0:00
Every good scene is a fight and you have to figure out how's this fight going to go.
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0:03
What are the little turns?
0:03
How can we take this sentence and make it mean something that is unobvious.
0:07
That's such a fun exercise.
0:10
And having that sort of social relationship with words is really useful for a writer because when you're writing, you are so fundamentally alone.
0:20
But imagining how that sentence is going to be interpreted by other people, that is an essential aspect of writing for the internet.
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You're one of the few people who speaks in a more purpley pros way than you write.
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And I think that it's something very unique about you.
0:37
Most people when they're writing, they try to really bring out the thesaurus, but you do that in your speech. Talk to me about that. Wow.
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I'm really on the spot to use a lot of multi-elavic words in this answer.
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Um, the truth is that I think ideas often come to me in this very raw and sometimes very thesaurusy and multi-elabic way.
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They don't arrive in the perfectly clear vocabulary in which I want to ultimately communicate them.
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And so a lot of the process of writing for me is being a kind of surrogate between the first instinct that occurs to me as a writer and the impression that I want to give readers.
1:16
the simple impression I want to give readers of my ideas.
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I don't know why uh ideas occur to me sometimes in extremely purple pros and I guess I'm extremely obligated to use a lot of SAT words in the our remaining time but um Laquacious pros. Laquacious pros. Thank you very much. Yeah.
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Um no, but it's interesting, right?
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Cuz it it I actually mean this in a complimentary way.
1:37
Like I I think this is actually the right place to be.
1:40
Like I don't think it's a coincidence that you insisted on doing a podcast in addition to actually writing.
1:44
That's really interesting.
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I I love thinking about this.
1:48
I should first say like the the um here we go.
1:50
The phenomenological experience of writing is fascinating to me.
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What is actually happening to you while you write?
1:57
How does the idea arrive?
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What does it feel like to have an idea arrive?
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Does it feel like a curtain is being pulled?
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Does it feel like it's dropping out of the air, being parachuted to you?
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Does it sometimes feel like it's not even in your head?
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That the idea actually arrives at your fingertips?
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That you're writing something on a computer?
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And I I never really write by hand, but you're writing something on a computer and the idea just flows.
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It doesn't occur to you first in your head.
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It occurs to you first on the page.
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And in a weird way, having the idea is actually the moment of realizing what you've written and in realizing it say, "Oh, that came from me and therefore I chose it."
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I'm honestly mystified and fascinated by that process.
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I mean, I think it ladders up to a lot of very deep ideas, which is how much control do we have in our lives?
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How much free will is actually free?
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How much of the decisions that we think that we're making are actually consciousness observing itself rather than us making decisions.
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We don't have to get into all that.
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We can keep it on writing.
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But I I I do find the act of writing to be like a quasi mystical experience.
2:57
H So you talk about the phenomenological experience.
3:00
Uh I think it was nature who said I don't trust any ideas that don't arrive at me through walking.
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So like talk to me about that that embodied experience.
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Now I'm trying to use all these fancy words. I Exactly.
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Now you set it set set us up to feel like we're like, you know, philosophy seminars like in the 405 class trying to use all the long nichi words.
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I'll say this and we can we can circle back to Nichi later, but I I don't go on that many walks.
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I know that walking has been is really helpful for many writers.
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Some of my best friends who are writers, Ross Anderson at the Atlantic for example, he is a walking writer.
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The ideas come when he is in nature looking at the trees feeling as I think a lot of people feel in nature like made small by their surroundings.
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There's something inspiring and about that feeling of being small within nature.
3:45
I prefer almost vampiric conditions for my writing.
3:51
I like writing in a basement with the lights off with the glow of the screen being basically the only light in the room.
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Maybe I'll light a candle if I want to like kind of romance myself, but not necessary.
4:01
I like feeling like I'm almost in a cocoon of darkness.
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And the it it it gives me the right kind of tunnel vision that I need to feel like the only relevant relationship in this space is between me and the computer screen.
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And it's just me giving ideas to the computer screen, being inspired by them, and then revising and being in this kind of, you know, dialectic with the words that are just pouring out. Nice.
4:25
So, how do you actually set up your life to do that?
4:26
Because in you can only get that tunnel vision if you don't have a bunch of pings coming your way. That's true.
4:33
And I'm I should I'm not going to pretend like I'm this incredibly masterful like Zen monk who's like really good at like always keeping my phone in like a locked box.
4:41
Meditate for four hours a day.
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I don't I I'm bad at it, right?
4:42
So, I can the the answer I'm going to give you is like the life that I try to live, but I want to be clear that I'm not like that good at living the life that I'm trying to live.
4:51
I try to regularize everything about my life during the work week so that I can spend as much time thinking about work as I need to.
5:02
So I make I pre-make coffee for myself every day.
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I eat the same thing for breakfast and often the same thing for lunch every day.
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I walk the dog at the same time.
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I spend hours and hours in the basement just looking at a screen and thinking about ideas. You I talk to people. I interview experts.
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um I write across um the notes app.
5:20
Like the literal way that I write is I have uh notes for interviews, I have notes for articles that I've read, and then I have an empty page where I sort of combine everything into the general structure of an article.
5:33
And I do find that like like having as ritualized a life outside of the world of writing, maybe I'm just telling myself a story here, but it allows all of the parts of me and my mind that are trying to discover and experience novelty to be focused on writing rather than be focused on other things throughout the day because everything else is just habit habit habit.
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All the novelty seeking is therefore as the story I tell myself is just funneled into the writing process.
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Do you dream about your writing? I don't. Huh.
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I never thought about that.
6:10
I never dream about my writing. I have.
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When I wake up in the middle of the night, I think about writing all the time.
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But do you ever write into the wee hours of the morning? Are you like No. No. So interesting.
6:21
So you're like this my job. This is how Eminem was.
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you know that he would write nine to five and then at five be in the middle of a a verse pen down by Yeah.
6:30
No, I've always compared myself to the Eminem of just macroeconomic analysis for the Atlantic. Yeah. No.
6:33
Um like I that's it's interesting about Eminem.
6:38
I mean you you read these these books sometimes where it's like you know here's how doky wrote, here's how like Toltoy wrote and it's like you know some of them needed their cold bath and some of them needed to I think Toltoy walked for like 5 hours a day or something.
6:48
I don't I I I'm reading I'm in the middle of a a book um the biography of of John Updike right now and um I'm not going to compare my pros at all to Updike or my talent to Updike, but my my schedule seems very much like John Updike's schedule. He was a family guy.
7:04
He had a lot of competing interests. He had lots of friends.
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He was not one of these, you know, monkish like acetic writers like like Nichi very famously was where he would have to basically go to a mountaintop or um never be around people.
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He had a very full life and therefore he basically had to regularize his writing such that he'd wake up, he would write very productively or as productively as possible from the morning until mid-afternoon and then he would just do other stuff.
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And that's kind of what I do.
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I I try to wake up early enough.
