Andrew: Hello, Carson. Welcome to Unblocking Session. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so excited to chat with you today. The best thing and the best place to start is just what do you feel blocked on?
Carson: Well, I guess I’ve sort of got a couple of different career things going on. I’m a professional poker player and I bet on current events and a couple of other small things. And most of that stuff is going all right. And there’s a mismatch where the people that I look up to or the sort of ideas or projects that I’m most interested in are in areas sort of currently outside of my career. So I’m like, okay, what does it mean if the things that most excite me or most impress me are people pursuing kind of a different path than I’m on and I feel like, should I try and pivot to that? But there are sort of things along that path that it feels like I’m more blocked on and I wanted help.
Andrew: Okay, cool. That’s helpful. I’m gonna ask tons of questions, largely just to get concrete details. I’m gonna jump around, and this is just for me to form a mental model, and then we’ll get into more explain-y territory in a little bit. So what is the thing that you really want? What are the things that you’re really attracted to, that you put your time and attention on that you’re just not doing?
Carson: Yeah. I think a bunch of people are sort of working together in public on Twitter. I’m really drawn to that, like Visa’s work and Rich’s work and the stuff that you’re doing.
Andrew: Yeah, okay, so like bucket there is like network work, public network work, or kind of like working in public, or is it specifically like the network state-y element of it, of like building some kind of network of people that are cooperating generally? Is it about the cooperativeness or just the working in public?
Carson: Yeah, so it’s about the cooperativeness. I live in a seven person cooperative house and I’ve lived in cooperative houses for the last six years and I really enjoy it. I plan to continue it. And I want to, I think I want, yeah, I want to do stuff similar to that and want to build out connected alternative things beyond just living in a cooperative house, probably similar to fractal. I thought about doing the fractal accelerator, but I felt like I was too blocked to really get a lot out of it at the right time.
Andrew: Sure. Okay, cool. Yeah, that’s helpful. And then right now, a couple things. I just want to talk about your finances for a sec. You said you’re doing well. What does that mean to you? Do you have a runway? Are you saving for retirement or are you just paying your bills?
Carson: Yeah, I have quite a lot of runway. I have, so I guess in my old method of calculating runway, I had like five years of runway, but now I have a wife and a kid. So I probably have a little bit less, but still multiple years of runway. And all the work that I’m doing is flexible. So it can be scaled up and down. And so it wouldn’t need to be a hard break. And it’s not something I couldn’t come back to if I stopped now.
Andrew: Okay, so you’re pretty confident in your ability to maintain your earnings potential, at least. Plus, right now you’re saving actively every month as you work. Good. And then, let’s talk about blockers. It sounds like there’s all these things you want to do, maybe you’re experiencing executive dysfunction is kind of the image I’m getting. What are those elements of executive dysfunction? Where is your time going such that it’s not going toward making this pivot happen that you want to have happen. Maybe your time and your attention, actually, let’s focus a little bit more on your attention than your time.
Carson: Yeah. I guess like last night, it was like, okay, my kid’s asleep and I’m going to be up for several more hours and there’s nothing sort of urgent that has to go in this block. And what’s the next sort of non-urgent important thing I can do during this uninterrupted block. And I didn’t come up with anything good or I’m not in the habit of sort of putting those blocks to good use, even when they come up.
Andrew: Okay, that makes sense. You have blocks where you could be doing non-urgent and important work. Like right now it sounds like the problem is a problem of vision. Okay.
Carson: Yeah. Or a little bit vision. I also think there’s a thing where I’m like, okay, the next step is reaching out to people or the next step is publishing things to create a beacon.
Andrew: Okay, so we have a vision. So we want to reach out to people, we want to publish things. Let’s start with the first one, because reaching out to people is so easy. Objectively, but it’s very difficult emotionally. So when you imagine reaching out to people, why not do it? What emotions come up?
Carson: There’s a, it’s risky. It’s like I actually, the people I’d reach out to are people whose opinions I care about and they don’t know me yet and yeah.
