41: Henrik Karlsson: Strolling Through Life's Labrynths

[00:00] If you're lost in the woods, if you're like clenching and panicking, and like, I need to get out of this woods now, it's going to be a terrible experience. But if you're instead like, I guess I'm in the woods, I don't really know where I am, but it's kind of beautiful here. I'm just going to stroll around, notice things, trust that sooner or later I'll end up on a path. Then that can be easier. I started indexing my diaries. What happened, I think, when I did that was that I became my own audience.

It's almost like a ballerina in front of a mirror. Imagine that we're moving through a giant labyrinth, a maze. [00:30] dimensions at the same time. And inside this labyrinth, we're going to have good artworks, good essays, good startup, good research ideas, somewhere in there. And our job is to take the right path through this labyrinth to find the good stuff. But I don't think we can know beforehand where in the labyrinth will the good stuff be. I guess you just have to try different parts of the labyrinth. Let's say you're trying to fit some tiles to a strange shape.

And let's say you only have like square tiles and the thing you're trying to put it into is round. You're just going to put [01:00] ground because you can't do that. And you actually have to sort of break the tiles. And the more smaller parts you break them into, more perfectly you're going to be able to fill that square. And I think the same is true with our mental model. But if you kind of get into that confused stick, it's like you're breaking your pre-existing mental models, the tiles. You're sitting there with a mess.

It's just a mess of small shards, right? And that part scares most people. And it's very overwhelming. It's like cognitively taxing to be sitting there like, oh, five minutes ago, I understood this. Now I don't understand anything. Welcome to Dialectic, episode [01:30] 41 with Henrik Carlson. Long time listeners will know this is not my first conversation with Henrik. I interviewed Henrik last spring when I was in Copenhagen and it was one of my favorite episodes. So I had to go back for a round two. Henrik is a writer. He writes full time on Substack and had gone full time fairly recently the last time I spoke with him.

This time, a number of themes that I think all circle around this idea of how you navigate using feeling and aliveness to more [02:00] creating entirely new things. We talk a lot about creative people, but I think this applies across any kind of problem solving. Henrik uses a number of metaphors throughout this conversation that all build on this idea of navigating through the darkness, getting through the woods and not being too terrified while you remain in them because you know that whatever is on the other side is worth it. Most great creatives and a number of the artists Henrik has studied, particularly by way of their private notebooks, consistently find themselves in states of [02:30] models, their conceptions of what they should be doing and rebuild them from scratch.

Henrik talks about an idea he calls mental proprioception or this sense of balance and feeling to know that you're doing the right thing. You can imagine the ballet dancer watching herself in the mirror, getting a sense of her bodily intuition. And I think for any of us trying to do something risky or creative, there is a element of that to find your balance. [02:54] and then continue to push ahead. Towards the end of the conversation, Henrik and I talk about an idea what we struggle to put the right words to, but it's this element of being hard and soft at the same time, or maybe we land on assertiveness and receptiveness.

This idea that you can press forward while remaining open to all of the possibilities and all of the things that you may not have conceived of yet. As we did a bit in the first conversation, we talk about maybe the right kind of introspection. A framing Henrik uses that I really loved is observing yourself not as [03:24] the subject. We talk plenty about agency and the right kind of risk taking and what it means to concentrate risk in certain areas and have far less risk in others so you can actually take risks on the right things and how ultimately most of us are probably still not pushing ourselves enough for what might be possible.

We wrap up by discussing conviction, what Henrik believes in, and in the end [03:43] what we do with the short time we are here. This was a meaningful one to me, and I hope you enjoy it. You can learn more about the episode and get links, full transcript, all of that, at fm slash Henrik dash two. And as always, if you enjoyed the episode, please give it a review or a like, thumbs up, whatever it might be, or subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. Before we start the conversation, I'd like to thank Notion, Dialectic's presenting partner.

[04:13] support notion is a creative tool for your life's work and it can be used as an individual or with teams big and small the last year of notion has been all about the ways they have integrated ai into how you can work the great thing is that notion is already where all of your documents tables ideas live notion is tremendously thoughtful about how they integrate ai in a way that actually enables you to focus on more of the important work and delegate or automate the busy work for me it's really two things that i want to spend all my time on the first is immersing myself in the [04:43] to speak to, just trying to like get inside their brain for a little bit before we talk.

And the second is the actual conversation, getting to be truly present with them and explore all of the ways their mind works. It's been amazing to see how Notion AI and agents can help me with everything on both sides of that. Custom agents, which just launched a few weeks ago, expand this even more. Essentially, you can take something really small, a simple bit of information that everyone on your team might need to query or something large, like how do I end to end prep a dialectic [05:13] Again, I don't want to delegate the actual research, but...

[05:16] Even being able to get a primer on the first things I should know for whoever I'm going to speak to or afterwards, be able to speed up the process of compiling the transcript and notes and timestamps and everything else allows me to focus on more of what really matters. Notion AI is also just an amazing way to identify patterns that come up across individual episodes and across all of the body of work in this kind of curriculum or project I'm creating here at Dialectic. [05:46] it and notion is my partner along the way if you don't use notion or haven't tried it in a while you can check it out at

com slash dialectic with that here is my second conversation with Henrik Carlson [05:59] hannah carlson here we are we're back yes we are round two in the flesh knock on wood on uh on video [06:08] Exactly. Nice to be with you. We are not in your home. I should establish right up front. So you are not obligated to any of the aesthetic choices. Although I think this is a fun room to be in. Yeah. [06:18] It is an old mill, and I do land in an old mill, so it's almost right.

