so much of the writing out there is dishonest there's a crisis of trust nobody trusts the media you call yourself the honest broker what is the story of the honest broker I launched my substack newsletter 3 and A2 years ago my subscription base has grown 30% in the last 10 weeks I saw that this is why I write directly for the reader it's very difficult to come out with something creative refresh because the
system will shut you down you hate formulas I hate formulas I believe we are within 10 years at most from the culture reverse in so as a writer if I don't like dopamine culture but I kind of feel like I need to be part of dopamine culture I feel like I need to get right to the point what do I do well here's my advice okay I love this episode love it but after the interview friend sits me down at dinner he's like all right it's
good interview huh so tell me why should I listen and my answer was me I didn't really know what to say so I go home that night and I'm like what how should I responded and I see this YouTube comment that Nails it it says this he's a beautiful synthesis of head and heart so who is he well Ted is the world expert in jazz music and that's where he began his writing but the thing that stands out about him is the way that
he's built his career there's so many writers who are trying to game the algorithms are trying to get big quick boom boom boom go growth growth but Ted took a different strategy he's been reading the classics every day for something like 50 years 50 years you name it he's read it he's listened to the album he's read the book this guy knows the Western Cannon so if you like this interview I got one recommendation
check out a substack and start with a piece called the Western Cannon isn't what you think man you're going to love this interview and I'm Jazz to share it with you but um all right I'm going to start off with a compliment that I don't think you're going to like but it's a really nice compliment which is I think that out of every any guest I've had on the show you really embody the word audite and I just
have to compliment you on that well thank you and I I want to disclaim any extreme are addition you see me my older brother if you if you want to meet someone who's aidite and actually no one has been more surpris than me how much it helped my writing on that note what do you make of the shift towards minimalism in writing a sort of shorter sentences simpler words write to a fifth grader and it seems like the same thing has happened
in music it seems like the minimalist style even in interior design has sort of taken off a minimalist aesthetic dominates everything right now yeah what's going on American PR still has not recovered from Hemingway now don't get me wrong I admire Hemingway he's an amazing writer but this idea of really short choppy powerful sentences and he got some of that from other writers I think dashel
hamama did a lot of that I actually think Hemingway got a lot of it from the pros of Ezra pound Hemingway and pound were friends in Paris if you read Ezra pound's Pros not his poetry it's got that short declaratory sentences it's it's very Punchy and that became the American way of writing and even people in France or Germany or whatever they would see those those those short Punchy sentences that's an American way of writing I
don't think we've ever fully recovered from that and I think that a lot of great writing comes out of that tradition but I miss the maximalist style me too so I'm an admirer of Moby Dick or the few recent authors that have a maximalist style probably the greatest example is David Foster Waller that's exactly what I was thinking of you know Infinite Jest is one of my favorite books just because of his
courage in doing the maximalism and it's like PR you'd be reading a sentence in PR and you you forget what the the subject of the sentence is and David Foster Wallace is like that with the foot notes like you'll be reading a sent as a footnote and like you go back to the back of the book and the footnote is four pages or five pages like a short story and after you've read that you forgot where you are in the book I
admire that I wish there was a return to a more maximalist Pro style not everywhere you know when you read the newspaper you're not looking for that uh but still and I do think there will be a return to maximalism I think everything goes into Cycles uh I would be surprised if someday if I wrote a novel I would just do deliberately something maximalist and elaborate almost pushing it to an extreme degree as an aesthetic statement
saying hey we can do this these tools are available to us as a writer there's no reason why we should renounce them but for the most part you're right there's a minimalist aesthetic permeating everywhere in our culture Now everywhere everywhere it's the water we swim in I want to talk about you you call yourself the honest broker what is the story of the Hest broker well I gave myself that nickname but there's a story behind
it and I have to say up front it's not an especially sexy nickname I know other music writers have better nicknames like my friends Stanley Crouch the late Stanley Crouch he called himself the hanging judge what a great name for a Critic I I'd love to be the hanging judge and this is how I became the honest broker I don't know how much you know about my background but there's a whole side of it I rarely talk about you know
I've got a degree in economics from Oxford and MBA from Stanford and I did a lot of things especially in Silicon Valley uh in business interests for powerful people who had business problems and they sent me all over the world to solve their problems and often they had very difficult problems and this was the way I made my living because for a long time I didn't earn enough from writing let me tell you
that's that's a hard thing to do so I had a day gig but my day gig wasn't like other people's and once this is going back some time I was trying to help a huge company set up in China and they sent me out there and they gave me some introductions so one of my patrons there was the one of the richest people in Hong Kong and he introduced me to his friends and all of a sudden I've got these powerful people in China who are giving me
advice but the advice kept contradicting itself one person would tell me one thing another person would tell me another one person would say you got to set up in this region other one no no you want to be in Beijing or Shanghai or whatever and I was hopelessly confused and then one night at a bar in a hotel I met this drunk Australian oh wow who changed my life the drunk Australian I don't even know his name that the
drunk Australian changed my life wife I was explaining to him my problems and he had been working in Asia for decades and he would tell me oh I know how I've been in Jakarta and Shanghai and Tokyo and Korea you name it I've been there I've worked with all the people and I know how to get things done in Asia he said I can solve your problem oh great what what's the solution to my problem he said Ted you
go to China you're going to set up a business go to some area you need to find the honest broker what do you mean no no you need to find the honest broker I this sounded great but this is like go find the wizard of O you know what are you talking about he said no no let me explain to you how it works in China we don't have rule of law in China you can't trust the court system it's very difficult to do business there but in every
Community there is a person who is the honest broker he's the person in that community that everybody trusts and he knows how to make introductions to other people you can trust and I said why will he do this for me he said Ted you won't believe it he's not even going to charge it but let me clarify he's not going to charge you up front you're going to become one of his contacts he's going to help you get
established he's going to introduce you to people he's going to give you advice you can trust he's going to introduce you to people that that are honest and then maybe a few years later he'll ask you for a favor sure and that's how the honest broker works and China cannot operate without the honest brokers in every Community okay now how do I relate this to writing and you got to realize I'm doing all this business stuck and I'm
writing on the side well this honest broker advice proved to be very useful and chant now I'm back home and I'm writing on music and I'm seeing how so much of the writing out out there is dishonest you can't trust it in fact it's gotten worse since that time because if you look at surveys now nobody trusts the media they don't trust the expert they don't trust the university professors there's a crisis
of trust out there and I even saw it in my own world of music writing and at a certain point it dawned on me that the solution to my writing problem was identical to the solution to my business problem in China with the difference that I had to be the honest broker and I said well this is how I'm going to write from now on I'm going to be the person people can trust I'm going to shoot straight I'm not going to pursue my own
interest which in music criticism you see people that will write something just so they can hang out with band or get on the jet with the Rolling Stones or backstage pass or whatever not that I was ever going to be on the plane with the Rolling Stones but still people will do things for reasons other than speaking honestly to their reader right now I recently comp piled a list of all the reasons why writers will lie and I
came up with a very long list but I decided that like my friend said in China you need the honest broker even here in the US maybe more than ever before so when I did finally set up my substack well I'm going to call it the honest broker and so that's how I became the honest broker there are three questions that you asked um whenever you're going to publish something cuz one of the things that I've noticed that
I think is rare I think there's a lot of critics who are critical and they're sort of drab and a little cranky and then there's a lot of people who have a sort of enthusiasm for the craft but they sort of suck up to the artists and suck up to everybody and then they don't have that honesty and there's three questions that you ask is this fair is this accurate will this be persuasive to all fair-minded observers why are those
questions well absolutely see there's a risk writing I I guess I should call it a Temptation there are multiple Temptations one temptation is to tell the reader what they want to hear another temptation is to write what the editors want another one is to write about a musician in a favorable way so that you can become a friend uh they're all you I write about something you get tenure at a university or whatever I
just put all those behind me and I ask myself is how do I serve my reader H this is the most important thing to me is my relationship with my reader that's more important than if they think I'm cool or me showing off or making connections with powerful people so what does the reader want from me what does the reader expect from me and the reader wants it to be honest they want it to be fair and obviously it has to be
convincing to Fair people if I'm not operating at that level I have failed now this may seem like something every writer would do but I think that there are a lot of writers who are for example they'll have some cause they want to support so they will tilt everything in their reframing of the argument in unfair ways not to convince fair-minded people but to do something that almost borders on
propaganda or promoting an ideology I would suggest that maybe 50% of the writing that circulates nowadays in newsletters or articles or whatever has an agenda and as soon as you go to the reader with an agenda I believe the reader justifiably has an element of distrust an element of skepticism so I want to build that relationship of trust with the reader it's me being the honest broker and as that honest broker I want
them to be able to trust me there's an element of honesty in terms of The Craft of writing of you find yourself saying things that you're almost not supposed to say things that maybe it's a shameful thought maybe it's a thought that might get people angry at you do you find yourself having those thoughts and when you do what is the initial reaction like of I just saw this honest thought that surprised me on the page and then in
your editing process deciding whether to publish it or not or how do I edit the sentence so that it has that fairness and that objectivity well let me take one example um most of my writing until the last 10 years or so was music writing I now write about a wide range of of subjects but I started out as a music writer and probably the biggest challenge for a music writer the biggest curse they have to overcome is the
desire to appear cool now I think all writers want to appear cool you know we want to be fashionable and trendy and all this but I think music writing especially it tempts the writer to adopt a cool pose so instead of speaking honestly or frankly you try to strut and PR and you try to act like the you're you're too cool for school that mean think of Rolling Stone absolutely know and and a lot of music writers