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I write or I try to be really productive from 8:30 until 3:30. And then I'm at the gym.
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I'm playing a board game with friends. I'm walking the dog.
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I'm having dinner with my wife.
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I like to feel like there's almost like a a contained box of like pressurized creativity particles that I'm trying to, you know, delimmit to the hours of 8:30 to 3:30 and like keep it all in there.
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And that can be, I think, a really useful forcing function because I won't lie to myself and say, "Oh, I'll procrastinate now because I'll be able to write a little bit bit of this later."
8:06
Or, you know, I won't be productive now because I can always like get back to this at 10 p. m. That's a lie.
8:11
I'm not gonna be productive at 10 p. m.
8:13
And so I really just try to keep it to that little box. How's your selft talk?
8:16
Positive, negative, what's the content of that voice?
8:20
So my selft talk is very loud.
8:20
First of all, I've talked to some people, some really close friends about like what's the volume of your selft talk?
8:29
Like what does thinking feel like to you?
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Does it feel like images?
8:32
Does it feel like kind of like a silent movie but not in black and white and color?
8:35
Does it feel like you know sort of collage abstract art for me?
8:41
My thoughts are talk and they're loud.
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And if my wife were here, she'd be like it.
8:48
Sometimes it's like there's another person in Dererick's head who spends all day, especially from 8:30 to 3:30, just screaming at him.
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So, he can't even hear anybody else. And that is true.
8:58
My selft talk is really loud.
9:03
The best way to describe it is not, I think, to define it along the binary of positive and negative because it's both.
9:10
Um it's just it's generative like what's next? What's next? What's the next idea?
9:15
And so it it's sort of it's a it's a goating inner voice I guess I would say.
9:22
How has theater influenced your relationship with writing?
9:27
So I was an actor before I was a writer.
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I was in professional plays in Washington DC.
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Um I kept acting until I was about 24 years old.
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My last play that I was in in DC where we are was at the Arena Stage which is a a theater um that's uh that's a few miles away and I did that while I was at the Atlantic.
9:45
The truth is I really did want to be an actor much more than I wanted to be a writer.
9:48
There's no job, I think, that's as good as being an actor when you're employed because your job is to pretend to be someone else and then stop and then people get on their feet and clap at you. Mhm. Every night.
10:08
Every night you're telling me I get to pretend to be someone else and then I stop and people clap at me and tell me how wonderful I am.
10:17
Like the feedback loop from being a good actor in a good play is the most exquisitly beautiful feedback loop.
10:26
Better than Twitter likes.
10:27
Better than so I mean theater is like Twitter if there's no trolls and every single time you post 15 people that you respect DM you and say that was the most brilliant essay I've ever read. Right?
10:42
like the best experience that you have on social media was for me just dur the everyday reality of being an actor.
10:50
And so I I loved it and I and and there's a part of me that wishes that, you know, life could be lived on parallel tracks and that like on some parallel track 36-year-old Derek has been doing this for 14 years.
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But uh alas, it's not how the world at least as I experience it is.
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How has it affected my writing?
11:05
Acting for me was an education in experiencing content, experiencing media through the eyes of other people.
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You rehearse in front of a director.
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You do scenes with partners and every good scene is a fight.
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Every good scene in movies and theater is a fight.
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Think of your favorite scene from your favorite movie.
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Were the characters agreeing on everything? No, it's impossible.
11:30
Every good scene is a fight.
11:32
And you have to figure out how's this fight going to go?
11:33
What are the little turns?
11:35
How can we take this sentence and make it mean something that that is unobvious?
11:40
That's such a fun exercise.
11:43
And having that sort of social relationship with words is really useful for a writer because when you're writing, you are so fundamentally alone.
11:55
There might not be another profession that's as fundamentally alone as the profession as the act of writing.
11:59
It's literally impossible to write a sentence with someone else. Mhm.
12:06
But imagining how that sentence is going to be interpreted by other people, that is an essential aspect of writing for the internet.
12:14
And I think having a background in theater made the social dynamic of writing more like easier for me to understand.
12:23
So, you were talking about conflict and tension, and what I think is interesting is that presumably applies in writing, but what I like about you is you for a journalist, you don't go out to pick fights.
12:35
You don't go out to like attack people like lions clawing at people.
12:40
And like honestly, that's my model of journalism, especially in the last couple years.
12:44
Feels like it's become so antagonistic.
12:46
And you haven't caved into this, which is one of my favorite things about you.
12:50
But I was sort of thinking through your pieces.
12:52
You do have that conflict.
12:52
You do have that tension. You do have that fight.
12:56
Well, tension is interesting.
12:56
And I'm pathologically agreeable.
13:01
And and when I say pathologically agreeable, it's not necessarily a good thing.
13:05
I And this might go back to theater, I need to be liked.
13:08
I feel uncomfortable being disliked by people I respect.
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And I also unfortunately find it uncomfortable to disrespect people.
13:16
So this leaves me in a place where as a writer in an incredibly contentious sort of internet environment, I want to write articles that as many people can agree with as possible.
13:24
And I even it's important to me to even represent people's ideas that I find horrific in a way that they will recognize.
13:30
At least they'll know that I'm not constructing a straw man, right?
13:33
I'm constructing the steel man of their argument and then explaining why I think that that steel man is wrong.
13:38
So for me, it's not so much that I am against tension.
13:40
It's that I dislike tension in my normal life.
13:45
life. but understand or think I understand at least the role that it plays certainly in theater no good theater no good uh movies without tension and also the role that it plays in writing obviously tension plays an important role in fiction writing there's no interesting novels that have no tension but I think tension is
14:02
underrated in non-fiction I think I understand the world through binaries so it's not this it's that on the one hand on the other hand right these kind of conceptualization tricks that break down an idea into two such that you have a little bit of a, you know, thesis, antithesis, synthesis structure to the argument. It's very
14:23
It's very appealing to me and for whatever reason, we don't need to unpack it. That's the way I write.
14:30
It's just the way ideas present themselves to me.
14:32
It's just they they I learn about an idea and I think a triangle.
14:39
Give me an example of that. Um, sure.
14:40
I just wrote an article about the research, very contentious article about the research.
14:44
um on masking and there was recently review a meta analysis of masking um RCTs randomized control trials that came out was very very controversial because the uh the meta analysis seem to indicate that masks don't do anything and I talked to mask researchers and I talked to aerosol researchers and I read much of the report and my conclusion is masks work high quality masks work mask mandates often often don't work.
15:17
So that's the interesting tension.
15:19
You have a product, an intervention that on its own does important work, but you have a policy that might not work.
15:28
So then the question is, okay, what's that's a little bit complicated.
15:32
That's a little bit theoretical.
15:32
What's an easy way to tell the story?
15:33
And I really love analogies.
15:35
I love metaphors um for better and worse.
15:38
Like the the the biggest critique I have for my editors is that I use metaphor too much.
15:42
But I thought, okay, what's a metaphor that makes this clear?