Spiritually. Wrong island or wrong landmass, but... [06:26] right corner of the world. So we'll take it. We're back in Copenhagen. [06:30] Okay, I want to start with maybe two not obviously related ideas. [06:37] You have somewhere where you say that in English, we spend attention. [06:43] In Spanish, we lend attention. [06:46] And in Swedish, as I understand it, we are attention. [06:52] Yeah. [06:54] Hopefully I don't have that totally wrong. Rough, at least directionally. You also tweeted recently a couple of... [07:01] Couple of things I liked first the most useful piece of writing advice you can squeeze into three words is don't think look that's Wittgenstein.

So much bad writing comes from people moving words about on the page instead of staring at the real thing and then adjusting their words to fit. [07:19] And then you also wrote, this is in a piece where you're reflecting on [07:23] The ways that children lose the magic, maybe. You say, [07:47] Thank you. [07:48] And [07:49] As I reflected on your writing, [07:51] you actually come back again and again to a – [07:55] There might be different ways to describe it, but what I might call cultivating the feeling or experience of being bored, coming back to boredom.

[08:04] and [08:05] Maybe specifically this notion that boredom is important in developing attention. And so my slightly cheeky first question is, how does practicing boredom keep us from becoming bored? Or excuse me, keep us from becoming boring? Yeah. [08:21] Yeah, I've used that phrase, like the importance of being bored of law. [08:26] Like right now, I saw it in your notes before, and instead of thinking about that word boring, I think it's maybe... [08:32] the wrong word, because it's, [08:35] It's not because... [08:37] boring might feel like you're [08:39] That's a bad feeling.

I guess I'm saying more [08:43] it. [08:44] under-stimulators, that you're supposed to be [08:47] not externally stimulated. Because if you remove external stimulations like rewards and status and YouTube videos and anything, that keeps you kind of activated. [08:59] then [09:00] You will feel bored. [09:02] At first, perhaps, but then eventually then you will, because we're like curiosity driven animals that have like rewards inside of us to seek out new stimuli, we'll start to sort of generate that internally. So we'll have start to daydream or we'll start to like pay attention to the flowers around us or whatever.

[09:21] will be curious about and start researching something or writing something. So, [09:26] I think it's a sort of question of like removing stimuli, um, [09:31] Still Kids. [09:32] point for those kind of maybe slightly more lower tuned kind of stimuli that comes from inside kind of bubble up. [09:41] and uh [09:42] Why I just thought a freak hero is from being boring. It's because I guess... [09:47] uh [09:49] boring is in a sense being predictable maybe uh like you can't from what you've observed me determine what i'm gonna say next that would be boring but the more you're

[10:02] steered by what comes from the outside, the more predictable you're going to be by the data from outside and the more [10:08] You're sort of generating your own decisions internally and from your own, like whatever that is. [10:13] that's an open source of surprise. So I think if you attune to that and over many years... [10:21] build up a richer and richer sense internally, that would be a source of surprise. And that's why you kind of end up being more interesting. [10:29] if you care about that. [10:33] Feels like maybe that's like the wrong way to frame it, like being not boring or...

[10:37] interesting because that feels like it's [10:40] for other people. [10:42] I think it's like [10:44] Better to think about like it will make you feel more alive. Yeah. Yeah. [10:48] or something like that. It's funny. I like that you've taken issue with both my uses of both being boring and boredom. It's funny. I... [10:56] had a conversation. I interviewed Sian Bannister and the first time I ever met Sian before I interviewed her, [11:02] we had a conversation about boredom and she said, [11:06] said something along the lines of like, I never bored, like I try never to be bored.

And we I was kind of debating over this, because I think we were having a similar disagreement, that wasn't really a disagreement to what you and I are talking about now, which is this kind of boredom that [11:20] Thank you. [11:21] leads to all the things coming in. It's actually more like space. [11:25] cyan and it was funny i was reading some of some other writing of yours and cyan uses this word that you also use which is dereve and this kind of [11:36] not totally aimless, but semi-intentional drift captures a little bit of the same thing, which is like, [11:44] I'm calling that boredom, which is like meandering or walking or just sitting and wondering and daydreaming.

[11:51] But to your point, [11:53] that is actually about [11:56] letting all kinds of things in that are going to surprise you or not necessarily like let you. But it's interesting. I loved our interview with Xi'an. [12:06] I was... she's so interesting. She's not boring. [12:11] at all. They leave. I was in Spain recently with my caves and, um, we were, we were in Malaga and, uh, [12:18] Unlike the Feste where they're [12:21] Uh... [12:22] I had some plans because it was just me and the kids because Johanna has working at Lick, so she was in the apartment the day after.

[12:29] I had to entertain the kids in the evening again, and I didn't have any plans. And so I just told them they were doing a derivative, right? [12:39] Much better pronunciation than mine, by the way. I don't know French, so I'm also digging. And the age-year-olds are like, what's the name of me? And I said, we're just going to go off an apartment, and we're going to look around, and you're going to get to pick the most exciting direction we can go. And I will go until we can't see anything more, and then we, you know.

[13:00] And then you decide again. And it was very interesting to notice how alive they came. [13:06] when they got to do that. And it's like a labyrinth-themed city. So we're just going down these back alleys and going into construction sites and finding all these nooks and crannies. [13:16] And it just made us so much more alive than when we were going to these places. [13:21] more exciting places. And like, instead of just like, I'm going to go here, I'm going to actually like stop every few minutes. I'm like, [13:28] Where do I actually want to go now?

