Henrik Karlsson may be the best new writer I know. He has near-superhuman powers of eloquence and perception, and if you aren’t reading his Substack, it’s time to change that.
How does he write? That’s what this interview is all about.
Some highlights:
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.
Almost everybody would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on.
Always, always aim to reach past your current understanding of a topic — to reach the thought behind the thought.
Beware of knowledge shields: These are mental models that are good enough to explain most of what we see, but cause us to ignore everything else, filter out contradictory evidence, and resist deeper explanations of reality.
Many of the greatest mathematicians didn't think in words or symbols; they thought kinetically. They'd feel ideas in their hands and follow the intelligence of their body.
When drawing, the trick is to spend more time looking at the thing you’re trying to describe than actually drawing. The same is true for writing. Look at what you’re describing more than the words you’ve written.
The philosopher Wittgenstein said: “Don’t think, look!”
"I'll go and look at a plant. I could stand and look at that for a long time, just describing what I'm seeing and then correcting it again and again."
The writing is finally good when what you’ve written evokes the same sense of aliveness and truth as the thing you’re trying to describe. Edit your writing until that’s true.
Finding your people is perhaps the biggest perk of writing online, but if you follow conventional writing advice, you will cut the very things that’ll help you find the people you’re looking for.
“I need to let things live in my body for about a year before I can actually turn them into essays.”
This is obvious, but bears repeating: If you write the best thing that’s ever been written about a topic, you’ll receive repeat traffic for years to come. There’s lots of competition for mediocre writing, but very little for any piece that’s 5-10x better than average, which is paradoxically the easier strategy to pursue.
If you insist on making your writing immediately comprehensible, you’ll block yourself off from especially interesting ideas that are right at the edge of language.
"Sometimes I'll lie on the sofa in my writing studio, close my eyes, and put on voice transcription and just talk."
To write is to pin your thoughts to the table so you can examine them.
The real work of becoming a writer is in becoming the kind of person who can think interesting thoughts, and essays are the exhaust from that process of personal growth.
Transcript
Table of Contents
[11:07] Finding the Sequence, Unleashing the Story
[23:14] Writing From Internalized Feeling
[34:38] Writing Honestly Despite Likability Pressures
[44:27] Fear, Confusion, and Puzzles of Wisdom
[55:10] Protecting Early-Stage Ideas from Criticism
[66:10] Writing Curriculum: Inner Journey & Ordeals
[78:30] Obvious Truths and Artistic Expression
David Perell:
Oh, Henrik, you have a blog that's called Escaping Flatland. And you've written so many pieces over the years, some of them gone mega viral to Substack.
By writing those pieces, you've developed this five-step method for writing that I think would be a really good way to start. It's basically a five-step method, anyone can use it. And the very first one, it just begins with exploring. But for you, exploring is something that happens over a long time. So let's start there and we'll go through the five-step method.
Henrik Karlsson:
So a mistake I've often done, which never ends well for me, is that I'll get really excited about an idea and then I just sit down and start typing almost right away. Because there's something that is unmoored. It's not grounded in me yet.
So what I found, as I was going over and I was looking at all of the pieces I've written, some of them I don't like, and some of them I can't believe I wrote those pieces. What did the really good ones have in common? What the really good ones had in common was that I was writing from a deep source of knowledge and experience. These were things that I had read about, often for years, that I had many conversations about. I had maybe worked on these topics, they were alive in me in a very deep sense.
Sometimes that was just accidentally I had lived, but sometimes it was just, I want to understand this, and I get excited about something. But when I get excited about something, I can't write about it. I have to give it a year. So I'll read books.
A year? Yeah, yeah. I mean, at least. It takes time to make something your own and to move past the simplistic way of thinking about things.
So I'll make some notes. I'll go back a few months later and I'll question myself, and I'll change how I word things. I'll see it in a different way, then I'll read a book. I'll go back again, I'll have a conversation, over and over until I have accumulated something that becomes urgent.
At some point, something coalesces into something that is just driving me. I think of that as an animating question. The stakes rise and I feel like this is really important and I need to get this on paper. It's a question that I need answered because it matters to me as a person. It's maybe how could this will help me become a better father or husband or whatever, something that's really alive and important to me. When I get that energy in my body, then I know it's I'm ready and the material is ready to move into writing something.
David Perell:
And does that process happen on its own pretty organically? One day, one moment, you're just like, whoa, there's the animating question. I now need to write about this because it's the animated question and it's the stakes, both of those paired.
Henrik Karlsson:
Because I write professionally now, I feel like I should put out pieces, and I sometimes try to force myself to have an idea, force myself to get excited about something. I can do that, but it's never the same thing.
The best thing is just take the pressure off, follow my curiosity, let it accumulate, and trust the process that it's going to arise, something that just wants to be born through me.
David Perell:
And why is the animating question important? Why can't I just write about a topic?
Henrik Karlsson:
A good piece of writing needs to have drive. It has to have drive, or a narrative tension. It can be done in different ways.
In a novel, it's usually done, someone wants something and is trying to get it, and there's obstacles. That provides momentum. You can do that in essays, too, but usually in essays, the momentum is this is a question, and I really, really need to know the answer of this question. Until I've closed that loop, I won't be happy.
That's what moves you through a text. Unless you're opening those kinds of questions, there's no movement in the text. It's just one thing after another.
David Perell:
So tell me about step two. When do you move from that to then collecting thoughts? Because it feels like what's going on there is you're collecting thoughts, but something different is now happening.
Henrik Karlsson:
In the second phase, once that energy comes into it, then I get a vantage point, and I've accumulated all these notes from books I've read and journal notes. But now I'm seeing the landscape. I'm seeing where I need to go, and then I'll start to pull that into a shape. It's almost like a magnetic field. The question is a magnetic field that is pulling the material in and starting to shape it.
I should move and have these things I need to. These are things I need to answer this question that's driving me, and a structure will start to arise as I move the material around.
How could this story help me go in and understand this more deeply? That argument from Aristotle could be used. I'm starting to see that these things belong together. I usually think of the third step as when these clusters start forming, because on an essay, I like to think of essays as these almost geometrical things. It's like a series of centers. It's a series of units that have to form a strong wholeness, but they're made up of different centers.
You're starting to feel like these things belong together; they are a unity. When I put these three or four things next to each other, something happens between them. So I'm starting to see that these are the units, and if I put them in this order, something comes alive between them.
David Perell:
An essay happens linearly, so then you're ordering the ideas, which is step three. How does that process work? It feels like when you go from the exploratory phase to the ideas snapping together, you begin a process of composing a piece. Is that right?
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah, that's a tricky part, because in my head, as I'm seeing these ideas and images, it all happens at the same time. It's like a net of different images, and they're all interconnected, but I need to figure out which order to put these things so that I produce the right kind of state in the reader.
An essay is about putting the reader in a certain emotional and cognitive state, not just communicating ideas. You have to figure out how to sequence these images and clusters that I've amassed. If I put this story here, that's going to put the reader in a certain emotional state. So when I go in to talk about Aristotle, they're going to be emotionally ready to deal with that in ways of seeing.
David Perell:
It goes something like this. There's this Van Gogh painting, and you say, "What do you think?" You have a series of thoughts.
Then you flip the page, and it says, "That was the last painting that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself."
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah.
David Perell:
Then you look at the same painting again, and now you see that painting completely differently because of the sequence of thoughts.
Henrik Karlsson:
That's a wonderful passage and beautifully sequenced. Sequencing really matters, especially for the types of topics that interest me, because I'm always trying to write from things that are deeply human. I typically don't write about esoteric stuff just to find something clever and new. I want to write about deep, eternal truths, and they can sometimes be almost boring if I just say them right out.
But if I can sequence it in the right way and tell a story, and then say that important insight after the story, that could open something up. Then I might add another insight that's coming from totally left field and turning everything upside down.