15:46
Let's imagine that there were 100 studies that showed that it's really difficult to make babies switch from eating sugary foods to broccoli. Mhm.
15:53
And the authors of a meta analysis say broccoli doesn't work.
15:56
No, that doesn't make any sense.
16:00
Broccoli works, but it is also true that a federal policy to mandate broccoli eating on the part of babies would fail in a lot of families.
16:10
These things can live side by side.
16:10
And so that's an interesting tension.
16:12
The product works, the intervention often doesn't.
16:16
And when I write and when I especially dive into complicated subjects, I really want to find the most elucidating tension possible.
16:26
What's the best way to break that down this idea into either a binary or a kind of antithesis thesis synthesis triangle? Right.
16:35
One of the you were talking about agreeableness and one of the things that I see as I sort of read between the lines of a lot of your writing is you basically working through what is the right amount of agreeableness versus disagreeableness.
16:51
And this sentence stands out on building a relationship with your readers.
16:55
You say, "Thanks for reading, but please don't just read.
16:58
Respond and disagree and point out my confusions and add clarity and help me make sense of the world."
17:02
So now that we've been talking here, what I'm reading in that is this is actually really hard for me.
17:08
So I'm going to write it down and actually work through my model of what the right relationship is with my readers to basically force myself to deal with disagreements, but also in a way that has my friendly agreeableness. I love that.
17:25
The amount of feedback that comes at any writer, any content producer online is so voluminous and it's often strewn with Yeah.
17:35
And aren't rooting for you. That's the key.
17:40
Find critics who are rooting for you. Mhm.
17:43
And so when I'm talking to people on my podcast or writing articles like this on my uh on my newsletter at the Atlantic, what I'm asking people is to root for me and to know that I want you to criticize me so long as I believe you're rooting for me.
18:00
Because it's not worth it, I think, to listen to who aren't trying to help you get it right.
18:09
They're just trying to dunk on you and point out that you're wrong. No.
18:12
like cultivate a roster of critics who want you to be better and then listen to them.
18:17
I think that's the right way just to deal with the flood. Yeah, I agree.
18:21
Have there been moments of despair for you of dealing with critics? Yeah, of course.
18:26
Um I don't like being wrong.
18:29
I don't like getting things wrong.
18:30
And when I feel like I got something wrong, absolutely.
18:33
It's a little bubble of despair.
18:34
And is it harder when it's in print like in the Atlantic?
18:40
No, it's a there's a permanence to everything.
18:43
You know, the article in the Atlantic in a weird way, the internet is more permanent than a piece of paper.
18:50
Piece of paper will become fossil. The internet won't.
18:52
So, I want to be right no matter what I say.
18:55
And when I feel like something that I said and that I put my weight behind, my reputation behind is wrong, I feel like And you ever found found yourself getting timid out of a fear when I was younger? Yeah. Work through that.
19:12
I grew up um I didn't just grow up.
19:16
It's not just the time passed.
19:17
It's also that the passage of time is its own instructor and it teaches you exactly how important pain is, which is that it is important and it fades. Right?
19:28
You write something, it's wrong.
19:32
Someone very public points out what a idiot you are. Oh, it's so hard.
19:39
And for the next 24 hours, you're not going to feel good.
19:42
But then life just keeps coming. It's Monday. Then Tuesday happens. Then there's Wednesday. Then there's Thursday.
19:48
And by Friday, the feeling you had on Monday is such a ghost.
19:56
It it it almost didn't exist.
19:56
It is a very spiky feeling, isn't it? Yeah.
19:59
But for me, like I get like red with stress and anger, but it it's very spiky.
20:06
This is the only thing the meditation's done for me.
20:08
It's just demonstrated the in lucible fact that life keeps going on.
20:14
That like every feeling that you have is temporary, that everything is impermanence.
20:20
Everything is living in a river of time that just keeps flowing.
20:25
And so you just cannot identify with any feeling.
20:29
and just bound it up in your identity.
20:31
And that's that goes for the good ones, too.
20:32
You write a great article. You feel amazing.
20:34
Maybe you win and maybe you win an award.
20:37
Well, that moment's going to pass.
20:39
And a week later, a month later, 10 years later, you don't want to be in the position of hanging your identity on something that you did in the past.
20:46
There's there's a new mountain to climb.
20:48
And so, I try very hard to stay, you know, kind of in like the temperate zone of emotionality.
20:56
I try not to get too high when an article does well.
20:58
I try not to get too low and maybe I sacrifice, you know, extraordinary, you know, untold levels of happiness because I'm just, you know, trying very hard to keep my emotions here.
21:08
But I think it's very useful as a writer to remember that like there's going to be a new dawn.
21:13
There's going to be new expectations for an article.
21:14
You just cannot live in a past that's that ought to be a ghost.
21:19
What is that moment of of epiphany like for you?
21:22
Is it like a swell of excitement?
21:23
Is it like I need to race to the keyboard?
21:26
Is it like, oh my goodness, I need to rush.
21:27
I'm going to lose this thought. Is it Hold on.
21:28
Let me relax, write some stuff down.
21:31
Let me get to it in a week, two weeks.
21:33
I have 10 thrilling aha moments for every one actual breakthrough.
21:43
I don't know if other writers are like that, but I'm in the shower.
21:44
Actually, that's a cliche.
21:48
I actually never have good ideas in the shower. I bring my phone.
21:51
I actually really That's great.
21:51
I bring my phone in my shower and I listen to like sports podcasts.
21:54
There's just like there's no germination of thought that's happening in the shower for me.
21:59
Um, but I'm making breakfast. I'm making coffee.
22:03
I'm just generally walking around my house.
22:06
I'm falling asleep when I just I'm falling asleep all the time.
22:10
I don't j about my writing, but but thoughts about writing um are just swirling around me.
22:14
I think it was Dali who used to sleep with a ball, fall asleep with a ball like on a nap and then the ball would drop and it would make a sound and then he would wake up and in that moment of the subconscious he would paint that moment.
22:29
Yeah, that's that's more Freudian than I would allow myself to put faith in.
22:31
I love the idea that there's something about our subconscious dreams that are smarter or more creative than our conscious dot connecting mind is capable of.
22:45
But I don't know that I believe that.
22:47
I think that dreams are just another machine in the system.
22:49
Um, and I don't have any ideas that are useful in dreams.
22:56
So maybe this is just me talking about myself.
22:57
Um, the aha moments feel thrilling and sometimes it's gold and sometimes it's fool's gold.
23:03
And the point is, I think, not to, you know, to to falsely judge or harshly judge the bad ideas, but just to remember that this is this is baseball.
23:13
Like, you're not going to hit a home run every time.
23:19
You go up to bat, you swing and swing and swing, and sometimes you hit the home run that scores a thousand runs.
23:24
Talk about this idea of a 9:00 a. m. mindset.
23:28
Oh, so when I first joined The Atlantic, my first job at The Atlantic was actually to be an intern.