became famous that way you know and and uh you look at uh Lester bangs for example Hunter Thompson who wrote for Rolling Stone I mean they had a an image they had to live up to now you go down that path there all sorts of problems you can end up maybe Hunter Thompson or you try to live it yourself there's a certain image people have of you and you feel responsible to live up to the image and now you're being untrue to
yourself I think but that and I fear you end up like H 100 Thompson you commit suicide because the the Gap as you're aging the gap between the Public's image of who you are and who you really are gets more and more painful uh to deal with um but in my own writing I made a decision at a certain point that I was going to abandon the Quest for coolness and the most powerful way you can do that is to admit your own
limitations to your readers okay what's an example of that well you know I think if you go through my writing you'll see often where I will give examples where I I said the wrong thing at the wrong time one of the stories I published was how the cops came to arrest me at Stan gs's house because I was too stupid to figure out what was going on when when the alarm went off and I mean I'm not going to go
through the whole story there but I will deliberately subvert myself in my narratives and I I do this it's almost the way the Aesthetics will wear the hair shirt it's a constant reminder that we may aspire to be on this level but more often we're down at this level and so I had to overcome a tendency if you look at my very early writings when I was writing for my college newspaper early on this desire to present the cool pose to the
reader it was painful to give that up uh but I'm now at a point I don't even think about it I just right from the heart I tell things the way they happened and I live with the consequences but I think this actually is part of the relationship I'm trying to co Cate with the reader probably the the the the best example of this now is Carlo kosg guard yeah who you know I actually got them up on the Shelf there
who wrote this prian autobiography and at every step He makes himself look as bad as possible mhm the funny thing is is you would think reading this eventually you would say I don't want to have anything to do with this guy but actually it's the exact opposite reaction you say I trust him if if he's willing to show his own frailties in such a Frank unforgiving way I probably can trust him when he talks about other things now I'm not at
the level of him because I haven't I haven't had the kind of of of dissipated that I think he had but still I believe that's a that's a powerful approach for a writer I'm going to expose myself and that gives me uh an opportunity to gain the trust of the reader so I can now have this more intimate conversation this more Frank conversation with the reader have you been deliberate about not trying to show off with fancy Pros
or crazy references because most people who are connoisseurs experts to the level that you are they use big laqua purple pros and you don't has that been a conscious choice or is that just more back to I'm a straight shooter I'm going to be honest and I'm going to talk to people like I'm having a conversation with them at the bar this happened gradually and almost without my thinking about it I had a theory of
writing going back to my college days okay I was reading you're an English major I an English major okay I'm reading a lot of modern modernist literature and I was very enamored of a literary critic named hu Ken who wrote a series of books on Yates and pound and tsot and all that and he would change his writing style for each book so if he wrote about Ezra pal he wrote like Ezra pound if he wrote about Yates he wrote
like Yates he would adopt something of the Persona of the author he was writing about in his own pros and I liked that and so when I started writing about music every book I wrote had a different Pros style how does one write like jazz well for example I wrote a book called West Coast Jazz and it is sort of a hip cool thing and and and and the pros is very flashy it's about life in Hollywood and the movie studios and all that and so I will
use more flamboyant language more flamboyant metaphors the adjectives will be more striking then I write a book about the delta blues so now I'm in Mississippi and now I want to write more like wner and all the metaphors have to do with the soil and the crops and the the way I structure the sentences becomes lazier more relaxed and open so every book I wrote I tried to change the style lazier relaxed open what is that
actually look like in a way a sentence is formed well what I I will I will compare things to uh the leaves of tree the shape of the leaves of trees or the flow of the river there elements of of fauler that will come into it and for example when I'm writing about the delta blues I read great books by Mississippi authors right trying to capture some of that and so you look at just the opening page of my
delta blues Book You'll see this is totally unlike the West Coast Jaz okay now let's fast forward to what you were just asking why how I write now I launched my substack newsletter three and a half years ago and I just continued to write the way I would write music criticism for a magazine or a newspaper but I found that my Pros started changing on its own without me even being aware of it it became more
conversational now why did this happen when I got on substack H one of the people there Dan Stone told me he said Ted when you write on substack you have a different relationship with your reader people are getting emails from your readers are getting emails from you several times a week they feel they know you personally so don't be surprised if readers start contacting you and acting as if you're longtime friends because
this is the nature of writing on substat and what I found was without even me thinking about it I started writing on substack the way I would have a conversation like with you or let's say I go out with a friend to dinner just the two of us and the banter back and forth we would have that's exactly how I started writing on substack it's very conversational and the funny thing was I didn't plan it
that way it just felt natural you know like I say I try to adapt my writing to what is right in that particular setting and without me doing a lot of strategizing on it I started writing in a more direct conversational manner now that makes it very awkward to show off I mean if I wanted to show off and and quote Shakespeare or whatever this is Plato Aristotle Dante the substack is not the place to do it but there is one
thing I do do is I will often in the course of my writing on substack I will throw away something in an aside or a subsidiary phrase that includes a a very Arcane literary reference or philosophical reference that just few of my readers will get and I know that for them they will find that very entertaining it's not me showing off it's just sort of like a fun thing I do for the the uh the few readers that will do it so for
example I will say I was listening to this music and it awoke me from my dogmatic Slumber which was what Emanuel K said when he wrote the critique of pure reason sure he had read David Hume and David Hume awoke him from his dogmatic Slumber so I'll put that in and I know that of my readers one out of a thousand will get that reference but it will entertain that reader and then there are other ones where I'll do something from a a
song lyric or whatever so there's a on the surface my writing now looks very straightforward and direct but there are layers within it and the and the person who has the more Arcane knowledge will get things from it that others that just operate at the surface level won't get sure you're now writing a book on substack so tell me about I think youve published like 10 chapters out of 12 that's right so how has that experience
been different almost done with the book how has it been different from the other books that you've published without that direct relationship that quick feedback with your readers well I was working on a book when I got on substack it's called music to raise the dead and it's about this extraordinary tradition in music going back thousands of years where music has this transcendental pal I mean
literally to raise people from the dead if you remember the myth of orus orpheus's wife dies he has to go down to the underworld and bring his wife Back to Life by playing the light so he's making music and Hades the the head of the underworld is so Charmed by the music he lets his let him bring his his wife back to life and this myth exists all over the world there are uh 50 or 100 Native
American tribes that have the identical myth now obviously they weren't reading ancient Greek mythology and it's linked to Shamanism where the shaman goes on in to a trance has certain songs and rhythms is able to get to an alternative state of being and that has magical powers and so this is the whole purpose of the book and I was writing this book and then I got on substat and I thought I'm just going to publish this book on
substat now that's not easy to do because people generally don't look to email newsletters for books but I made sure each section that I published was self-contained so you could read this installment and even if you hadn't read the previous chapters you could still read any chapter in isolation and still worked and so I've been doing that and it's a little more elaborate than the stuff I would normally put on suback it
has less of that conversational tone it's got footnotes and it's a huge amount of scholarly apparatus there but still I I think my readers appreciate that uh and also I like the idea of taking a book and bringing it directly to my reader without the intermediary of an editor or publisher which is one of my goals in life is to have that direct relationship with a reader if I can do it for a newsletter
why not for a book you're talking about the shamans who've had the music memorized and that was the way that music was was shared I mean I think at the bards and ancient Greece with the Odyssey and the ilot how does songwriting change after the invention of typography to what we're getting to now how is songwriting fundamentally different from what we got back then well I think there were certain changes
and shifts in musical culture and I think they also apply to writing especially poetry and I think the biggest shift actually happened about 2500 years ago and I call this the Pythagorean rupture that's a fancy term now what do I mean mean by the Pythagorean rupture yeah what do you mean what I mean is up until the time of Pythagoras now he was an ancient Greek philosopher and most of us know him through geometry because he
had the Pythagorean theor right which I vaguely recall in the deep pris as my head but Pythagoras also was the first person to understand how to tune instruments and the mathematical ratios in tuning and he found if you had a string and you had enough and then you change the length of the string it changes the note and he worked out on the proportions and he created the first true guide to musical modes or scales in
history now what happened though is before Pythagoras music was very magical you'd fall into a trance you'd have Divine experiences you'd have tutelary Spirits you'd have shamans that could cure people and the music would would Empower them after Pythagoras music stopped being magical it became mathematical and one of the key focuses of my vocation as a music writer is to recapture the magic of music and the
same thing is true of poetry I mean poetry was a magical invocation the first thing you did as a poet is you thank the Muse The Muse inspired you the goddess the goddess inspired your writing what an amazing concept that is and we lose that now one of the few people in modern times who believe that was the writer Robert Graves who was a novelist uh and wrote a lot of very successful books but he he wrote a book
called The White goddess he believed that there was a muse it was a goddess that inspired his work and so for me there are ruptures like that the Pythagorean one and then when you talk about what you just did is people writing music down on paper that's the ultimate extension of that music music now is no longer magical sound it's not even sound it's written on a piece of paper and I know in my own studies the
Aesthetics of music I had philosophers tell me that well the real music Ted isn't the song it's the musical score this relates to songwriting but I had dinner with a musician few months ago and he got to be in the studio with Kanye West as they were writing some songs and I said what was that like he said said they did something really interesting what they did was they wrote air quotes wrote by going around and
they would basically throw out different lyrics and somebody in the room tried to write something down and they're like do not write it down do not write it down and he's like why and it was Kanye or somebody else said we do not write things down in the moment we let the moment flow and we let our memories remember and then we remember only the best lines and then we write those down after and I I think that that's an interesting blend of the