Andrew: You’re risking something. Like you’re risking your relationship with them or you’re risking your reputation. Yeah.
Carson: There’s not even a relationship, being rejected by people whose opinion I’m interested in.
Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so you risk rejection. I’m curious, if we sit with that rejection more. So, let’s imagine the rejection case occurs. Is there a specific person? Like, Rich. Let’s say Rich. You want to reach out to Rich. So imagine that Rich rejects you. Like, the most likely form of rejection is ghosting or him saying no thank you right now, looking forward to whatever you’re asking. So imagine that those happen, then what? What happens emotionally?
Carson: It’s ego blow. It’s. Yes.
Andrew: Mm, it’s sort of like, I’m not good enough to work with Rich, or...
Carson: Yeah, or I guess, yeah, I’ve been comfortable and it’s sort of like life has come to me. So it’s just been a long time. I think then it’s like, some part of my mind is like, because we haven’t been rejected in a while, that’s because we’re so good and cool and not because we’ve been so complacent about putting ourselves into position.
Andrew: Mmm. So it would indicate a large update that you don’t feel emotionally prepared for. The large update is something like, I’m not as good and cool and successful as I... It would be a big update like, maybe I’m just not there yet, even though I really want to be, something like that.
Carson: Yeah, I think that, yeah, I think, and also, you know, it’s something where I don’t know for sure what it’s like if I knew I might’ve found a better workaround to it.
Andrew: Yeah. So, okay, a couple of ways that we can know and just get a little bit more clarity is we can try to scan our body as we’re imagining this occurring. So as you’re imagining reaching out to Rich, are there parts of your body that light up at all? Or you’re imagining reaching out and asking for advice from Visa or from me, or a collaboration or a partnership, or sending a manifesto.
Carson: Yeah, I feel it sort of in my upper, upper area.
Andrew: Okay. And is it a constriction here? Like kind of a constriction in your lower throat? Or is it something else?
Carson: It’s a little lower than that.
Andrew: Solar plexus, maybe chest.
Carson: Yeah, higher than the solar plexus.
Andrew: Yeah. And it’s near the surface is what it sounds like. Or like deep.
Carson: Near the surface and then also maybe a little bit of something in the neck. The image that comes to mind is like, maybe being in a room where I don’t yet know the people and I don’t have social status in that room. And I’m off to the side a little bit separated, observing the room and feeling a little bit uncomfortable sort of.
Andrew: Definitely. Mm. And what you want is to approach people and join the conversation, but the method is not easy in that image or straightforward. OK. And then something that can sometimes be helpful here is wondering, do you know when this started? Starting to feel this way about asking other people for help.
Carson: Yeah, sort of not specifically about asking other people for help, but there’s really like 2016. At that time I put essays on the internet. I made YouTube videos. I streamed on Twitch and then my life didn’t go very well. I sort of was not super well calibrated. And then I think in the mode of getting to the next step, I changed a lot of things and the things that I changed included somehow not doing that in the same way or being sort of unblocked in the same way.
Andrew: Hmm. Yeah. What happened?
Carson: I sort of prior to that, had the worst emotional low of my life, was really depressed. And coming out of that depression, I was like, okay, I’m totally free. I can be whoever I want. I was just unfiltered doing everything. And I think that may have been a little bit too far or it didn’t work super well. I then had a couple of relationships sort of damaged from that. And then I slowed down a bit and sort of found an equilibrium that worked, but it wasn’t, I think there’s a higher energy, more sort of unfiltered equilibrium that would also work.
Andrew: Mmm. Yeah. It sounds, were those relationships important to you?
Carson: Yeah, it was, I had gone to a summer program prior to my freshman year of college and had been kicked out and told, okay, you need to defer a year and mature before you can come back. And I think, yeah, sort of in the moment for that, I was like, that’s fine, they’re wrong, I’m right. And then I feel like months later, I was like, okay, maybe they’re onto something and I should chill out.