[13:30] Oh, [13:31] Because like, yeah, the streets we got to were probably less interesting in some objective way than like it was in any of the cool caves we went to or the beach. But we were so much more alive to those places because we were like having to attune to ourselves. [13:45] to figure out what would be most interesting. So you could see that you just started galloping down the street, like the kids just came alive. [13:53] And I felt the same, but you see it in the kids some more because they...

[13:56] It's in the bodies. But I think we all kind of have that sense of like, you're talking about a dance down this week when you... [14:02] take that con to like a change yourself. [14:05] Yeah, it's a state of attention. I can't remember. It's possible we even spoke about this last time, but in the [14:11] In the Robert Irwin biography, he and Terrell and some guy at NASA go into the sensory deprivation room. [14:18] And they sit in there for like eight hours. It's not even a water tank. It's just dark.

And they sit in there for like eight hours. And they walk. They're like prancing down the street looking at flowers, basically tripping. Because they're just like... [14:28] Everything is so, and I think it's pretty marvelous how even something as simple as just like, hey, kids, we're not going to wander around without a plan. We're going to derive or whatever. And like, as a result, really look. It goes back to the Wittgenstein thing. Yeah. [14:44] maybe the painters have know it best, which is just look and really see, look and really see.

And you will be quite surprised by what is actually there. I'd like to talk about something that you've [14:56] Written about in different ways quite a lot. And most recently you described it as mental proprioception. If I'm not pronouncing it incorrectly. A few lines from you. [15:08] My job as an essayist consists to a large extent in putting myself in the right state for the thoughts to come out right. That's something you continue to come across, come back to over and over again, this form of exhaust. [15:21] There's a lot else happening that can distract me from my curiosity, or that, even worse, I can mistake for curiosity.

For example, I also get another kind of positive, motivating feeling that, if I observe it closely, says, if I write this, my readers will be pleased. [15:37] Staying fully centered in curiosity through an entire essay is perhaps as hard as feeling that you are holding your body exactly right to execute a pirouette. I often, without noticing it, tip over into writing what is popular and then I stumble. [15:52] Thank you. [15:53] I [15:55] Yeah, I wrote that maybe a month ago, and I stumbled last week anyway, because it's like, it is very, very hard to do, because I've been struggling with my brain for the last two weeks, and I was just like, why isn't it working?

And I was feeling all this resistance, and [16:14] And, um, [16:15] It wasn't fun at all. [16:17] And then, like, I guess two days ago, I decided, like, I'm going to... [16:21] put the thing I'm working on aside, which felt like a very good and important essay such as that. [16:27] I had made some good progress on and I'm just going to work on this thing that no one cares about at all. And all of a sudden everything came loose and that turned out very lovely and it was just so easy.

So again, I had sort of what I realized was that I tricked myself up and like, [16:41] thinking that the essay I was working on would be [16:44] a big, important essay. [16:46] And that was just like... The weight of it was almost... Yeah, because what I hear in this, by the way, I'm not sorry to interrupt you, is... [16:53] Maybe I'm over focusing on the metaphor, but it's about balance. [16:57] I think so. More so than even leaning one way or another way. [17:02] Yeah, it feels like, I mean...

[17:05] putting the weight in different parts of my body or something. It's like, it's, [17:10] Yeah, it's very tricky to talk about. It sounds like almost wool when you try to talk about it. But the felt sense of it is that... [17:17] my [17:18] my motivation or where I'm [17:20] writing from is like in some different part of my body. I'm like too low in the body or something. I don't know. Like it's just [17:27] I feel heavy. [17:29] And then when I get it right, there's a certain kind of nimbleness, a certain lightness, a playfulness.

Like, again, as... [17:36] I feel like the kids when they're galloping down the street. It's just like I get... [17:40] this kind of fluid movement in my body. [17:42] it's very closely related to posture and stance and like [17:48] balance somehow. [17:50] Yeah. [17:51] One of the things that comes up over and over, um, [17:55] especially as you kind of seep into... [17:58] the ways you write about other people is you're just kind of obsessed with this [18:04] maybe what I would call the ways that people maybe like disassemble themselves and reassemble themselves.

Another way of putting this would be to sort of lean into the confused space. [18:16] And the way that most shows up, I think, at least in the writing you like to read, is these notebooks and these private writings of people who are artistic or even maybe scientific or mathematical. I know you're big on Grothendijk, Ingmar Bergman, Tarkovsky, but there are other kind of versions of this in Herzog and Nosgaard. I recently read the Steinbeck letters when he was reading East of Eden, another version of this. [18:46] known and the pattern i kind of you call it a building up ability to perceive evolution of their own thought but what i see this almost as and it may be it's ties to some other things you've written is like this like wading into the confused space or maybe even the unbalanced space to steal from the earlier metaphor um [19:06] I guess my question is, like, what...

[19:08] What is the benefit of and why do you try to confuse yourself or move into these spaces of not totally knowing or being sure? [19:19] Well, I... [19:20] Maybe I can try to get out a sort of an image. [19:24] First, right, it's sort of, let's say you're trying to make like a mosaic, however you say that, like you're trying to fit some tiles. [19:33] to a strange shape. And let's say you only have like square tiles and the thing you're trying to put it into is round. If you're just going to put them in, [19:42] You're going to make a square.