two things they were saying I know that that doesn't have to do with Pythagorean notation but there is a similarity there it's not sitting and writing it's sort of freestyling letting something go and then remembering things later on and keeping that and this makes perfect sense and I think a lot of writers are like this the magic of writing is so uncontrollable you get an inspiration where does it come from and
once you have experiences where these things come to you you worry is it going to go away I know songwriters this is a huge fear is that the song came to them often it comes fully formed just as in a moment the song just seems to create itself I know in my own music career the highest level of me playing jazz and I worked for many years as a jazz pianist is that moment when the music seems to be playing
itself and you're almost almost watching yourself do it how am I doing this and as soon as you start thinking about it you make a mistake and as soon as your conscious mind comes in and I know the same thing happens in writing now writing is is a much more methodical thing but still that same situation arises and so when you get that inspiration like the story you've just told you're very careful with it don't
write it down you try to hold on to it and I know I collect bits of wisdom from people who've had moments of inspiration and one of the here's a great story this came to me from John handy who was a saxophonist who early in his career worked with the great jazz basist and composer Charles Mingus okay in fact he was on an album called Mingus and some people will tell you justifiably this is one of the five or 10 greatest jazz
albums of all time remember the first time I saw John handy I played that album that's me I'm playing that part I'm playing you want to wanted to make sure that I knew that he was playing the parts on this because it's such an amazing achievement to be one of the great jazz albums of all time and years later I had an opportunity to produce a record of his so I worked as a a record producer
and here's a great story he had where he was playing with Charles Mingus and he's playing a sack solo one night and it's just inspired and the notes are coming he has no idea where they're coming from but the the audience is just loving it they're screaming they're cheering they're clapping when he's done the audience is just bling away they'd never heard anything like that and Charles Mingus his boss the basist calls him
over and tells him John don't ever do that again now what's going on there now what John handy said is his immediate reaction was the boss is jealous of me I just did something that was so exciting that I became the center of attention and now he doesn't want me to do that but he said it only occurred to him later what Charles Mingus really what he really said was you had a moment of inspiration there where you did
something you were totally in the moment don't try to play that exact same thing tomorrow night huh now I see what you're saying you got this idea and now tomorrow night instead of being fresh and open to the experience and in the moment again you're going to try to recreate what you did 24 hours ago or a week ago or a month ago or a year ago so when he told John had don't do that again he wasn't saying I'm jealous of you
because you did something great he saysi want you to do great things again in the future but the only way you can do that is being open to the immediacy of the experience right there you know it is striking if you talk to film directors they'll say there was something about the 17th take that was just perfect it was just perfect and we did 18 19 20 we'll never be able to recreate that and I feel that with writing I will show up
I'll have the same cup of coffee I'll sit in the exact same place I'll sleep the exact same amount everything will be the same but there's something on someday where something comes out and then I will look at that piece of writing and I will say I don't really feel like I made that do you feel that I believe this is a common experience of creative people especially when you're operating at your
best and I I write every day I write every day and I have a list of Articles to write or whatever and sit down and I'll work on something but every once in a while you'll just start writing and it will seem to have a life of its own totally and I've heard novelists tell me this is that the characters start doing things you didn't ask them to do you know the character the character starts imposing their will on the author characters I'm
going to do this I'm going to do that but even in my non-fiction writing I feel that this writing has a life of its own it has a direction it's going to go and I have to trust that well there's a in Creative work where when you start off at least for me in not every Project's the same but often I have a vision for where I want to take the peace and I'm leading it and then there's a moment when the peace takes on
a life of its own and I am now in response in service of the piece almost a custodian of the intrinsic Telos that that piece now has absolutely and this is a a valuable lesson the thing that helped me enormously with all the years of me playing jazz piano because in jazz there is a culture that prices improvisation right of course and if there are two paths you can go and one is keep doing it over and
over the same way to get it perfect or to do it every different every time you do it differently to try to capture something spontaneously then as a jazz musician you're supposed to do it the second way now I know Jazz musicians who do play the same solo every night they get up there it's time for the sax all and it's exactly the same the way they did it the previous night within the Jazz Community those people are derided
and scored not surpris you wouldn't say it publicly but you say this is not the spirit of the music if you start playing it the same way the funny thing is sometimes it sounds very spontaneous and then you'll go to the you'll sit around and you'll hear the next concert it's the same and so I very early in my jazz vocation which came to me before my writing book music to me I was a musician before I really became
serious as a writer and I got this idea of just trusting the spontaneity and not try to force anything and to let it come to me that's helped me enormously as a writer and so now I do this almost as an extreme I will write things and some of the stuff I write is pretty strange I mean if you read my newsletter it's unusual but this is the only way I know how to work is is to that myself take chances that's the only way I can get up
to that level you know I have to if if I just tried to do it by rote and routine and formula I could get up there maybe consistently but if I want to get up to that higher level I've got to take risks and this is how I do it yeah that shows up all the time in your work what is it about formula that you just loathe and despise so much it's true and I often get into interviews and people say why don't
don't you like the Marvel movies or what these are just formulas you hate formulas I hate formulas I hate formul I'm almost extreme so for example my wife and I will watch movies and I'll say I don't want to know I thing I hate most is when the movie or TV series starts within the first five minutes I already know how it's going to turn out sure well this is the hero that's the villain the hero will Triumph the
villain and you just when you know that there's no interest to me I I love movies or books or TV series where they completely disrupt my expectations that's what's fun for me is to have something that completely disrupts my expectations that that sends like this energy through my body and and so I am the enemy of the formula but I don't think it's unjustified I believe a lot of the crises we have in the culture now are
driven by too heavy a Reliance on on formulas I mean Hollywood is struggling there Disney had a miserable court and they haven't had a huge hit movie this year Paramount has been struggling that last mission Impossible film was not as uh lucrative as they thought exciting movie but still the box office receipts fell flat and you look at at the all the movies the the last year we had a bit of a blip with Barbie and Oppenheimer but
if you look at the monthly Trend and I've analyzed a six-month moving average it's downward there's a complete lack of excitement among the movie audience and it's because the studios RI too much on formula So when you say that we need to move Beyond formula are you saying what we need to do is like the Beatles where every single album sort of gets better and it actually changes and evolves over
time and then that creates a change in the culture from like 63 to 68 or you saying like no we need more Bohemian rap city in the world where it's like one song but it's like actually seven eight different songs M Mia M Mia you know it's like all of that what are you saying I was saying all of those all of those and more let a thousand flowers Blossom The Beatles are a great example they're great example because and and
some Beatles fans are going to get angry at me but I will say it outright I love the Beatles but when they were first signed to a record contract those songs were not very sophisticated so I mean I think George Martin The Producer said I brought these these boys from Liverpool and the best thing they could come up was Love Me Do and I he said he was completely completely disappointed in the quality of their songwriting early
on but they got better and better at every album they took more chances and finally they got to a point where every album was a fundamentally different experience than the previous album and what this did was and this was marvelous is it reinvigorated the whole music culture because the Beatles were so successful all the other bands and record labels were trying to imitate them but they couldn't keep up
so uh they came out with a TV show with the monkeys and the monkeys came on TV in the mid-60s and they captured the Beetles sound as it had been the previous six months but by the time the show actually shows up on TV the Beatles are already on to the next thing and this Shook Up the Music culture and you had a period of several years in which the music changed every few months and the record labels would give
their artists a lot of creative freedom because they realized that if we are going to keep up with what the Beatles are doing and the fast pace of change in popular music we need to give our most creative people more freedom nowadays we have the exact opposite of that and I'll talk about music but the same thing I think is true of a lot of writing if you listen to the radio now you listen to the hit songs
today a hip hop song country song a pop song and imagine if they had been on the radio 20 years ago what would you think well that would have fit in 20 years ago they really W you know this is a striking thing about country music it seems to me that it's very stagnant I'm no country music connoisseur but I'll give you one data point sort of the only one I have but I graduated from college in 2016 so it's
been the better part of a decade and I can turn on the Sirus XM country music the highway and I know the words to about half the songs and I basically haven't listened to country music in 10 years well this is the songs are staying on the radio for longer there's a shift to people listening to old songs instead of new songs and when the new songs come out they're very similar to the old ones now why is this happening I don't think
it's happening for Creative reasons I don't think it's happening because it's the most artistic or aesthetically pleasing or satisfying thing it's happening for economic commercial reasons and because the companies are not Risk Takers so this gets back to my unhappiness with the formula it's very difficult to come out with something creative refresh because the system will shut you down the system
will shut you down this is the hypocrisy of the record labels and the Publishers in that what they say doesn't match their actions what they say is we're looking for fresh Talent we're looking for writers with a different voice and a different perspective but I'm being cynical here but I believe this is true the reality is sitting in those publishing offices in New York the reality is what was on the bestseller list last week we want
exactly that so like when Harry Potter books come out we want a a boy wizard yeah well to this point I'm just tired of that same non-fiction formula of here's my point here's an anecdote here's a study and then we sort of summarize the point and you just do that over and over and over I just find the the bestselling books that you would find at the front table at Barnes & Noble to be very formulaic in that way
and when I talk to my friends who are writing books working with Publishers the word that comes to mind I don't know why it's like it's squashing the individuality squashing the individuality I'm going to write about this in the future about the culture is flattening huh the culture is flattening but i' this is why I write directly for the reader I just it was and I don't want to sound overly cynical but it was so frustrating dealing with the