It's an improvisational jazz kind of thing where you're trying to assess. It's an emotional experience. When I'm doing it, I'm lying down on the sofa, and I picture these clusters in my head. This cluster has this kind of color and this kind of feeling. If I put it next to that one, there's no energy there. But if I change the order, wow! I feel this energy released in my body. That's the right order; now they snapped into place.
I have this third idea that I want to get in, and I'm moving them around in my head. Because I've written so much, I can visualize them almost as geometrical objects in my head and feel the energy field between them. That sounds almost woo, but that's how it feels.
David Perell:
So basically, we have step one, which is exploring and waiting for the animating question. You begin to find that. Then you really start deliberately collecting thoughts.
Then you're looking, as you're collecting thoughts, you're looking for clusters. Then you begin to order the ideas, and then you begin to write the core. That's step four.
Henrik Karlsson:
Exactly, and then you write through it. Sometimes if I'm really lucky, I can just start writing, and the sequencing happens by itself. But often I need to sit for a long time and just feel in my body how the sequencing should be.
And then once it snaps in place, I can just feel this release of energy in my body. Then I'm like, okay, let's hit the keys here. Let's type this out. And then I usually type really fast. I try to go because now there are stakes. There's emotion going into it, and I want to capture that energy because I know if I feel it in my body, there's going to be momentum in the text. If I'm excited, I'm just going to move through it. And if I can get myself to laugh and cry, that's going to happen for the reader, too. So, at this point, I'm just trying to get through it.
I'm going to have to edit it a lot later, but I want to get that first, follow that gradient of energy at first, and get it to be like a coherent whole thing. I don't want to have it be a patchwork. Sometimes you'll write a little piece here, a little piece there, a little piece there, and then you put it together and it doesn't really cohere. A good piece is a wholeness. It's not separate pieces next to each other.
I find it's easier for me to get into that if I've lived with the material, and then I just let's go through it kind of fast. Sometimes I even transcribe it. I'll lie on the sofa, close my eyes, and I just talk it out, and sometimes I'll do it several times. I'll talk my way through the essay, and then I'll do it again and again until it kind of snaps in place. And then I'll have a piece, and after that's the editing.
[11:07] Finding the Sequence, Unleashing the Story
David Perell:
So that's step five editing.
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah, and an important thing that I almost always do is that I write the beginning and the ending when everything is already done. I don't know if that's generally true for everyone, but for me, if I start writing an opening, and I know this is going to be an opening, I get really pretentious. I get really tense. It's overworked. It takes a lot of work.
I'll sit for two, three hours working on that opening, and then finally I get through it and I can start writing through the piece, and then I reread it.
David Perell:
It doesn't hold.
Henrik Karlsson:
It doesn't hold, so it's not worth it for me to do all that labor to get that opening. Usually, once I've written a piece, the opening is obvious.
When I wrote Looking for Alice, for example, I wrote that way. And then in the middle of the piece, there was just a throwaway line where he said that someone once asked Gertrude Stein if she was a lesbian, and Stein answered, no, I just like Alice. And I was like, wait, if I move that to the first line, that's just going to make the whole essay come together.
So it just arrived in the writing. I didn't have to think of it because once the essay was there, and I could see clearly when it was on paper what it was about, then it was obvious what the opening should be, and I already had it, so I just had to move it up there. Often it's like that, I can just take something and move it to the top once I've understood what the true insight of the piece is.
David Perell:
So tell me this. I want to talk about then how do you actually write well? The thing that you have picked up on that has been a shock to how I think about the craft is to spend less time looking at the page and more time looking at the thing that you're describing.
Henrik Karlsson:
As I said, I started writing on Less Wrong and Reddit, and there's this intellectual thing where you're supposed to have big ideas. I had to unlearn that because I realized I was getting stuck in the ideas. I was getting stuck on the page, and there was nothing there.
The ideas were kind of brittle. My wife, who's very sharp-eyed, would look at them and easily poke holes in them. I realized that I needed to look at real things.
I started writing from case studies, not necessarily that the case studies are in the writing, but every piece I have, I've had three or four case studies, like examples from my life, from my friends' lives, where I'm testing what I'm writing against. It's sort of like a painter doing a still life.
I'm putting something, and then I'm painting, and then I can look at it. Does what I'm saying match reality here?
I want to suck reality into the writing. When I write something, and then I look, reality actually looks a little bit different because what I'm saying here doesn't match. I go back and rewrite, and then I look again. Like a painter, you look, you paint, and you compare. Oh, no, it's not actually like that.
In that way, you're sucking reality in, and reality is much smarter than you are. It's got more nuance, so you don't even have to have it in your head. You can just suck it from reality.
David Perell:
What's the thing that most people get wrong or that you didn't understand?
Henrik Karlsson:
You might start from something like, you have a conversation, you're talking about a problem, and then you write it on the page. Now it's on the page, and you're like, "I really don't like how that sentence sounds, or maybe I should have a metaphor here. Maybe this adjective, or maybe not."
You start moving the words around, and you forget that this is actually trying to represent something.
I'm saying, spend more time looking at the thing. Wittgenstein has this line that says, "Don't think, look."
You don't want to get caught up in your mental models and your representations. You want to always turn to the real thing and look at it.
I actually do like these still life exercises where I'll go and look at a plant over here. I could stand and look at that for a long time, just describing what I'm seeing and then correcting it again and again. It's just an exercise.
It gives a certain humility because I realize, "Oh, it's a white flower." Is it really white? No, it's actually something else going on in the middle. How many leaves are there really?
Once you start going back and forth, you realize, "I didn't really see that flower at all." It can be a quite interesting experience to just take even a flower and write about it, look and write, look and write.
David Perell:
Yeah, I never learned how to draw, but all the time that I spent drawing and trying to paint things, the number one realization I had is I've never actually looked at anything in my life. Literally, I've never actually looked at anything, because when you draw, you just realize the most subtle details.
For example, if a woman is wearing a red dress and walking in the sun, that dress is actually 10,000 shades of red. Then there are all the wrinkles on the dress and the curves of the entire thing. It's so much more than just a red dress. The abstraction that we get in our head is, "Oh, it's a red dress."
As you look and look and look, you're reaching past your current understanding of a thing and trying to dig deeper into something that's truer and higher fidelity.
Henrik Karlsson:
It's such an interesting experience. I was reading the diary of Delacroix, the French painter, yesterday.
It's so interesting to see how he's always going around, both in writing and in painting, looking at things. Every day, he'll say, "Today I went to the stable and looked at the horses." Then, "Today I went to the stable again and looked at the horses."
He's just going around; that's his job. He's going around looking year after year.
It's so interesting to see how he writes about it, because he'll notice things about horses and leaves that I would never notice. It's almost surreal to read his description sometimes. He'll say, "The shadow was yellow."
It sounds almost bizarre, but he's actually seeing the actual color of it, whereas I would just think the shadow is black or something because I haven't looked. He sees that the shadow is yellow in one part and purple in another.
He's actually seeing, and he's just going around all the time writing and painting, and it's incredible to see someone take that practice really seriously.
David Perell:
So tell me about your process. You have an idea, something that you feel moved by, compelled to write about, and then you have this surface-level understanding of what the thing is. You've glanced at it.
How does the process of making your written description of it, how do you make that vivid and concrete?
Henrik Karlsson:
It's a long process for me. I think about something, and I'll make some notes about it. Then maybe a few weeks later, I'll go back and look at those and question myself. I'll often interview myself, like, what do you mean the shadow is yellow? Or whatever. What does that mean? I'm interviewing myself.
David Perell:
Tell me about that.
Henrik Karlsson:
It's this way of pushing past this sort of habitual language. I'll just say things, and then I'll interrogate myself, like, what do I actually mean? Like that question, what do you mean? What does that mean? Do you have an example?