23:32
And they came to me one day and they said, "We have an opportunity for you to be a a writer, a staff writer online.
23:39
Um, it would be for the economics desk. Are you interested?"
23:44
And my instinct was to say, "No, absolutely not.
23:45
Please don't make me do this."
23:47
Like not only do am I not interested in economics, my lack of interest in economics, this is me at 22, is so profound that when I get the Washington Post, I I read every single section and I throw out the business section.
23:59
I'm interested in literally everything except for economics. Don't make me do this.
24:02
And I remember I told my parents at the time, I was like, being asked by the Atlantic to be an economics writer is like wanting to play for the Yankees more than anything in your life.
24:10
and you spend your entire life as a catcher and you just like work and work and work to be the best catcher possible and they're like congratulations you're our second baseman. You're like what?
24:19
This is not I'm going to suck at this.
24:21
And so that's what I told them.
24:23
I said I'm going to suck at this.
24:24
And they said well here's the deal.
24:27
If you suck we'll just fire you back to your old job of being an intern.
24:30
So the opportunity cost here is pretty low. I said sure fine.
24:32
And my approach to this job of writing about economics when I knew nothing about the subject for an August news organization was I'm going to wake up every morning and there's going to be a question that I have no idea what the answer is to maybe something like why do where does unemployment come from and what kind of public policies are necessary to bring unemployment down.
24:53
I have no idea at 8:30, at nine o'clock, but I'll spend that entire day reading, talking to economists, talking to other journalists who know more than me.
25:02
And by 3 or 4:00, maybe I'll be able to write that article about why about how what kind of public policies bring down unemployment.
25:11
But I have to be careful to remember my 9:00 a. m.
25:13
self and write the article for my 9:00 a. m. self.
25:16
Don't write the article in such a way as to make it seem like, oh, you've t you've taken that PhD class.
25:21
Oh, you're smart enough that you can use a bunch of buzzwords and acronyms and just, you know, get by on being arcane.
25:28
No, write it as if you're writing for someone as simple minded as you were 6 hours ago. Sure.
25:34
And I find that that 9:00 a. m.
25:34
mindset is is really is really useful.
25:36
Not not only because I think it expands the possible audience of my writers, but also because it's the most honest way for me to write for myself.
25:44
When I am using complicated language and these you know afficious acronyms, sometimes that complication is standing in for my true understanding of the subject and it it requires me to write about the subject in really simple straightforward language to really understand for myself.
26:03
Do I get this or do I not? Right. Sure.
26:09
Just come back to something super concrete.
26:10
your formula for interestingness.
26:12
Interesting equals novel plus important. Yeah.
26:16
I remember I was talking to a young journalist about her career and she said, "What do you try to do with your writing?"
26:23
And it was one of those um simple questions that was like profoundly difficult to answer.
26:27
What are you trying to do with your writing?
26:30
And the answer that came out of me was, "I'm trying to be interesting."
26:34
And she asked the right follow-up question.
26:36
She said, "What the hell does that mean?" Yeah.
26:38
I was like, I guess to me interesting is is novel plus important.
26:42
And you know, you can fall into traps on either side of that of that peak.
26:46
Um, you can fall into the trap of being uh interesting but not, excuse me, important but not novel.
26:54
You can, you know, point to, you know, there's lots of things about mathematics, for example, that are importantly true, but there's nothing new about them.
27:01
And meanwhile, you know, you look at, you know, tabloids and many other parts of journalism, there's lots of things that are new and seem important by virtue of their newness, seem immediate by virtue of their newness, but aren't actually important.
27:13
And I try to live at that that intersection of of importance plus novelty.
27:18
I'll say again, just connecting back to one of the first things that I said about tension, this is this is an example of the way in which this kind of thesis, antithesis, synthesis framework It just just happens in my brain and I don't I'm not trying to say it's it's good or bad.
27:35
It's just the way I think that when someone says what's the formula for this or what is this?
27:39
I think you know time to think of a binary formula importance novelty. Yeah.
27:44
One thing when I talk to right of passage students one of the muscles that they haven't developed is an intuition for what's interesting.
27:52
And I think that this is a lot of what I think of my job is as a writer is cultivating taste and cultivating an intuition for what's interesting.
28:00
How do you shape, craft, chisel an idea so that it has a shape of interesting that can then pierce the waves of the internet and then seep into the reader's mind. That's really lovely.
28:13
I mean, I feel like one of the things that I've changed the most about my general approach to writing is that especially when I was younger, I thought that writing had to be this like utterly refined like three Michelin star experience, right?
28:27
Like it just had to be like when I'm a writer. I'm a capital W writer.
28:31
These sentences have to just be so pristine and they have to demonstrate word for word my intelligence to the person that's reading it.
28:40
And one of the things I think scares a lot of young writers is they feel like they have to like get into the tuxedo.
28:46
That's not what people want.
28:46
People love to be talked to as if it's a friend.
28:50
As if it's a friend with something else. Friend with a twist.
28:55
Like your favorite writer's like a friend who's a little bit smarter than you.
29:00
A friend who's a little bit more of an than you.
29:02
a friend who's a little bit more perceptive of human relationships than you, but who writes in such a way that the sentences click into your selft talk.
29:10
Like when we recognize greatness or genius or just good writing, that recognition is automatic, right?
29:18
It's like seeing your it's seeing a friend in a crowd, seeing yourself in the mirror.
29:22
It just it happens in a moment before recognition almost.
29:23
It's the shock of recognition.
29:26
And to do that, you have to write at the level of your audience, not just trying to impress them. Yeah.
29:31
I mean, honestly, my take away from the last 20 minutes is like people should be wrong more.
29:36
And like one of the big problems with modern writing is everyone's just trying to be right.
29:40
And actually, if you're just cool being wrong, like here's a thought experiment.
29:43
What if you were wrong about 9,999 articles, but your one article out of the 10,000 was the most right thing ever?
29:51
This is sort of like what you're saying about Nze.
29:52
The problem with being wrong 99.
29:53
99% of the time is that part of writing is building trust.
29:57
So you have to especially part of writing today when you can you're subscribed to as a substack you're subscribed to as a newsletter at the Atlantic you are followed on Twitter the audience that you have is a lagging indicator of your demonstrated trustworthiness right and credibility and credibility.
30:16
So you have to build credibility.
30:21
The interesting thing from the nin perspective is how do you build a reputation for seeking truth but keep alive the inner spark of that musical mind that mind that exists before truth.
30:35
I'm gonna stop there because I think seeking truth is actually the key thing that there are ways like in life, right?
30:41
This is sort of what the sort of dialogue and discourse is is it's like I'm going to seek truth and I'm going to posit something that actually might not be true at all, but it is in search of truth.
30:51
But that is different from insisting on truth.
30:54
Once you're insisting on truth, you've almost closed yourself off to the peripheries of possibility.
30:59
Whereas sometimes when you're seeking truth, that can be like this embodied experience that's more intuitive. Yeah, it's it's a rant.