publishing industry in the US right now particularly the major Publishers there's such a narrow range of things they want and it all changes based on what's fashionable so uh Pirates of the Caribbean as yet they want pirate stories and and you give them the pirate story and they say well this week it's sword fighting Hillbillies can you do a sword fighting okay I'll do a swort p it's just it feels like they're chasing
each other and they're chasing their tail and it becomes very stultifying it becomes very banal I believe the Liberation in our culture is going to be risk-taking which is probably going to happen on the Grassroots level of course you know I can do it on substack because I don't have to answer to a a corporate boss I don't even take advertisers I don't have sponsors or patrons I please the readers the relationship with the
reader and the reader understands day one that Ted takes cancers MH you probably read that article I did the other day if you introducing you know cuz I picked up my subscription base has grown 30% in the last 10 weeks I saw that so I had to integrate my new readers into my newsletter so I said welcome on board I'm happy to have you here the first thing you need to know is to expect the unexpected so I have the reader they
understand that I can take chances and you can do that in the micr culture now you can do that and what you do I can do it in what I do uh if you have a YouTube channel you can do it if you self-produce your albums on band camp you can do it uh as soon as you start working within the mainstream publishing industry particularly the major Publishers my experience there maybe other people have better experiences in
me but my experience is the range of writing they want has become tremendously narrowed and predictable and formulaic and that if we're going to get something fresh and exciting it's going to happen not under their watch it's going to Happ bubbling up from the microculture when Kevin Kelly was running the whole earth catalog with st brand I think it was I might get the fraction wrong but I think that their
goal was to alienate oneth of the readership they said 1 was roughly right because if it's any more then you haven't pissed off enough people but if it's any less then you're probably not speaking to your audience it really stuck with me that's great Stuart brand is a hero of mine that I haven't heard that but that's great and in fact when people get upset at me I can I often consider that positive sure I love that
idea and I don't look to make enemies but if you are going to make enemies make the right kind of enemies is what I say and so I W when I criticize you know Marvel movies like Martin Scorsese found this he criticized the Marvel movies anding we need more risk-taking in Hollywood a lot of people get angry at him less So lately though I think as people see the box office fall off even some of the fans of those movies are are
getting frustrated by the formulas but I believe this is the single biggest risk and opportunity in our culture is to fight through the formulas and to create something that's truly different something that's like a new counterculture I'm really I have every expectation that we are going to get something that's more like a new Counter Culture it's in the process of being formed right now there are now internet
platforms to allow it and it's just a question of it all coming together and cohering I thought this was interesting advice for writers you and you can pop in whenever you want I'm just going to talk through it buy a blank journal and keep in a same in a safe place you don't want anybody to see what you're writing it then at the end of each day put down what happened during the last 24 hours
but there's one unbreakable rule what you write in the journal must be absolutely and totally honest well and I've got a say you're you're quoting for something I wrote I took this from somebody else the problem is I don't remember who I I heard this from so I I've got to I've got to stay up front I believe this I can't I can't take total credit from somebody told me this years ago it's great advice and what they said was
people say I don't know what to write about I want to be a writer but I don't know what to write about or I don't have any good ideas this was the best advice take a journal every day you write stuff that's brutally honest and you can't show it to anybody because everyone will get angry if they just you know but if anything irritated you during the day or something happened you didn't like or you saw something well they shouldn't
they shouldn't do it this way they should do it that way and what happens is you write that down every day and after you've done about 30 days of this you go back and you read it and you say where did these ideas come from where did this this fresh risk-taking Rider C I didn't know I had this stuff in me but it was only by giving self permission to break the rules that I could do it now let me let me explain
why this is true I'm going to get a little scientific on you so be forgiving of this let's look at the theory of evolution okay okay and supposedly according to the theory of evolution people get better and better all the time but in fact what evolution has done is not taught us to be honest but taught us to fit in because the survival of the fittest is the person who fits in like if you're a child and your family moves you go to a
new school and you're thrown with all these other kids what's your goal well I want a fit in you're drafted into the army you're with all these soldiers well I want to fit in I don't want to make waves this is how you succeed in the world so there's this evolutionary tendency for people have to choose being honest or saying what will help them fit in people are rewarded for fitting in so this is why we have group thing this is
why we have formulas and there's a girardian component with imitation absolutely you know pet you were absolutely Renee Gerard said there's the tendency for people to imitate and this has been programmed into US biologically because we survive if we fit in now I'm going back to writing now and this writing advice I just gave this is why you need to unte yourself everything you've done to fit in and be part of the
group thing you have to give yourself permission to be honest because Society will not give you that permission 99% of the situations you are in in society will reward you for adapting to other people's expectations and that doesn't create greatness as a writer so the only way you can get to this higher level as a writer is you must give yourself permission to go against The evolutionary tendency the need to fit in
the groups think the girardian mimetic thing of imitation and speak honestly from your heart but you have to teach yourself that I mean you use the word give yourself permission I almost want to use a more active verb there if you need to push yourself it's more than permission you need to propel yourself into a place of discomfort we're almost squiggling and squealing I like ah I'm not comfortable saying this and that's
why the journaling in private is so important absolutely and there's another thing I will say is that it takes time and this is where the more experience you have with the world and comfort and confidence in yourself you're better able to speak with that Honesty this is hard to do when you're young I give advice to my sons I say I this is your very difficult situation you're constantly in in
settings where where Conformity and fitting in are inculcated and it's difficult to speak up and say this is what I believe but that does get easier over time so this is the you know in many in many creative Pursuits you worry that as you age you're going to lose it because the the young have all this their neurons are firing much faster and all that but there is an advantage if you've led a life and you've built a sense of
confidence in who you are and a Mastery over difficult situations you've had experiences that were tough you got to the other side of them you put yourself outside your comfort zone and you flourished that aids us when we get to this point where we're going to write honestly because finally I know who I am I know what I believe and now I know what I'm going to say you were talking about Conformity and when I was reading your
50 quotes you quoted Romans 12:2 one of my favorites do not conformed to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind why did you choose that and how does it show up in your life that's a great quote it's so good so good because the pattern of this world is not something that you can put your anchor on yeah and what you see is that there's always a flavor of the month and the flavor of the weak or the
the thing happening now and if you try to build on that it collapses because those things those things never survive and so you must seek out the Timeless and you must renew your mind on the Timeless truths and that's why you know I I I spent a lot of time with these old books is because this is my firmer anchor and and I I was very extreme when I was young you're G to you're going to find this
ridiculous I had a professor once who taught me Milton and Dante and uh medieval and Renaissance literature and he told me once Ted I don't read any book written after 1900 because it hasn't proven itself yet the funny thing is I was like that for a long time now maybe I was more like 1940 or 1950 but I I had this idea that I didn't want to invest in a book until it had proven its benefits to generations of readers now I'm not as
much a stickler on that now I read a lot of new books but still I believed if something has given wisdom to gener ations of readers for hundreds and hundreds of years I should open myself up to that experience well I saw you say read old books when you're young and younger books when you're old what's going on with that absolutely that's what I did that for music and literature and and this is It's the exact opposite
of what most people do the exact opposite most people like in music when they're young they listen to the new music and then as they get older they still listen to now they listen to the old music CU they're still hearkening back to when they were young and and what I did with my reading and the music I consumed when I was younger is I wanted to understand the tradition and so for example I felt I
could not understand a contemporary novel at the level I wanted to until I had read three 400 500 of the classic novels in the past there was a point when I was younger a a big newspaper asked me to review a contemporary novel and I just looked and said I don't know how to do this I haven't completed my education yet finally by the time I got into my 40s I was well read I was well I had read the classics the the ancient Greeks
the ancient Romans the Egyptians the Mesopotamians the spiritual literatures the novels the poems the Epic I had the philosophy the history finally I I had that grasp I said now I can focus on what's happening today and have a perspective on sure so I started reading contemporary fiction around age 45 in my 40s I started listening just to new music for the most part what I listen to 80% new music now when I was
younger it was 80% old music this makes no sense to most people but to me it's been very valuable because now I can look at something happening today in the culture today and I have this Foundation of why this connect back to what Shakespeare did or what Aristotle said or what the ancient Greeks did in their tragedies this is the way I view culture and so I will look at at something like Breaking B yeah and I'll say well
finally somebody's done a TV show that's like uh ancient Greek tragedy what do you mean well all the other TV shows the main character is static and acts the same as season 1 Season 2 Season 3 season 4 whatever but Walter White starts as good basically good person he's a science teacher high school he's got cancer he needs to pay his medical bills and out of desperation what he does is he starts selling drugs but even then he just
wants to do the science part of it he has his his buddy Jesse does the Sally because Walder white is a pure person with pure motives and then you watch gradually over the series of several seasons he becomes an evil person becomes a criminal because he has a tragic flaw which is this desire for self-aggrandisement that had been negated in the world he tried to do a startup and it failed it forced to do
teaching and now his tragic flaw leads to his final collapse and so I say well finally somebody has done a TV series that draws on the wisdom of the ancient Greek tragedy that's why this thing is so successful none of the other TV series are doing so this is how I view culture now how I view writing how I view narrative how I storytelling is this larger perspective walk me through two things the first is tactically what
you did in your teens 20s 30s so that by the time you were 45 you had that education so what did that look like on a day-by-day basis and then the other thing then we can get into what do you do on a day-by-day basis in terms of where writing fits on your schedule then focused reading in the chair upstairs and then just listening to music okay and I've got to say up front I don't talk about this