I'll literally write these questions to myself in my notebook in the margin, like, give me three examples. I'm interviewing myself. Once I start, okay, so three examples. I'll start thinking about that, and then, oh, wait, those examples don't actually match what I said there. What's going on there? And then I'll write about that, like, why doesn't it match?
So, this process of actually trying to understand it, and I'll talk to my wife about it. I'll talk to my friends. I'll read books about it. I'm trying to feel my way around until I feel like now I have it fairly well, and I start writing.
Then there is this process again. I'm writing it, and I'm stopping and rereading what I've written. Is that do I really believe that? Is that really true? Can I give a concrete example of that? Can I think of a concrete example of that? Interrogating again.
Hopefully, at this stage, I'm fairly solid, but I also show it to my wife. She'll do the same. It's this process of trying to suck intelligence into the piece. I want the piece to end up smarter than I am, because by doing this, that's the beautiful thing about writing, because you have these artifacts that sit. Let's say in March, I'll write something down, and then in June I'll go back to it. Now I'm it's two Henrik have written on that piece.
David Perell:
Cause you're a different person now.
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah, I'm a different person. I don't even remember all of the considerations that went into the first draft. That's forgotten, but the text remembers them. The text starts to accumulate more than I have and starts accumulating feedback from other people. So the text ends up carrying more wisdom than I have over time.
David Perell:
Can you make concrete for me the idea of sucking in the wisdom, the wisdom of reality? How does that sucking process happen?
Henrik Karlsson:
When I work with my wife as the editor, she's not a normal editor who goes around crossing out a word or something. She'll read a piece, and then she'll say, let's throw that out. But that's interesting. Let's have a conversation about that.
Then we'll start, okay, so what's a concrete example of this? Maybe we'll go get some biographies, and we'll try to match what I said against the biography and look at, does it fit here? Does it not fit? Interviewing and testing it against real data from the real world, like either things I'm looking at from my life, things in my diary, data, biographies, different kind of.
I'm trying to find some kind of data source from reality that I can test my ideas against.
Often some of that ends up in the essay, like, oh, that's a good example. I'm going to use it in the essay, but a lot of it's not even in the essay. It's like this iceberg underneath that the reader doesn't even see.
David Perell:
How do you feel like your writing is different when you're trying to describe an emotion or a sensation, like a Looking for Alice piece versus something more practical and concrete?
Henrik Karlsson:
It's very strange when the reality you're using is your own emotions or your own subconscious or something, but that's harder to talk about. It's just almost entering this kind of dream state.
Sometimes I'll lie on the sofa in my writing studio. I'll just lie down, close my eyes, and put on voice transcription and just talk. I'm feeling the energy in my body, and I'm moving around. I think that gets easier with time as well. Writing used to be words on a page for me, and now I've done it so much that it's become internalized.
I can visualize a piece as these force fields of energy, almost like I can feel the energy of pieces. I'm moving around and feeling where I get excited. Then I can either talk it out or type it down. If I feel the feeling really deeply and write it rapidly when I'm in the feeling, that somehow seems to come across to the reader. It's hard for me to tell if it's there, but it seems to work.
[23:14] Writing From Internalized Feeling
David Perell:
I totally know what you mean, and I think you're capturing something deeply. So I'll explain what I've learned through podcasts. I used to think of what one of these podcasts was, I would sit down and I'd say, "Dear Henrik Karlsson:, I want you to give me the most concrete and vivid teaching description of exactly how I write." It was almost as if I was optimizing for the transcript and the takeaways—what are the six things that a listener could learn?
Then, over time, I started thinking, what is a conversation like this? A lot of it is an exchange of energy. Our energy gets shared with whoever's listening or watching or tuning in, right? I think it's the same thing that's true in writing. So many of my favorite writers, it's not like there's this logical perfection that they're giving me.
Wow, the framework is perfectly packaged. It's actually just, I feel like I step into some sort of energy field that they have, whatever it is, and I really enjoy being in it. Maybe it inspires awe and wonder. Maybe I just feel like there's a kindness about them that I find very sweet and endearing, whatever it is. That's a bit of what I'm hearing you say, is to trust that deeper level of language that we can feel but is harder to pin down into language.
Henrik Karlsson:
There's almost, at least in the intellectual part of the Internet, sometimes even some shame around that, like it's soft in some way. At least for me, it felt almost hard.
I remember I wrote a piece called "Looking for Alice" about how I met my wife, and I didn't even intend to publish that. I published it because it leaked because it felt like I can't write emotional, soft stuff like that. It's not how you're supposed to do it. Maybe that's just me, but it was almost embarrassing to go down so deep into an emotion.
It's interesting with that piece, too, what you're saying, because I remember at the time it was my first big hit that I wrote, and I thought it was because it has such good advice in it. Now it's been two and a half years, and I reread it. At least half of this advice is kind of shady and maybe not good. Half of it, I think, is pretty good, but half of it is maybe not so good.
What makes this piece work is actually instead that you can feel how much I love my wife. Maybe a lot of people haven't seen a man express very deeply love for his wife. That's really beautiful, but I didn't even know that was what I was doing. I was trying to give some advice to a friend. I wrote a piece as advice to a friend. He leaked it, and I thought, "Oh, it's such good advice. That's why people like it." No, it's because I let the emotion through. Sometimes you don't even know why your writing works.
David Perell:
Why do you feel compelled to write?
Henrik Karlsson:
The thing I like to tell myself is that it makes me feel more alive.
Yeah, but it's bringing the world into me. I'm reading a book and it's interesting, but unless I stop and actually write about it and put my own words to it, I'm not going to make it into my body and become part of my, I'm not going to be transformed by it. I want to be changed by life. I want to grow and change all the time. I want to be affected by life.
Somehow, by writing, I can lower the barrier and let more of reality in and be more changed by it. I think that's the main drive for me now. Obviously, when I was younger, I wanted status and all of these things, so there's a complex set of reasons.
But the thing that sustains me is how transformative it is to really give yourself time to sit with something and turn it over and turn it over and put your own words to it. Even after thirty hours, I'll realize this is the entirely wrong way of thinking about it, and then it will just snap around and I'll change my opinion and do something completely different.
From that on, my life is changed. I'm never going to think about that in the same way. It's almost like I'm cleaning my head and putting things in order.
David Perell:
Tell me about that sensation. Cleaning. Putting things in order.
Henrik Karlsson:
So my wife has a way of cleaning, which I don't really understand. She'll start by kind of, oh, this needs to be moved to the garage, and this needs to be moved. She'll bring everything out and it just gets worse and worse. She's moving out the sofa and I only need to vacuum under here and it just gets worse and worse.
That's the way she cleans.
That's the way I write, too. I'll start with a simple idea, and then I'm like, wait, I don't know if that assumption is true. Now I'm a little confused and maybe I should bring in another example and why that example doesn't fit at all. I get more and more confused. It's just really weird.
Then we'll talk about it, and this doesn't make sense. I thought I knew how this worked, and I don't understand it at all anymore. Wait a minute. It actually snaps. It compresses down into another simple formulation, which is different. I have to go through the confusion to get to the simpler thing.
I used to struggle with that because I used to feel like this is just getting worse. But then I remember talking to a mentor about it, and he's like, no, no, you're halfway there. You're supposed to ride through the confusion. You'll start with something simple. You get more and more confused, and just trust it. Eventually it will collapse down into simplicity again, but you have to ride through it.
David Perell:
How do you think about introductions? Specifically, there's a kind of bar lowering that you've embraced in terms of making lesser and lesser promises at the beginning of the piece, which then give you a kind of permission to almost explore more freely as you write the piece.