Andrew: Yeah, so you’ve been maturing and now you’ve done all this really good work. You have a life for yourself. You have savings. You have a family. It feels like maybe you took that to heart and in fact you are spending a lot of time and energy trying to mature in the way that you were asked to. I wonder if there’s a way to give yourself credit for that, especially to help the person. It sounds like the person who was told that they needed to be mature, that was quite painful. And I wonder if you can tell that person good job and that you did it.
Carson: Yeah, yeah, I could. Because I brushed it off. It’s like, but then the person two months later who was like, okay, maybe there was something there. Yeah. Good, good job then. There were a lot of different directions I could have taken my life at that time. And I really appreciate where he took it. And I think, yeah, he did a really good job. I’m thankful for that.
Andrew: Yeah, and I wonder, because to me, if I was in that position, I would feel bitter, I would feel depressed, I would feel rejected. That’s really heavy. And maybe also just, it sounds like, yeah, you were in some ways able to brush it off, but it also seems like it really got to you as well. And just letting those emotions bubble up and letting this part of you that was rejected by people at a formative time in your life just be expressive enough that... And again, I’m making a couple assumptions. Like one assumption I’m making is that part of you that was rejected is kind of holding you back a little bit and is kind of flaring up emotionally when you’re imagining reaching out to people. And if that’s the case, just feeling those emotions fully and being like, yeah, wow, all that stuff sucks or that’s sad. It might be that you need to grieve. It might be that you need to feel some amount of anger.
And a move that works here for me and for a lot of people, when you’re especially if you have some kind of thing that’s blocking you that we’ve identified, is just you’re trying to find what are the ways in which I can work with this slightly undeveloped part and then just help it mature a lot faster. So it’s like you did the maturing, but maybe that part is still brushing it off a little bit and not fully integrating the fact that you did all this work to mature and that you’re on the other side now and maybe those people at that summer camp would really appreciate having you now.
You have a lot to bring to the table and you are a lot more mature and similarly maybe a lot of people now that you could be reaching out to have a lot to gain from your relationship that you’re not letting them gain because you’re worried that they won’t think you’re mature enough but you did spend all this time maturing, giving yourself some credit for that and then as I’m saying these what you might want to be searching for is objections. So the claim, I’m mature enough now. If there’s any objections to that, that’s kind of what you want to look for.
Carson: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s some... I don’t know, some of the people whose stuff I really like on Twitter, like Chris Chipmonk, I feel like tweets a lot of things where it’s like, this is... I feel like in some ways he’s just so willing to appear immature on Twitter and I admire that so much and I’m like, I would like to unlock the willingness to be publicly immature on Twitter. The new places that you can get to if you’re willing to do that feel really worth it.
Andrew: Yeah, OK. And by the way, generally here, searching for objections is a general part of the method that I do. So you can object to literally any part of it, including, this is the wrong frame. We’re going down the wrong rabbit hole. Actually, I want to focus over here. Actually, we’ve misplaced our attention because I don’t know everything about you, and it’s hard for me to have complete context. But let’s say this is the right place. Let’s spend a little bit of time here. I think, is there a way that you can integrate those two perspectives? Is there a way to be immature in a way that is actually mature? Do you have any thoughts on that? Or is that something that you still need to learn?
Carson: Yes, I think there’s a way to do it because I can see other people doing it.
Andrew: Yeah, and I guess for you, do you feel like what are some of the things you’d like to be immature about? That you’re like, man, I feel blocked on this because it’s too silly or it’s too immature.
Carson: [pause]
Andrew: So like all of a sudden there’s a lot of censoring like there’s an anti-memetic field around this or something.
Carson: Yeah, just...
Andrew: Like this is dangerous. We’re not supposed to go here.
Carson: Yeah, a little bit. It’s like, yeah, what if I put the things that I thought into words and then put those words in conversations or essays or told to the people in my life. Yeah.