You're not going to make it wrong because you can't do that. And you actually have to sort of break it. [19:48] the tiles in order to [19:51] and the smaller parts you break them into, the more perfectly you're going to be able to fill that square. And I think the same is true with our mental models. So you're... [20:00] we have any less mental models of all the situations, and they are a little bit like square tiles sometimes. So you get a new situation, and it might apply a little bit, [20:10] But if you just apply it straight off, [20:13] It won't fit perfectly, but if you kind of get into that confused stick, it's like your great game.

[20:19] your pre-existing mental models, the tiles, and then you end up with like, you're sitting there with a mess. It's just a mess of small shards, right? You had debris. Yeah, and that part scares most people. And it's very overwhelming. It's like cognitively taxing to be sitting there like how... [20:36] Like five minutes ago, I understood this. Now I don't understand anything. And people try to like escape from that and like have all sorts of, [20:45] Um... [20:47] like inbuilt desires to like reach cognitive plurals. We would just see the world as like everything in the world is a square shape or a square frame.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what we sort of end up doing. You have like confirmation bios, like the classic sample. Like, you have to go like, "Oh no, my square is actually correct. Like, I'm just gonna find things that confirm that." [21:05] or [21:06] Or, yeah, you'll get angry. There's all sorts of reactions. And also, like... [21:11] Like, Darwin made a marvelous observation... [21:14] But [21:15] He said he has to write down everything that sort of disconfirms him. [21:19] everything that doesn't affect his mental models because he'll forget them. [21:23] And I think that's true of all of us.

I misread that when I originally read it. I didn't totally catch what that... [21:28] The importance of that is it's actually rejecting your body, your mental immune system to shy away from the things that, [21:36] don't fit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because Jordan Mews is specifically writing down the things that he doesn't like. Yes, exactly, exactly, because those that are like, doesn't fit in that, confuse him, like his, his mind's very good at filtering that, and all their minds are very good at that. Yes, it's, it bounces off of him.

Yes, so, so, so we have a tendency to want to protect our squares, and like, in a, a, a, a, [21:55] in in in sort of cognitive [21:58] I don't remember, but is this a character clone maybe? Where they do research, they talk about like knowledge shields. [22:06] Like, as you're going through life, you're having to construct all these mental models to navigate, to make good decisions, right? You have to model the world in order to make good decisions. And that's costly. It, like, costs energy to reconstruct and make these.

So your brain is sort of incentivized to, like, make them only good enough. You don't want to understand and see the world correctly. You want to see it well enough that you can manage, right? And that means that at some point when they are, like... [22:33] 95% correct or something, it's going to differ [22:36] for everyone, but when they're good enough [22:39] your brain is going to start to filter stuff. [22:42] And then you're going to converge on a mental model, which is not the correct understanding of the situation, but it's good enough.

And when we get to that point, you start taking in new data. [22:54] Everything new that just doesn't fit just gets... [22:57] And that's why it's a shield, like a knowledge shield, because it shields you from new information. And so a lot of work when you're doing expertise training in the military and so on is finding ways of breaking these shields. How do you make sure that you break their understanding so they end up confused again? So they end up breaking their tiles. Because... [23:21] Again, like to get back it off.

Once you get the tiles apart, that's like the first step toward piecing together a better one. [23:30] And then you have to break it down. Well, and not only that, there's an element that I think you've written about, which is like when you're sort of sitting there and you've done the initial work, which is you've broken everything up. You briefly just spoke about this. And you're sitting there with your pile of shapeless debris and you're just like. [23:46] almost at like rock bottom of understanding. Like there's no coherence. [23:53] What is it like – maybe I'll read one more thing, and then I'll ask the question I was going to ask, which is – [23:58] Nosgad on Twitter.

[24:00] what he calls sub-Bergman. He says, in order to create something, Bergman had to go sub-Bergman to the place in the mind where no name exists, where nothing is as yet nailed down, where one thing can morph into another, where boundlessness prevails. The workbook is this place. In it, Bergman could put anything he wanted. The entries he made there could be completely inane, cringingly talentless, heartrendingly commonplace, intensely transgressive, jaw-droppingly dull. [24:30] in part their purpose. They had to be free of censorship, in particular self-censorship, which sought to lay down constraints on a process that needed to be wholly unconstrained.

[24:42] And I know you're... [24:43] you're enamored with those in particular, as well as among a number of these notebooks. [24:49] What all of those seem to get at, at least the best of them, is something along these lines, which is maybe to use your metaphor, it's like the person sort of sitting with all the broken pieces. What does it look like when you've done that work to start? [25:02] to gradually put these pieces together and maybe... [25:06] still in this sort of circle. Because that is a very cognitively uphill, emotionally uphill experience.

[25:16] Yeah, well, yeah, it is. It is demanding, very demanding. I remember I... [25:22] I think I already talked with Michael Nielsen. [25:26] or maybe we tweeted at each other about this at some point several years ago. And he said something that like helped me understand this and like helped me [25:35] get the right stance, so to speak, around this. Because I was sort of complaining that when I was working on my essays, [25:42] Like they would be good and then they would [25:44] gradually sprawl and and then and then at that time i would like [25:49] be sort of afraid like about that and i would try to stop them so like i would start that sport at some point and like clean it up [25:56] And because I felt like if I just keep going, this is going to sprawl endlessly.