Henrik Karlsson:
I like both kinds of pieces. I like the big sort of canonical piece where you have a bold promise. I have a piece called "Childhood of Exceptional People," where I make a really bold promise. I say I've read 40 books about the childhoods of various people who have gone on to do exceptional work, and I'm going to catalog the main patterns they all share. That's a really bold, big promise. I like a piece like that, but they're also incredibly painful to write.
The problem when you make a really bold, big promise like that is that you have to deliver on it, and then it becomes almost slave work. I'll start writing a piece like that, and I've written three parts, and I look at it and feel I've not actually done what I promised to do. This is not still done. I need to do another one. It's not done yet either. I have to force myself to deliver on the promise, and there can be a sort of strained feeling to a piece like that. It's like you're doing the labor, and sometimes it's worth it.
I really like another kind of piece where I start with an almost silly observation. I had a recent piece which just starts with the observation, almost all my favorite books were not meant to be published. It's an interesting observation. Why is that the case? I don't know myself. It's not like a big promise. You're not like, oh, now this is the big piece about why Henrik does.
David Perell:
You're just puzzled by this question.
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah, the only thing I promise is I'm going to think a little bit about why I like unpublished books. That's everything I promised. Then I can start going, okay, where do I want to go? Oh, this is interesting. Oh, wait, that's even more interesting.
Then I can move through the landscape more freely, and there's a playfulness and energy to that. Often I end up going to some really interesting places. In that piece, I go into some problems with education, cognition, and all these different areas and quite big topics, quite interesting observations, but I didn't promise it. So when you get to those topics, it feels like over delivering. They're much more fun to write.
David Perell:
The thing that comes to mind is that people's actual thoughts are more detailed, more alive, more true than often what they'll say out loud. I dug up this David Perell: perell Foster Wallace quote where he says, at some point, you find that 90% of the stuff you're writing is motivated and informed by an overwhelming need to be liked. This results in bad fiction.
Not everyone is at 90%, but at some level, there's this feeling of I'm writing in order to convey something other than just the pure and honest truth.
Henrik Karlsson:
That's why it can be so refreshing to read unpublished works, things that people didn't know others would read.
David Perell:
More honest.
Henrik Karlsson:
When I write, I try to be honest; I try to just write the simple truth. But there's a difference of I'm trying. When I'm writing in my journal, I'm not even trying; it's just easy.
Even if you succeed, you kind of have to push through those incentives that are pushing you to be likable. There are all these forces, and that kind of saps some energy from the writing. When I'm writing, I'll notice, wait a minute. I just wrote that because it's cute. I wrote that because I know people think I'm cute and likable, and then I have to stop and scratch that out and go on. There I just lost some momentum, some energy.
Even if you want to write truly, it's hard to do it when you know it will be seen. I try to find various ways of shielding myself from that influence. I spend at least half of my days with no Internet connection on. I do a lot of my writing while walking up and down the road. I'm writing on paper or dictating. I'm trying to put myself in situations where I don't remember that anyone would read it. I have to do all of these hacks to silence that so I don't have to fight against it.
I do not always succeed because it's so deep in us, that need to be liked. Even the need to be comprehensible can even be a problem sometimes, feeling like I need people to understand what I'm saying here. Sometimes the really interesting things you don't really even know how to express. It's right at the edge of language. If you want to be understandable, you'll drop that. I want to be able to stay with the really fragile thoughts too.
David Perell:
How do you think about the rhythm of your writing now and editing?
[34:38] Writing Honestly Despite Likability Pressures
Henrik Karlsson:
It's so important. I really don't like it when I've written a piece and then I have to take some pieces out and move things. The rhythm is off.
David Perell:
Awful feeling.
Henrik Karlsson:
And then I just have to write it through again. It's hard to say what it is, but it's just this energy in your body. I feel like here I want it to be like water and flow. Now it's been flowing for a bit, so now I want a short sentence and snap.
It's both the rhythm and what kind of images. I think a lot about it like it's playing chords. If I'm writing something that's very intellectual, I think it's quite nice to maybe add something about the form, like bring in a different chord. I really like the juxtaposition of different colors. That's something I think a lot about, how to bring elements that seemingly don't work together and bring them together. So it's rhythm, it's mixing different elements. It's all part of just listening with the full body and how does this feel.
David Perell:
Tell me about learning to pay close attention to your thoughts, to your feelings. How do you cultivate that feeling?
Henrik Karlsson:
It takes time. You can't just write and then read it rapidly. You have to actually just sit there and maybe close your eyes and just be silent for 5 minutes, 10 minutes maybe. Sometimes I write a piece when I'm out walking. I'll just walk and I'll get a rhythm in my body and I'll just listen to it until I feel, now it's ready. Right now, there's that word that wants to come out.
It's very hard to talk about, but it's just trusting that if you sit, you don't have to labor your way through it. It's tempting to just sit there and fix things and move things around, but it's okay to stop sometimes and just sit with it or just let it. If you've been with it for a long time, maybe just let it simmer in your subconscious for a day or two. There are various ways of slowing down.
David Perell:
How do you get better at finding interesting ideas?
Henrik Karlsson:
A really good idea is to have good friends that are interesting because conversations are, and that gets back to what I was saying in the beginning. It's gotten so much easier with time because I'll write a piece now where I have maybe a first rough sense of an idea. Then I'll get like five, six, seven emails from interesting people and I'll talk. Oh, you should read this book and I'll read that. Then we'll jump on a zoom call and talk about it.
There's something in this kind of playful back and forth with other people where I often surprise myself. Reading odd books, books that are kind of off the beaten path are usually good because good ideas often come from this collision between different areas. I'm really nerdy in machine learning, for example, and I find that to be because I'm a literary guy, it's interesting to go to a very different field, to go into machine learning or mathematics and pull ideas from there and crash that into poetry or something else. These strange connections often generate ideas. By reading widely and in strange directions usually sparks a lot of ideas for me.
Patience, patience all the time. Just allowing the head some space, just like going for a four hour walk, having a lot of good conversations, writing in my journal, reading some books and then just going for a long walk and just seeing all of those things slowly collide and merge in my subconscious until something just like, wow, that's a good idea. After a while, I've felt like I'm almost constructing my life around how can I have more of those experiences. Not having Internet on and spending more time talking with certain people, trying to shape a life that enables this kind of left field thinking.
David Perell:
It seems like a big part of shaping that life too is just giving up so much so that you can really focus on the thing that you value, giving up things in music, in programming, in in person connection so that you can really just focus on family and writing. Those seem to really just be the two things, right?
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah.
David Perell:
If you're going to be really successful at something, you need a good theory for what you're going to give up and not do.
Henrik Karlsson:
My experience in life is that things get better the deeper you go, because there's more and more richness. I've been with my wife for 12 years, and we've spent so much time talking. We were like 10,000 hours into our conversation now, and it just gets better and better.
It's really fun to talk to you here, but I'd love to know where we would be 5,000 hours from now because I bet that would be even better and more interesting. That's my experience: whenever I stay longer, go deeper on a craft, on a relationship.
Once I had that realization, maybe at 25 or something, I realized that if I want to be able to do that, I need to say no to a lot of things, because either I spread myself thin or I go deep, and I want to go deep. So I decided to focus really hard on my family and my wife.
After some soul-searching, I figured that writing is the thing that just gets to the deepest place in me, so I put music mostly to the side, I put programming mostly to the side, and just decided to go really deep. It takes some courage to let go of those things, because you look weird when you do that.
It's really easy to sacrifice the wrong thing, because you haven't sat with yourself and figured out what's the hierarchy of values in your life. When I say hierarchy of values, of course now we finally have a car. It's really nice to have a car when you have kids and drive them around.
At an earlier point, when I had to decide, should I write or have a car, then I picked write. Now I don't have to make that choice; now I have a car and I write. But what's the hierarchy here?