Andrew: Right. Yeah. Well, there’s a couple things. First of all, if you say anything that you really don’t want publicly, I don’t need to release the episode. And I can make sure that none of that stuff gets heard by anyone. And then secondly, I personally am not going to judge you. I think this is a plenty safe space to say relatively radical ideas or things that you think are dumb. If that helps. I would personally be delighted to hear your weird ideas that are immature.
Carson: Yeah, no, I can know that to be true. The step of being like, okay, I’m willing to have this conversation and then know that this conversation is going on to you too. I’m not so far away. I’m, you know, that’s...
Andrew: And is it related? So we have all this data now. It’s like, shit. As soon as I actually am contemplating sharing these ideas, all of a sudden, boom. A lot of feelings of locking back up and saying that’s a dangerous area. Is that the same part that was rejected? Are we getting a different part now? Do we have a little bit more evidence of where this is coming from? Or why, what you’re afraid of is happening or any imagery that comes to mind.
Carson: Feels like maybe a different part, not... Yeah, tough to tell.
Andrew: Mm-hmm. What would happen if you said the immature stuff?
Carson: I would get to know people faster, they would have more interface of me to work with than, you know, I... I would be more frequently judged to be immature by people.
Andrew: Okay, yeah. Is that worth it to you? Like if it was just those things? Is it worth being slightly more frequently judged to be immature in order to be closer to people?
Carson: Yes.
Andrew: Okay. Are there any objections to that or... Maybe you just start now.
Carson: Just the physical objection. Intellectually, this is the position.
Andrew: But the physical objections, it’s holding onto something that we haven’t addressed yet. Like, what does it know? What does it know that we don’t know? Like it knows something about what’s gonna happen to you.
Carson: Maybe it is the same part. It’s like, okay, we’ve got, you know, we’ve got this good community. We’ve got...
Andrew: Yeah, you’re gonna get kicked out of summer school. You’re gonna get kicked out of your whole community.
Carson: Yeah, like, okay, let’s not get kicked out of the co-op scene and it’s like, I don’t think that’s realistic. I’m, you know...
Andrew: Yeah. No, but totally. Like it has in fact happened to you that upon sharing certain types of ideas, you have been completely kicked out of your social scene. So you know with proof that that’s something humans do to each other. And it’s really good for you to acknowledge that and to give that part credit for protecting you. It’s trying to look at reality and use that evidence to protect you. Is there anything, what if we start small? What if we just dip our toe in? Is there anything that you can share that’s close, it’s edgy, but you’re like, surely nobody’s gonna kick me out for that. Like that’s just kind of a funny joke. Maybe we don’t just need to dive into the deep end.
Carson: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think there are options like, I wrote a short, mundane essay about my approach to life and finances related to my poker career and only shared it with a discord of poker players, but there’s not...
Andrew: By the way, who are you afraid of rejecting you? Like, surely some people come to mind. Is it your housemates? Is it some specific accounts on Twitter? Like, who is gonna be the person? If anybody rejects you for your ideas, who is gonna be the person that rejects you first? Or the group of people?
Carson: I don’t think it’s necessarily for the ideas. It’s like... Well, okay. I guess there are two different ones. I think for my scene and community back home, there’s maybe some fear that it’s like, you’re a capitalist with worrying ideas who’s trying to do things incrementally while we...
Andrew: Yeah, marginalism. We need revolution, Carson!
Carson: Yeah, so I think for that there’s a little bit of that and then for I don’t know Twitter like if I think about coming to New York and visiting fractal it’s just like, it’s like, you know, there’s a hundred other people, you’re nice enough, but we’ve got busy lives. Yeah, or, you know, you meet some bar, but we’re busy and going through our things and you’re here for three days or whatever. I probably won’t remember your name, but I like you well enough.
Andrew: That doesn’t sound so bad for what it’s worth. You’re starting to talk me back into it. It’s like, I get to stay with a bunch of people for three days, and I meet them and we like each other, but we don’t fully remember each other, and then maybe we meet again later down the line. It’s like, I don’t know, that’s kind of nice.