31:04
It's about finding ways to carve out space in your writing for that rant, for the rebel yell, for the don't judge me, but like here's an idea.
31:15
And what's useful about that is that sometimes sometimes those rants, right, they get at the fundamental truths.
31:22
It's tough in some environments when you can't prove it, right?
31:26
When you when you can't prove the thing to the to the level of certainty that you would want to, but sometimes I think yeah, it's useful for writers to just keep alive that that sort of that that rant bone, you know, in their bodies.
31:39
I recently got into a raging argument with somebody who I really care about and there was a lot of tension and in that argument there was more truth that was delivered than the previous year and we were in a state of rage and fury and if I read a transcript it would be very wrong. Mhm.
31:59
But something about that moment and about the experience of the wrath of it enabled nuggets of truth to be revealed that hadn't been revealed when we were in calm and sober states the previous year. It's really interesting.
32:11
Okay, so two thoughts I just had are like I'm kind of imagining if like if like Sam Harris was like sort of refereeing this conversation, right?
32:18
So my my cop to the Sam Harris refereeing moment would be this.
32:25
Imagine the writing process as a somewhat Darwinian process in which certain mutations, certain explosions of ideas are necessary in order to be refined to find ultimate fit with the truth.
32:40
Which is to say, if you don't allow yourself to rant, if you don't allow yourself to dream a little bit and say some things that are little that are kind of like, I can't prove this, but like is anyone feeling this thing?
32:50
Those are like little genetic mutations that allow you as a writer to see all right what what gets the response, what what what finds fit with my audience, what can survive by virtue of its fit in the land in in the discourse space.
33:06
And so you're coming up with all these different ideas, some of which are like absolutely provable by science and RCTs and some of which are total rants and uh and just and just new unformed concepts.
33:18
But some maybe somewhere in those in those in that that that menu of like new ideas, people might say, "Oh, actually that reminds me of this thing.
33:24
Oh, actually that reminds me of this thing."
33:27
And also, here's a study you never would have found that might back back up that instinct that you had.
33:30
And here's also here's an ecological finding that we have from, you know, the OECD that might back up your finding or or or your rant.
33:39
And you might end up discovering that the rant was really useful for arriving at truth because it allowed you to say something you really felt might have evidence out there and it ended up serving as an attractor for that evidence.
33:53
The rant is published, lots of people read it, people get upset, but part of that feedback loop is you get some data, some information from some experts that says you're on the right track. The rant is a mutation. Yeah. Right.
34:06
The rants the rants a useful mutation, right?
34:07
And you're seeing like does the mutation of like the galopagus parrot like fit the ecosystem of the gopagos. It doesn't fit.
34:15
Okay, it dies out, right? Oh, wait.
34:17
No, but what if like the longer beak actually allows them to reach deeper into the flower to get the berry?
34:19
I don't I don't what whatever Darwin did this thing. Um, okay.
34:23
Well, maybe maybe maybe it has fit.
34:26
Maybe this stupid mistake of genetics and reproduction came up with the perfect beak for the flower.
34:32
And that it's it's interesting to think that that's what the writing process, the collective writing process is, that we're all just out here like little mutations in the system trusting the system itself in a weird way to like be able to find fit with the truth. Mhm.
34:56
Well, to sort of flip this, I think that what we're seeing with the moneyification of society and really content right now is sort of the opposite, right?
35:05
You've written so much about this sequels in Hollywood.
35:07
1996, none of the top 10 movies were sequels.
35:12
20 20 years later, 2016, more than half of the top 10 movies were sequels, adaptations, or reboots. What's going on?
35:20
Well, what's going on is not that movie studios got stupid.
35:23
You said they got smart and they realized that in a very very contentious attention ecosystem, audiences like familiarity and they respond to familiarity.
35:35
So if you're going to spend $100 million in a movie, it can't be it's really risky to make an entirely novel idea that has no pre-existing IP, intellectual property.
35:44
That's why if you look at all the movies that are made, it's more than hundred million dollars.
35:47
They're all made based on existing IP.
35:49
you know, either they're like original like Dune or they're, you know, unoriginal, which is to say, you know, Marvel 27.
35:56
Um, but this this is such a bigger idea, I think, than just movies.
36:01
This article that I wrote, The Dark Side of Moneyball, was about baseball at the top.
36:05
It was this idea that I had such an intimate and beautiful relationship with baseball in the 1990s.
36:10
I was obsessed obsessed with baseball.
36:12
And in the last few decades, I've wondered, why don't I care anymore?
36:16
Well, you look, you go into the data, right?
36:18
This is actually this is an idea.
36:20
This is an article that's a really great example of it began as a rant and then I went looking for the facts that might fill out the rant.
36:26
Um, and I realized the number of singles in hits, singles in games has fallen to an all-time low.
36:31
The ratio of strikeouts to hits has entirely flipped.
36:33
I think it's at an all-time high now.
36:35
I think five of the years in which you had the most strikeouts per games were all in the last 10 years. Baseball has changed. It's become more boring.
36:43
It's all about the three true outcomes of strikeouts and walks and home runs.
36:46
So, okay, maybe that's why I don't like baseball anymore.
36:51
And I thought, you know, why did baseball become this way?
36:52
Is it because baseball teams are stupid?
36:54
No, it's because they're smart.
36:57
It's because they looked at the analytics and they all did the same thing.
37:00
And thinking about why that frustrates me, I remembered this book by I think his name's Richard or Ronald Coos course called Finite and Infinite Games. Yeah.
37:14
And he said that in life there are finite and infinite games and finite games are played to win and infinite games are played to keep playing.
37:23
So a fight with a spouse or a friend is a finite game.
37:28
One person wins, one person loses.
37:30
A relationship with a friend or spouse is an infinite game.
37:33
You want to keep playing. Mhm.
37:36
And I looked I thought about that idea and I looked at movies and music and baseball and a couple other sports and I said this is what's happening to our culture.
37:46
Smart people are so focused on winning finite games of refining the product that the infinite game of the product being interesting to people are being lost.
37:58
being lost. And I I thought about that that article a lot and it fits perfectly into this model of the the utility of rants or articles or writing that isn't fully true that are sort of halfbaked because in a weird way this article was kind of halfbaked but the response I got
38:17
to it was electric because I think it it clicked into other people's feelings unproven feelings that this just had to be true that there was something happening in culture that it was being overly quantified in a way that was making the overall experience of it worse. I mean, this has been something I've
38:35
I mean, this has been something I've been thinking about so much recently is how algorithms homogenize writers and yet everyone's favorite writer is so clearly not serving the algorithm. That's crazy.
38:49
And like what I mean is you have this sort of regression homogenization to si like extremely simple words, short sentences, very clear takeaway.
38:58
Here's the summary point, right?
39:00
Like if you walk into Barnes & Noble and you just pick up the average non-fiction book, shiny cover, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's so algorithmic. It drives me crazy.
39:08
It's not interesting at all.