It's going to fall apart. [26:01] And then he said, look, well, if it starts to sprawl, like, then you're halfway there, right? And that was very important for me because I admire Michael's work a lot and to just have someone... [26:13] this work I admire, tell me that this thing that to you, to me, felt like everything falling apart, [26:21] that I'm just wasting my wild reaction. Yeah, I'm lost in the woods. [26:25] Yeah. [26:26] Having him say that, like, I've been through these woods many, many times, and the good stuff is on the other side of it.

So painful, though. Yeah, and that made me like, okay, I'm going to try. And I think, actually, the one I wrote about Bergman and the Grothendek was the first one where I was like, I'm going to go through the entire woods. And Johanna and I worked on that for, like... [26:47] three months or something, it ends up being a very simple piece in a way because that's what's happened on the other side of it. You end up with something quite simple again usually. Yeah, yeah. The circle is as simple as the square perhaps.

And that can be humiliating too because people read it as like, yeah, of course, this is obvious, but I have spent... [27:06] pretty much getting there. And so... [27:09] So there can be also temptation maybe to like shy away from it from that. Like I want to keep it complex. It looks more... [27:15] But the best writing, by the way, the best writing, not always, but much of the best writing is the kind of writing you're nodding ahead saying, oh, yes, this is. But it can seem easy to write. But what it's actually doing is it's sort of giving you the words.

[27:29] for something you've kind of felt or acknowledged but didn't know how to [27:32] it's almost a version of this. I find, I find that so much of the, that's why so much simple writing can be so elegant is, and maybe you don't get quite as much credit for it. Cause some people will be like, Oh yeah, I've been saying this, but that's, that is the work that's inside there. Yeah, exactly. Uh, [27:48] Because it might be fun to think about that particular essay. [27:52] Because it actually sort of started out in some ways...

[27:56] sounding smarter than it ended up. Because, like, my first idea for that, the draft I wrote, was sort of about this idea that our identities are interfaces, and, like, because interfaces are this thing that kind of [28:08] an interface between you and the outer world and like... [28:11] how you arrange that interface is going to like blah, blah, blah, right? So this is quite a complex idea. And I wrote this piece about it. And my wife, Johanna, she looked at it and said, well... [28:20] I kind of liked that one line where you said...

[28:23] that like being [28:25] board is important. And it's like, oh, and I had to throw out like this entire [28:30] complex apparatus I have built of theory. [28:33] And I just take this line, and I remember feeling that that line, like that boredom is important, perhaps it's just so obvious, right? [28:39] And then to build up from that to something deep and interesting, I had to go read like 10,000, no, like 1,000 pages of Rothenjeks' wild notes, and I had to read like 40 years of Bergman's Notebooks. It was an extremely long process, and then I kind of ended up with something that is, in some ways...

[28:57] obvious, but it was a fairly long process and ended up [29:01] To get back to the question, I don't think we answered your question. It was something like, how do you... [29:07] How do you build up from that? Yeah, when you're sitting at the bottom, it's almost like you're the kid who's... [29:13] broken all the Legos apart and you're sitting in your pile of broken pieces and you're like, my feeling is, is similar to your, your comment about sort of feeling like you've spilled over is that that's like not only cognitively wearing or a cognitive low point, but it's emotional.

If you're halfway through a project, it's emotionally hard to. [29:33] I think, [29:34] The two things have made that easier for me over time. [29:38] Uh, [29:39] Because that project, when I wrote that, and that essay is called Cultivating a State of Mind When You, I guess, Are Born, I think. And when I wrote that, that was terror. That was like three months of sheer terror. But it kind of was like this... [29:54] baptismal fire almost where I like, [29:57] I learned to write the new way. Um, [30:00] But I think the thing I did wrong there was that I had sort of the outcome plan [30:05] in mind.

I was clenching. I wanted this to cohere, to show if you can instead [30:12] Um, [30:12] It's a bit like if you're lost in the woods. If you're clenching and panicking, I was like, I need to get out of this woods now. It's going to be... [30:21] a terrible experience, but if you're instead like [30:23] Well, I guess I'm... [30:24] In the woods, I don't really know where I am, but it's kind of beautiful here. I'm just going to... [30:28] stroll around, notice things, and trust a similar label, I'll end up on a path, then that can be easier.

So you're kind of unclenching and being like, [30:40] There's no deadline on this. Like when things fall apart, you might have to trust that doc. [30:46] can take time and it will end up looking like something completely different. You just like haven't let go of all things. [30:52] Well, it's not seeing the thing you were hoping to see, to tie it back to what we were talking about earlier. It's being open to seeing something else. Yeah. Yeah. [30:59] Exactly. You have to really let go. And so that helps. And the only thing that helps is to go through the woods a few times.

[31:06] Because it's just like, the other day, because the first few times I went for the woods, it's like, [31:11] With the... [31:12] can't literally be anything on the other side of this because this is just confusion this is terror and uh and then oh [31:19] Lo and behold, I ended up with much more clarity and [31:23] understood things that are important to me and I end up writing an essay I like. And doing that a few times [31:29] Kind of. [31:30] change the emotions around it. [31:33] Confidence is the memory of success, as my friend Jason likes to say.

Do you keep notebooks in this way? [31:40] Yeah, I do, from time to time. Uh... [31:44] I said alternate, but yeah, I do write [31:48] Several hundred thousand words of journals in a year where I... [31:53] like it can difference but like some months i'll write 60 000 words in a month like where i'm just [31:58] endlessly sprawling and going, do you delete them? [32:02] Now I have, I have them, um, [32:04] I can think of like maybe if I have time, something like I should edit some of that together and then publish it.