It's very easy to be confused about the hierarchy and end up putting things in the wrong order and sacrificing the thing that really makes you alive. I guess that's one of the good things about writing, because writing is the practice of sitting down with things. It probably helped me figure out my ranking of things by actually writing about it. What do I actually care about? Where do I feel alive? What am I willing to compromise on, and where are my strict ethical boundaries?
David Perell:
When you talk about the work of writing, we've spoken about paying attention, looking. But then there's the other part of it, of figuring out what something is asking of you. What do you mean by that?
Henrik Karlsson:
I always try to write from a deep personal need. I never pick a topic because I think people are going to like this. I always bring it from a deep personal need: How could I become a better father? How could I think about feeling overwhelmed recently?
I'm starting from something that if I could get clarity on, it would improve my life or let me serve my loved ones better. The writing that I want to do is asking me to become a better person. I feel something almost scary that I have to confront; I have to grow and change. The writing is like the hero's journey, going down into the cave.
At least with all my big, good pieces, it's like I'm going down the cave. There's some fear I have to go down because I need to confront this. There's something holding me back from experiencing things more deeply or being more present with my wife, and there's something here that I don't understand. I need to go down.
David Perell:
Is a puzzle the right word, or is it something else? A puzzle compulsion? How do you describe that?
Henrik Karlsson:
It could be a puzzle, but also a need. Sometimes the answer is obvious, but I need to sit with it to let go of the fear. It's like that with a lot of wisdom.
You know what to do already, but you're afraid for some reason, or you're confused. Sometimes it's a puzzle, like, how should I get all these things to fit together? Sometimes it's time to confront that fear and get clarity so I can shoulder my responsibilities better.
[44:27] Fear, Confusion, and Puzzles of Wisdom
David Perell:
When you're doing that and you're trying to create language and describe whatever it is that you're trying to describe, how do you feel like Danish is different as a language from English?
Henrik Karlsson:
I speak Danish and Swedish.
David Perell:
Are Danish and Swedish pretty similar?
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah, they're about 70% the same, and English is more like 20% the same.
David Perell:
Okay.
Henrik Karlsson:
One thing I miss when I write in English is that English grammar is much stricter, and word order matters a lot more. You have to put things in a precise order in English.
In Swedish, it feels like I can just move the words around in whatever order I want. So I might say, "The boy held the ball that had been thrown through the window." I could also say, "The boy held the through the window thrown ball."
I can change the order in almost whatever way I want. It's much freer.
I remember when I wrote in Swedish, I really loved doing that, like, "Oh, I don't want to have this word here. I'm just gonna move it over here." I could just move things around, like on a scale.
I want the rhythm to be more like this, so I'm going to move the words. But in English, I can't. If I move it here, it's ungrammatical. If I move it there, it's ungrammatical.
David Perell:
I think we should all be way crazier with grammar.
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah.
David Perell:
Especially in the LLM age.
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah.
David Perell:
Because LLMs are just another force for standardization.
Henrik Karlsson:
One of the things I often think about is if English is poised to become the global language, we should make an effort to bring in all the weird innovations from all the other languages. Bring in the weird grammar from Turkish and the cool words from Persian. Everything should come in.
We should allow ourselves to be wilder, but it's hard to do. I could bring in things from Swedish, but whenever I do, it looks like I'm wrong, and you look stupid when you do it. It's a hard thing to do because you don't want to be ungrammatical because that looks stupid.
David Perell:
Are you excited about what LLMs are doing to writing, or are you annoyed by it? Do you use LLMs in your writing?
Henrik Karlsson:
Very little of what I put in the essays has been touched by LLMs. I might do things like, because I'm a second language speaker, I don't know English all that well. So sometimes I'll describe a word and then it'll give me the word because I don't know the word. Or I'll ask it, "Is this grammatical?" I'll do things like that to help me talk English.
Sometimes I'm not happy with the way something is phrased, and I'll be like, "Give me 10 versions of this with different words," to just get me out of my head and see different possibilities. That's basically the only time I actually end up putting something into them, maybe like 1% of my words.
I do really love using them and playing around. I'm really nerdy with LLMs and have been a power user of LLMs since at least a year before ChatGPT. I find them incredibly interesting.
I've been somewhat underwhelmed in what they've delivered so far. It feels like they should be able to do something really interesting, and I haven't seen it yet. I've seen some interesting images being made, and I've seen some interesting music being made, but I've not yet seen any good literature be made. It feels like we should be able to do that.
But they are incredible tools for things like research. They're starting to get to the point where they can do some basic editing. I have a prompt where I ask it to go through, "These are some words that I overuse. Can you point out when I use them? These are other things that I want to think about," just to help it remind me.
So I don't have to keep all of the things I should look out for in my head. I can just store some of my bad habits in a prompt and ask it to look through my essay to see if I'm doing the bad habits.
David Perell:
There's one version of writing, which is you're writing to give an answer. You're saying, "Here's how you find an interesting partner or the right partner for you." Whereas the other one is, "How do you do that?" And it's more exploratory.
I don't know if you have strong thoughts on this.
Henrik Karlsson:
I've definitely been trying to move toward a second kind where there's a kind of reflective, vulnerable, searching through the space. I don't have the answers.
I find that type of writing to be much more invigorating to read. I also find that there's something really interesting about seeing another person grapple with something. I've learned so much by reading some of my favorite writers and just seeing them grapple in real time. They'll start somewhere, and then they'll realize they're going down a dead end, but they'll leave that in and say, "Wait a minute, I'm wrong here. I'm confused. I feel…"
David Perell:
I love it when writers do that. They kind of keep it in, and they almost like, "We gotta turn the car back and go back down the road. Okay, that one didn't work. Okay, here we go over here."
There's something about it that feels very sincere. This is the problem with editing. Sometimes people edit that stuff out. And there's a certain kind of writing when you're writing to answer a question that you're asking. We can kind of go on the process of exploration and discovery with you.
David Perell:
By definition, that process has a lot of fits and starts. You don't want to keep all of them in, but you do want to simulate the process of discovery for your reader.
When you do that, it's sort of like, "Hey, come here, come here, come here. Hold my hand. I'm going to show you this, and we're going to go trace the steps of my discovery." It's intimate.
Henrik Karlsson:
It's almost like two different mental states. When I write as I've been moving more and more toward trusting the reader, being more, reflecting honestly and deeply, and allowing dead ends to hang in there, I've had to almost move to a different part of my body to write in that way.
That's very vague. It's hard to say what it is, but I have to go to some place where I relax a little bit, where I let go. I'm not afraid.
A lot of trying to be smart and trying to go straight to the point is a fear of looking stupid for me, where people are going to get bored.
David Perell:
It's funny that you talk about this fear of looking stupid, because I have that too. I rarely read writing and think, "Oh, that person looks dumb." I'll sometimes say, "Oh, that's a ridiculous take." It's actually just the take itself that I think is stupid.
It's rarely the lack of polish that makes me think that person is stupid. Actually, I often find that the lack of polish is quite endearing to me. But then I sometimes get at the keyboard, and then I'm like, "Oh, I need to look so smart and all buttoned up."
Henrik Karlsson:
I'm super forgiving. People can be almost monsters. Like some of the things that Karl Ove Knausgård does in his books, I'm like, "You shouldn't have done that." But when I read it, that's okay. I'll keep reading.
I don't even judge when he does really stupid things, but then I'll judge myself for something banal in comparison.
David Perell:
Tell me about the fragility of young ideas.
David Perell:
There's this beautiful line where Jony Ive is speaking at Steve Jobs' funeral. In his beautifully eloquent voice, he says that the thing that Steve Jobs understood better than anybody else is that young ideas are so fragile. He starts referring to them almost like a little bird, so precious.
David Perell:
There's definitely room for critique in the writing process, but when critique comes too early, it squishes the ideas. That's what Johnny says, that ideas are so easily squished. You have to honor them early on.