39:10
I just want to take the book and throw it against the wall because it's just the antithesis of creativity and beauty and wonder and expansiveness that is like the core stuff of the human spirit.
39:19
And this is what's so interesting that this is happening because we're getting smarter, not cuz we're getting dumber.
39:25
That's the fundamental paradox that just makes my brain swirl.
39:29
Well, yeah, there's two really interesting things here.
39:31
One is that there really is a familiarity bias in human nature.
39:35
People really do like things that are familiar.
39:37
And so there is something about most people and most audiences that is fundamentally basic.
39:44
But what you've pointed out that's really important is that audiences as an aggregate can be kind of basic on average, but individuals tend to be much weirder as individuals, right?
39:56
And one thing that the internet does, I think, to writing and does to culture, which should be good for weirdness is that it allows you to be weird at scale. Right?
40:08
I had just come back from a trip to Tokyo.
40:09
And before I went to Tokyo, uh, a friend of mine was like, "You need to go to this bar where they only serve like habiki whiskey that's 10 or 15 years old and all they play is punk rock vinyl." I was like, "What?"
40:22
like how does a bar like that work?
40:25
Like it's the strangest idea for a bar I've ever heard.
40:28
He said, "Well, remember Derek, Tokyo is metropolitan area of 35 million people.
40:33
If you come up with an idea that is attractive to 0.
40:35
01% of Tokyo, you have a massive, massive hit of a bar.
40:42
And the internet is Tokyo.
40:46
The internet is a metropolitan area with excellent transportation systems.
40:50
It's really easy to read someone in India, really easy for someone in India to read someone in Saskatchewan, right?
40:56
So the public transit on the internet is sensational.
41:02
You can be niche at scale on the internet.
41:05
You can be weird and specific and cultivate an audience that makes no sense to 99.
41:12
99% of the internet and you are massively successful.
41:16
I was thinking of you when I was at the uh when I was at the the Louv in Paris this year and actually it was Musea Dece which is the impressionist painting in Paris and your impressionist story is very good from a content distribution perspective.
41:32
So that's our other Derek's greatest hits. Tell that story. Tell that story. Okay. Yeah.
41:36
The first story from my book Hitmakers uh is about the impressionist cannon.
41:39
And the question is there were a bunch of impressionist painters in the second half the 19th century in Europe that were trying to do this new thing where they were still being representational with their art but they were being a lot fuzzier or less realistic in their representations of whether it's fruit or landscapes or individuals.
41:57
And the question is the paradox to resolve is why is it that we all consider the same paintings famous if there were a ton of paintings at the time?
42:07
We all know Monae Manet and Renoir and Sesan and Pisaro and Sici.
42:12
Um why these why these six or seven painters?
42:16
And the answer turns out to be at least the one that I am very persuaded by.
42:20
There was a impressionist painter and collector named Gustav Kaibat.
42:24
And Gustav Kaibat collected a bunch of paintings that no one would buy off of his friends. Who were his friends? Everyone I just named.
42:32
Monae and Manet and Renoir and Sesan and Dega. So he dies in his 30s.
42:37
He dies young and he bequeaths his collection of art to the state.
42:43
He says they want it to hang in the Musea de Luxembourg um which is a French state museum at the time.
42:47
And they say no that's crazy.
42:48
But the executive of his estate I believe was Renoir.
42:51
And so they found a way to force these paintings to be hung in this famous French gallery.
42:56
And the canon that we recognize today is exclusively the painters that Kaibot collected.
43:04
And so what happened I think is that Kibbat's collection hung in the Misa Luxembourg and was canonized in that moment.
43:12
Everyone in the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s when they were thinking what's great impressionist art, they would go to the same exhibit.
43:19
They would see the they would all see the Kaibot 7 and they would say ah this is the great impressionist art of our time.
43:25
So what happens in the 1920s when you're writing an impressionist a book of impressionist art you go back to the same cannon.
43:30
What if you're writing a 1950s book about impressionist art?
43:34
You go back to 1920s book which goes back to the canon.
43:36
So it's a wonderful story about how um unlikely moments in history can canonize art, can make something famous.
43:49
Sometimes it only takes one moment where you have all these cas cascading events off of that moment that that sort of almost erase the global population around worshiping like a single piece of art.
44:01
And I'm sure you can tell similar stories maybe about like you know maybe something happened with Casablanca that made it like the movie that everyone thinks of when you think a famous old movie.
44:09
Um but I do think that um the flip side of this coin is lots of things are famous not necessarily because they are great but because there is a history that explains how they became canonized.
44:25
I think that cannons now are much harder to concretize in part because there's an abundance of media and in part because the old gatekeepers have gone away.
44:34
The proverbial museums are not as powerful as they used to be.
44:40
So for television, for example, what percent of Americans watched the last episode of Cheers or MASH?
44:47
It was like 60 80 90% of households with the television. It was crazy.
44:52
You don't get anything like that anymore, right?
44:54
Modern culture is way too fragmented.
44:56
And so it's not just that it's fragmented and abundant.
44:59
It's also that you don't have powerful gatekeepers to canonize a new painter or musician or writer.
45:06
The same way that a national high school curriculum can say, "Hey, everyone, you're reading Fitzgerald."
45:18
Tell me about your obsession with naming things.
45:20
Workism, hygiene, theater. Yeah. Yeah.
45:22
Workism, hygiene theater, abundance, agenda.
45:24
Um I think that I think it partially comes from the fact that I enjoy writing musically.
45:30
I enjoy writing with repetition and um anti metaboly which is like um an ABA structure.
45:41
Uh most famously like ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
45:46
It's not the size the dog in the fight, it's the size the fight the dog abba.
45:49
It's called Ant Metaboly.
45:52
And I love Ant Metaboly because it's very memorable and it turns any idea into music.
45:56
Um, and I love ideas that can be turned into music because I love I think because I love writing that is memorable.
46:03
I want people to remember my writing.
46:05
I don't want it to dissolve on their tongue.
46:07
I want it to I want them to read it and I want them to talk about it.
46:10
I think it might have been PG or some other writer I think in the tech space who said, um, my goal is for my software to run on as many people's hardware as possible as a writer.
46:20
Um, and uh, I don't think in technical terms like that, but I absolutely agree with the sentiment.
46:25
And so naming things is just a logical way of attempting to make your software a little bit more viral.
46:35
Um, people remember the names of ideas, sometimes even more than they understand or remember the idea itself.
46:42
So, as a writer who loves musical writing and memorability and sort of places that on the top of the pedestal, um, I do love naming things.
46:52
There's an embedded varietality in it because people talk about it, they remember it.
46:55
Um, but tell me about hitmakers.
46:57
I think that as I was thinking about why you wrote it, I wonder if this was you trying to figure out how do I make hits?
47:04
How do I distribute my work?
47:06
And rather than getting obsessed with distribution, I'm going to look at the synthesis and interplay of content and distribution and have content that distributes.
47:16
And naming things is actually a good example of that.