It could be like a fun sort of companion to the essays. Cause like to take the notebooks for, from the last five years as a Britain, the essays are like, [32:18] So this is kind of the process behind the life and the frustrations. [32:23] Yeah, I do find them very valuable. Often I find that... [32:26] As I write them again, [32:29] a sense of just being lost in a moment. But what I find valuable is to... [32:35] give myself a few days a week where I'm allowed to kind of wander in the woods in the notebook, just read randomly and let things fall apart without any pressure.

[32:46] And then I'll go back to them maybe a few months later, and then I'll see, like, that was really good. And I'll find... [32:53] It's almost like I'm lost in the woods and I'm finding these clearings, but I can't really see it at the time. I can't pressure myself to see it at the time, yes, because then I'll clench. So I'll just go around. And then when I look back, I find these kind of beautiful essays in there. [33:12] I actually was rereading some diaries I wrote... [33:16] from maybe like two years before I started the blog.

[33:19] And I remember that as sort of a dark night of the soul kind of period where I hadn't found my way yet and so on. And I didn't, I hadn't learned how to write. [33:28] And the fun thing when I was rereading them was that, like, one, they were much better than I remembered, and two... [33:35] uh... [33:36] I had actually written almost word by word two or three essays that I wrote three years later. [33:42] So I had already done them in there, but I just didn't notice it and I didn't have the confidence to see it.

So actually that wandering. So if I can go. So now I try to be more persistent about going back. Right. Returning to those wandering. But like, yes, I guess I try to. It's again a little bit like that. [33:58] sort of being a child and then like editing, writing drunk and editing sober is a little bit like that. Like, [34:05] being a kid on a WV, going around in the woods, and then... [34:09] getting back to it, like, a few months later, being, like, sort of a, maybe a connoisseur of this, like, [34:14] I'm going to pick out the best box of this.

Yeah, it's funny. [34:18] One, I totally relate. I write certainly far less than you do. But like I have a writing group I go to. I'll write things one Wednesday morning and I'm like, man, wrong, not in the right mood. This all sucks, whatever. And a week later, I'll look at it and be like, oh, this is pretty good. I'm such an unreliable narrator of the present, let alone the other. Yeah. The other thing that's funny about it is on some level. [34:43] Writing itself is this practice of doing this often for the experience of living.

You go on a derivouac or whatever. [34:52] In my experience, unless I spend some time meditating on it and ideally writing about it, [34:58] I have to kind of trace the grooves once or twice for it to really... There is something about having to encode. The more times we encode something, the more... [35:06] It like gets to work. The other part of this... [35:11] you don't delete these notebooks. And so there's some element of you in some part of your brain that's saying, like, maybe somebody will read these. If I'm, [35:19] successful enough or like one of the points you make about the notebooks is that it's [35:23] It's the one place where Bergman isn't being observed.

[35:27] I guess I'd like to tie to another point you make, which is you talk about sort of [35:32] constraining oneself i think it's with um von trier or vinterberg like tying your hands behind your back finding ways to sort of create in ways that are deliberately constrained now's guard forces himself to i think write five pages a day at certain times and then eventually 25 000 words in 24 hours which let's not dwell on that but that is it that is a dark yeah imagine like having agreed to publish that also [35:57] He did?

Yeah, yeah. It's in book two of my struggle. [36:02] And he's doing it in the middle of this being a controversy. So he knows that 500,000 people, 10% of the population in Norway is going to read this. [36:11] And then he stands so much for hours for I didn't try to [36:14] 5,000 words about like meeting and falling in love with his wife and like in a very intense and like painful like [36:21] Yeah, let's not do that. [36:23] The point, I think, is... [36:25] Maybe one version of this is just like finding ways to sort of prompt yourself into new ways of creating or writing or whatever.

And then the other version of this is this element of considering... [36:35] how it's going to be observed. And I'm curious how you think about either tricking yourself. I mean, I can't remember what it was specifically, but you wrote somewhere about like, [36:43] Spending one week... [36:45] literally writing, [36:46] And it all has to be deleted at the end of the week. Maybe another week where you like... [36:50] The whole point of it is just to make it as pop as possible, or most audience-oriented as possible. Maybe you haven't done those examples specifically, but I'm curious how much you play with those types of things.

Or even think about this in the case of The Notebook, which is like... [37:04] Is there ever a version of writing that if I truly promise to, [37:08] permanently delete afterwards versus putting my... [37:11] back catalog of notebooks, how it would change. [37:16] I don't think... [37:17] about an audience at all when I'm in my notebook. And I'm very, like, I could, I think it would be valuable to publish parts of it. [37:26] But as I write it, I don't think about the audience at all. And I couldn't do it.

If I go back and read my diaries from when I was like... [37:36] 17, 20, something like that. I can clearly see [37:40] like I'm young and I have hubris and, and that I think that like, this is going to be a red and hopefully not. [37:50] Uh, [37:50] but if I read my diaries from, let's say, around when I turned 30, I can definitely, there's been some shift in my stance where in clear it felt like, [38:00] This person does not... [38:02] no longer think anyone's going to read it.

Are you writing to yourself? [38:05] in the future or are you writing to yourself in the future? Yes, exactly. So I think the big change that happened for me in 2019 [38:14] which was like a precursor that led to the final sort of breakthrough with the public writing, was that I started indexing my diaries. [38:22] So like once a week I would go through and I would number the pages and then I would do an index on the front page where I would write like on pay, on fold up to, I talk about Ivan Illich and then also on.

