it's really— I mean, with the 7-year-old, she's starting to get big enough that she like understands these things and starting to have the experience herself so we can start to talk about it. And it's just really interesting. To just like have a very conscious decision. She, her, she and her friends love to ride on stick horses and they do like stick horse competitions where they compete with each other.

And first time she was going to do that, she was super nervous and didn't want to be a part of it. And we're like, no, like, this is probably going to be fun if you overcome this. At least that— and it's a small thing. It's a 7-year-old. But like the experience for her of like And like talking through that and then going through all of the exercise and we're talking about like the way to move past the fear you're feeling here is that you just prepare yourself. You're gonna be the most prepared person when you come to competition because, and then you know you can't fail because you've prepared so well.

And when she did that and she was like, yeah, I prepared and I wasn't afraid and then I could do it really well. And it's a small win, right? Speaker A: But I set future me up to succeed. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then we can talk about now when she has a real live experience of like consciously going through the process of being afraid of something, overcoming it, and then getting a reward of like finding this new fun activity and community with her friends in doing that. And then we can reference that like, okay, but now this other thing you're afraid of, the same thing will happen if you do that and keep going, keep going.

Speaker A: Powerful stuff. That's all I got. Speaker B: Thank you. Speaker A: Thank you very much.