47:19
That's a great interpretation and it's it's a it's a absolutely valid interpretation of of why I wrote it.
47:24
The truth is I wrote it because I found it interesting.
47:28
I thought it was important to novel.
47:30
I started off writing for the Atlantic as a macroeconomics writer.
47:32
I did uh a lot of that work of macroeconomic analysis in a period when the most important questions in the world were about the great recession.
47:42
Why is unemployment so high?
47:42
How do we fix the economy?
47:44
What's the long-term effect of this downturn?
47:46
But then around 2011 2012, the truth is we just had a slow and steady boring recovery and the most interesting questions in the world just weren't in economics anymore.
47:57
They were somewhere else.
47:57
This is a period when the music industry was undergoing lots of changes as we were moving towards streaming.
48:02
streaming was also beginning to affect television.
48:04
And I thought maybe the most interesting stories to tell in the world right now are about the emerging economics of entertainment and media.
48:11
And as the closer I got to the question of what is it that makes media companies successful, I realized this is not just an economic question.
48:22
This is a fundamentally human psychological question.
48:25
Because what I'm really asking is why do people like what they like?
48:30
That's that's the core mystery of culture.
48:33
Why not just why do they do what they do, why do they believe what they believe, why do they like what they like.
48:39
And that took me down a beautiful rabbit hole that I really enjoyed um going down and resulted in hitmakers.
48:47
And you know, fundamentally the thesis of the book is that people are torn between opposing forces.
48:51
We are we have familiarity bias.
48:53
We like what is familiar. We like what is old.
48:55
But there's something in us that seeks to explore, right?
49:00
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
49:02
That that last line of Ulisses is true for all of us in a way.
49:07
So, we want something that's a little bit new.
49:09
And how do we think about then marrying these paradoxical values?
49:15
We like new things that are sneakily familiar.
49:18
M and much of the book was about how to achieve that that braiding of familiarity and surprise in everything architecture and art and television and entertainment and social media.
49:34
How if you to draw a line pre-Hitmakers, post Hitmakers, how is your writing, how is your approach to distribution and the craft different?
49:44
I think the truth is that one of the critics, one of the critiques of hitmakers that in retrospect I think was absolutely true is that I wasn't clear enough about my thesis and since then it took it was it was painful to hear that in the moment because I put so much time
49:59
into the book and I was just so thin skinned about critiques of the book I think when it first came out and I think about it in retrospect and I think the critique is totally right and it changed the way I valued simplicity of messaging in pieces. I've
50:14
I've definitely recognized that the articles that I write that are clearer in their message tend to be the most successful and finding that kind of simplicity in really complicated subjects is hard.
50:27
Like finding a way to boil down a complicated subject so it's a little simple bumper sticker and yet that bumper sticker contains within it the nuance that the that the full story had. That's so hard.
50:41
But I think I realized after writing that book how much more important it was for me to achieve that balance of simplicity and nuance.
50:49
So for you, you value writing musically so much.
50:52
So help me as a writing teacher, if a student's coming to me and write a passage and they're saying, "Hey, I want to learn how to write musically.
51:00
I love the way that Derek speaks.
51:02
I want to take that language, that energy.
51:04
I want to put it onto the page."
51:06
Are you consciously learning how to do this?
51:09
I have two answers to that question.
51:10
The first answer is that there are a handful of Greek rhetorical devices.
51:13
They really are all Greek rhetorical devices that are really easy to use.
51:17
And sometimes if you're lost, if you just have some of these Greek rhetorical devices on a postit on your computer, you can you can remember that ideas can break down in these kind of ways.
51:27
So, kayasmus rant metaboly has to be the best example.
51:30
You take a complicated idea that is all these different parts.
51:34
different parts. You think okay how do I break this into the most elegant binary so that I have ab ba ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights um the this way of speaking with inverted repetition is successful or speaking and writing I
51:55
think is successful because it's you want to be just musical enough without sounding like you're trying to write a pop song or trying to be repetitive just musical enough to disguise the music I think is the idea and um I would I would encourage them first to become familiar with these sort of like music in a box tools just how to take any idea and basically turn it into song. Um more broadly I would say the
52:17
Um more broadly I would say the principle here is that repetition is music.
52:21
Repetition is the god particle of music.
52:23
And you know, rhythm repeats within songs and verses repeat and then choruses repeat and then you repeat the chorus and then often when you really like the song, you play it again and again in your head.
52:33
There's no music without repetition.
52:34
And so if you want to take any idea and make it musical, the first thing to add to it is the element of repetition.
52:40
The second thing I would say is that read the writer you want to sound like. read them a lot.
52:51
Read them so much that their pto, their rhythm, the sort of invisible like x-ray structure of how they think and write, read them until that just flows out of you.
53:06
I remember when I um I got on a on a jag reading Philip Roth after he died.
53:12
So the the great Jewish novelist Philip Roth um I never read a book by him uh before he died.
53:17
and he died and I thought, "Okay, I really missed out.
53:21
I feel like I should jump into this."
53:23
I had been a John Updike fan, but but Roth was not someone I'd read.
53:26
And I read a ton of his books in a row.
53:29
I read American Pastoral and Sabbath Theater and a couple others.
53:31
And it's complicated to like describe how Philip Roth writes because he's really sui generous.
53:38
But like Philip Roth will write these sort of like it'll be one paragraph, one sentence and he'll be trying to explain the feeling of anger when you're betrayed.
53:49
And what he does is, and maybe there'll be some like Roth fans that are watching this that are like that's not what Philip Roth does at all, but this is what he did to me.
53:57
He'll say, "The feeling of anger upon being betrayed, there's there's rage, but behind that rage, isn't there a disgusting pleasure that the thing you thought was betraying you actually is betraying you?
54:16
But then underneath that pleasure of being right, isn't there this sense of loss that the person that you trusted betrayed you?
54:27
And underneath that, isn't there this sense of you as a child lost in the woods looking for something to trust and you can't find it?
54:35
But then backfilling that is actually just the rage again.
54:41
the and he takes these seemingly simple thoughts.
54:45
He's like the best writer of neurotic selft talk because I think I heard this from Ethan Cross who studies selft talk at um University of Michigan.
54:55
We talk to ourselves a thousand times faster than we in our head than we actually talk.
54:59
Which means that for every feeling that we have, there's like three pages of thought.
55:06
And Roth is so fantastic at showing how these thoughts can be layered.
55:09
It's just this this roing like tugofwar between all these different ideas.
55:16
When I finished reading his uh his his books, I think I was writing an article about online dating and why online dating might be hard for some people, might be more like existentially anxious than OG dating, dating in the pre- internet way.
55:39
And I I'm not gonna be able to quote it right now, but I said something along the lines of like there's something so beautiful about the convenience of being able to sit on your couch and meet people that you don't know that might become your wife.
55:48
But underneath that is the sickly anxiety of recognizing how crazy it is that you're on your couch looking at faces and one of them might be the most important person in the world.