Henrik Karlsson:
You have to shield them, right? Often the thing that kills ideas are social expectations. Some of my best ideas, when they come to me, they're almost nothing. It could be just a color or something.
If I were to come to you, I'll call you David Perell: perell. I have such a good idea. I want to write an essay that's going to be like, has a feeling that it's pink. You're like, what are you talking about? But that might end up being really good because maybe I'll sit with that feeling pink or what does that, whatever. And that might lead to a really good essay.
But if I tell it to you, you'll be like, that's not even an idea. Pink? And if once you say that, it's going to be really hard for me to be excited about that idea after you've told me it's stupid.
So I find that I need to give ideas space to live, like in my diary or in my head as I go on long walks, and just trust that this is going to grow into something. I was talking about these dream images, especially with poetry, but also with essays. It's often like a small image, and you just David Perell: perell Lynch has this wonderful thing where he talks about when he comes up with his films. He gets these fragments of images, and then he'll put them on a hook and lower them down into his subconscious. You just have to trust that process, because if you show that first piece, that's nothing.
[55:10] Protecting Early-Stage Ideas from Criticism
David Perell:
Would you say that it's like turning a net into a line?
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah.
David Perell:
What does that mean?
Henrik Karlsson:
Ideas in our head, feelings, images are not linear. If you are thinking about where you grew up, you're not seeing that as a story. "Oh, I grew up on this street." It's not one thing after the other; it's everything at the same time. There's maybe the smell of your room, and then things you did. These things are superimposed. In the subconscious, it's like everything at the same time. It's like a net, a network. It's like nodes connected.
When you're writing, you have to make a really tricky transition because you're going to take this thing that is like a cloud or a net or a network in your head, and then you're going to turn it into a string, a line, because writing is one word after the other, and that's very different.
If you do really well, once you read it, it expands back into this net in your head, because good writing is not just what is on the page. It starts these reactions in you, and it sets off thoughts and emotions, this cloud of associations in you. That step to go through that, making it linear, is really hard.
You could imagine it almost like, sometimes the process I do is that I'll literally make a cloud. I'll write notes and link them together. I use Obsidian, so I'll write 50 different notes, and there are links between them, and I don't know which is the start and which is the end. I'm just getting everything down, the whole network of ideas.
When I write, I have to decide, okay, I'm going to start there and move through this link here and try to find a path through this network, which is how can I find a good path through this thing that's actually like a spider web? Which thread should I walk on? Because I want to walk across the spider net on the web in such a way that I hit all the most important points so you get the feeling for the whole net. But I can't give you the whole net; I can only give you one walk across the net. What's the right walk to do justice to the full net and make that come alive inside of you?
David Perell:
What's the role of mystery in your writing and thinking process?
Henrik Karlsson:
Mystery. Werner Herzog has this wonderful way of talking about it. He says that you want to have ecstatic truth, not an account, static truth.
He says too many documentary filmmakers just want to capture the truth like an accountant. He says sometimes you might have to frame things and maybe invent a little bit. You can argue the ethics of inventing things in documentaries or whatever. He's saying that by inventing a little bit and adding things, sometimes he'll add a fake Pascal quote. It's not Pascal. He wrote it himself, but he says it's Pascal. When you see it's Pascal, it's this old quote, and that elevates it so you're ready to hear what's said. He's playing on these emotional things.
Sometimes he has a documentary called Little Dieter Needs to Fly. It's about this guy who was captured in Vietnam and had to run through the jungle for months. It's an incredible story.
In the documentary, you follow him to his house, and he gets to the door, and he opens and closes the door again and again. He says most people take this for granted. But for me, opening and closing a door is a big thing because I've been in prison camps. This is such a big thing. It's a very strange moment, and it's very affecting because you feel, wow, being able to walk out of your house is a privilege. It is a deep emotional moment there. But it's nonsense. He doesn't actually do that. That's Werner Herzog. It's totally fake. It's a documentary, but he doesn't do that in real life. Herzog says maybe you should open and close the door because that's going to create this resonance in the movie. That's going to make people more able to see the deeper truth of the idea here.
I usually don't invent stuff in my writing, but I like to add these colors in a way to set up a certain emotional color, so that when the idea comes, it hits you in a different way.
David Perell:
I can't believe how much synesthesia is in the way that you talk about writing. So much has been in color and in
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah, in sound.
David Perell:
I see it. I feel it in your writing.
Henrik Karlsson:
I read a book called the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field by a mathematician called Hadamard. Incredible book. It was written maybe early 1900s. He made an observation that the greatest mathematicians do not think in words or symbols. They think kinetically. They feel it in their hands. They feel energy fields in their body.
It's only once they are fairly far along in solving a mathematical problem that they actually write it down because it's too clumsy to work with words. It's much faster to move with these intuitions in your body.
I was like, wow, that's so strange. I wonder if I can write an essay without words. That was hard. So I lay down and closed my eyes and lay for half an hour. I'm not going to say a single word in my head. I'm going to try to keep my voice out and see if I can just feel the emotional currents of the piece. It took some practice, but those are just weird things you have to do.
David Perell:
What other weird things have you done?
Henrik Karlsson:
I'm always playing around with things. What happens? How does my writing change if I write by hand, if I walk as I write, if I listen to this music or that music, or if I write really early in the morning or really late at night? I'm trying different things all the time and running some experiments on myself to get a feel for how it affects me.
David Perell:
What you're making me want to try is if you ever do assisted MDMA therapy, you'll wear these big headphones, and you'll listen to some beautiful nature sounds or sort of like tribal, fluty music. You have this eye mask, and you lie down, and you're making me just want to do this.
What's fun is if you really have good noise canceling headphones, you actually can't even hear yourself talking. So, what would it be like to talk out a piece, but you can't even hear yourself talking? I don't know what would emerge from that. I kind of want to try that.
Henrik Karlsson:
It'd be fun to do things like that. I'm doing things like that all the time. I'm not so much with MDMA, but.
David Perell:
I'm not saying you need to be on MDMA. Speaking out a piece is one thing. That's a great trick, but I've never thought about speaking in a way where I can't even hear myself speaking. And then who knows? You almost enter a dreamlike state, sort of like what Salvador Dali would do when he was painting. He would enter a kind of dreamlike state.
I don't know if it's apocryphal, but he'd have an apple. Then the apple would fall, he'd hear it, he'd wake up, and right in the second of waking up, what are the ideas that emerge?
Henrik Karlsson:
My two favorite pieces I've written this year, one was called "Sometimes the reason you can't find the people you like is because you misread the people you know," or something like that. It's about my best friend.
David Perell:
Your best friend?
Henrik Karlsson:
The way I wrote that piece was when I was into exploring how my cognition works as I write. I just lay down on my sofa and thought, "Let's just think about my friend." I had no idea for the piece. I was just going to think about my friend.
I lay down, closed my eyes, and started talking aloud, almost like a psychotherapy session. A lot of writing feels like psychotherapy in a way. I was just walking through my thoughts and feelings, thinking about what I felt about him associating. I talked for a long time, a lot more material than in the essay.
At some point, I felt this energy, like there was something. I felt like a border around something, a section of what I was saying that felt like "this feels like a thing." Because sometimes something feels like a thing. It's hard to explain, but you know what I mean. I was saying a lot of things, but I felt like if I cut away everything else and just keep that part, that's actually a thing.
David Perell:
If you were to teach a class on writing, how would you structure the curriculum? You got a whole semester. What are the core things, the core lessons that you would impart on people?
Henrik Karlsson:
Becoming a person who writes well, it's not a skill set. It's deeper than that. It's becoming a certain type of person and being connected to yourself and so on.
Werner Herzog, when he did his film school, said that to apply, you have to walk from Madrid to Kiev by foot. He didn't actually do that, but it was a joke. I think that's a pretty good idea because you have to do some kind of ordeal to shed a lot of everyday mentality.
