Playful Curiosity, Exploring the World Headfirst: Meet Christofer Lövgren

Humans with Josh Levent

Christofer Lövgren calls himself the irrevocably curious dickhead. Born and raised in Sweden, he grew up playing with Legos, Gameboy and Trading Cards. When he was 5 he picked up the guitar from his granddad and fell in love with it.

He only gave it up at age 19, when his workout addiction led to extreme pain in his hands and forearms making guitar-playing impossible.

Luckily he’s now again at a place where he can play guitar and is even playing with a band.

Christofer is someone who loves conversations. He told me that exploring the outer world doesn’t interest him much, because he is so fascinated by his own and others’ inner worlds, which he can tap into through conversations.

One of the places he does this is on his podcast, Do Explain, which he started 2 years ago to explore the work of David Deutsch and Critical Rationalism more broadly.

At school, Christofer loved maths when he had fun textbooks until 6th Grade. At that point the serious textbooks with fewer interesting pictures and colours, and a separate book for doing the work made him lose interest. He now says that anyone having fun is learning, even if just on an inexplicit level.

While we also talked about serious and difficult topics related to mental and physical health, at the end, we had a lot of fun recording this episode and you will hear us laughing a lot. And at the end that encapsulates Christofer’s personality completely for me. He is deep, and a great conversationalist for serious topics, but he will always make it fun as well.

On today’s podcast:

• How Christofer go introduced to the guitar by his grandfather
• How he managed to rack up 7 concussions in his life so far
• How he used to hide on the toilet so he could spend more time playing on his Gameboy
• How he used to torture his Spiderman action figures
• How he loved math when it was fun, but lost interest when he got the more serious textbooks for teenagers
• The tragedy of thinking that learning and fun are opposites in some way
• How he learns more in a weekend on YouTube than he did in 3 months at University
• How the most intensely curious and intelligent people often also have a silly side and can be so fun to be around
• Reading Harry Potter in childhood and not much fiction since
• Never feeling like you belong
• Becoming self-conscious at age 12, which lead to a weight-lifting addiction at age 16
• Having a panic attack trying to decide how to split up a workout
• Burning out at age 19 from working out too much, not sleeping enough and generally being in a highly stressed state
• Spending 3-4 years looking for ways to workout that didn’t feel like it was destroying himself
• The identity crisis of losing the two things he loved most (guitar and working out)
• How Christofer decided that if he was going to be miserable, he would be a miserable drunk and began drinking whiskey which he hated
• The difficulty of treating the consequences of his burnout which doctors shrugged away
• Developing a panic disorder from the untreated trauma
• How things can be extremely traumatic for you personally even if it doesn’t look that bad from the outside
• How he hit rock bottom while in a foreign country in a new relationship
• Finding help from functional therapists 5 years later
• Trying freedom business entrepreneurship
• Learning how to separate pain from suffering and enjoying life even when things don’t always feel great
• How he decided to go to university at age 25 to get a degree in cognitive science
• His interest in how we make progress
• We bond over our love of David Deutsch and share how we discovered his books

Links

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReachChristofer
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DoExplain
• Website: https://www.doexplain.org/