often and I CU it's what I did was so extreme I say it's like an extreme sport what I did with my education was like somebody trying to climb Mount Everest or whatever I'm I'm I want to and I'm not telling other people to do this I'm not holding myself up as a role model I'm not saying everybody has to do this and I'm I'm not showing off or whatever but I I'll I'll I'll tell you what I did myself provide
the Proviso was this was me doing something sort of like an extreme sport level of discipline sure starting in high school I would get up at 5:30 in the morning to read for an hour or so before going to school I wanted to have enough time to have breakfast and you know shower and shave whatever but I also a huge chunk of time every morning to read before going to school and this would not be books assigned in school this is
always Beyond school so this became part part of my pattern throughout life it's easier to to do that in an educational institution but when I got jobs it was hard I had some very demanding jobs but I always if I had to give up sleep so I could and so I wasn't getting enough sleep but I still could get up early and do my reading regimen um you would I would this was important and I would and I wouldn't
wouldn't be a slacker you know so for example example when I my first really demanding job was with the Boston Consulting Group and this is a high powerered job back then they only had about 340 consultants in the world so you went into that job you are advising Fortune 500 CEOs now it's ridiculous to consider me advising Fortune 500 CEOs when I'm in my early 20s and this is a this is a scary thought but the reality was I was thred
into this High powerered job but still every morning morning before I went to the office I would drive over to the Stanford campus Because I was living in po Alto I'd go into trusted reunion I'd bring a stack of books and these were the most difficult this is when I read SAR being in nothing sure so I'm you know these were the most demanding books I could find and I wanted to force myself out of this analytical business
mindset this commercial mindset I needed something as an antidote to that and then when the day was done I would drive back to Stanford I'd find a practice room and I'd play the piano that I'd go I didn't even I didn't own a TV back then I didn't own a TV until I was in my mid-30s because I wanted to to have time for reading listening to music music making but I've continued this I've done this for 50 years
now and even now I will I don't people view me as a writer and I am a writer I'm a productive writer but I don't start writing till the afternoon the whole morning is devoted to listening to music and reading and mostly reading books and I I will later in the day I'll read articles or whatever but I'll read books and they're demanding books and the books are always designed to be mind expanding so I've now done this for 50
years and it's given me a great grasp of things and I will say that I did not do this as a career strategy I didn't do this to make money or anything obviously I didn't do it to make money the funny thing is around the time I got into my 40s it had an impact I would speak and people would respond to my speaking in surprising ways I had a certain Authority I had a certain gravitas people took me very seriously and I could only conclude this
this was the cumulative result of this arduous education I had imposed upon myself had given me an authority in people's eyes and it wasn't like I was trying to show off I wasn't quoting Plato or Shakespeare or whatever but there was somehow this education had seeped into me and had so permeated my mind and my communication skills the way I would construct sentences the way I would try to present an argument and all of a
sudden people wanted to hire me now for all sorts of projects Ted we want you to help us raise money for our business we want you to do this that or the other and the funny thing was that this this education which I had not done for the slightest commercial reasons did prove to be a vocational skill and even now it's a vocational skill but it only works if you pursue it disinterestedly because the payoff is so
long and coming you could never actually do this as a conscious career strategy you have to have a love of learning and a love of immersing yourself in these works and then you will get benefits the other thing that stands out is you have written about jazz then music but not just reading the musical Cannon reading all over the place how then have books about say Finance like the Alchemy of Finance by George Soros how have
those influenced how you see culture and how you see music how you see writing how you see the world changing now that was another pure coincidence and if you're open to experiences coincidence and chance will play a great role in your life could be a very positive role but let's go back to this period when I talked about the honest broker where I'm doing projects all over the world I was 30 countries in
five continents I'm doing on the ground projects these are very business oriented projects I so you needed to get more uh pages in your passport actually I did yeah I actually ran out of pages in my passport I was traveling so much I had to send it back to the state department to put more pages in and I was expected to do many things but I was supposed to analyze situations first and foremost and predict the future how will
this product launch go how will this technology evolve what are consumer attitudes going to be now versus 5 years from now and people were constantly hiring me to predict the future so this became a specialty of mine I became what you call a futurist and it was only at a late stage I began applying this to my writing I remember I was writing the delta blues and I ran into a argument about whether the blues had
been an innovation or the retention of an old tradition and I said well actually what I studied in product launches can help me here the product launches taught me that Innovation happens in densely populated areas when I studied product launches in business we used these formulas to predict and the formulas all came out in the medical literature to predict the spread of disease and so what I found was Innovation
happens most rapidly in the same kind of settings that create the spread of disease densely populated areas where people of different cultures come together I couldn't believe some of the some of the similarities between the Island of Lesbos in ancient Greece and New Orleans absolutely so this is a classic example why did Jazz come out of New Orleans because New Orleans was a densely populated city it was a very
medically dangerous city with with diverse population then I got to the blues which came in the middle of nowhere in the most rural areas where there was no intermixing of people I said well it's obvious drawing upon what I studied for product launches and predicting the future in business that the blues was not an innovation it was the retention of an old tradition and because it was in an isolated place it
stayed alive because if a blues musician had gone to New York or Chicago they would have forgotten the blues it's only because they were in isolated rural areas they could retain Traditions going back to Africa huh so this was the first time in my life where I was studying music and culture and an analytical technique I had used in Silicon Valley helped me understand it now since then I've done this increasingly where I
study what's happening in books I'm happening in movies music and I use all these analytical techniques so that's why I will read a book by George Soros called the Alchemy of Finance where he shows how he became a billionaire by understanding the way financial markets especially currency markets would evolve and I will this is why I will study all these people that have developed analytical
tools I was just reading Ray Doo's book he's trying to predict what's going to happen in Investments but I can apply that to culture this is why I learned from Rene Gerard because re you know Rene Gerard got the idea that that uh led to the first investment in Facebook because the idea is if people imitate each other Facebook is a great investment because now you can Mark your imitation against your neighbors so what
i' I've done is I've drawn on all these analytical techniques that normally a music writer would never worry about it but I had been forced to do this to earn a living to earn a living I had been forced to find ways to predict the future I'm doing it now I'm just applying it to music writing movies and culture not to new products I always like to think like if I'm listening to this what does this mean for my right
and there's two takeaways that I'm that I'm getting one of them is what is the skill that you have that is highly distinctive from the other people in your space so one of the things that you have from your NBA background BCG is the ability to analyze an S1 so you can look at what's happening at Universal music group and Spotify and actually break down what's going on there that's the first thing how do I become uncorrelated to my
competition so to speak and then the the other thing is that becoming a good writer can begin with deep domain expertise and so often we think of oh I'm going to learn the craft I'm going learn about adverbs and all the Schoolhouse Rock stuff that we learn in fourth and fifth grade but what you're saying is it begins with the expertise build up that large Corpus of knowledge and then you can begin to
cross-pollinate ideas that are in your head that's absolutely true not long ago I was visiting a college campus and when I go there they often have me give a lecture on music they have me sit in on music classes but at one of them they said we want you to talk to a classroom of writers so I be I'd love to talk to writers I have a lot of things to tell them uh one of the things I told them was if you want to be a writer you must
also become an expert in something right you know for example I know people that went to law school they leave Law School they decide to become a sports writer then they see all these Sports writers these uh athletes are getting arrested and they're the only person in The Newsroom that well I know the law I'm the president the fact that they studied law makes them a more effective sports reporter I bet if you knew the law you'd
be a great music writer too because you know every week some musican is getting arrested on some charge but there's a thousand ways where if you you have some expertise other than just write it right it will make you a more powerful writer because you will have perspectives on the world now I stumbled upon one pathway where I learned business I learned analytics I learned how to read a financial statement I learned how to
anticipate Trends and then I applied into culture writing but you could do that a hundred other ways and so I told them I said if you want to be a writer you should also find one or two areas in which you know more than the other writers and that will give you perspectives it will give you things to write about it will it will Empower you now I'm old enough now where I have a bunch of these things in my back pocket
there's the the reading I've done and my self-education my work as a musician uh stuff I did in in Silicon Valley I draw upon all of it now and I view everything I know everything I've learned everything I've experienced helps the one problem that's inem right now is most writers if they work the only place they work is at a college teaching writing right and that gives you a certain range of experiences but they
should try to cultivate other experiences outside of that because just being a teacher although it's a very valuable and commendable vocation will only get you so far you need to have experiences beyond that if you want to to continue to rise and develop as a right one of the things that I've also picked up is is a real appreciation for taking notes so you'll read a book and you're just showing me for for example
hegel's phenomenology and you were showing underlining the sentences making little margins but the thing that really stuck out was your reconstruction of different sources so you finish the book presumably and then you say I'm going to reconstruct this put this into my own words not just that but also handwriting different paragraphs different sentences that really resonate with you so what's going on there why do
you do that I originally did that handwriting now I often go directly to the computer you've seen where I sit and read yeah literally it's 5 feet away from my desk or my computer is so I was reading Hegel for example and he says something there about uh the ancient Greek culture flourished uh because of its heterogenity okay that ancient Greece was known as being welcoming to foreigners and this was one of the powerful things
that set it apart and made it the center of European culture for a while and I'm thinking well this fits in with my writings on diversity the diversity is empowering to a culture now Hegel uses the word heterogenity not diversity but it's very interesting so I just put the book down I walk over to the computer and I start writing and after I've written a few paragraphs I save the file and I go back