[38:37] Fold up 18, right? So I would list them. This is the re-encoding again, by the way, the retracing. Re-encoding. And then the idea for that was just to... [38:45] make sure that I would [38:46] go back to it and kind of enter into dialogue with my past self and not have all of these thoughts ways that they would be searchable [38:55] But what happened, I think, when I did that was that I became... [38:59] My own audience. [39:01] Because prior to that, I almost never reread my stuff. And then I started rereading.

It became real. Like you knew the audience. One of the things I like to talk about is it's really easy to write a letter because you know exactly who the audience is. But also, you know. [39:17] you have extreme confidence the person will read it. Because if you write anyone a letter, at least if you know them, they're probably going to read it. And so it's almost a, what I'm hearing you describing almost is a trust of your reader to actually follow through. [39:29] you got into a pattern where future you actually would go back and read it.

So it made the stakes more serious. Yeah. And I guess, I guess, [39:37] I'm speculating here, but I suspect early on when I did that, I would read things, go back and read things, and I noticed, like, oh, that's cringe. Like, I am... [39:47] posting, I am doing these things, and that would be embarrassing, [39:52] in front of the audience of myself. And so I would like... [39:55] I'll learn that close. It's almost like a ballerina in front of a mirror, like looking at the movement of the leg and knows, oh, like, that's the wrong movement of the leg because that's posing, that's...

[40:07] That's... [40:08] cringe. And I guess I kind of [40:11] without even thinking about it, how that kind of reinforcement loop [40:15] which helped me get into the right post. So whenever I write in the notebook now, I always like immediately go into the right post where I'm like open, creative, open. [40:24] willing to linger in confusion and so on. Whereas in other mediums, like if I open the Substack Editor, like I'll [40:32] Like, I can't write... If I try to write in Google Docs or if I write... Like, I'll...

[40:37] entering the different stances, like if I write an email, being one stances in WhatsApp, all different stances. But I have, through practice, encoded a very good stance around my notebook. So I can always go there. Yes, it's an environmental priming that is like, I know what we do here. Boom. I'm in that. Hmm. [40:54] There's a little thread, I think, that relates to this in terms of how we sort of talk to ourselves and ask ourselves questions. An old thing on, I think it was old, on Nick Cave. [41:03] and maybe almost like a thesis of one of the things the notebooks can do.

You're talking about this woman, Kelly, who is writing into Nick Cave for advice on how to be creative, and she's struggling, she's blocked. You say, another way to make a distinction between them, Nick and Kelly, is to say that Cave is trying to figure out what his voice is trying to say right here, right now. While Kelly wants to hear her voice, tell her what is true about her across time. [41:33] that they want to know what a voice inside them says if they block out the expectations of Broken Father's society of the audience.

Cave is more modest than Kelly here. He is asking not who he is, but in a roundabout way, who am I in relation to this song, this book, this tour? Is there potential in this song? How can I open it up? What does it want? Those questions are hard, but not as hard as who am I, and can often be solved in a few hours at the desk. And so I guess my question is, is the secret... [42:02] in part to maybe what you were just describing, this good, healthy, kind of productive conversation with ourselves, just to maybe ask questions.

[42:10] simpler questions or to be more specific. [42:15] Well, if I think about my own... [42:17] notebook. I think another shift, I don't remember exactly when that happened, but maybe around the same time, is that I [42:23] shifted a lot of it away from myself. [42:26] Like I used to use my diary to sort of deal with my frustrations and so I still do that for a little bit. But I started to... [42:35] attend outwards. My notebook was filled with reflections about things I wrote, things I saw that my kids were doing, things that happened in nature, conversations that happened.

So I... [42:48] I started a tent out where [42:51] um [42:52] I made a note about that recently where – [42:55] Whereas this, it's almost like [42:58] You can know yourself as an object. And I think that was what Kelly wanted to do. Like, what kind of person am I? [43:05] Who am I? [43:08] Who, like... [43:09] And almost drawing a narrative around yourself as well. [43:12] And that's very complex. Like, I have no idea who I am. Like, that's... Like... [43:18] We're such... [43:20] extremely complicated objects. Even like... [43:24] saying like what is Hamlet or like a short book is very hard, but we're like, [43:30] that times a thousand.

We were going around having different experiences in sports every moment and trying to [43:37] define down what that is, [43:40] It's very hard to have a good understanding of yourself as an object. [43:45] And I think a lot of people try to turn toward that, and that can just be confusing and [43:50] needle greasing and so on. [43:52] But when I try to [43:55] attuned to things outside of me, like to my kids or to a book or to nature. [44:01] uh [44:03] I also have to [44:04] You're in that you're in myself, but I'm connecting to myself as a subject.

Yes. [44:08] I'm going to connect him to myself as like a... [44:11] a person paying attention and like, what am I noticing here? What am I noticing? [44:16] getting frustrated with or what am I [44:19] curious about and all of that is also like information and you can understand that kind of subjectives [44:25] perspective of yourself. And if you look at someone like Rick Rubin or Niccate, they have extreme confidence in their subject. They know themselves as subjects really well. They know the pieces in the circle. They know the debris more so than they are like looking for the boundary shape in a way.