We have all these social expectations, and just going out there and being alone on a long walk or doing something really hard, going to war, whatever, is sometimes needed. If you have that, if you have a perspective and groundedness in yourself, then figuring out the stuff with adverbs and all that is kind of easy. The hard thing is having a connection to your lived experience and a certain boldness in pursuing that and not caring too much.
[66:10] Writing Curriculum: Inner Journey & Ordeals
David Perell:
How much do you feel like your ability to write well is limited by boldness and courage?
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah, that's probably always the biggest bottleneck. Always.
I often try to tell myself it's some other thing because it's really painful to work on boldness; it's error-scary. I often tell myself, I need to get better at coming up with metaphors, or I need to get better at openings or whatever. But that's usually an excuse, because if I can go deeper, that's usually the better place.
When writing became a serious practice for me, there were some moments in my life where I can see that the realness of the writing has been dialed up. The first was when I was 15 and a friend of mine committed suicide.
That just blew me wide open, and the way I reacted to that was by writing music. Before that, I'd been a kid playing around. But when that happened, I just felt I need to write. I started writing music, and then that evolved into poetry and evolved into essays, and it was because it came from such a raw place.
Once you realize you could as well be dead, it doesn't matter. It became so real; it helped strip away a lot of the nonsense because you could as well be dead.
The second point where it deepened in a substantial way was when I was 21 or 22. I went to Bolivia, and I went up into the mountains. I was staying three weeks in this village with some Aymara Indians. We didn't speak the same language. They would play some ABBA music for me. Sweden, you know, like "Dancing Queen."
They love that stuff; they're obsessed about ABBA. I had no one to talk to for three weeks up in these really arid mountains.
When I was there, I got a notebook that someone had made, a homemade notebook, and I started writing and just obsessively writing. Before that, writing had been still sort of playful. I'd been making music and making some poems, but then it was just something flooded through me. I think that was because I was alone. There were no expectations. Every role I was supposed to play at home, how I was supposed to feel, all of that fell away.
When there was nothing left, the thing that bubbled up to the surface was that I needed to write, and that writing... If you do that for three weeks, if you sit alone in a mountain and write for three weeks, you're going to be a little crazy afterwards because you're going to go to different parts of yourself, and you're going to train different parts of your brain, almost like short new paths in your head. When I came back, I couldn't ever really get back into fold because I'd seen another thing. There are these moments where it deepens.
I think loneliness is an important thing.
David Perell:
I asked you earlier about mystery, but the word that you use is loving curiosity and cultivating that sense.
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah. I think you need to sort of trust the world.
David Perell:
Trust the world?
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah. If you can get to the place where you feel like I'm really curious and in a very warm way, like I'm not looking at this puzzle because I want to win. I'm not going to prove to others how smart I am. I'm just like, what's going on here?
David Perell:
It's like making yourself porous.
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah.
David Perell:
The thing about porousness is there are just holes and anything can get in, including bacteria, virus, whatever it is. Also, when you're porous, something can move you. You're giving reality an invitation to get in the front seat of the car, and you're kind of in the passenger seat now saying, all right, I'll go with you.
Henrik Karlsson:
Yeah, exactly. It's this strange combination of being very porous and very firm at the same time.
David Perell:
What do you mean by firm?
Henrik Karlsson:
You have to have a really bold conviction in your values. This is almost paradoxical. You see that with great poets or great artists of any kind. They're very open to the world, but they're also not going to let the world dictate who they are and where they're going. It's very easy to be very loving and just inviting everything in and being agreeable, but that's not what we're talking about.
There's this other strange combination of mental states where you're giving this. You're Christian, so I think Jesus had a lot of that because he was seeing everyone. He was very loving, but he's also very firm. He knows what he stands for. That combination is a very odd combination.
I think that's probably why Jesus is such an interesting archetype, one of many reasons, but he embodies this very complex set of characteristics that makes him into an interesting character to meditate on because he's combining these traits.
David Perell:
People always say, "Oh, Jesus, such a sweet, loving guy." But have you read the Gospels? Of course, he has that, but Jesus goes hard, "You brood of vipers!" There's a tension. It's neither this thing nor that thing. It's the two of them in harmony that it really comes together.
Even in music, it's not a chord that's beautiful. It's a chord progression that's beautiful. It's not a word that's beautiful. It's words together that's beautiful. That's the art. That's what's so beautiful about life. It isn't just like you do this one thing and then it all works out. I wouldn't even say that it's necessarily the golden mean. I'd say it's the pairing of things together.
One time I was in a desert, and I had some dark chocolate on a hot May day in the Texas desert. Sweltering heat. I'm sweating. The dark chocolate made my mouth so dry that I wanted to hit the eject button on life. Someone handed me an orange slice, and I put the orange slice in my mouth, and I was like, "Wow!" The orange slice is so much better as a reaction to the chocolate.
Earlier, you were talking about how in your more intellectual pieces, you'll often write about the farm. That's exactly what you're saying. The farm is the orange slice.
Henrik Karlsson:
It's the sequencing of things that produces. That's what ritual does too. You'll sequence things in such a way that it produces some deep state or deep insight. I haven't read the Bible much, so you're probably much better at this than I am.
It's interesting to think about the New Testament as an essay. It's trying to convey certain truths, but it's using parable. Some of the things are written out literally word by word, but it's framed in stories. It's really trying to construct. The idea trying to be sent over to the reader or the believer is very complex. It's a very complex set of ideas.
How do you compress it down? It's a fairly long book, but it's still a short book for the set of ideas it's trying to commit. They found this really powerful way of combining poetry and images and straight truth in a sequencing that will produce an effect in the reader. Then, of course, there's the whole community around it and how you read it and the structure.
When it comes to these really deep truths about how to live, you can't just say them. They're not like physics. You can just write it down. You have to construct some kind of experience.
David Perell:
David Perell: perell White, the poet, has a line where he tries to define poetry. He says that his definition of poetry is language for which we have no defenses.
What does that mean? It means that with certain kinds of writing, we know how to deal with it; it can't overwhelm us. Then every now and then, you'll read something or hear something that just strikes you. It just takes you back; it's the same thing in music.
So what's going on there? Something about the sequencing of the ideas, the way a story is told, the way a sentence is written, it somehow pierces into the core of who you are and touches something. When we have a visceral resonance with something, that's what's going on. Poetry is language for which we have no defenses.
Henrik Karlsson:
The way you do that connects to the subconscious. Artists are really good at tapping into subconscious or deep emotional states, capturing that strange thing, and finding some combination of words that produces that effect.
The most interesting, the most alive ideas are, in some ways, truisms, in some ways, obvious. I like to write about ideas that are kind of obvious because deep truths are somewhat obvious. You should try to be a good father; you should be kind; you should honor your commitments. These are kind of obvious.
If I wrote a post that said, "You should be kind," that wouldn't work. Something that often happens is that people don't write about these obvious things because they sound boring, so they end up saying something smart instead. But it's not as important as the boring thing.
The boring thing needs to pierce through to your heart. So when you write about the boring things or the obvious things, you have to really construct those complex, piercing, poetical ways to make that thing alive in you. You might know it, but you have to make it real inside of you. That's the kind of writing I'm going for.
[78:30] Obvious Truths and Artistic Expression
David Perell:
You can feel as a writer if you're doing that. When you say to someone, "Hey, what are you writing about?" it can feel trite, but somehow the way that you're writing about it just feels so alive.
That's a story that now makes it feel fresh and vivid. If there's no surprise or excitement for you as the writer, then there's no surprise and excitement for the reader.
Henrik Karlsson:
I want to laugh and cry and be elated when I write.
David Perell:
My friend Paul Millard said that he wrote his memoir by just going on a walk until he started crying. Basically, "The Pathless Path" is a collection of things that I kind of just wrote in tears.