and start reading again but to me this interactive process process between reading and writing is very powerful it's consumption and synthesis absolutely boom boom I could not write at the level I do if I didn't have a constant intake of new ideas and New Perspectives this is why I don't start writing till I have read a big chunk every day because the reading is like fuel in the tank I read articles I read books I'm
constantly trying to get new ideas into my head uh and everybody should do this and this is the fly in our culture because people go to work and the boss measures them on their output the boss should measure their input too and the bosses don't ask that the boss wants to know what is you do today what was your output they don't say what movies did you see what books are you reading what magazines do you read what newspaper do
you read boss doesn't ask that but the boss really should there is no field in which your input doesn't help your output if I was a cook working in the diner the more I learn about food the stronger I am anything I do if if I am uh doing repairs the more I know about Machinery the stronger I am if I am a driving an Uber the better I know the streets and the maps the stronger I am there is no field of endeavor in
which your input does not Empower your output I take this to an extreme I make sure I spend more time per day on my input than my out output but honestly I could not work at the level I do if I wasn't obsessive about this so I know I I seem compulsive but there's a method to my madness because this is how I write you spoke a little bit about PR earlier but do you ever read for style or is it mostly for the content and the
information oh I love I love people that write with a great style so uh PR is is is is great at that uh I love Henry James especially the late James dovi Susan sag Joan didan Isaiah bin the the intellectual historian sometimes I here I'll give you an example I don't even like the book but I like the writing style I love that this is this is a classic example years ago I thought well you know how I like
to read big books yeah well I'm going to read the decline and fall of the Roman Empire by Gibb and I'm reading it and at a certain point I find that after I'm about 1500 pages into I I don't agree with this guy this guy was uh one of the exponents of the Age of Reason and he's trying to explain everything in this Ultra rationalist way that misses a lot but the thing is I kept reading because he wrote such beautiful sentences there
may be no greater Pros stylist in English than GI the beauty of his his paragraphs is extraordinary so that's a classic example I will now at this point I will read just for the style because I've I've given up this on this writer as a source of wisdom but I still believe they know how to do beautiful sense I think it was the Civil War historian Shelby foot who he read PR all the time and this is exactly what he
said I just have to read in Search of Lost Time over and over and over because of the way that his style infuses into my writing and I know different writers who they'll read a certain kinds of book when they're not writing but once they write they actually don't want to be influenced by content they just want to be influenced by style they swivel the spotlight on the kind of books that they actually read well I told you when I did
Delta blo I read books by Southern writers right to try to get that Pros style there uh and there are writers that I will read just for the sheer enjoyment of the style I does not mean I'm going to imitate them it doesn't mean I'm going to imitate them but I believe that it's useful to see the many different ways you can write and to understand the full range of possibilities of written expression uh and then you find your own home there
you find your own place there I absolutely I will read some writers just because I love the way they put together a sentence I want to dive into specifically how you attack a question and a research project head-on and right now you're focused on the shift from this sort of post-enlightenment rationality into Romanticism from like 1750 to 1850 so you have that question that question is Way Beyond my ability
to like I I wouldn't even know how I would attack that so how have you been doing it from a what you read perspective the questions the writing that you're doing how does all of that come together okay well that's a good example because I haven't written much about this it's ongoing research the premise is very simple let me give you the premise I'm researcher but you'll see to to actually write
about it it's a huge amount of research but the premise is simple Here's my thought that right now we live in a society that is overly run by technology rationalism algorithms the stem thinking everything is reduced to computer code and Mathematics and we need more of a Reawakening of our humanistic sensibility our creative artistic side like an intuition well I'm just thinking in terms of caring about human beings
rather than about computer code so I I look at and I said the problem with technology now is that people think progress is a new technology progress is flourishing human beings and we I'm worried that the leaders in our society now think that just expanding our technology which now increasingly feels manipulative and controlling that this is actually doing more harm than good and we need a Reawakening and a
celebration of the human Spirit human creativ ity even human rights uh and so anyway my hypothesis is that the situation in 1800 was exactly the same H in that you had the Industrial Revolution people were building factories it's the Age of Reason people want to do everything rationally and logically or algorithmically people call it the enlightenment everything must be done according to the rules and scientific
method and around 1800 people felt that was too constraining and all of a sudden we have something that's called Romanticism and for 100 years it dominated Western culture is romanticism which is celebrating the artistic spirit so all of a sudden poets are more famous than financiers and industrialists people can't imagine now how famous Lord Byron was or Keat or Shelly if I ask people today to name a living poet they
can't but in the beginning of romanism poets were celebrities Beethoven was a celebrity GTO was a celebrity creative people were considered the legislators of the universe and so I thought and then great things happened as a result of that for example in the 1820s they finally have child labor laws why didn't they have those in the Age of Reason why didn't they have those at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution they were so
focused on profits and maximizing efficiency you don't get child labor loss until the 1820s and the finally you get rid of slavery but this happened during the romanticist era you would think why didn't the Age of Reason Why didn't the Enlightenment thinkers get rid of slavery but you actually needed the humanistic creative artistic thinkers to do these things so my hypothesis is something happened around the year
1800 that changed the world for the better and we need the same thing right now that's my view now how do I research that said well I don't know enough about Romanticism so I go there and I'm reading Lord Byron I'm reading all the prophetic works of William Blake who is a tremendous critic of the Industrial Revolution he said these factories are the dark satanic mils wow I didn't know that and and so Blake and for Blake if
you use the word Isaac Newton that was like an insult if you said today we think Isaac Newton is a great scientist but for Blake you wanted the creative spirit and so I'm reading Blake I'm reading his prophetic poetry which is very dense and difficult so I have to go and get these biographies and literary commentaries Shelly Keats and then I have to understand the French Revolution which was the collapse of of of
rationalism because the French Revolution wanted to reconstruct a society on reason and then they ended up with a reign of terror they're killing each other the guillotine came out and and the revolutionaries literally started executing each other I thought I saw Edmond Burke so the great original sources on the French Revolution I have to learn now so you have to read Burke the ALS regime by Tok
you have to read carlile's French Revolution like three thick volumes there uh and I have to read through the novels and I've read a lot of it already so I have read of you know I have read fa and I've read a lot of brusso and I've read a lot of voler I've already read a lot of this but basically I've been working on this for 18 months 24 months trying to understand what happened with the rise of Romanticism as a
powerful moment of change in our society where human beings were important again and creativity and Artistry did that and saved us from an algorithmic rationalistic society that was just trying to maximize profits and I'm saying this and this is the key thing I'm not doing this because I love history I'm not doing this because I love the past the thing is I care about the future and so my thought is I can
learn something from this my reading can do this and then I can translated into my writing and hopefully I can write something that's fair convincing honest and has a positive impact on society that's then on our culture that's that's what motivates me at this stage of my life right before we recorded I asked you about Julian Janes and the origins of Consciousness and he has this theory that basically people
had this direct interface with gods that got removed they almost heard these voices and William Blake he also saw things he had these crazy bouts of inspiration and a little strange what's going on there so what do you make of where do writers get inspiration and what do you make of these very surreal and Enchanted stories about what certain writers have have seen and heard I've got to say that over the course of my life I have become less
rationalistic and more metaphysical and I'm I even feel that there's a danger I'm going to become mystical at some point where I'm going to become like a a Mystic I have I have to restrain myself because increasing and and I'll I'll give you back why would that be a bad thing well because we live in a society that prizes rationalism and empiricism okay this was a big thing when I studied philosophy at Oxford empiricism was the
reigning theory of philosophy in England the anglo-american philosophical Tradition at Oxford it was everywhere and unless you could sense something you could see it you could feel it you could taste you could hear it didn't exist this was the essence of their philosoph iCal tradition and I was this was force-fed into me and I became very skeptical and what I said was this is not correct because the most important
things in our life cannot be sensed with our sense organs what do you mean Ted talking about ghost no I'm talking about things like love right friendship how could I prove empirically that my wife loves me how could I prove empirically that I love her this is a leap of faith it's like it's almost like a religious experience trust friendship all these things are not empirical but they're the they're the foundation of our entire
life so I reached a decision when I was in my 20s that the most important things in our lives are things you could not see you could not even prove they exist now once you go down that path though once you begin going down the path of metaphysics that I believe in things I can't see this opens you up to all sorts of of experiences but also conflict with our world because we live in a very stem
oriented rationalistic empirical world so let's get back to where do writers find inspiration yeah the muses William Blake if you go back in time people believed that the artistic inspiration was like this was metaphysical in the ancient times the Muse the goddess would actually give you the poem hesiod was a shepherd and the Muse appeared to H it here is the inspiration for your poetry at the very beginning of Homer he thanks
the musees Milton thanks The musees Virgil and theot thanks the M the first thing you do is thank the Goddess that gave you the artistic inspiration now you were talking about Blake and I was studying Blake recently for this Romanticism project what many people don't know was Blake was a great poet but he got this from voices he heard and Visions he had he had his first Vision at ag4 huh at age
8 he told his parents that he had a vision a saw a tree and it was shining like stars in the night sky from the glistening of the angel's wings his Dad tried to give him a beating his mother intervenes and you can't B you can't beat our little Billy you know he's just a little kid and a short while later uh William Blake went to his mother and said you know I had another Vision today I saw the the prophet Ezekiel out in the
garden well then she gave him a beating you can't say this you know your father will beat you but this was how he got his inspiration now people will say well he was crazy he was schizophrenic he had a mental illness now this is a good question did he have a mental illness I'm writing about this right now is if you are an artist and you have a vision are you crazy but what people don't realize is this is much more prevalent