Carson: Yeah! There’s got to be something else there, you know, if I hadn’t made it happen. If I’m like, okay, here’s an example of people extending and doing types of things adjacent to what I want to do. Have I considered stopping by there in the last year? Boy, have I considered. Have I done it? Boy, I sure haven’t, you know.
Andrew: Right. Yeah, maybe it’s like, we won’t actually have a conversation with you about what specifically is going wrong. But you could also schedule that. You could be like, yeah, I know you’re busy, do you have time for this kind of meeting with this kind of scope? We’re chatting now. Anyway, I have to go now, unfortunately, because we’re at time. But these are all great questions to deal with. I think, yeah, this type of fear of judgment from society is so common, very, very, very common.
And the more that you work through it and the more that you work through these emotions, the more you’re going to mine gold also for the people in your life. So to the extent that you want to mature very much, I don’t know, writing about these feelings themselves and what’s happening with them is going to help with that in interesting ways. And it’s going to be useful to people like me or people like Rich or, you know, we’re all interested in these questions of what how do people feel in society and how can we get to know the facets of living in a society better such that we become masters of society and aren’t subject to them so much but actually they are things that we can use in order to improve our lives. It sounds like you have a perspective on that that’s rather unique and both common but also you have a good grasp on it and you’re able to talk about it and then yeah, I’m really interested in what would happen if you were known as a capitalist, for instance.
I’m also interested in what would happen if you were known as a try-hard in the community space or something. These are interesting things to contemplate, and it’s also interesting to contemplate whether or not I ever felt that way, or whether or not Rich ever felt that way. Or if we had ever been rejected for the sorts of ideas and communities that we wanted to build.
And it’s not even therefore like, I also have to be, but also just thinking, maybe there’s a sense in which you can connect to people through your own sense of alienation. And in that way, lessen the severity just a little bit. I’d also just take seriously, humans do witch hunts and people get rejected and have you read the Tim Urban thing about the elephant, the mammoth? Tim Urban, Social Mammoth. This essay changed my life when I was, I don’t know, 14 or whatever. I read it in college. I’ll send it to you on Twitter DMs. But it’s basically about the mammoth who deeply cares about what other people think. Part of your brain is Tim. He makes these funny graphics. A really, really funny essay. Very much will make you laugh. But also kind of paints all this in a fun light.
But yeah, I just want to point out these are ridiculously valid fears. In fact, you even have evidence that the fear is valid by having been rejected. And also you can know it even better. You can develop a nuanced relationship with this fear such that you know what is going to get rejected and you know what’s not gonna get you rejected and you can predict how people are gonna respond to things. And you can take risks too, where you’re like, I’m not actually sure about this one, but I know I could handle the downside risk. So it’s going to be okay. So your relationship with social rejection can be one that’s a lot more mature than the, if I even open that up, I’m going to shut down kind of relationship.
Carson: Yeah. And I think I know that I’m, I feel like, my sensors, I’m not someone who’s like, I really don’t know where everyone else is at. If I step out, it’s just going to be a train. I do think I have the knowledge to be calibrated or to control it at various flow levels that are not zero as well.
Andrew: Yeah, and even despite the fact that you have that knowledge, it is still work to convince all the parts of yourself. So it’s like, you know intellectually, but just take seriously how afraid you are also and be like, that’s a completely rational fear. I have so much evidence that that’s a rational fear. How do I work with that part to convince that part? Rather than, you don’t want to use logic against yourself as a weapon and bash yourself in the head with it. It’s like, that part is just like, no, logic doesn’t work on this problem. It’s so much worse than you think. And you have to be like, yeah, you’re right. Like, wow, it’s really, really bad. I see how bad it is. And then kind of gently take bigger and bigger risks into the kiddy pool instead of trying to dive in all at once into the part that you intellectually know is going to be OK, so to speak. Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. I unfortunately have to hop off. It was a pleasure talking to you. And I hope we get to chat again in the future. It’d be fun if you visited Fractal.
Carson: Very much.
Andrew: Bye, Carson.