How do you expect somebody else to be moved by a piece of writing if you aren't moved by it yourself?
Henrik Karlsson:
You are the only person you can observe that closely. Just wait until you see a reaction, and then that's the writing.
I could probably figure out some ways of making some people cry by doing some tricks, but that's fake. The really real stuff, you should feel it and get it on the page.
David Perell:
You talked about ideas being brittle, but you also used the word "crumbling," that ideas can crumble, and then after the crumbling, the light.
Henrik Karlsson:
It comes in when you're just having a conversation and when you're just thinking about things. Ideas kind of tend to float a little bit. If I say something and you say, "Well, what about this?" then I can say, "Oh, that wasn't what I meant." It's just kind of floating. That might be a good social strategy for never losing your face, but it's not a good idea for improving your thinking.
What I like about writing is that when I write it down on paper, I can't fool myself. That's what it says. That's what I wrote. I can't pretend like I was something else because it's on paper. That means instead of it morphing a little bit or changing a little bit, always in what I said, now it's wrong instead, and it breaks. Once I critique it and say it breaks, and when I've written something down and I've critiqued it, it's fallen apart. Again, I enter this zone of confusion, and that's where light comes in.
Because in the confusion, I'm letting go of my preconceptions. I'm kind of moving beyond my mental models, and I'm confused. Now, when I'm confused, it's like I'm taking in data in a more raw form from reality, and when I do that, I can learn because when we have our mental models, we're filtering all the time.
David Perell:
All the time.
Henrik Karlsson:
If you've decided that everyone who's on the political left is stupid, you're going to filter any time someone on the left says something smart. You're going to filter that, and every time they say something stupid, you're going to remember that. But if you can get to this point where you've left your mental models, you're going to see things in a more high-resolution way.
David Perell:
If you were to say, "Let's go to dinner tonight," and someone says, "Hey, what'd you learn from Henrik?" the number one thing I'd say right now is that you spend a lot of time in your writing process getting to a pre-linguistic state. How much have we spoken about bodily feelings and color?
When you're pre-linguistic, you're not operating inside of a mode of category. Because of that, you're getting much higher resolution. You're getting...it's like a giant photo that hasn't been compressed. The compression comes later. Most of the way that people speak is in a lot of compression. If you say, "Oh, the political right tariffs," you have compressed so much, but what you're trying to do is get to a pre-compressed state as you observe reality and look and look and look and look, and then just let that process of observation happen over a long amount of time, sometimes a year.
You said, "It needs to live inside my body for a year." Then, after a year or two years, you'll do the work of compression, and I think that really distinguishes you from how most people think.
Henrik Karlsson:
It's really important. I feel like my toolkit is a series of exercises for breaking my own mental models. I'm trying to...so I write things down and I critique it, and I have various questions I ask. I want to confuse myself. I want to find counter-examples. I'm doing all these sorts of things to make myself more confused to get to see, yeah, and is more confused.
David Perell:
Is that the right way to say it, why confused?
Henrik Karlsson:
Why confused? Because...
Henrik Karlsson:
When they do accelerated expertise training in the US military, when they want to get people to become really good soldiers very, very fast, they have programs where they get people up to an elite level in a few months. What they do is try to make them maximally confused. They'll do case studies; they'll put them in simulations and case studies and not give them any theory or any explanations of what's going to happen or how to interpret it. They have to interpret it themselves. Then they throw another case on them, which totally breaks whatever they came up with on the first one. They're trying to avoid, because we have this tendency of forming what's called a knowledge shield.
Certain types of mental models are good enough to explain most of the data we see, and once they're good enough, we start to ignore everything else. If you want to have an accelerated learning curve, you want to avoid forming knowledge shields. The way to do that is to put yourself in situations where you get so confused that you can't really form any coherent stable mental models.
That's what I mean by confused; you don't have any stable mental models. You have maybe a half-working mental model here and another here. It's this kind of unstable state. There's no full coherence yet. That's what I mean by confused. I don't mean you've done a lot of drugs or anything. It's a sense of, I don't really know. I have a rough sense of maybe what's going on, but I can't explain what's going on here. That's a good state to be in if you want to be open.
David Perell:
Can you describe for me where you live and where you write? Break that down for me concretely. I know that you live on a remote island in Denmark on a farm. I imagine there's your wife there, and there are two kids. Paint the scene for me.
Henrik Karlsson:
We have two houses, and right now, we have mold in the main house, so we're living in the stable, on the upper floor. We've put some nice stuff in there. In the morning, I get up and walk down into...
David Perell:
What time do you wake up?
Henrik Karlsson:
I used to be very disciplined and get up at 5:00 and start working at 5:00, but that was when I had a job because that was the only way I could fit it in.
David Perell:
Was this when you worked at the art gallery?
Henrik Karlsson:
Exactly. Then I would write in the morning from 5:00 until 9:00, and then I'd go into work. Now I work full-time, so I start at 7:00. I go down and sit there in what would be the woodworking room in the stable, and I write. If I'm stuck, I'll lie down on the sofa, or I'll start walking on the meadow and up and down the road, or go walk in some nature reserve. I like to do a lot of walking.
I usually do that between 7:00 and 3:00, six days a week. In the afternoons, I usually hang out with my kids for four or five hours and try to be a very present dad because that's a very grounding thing for me. It's a nice, integrated existence.
It's an enormous privilege to be allowed to live like that because everything is integrated with everything else. I'm sitting on the farm writing, and if I get stuck, I'll go out and fix some brick wall that needs to be fixed, or I'll hang with the kids. The writing feeds into me being a better dad, and being with the kids gives me ideas for the writing. It's a very kind of integrated thing. It's a beautiful place with two small houses, and we have a little wood with beech trees.
David Perell:
I want to close with why you write. What I really think is fun about your writing is sometimes you'll just completely break the rules. But there's no place that you broke the rules more than the title that you have of a piece, which is both the thing I want to talk about, but also just make a comment that you just had the audacity to title a piece this. The blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.
Henrik Karlsson:
Long titles are underrated. Most people only read the title, so you might as well be useful and put all of the important information in titles, so they get that at least.
That insight in itself, that post, this idea that what you're writing is a search query, was one of the things that has blown my life wide open. As we talked about a lot today, I'm writing because I'm trying to process my own life.
But once you put that on the Internet, it starts to move out across the social graph and find other people who are into the same thing. All of a sudden, I remember this time in December 2021, I had 50 readers, and I was starting to get emails from really interesting strangers from all over the world who had read the same books as me and had done that.
I started talking to them, and it's almost surreal because I'm putting these words out and they are summoning a culture, a friend group. Once I have met these people, I start to get changed by them. So I write something that pulls people in, and then I become a different person through meeting them. Writing becomes this process of summoning a culture, the specific culture that can hold me.
I think a lot of people, myself included, never felt truly at home in the cultures they were in. My small hometown, it's not really mine. This job I have is not really me. To be able to summon a place where being your full, idiosyncratic, authentic self is the way to be, which is encouraged, is a very lovely feeling, to have a space like that where you can feel safe in exploring the parts of yourself that feel alive, having these conversations, and growing and changing. That was the big gift.
In retrospect, I'd written for a long time before this happened. I had been following our conventional logic, which was I'd written for magazines and so on, and I had been taught to write for a mass audience, that you should simplify things a little bit and take out the weird stuff. Once I let go of that, the interesting thing is that my writing became weird and too long for most people. Most people read it and were like, "What is this?"
But the few people who read it, they were my people. They really loved it, and then they started sending it to their friends, and it became this kind of flywheel. It's something I wish for everyone, to have a few blog posts out there so your people can find you and have these meetings. There's something so deeply nourishing about being seen in your interests, in your curiosities, in your values, being held in that, and being able to rest in that and grow in that sort of relationship. That has been the biggest gift of writing. Thank you.
David Perell:
Thank you.