than anyone knows I mean Robert Frost heard voices every day of his life Robert Frost heard voices this is goes into his poetry now let's look at music let's just now what I I find very interesting is I look at the dream the dream the dream when you follow us I write about sleeping more than any music critic in history H because why do I write about sleeping is when you have a dream this is everybody's chance to have
an out-of- body experience and to have something crazy so even if you don't have visions like William Blake or Robert Frost in your dreams you will have these experiences and I started doing research on when great songs were written in dreams people have no idea how common this is let me give you I'll just give you a few example Paul McCartney's most successful song was yesterday yesterday it was picked by a poll of the BBC as the best
song of the 20th century came to him in a drain another one of his huge hits was Let It Be came to him in a drain the Rolling Stones biggest hit was I Can't Get No Satisfaction the Riff came to Keith Richard's in a dream in fact the story is amazing he wakes up in the morning and there's a tape recorder he plays the tape and he got the Riff to satisfaction he doesn't even remember doing it but apparently in the middle of
the night we like the in the middle of the night he gets up from sleep records it goes back to sleep next morning it's on his tape recorder he has no recollection no recollection it came in a dream Billy Joel's biggest hit just the way you are came to him in a dream Sting's biggest hit with the Police Every Breath You Take came to him in a dream Carl Perkins the rock singer Blue Suede Shoes the
song came to him in a dream so I started going to musicians like on Twitter I say tell me situations in which you got musical inspiration in a drain you can't believe how many musicians reached out to me huge numbers of and they're ashamed to talk about this for a variety of reasons first of all it seems crazy if you get a song someone gave you a song in a dream this is like the vision quest
of the Native American when you go on a Vision Quest you'd have a vision and you'd get a song a magical song this happens all the time and they don't want to talk about it and also when you do have inspiration you're very protective of where that inspiration comes from you're worried if I talk about it too much it won't happen again right so if I get a great idea and a dream I may not want to tell people because this is my
own little secret here but the bottom line is the situation today is no different than what it was for Homer or Virgil or for these other poets that Thank The Muse we still get this inspiration from wild crazy Visionary places and that we should nurture this we should trust it and we certainly shouldn't mock or ridicule and I think a lot of that happens let me challenge you on it being no different and it kind of
comes from your book on Jazz where you talk about the the challenges of trying to get jazz into notation you almost try to tame it and constrain it you'll have better language for it but if you look at people like Walter Ang and Marsh MCL they really talk about how the invention of writing and typography change Consciousness do you think that with the sort of Gutenberg Revolution we did lose a sense of that Enchanted well I for
example I have disagreements with wal wrong who talks about orality but you read this book he never talks about music h and a lot of these people they're talking about you have text and and it's great but the the the spoken word is important and I agree with all that but there's this musical realm too and I believe there's a Continuum between the song and the writing and and I also I'm distrustful of theorists that try to make it too
rationalistic and logical and rigorous and scientific I believe that we need to tap into the magic of our universe and the Magical potential of our universe the reason why the dream is so important is this the this is the last safe place we have to tap into something crazy wild magical and unpredictable I think if we lived in a less rationalistic Universe we might be able just to tap into that by wandering
around in the garden or take going climbing the mountain to the mountain top or going on a retreat or whatever nowadays for most of us the only chance we have for that strange out of body experiences in our sleeper dreams or maybe taking uh hallucinogenics which I don't do I'm a I'm I'm a sober person so for me I have to get my out of- Body Experience through music or these other things too but we need to take that
seriously and we shouldn't try to overly theorize it and we shouldn't try to mock or dismiss it how do you try to cultivate these things in your writing or is there a time when you felt like you had one of these mystical whole Muse like experiences I first thing I do in the morning is try to remember my dreams the very first thing I do in the morning is try to remember my dreams and if I can do that it nothing frustrates me more
than to wake up and I can feel I just had a dream and I cannot grab the details of it this frustrates me enormously and and people would say what what possible benefit let's say you dreamt you were on a ferris wheel wearing your pajamas what possible benefit could this have to your I said no I want to tap into the deeper parts of my unconsciousness and this will and I want stuff that will jar me out of the
predictability of my day-to-day life and so uh I'm constantly seeking ways to expose myself to unpredictability this also gets back to my reading why I I I read the strangest books I read the I read the books where the writer is going to impose their worldview on me like Gerard that's right where I I they're not going to give me what I want they're not going to give me what I expect they are going to force me
to go down their path and see the world from their eyes there's a real arrogance in that in a good way no absolutely and and and okay sometimes it's a crazy maniac and you get that and you throw that book aside but for the most part the same reason why I try to remember my dreams is the same reason why I try to expose myself to these extraordinarily Visionary writers or musicians or whatever ever they are going to broaden
my mind they're going to broaden my horizons they're going to give me things that I could have never come up on my own and to me that's the essence of the creative life can I throw out a few one word people genres and I just want to hear about when you think of their writing style what do you think of so we can kind of do a fire around okay The Beatles Love The Beatles what I like is they're desire to push themselves
more than their fans the fans always wanted them to repeat themselves that's why they got so many bad reviews they'd come out with a new get bad reviews and the Beatles kept pushing themselves harder than the marketplace or the fans did so I The Beatles are on my Mount R Bob Dylan Bob Dylan the same thing very po was would be very poetic willing to be a rebel uh and also what I liked about it is he did new things but it was
very rooted in the tradition I think he saw himself as an extension of what he got three in the old traditional folk singers so he had this beautiful thing of taking what's old and turning it into something new and uh to me he's a constant inspiration gospel music gospel music is very interesting because the older it is the more I like it when it becomes too slick you know for example I
would say you want me to listen to Christian music I'll chant the Psalms you know and or I'll listen to Bach you know I like I like the the closer to the source you can get in gospel and spiritual music the better so like just sing the song the Psalms rather than the new stuff I you for me I will actually this sounds crazy if you have hymns and you want me to rank them from favorite to least favorite you could almost do
them chronologically if this was copyrighted in 1911 I probably like it better than the one copyrighted in 1950 right Amazing Grace how sweet this sounds I I want to particularly in anything having do with spirituality I want to go back to the source or the source up there you know Taylor Swift Taylor Swift I have I have made my piece with Taylor Swift because I'm very resistant to the Simplicity of modern
music and the Four Chord song but I love Taylor Swift and that she's creating transformative experiences for her audience life-changing ones in live music and like I said I've I watched the uh documentary which has the full era concert all three hours of it I watched it three times primarily to watch the audience I mean I it's great watching Taylor's GL what I love seeing is the people in the audience are having an
ecstatic experience it's almost like one of these amazing Muse inspired experiences I'm talking about in the creative moment you see it actually more in the audience than you do in Taylor Swift so I like what she's doing to the culture from the point of view of energizing and and um giving Vitality to the audience the writing the freestyling of Eminem Eminem I'm I'm to me there's too much of a pose on these things see
this is where a lot of the hipop to me is the problem I had with when I talk about music critics oron you're so much focused on the cool pose and and setting a Persona out for for the audience I think extraordinarily creative and artistic but I would like something that was a little uh less of a u dramatic stance you wrote your 12 favorite problems and I want to ask about a few of them this comes from Fineman he
basically says keep a list of 12 Fair problems in your head let them marinate let them stew many years later you might even come up with an answer to one of them and then all of a sudden they'll say how'd you do that you're a genius you've really just been working on these 12 favorite problems but I want to take these and apply them to writing so I'll ask them back to you how can creativity intellectual vitality and learning be
maintained in the face of inescapable obstacles such as earning a living or aging or financial hardship or residing far from major cultural centers well this is important I think that the people that are learning writing at writing schools are being misled often and they're told well just follow your heart and everything's going to be great and you'll be uh good things will happen to you on their own and I've always told
people get some marketable skills too it's very interesting when I go to these colleges and they put me in front of writing students the teacher will introduce me and they'll say today we have Ted here he's written 12 books he writes for these famous periodical U but he also got an MBA from Stanford and did business work he's going to talk about writing today and I'll say what question you have you know
what question I get all the time is how did you earn a living and balance work and writing people want an honest answer to this and if you just say I'm going to teach you how to use adverbs well you're not being honest with them so I believe any writer has constant struggles how do I my writing is not bringing enough money to pay the bills how do I how do I handle this or I want to be a writer I want to spend time with my kids too how do I
handle this I want want to be a writer but I really need to live in New York and I don't how do I handle this so to me this is a big issue I don't think it's talked about enough I was absolutely determined to do writing without sacrificing these other things I was going to earn a living I was going to have good family life I was going to live where I want to not in a city that is uh I find alienating just to advance
my career and I think this is a huge issue we should talk on honestly about it and it would be great if at an early age uh people that were learning to be writers were told about these things in very honest language how do I avoid becoming a narrow Specialist or a superficial generalist is there a third way if so how do I get there well uh the the philosopher unamuno once said as a writer you have two options and they're
both bad you can become a diletant or a pedant and the diletant knows about a lot of things but in a very shallow way the the pent knows about one thing a lot but is is is is very tiresome and boring to listen to so this is the the choice you make and I thought well I'm going to find a balance between these and so as a writer what I've tried to do is to find certain areas I specialize in but not at such an obsessive level
that that you get the hammer nail problem that's right you know I mean I know Jazz writers that can tell you how many hairs Cannonball aderly had on his back right you know and I'm I'm not going to do that you know I I am going to I'm never going to get into that level of granularity that plenty of Scholars out there doing it they can have articles on well I counted a hair this guy missed
and you know whatever but what I I want to do is to have a certain level of of of of I want to have a certain level of deep knowledge but not to the point where it becomes obsessive so what I will do for example is I will decide I want to learn about a certain subject and I will read 40 or 50 books on that one subject and then I'll go on to something else now after reading 40 and 50 books I am not ready to be a professor but I