[44:43] Yes, yes, I think those things... Or maybe another way of putting it would be like they're seeing the pixels deeply. They have an incredibly high resolution on the pixels, but they're like less... [44:53] concerned with what the holistic image is. Yes. [44:58] They are on a derivere. They are making... [45:02] Yeah, it's like with someone like Nick Cave, it's not clear at all where he's going. Obviously, music is very important to him as it's been for 40 or 50 years. [45:13] But the way that music evolves and the different kinds of films and books and [45:18] art projects he does along the way, right?

He's making his small ceramic ingredients. All of that is very drifting, very much getting just [45:26] it like, [45:28] If you were trying to understand Nick Cave as an object, let's say you were his management and you were trying to, what is the Nick Cave brand? Yes. You would never go, we should do porcelain figurines of the dead, right? [45:45] I don't know where I'm getting here. I think it's telling that [45:48] The world today is very we are trying to put ourselves into brand shapes, let alone algorithm shaped holes like we are.

We are trying to make ourselves legible. The modern is certainly the Internet is about making yourself legible in a way that is like cohesive enough and small enough. [46:04] and contain enough that it can be like replicated externally. And so, [46:09] I do think it's telling that there's some kind of external pressure to be that way. [46:13] And by the way, maybe less with Nick, but like people love to like, [46:18] draw some guru box around Rick Rubin and then poke fun at it. And I think Rick just doesn't care because he's just like, I like these pixels or I like these little shapes.

[46:28] Yeah, exactly. [46:32] The understanding that people have of Rick from the outside is... [46:35] It's probably very divorced from what he is from the inside. I think they're observing him far more than he's observing himself. Yeah. Yeah. [46:44] Yeah, and also the stereotypes of him, like just being that guru, where he's actually a very, very intellectual person and spends enormous time reading and so on. That's not what I'm very... [46:56] This, I think, relates to a thing that [47:00] Relates to also to what we were talking about at the top, which I would call a broad...

[47:04] thing around being unpredictable. And I think that extends into taking risks and agency and a handful of other things. [47:11] You say, I have such difficulty hearing what I feel when there are strong external reasons to do something. We were speaking about that. And. [47:19] As a result, [47:20] you kind of need to create the space to become more unpredictable. [47:25] You're talking about AI. You say a language model basically analyzes a string of words and completes it by predicting how the text would have continued if it was a sentence on the Internet.

Your job, on the other hand, is to write the least predictable thing that still makes sense. And then you say once you learn the grass is supposed to be green, it becomes almost embarrassing to make it blue, even though real grass is often blue, as good painters learn when they start to pay closer attention to reality. [47:55] sake, which I think the wrong reading of [47:57] "How do I make myself irreplaceable to AI?" You could imagine someone just trying to be chaotic. [48:04] And, [48:05] Thank you. [48:06] using unpredictability as a [48:09] path to getting towards, not sure what the right word is here, like [48:14] where you want to go or to the place that is right or to a place that is ours, maybe something that is true.

[48:22] How do you know... [48:24] How do you know the difference? Whether it be in a stylistic choice in creativity and writing or in a life [48:30] decision choice. I could imagine there would be a... [48:33] a risk of just being unpredictable for its own sake. [48:38] Yeah, I think maybe I'm going to push back on that in terms here. I don't think having as a goal to be unpredictable, I think that is, again – [48:47] playing to the audience like I am trying to fight the AI or something [48:52] I think they're...

[48:54] Again, better to try to orient... [48:57] what is exciting or what is alive. [49:00] and so on. It's made more, what I would say is, is, is, [49:04] what to aim for. I was speaking about when it comes to constraints and unpredictability, [49:10] I was thinking about Young Cage and Lashantier. [49:14] So above [49:17] do very unpredictable work, and we both use... [49:22] constraints a lot in the process. So like... [49:25] Young Cage, he has this piece, I think, where he... [49:28] He's set up a system and then he's using it.

[49:31] Aixin or like sell and dice since I want to like make all the decisions so the music is [49:37] total chaos, right? It's like the timing of the notes, the pictures, everything is like decided. [49:43] through this random system. Yeah. [49:46] I mean, that's a fun experiment, but it's a horror to listen to in my ears. It's like, it can be interesting for a few minutes. It's a hack. It's a hack to... [49:56] Funnily enough, Sian rolls dice to decide to do things in her life. But I don't think she's...

[50:02] She's using it to get to a place of kind of [50:06] openness or derivative or original seeing versus using it as a way to like get to the finished product, which maybe is the difference. Yeah. Yeah. Because yes, it's, [50:15] Exactly. [50:17] Because... [50:18] randomness can produce... [50:20] I'll search off [50:23] It will get you out of the habitual. It will get you to places, combinations you would have never seen before. [50:30] Um... [50:31] But... [50:32] Young Cage, in that at least, he doesn't [50:36] then apply his own taste on it.

[50:39] He just says, okay, so the system has run its work. Now we have random chaos. Here we go. [50:44] And that's one kind of experiment. And then you have... [50:48] I was going to go with Lotion Free, but we could go with Brian Enois maybe closer. He also does [50:54] These things where he has a system, I think, that runs in his house where... [50:59] He has... [51:00] you know, [51:01] 10,000 sonic landscapes that he's made. [51:04] across the years. [51:06] that has never amounted to anything. [51:08] And then his system will pick two at random and play them at the same time in his loudspeaker.

And then he can just push a bottom and it will change it to a different combination. And then he can push another bottom and it saves that combination. [51:21] So he's like exposing himself to a lot of dissonance, but then he's applying his taste like. Now it's a cue. Yeah.