55:57
And underneath that is horniness.
55:59
And underneath that is is is more excitement.
56:01
I'm sending out a message to someone who might be my wife or someone who might never talk to me again.
56:03
And and so I remember reading this and thinking like this is I'm not readiness in a way.
56:09
Like the ghost of Philip Roth is like attempting through the meat puppet of Derek to like write about what it's like to online. Oh, that's so cool.
56:17
Have you ever heard Shantam? No. Oh my goodness. You got to read it. You got to read it. Gregory David Roberts. Phenomenal book.
56:23
And that's exactly what I do.
56:27
just will write with paragraphs of Shantam saved next to me and the what is it?
56:35
Tell me more about this book.
56:36
It basically it's this guy he's stuck in a prison in Australia. He escapes.
56:39
He goes to India and he has a crazy adventure with drugs and death and girls and all this sort of stuff.
56:49
But the writing is so good.
56:50
And so what I'll do is I'll save paragraphs.
56:53
But was both what was both heartbreaking and beautiful is Apple made a TV show about it. And it was horrible. Yeah.
57:04
And the reason is because just like Philip Roth when you are so attuned and optimized for the medium of writing sometimes that doesn't always translate into video and sometimes it works really well.
57:15
But these sort of very perceptive people and the kind of perceptiveness that you can have in writing especially when it's cognitive perceptiveness of the layers of human self-t talk it just doesn't translate to video.
57:27
There's a great book um what we see when we read that makes the point that we're often disappointed when we watch movies of our favorite books, right?
57:45
Because every book is a movie.
57:50
When we read the book, we in our minds, if we have this kinesthetic capacity to read letters and create images, not everyone has that. Mhm.
58:02
We see the movie of the book that we're reading, but the movie is imperfect.
58:05
So when the character of, you know, whoever, um, Madame Bovery appears to us in our heads when we're reading the book, she doesn't appear as crystal clear as like a photo of Kira Nightly.
58:23
We see her nose, then it's gone.
58:25
We see her lips and then they're gone.
58:26
We see her hair in the wind and then it disappears.
58:28
It's it's impressionistic.
58:32
And so when we But it's also important to us. It it's it's dear to us.
58:34
the movie for one and the actually watching it on a screen is always a disappointment because there's no way it can often match the movie that we have in our minds.
58:46
One thing I find lovely about that idea is that it suggests that all writing is an effort to translate one person's movie in their head into another person's movie in their head through the medium of letters. Right?
59:06
I have this thing I need to communicate and I'm not going to communicate it perfectly because there's no way to capture the motor mouth of self-t talk perfectly in words on a page.
59:19
I'm going try to capture it and I'm going to give it to you and I'm going to see if this little game of literate telephone can work so that you can see the same movie that I'm seeing. Do you see it?
59:28
And it's it there's there's a there's a lovely idea behind this disappointment that you described, which is that we are all through language trying to and failing to communicate the movies of our lives to other people.
59:46
One of the things that you lose is the ability to capture.
59:49
But one of the things that you gain, and I learned this from Robert Caro, is He so when he would interview people, he would always just repeatedly ask, "What would I see if I was there? What would I see?
1:00:07
What was in front of you?
1:00:07
What was the experience of that?"
1:00:09
And he says, "If you let the reader see the place, if you do it well enough and have shown the character of your protagonist well enough so the reader can see the scene, be involved, then the reader can see things, sense things, understand things about your protagonist that the writer doesn't have to tell them.
1:00:25
the reader can grasp them for themselves.
1:00:30
And what I think you lose in writing is the capture.
1:00:35
What I think that you gain in writing is enhancement through symbolism.
1:00:39
And what I mean by that, this goes back to our thing of truth.
1:00:43
It's sort of like what you get in the shift from realism in art to impressionism.
1:00:49
Impressionism is a story. Realism is capturing.
1:00:53
And I like writing that is more of the impressionistic style where what it's doing is it's taking whatever is happening and it's dramatizing it.
1:01:03
It's magnifying it and through the poetry it is giving you a truth that not even the eye can get to. That's beautiful. I'll say this.
1:01:11
I like impressionist and really early abstract art much more than I like representational art.
1:01:17
And it's not just because of the answer that's typically given, which is that represent rep representational art was merely trying to capture that which photographs and movies should could merely capture more acutely.
1:01:31
It's also that I judge my aesthetic experience by feelings, not by the virtue of correctness in art. Right.
1:01:43
So when you look at a Kandinsky Yeah.
1:01:44
and you look at um you compare it to I don't know like like a Michelangelo um if you say what did a better job of capturing reality which of these paintings is more true right all right well Michelangelo is actually like carving statues of people he's actually repres representing you know like angels or or or or gods as humans actually are Kandinski's drawing it's nothing it's just like it's a representation of what the sound of drums looks like.
1:02:14
Um, but it doesn't matter because there's a deeper kind of truth that we're talking about when we're talking about art.
1:02:24
And that's that's the that's the quality of making someone feel connected to themselves or connected to something bigger, right?
1:02:33
It's it's it's serving as a means of inspiring the feeling of awe.
1:02:38
And I get so much more awe from seeing abstract art or seeing maybe Heronomous Bosch, which is just surreal, than in looking at pictures that represent ideas.
1:02:50
And that might be a very important lesson for writers, which is that there's only so far you can travel toward impressing people, toward capturing truth by just sticking to the facts.
1:03:03
You have to you got to churn the stomach.
1:03:07
You can't just write for the frontal cortex.
1:03:08
You have to get in there and just grab the gut with words sometimes because that's that's really where this next level of feeling comes from. Yeah. Last question.
1:03:20
You said earlier you were a theater guy and now you're a writer.
1:03:25
So, what is it about this craft that warrants years, decades of your life? What a great question.
1:03:34
There's a simple answer which is that it's just really fun.
1:03:39
Like writing is it's so fun to wake up.
1:03:44
There's a blank page to realize that there's a literal infinitude of things that you could do with that page.
1:03:53
There are things you can do with that page that can get you fired.
1:03:55
There's things you can do with that page that will win you awards.
1:03:59
there's things that you can do there that will make a million people furious at you.
1:04:07
Um that kind of freedom is it's dizzying.
1:04:13
Um Kirkagard said, "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." And I love that.
1:04:18
Um there's something so um so beautiful about having as your occupation the ability to do anything.
1:04:31
That really is like the realm of writing. You can do anything.
1:04:33
Um, and so I think that the two jobs that I've been the two occupations that I've been uh interested in uh have been acting and writing because it it says here's an audience and here's something that's blank whether it's a stage or a page and you can do anything on that stage and you can do anything on that page and it's going to make this audience over here react.
1:05:02
They're going to feel something.
1:05:05
They might not even know what they're going to feel when they come into the theater, when they click on the article or open up the book.
1:05:11
You're going to change like the quality of their consciousness and their emotional experience with this freedom.
1:05:21
Why would you want to do that? Amen.