know a hell of a lot once you've read 40 or 50 books on the subject you do know quite a bit you saw my library upstairs y you see that I've got you know 3040 books on Ro the music of the ancient Romans I've got 3040 books on the music of the ancient Greeks or whatever so what I find is I do a deep dive enough to give me some Authority so I can speak with knowledge but not so much so that I get to that granular level and become tiresome to my
readers this is my favorite of the four how can I protect or nurture local Styles and perspectives in an increasingly globalized and homogenized culture this has been important to me from the very start of my vocation I had grown up in Los Angeles and I said I'm going to write a book on West Coast Jazz and so it was a regional style and I like the idea of a regional style something that happened in the area
where I grew up and I would understand the specificity of it and how certain local conditions created something that couldn't happen anywhere else in the world and so I wrote that book and then when I did the Delta Blu and I started doing this I read writing about New Orleans and I realized that this is the endangered species in culture we talk about endangered species with birds or animals or whatever within
culture the endangered species is the local Regional style I mean I remember traveling around the world on my business career I would always go and try to sample the local music but at a certain point I found you couldn't sample local music it was disappearing so I would be in Indonesia and I would go into a record store and they would have Madonna Rod Stewart The Beatles I heard Taylor Swift and Casa Blanc I was
like what is going on and and I went to the guy I want some traditional Indonesian music and the clerk there looks at me like I'm crazy nobody wants this you know and so this is a tragedy in our culture I don't think it's sufficiently recognized but I want to support local Regional Styles we had in writing there was a point in American culture where writers from the south wrote fundamentally differently from writers
in the North or the west or whatever I don't think that's true anymore so I think we lose something when the world becomes so flattened and so homogenized we lose that heterogeneity as Hegel called it or the diversity and even now if you look at Regional styles of the American accent the it's become more and more compressed well absolutely we're sitting in Austin right now and I had a visitor
here here recently came guy came here to interview me came from New York and he was spending a day or two in Austin I'll say this is what you're not going to see you can walk through Austin you're not going to hear any Texas accents you're not going to see many people with cowboy hats you know and I said you can mock this but I miss this I actually when I go someplace here and I hear somebody with a Texas accent oh this makes my
day it is it is sad that the whole culture of the country is becoming so homogenized and it's the same you go overseas and you find the McDonald's or whatever it's very depressing to me and if we're going to fight this anywhere it has to be in the cultural artistic creative sphere that's our last chance to create Regional local pockets of creativity and anything I can do to help that I do how can I operate honestly as a
Critic without absorbing all the negative psychic energy involved in criticism how do I reconcile this vocation with my desire to act kindly and compassionately at all times this is very important to me I have key values that are important in my life kindness love forgiveness compassion uh and we live in a very Hardball culture we live in a culture of anger and outrage right now and I could do a test I could go on social
media and I could offer very opinions on things and what you'd find is the angrier I get the more likely it is to go viral so the culture rewards you for intolerance and you literally get rewarded in our culture for being a jerk anger intolerance and I refuseed to play that game and I've decided that there is a path to reaching an audience where you're measured you're Duty dious you're fair you're kind and I believe one of
the reasons for my success as a writer is I have held to that and I believe that there's actually now a hunger you know we talked about George Soros and the theory of reflexivity where these Trends eventually reverse I believe we are within five or 10 years at most from the culture reversing from a culture of anger to a culture of kindness and compassion uh and I want to be ahead of the curve
on that I've been trying for years to be ahead of the curve and I believe now I see in the response I get to my own writing validates my view that we will become a Kinder culture we will become a more loving and forgiving culture there people already want that there's a hunger for that and I'm going to stake my career on that that's absolutely important to me well I think a good example of that and I want to put the
chart on the screen right here is your state of culture piece where you talk about maybe you can summarize it but the decline in so many ways in culture from Sports of you you play sports to you watch sports now you gamble on Sports you play music you listen to music now you scroll Tik Tok videos and you really hit on something there and I think it's a good example because it's going viral for its perceptiveness for its truth
rather than getting angry at anything I think that there is a undercurrent of it's not Vengeance it's nowhere close to that but it is a deep frustration and a sort of lament for the loss of what we used to have well I call it dopamine culture and it's a culture of distraction and this is fundamentally different than the past because 20 years ago if I'd had a debate with somebody about the culture the debate would be
about art versus entertainment and the art is more demanding it's more rigorous it forces you out of your comfort zone entertainment is something that's more adapted to what your expectations are it's more formulaic but now we've got a third category you got art you got entertainment and just distraction like people scrolling on videos on their phone video of somebody's pet where somebody showed a a photo of their meal
or something like that that's not even entertainment right you can't you can't even call that entertainment it's just it's distraction and what we find is that it gives a jolt of dopamine to the brain and the people that designed these social media platforms all of them in the last 12 to 18 months shifted to these scrolling reeling interfaces now they haven't told you why but the reason why they're doing this is
it's addictive if you get an adamine hit every 15 seconds it's an addictive process so you stay on your phone they can give you more ads this is no different than what companies do in other product areas I knew some people that worked at a very large potato chip company which I will not mention by name but they said well Ted you have no idea we work for years to find exactly how to have a potato chip so that you ate it
and there was a flavor in your mouth and it died in a certain number of seconds so you had to reach for another potato chip we make these things addictive the goal is to make them addictive because that's how we maximize sales now nobody in Silicon Valley will tell you this but all the Silicon Valley companies with these social media platforms have made similar research I'm sure and they show
we have this scrolling uh interface and so people are addicted to distraction this can't be good for the culture now you know where I come from I come from sort of this Timeless area when I think about something happening in the culture I'm thinking about it in terms of what happened over the last 2 three thousand years sure and so uh the idea that now we've shifted to these quick dopamine hints is something of
great concern to me and once again I will stake my career and my efforts on on something that's more helpful to the culture and more helpful to the society classic example I choose what my values are and then my work has to live up to those values otherwise I'm not the honest broker so as a writer how do I if I don't like dopamine culture but I kind of feel like I need to be part of dopamine culture I feel like I need to
have a good hook feel like I need to bring somebody in right away I feel like I need to get right to the point what do I do well here's my advice and other people will tell you differently but I think that it's death to try to chase the culture and I've seen a bunch of editors over the years who've told me Ted you got to dumb it down it's got to be faster it's got to be quicker people don't want anything
that's more challenging what I'll tell you is all those editors are out of a job now huh the periodicals they work for often have disappeared from the face of the Earth because there's no long-term relationship you can have with a reader like this I had a video of me on somebody else put up on Instagram the other day they got two million views two million views of me talking but it's just a few seconds and I was I was I was
talking to my my wife to I said this got me no readers there there's no trans you can't engage with this it's not it hey it's gratifying for my ego to have reached two million people there but I cannot have any engagement on that platform if I want to engage I can engage with a video like we're doing because we're talking at length at things this will engage with people my writing can engage with people if you do
something at a level like this you can engage with them but when you work into the distraction culture all you have is your 10 seconds of Fame enjoy it but you can't build on it so I would tell writers don't chase that be true to your own values there are people that are hungry for something more substantive we saw this in food when I was growing up the big thing were these high-tech foods frozen foods microwave
meals canned goods all that we've seen a reaction against it now Gourmet cooking Healthy Living organic food all these Cuisines the the hot thing in food now is organic and natural those things actually are growing faster in the marketplace than the pre- process stuff I think the same thing will happen with in writing have natural ingredients do it organically be true to Quality if you try to to to chase the tech platforms
and this pre-digested stuff you may have a few brief flurries of success but you can't build a career like I have had over decades without the deeper engagement that that kind of relationship with the reader requires at the risk of being reductive what I'm going to try to do is summarize this conversation and you'll let me know what I either got wrong or missed okay but I think that if I were to say how
how do you write it is you spent decades reading viciously reading the classics and reading not for entertainment but to really expand your mind and you did that day in and day out day in and day out and then you sort of rejected I'm going to focus on style I'm going to really focus on audience growth and you've said at every juncture especially more recently I'm going to be as honest as possible and I'm really going to focus
on building trust with my readers with that direct relationship and it's okay if I offend some people but what matters is that I do not lose that sense of integrity and that sense of Integrity comes through trust I'm going do that day in and day out and now the internet has allowed me to do that I can publish on substack I can build a direct relationship with my readers and I can write and publish when the article is
ready but I'm going to do it consistently enough and then in that consistent writing what I'm going to do is I'm going to show up every single day and I'm going to and I'm going to write but that time is going to start with reading in the morning some Tim lessen to music and I'm going to write generally later in the afternoon I'm going to do that day in and day out and we get judged for our outputs but it's
really the inputs that have mattered over the years for you the inputs of listen to music and reading and what did I leave out you did a great chob there we go I I would have thought what I said was in was just a jumble of things but you made it sound very coherent no that's absolutely true I will add one last thing uh I know there are different paths for different people my path may not be the identical one that other
people will take towards success or towards happiness but I believe in the one I've chosen I will add one thing though is the approach I take is longer term and more cumulative I'm absolutely a believer in how I did it but it's not something that's going to pay off in 4 weeks 8 weeks 12 weeks we need a slowness revolution in our whole culture right now and I practice that myself I do believe though if you want to build a
career as a writer over the long term 10 20 30 I'm now been writing for publication for 50 years because I started like you know while I was uh still in high school um if you want to do it over the long run and flourish over the long R I do believe that the approach that you just summarized I believe that works and it's the one that I endorse Ted Jo thanks for coming on how I WR thank you it was a pleasure that was fun